Ella Torres is a Brazilian writer and translator and a graduate of Barnard College, where she earned a degree in English and Creative Writing. She writes editorials, fiction, and poetry, and is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at The New School.
~~~
It's 1945. You are five years old, and you are folded behind the couch like a letter no one wants to open. Your father and mother are screaming in the bungalow's kitchen. He throws a chair, she cries. The couch smells like cigarette smoke and the lavender soap your mother uses on Sundays, when she's trying. You cover your ears with your stuffed rabbit, fur rubbed bare at the neck from clutching. Your thumb finds the bald patch, worn smooth as a stone in a river, and traces it the way other children trace their mothers' faces. The door slams. He's gone.
Your mother tips back the bottle of Tequila he left behind. She sinks onto the sagging couch, her throat moving like she's swallowing something much larger than liquid. She looks through you—no, not through you, past you, to some version of her life where you don't exist—and says something you've heard before: you ruined her life, you stole her body, everything wrong started the day you were born. You look down at your hands. They are small and dirty and you wonder what they took, when they took it, if you could give it back. You would. You would give anything back.
You stand very still. You are waiting for the next sentence, the one that starts with but I love you anyway. You have been waiting for this sentence your whole life. You will wait for it for the rest of your life.
You turn, small feet on the cold floor, and go back to your room. The hallway is dark and your shadow stretches behind you, thin and long, like it's trying to stay in the living room with her, like even your shadow wants her to want you.
There are kinds of sadness, you will understand when you are older. Some sadness announces itself with tears and wailing. But there is another kind, the kind that sinks into you quietly and stays, the kind that rearranges everything and calls it home.
So you sit by the window. You arrange the rabbit in your lap, paws together, like he's praying too. The forest presses black against a blacker sky. Three lights flicker between the trees. Red, green, blue. Fairies, you decide. The kind from stories other mothers read to other children in the park. You press your hands so hard together your knuckles turn white. You whisper to them, then say it louder, then louder still: you're ready, you'll go. But the lights just flicker, beautiful and distant. Please please please take me home. You bang on the window with your small fists. The lights stay where they are. They always do.
~*~
The Johnsons only invited you to their Summer barbecue because they feel bad, but you don't care: there's balloons tied to the white picket fence, pink lemonade sweating in a glass pitcher, hamburger patties sizzling on the grill, and other children running wild in their cotton shorts and striped shirts, cake frosting plastered across their faces.
You want to eat all of it. Not just the food—the light, the noise, the way Mrs. Johnson calls everyone honey like she means it. You want to unhinge your jaw and swallow this whole day and keep it somewhere safe inside you.
It's your turn on the slip and slide. You run and fall and the world tips sideways, your stomach lifts like it does on the swings, that flutter of wings inside your chest, good butterflies, not the ones you get when your parents fight or the kitchen shelf is empty and your stomach starts eating itself. Water sprays cold and clean, the grass smells like crushed green and chlorine and someone's mother's suntan lotion, like summer distilled into a single breath. For one perfect second, you're weightless. You're nobody's daughter, nobody's mistake.
You slide to a stop at the end, laughing, water in your nose and grass stuck to your knees. You stand up, still grinning. And then you see them watching. The older boys near the fence, nudging each other. One of them has braces. One of them is holding a hot dog he's forgotten to eat. Boys have stopped being boys now, they're something else, entities who look at you with eyes you don't understand. Then you’re reminded: you are ten years old, and your body has betrayed you into becoming. Your chest is swelling like fruit you didn't plant, growing faster than the rest of you, like your body forgot to wait for your mind to catch up.
Suddenly, it’s your turn on the slip and slide again but you don't want to go anymore. One of the girls—flat-chested, hair dripping, still just a kid—calls your name. You shake your head. You pull on the oversized shirt you brought. You sit in the grass with a plate of cake and eat it alone, not because you're hungry but because this is what you came for, this is what you can still have, this is the part they can't take.
~*~
Unlike the other teens, going to Lincoln High is the favorite part of your day. For seven hours you can disappear into the Pythagorean theorem, into diagramming sentences, into the way a mitochondrial cell holds everything it needs inside one tiny membrane, self-contained, complete, asking nothing from anyone.
You come home late, later than you need to, taking the long way past the diner and the five-and-dime, counting the cracks in the sidewalk, stopping to watch a woman arrange pies in a window, reading every menu taped to every glass door—anywhere, anywhere but there.
You open the front door as quietly as you can. It doesn't matter. Franklin, your mother's boyfriend, is on the couch, smelling like cigarettes and motor oil he couldn't bother to wash off. He looks up when you come in. He always looks up when you come in. Your mother is already drinking. They scream like your mom and dad used to, but they have sex too, loud enough that you can hear it through the walls. You lie in your bed with a pillow over your ears and wonder what it would feel like to want someone that much, to choose someone, to let them in on purpose.
You shower in the claw-foot tub with the chipped porcelain, using the same bar of Ivory soap until it's thin as paper. In the mirror, foggy with steam, you see what everyone else sees: the long legs, the narrow waist, the chest that makes men stop mid-sentence. A customer at the diner last month told you that you looked like Elizabeth Taylor, only softer. You didn't know what to say. You're fifteen.
In bed, you drift toward sleep until a weight shifts the mattress. Something crawls into being beside you, heavy and wrong. Before you open your eyes, you know. Frank. He smells like tequila and Pollo Guisado, grease and garlic on his skin, chicken flecks caught in his teeth as he looms, his breath hot and sour on your neck.
His hand is on your thigh. His hand has been on your thigh before, in the hallway, on the couch when your mother was in the kitchen, and you learned to go still, to wait for it to pass. But tonight his hand doesn't stop.
Your nightgown tears: the sound of fabric ripping is louder than your voice. Each rip peels away the thin membrane between you and this, between before and after. Your scream lodges, throat tight, swallowed back down into your stomach where it sits like a stone. You are thinking about the mitochondria. You are thinking about the Pythagorean theorem. You are thinking about the pies in the window on Maple Street, cherry, apple, pecan, lined up in a row, $1.25, $1.50, $1.75. Your limbs go leaden, distant, like they belong to someone else now, like you've left your body behind and floated up to the ceiling to watch. You lie there, steady and stopped, your mind fleeing to the fairies you conjured at five, those fragile guardians of a softer world, their red and green and blue lights dancing in the forest. They didn't come for you then. They won't come for you now.
Your mother comes in. For one desperate second, you're hopeful she will tell him to get out. But she screams at you instead. Not at him. At you. She follows you from your room to the kitchen to the hallway, her voice rising with every step. Tramp. That's what she calls you. Little tramp. She says she had plans. She says she was going to be somebody.
You look your mother in the eyes. They're dark like yours, like a deer's eyes, big and black, as if they absorb everything they don't want to see, every secret they can't speak. She's still beautiful, your mother. That's the thing nobody tells you. The women who hurt you can still be beautiful. You have her mouth. You have her cheekbones. You don't have whatever it is inside her that breaks.
That night you promise yourself: you will get out. You will use the only thing she gave you, this face, this body, and you will go so far from here that none of this will ever be able to touch you again.
~*~
You watch a man launched into space on the television above the Galaxy Diner counter on Sunset Boulevard. The whole diner stops to stare: waitresses with coffee pots suspended mid-pour, short-order cooks wiping their hands on stained aprons, customers frozen with forks halfway to their mouths. Two years in the city of Stars, becoming one seems like less and less of a possibility with each passing day. But you're still here. That's the difference between you and everyone else who dreams: they have bus tickets home. You have nothing. And nothing is the best fuel there is.
You ran out of money for acting classes six months ago. Coffee poured with a smile, leaning over tables at angles you've calculated, the fringed dress and feathered headband of a girl playing dress-up in someone else's idea of glamour. Your Mary Janes pinch. Everything pinches. You've memorized which booths get the studio executives. You know their names, their orders, their wives. You know which ones tip well and which ones let their hands wander and which ones might, if you laugh at the right joke, mention your name to someone who matters. Each man in a suit is a potential door. Most leave quarters on Formica and nothing else. But you only need one to open.
You know what you have. You've always known. The body that made boys forget their sentences at fifteen, that made Franklin think he could take what he wanted—you've decided it belongs to you now. You decide who touches it. You decide what it buys. At twenty years old, your chest and your face are not your shame. They're your inventory.
One evening, still in uniform, you turn onto Vine Street and stop. Lights. Cameras. Bodies moving with purpose between trailers. A twenties picture—women in drop-waist dresses and cloche hats, men in Oxford bags. You look down at yourself. Same era. Same lines. You could disappear into that set and no one would know the difference.
You don't think. You just move. You walk onto the set like walking through a door someone left open. A production assistant with a clipboard materializes, frowning.
"Who are you?"
"I'm here for background," you say, meeting his eyes.
"Name?"
You open your mouth to say it—the name your mother gave you, the name Franklin grunted in the dark, the name on your birth certificate in a city you're never going back to. But something stops you. That name belongs to a girl who cried behind a couch, who got blood on her nightgown, who ate cake alone in the grass. That girl doesn't get to be famous. That girl doesn't get to win.
So you kill her.
"Joan," you say. It comes out steady. "Joan Laas."
You don't know where it comes from. Somewhere clean. Somewhere with no history. A name that sounds like it belongs on a marquee, a name no one has ever screamed at or whispered into or ruined.
He can’t find Joan Laas. You tell yourself it’s a name too big to belong to an extra. So ten minutes later, you're in a trailer. Giving him a blow job. The transaction is efficient, wordless. You've done worse for less. You've done worse for nothing. Two hours later you're in your first picture, background but beautiful. You don't thank your mother for the genes. You thank yourself for understanding how the world works, for not flinching when it asks for payment.
Two months later, you're signed to Apex Studios. The night you get your first real paycheck, more money than Franklin made in a month, more than your mother ever saw at once, you buy Häagen-Dazs and cheap champagne. You sit on your studio apartment floor, the ice cream melting while the champagne fizzes sharp and cold on your tongue. You're twenty years old and you've won the first battle. There will be more. Harder ones. You will be famous. You don't hope for it. You don't pray for it. You just know.
~*~
You just left the studio from shooting Pride and Prejudice, your hair still pinned in the Regency style: soft curls framing your face, the rest swept up and back with ribbons threaded through. You love being Lizzie Bennet twelve hours a day.
It's 1970 and you're recognized everywhere you go. The real estate agent, a man in his fifties with a golf tan and a wedding ring, drives you up into the Hollywood Hills in his Cadillac. The leather seats are hot from the sun, sticky against the back of your thighs. He asked for your autograph when you arrived at his office, grinning like a schoolboy. Now he's schooling you on the difference between Spanish colonial and Mediterranean revival. You let him talk. You've learned when to perform interest, when to let men feel important. It costs you nothing.
You follow him into a house on Mulholland. Spanish colonial with terracotta roof and kidney-shaped pool. The pool stops you. Kidney-shaped. Like the Johnsons' pool was, just much bigger. Grander.
You tell him you'll take it. He reminds you you'll need a co-signer for the mortgage, all women do. His tone is apologetic but certain, like he's explaining gravity or the weather, just the way things are. This makes your skin burn so you tell him you'll pay upfront and savor the look of shock on his face. You watch it happen: the recalibration, the subtle shift as you stop being a pretty actress who needs help and become something else, something he can't quite categorize. You plaster on your smile, the one where your cheeks hurt from holding the curve, where your eyes stay flat and dead even as your mouth performs delight, reserved for men like him, who think they're better than women like you.
Two weeks later, you're at a party in that same house, your house, champagne flowing, Sinatra on the hi-fi, beautiful people spilling from the living room onto the patio. You hired a caterer, a bartender, and bought new furniture in a single afternoon at a showroom in West Hollywood. Everything matches. Everything is perfect. You hardly recognize it as yours.
You're standing by the bar when you see him.
He's beautiful in a way men usually aren't, at least not the ones you've known. Tall, dark-haired, with a face like it was carved rather than born.
He throws you a line about how you throw a good party.
It's your first one, you tell him, with a smile that doesn't explain this is the first house you've ever owned, the first party where you're not serving drinks or performing for your supper. You notice that when he talks to you, he doesn't look at your chest first. This alone makes him remarkable.
His name is George, he says. He's a Warner Brothers executive, you learn. He quotes Truffaut. He asks if you've read Baldwin. You say yes.
When he kisses you later on your patio with LA spread below like proof, you let yourself feel it. His mouth tastes like champagne, clean, nothing underneath it, no tequila sourness, no danger. His hands stay where you want them. He pulls back to look at your face, checking, making sure.
This is new. This is terrifying. A man who asks.
You let yourself want him. You let yourself imagine that wanting doesn't have to cost you anything, that your body could just be yours, moving toward someone because it wants to, not because it has to. It feels dangerous, this hope. Dangerous as the lights in the forest, the ones you begged to save you at five. They never came. But you kiss him back anyway.
~*~
The kitchen table overflows with fruits, schedules, magazines, and scripts. One of them, an adaptation of All My Sons, your agent swears will finally get you the Oscar. George is making eggs. On Sundays you both tell the maid to stay home so you can cook naked and have sex on the counter, a little ritual that keeps four years of marriage afloat. Sex is pleasurable with George, yes it is. But now it feels like a mission. Sex no longer equals what's expected at night when Franklin comes home drunk, or a bus ticket to Hollywood, or a script with more than three lines. Sex equals a baby now. Something you spent ten years making sure never happened. Now you can't make it happen at all.
When George is done kissing you from toes to lips, you feel it coming, the blood arriving right on schedule, your body keeping time like a clock you can't stop winding. You run to the upstairs bathroom. You punch the wall. Your knuckles split. A small satisfaction in the sharp burst of pain, something real and immediate and yours to control. At twenty, bleeding meant you got away with it—another month free, another month yours. At thirty, it means your body remembers exactly how to let go of what never was. You wonder if it's because you ruined your mother's body all those years ago then push the thought down.
When you get to the studio, the place that feels more like home than your actual home, where soundstages transform from Regency England to 1920s Paris to contemporary New York within hours, where you shed yourself like a coat and become whoever they need you to be, you go to your trailer and sit down for makeup. Anna comes in with some mail. One envelope doesn't match the others—cheaper paper, smudged, the handwriting cramped and slanting right like it's trying to escape the page.
She has finally found you.
Your mother writes about reconnecting. About Franklin passing. About death bringing family together, as if you were ever a family. Then she asks for $200. Reading his name—Franklin, Frankie, the diminutive she used like he was harmless, like he was hers to forgive—makes bile rise in your throat. She buried the request at the bottom, after the small talk, as if you wouldn't notice. You wish she'd just asked for the money. You wish she hadn't made you read his name first.
You open your purse. George makes you carry cash for emergencies. Emergencies usually mean Halston blouses and last-minute dinner reservations. Today emergency cash means counting out three hundred dollars, more than she sees in a year. You fold each bill slowly, deliberately, taking your time. You tuck them into the envelope she sent, the one with her pleading words and his dead name. Then you spit on it. Once. Twice. You watch your saliva darken the paper. You seal it. The pleasure is sharp and cold, like biting into ice. Fifteen years of silence, answered with wet bills and contempt.
You hand the envelope to Anna. Back to work.
In today's scene you're playing a daughter saying goodbye to her dying father. The director calls cut after the first take.
"Print that," he says.
Anna brings you a tissue. You didn't realize you were still crying. You take it. You wipe your face. The makeup artist comes to fix your mascara. You let her.
~*~
George drinks too much. You've known this since the first year of your marriage, but now it's getting out of hand. When he drinks, he gets touchy, but no heavy fists like your father, no disgusting surprises like Franklin.
He gets touchy with other women.
You've found a different taxonomy of betrayal in men: some break skin, some break vows. Still you love George. He sits in the doctor's office with you when the doctor tells you your body won't hold a pregnancy, something about your womb, something about scarring, something you stop listening to because the fluorescent lights are buzzing and the doctor's mouth is moving but all you can hear is your mother's voice saying you ruined her body, and now your body has ruined you back.
George tells you adoption is just fine. He books surprise dinners and trips when you finish shooting projects. And despite you being thirty-five and your body starting to show its age, he tells you you're the most beautiful girl he's ever seen.
That's what you tell yourself when George comes to you with tears in his eyes saying he's gotten his assistant pregnant. She's twenty-three. She's nobody. She's going to have his baby.
He tells you you two can raise it. Together. As if this is generous. As if this is a gift he's offering you—another woman's child, made the way you couldn't make one, grown in a body that works the way yours doesn't. When he suggests you raise his love child you throw the porcelain vase he got you in Saint Tropez at his face. It misses. Shatters against the wall behind him, blue and white ceramic exploding across the hardwood. You wish you hadn't missed. You wish you'd never learned to miss. You wish you were the kind of woman who breaks vows instead of vases.
The next week George packs his bags.
You throw yourself at work and win an Oscar the same year. On stage, you thank the Academy, your director, your co-stars. You hold the gold statue and smile for the cameras, flash after flash after flash.
That night, you come home to the house on Mulholland. The house with the kidney-shaped pool. The house you bought yourself, paid for yourself, filled with furniture you picked out in a single afternoon. You set the Oscar on a shelf in the living room. You pour yourself a drink. You sit on the floor in your gown, the beading pressing into your thighs, and you wait to feel something. You wait for the pride to come. It doesn't. The house is so quiet you can hear the ice cracking in your glass. You think about calling someone—your agent, a friend, anyone—but there's no one to call.
There's no one who would understand that you just won the thing you spent your whole life wanting, and it feels like holding a golden rock while you drown.
The next week you decide to take a sabbatical. Your agent is pissed. You tell him to fuck off. He smiles and suggests a resort in Japan, very far away from the golden chaos of Los Angeles.
The day your flight takes off, you're wearing a headscarf so no one recognizes you. The woman next to you is reading a gossip magazine. You know before you look. You look anyway. George with his assistant and a baby. "It's a boy!" You would have wanted a girl.
You think about the slip and slide. You think about the girl who wanted to live inside one perfect minute forever. You think about the fairies in the forest who never came.
You lean your head against the window and weep. The woman next to you pretends not to notice. Everyone always pretends not to notice. When you get tired of crying, you order a bottle of champagne and drink until the lights below look like stars, like the whole world is just a long way down and none of it matters, none of it was ever real.
~*~
It's 1985 and you moved to Japan four years ago. Here, everything moves slower, quieter. The air smells like green tea and rain. No one speaks English and you're grateful, for once, to be incomprehensible, to not have to perform understanding.
You walk to Nara Park. Hundreds of deer roam free there, bowing to tourists for crackers. You buy a stack and sit on a bench. The deer approach slowly, their small hooves clicking against stone. One eats from your hand. Its mouth is soft and warm against your palm. It doesn't grab. It doesn't take. It just accepts what you're offering, gently, like it trusts you not to hurt it.
You stay for hours. You don't know why you're crying.
The deer move around you with their heads low, patient, asking for nothing more complicated than crackers. A mother walks past with her fawn stumbling on new legs. The fawn's eyes are huge and dark, all pupil, all openness—the way children look before they learn what to be afraid of. The way you must have looked once, before you learned.
You think about being five years old, pressing your palms against a window, watching lights in the forest that you pretended were fairies. How badly you wanted them to take you away. And here you are, forty, on the other side of the world, feeding deer in a park because you have nowhere else to be. The deer don't know you're famous or divorced. They don't know about the Oscar on your shelf or the house on Mulholland or the vase you threw that missed. They don't care that you can't have children or that your husband left you for his assistant. They just eat their crackers and move on.
A small one, barely past fawn, comes close and stands beside you. Not eating. Just standing. You hold still. You barely breathe. It feels like a test you don't want to fail. After a long moment, it folds its legs beneath itself and lies down next to you on the bench, close enough that you can feel its warmth through your dress. It smells like grass and clean fur and something you don't have a name for. Safety, maybe. Trust.
You put your hand on its back. It doesn't flinch. It just breathes, slow and even, like this is ordinary. Like gentleness is something that happens.
You run out of crackers. The deer wander away. The small one stays a moment longer, then rises, looks at you with those dark, unknowing eyes, and walks into the trees.
You sit there anyway, watching them exist without you, and understand that this is what freedom looks like: not caring whether anyone stays. But also this: the deer came to you. They didn't need you, didn't want anything you couldn't easily give. And they stayed anyway, for a little while, just because you were there. Just because you were quiet. Just because you had something soft to offer and offered it softly.
You think maybe that's all innocence is. Not the absence of knowing. Just the willingness to come close anyway.
~*~
Malibu is calmer than LA. That's what you tell yourself when you move back to the city of stars. You have three projects lined up with MGM this year.
At a party that night in the Hollywood Hills, you notice men still looking at you. Their eyes follow when you cross the room, when you lean against the bar, when you laugh at something the director says. Forty-five and they still look. You catch yourself counting it like money, like proof, and then you stop. You don't need proof anymore. You don't need their eyes to know what you're worth.
That's when you see him. George. Across the room.
You pretend not to notice. Your body notices anyway—a small flinch, a tightening in your chest, the old muscle memory of wanting him. He walks toward you followed by his wife, who has a forgettable face and an outstanding figure. You don't hate her. No. She grabbed life by the balls, you did the same. She grabbed your ex-husband by the balls and made them hers.
George is drunk too. When he's drunk he gets touchy. He takes you aside, his hand on your arm the way it used to be, familiar and unwelcome, and says he still loves you. His wife is five feet away. His breath smells like whiskey. His eyes are wet.
You look at him. You really look. The face you married, the face you cried over, the face you saw in a magazine on an airplane while your whole life fell apart. He's older now. Softer. Smaller, somehow.
You feel nothing.
No—that's not true. You feel glad. Glad you threw the vase. Glad he left. Glad you spent five years on the other side of the world learning how to be alone. Glad you're standing here in a dress that costs more than your mother ever made in a year, and he's the one who's begging.
That night you get drunk. You laugh. You dance. The music is loud, everyone's smoking and talking over each other, and for a few hours you let yourself disappear into the noise, into the champagne, into being just another body in a crowded room. It's the most fun you've had in a while. For five years your life has been silence and tea and deer in a park. You forgot what it felt like to be loud.
You bring one of the young waiters home. When he walks in and says "Wow, this is where the great Joan Laas lives," something in you goes quiet. Joan Laas. The name on two Oscars and a divorce decree and a house in Malibu. You built Joan Laas out of nothing. Out of a blow job and a lie and sheer fucking will. And now a twenty-five-year-old waiter is standing in your living room, looking at your things, saying her name like he knows her.
He doesn't know her. No one does. Not even you.
You realize you don't want him. You don't want to perform. You don't want to trade your body for the feeling of being wanted. You're tired of that transaction. You've been tired of it your whole life. You tell him you're not feeling well. You hand him a towel and tell him to sleep in the guest room.
In the morning, he's gone. You make yourself coffee. You stand on the deck and watch the ocean. You don't feel lonely. You feel clean.
~*~
Your first day on set, the first in two years, you see a deer wandering by.
"She's a prop for the movie," one of the producers tells you. Prop. The word sits wrong in your mouth, makes something tighten in your chest. "She'll be your daughter's deer that she befriends in the countryside." You're playing a mother in a war movie whose family is evacuated to the countryside. Mother. Those are the roles reserved for you now. At forty-five, you're no longer the ingenue or the bombshell. You're the mother, the mentor, the woman who exists to support younger, prettier versions of yourself. The studio doesn't say this outright, but it's there in every script they send, every role they offer. You take them anyway.
You've never been too proud to take what's offered. That's how you survived.
Over the next months you find yourself falling back in love with acting, with Hollywood. You join the producers for happy hour and give the young actresses tips. You look forward to sharing coffee with your makeup artist. You love the practicality of it, the craft of hitting your mark and finding the light and knowing exactly how many steps to take before you turn. Most of all, you love the little deer who comes to set every day. You name her Baby. You give her crackers like you did with all the nameless deer back in Nara.
When the movie finishes shooting—the one that will win you your second Oscar, though you don't know that yet—you ask about the deer.
Too expensive to keep, they say. They're going to send her somewhere. A farm, a zoo, they don't specify. They say it like it doesn't matter.
You write a check on the spot. You will not let them discard her. You will not let her become a thing that gets used and thrown away. Not her. Not anymore.
At night, you lie in bed and Baby sleeps on a blanket beside you, her breathing slow and even. You watch her in the dim light from the hallway. Her eyes, when they're open, are dark like yours, like your mother's. But they're different. Baby's eyes don't hold anything they don't want to see. They don't swallow secrets or absorb violence. They just reflect: the sheets, the moonlight, your face looking down at her.
You think about the girl at five, the one who watched the lights in the forest and called them fairies. The one who pressed her palms to the glass and begged to be taken somewhere safe. You think about her at ten, on the slip and slide, the last moment her body was just for running. At fifteen, when a man crawled into her bed and she floated up to the ceiling to escape. At thirty, when her body failed to hold the one thing she finally wanted.
She's still here. She's always been here. Not Joan Laas—the other one. The one with no name. The one who survived.
Outside, the Pacific breaks against the rocks, the same rhythm it's kept for millennia, indifferent to your big life.
You reach down. Your hand finds the soft space between Baby's ears. She doesn't wake. Doesn't flinch. Just accepts your touch like it's ordinary. Like you're safe. Like you've always been safe.
And you understand now what the deer has always been. Not a pet. Not a prop. She's the innocence you lost at ten, come back to you in another form. She's the soft creature who trusts without reason, who comes close without fear, who doesn't know what your body has cost you and doesn't care. She's the part of you that got left behind at the Johnsons' barbecue, the part that floated up to the ceiling when Franklin came, the part you buried when you invented Joan Laas.
She came back. She found you.
The light from the hallway falls across the bed. You breathe. Baby breathes. The ocean breathes.
You have a deer who trusts you. A house by the sea. Two gold statues on a shelf you never look at. You have silence when you want it. Noise when you don't. A door you can lock and a door you can open and no one on either side who hurts you.
You’re fifty and life is just beginning.
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