Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

“All right,” Tim said. “That will be twenty-two dollars.”

Anna said, “Really? That seems a little low.”

“Does it?” he said, looking at the plants.

She began the garden that same night, running into the house and plugging in the battery charger for Anna’s cordless drill. Anna had a whole tool set that she had bought when she first decided she would live alone in Comptche, but she had never used it because she was afraid of the power tools. She said, “You’re going to use the drill?” and Turtle nodded, pulling Carhartts over her Smartwool long underwear, and Anna said, “Do you know how?” and Turtle nodded, and Anna said, “You’ll be careful?” and Turtle said, “I’ll be careful,” and Anna said, “You won’t drill a hole through your finger or anything?” and Turtle said, “No, I will not do that.” She wore a headlamp and her wool sweater and her old jungle boots, and she looked at Anna dead-on and guileless because Anna was embarrassed and anxious, and Turtle wanted to show Anna that she could ask whatever question she wanted.

“Okay,” Anna said a little bashfully. “Okay.”

Turtle had told Dr. Russell about the surgery they’d done on Cayenne’s finger, drawing it out on a sheet of paper. Dr. Russell said that the amputation made sense in a sterile environment, but that it made no sense to do it on your living room floor. Though it was, he said, an operation he performed all the time, it wasn’t necessary. The skin would epithelialize—it would grow back over the tip of the finger if you just kept changing the dressings. And when Turtle said that they’d gone past the knuckle, had clipped back the next bone, Dr. Russell had paused, very fractionally, tilting his head to the side, and said, “Well—maybe that made sense in the situation,” and Turtle understood what he wasn’t saying. She’d clipped out the next bone herself, and Martin had perhaps contrived the need for that.

Turtle carried the boards down the hillside, set them up in the clearing, and knelt in the wet leaf litter to predrill the holes. What once would’ve been a single night’s work for her was now a grueling multiday project. Even walking down the hill had her grimacing from the pain in her guts. Dr. Russell had said that the pain might wax and wane, but she would very likely have chronic pain for the rest of her life, and she could manage it with drugs or not. Turtle chose not. The ileostomy bag was a sweaty, plasticky presence fixed to her side. She braced the eight-foot board between her legs and, holding the four-footer against it, screwed them together, her hair falling into her face, grinning to herself, her whole body aching just from the effort of keeping the drill steady.

The next day, she carted each fifty-pound bag of topsoil down in the wheelbarrow, sweating and swearing and grinning, and she threw each in turn down onto the leaf litter beside her boards and stood wiping her face with the back of her hand and grinning, happier than she had been in months, and then she would lie down in the wheelbarrow and stare up at the sky and just breathe. Way up above her, the tips of the redwoods swung in the breeze and they were a delicate green and Turtle was alive. Preposterously alive, for how many mistakes she had made.

She cut the bags open and filled her beds with soil and then she dug out the holes with her bare hands, each seedling a handful of black earth and a coil of white roots. When she awoke the next day and cooked her oatmeal and came down holding the oatmeal in its warm pottery bowl with its dollop of Cinnamon Bear honey on top, the mist was rising off the forest floor, and it was so, so good. Then the next day, she came out in the morning to find that the deer had cropped everything but the squash down to stubs. She’d stood there in her Smartwool tights and large pj T-shirt and the wool sweater, and she’d wondered how it would’ve been if she hadn’t gone to Jacob’s house, had just kept driving, knowing that Martin had Jacob’s address, and that Martin was going there whether she went there or not, and she thinks, if he had gotten there, and Grandpa’s truck wasn’t there—what would he have done? Would he have kept driving? Or would he have parked and walked up the deck kicking aside red Solo cups? Sometimes she thinks that if she had just kept driving, it would’ve been okay. She can’t get any clear picture of him, not of his face, just of his back, broad, shadowed. She had expected him to be there when she woke up in the hospital. It was just after the first surgery. Anna was there, looking ravaged, red with crying, and Jacob was there, reading. Martin wasn’t there and she had thought, he is gonna be so fucking mad. Then she remembered.

After the deer got into the garden, she’d gone back to the hardware store and purchased two rolls of eight-foot chicken wire and fence posts and a fence-post driver, and because the posts and the rolls of wire did not fit in the Saturn, and because Turtle couldn’t carry any of it, she’d paid to have it delivered and then she’d tried to do all the work herself, digging an eighteen-inch trench all the way around the garden, but she’d found that she couldn’t lift the post hole driver, and so Jepson and Athena, Sarah’s children from next door, came over to help her pound them in, and to stretch the wire from post to post. They were a year apart, both in high school, and careful of her. She repurchased her plants from Tim at North Star nursery and replanted them and she built a bamboo trellis for her snow peas and she had been so proud , knotting the trellis with twine, thinking how the peas would grow up over it, and then she’d come out to find that the raccoons had collapsed the trellising and laid their oily, stinking black shits all over the beds and that ravens had eaten the seedlings and the starlings were picking apart the twine for nesting material, and Turtle kept on, replanting and crossing her fingers, and slowly, the plants began to survive.

Then one morning Turtle came out to the garden and there was a fawn trapped inside the fence. The doe waited skittish at the edge of the clearing, dashing away and coming back, and the fawn leapt against the fence again and again without clearing it, leapt against it until the fence post leaned out and she tangled a leg in the wire and began kicking frantically, trapped. Turtle went to the toolshed and retrieved her wire cutters and a length of rope. She tied a lark’s head around the two back legs, then wrapped the legs with four more coils and tied them off with another lark’s head across the strands, a gentle knot, but one that kept the fawn from kicking. Then she took the struggling, panting creature in her embrace, the fawn surprisingly warm, small as a dog, heart hammering beneath heaving ribs, wrapped one arm around the fawn’s gasping throat, and with the other hand worked the wire cutters, breathing onto the fawn’s red-brown fur, smelling her wild, musty scent, and finally she lifted and carried the fawn out of the garden, set her down, and untied her legs. The fawn could not walk. She could only stand and collapse, stand and collapse. Turtle left her there that night, curled nose to tail, and when Turtle came out in the morning, the fawn was still there and the doe was gone. Turtle stood with the fawn curled at her feet. Quivers chased themselves down the small flanks. Turtle sat down beside her and thought, get up, goddamn it, but the fawn would not rise.

That night, Turtle took the head off the pick mattock and walked out with just the haft. The fawn was again curled head to tail, now shaking all over, blowing snot. She turned and looked at Turtle with one large eye, so dark it was almost black except for the bottom crescent of the brown iris, and Turtle killed her in a single downward stroke. Then she sat down on the duff, splay-legged, still holding the pick mattock haft, and she looked at the small corpse and did not know what to do, and if she knew, she didn’t know if she could carry it through. She pitched a line over a madrone trunk, hauled the child-sized corpse into the tree, drew her belt knife, and stood shaking all over, dropped the knife and sat down and stood up, walked away and came back and picked up the knife and cut the fawn from asshole to throat, and it was as bad as she thought it would be, the feel of the flesh beneath the knife, and she walked away and stood leaning over and threw up into the huckleberries, and then she opened the leathery skin and pulled out the bloody entrails and didn’t stop, and didn’t think about it. She cut the fawn into steaks, and put them into the freezer and stood in the kitchen afterward, washing her hands in the sink. With Athena’s help she tore out the fence and carried the rolled-up wire and posts to the shed.