TWENTY-ONE: SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN

“ARE YOU SAD?” LUMP asked me as we stapled and taped more flyers up around the barn.

“What?”

“You seem sad. Or mad.”

“No, Lump, I’m not sad or mad.” I didn’t know how to tell her I was somewhere in between the two and that, more than that, I was something else as well. That I was furious and heartbroken but there was something extra that I wasn’t familiar with. It was something that felt like happy, even if happy wasn’t quite the right word. Something like distracted, or like a pace being changed. Different air finally getting breathed in.

“Is it about the deer?”

“Lump, I said I’m not sad.”

“It’s just that you keep putting the flyers up a certain way like you’re doing one thing but thinking about something else. Like when grandma talks about Uncle Thomas and then ends up dusting everything and cleaning the sink even though the sink never gets that dirty because we order pizza a lot.”

I smiled without opening my mouth. It was cold but the sun was bright enough to make you unzip your coat and take your gloves off.

“I’m just thinking about the deer,” I said. “Want to make sure these flyers are in all the right places. Tall places so the adults can see them, short places so the kids can see them.” I demonstrated this with my hands.

“Are you worried because you were there when the deer got away?”

I aggressively stapled another flyer to the barn doors. The fence where the deer had escaped was blocked up with a few bales of hay.

“A little. But I’m also thinking about how, after he got away, the other deer is back at the barn, safe, and it’s nice out and it’s sunny and it’s like nothing is wrong.”

“How do you know the deer was a boy?”

“What?”

“You said ‘he’—how do you know he was a him and not a her? Were you sexting the deer?”

I stopped and faced her full-on. “What?”

She squinted one eye shut and spoke like she was reciting something she’d read: “‘I-dent-ifying the gender of a deer or other baby animal is called sexting.’ I read that on the Internet last night even though we’re not allowed to and even though the Internet drains my battery and I have to use data to get the Internet from satellites. My phone connects to satellites,” she said confidentially.

“Sext … sexing. There’s no T. With a T it’s something else.”

She knew what she was trying to say, she’d just said it wrong. Like the time I’d mixed up the words “primal” and “carnal” on an essay question about To Kill a Mockingbird.

“It looked big for a baby deer so I assumed it was a boy.”

“Girls can be big. Bigger than boys.”

“Very true. What are we calling the deer? Does the deer have a name?”

“Not one that she knows yet. Right now her name is Amelia Earhart.”

“Because she’s missing?”

“No. Because she doesn’t believe in fences. She can go wherever she wants, whenever she wants.”

“You should name the deer Jimmy Hoffa. I think Jimmy Hoffa the Deer has a nice ring to it.”

“Mom says it’s important to have strong role models that aren’t on the Internet or TV or drugs,” she said, ignoring my joke about Jimmy Hoffa the Deer. “And Amelia Earhart…” She placed the flyers down reverently and unzipped her coat. The front of her shirt had a picture of Amelia Earhart standing atop her Lockheed Model 10 Electra, waving to an unseen audience, her red scarf caught in the wind and blazing behind her. “Amelia Earhart is a hero. But anyway, you shouldn’t be sad because you can’t stop deer from escaping.” She zipped her coat, picked the flyers up, and wiped away the flecks of dirt and earth from the bottom page.

“Then why are we putting flyers up? If they’re just going to run away again, right?”

“No.”

“No what? Why not?”

“Because this time she’ll know she has friends.”

I checked, and all of a sudden, the mysterious other feeling, the one that wasn’t quite happiness but somewhere closer to distraction, simply wasn’t there anymore. Now it was the same anger and sadness that had been hanging around for so long.

“You think he didn’t know he had friends? What about the other deer that tried to escape with him?”

“Her. Maybe they just weren’t fast enough.”

“The other deer was plenty fast. Just as fast as the one that got away,” I said, indignant. I told myself to relax. “What if he knew exactly what he was doing and was just being an asshole? Like what if the deer was a pattern asshole and was always doing stuff like this to the other deer?” I asked the eight-year-old. Then, “Sorry I swore.”

“Huh?”

“I’m saying, what if that was the deer’s plan all along, because that deer was always doing stupid stuff and making the other deer pay for it? Like making a break for it and not telling the other deer. Because the other deer tried to escape too. You could just tell the other one wanted to run away.”

One of her eyebrows raised up a little and her mouth became a thin line, like she didn’t know why the supposed “grown-up” was talking to her like she was a therapist.

Instead of just saying, “Dude, shut up,” she very generously said, “I guess she was being selfish. But. I think probably she was just scared—probably like all the other baby deer—and just did what she thought was best.”

This mysterious other not-quite-but-almost happiness feeling was a million miles away. We weren’t walking in the warm sun or talking about funny things to name missing deer anymore. This wasn’t cards at night or smoking on top of decommissioned ROTC equipment. This was the Ghost of Charlie Baltimore, flickering just outside of my line of sight.

I stapled another poster up with what I hoped was less aggression.

“What is that?” she said, looking over my head toward the tree line. A splash of orange and white was flitting back and forth in the wind, just past the trees. “Is that a windsock?” It was. “Usually at night airports shine bright lights on their windsocks,” she continued. “Probably so planes won’t run into them but also so they can tell which way the wind is blowing even though it’s nighttime out. I like that the wind wears socks.”

Which it doesn’t, because the wind is not a sock-wearing thing. But that didn’t stop her from staring at the piece of orange-and-white fabric riding the invisible air currents, trying just to sail off with the breeze, where it could always point the direction of the wind for the rest of us.