“Hang on,” he says.
Moments later, the sound of shrieking metal brings me back from a kind of shocked stupor. The motorist, along with someone else, is prying open the door with a crowbar. After a minute of work, it finally gives. The door pops open and the fresh night air rushes in.
The motorist reaches for me. The man beside him is older, with white hair and glasses. “Wait a minute,” the older man says. “We shouldn’t move her.” He focuses on me and raises his voice. I can smell mint gum on his breath. And something else, too. A coppery smell, but not on him. On me. Blood.
“Ma’am? Can you move your head?”
I gingerly twist my neck back and forth. The pain is strong, but it feels like strained ligaments, not vertebral. “I think so,” I say. My voice surprises me. It sounds like someone else’s. Like me, twenty years ago.
Fifteen, maybe.
“Okay,” the older man says. “But do you feel like your head and neck . . . ? We don’t want to move you if there’s any issue . . .”
I start to wriggle out of the car.
The older man steps back. So does the young motorist. I can’t spend another minute in this car. The airbag has deflated, at last, and I’m able to swing my legs over and step down, toes to the ground. The two men hover close, arms out, not sure if they should touch me or help me. Finally the younger man gets a hand under my elbow to help steady me.
“You took quite a hit,” he says. “I think hitting the guard rail like you did put pressure on the doors, cinching them shut.”
I’m listening to him, but I’m also staring across the road. The deer is there, on the far shoulder, lying on its side. Its head is thrown back, as if in ecstasy. A small pink tongue pokes from the black seams of its mouth. One eye, glassy and black, stares back across the asphalt at me.
“My wife went on ahead,” the older man says. “She was going to drive until she got a signal, then call police.”
I get my bearings. The spot is probably just a mile or two off of I-87. It’s the windy mountain pass that precedes Lake Placid. Beyond the guard rail, the land plummets into a steep ravine, punctuated with pointy pine trees. The headlights of the Range Rover, still on, stab out into the air over the massive drop.
“Pretty close to the edge,” the young man says.
My mind was spinning at first, but now it’s settling, thoughts forming clear and simple: The cops are coming. It will be state police. An accident report. An insurance claim. And judging by the look of me in the reflection of the side-view mirror, likely a trip to the hospital.
And I’ve been drinking all night. Two gins at the office, and a couple of healthy glasses of wine at home. It’s been hours, most of it likely metabolized, but still . . .
“Ma’am?”
I get back into the driver’s seat. The keys are still in the ignition. A safety feature has rotated the key chuck back into the pre-ignition position, so I twist the keys to test the battery, the starter — whatever gets this thing going. The engine, surprisingly, fires up.
The two men take another couple of steps back. They’re almost in the road, and so they walk around in front of the Range Rover, watching helplessly as I put the vehicle in reverse and hit the gas. With a couple of bumps and a jarring jump back onto the asphalt, I’m on the road again. The Rover sounds okay — the only problem is my door is still open.
Leaning over, I catch the handle and give it a hard pull. With a loud wrenching of metal, the door closes. The door-open indicator light stays on, however. It’s good enough.
The men exchange glances. The older one is talking, jaw wagging, but I can’t hear. Finally, he faces me and waves his arms in the air. He’s shouting, “Ma’am! Ma’am!”
I put the Rover in park. The power window works, but only partway. Pressing the button lowers it by about half. The white-haired man is there, talking at me through the gap. “Ma’am. I don’t think you should.”
“Thanks for your help. I appreciate it.”
“Ma’am — I think you’re in shock. It might be best to just . . . get out of the vehicle. Let the police handle it.”
I stare past the white-haired man at the deer on the far side of the road. I feel like we’re in it together, the deer and me. That these people are interlopers.
“Ma’am? Really . . .”
And yet a part of me knows he’s right.
In the end, it doesn’t matter, since I can see the blue and red lights starting to pulse in the dark forest as a state trooper car comes up the mountain road and around the bend.
CHAPTER TWENTY | Saturday
I’m brought to the hospital in Lake Placid. The facility is small but functional. Paul has been notified and is waiting when we get there. Once I’m out of the ambulance and in a bed in the small ER, Paul fawns over me, touching me, wincing as he takes stock of my injuries as if he can feel my pain.
Within half an hour, I’m released. I have a cut over my left eye — from my watch — and some bruising of my forearms. It had seemed worse at the time, but I’m told I’m lucky. Very lucky. Paul brings me home in the pickup truck — the Rover is being towed. We’ll have to get a rental while we work out the insurance claim and repairs.
Dawn turns the sky red and gold. Paul glances at me as we drive along. “The trooper I spoke to said you kept asking about the deer. He said they have hunters, or butchers, one of those. People who will take it and make use of it.”
I can still see the eye looking at me over the sloping, dark road. Deer are actually quite common in Westchester, something of a nuisance. We see them in our backyard all the time. But northern deer, Adirondack deer — they’re different. Elusive. Less domesticated, and more wild and mysterious.