The yellow sign with the bent black arrow said to slow down, there’s a curve ahead, but I knew the corner well enough—a blind and banked twenty-five—and the tires on my pickup had a fair bit of tread.

The headlights cut through a night heavy with the ocean’s scent, with sweeter traces of the winter woods, spruce and cedar, mostly. The trees crowded thick to the shoulders, their boughs overreaching, and it seemed we were driving down a ragged tunnel. A steady mist fell.

Beth’s hands lifted from her lap and grasped her seatbelt: Her way of saying Eddy, slow down, you’re speeding; I’m afraid; please slow down. She was bundled in a coat and sweater against the draft shooting cold through the hole in the floorboard.

I eased off the gas; the needle dropped toward forty, maybe forty-five and we entered the curve.

A doe stood at the edge of the pavement. She was stiff-legged, tail up, neck graceful, alert and beautiful, caught full in the sweep of lights. Her eyes gleamed yellow and she snorted fog. Maybe that was when I fell in love with her.

But a startled deer, I knew, might do anything. She might just stand there and, glassy-eyed, watch us pass, or she might turn and bound away into the woods, or she might trot straight ahead onto the road. I shifted down a gear and to give her more space, veered left and across the yellow line.

Beth gasped.

All the doe had to do was nothing. Just stand there.

She spun on her rear legs and bolted—a dun-brown flash that struck the right front fender. The steering wheel shuddered; the jolt of impact shot into my hands, up my arms and into my chest.

Beth screamed—maybe. In that crystalline moment, it could have been me.

The doe flipped into the air, banged off the windshield directly in front of Beth and disappeared over the cab.

The pickup slewed across the highway, crossed the centerline, spun a one-eighty and came to rest in the far shoulder of the southbound lane.

The engine idled smooth, indifferent, as if something hadn’t just died. A headlight pierced the night. The doe, I knew, had busted out the other one. I held onto the wheel with both hands, scared, afraid to let go, knowing it had been me, not Beth, who’d screamed. Or maybe it had been both of us. I took my foot off the brake.

Beth sobbed—a great shiver that came through the bench seat. Her face was pasty white, her hands tight around her seatbelt.

I said, “Are you okay?”

One hand fluttered away from her seatbelt, stalled in mid-air, fell to her lap and curled up. “Oh, Jesus, Jesus!”

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