How strange that Erika still existed, that she could stand right there where the deer had stood half an hour ago, talking as she always talked.
Molly experienced a deep unsteadiness. Everything seemed normal; she was disoriented by the normalcy.
COME OUT TO CAR WHEN E ARRIVES.
She realized that the whole time she had been putting the kids to bed, the promise of Erika’s imminent arrival was in her mind like a life raft.
E BACK BY 7PM.
But now, watching her unflappable babysitter talk on in the friendly light, she was finding it impossible to locate the words necessary to explain what was happening, to tell Erika about the intruder, to get her support in reporting the incident to the police.
“Have fun!” Erika said as Molly picked up her bag and opened the front door and felt something take hold of her body, a magnetic force that pulled her out of her home and toward the street.
2
The deer was sitting in the dark in the driver’s seat of their parked car.
They had two sets of car keys. One was in an airplane over another continent. The other she had dropped in her bag after locking the car when she got home from work.
Yet the deer was sitting in the dark in the driver’s seat of their parked car.
She could have turned away. She could have run back inside.
IF YOU DO NOT COME YOU WILL REGRET IT FOREVER.
She pulled on the handle of the passenger door. It was locked. Instantly the deer found the button and unlocked the door and pushed it open and pointed at the passenger seat with a black-gloved hand.
Molly remained standing in the open door.
Her key chain, the unmistakable beaded loop Viv had made at preschool, the key chain that ought to be clunking around at the bottom of her bag right now, dangled from the ignition.
The deer had the upper hand. The deer knew things he had no way of knowing. The deer could destroy her and her children if he so desired. It seemed clear that a path had been prepared for her; she saw no choice but to walk down it.
The deer was perhaps annoyed, or maybe upset, by Molly’s tears. He reached out toward her, both palms up, a gesture of exasperation or a gesture of invitation, surrender.
3
The deer was a nervous driver. Molly experienced his hesitations in her own body, the familiar anxiety of the left turn onto the thoroughfare. The deer head added to Molly’s tension, and presumably to the deer’s too, as it severely inhibited one’s vision. She remembered how it felt to be inside that head, the smell of flour and glue, the shrunken view and the kids exclaiming and David asking if he’d made it the right size.
The metallic surface of the mask reflected the traffic lights, red and green and yellow blurs. The shadows of branches and telephone wires moved across the gleaming shell.
Was it possible that a concerned citizen, even a police officer, might catch sight of the deer, would be alarmed and act accordingly? But in truth the deer mask was beautiful; to any witness in a passing car, she and her kidnapper surely looked like a carefree couple driving around in costume, on a lark or en route to a party.
She considered requesting that he remove the deer head in the interest of their collective safety, but before she could brace herself to speak, the deer pulled up in front of the liquor store with the bulletproof plastic. He parked and got out and waited for her to join, which she did as in a nightmare.
The deer led her inside. There was no one in the store aside from a heavily bearded cashier flipping through a catalog behind the discolored plastic, blind to the scene of a deer escorting a woman to the ATM machine and wordlessly indicating that she should remove her wallet from her bag and insert her bank card.
Molly was quivering but she did not hesitate to do the deer’s bidding. Two hundred dollars in exchange for her children, asleep, in that peaceful room, with Erika the dragon guarding the hallway. Perhaps this was it, this tiny robbery; perhaps after this she would be taken home and could begin the process of forgetting.
Yet when it came time to punch in the four digits of her passcode, she couldn’t recall them. A series of numbers nearly as well-worn as her own birth date, but under these circumstances, the panic, they escaped her. Her fingers dithered, stupid, above the keypad.
The deer’s gloved fingers shot under hers and entered a four-digit code; the machine rewarded the correct combination by ejecting ten $20 bills from its innards.
So the deer did know all her secrets. Molly felt cold, ill.
The cashier did not react as the deer paid for the bottle of Grüner Veltliner (her white of choice, though it was the deer who pulled it from the large refrigerator) with the money she had just handed over to her captor.
4
Back in the car, the deer reached to retrieve a gray sweatshirt from the car seat where Viv always shed layers of clothing and crumbs of food. He folded the sweatshirt and pressed it against Molly’s eyes. It was a terrorizing thing, to have a kidnapper blindfold you, but she understood why he was doing it, or thought she did, so she tolerated it as he knotted and reknotted the arms. She breathed in the smell of Viv, that breezy dirty banana smell of child.
Once her eyes were covered, she heard him removing the deer head, just as she had predicted. The soft scrape of papier-mâché antlers against the roof of the car. And then the tug of gloves being pulled from fingers.
Her newfound blindness made it difficult for her to keep track of his choices, even in the known intersections of her own neighborhood. He made one turn, then two others, and already she was mixed up. She had transformed into an object being conveyed, matter in transit. She pictured the outskirts of town, one of those sparse desolate groves alongside the highway.
Her body felt bereft, untethered.
How tethered her body felt on weekend mornings when the four of them lay together in the big bed. Often Ben was naked, between diapers; often Viv was naked, angry if anyone tried to dress her. The mother and the father formed a circle around the two small naked bodies. No safety like this safety. The oxytocin churning through them. If the world must end, let it end now, when we are here, like this. Every single other thing—from the exhaustion of the week to evolution itself—is in the interest of this. This pure lack of desire. The need for absolutely nothing more than this.
She reached into her bag, desperate to handle her phone, her link to home. But what met her fingers was her key chain, the unmistakable beaded loop Viv had made at preschool, identical to the one currently dangling from the ignition.
5
She clung to the key chain in her bag as the kidnapper parked the car, as the kidnapper removed the matching key chain from the ignition, as the kidnapper walked around the car and opened her door and drew her out.
The keys the key.
The kidnapper led her up a paved walkway. She heard him fingering the key chain that had so recently been in the ignition. He unlocked a door. She tried to remember all the doors that could be unlocked with the keys on her key chain. Their front door. Their back door. Their car. David’s basement studio. The Phillips 66. Her locker at work.
The kidnapper pressed her through the door and relocked it behind them. She recognized the smell of the room but couldn’t place it.
She had the urge to yank off the blindfold yet also felt somehow safer in this artificial dark, letting her other senses be the courageous ones for a change. The smell of cinnamon, old fabric, Clorox, dried-out dirt.