I told my husband. “I’m going to go for a drive.”

But what I really felt was a little more sour than restlessness. I’d spent all afternoon staring at my computer screen on the front porch desk I’d bought to write on all summer, not doing any writing at all. Boredom and anxiety commingled into something bitter and pungent, like failure. 

I loaded myself into the car and drove the back way, through the trees and Japanese knotweed, to Burger King. I thought maybe chicken fries would jog my creativity, but they were cold and stale and didn’t help at all. I pulled out of the lot and started for home. Two failures for the day.

At the red light by the gas station, a sticker-covered Jeep with a Thule bike rack stopped short, and I slammed my brakes to avoid hitting it.

“Cool Jeep, dickhead,” I muttered.

I didn’t necessarily have anything against Jeeps in particular, but I was grouchy, that bile-like feeling in my stomach settling and expanding, permeating my insides until I was made of vinegar.

When the light turned green, the Jeep sped up so quickly it left tire marks on the road, and I kept my distance from whomever in the driver’s seat needed to be at a cool Jeep convention immediately.

Up ahead, a fawn crept out of the brush, tiptoeing onto the road, curious and young. The Jeep, going too fast and paying too little attention, didn’t flash its brake lights. It clipped the fawn on its rear end, sending it sprawling under the jeep, where the baby spun on the road, landing hard and fast, narrowly missing the other tires. The Jeep kept driving and the fawn thrashed its legs wildly in the center lane, like it wanted to stand but couldn’t.

A wave of nausea seized my gut in its clenched fists. “Oh my God,” I repeated over and over as I drove by.

“Oh my God.”

My throat felt full, and my eyes burned with hot tears that sprung from somewhere deep and angry. 

Should I turn around? I thought. What should I do?

I drove for another half mile, repeating Oh my God, the words murmured over my lips like a prayer, though I’d never been religious. Like a mantra. Please be okay, little one. Please. My heart thumped in the hollow cavern of my chest, a creature trapped in a metal trash can. I could either leave it, and try to pretend I hadn’t seen what I did, shaking my head like an Etch-a-Sketch to erase the images whenever they crept in, or I could go back and see if I could help. I tapped my thumbs on the steering wheel. Finally, I turned around in the gravel driveway of a storage facility and shakily guided my car back to the scene.

It still lay there in the road, but it wasn’t moving anymore. I pulled over and put on my hazards, but my parking itself was deeply haphazard. I didn’t care. 

Bright red blood—so bright it looked fake, like ketchup or a bad Halloween costume—billowed out around the fawn’s back end. I couldn’t tell if it was alive until it suddenly opened its deep brown eyes and looked at me, right into my own eyes. It picked its head up then, kicking its feet, and cried, a harsh, horrible sound. Tears poured down my face and I wanted to be sick. I might be sick.

“Oh, baby,” I soothed, feeling supremely helpless. What could I possibly do to help this poor creature when I could hardly help myself? I hadn’t written a word in weeks, and with every moment I spent saving photos to my Pinterest board I felt increasingly like a worthless fraud. When the fawn cried again and looked at me, fear and pain in its little eyes, I wanted to tell it that. I don’t know how to help you, I thought. I don’t know what to do.

A man in a white truck slowed and rolled his window down. “You okay, miss?”

“It’s a fawn,” I told him, pointing. “It’s still alive. I don’t know what to do.”

“Oh,” he said, before driving away.

The fawn was still trying to get up, baying and struggling on the hot pavement, when another truck pulled up. The man who rolled down the window leaned his arm on the door while he spoke. “I have a gun in the back. I’d help you with it but the Game Commission would probably fine me.”

“Yeah,” I said, but I hated him instantly, ferociously protective of this little fawn.

He drove away, not having helped at all, and I stayed there in the center lane, my head swiveling between the deer and the cars that kept driving past us, both crying on the road.

Another car pulled over across the street, and I prepared myself for another man to tell me nothing of use, but instead a woman rolled her window down, parked, and unbuckled her seatbelt.

“A fawn?” she asked. 

I nodded. “The car in front of me hit it,” I told her. “I had to turn around.”

She nodded back. “I saw it was still moving, I had to pull over. We have to get her off the road.”

I nodded again, feeling dumber than I ever had.

“The Game Commission is right over there,” she said, pointing behind us. “Should we call them?”

“Yes,” I said, finally feeling useful. “I’ll call them.”

“Okay.” She leaned down to the fawn, then called over to her car. A young girl, not much more than twelve or thirteen, sat in the front seat. Her daughter.

“Riley, I need you to get out and see if we have any blankets in the trunk.”

Then, to me, “We should wrap it up in something.”

The look in Riley’s eyes when her mother gave her this new set of instructions was just like the look in the fawn’s: panicked, unsure, but willing to listen to anyone who would help.

Kneeling, the woman slid her hands under the fawn’s back and lifted, cradling it to her chest. The fawn let out another cry, this time more from pain than fear, I guessed, but let herself be cradled. I looked around for the doe, but saw nothing. I imagined the agony and helplessness the doe must have felt to see her brand new baby mowed down by a careless someone in an unfeeling machine, and wondered at a deer’s capacity for grief. 

*

A nature documentary I watched as a child featured a computer-generated colony of paleolithic primates, the youngest of which mourned his mother deeply after she died from eating a pile of poisonous berries. With his mother’s body on a lakeside rock, the young primate wailed and tore at his fur, crying and prodding at what once was his mother to just get up. It caused me such devastation then that my own mother scolded my overwhelming emotions, and forbade any future viewing of nature documentaries. Was the doe nearby watching this unfold? I pictured her waiting anxiously in the wooded area by the shoulder, seeing her baby still alive but in imminent danger. Maybe deer grieved the way pioneers with fifteen children, two surviving to adulthood, did; invisibly, grief woven inexorably into survival.

The phrase too sensitive for this world haunted me ever since my mother recalled a student she’d had who’d taken his own life decades before I was born. It was engraved on his headstone in the same cemetery as my grandparents’ graves. For my whole life, every creature had felt kindred and human to me, which either allowed me to feel deeply and pull from a well of joy, or caused me immense despair and undue pain. 

Every time I felt too much, too deeply, I thought I also was probably too sensitive for this world. 

Now, thinking of the doe who found herself suddenly childless, I wondered at my own capacity for realism. Could a deer really feel grief, or was I projecting my own shocked heartache onto her?

“It’s just an animal,” an old acquaintance once told me when I reacted to a neighbor shooting an apple-stealing woodchuck right in front of me at dinner time.

Those four words drove a wedge into a burgeoning friendship, and might have well as been followed by a “you idiot.” The finality of it, that there were people who were unaffected by the sudden and brutal death of a living, breathing thing, made me feel alien.

Finally, blissfully, I was connected to the Game Commission and made a tearful report. The fawn was still alive. We were between Briarcrest and Greenbriar—the natural whimsy of the names at odds with the horror show I witnessed. We would wait by the road for the game warden.

The woman had gently laid the deer on the grassy shoulder, and she met my eyes when I got off the phone. “They’re going to come,” I said.

She nodded. “Its hip bone came through the other side,” she said. “I think from the road.” Her hands were covered in blood.

“Poor baby,” I said, and more helpless tears came. 

“It cries whenever I take my hands off it,” she said, and we shared a look that said we both knew why—it wanted the comfort of being touched, of being cared for. Would its deer mama have comforted it if she could? What would she have done to help her baby? And how could we do the closest thing?

“There are no blankets,” her daughter said. Her pink shorts were bunched up around her thighs and she had a clip-in feather in her light brown hair. It reminded me of myself at her age, when I put glow-in-the-dark gel in my hair and expected it to glow.

“Hold on, let me see if I have something,” I said, then started across the road.

“Careful of the cars,” the woman said, mothering me on instinct even though she looked about my age.

All I could find was my favorite scarf, navy blue plaid and so soft I wanted to bury my face in it every time I wore it. I thought, for a split second, of saying I didn’t have anything either, but then the fawn cried again. The woman must have taken her hands away. I heard her soothe it in a low voice, and closed my trunk, scarf in hand.

“Here,” I said, “I have this.”

“I think her tail is broken, I don’t know.” She touched the fawn’s tail as she spoke, and there was a note of questioning in her tone. Of bargaining. “Maybe she’ll make it. Are you okay with getting blood all over it?”

“I don’t care,” I told her, still holding out the scarf. “It’s okay.”

She took the scarf from me, then started to wrap the baby deer in it with the same care as if she was swaddling a human child.

“They’re taking a really long time,” she said. “The Game Commission. The office is right there, should we just bring her over ourselves?”

“Maybe,” I said. They were less than a half mile away from us, but felt so far removed from this tragic place.

“It might be better than just having her sit here,” she said. “Riley, I need you to get in the back seat.”

The girl made a high, anxious noise, eyes widening. 

“I’ll follow you over,” I said, and watched as she lifted the baby again, and as it tucked itself into the crook between her head and her shoulder. 

“She’s not going to bite you,” the woman said to her daughter. “She just wants someone to comfort her.”

Were we both projecting our own feelings onto the deer, or were we reacting to something powerful and unseen? Either way, our intuition was guiding us, and my heart was shredded raw.

As we drove the short distance, my whole body buzzing with pain like an exposed nerve, I panicked over calling the Game Commission. Should I have called a wildlife rehabilitation facility instead? Could they have done something for the fawn’s injuries? Would she survive? Would the game warden euthanize her? If I had called a wildlife emergency line, one I found online only after calling the Game Commission, would the fawn have a fighting chance of survival? Had I doomed her to die? Would she have died anyway? In an effort to be kind had I been cruel? Or vice versa? My thoughts raced by me and I couldn’t catch any of them.

We pulled into the lot fifteen minutes before closing, but the front doors were locked. When a truck pulled around the back of the building I flagged it down, and the game warden pulled his truck into the spot next to the woman’s.

“I called about the fawn,” I said, through tears and a racing heart. He looked at me cautiously, like he didn’t want to or know how to handle a weeping woman at the end of his workday.

“That’s where I was just headed,” he said.

“We have her here,” the woman said, then opened her back door.

“You touched it?” the game warden said, his eyebrows raising.

“Yeah,” she said, the word a shrug, and she leaned into the car to retrieve the fawn, wrapped up in the comfort of my favorite scarf. Of course, I thought. Of course she touched it. Of course we wanted to help this helpless thing who was just curious about the world and was demolished for it. Who got in the way of a fast-moving world and lost its balance and had no one to help it back up. Whose life was now defined by a split second, by a punishment far too harsh for the simple curiosity of youth. Of course, of course, of course.

The game warden was looking in the back of his large SUV and returned with a black plastic tote, its yellow lid zigzagged together. It was the same kind of container we used to store the frozen bagel dough at the cafe where I used to work. It’s too small, I thought. He can’t put her in there, can he?

He could—after he took a pile of papers out of the bottom. He took the fawn out of the woman’s arms, and it cried again, maybe from pain. Maybe because it had left the sisterhood we created, in which the world hurt us but we were soothed. We were alone and in pain, but there was comfort to be found in soft hands and calm voices. 

When the game warden put the fawn in the box, still crying and scared, I thought again: Did I make the right decision? Should I have looked harder for a wildlife veterinarian? A rehabilitation facility? Someone who could staunch its bleeding and repair its wounds, then let it live out its life freely, happily, curiously? 

Or maybe I am too naive, too soft. Too sensitive for this world. Maybe the world knew better that the fawn couldn’t survive, that it was too broken to thrive. That the kind thing would be to put it out of its misery and let the world spin on. 

But I also thought that with enough time, nurturing, and care it could recover. It could still live in a world where it was loved.

The words too sensitive for this world flickered in my head again, and though I tried to shake them away, they lingered.

I heard its cries after the warden put it in the trunk of the SUV. He slammed the door and looked at us, the two women and the girl. There was a pause and in that pause I knew. Neither of us wanted to ask whether the fawn would be okay—What would happen now—and the game warden didn’t want to tell us.

“You can go inside and wash off,” he said to the woman, whose hands, arms, and feet were covered in blood like cherry juice on a child’s chin, but she shook her head.

“You have all of our information?” She was brave enough to ask for both of us. It was a reminder of recourse, procedure, and accountability—a language spoken by a government entity. It was a reminder that we intended to save a life, not end it.

“I have everything,” he said. “If you made the report, I have it.” He drove away.

*

The sun was starting to set, tinging everything in an apricot glow. We three watched in silence as the truck faded out of view, the woman with her arm slung around her daughter’s shoulders.

“Well, that wasn’t how we thought our day was going to go, huh?” she said, giving the girl’s upper arm a rub with her bloody hand.

She told me her name, Kim, and I told her mine.

“I’d hug you, but...” she said, gesturing to her bloody clothes and skin. I hugged her anyway, both for stopping to help and for her bravery, and we both shook.

“Thank you for stopping,” I said.

“I couldn’t just leave it there and do nothing,” she said.

“Me neither,” I said, thinking of the men who slowed down to help but ultimately offered nothing. Of the man who really seemed like he just wanted to tell me he had a gun. 

It felt distinctly womanly, what had just happened. The doe, maybe somewhere mourning the loss of her new baby. Us, two women with no idea what to do, showing a daughter how to be anyway. And the fawn, its fate unknown but now clinical, and the loss of whom I could feel as deeply as I could feel its cries like sandpaper on my bones. 

As I drove away, I thought of womanhood, and of choosing to care for another woman’s baby when she couldn’t. And the next day, when a fawn in my neighbor’s yard wandered, playful, too far from its mother and too close to the road, I ran from my writing desk on the porch to shoo it back to safety, another doe in a village of does.