She made herself stop. Was there nothing that would keep her from drifting away? What crisis was urgent enough? It would have taken nothing for her to crash the Corolla on the ride home. Now, she was blessed to have arrived safely, and she was standing and thinking about. . what? Why did her plans get away from her? With the visit to Stella, she had meant only to help Max. As, now, she meant only to make things easier for the bodies in the living room. Why couldn’t she keep to her plans? She felt afflicted alongside her son; she did not recognize herself. Alex always panicked when the fridge door remained open for too long, wasting electricity, and with a guilty tremor she knocked it closed — she intended to cause no provocation tonight — though everyone was in the living room.
Maya would expertly steer the Benders through several plates and then out the door, earning the gratitude of Alex and Eugene; the problem of her disappearance would be buried in the relief that would follow the Benders’ departure. Maya had failed to get Madam Stella to lay hands on Max, but several weeks had now passed without Max acting strangely, and so perhaps her husband was right, and the thing to do was to leave the boy alone, to let him grow out of it. He had, after all, come out of his bizarre adventure unscathed. Perhaps he was protected. Maybe her son was charmed in some way. If she couldn’t be, then maybe he was. Abruptly, Maya was filled with a light-headed optimism. She took four plates, two in her fingers and two balanced across her forearms, as she had seen waitresses do at the Acrewood Diner, and, feeling a frisson of otherness (she was a waitress in some diner), stepped into the living room.
It was only now that she realized that she’d heard no sound from it for some time. If Maya had been less preoccupied by her thoughts and looked in to check why the Rubin/Bender quartet was so quiet, she would have seen much sooner what they were seeing. They were all four standing in a hushed pall at the sliding door to the backyard — Bender femme was actually shaking her head slightly in a kind of pained wonder. Alex was rigid with disbelief, Eugene impassive, and Bender had slid his hands professorially into the pockets of his striped trousers, as if the vision before them would require not a little professional insight.
What they were witnessing was the resolution of Alex’s problem with deer damage — sans deer repellent. Its ingredients surrounded their son in a clearing beyond the lawn, where the pines began: a carton of eggs from the refrigerator in the garage, a small bucket filled with water, a spray bottle, a second bucket, empty. The five of them watched him extract an egg, crack it on the rim of the water bucket, and seesaw the two halves until the yolk and albumen were separated from the chalaza. The former went into the water bucket, the latter into the other.
But it wasn’t this ritual, strange though it was due to the cabalistic overtones of the odd, raw ingredients — for a moment, Maya tensed at the thought that Max had been cursed in a new way at Madam Stella’s — that held their attention. It was the fact that around Max milled a convention of bucks, does, and fawns, who always bolted as soon as Alex heaved open the yard door in fury. Maya counted, stricken: There were nine. They were chewing the twigs around Max’s feet. Though Max had yet to utilize the mixture he was preparing, the teeth of none were clamped around the pines. Occasionally, the visitors rubbed their white-spotted flanks against Max’s side, like housebroken cats. Except for the fawns, all were bigger than Max, and when they sidled past him, they bumped his small body so that it looked as if he might fall over.
Maya reached for the handle of the sliding door. But another hand — she was too startled to check whose, but it was an unfamiliar hand, and later she thought it must have been Bender — held her forearm. They watched Max bumped hard by a fat buck, stupidity in its eyes. It was the color of dead leaves save for two white circles around the eyes and a patch below its mouth; it looked like it was wearing a mask. Max put down the water bucket — which, perhaps out of sensitivity toward his father, he was trying to pour into the sprayer without spilling onto the lawn — and turned toward the buck, its antlers like two gnarled, splayed hands. Then he laid his palm on the velvet-looking spot between the antlers. They stood like that for a minute, the deer’s eyes shielded by Max’s palm. Finally, the buck tucked its hooves under the muscled flank of its belly and dropped to the ground.
Bender’s hands fell out of his pockets. Though he had solved the Kennedy curse, he had never witnessed anything comparable.
Maya felt — she felt rather than saw it — a body break from the group by the door. It broke forward, it heaved open the sliding door with a melancholy sigh, it lunged ahead only to discover the screen door blocking its way, it uttered a curse that had never been heard in the house, it ripped open the screen door, and burst onto the deck. Only then, from the back, did Maya see that her husband was rushing out after their child. She mouthed a weak no — mouthed it weakly and without any intention to be heard.
Seeing Alex, the buck with the masklike face sprang from its seat, an antler grazing Max on the side of his head. Max yelped and clutched his temple with both hands; the Rubins and Benders did not need perfect vision to see the blood spurting down his little fingers. Maya shrieked. The fawns and does became agitated and began to flee, trampling the ground. Max, down on one knee, went down on his butt, and then he was prostrate. As they stalked away, the animals trampled him. He tried to roll up like a snail to protect himself from the stampede.
+
Alex was shouting for her to get Max in the car. Max was sobbing in short, agitated bursts. Kissing him up and down his face, Maya managed to pry his hand from his temple. Alex barked Maya’s name again. The elder Rubins and the Benders stood fixed in place, terrified. After she wiped his temple with a damp cloth, Max wincing and wriggling and his sobs turning to squeals, Maya saw a puffy pink welt, but no broken skin. But where had the blood come from? She soaked a gauze pad in peroxide and then tied a strip of gauze around his head so it would remain in place. He looked like a war wounded. Max whined, too tight. “Shhh, my love, shhh,” she whispered into his ear, and allowed the two of them to be swept toward the car.
In the emergency room was the usual collection of young men with heads in their hands, blood on their T-shirts, and hastily wrapped bandages marking the injury, and mothers with whimpering children. It was the latter group that frightened Maya more — partly because it was mothers and children, and partly because you couldn’t tell what was wrong.