The Deer

A memoir excerpt

This essay was published today in Electric Literature.

It’s an excerpt from the memoir I’ve been working on over the last couple of years, a collection of braided essays that draws connections between the liminal spaces of trying to make a baby and trying to make it as an artist: the ambition, the shame of unmet desire, the failure, the self-doubt. I’m thrilled to be able to share a bit of it with you today!

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We make the slow crawl up the Taconic. It’s a late December evening at the tail end of 2021, and a fog has rolled in, wet and white. Z grips the wheel and steers us through it with grace, the skin pulled taut over the broken bones that never set properly in his right hand. Inside the car, the hot air blasts my feet. Some comedian is talking on a podcast, but I’m only half-listening, the jokes landing like snow, immediately dissolving inside the warmth we’ve made.

We are alone on the road, and then we are not.

I see him first. From the wooded median between the lanes comes a floating chandelier, a deer lighting the world with his antlers. He emerges from the fog like a myth. The comedian is laughing and the animal is running and all I can say is Z’s name—one short syllable—before he sees the deer too. He turns the wheel, but it’s unavoidable. We collide, bumper on bone. The impact—dull and furred and sudden—is what I will remember the most.

The collision happens on our way home from Christmas in New Jersey. Sitting in the passenger seat, I can feel that I’m still bleeding. It’s been three weeks since the miscarriage. A mauve-brown pulp, menacing as a hex, looms up at me each time I check my underwear. Fittingly, the weather has been strange all month, prone to sudden belches of pea soup fog, swirling like a cauldron with something foul. Sometimes the sun’s rays try to push out from behind so the fog seems lit from within. Like it has some spirit trapped inside, struggling to be released.

As it turns out, holidays don’t stop happening when you’re grieving. The festive cheer carries on. The bright lights mock and twinkle. I spent Christmas on the couch sipping champagne cocktails I didn’t want to be sipping, talking to anyone who would listen about my grief. I always seem to want to share my underworld, to ferry others there—not because I’m morbid but because I find it is the most honest place we can meet. It’s as if we all assume our actual forms when flattened by loss, and there is a sense of relief when we can finally recognize each other’s true faces.

The deer appears everywhere in mythology and fantasy, from the Greek myth of Actaeon—transformed into a stag as punishment by the goddess Artemis—to Miyazaki’s Deer God in Princess Mononoke. It is often a symbol of both reverential beauty and extreme vulnerability, susceptible to violence: Actaeon torn to shreds by his own hounds, the Deer God shot by a power-hungry politician. In many of these stories, the deer shows up like a divine missive, capable of bestowing blessings and ushering in extraordinary transformations. To kill it, then, is not only a grave transgression but an act of self-sabotage.

I have felt drawn to deer all my life. Wide-eyed, fragile, unwittingly struck by their fate, they feel like kin. All of us just passing through, hoping not to get hit. Once in college, I dressed as a stag for Halloween, with a fringed leather vest and elaborate pipe-cleaner antlers that kept getting tangled in the dorm’s string lights. Later, once I’d moved to New York and started marking my life on my limbs, I nearly inked a stag head on my bicep. I kept reapplying a fake tattoo from a book of deer silhouettes, testing out the impact. Part of me thinks that even though I never got it permanently done, the image imprinted somehow, shadowing my skin.

These days, there’s one family of deer that grazes our backyard year-round. They paw at fallen birdseed in spring and snap at the citrus of hemlock needles come winter. Of course, I can’t be sure it’s the same family each time, but I like to think they return, that our home is theirs too. They come down from the train tracks, clacking at the rocks with cloven hooves, or up the slope from the river.

But tonight there is only one stag, and he runs toward us with a force I cannot stop. I am just a passenger in the drive toward his death.

My body has always been more than my body. As a singer, my body is my instrument. Air funnels up from the diaphragm, ripples across the vocal chords like the wind that rakes the salt flats, and out pours a new form: sound, tone, melody.

It requires attention and fine-tuning. It requires a sensitivity that sometimes drives me crazy—the sprays and lozenges and warm-up exercises, the steams, teas, and trills. And still, far too often, I’ve gotten sick right before a show.

At least you can still play the drums when you have a head cold, I’ve often said sullenly to Z. He and I have been playing music together for years. It’s how we met, the summer after college, playing in an indie rock band. I had just graduated with a major in music, specializing in classical singing, but decided not to go the choral route like some of my classmates. I craved the hot lights of a rock club, the spit and fire of a microphone grate shoved right against my mouth. So instead, I spent that first sweaty summer practicing in a New Jersey basement with the band, empty cans of Natty Ice rattling with the resonance of every snare hit, before we moved to Brooklyn to try to make it big.

Z broke his hand once just before the start of a tour and still managed to perform, dazzling audiences of young punks with his one-handed maneuvers. And yet, as a singer, a single cold could flatten me. Every time my body buckles just before a big moment, it feels like a betrayal.

But never have I felt so betrayed by my own body as when it was tricked by death.

Sometimes it just happens: the chromosomes don’t line up, the hormones don’t rise. You get an infection, you get high blood pressure, you get unlucky. This can happen a few weeks into gestation or five months or nine. The tiniest misalignment means the life is not viable. It means pulling out the weft of the dream you’ve been weaving, watching it drain from your body in dark threads. It is miraculous, then, that any of us are here. The word “miracle” shares a root with the word “mirror”—the Latin mirari, meaning to wonder or admire—conjuring up that astonishing feeling of seeing yourself reflected back at you and thinking, face, self, alive.

In the Buddhist Lotus Sutra, there is a poignant allegory for the miracle of human conception. The story goes, a one-eyed turtle lives deep in the ocean and only comes up for air once every one hundred years. Floating on the surface of the water, tossed by the waves, is a piece of driftwood with a hole in it. The sutra asks, what is the likelihood that the half-blind turtle, in its infrequent surfacing, in all that ocean, will emerge inside the hole? The answer: even likelier than the possibility of being born in this human form.

One spring morning a couple of years ago, a doe and her fawn entered the yard. I was sitting on the patio in my pajamas drinking coffee. There were clumps of stinging nettles coming up at the edge of our property line, a lone daffodil beside the compost. The deer stepped around them, moving unhurriedly through the grass, their bodies soft with a sense of privacy. They didn’t know I was there. But the second I reached for my mug, awareness poured into their forms like cement. They tensed, grew rigid as statues. Instinctively, I put a hand to my heart and bowed my head. You are safe, I thought. I will do you no harm.

After a moment, the mother seemed to understand, relaxed, and went back to her snack of mulch. But the fawn became curious. She took a step toward me and bowed her head in response. I held her black gaze, barely breathing, and bowed back. Again, she lowered her head and shortened the distance between us.

Step, bow.

Step, bow.

It went on like this until the fawn was mere feet from me. My fingers began to tremble, imagining stroking the silk between her eyes—but just then, a truck roared past, and the spell was broken. The baby spooked. White tails wagging like the heart of a flame, the two deer jumped in tandem into the brush and were gone.

When we talk about miracles, what we’re really talking about is chance. Through some serendipitous conjunction of elements, we are here, and we could so easily not have been. Chance hums in the background like a live wire, full of potential charge.

Death, like life, also deals in chance. It was chance that led us to cross paths with the stag in the moment he veered out from the median. It felt like a miracle we didn’t die. What wild odds, that it was us who hit that one wild animal, that it was that one animal that was meant to die on the hood of our car.

This is what I try to remember when I find it unbearable, in the aftermath of the miscarriage, to get through another day. I remind myself how extraordinary and precious life is, how I should just be grateful to be here, living in this miraculous moment. But there are times in my grief when the moment is like a house on fire. Or like a black door, shut. It’s hard to live in it when the moment is so inhospitable.

Just after we started trying for a baby, I went out with friends one night. It was a mild autumn evening, the hours still long, streaks of lemon light persisting in the darkening sky. I knew it wasn’t likely I was pregnant that cycle—I had only just gotten off birth control and was told the hormones needed time to resettle—so I had a few drinks, then a few more. Later, I sat crying in the bathroom, worried about what I’d done on the off chance that I was carrying the barest beginnings of a child. Please don’t come yet, I begged the unborn soul, imagining them circling, looking for a way in. I’m not hospitable.

There was no child that month, but the next month there was. Two months after that, there was nothing at all but fistfuls of thread, leaving me, leaving me.

Later, I learn that Hades, Greek god of the Underworld, was known as The Hospitable One. When the dead arrived at his gates, he welcomed them and made them feel at home. An immaculate host, a loving caretaker, preparing the eternal resting place for their lost souls.

Two weeks into lockdown, in March 2020, I released an album called The Caretaker under my artist name, Half Waif. To celebrate, Z and I decorated our living room with blinking string lights and battery-powered candles, mounted an external USB camera, and invited the world into our home for a live-streamed set. Z played the drums, and I sang and hammered away on the baby grand piano that sat in the corner like a fat black widow.

Despite the fact that for months, we had watched the virus spread on the news, overtaking countries across Asia and Europe, it felt like everything unraveled so fast. One minute, we were rehearsing in a Brooklyn basement for a big release show in New York, and the next we were fleeing the city, driving fast up the Taconic, pausing only to hit the 24-hour Price Chopper at 11pm, where the shelves of toilet paper had already been ransacked. We were scared and numb, and like so many others, we were out of a job. The tours we’d booked in the US and Europe were canceled. Everything was shut down.

But there was a part of me that wasn’t sad about it. It was a time of tangled emotions that took on a complexity of flavor: notes of disappointment sat on the tongue alongside the saffron-sharp taste of relief. I’d always had a lot of anxiety about touring, and the older I got, the less sustainable it felt. Z and I often said that it wasn’t the shows we got paid for when we went on tour—it was the other 23 hours of every day, when we’d haul heavy gear in and out of the back of the van, Tetrising the shapes to fit, and wolf down meals of sad vegetarian sandwiches or gut-bomb burritos during pit stops. Waking on the scratchy, hair-ridden sheets of cheap motels and not remembering where we were. Killing time in random towns, another coffeeshop, another bookstore. Driving and driving and driving through all hours, all weather conditions, all states, passing days in cramped, crumb-filled seats, lonely as an island.

Late one night after a show in Denver, we were winding through the icy outer reaches of the Rocky Mountains, trying to make some progress on the long drive to Salt Lake City. I was sitting in the backseat scrolling on my phone when suddenly, I felt the 15-passenger van swerve so hard, I swear it went up on two wheels. Coming around a bend, our headlights had illuminated a struck elk lying in the middle of the road, still alive and heaving with labored breath.

We weren’t the first to encounter the elk on that dark road. We missed it by inches, a hair’s breadth from death.

Has this come to punish me, or has it come to awaken me?

The question rises in my mind like an echo in the seconds after Z and I collide with the flying chandelier, extinguishing its light. I had asked the same one three weeks earlier while I lay on a towel, bleeding out like an animal.

I knew our chances. One in four pregnancies end in miscarriage. My own mother had two before she had me, and Z’s mother had one before him. It is tragically common, people are quick to tell you. But what struck me the night it happened to me—the tang of blood souring the air—was how horrific it was. How gory. How could something so common be so brutal?

“Miscarriage” is too clinical a term for it. It’s a closed-door, a private ward of a word. I wanted a word for Z’s red basketball shorts that I wore over a thick maxi pad that night, the red on red when the blood soaked through. I wanted a word for the feeling of his body against mine in the minutes after we understood what was happening, a word for my need as I fell into the solidity of him, disbelieving, dissolving, destroyed. I wanted a word for the false cheer in the texts we sent out to everyone we’d told: we’re so grateful we got to be this soul’s parents, even for a brief time! “Miscarriage” is a single-room word, finite, enclosed. The reality was a labyrinth with a monster at its heart.

Like so many others, Z and I got into birdwatching during lockdown. We put up feeders and downloaded Cornell’s Merlin app to identify the visitors to our yard. When we learned to recognize and name all those, we started venturing out in search of new birds. We were addicted to finding these “lifers,” the term given to a bird when you see it for the first time in your life.

One day, we came up with a silly phrase while looking for lifers on our walk. A woodcock, perhaps, doing its spiral spring mating dance, or one of the many outrageous migrating warblers—the Blackburnian with its punk-rock streaks of orange and black, the banana-bright Magnolia with its drizzle of dark neck feathers. You gotta squeeze the juice out of chance, we’d say, training our binoculars on the trees. What we meant was, we might not see any life at all, but still it’s worth a shot. As if chance was a lemon. As if we could make something out of it even if we never got what we wanted.

When you’re trying to make it as a musician, you become familiar with chance. You understand that not everyone will break through. You receive the requisite advice from the adults around you to “get a real job.” You roll the dice. You move to Brooklyn after graduation. You work random jobs—a bookkeeper, a cheesemonger, a Park Slope nanny. You eat lettuce for dinner, eat peanut butter for dinner, cry when the father of the girl you nanny forgets to hand you forty dollars when he comes home, because you were planning to use it to buy a real meal. You play shows in fire hazard basements, in flower shops, in coffee shops, in skate parks, in bars, in any town that will have you: Watertown, Muncie, Bar Harbor, Kalamazoo. You pay your dues. You cut your teeth. And like the first baby teeth cutting through the gums, it is a painful process of becoming. Teeth for chewing, teeth for baring, teeth for sharpening and tearing into the heart of the world. You want it so much. You watch other bands around the city excel and get signed, you wonder if it will ever be your turn. You keep playing the slots: another show, another album, another song. Will this be the one? Your number does not get called. You crank the handle again. You want it so much. Will this be the one? You crank the handle again. Another show. Another song. A lemon, a lemon, a heart.

We leave the stag dying on the side of the road and drive on in silence. I worry that somehow the deer family that visits us will know what we’ve done, that they’ll sense the shift in our allegiance and we’ll no longer be a safe clearing in which to graze. I wonder if the fawn will ever draw near me with her liquid eyes again.

When we get home, Z examines the damage to the car while I go inside, the thud still echoing in my ears. In the mirror, I catch sight of my tired eyes, my graying hair. There’s a clarity there, the skin blanched as parchment, all of it rendered brightly in grief’s neat penmanship. Face, self, alive.

The next morning, we wake to snow. It has fallen heavy overnight. The fog is gone, leaving the sun free to reflect off the snow in a blinding blaze. I open the curtains at the back door as I do every morning, wondering who and what I’ll see. The yard is empty, but just beyond the glass—so close I could reach out and touch it—is a set of small yet unmistakable hoof prints.