A Strange Week

It had been a strange week, starting with the flowers. On Wednesday when I got home from running some errands, there was an outsized oblong-shaped box, set on the short end, waiting on the front porch. It was addressed to someone else. I took the box inside and opened it to find a red glass vase and a bouquet of roses, assorted colors like a carton of candy hearts, pink and yellow, red and white. Valentine’s wasn’t until Friday. The attached note read: “To ——, my special nurse.”

I unwrapped the bouquet from its cellophane sheath, trimmed the stems and cut back a few of the leaves so the blooms would look less cluttered. I filled the vase with water and sprinkled in some of the flower food packet then stood the flowers in the water. The glass glowed ruby in the early evening light. Pretty.

I looked again at the “To” line on the box and read the name of the woman who wasn’t me printed over my address. There was a phone number for the intended recipient that I hadn’t noticed at first. I texted the number about the flowers, took a shower, made dinner and went to bed.

Valentine’s Day arrived sunny and clear, but I didn’t hear anything back from the woman about the flowers. I felt kind of guilty about keeping them, but I didn’t think there was much else I could do, and, along with the flowers that I’d actually received, it felt extravagant to have multiple bouquets decorating the main room of the house. The kind of luxury I could scarcely imagine ever paying for on a writer’s wages.

An upslope blew into town the next day. The morning started out warm, by February standards, but as the day went on, the temperature steadily dropped. A thick cloud collected over the skyline peaks, winter’s woolen breath. By midday rain turned to snow and the air was chill again. A thin layer of devilish ice coated the roads under the fresh cottony powder. The power went out in early afternoon, which doesn’t happen often here, lengthening the late hours. I felt a small thrill in the stillness, a snow-day abandonment. As dusk gathered in the house, the light grew faint and smudgy and, then, darkness.

With no internet, we joyfully abandoned the notion of watching the news, ate leftovers and lit candles. There wasn’t much else to do so we read aloud to each other in shy voices by headlamp. Night pressed against the living room windows, darkening the glass like water, deep and Atlantic. We pulled down the shades and it felt warmer in the house. Around 1 a.m. I was woken up by the sound of the refrigerator alarm, and I knew that the power was finally back on.

The overnight low dropped near 0°F, and the following day dawned with a trace of fresh snow, the air sharp and cold. I went into the kitchen, brewed some coffee and then made my usual visit to the front window to look out at the day. Lifting the blinds, the gray morning was snow-lightened. And then I saw it. There was a deer lying in the front yard.

It appeared to be sleeping. The way the deer was sidled up next to the house made me think that it might have been seeking out warmth in the single-digit lows. I cooed at it through the closed window with delight, steamy tendrils rising from my coffee cup. The deer was curled up like a cat, its legs folded under its body in a tight package, head tucked down to one side. Its coat was a dusty gray-brown like pale tree bark, the same winter color as the rabbit who lives under the shed.

When the sun had risen enough to reach the yard, the deer extended its legs a little, rolling onto one side, and I could see the way its faded brown coat was bordered with more golden-tinged fur at the edges, before exposing the downy white of its belly, rising and falling with the slow rhythm of its breath. In the morning light, I could see individual hairs illuminated in the spray of fur that rose from the crest of its hip. Feathery and delicate as the single shoots that form a dandelion puff. With eyes closed, the deer shifted its head and I could see the holes on its forehead awaiting the spring growth of antlers.

As I stood there watching through the window, I was surprised that the sun’s warmth didn’t fully wake the animal. It was no more than two feet from the house and, despite the prevalence of deer that graze in many of the neighborhoods in town, this level of domestic comfort seemed unnatural. A few moments later, it started to stir. The deer raised its head with half-closed eyes, but it only seemed able to loll its head around in a drugged circle before lowering it back to rest on the ground. Its muzzle was damp below the mouth.

I slid open the door to the front porch and stepped outside to see if it would run off. At my approach, the deer’s ears dropped back, but otherwise it made no effort to move. I wasn’t sure if it could actually see me, or it just sensed my presence. Its eyes looked drained and unfocused, its body drawn.

I looked up the symptoms for Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) as I waited on hold on the Colorado Parks and Wildlife service line. The symptoms—listlessness, drooling, weight loss, stumbling, lack of fear of people—all matched those of the poor creature that was descending from existence in the cold, snow-lined yard. One part from the Centers for Disease Control’s overview of CWD seemed especially stark,​ ”It​ is always fatal in infected animals. There is no vaccine or treatment.”

I tried to go about the morning while I waited in the warm house, but I kept coming back to linger at the window. The deer’s breathing seemed ragged now, the last life leaching out of it in vapor-clouded breaths. I wondered if it had been there all night, alone in the dark waiting for the relief of morning.

All said and done, the Ranger went about his business in less than ten minutes. He rolled up in a pick-up, backed the truck up in the driveway with the bed facing the deer and then walked over and shot the deer at close range with a handgun. There was a completeness to the sound, the gun shot had the finality of a balloon’s pop. A quick, killing release of air that changed form to formless. He easily loaded the deer’s frail carcass into the pick-up’s bed, thanked us for calling and then drove off. All that remained was its imprint in the snow; death lying down in the front yard.

I arrived home the next day and the same box was on the porch—the tall rectangular purple-cardboard packaging that the first bouquet of flowers had arrived in. A second bouquet was inside, identical—down to the note—as the first. I went through the same motions, cutting stems, trimming leaves, sprinkling the flower food in the water. I stood the new flowers in the twinned heavy glass vase, its thick crimson sides glinting their opaque blood-red gleam.

When I tried to call the flower delivery company, I was met with an automated menu that asked me to give various information about the delivery: the order number, the recipient’s name, the sender’s name, the delivery zip code. None of the information could be linked with an order on record.

Mystified, I sat down at the kitchen table and considered the flowers, who had sent them and who they were meant for. I told myself it could be a computing error, a glitch in the system that sent them twice, but that didn’t explain why there was no record of them being sent in the first place. I told myself ghost stories about a couple that had lived here long before me, a long-married couple where maybe the wife had been a nurse and that’s how they’d met. Maybe he’d set up an automatic delivery every year on Valentine’s Day, so that they would keep coming even after he’d died. I couldn’t decide if this notion was sweet or devastating, a simple reminder of a life shared outlasting death, to guard against that eventual, final aloneness.

The edges of the petals had already started to crisp slightly, the result, I was sure, of the dry February air and the heater running. But they still felt soft and silken under my fingertips, and in their folds a freshness lingered, dewy and rose-scented. Most of the recent dusting of snow had already melted and you could feel the days lengthening one by one. Soon there would be flowers pushing up through the soil, rising to the call of the birds’ song. Through the window I could see the matted patch of grass where the deer had lain, but overhead the chinook winds were shaking the branches of the trees awake, the sky had already shifted to that warmer shade of blue that guaranteed, eventually, the promised arrival of spring.