Dear Lucy
animation by Gloria Sung, words by Megana Kumar
Dear Lucy,
Bad news (for you, not me.) I may be joining you sooner than you’d hoped. My blood pressure has been through the roof in the last two weeks (before you start, it is not diet or age or not meditating enough or whatever other nonsense that you picked up from the magazines.) It’s because I’m being tortured to death by a demon from Dante’s 9th circle of hell.
Whoever made Bambi has a very skewed perception of deer. You’d think they’re all cute and fuzzy and brown, with soft legs and knobbly knees. Well, I’m here to tell you that this perception is completely unfounded. Deer are not knobby-kneed little innocents any more than they are spying, thieving government operatives. I know, I know, I can already hear you ask — what evidence do you have, Robert, to prove this hypothesis? And all I can say is that you have not been around the Burnt Sausage Deer of Death.
BSDD, or BS, as I like to call it, is the most evil creature I have ever met. There are four white spots under its left ear. It is not fuzzy or brown and instead is this horrible orange-red color, like those awful crackers that Darlene used to bring to Wednesday dinner. I swear to god that woman was handing out carcinogens for free. And don’t look at me like that — I know you’re looking at me like that. You can pretend all you want, but I’m not going to act like her own husband wasn’t feeding the death traps to the dog under the table. BS keeps chewing on your azaleas (three of them are gone) and lumping up our grass (there are five patches around the porch.) I spent a whole Saturday lining up marigolds just like we’d always do — eight rows, nice and neat — and that damn deer clobbered through them like some kind of skateboarding punk. I told Maggie about it, but Maggie told me that my feelings were misplaced and that I was colorblind. I told Maggie that she could take her feelings and shove them up where the sun don’t shine.
You know me, though. If I go down, it won’t be without a fight. Maggie and Darlene’s crackers be damned. I’ll tell you about my sweet, sweet victory the next time I write. By the way, I replanted your azaleas. The pink ones, because I know they’re your favorite. I’m trying to keep everything like it was when you were here.
I am not losing your garden.
Angrily yours,
Robert
Dear Lucy,
I can’t believe I was just outdone by a deer. A deer. A no good, two-faced, buck-toothed hideous deer.
I was walking down to Terry Falls the other day. It was perfect weather for hiking — I even used your test to check — went outside to see if I could see the sun spilling out around the edges of the leaves (six leaves met the criteria.) I didn’t notice anything along the trail for you to write down in your field journal, unfortunately — only two squirrels and three frogs. Got to the falls 15 minutes in, give or take. I put on my trunks (yes, the blue ones and not the red ones you called “hideous” and an “insult to human life”) and waded right in. The water was so clear I could see you in the pebbles
I know you’re surprised. I remember what I’d say — the water’s cold enough to bite, and I remember what you’d say — but it’ll feel real easy on your knees, and I know you don’t stretch enough. And I’d say stretching is for idiots. And then you’d laugh.
I think I wanted to hear it, that laugh, so I stepped right in. It never came.
After I was done “healing” my knees and cutting my toes on rocks (three cuts, two stopped bleeding,) I stepped out, taking off my trunks, ready to grab my pants and head home. Only there was a huge problem. My pants were missing. I scanned the area near the rock beds, and they were nowhere to be found. I heard a rustling sound behind me and when I turned around I was confronted with a bigger problem.
My trunks were missing. Which means that I was left standing in the middle of the woods in my goddamn underwear. I set my hands out in front of me, stalking the perimeter of the falls, waiting for the culprit behind the rustling noise to reveal itself. And just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, I saw a horrible red-orange color in between the trees.
One spot, I counted, under its ear. Two spot, three spot, four.
BS strutted out, blue trunks and black pants in its mouth. I locked eyes with it, eyebrows furrowing and fists clenched. I knew I had to make the first move. I grabbed the nearest stick (twig) I could find and waved it around, hoping to instill a sense of fear in my enemy. The deer snorted and started running away, which was extremely humiliating. I chased after it, dashing through the woods, hot on its tail. BS had already taken away the peace of the garden, and now it was leaving with a piece of my swimming trunks. I felt branches snap under my toes and my chest starting to cramp up, (why did you say that happened? some lactic acid buildup?) but nothing could stop me from reclaiming my pride.
I tripped on someone’s foot and fell flat on my face, stopping me from reclaiming my pride.
“Sir,” a voice said, tired. I looked up into the blurry face of a curly haired, acne spotted teenager. “public nudity is prevented in the park.” I tried explaining the gravity of the situation to him, but he didn’t seem to understand. In my defense, there was no way for me to realize that I was running through the woods in my underwear screaming “GIVE ME BACK MY PANTS, YOU ORANGE BASTARD!” And also to add to this very sound defense, this is not an accurate description of my character
—
There was knocking at the door. 1 knock, 2 knocks, 3, Robert counted off.
Robert put down the pen, shaking the ache off of his hand. He didn’t need to look out the window to know who it was.
“No!” he shouted.
“You haven’t even come to the door yet!” An indignant voice replied.
“I know what you’re going to ask me,” Robert grumbled. “And the answer is no.”
“You don’t know if I’m going to ask you anything,” the voice continued. “I could be here to borrow sugar. Or to tell you that Maggie’s been hit by a car—”
“Good riddance,” mumbled Robert.
The voice ignored him. “—or to sell you cookies.”
He snorted. “Don’t kid yourself. Your face looks like cracked pavement, with all of those wrinkles.”
“Hey! I’m only 34!” Robert felt his head start to throb from the voice’s pitch, so he walked over to the door and threw it open. The woman outside was just who he thought it’d be—Andrea, from the hardware store.
“Quit shrieking outside of my door. I know what you’re going to ask, and you know what I’m going to say.” He looked at her gloves. “Stop dropping mud everywhere!”
“Come on, you’d be such a big help. It’s just one vegetable patch!”
“Just one vegetable patch?” Andrea winced, as if she knew what was coming. “Just one vegetable patch means at least 20 hours of labor. It means 15 cubic feet of soil, it means at least 25 trips to your store, and 100 gallons of water—”
“Spare me the lecture,” Andrea threw her hands up. “As if I didn’t understand from the 63 PowerPoints you gave me earlier.”
“Clearly, you didn’t. Look. I have a garden at home, and that’s the garden I’ll take care of. I know you think I’m some sort of grief-driven nutcase.” Was she nodding? “But I don’t need your pathetic little pity project when I already have something more important to work on.” Robert spat. Not to mention an orange-red menace to deal with. He had 47 weeds to pull, 4 bushes to prune, and 1 score to settle.
Her face hardened, and her eyes gained an emotion he couldn’t place. Something in the middle of tiredness and annoyance. “Don’t say that. Not everything is about you, you know. For all you claim to know about Lucy, you don’t think she’d have said yes to me in a heartbeat?”
Something must have changed in his face, because the next second Andrea was already reaching for him. He felt a metal taste in his mouth, something rusted and old, like his tongue was growing a patina. His jaw tightened, voice steel. “Don’t you ever throw her name like that at me again. You didn’t know her like I did. Nobody does.” He slammed the door on her, ready to get back to the—
“AHHHHHH!” Robert screamed. There, under the glow of the kitchen lights, stood BS in all of its orange-red glory. Robert pinched himself in case he was in some sort of waking nightmare, racing towards the front door, throwing it open for escape.
“You changed your mind!” Andrea rose to her feet, her grin stretched from ear to ear. Robert stared at the horror in front of him and the horror behind, hands frozen on the door knob, trying to pick the lesser of two evils. Andrea sensed his fear, latching onto his arm and pulling him out the door with such superhuman strength that he went tumbling forward. “I’m so glad. I knew you’d come around!”
“I—but. No! I didn’t—” he sputtered. She peered into his kitchen, and he counted six more dirt crumbs falling to the floor.
“Is that a deer?” she asked, voice delighted. BS’s head bucked up, and it stared at her, unbothered. “I guess Colby did see one,” she muttered under her breath.
“NO!” Robert hissed. “It’s not a deer. That is a demon. Don’t underestimate its power.” Andrea stared at him incredulously, and the sides of her mouth twitched upwards infuriatingly. Robert felt a vein bulge in his head. She opened his fridge, shameless, grabbing a carrot from the drawer. 16 left. He started to protest, but she held her hand out to shush him. To shush him! What gave her the right? As if he would be silent! “You are not shushing me in my own house!”
She broke the carrot in half, placing one in front of the deer before taking a bite out of the other. This has to be some sort of sick punishment, his mind supplied, mournfully, maybe I’m trapped in one of those SAW game situations Lucy liked to watch so much. “These are washed, right?” Andrea asked. No, I hope you get a contagious disease, he opened his mouth to say.
“Aunt Andy?” A voice came from the door, tentative, young. “Sorry, I didn’t know if I should come in or not.”
“Yeah, come on in, kiddo,” Andrea said, like this was her house and those were her carrots and the deer was her personal partner in crime. Robert shook his head. He could see it for what it was now — Andrea and the deer, teaming up to get him to do community service, of all things. The kid walked in, and Robert took one look at his tired, curly-haired, acne-spotted face before realizing that his life was a joke.
“Wait a second.” the teenager squinted from across the kitchen. “He’s the guy that was running in his underwear in the woods!”
Andrea whirled towards him, jaw on the floor, thrilled. “You’re the forest pervert?”
“I AM NOT A PERVERT!” Robert screamed, choking on his spit. “I was chasing this deer,” he points an accusatory finger at BS, who had the gall to give him an unimpressed stare. “that stole my swimming trunks. And ravaged six rose bushes. And ruined eight marigold rows and chomped off three azaleas and—”
“Let me guess,” she lowered her voice, and knitted her brows. “took 47 hours and 27 minutes of my precious, valuable time!”
“39 minutes, actually,” Robert crossed his arms. “and I don’t sound like that.”
“You do,” Andrea and Colby said at the same time.
“Okay, that’s it. Everyone out!” he whipped his head towards the deer. “And that includes you!”
“We’re not leaving without you,” Andrea said, determinedly, hands set on her hips. “you told me you’d help, and now you have to keep your word.”
“I didn’t tell you anything!”
“You told me with your eyes.”
“What the hell are you—”
“You knew Dr. Grant?” Colby’s voice piped up over the din. He was looking at an old picture, one from when Robert and her were just out of college. Robert felt an echo of the memory push against his mind. Lucy’s face caught in a beaming smile, and his face caught in hers. All of a sudden, he felt the anger leave his bones, replaced by a gnawing, worn out soreness.
“Colby—” Andrea started, wary.
“Yeah, I knew her,” Robert said, and the wound in his voice started to open.
“She’d come by our school all the time to help with the gardening program,” Colby said softly. “She’s really cool. It’s crazy what she’s done for the wildlife here.” Colby passed him the photo, careful not to squish any of the edges.
“Smart as a whip,” Robert’s voice was thready. He grounded himself in Lucy’s hair, faded away in the photo. One strand, two strand, three strand, four. I used to curl them behind your ear, he thought, the wound cutting open, and I’d forget what number I was on when you looked at me. “That's my girl.”
“She’s kind of the reason I became a ranger. I know I’m not very good,” he looked down at his shoes. “But she told me it didn’t matter, as long as I cared. I’m really sorry that she died. She’s why our school started the whole community garden project. We thought she’d like it. She talked about her husband—I mean, you, all the time.” Robert took a breath to keep from crying. They stood there for a while, and try as he might, he couldn’t count for how long. He felt numb. He thought about Lucy talking about him. About his rectangle hands and the wrinkles around his lips and the way his nose slanted one way instead of the other. The comfort he found in numbers, their certainty. The way she’d always pick some flowers from their garden to give to him and the way he’d always save some to braid into her hair, no matter how much he told her that picking flowers from your own garden and giving them to someone is not a good practice. There was nothing to hold him down anymore, and there was only so much air to breathe before he burst. He only noticed that the picture had started to dampen in his hands when a fuzzy head knocked against his thigh.
One spot, he counted, behind BS’s left ear. Two spot, three spot, four. He felt the two pads of his feet on the floor, and one hand on his shoulder. “Hey,” Andrea asks, voice soft, eyes softer. “I know I keep saying that you have to help, but you don’t have to—not if it’s going to hurt like this.” Lucy sat around the edges of Andrea’s eyebrows, he noticed, absently, when they furrowed together. He stared at her, and she looked back, eyes steady, kind. One of his hands rested on the top of BS’s head, finding a rhythm.
“Come on,” he said, voice rough, resolute. “show me your stupid garden.”
BS made a sound, and Robert thought of Lucy’s laugh.
—
Dear Lucy,
I can hear you laughing from all the way up there. Can it, woman.
Yes, I was roped into helping out with the “community garden.” Thank god I was, because Andrea was close to having Darlene help out. Can you imagine? Because I wanted to preserve biodiversity and not endanger every single species (including humans!) in our neighborhood, I decided to grow the vegetable patch Andrea’s been hounding me about for the last nine weeks. The patch was beat up and weathered, but it was in a good enough place for sunlight to reach through. I forced Maggie to sit down and draw up a plan with me (proud to report our kid can draw straight lines, we didn’t put her through Architecture school for nothing.) We planned the beds in groups of four to make the vegetables easier to rotate. It was rough work— I had to clear out all the junk before seeing the soil. I went at it with the rake, and BS went at it with her hooves, and we managed to break up all of the clumps.
Andrea, for all of her gardening experience (I mean, the lady runs the store, for God’s sake) has the patience of a newborn puppy, so when it came to the waiting period after weeding, she went off the rails. I'd come home from work some days and see her and BS in the kitchen eating through all of our carrots (I buy them in bulk now—I stopped counting a while ago because seeing my max expense go from electricity to carrots is not good for my heart.) Of course, I don’t let her off scot free. She sends the kid over to help out with our garden and—
Oh man. I’ve been tricked into babysitting a teenager.
The kid’s alright. Doesn’t talk as much as she does, which is better for me. Soaks everything up like a sponge, though. Fast learner. We’ve had our issues, like when he figured out that I was making him lift 30 pound bags of soil when we had a wheelbarrow the whole time, or when I figured out he used a skateboard, but overall, things are going well.
Okay, okay, stop that. I’ll tell you about the deer. BS and I are on speaking terms now. There was one night, when a storm was rocking our garden real bad, and every plant was quivering in the wind and the rain and the sheer force of it all. My heart was beating out of my hands. I was outside, clinging onto pieces of topsoil and the ripped petals of flowers, and I couldn’t tell if the water on my face was from my eyes or the clouds. When morning came around, our garden looked like it had been pummeled through by a hammer. The tarp did what it could, but under weather like that, there was only so much you could do. I remember looking at it and trying to count what was left. 3 rows of marigolds when there were supposed to be 8, 2 roses left, 0 pink azaleas. It was like you were being stripped right out of my heart. I stumbled towards the sunflowers, and there BS was, headbutting the stakes upright. She looked at me, and I looked at her, and I counted the four spots behind her left ear and the four strands of hair I would tuck behind yours.
I miss you like a limb. I feel an ache all over when I think about you — and I think about you every day. I don’t try to. I see you on faces and in flowers and in goddamn deer spots, and I don’t know how to stop. I’m so tender I feel sore. But in a way, the change isn’t terrible. I think seeing you everywhere is better than if I didn’t see you at all. You’re not always here, and you never will be, but reminders of you are. The wound in my mouth will fade, even if the scar stays. I can take breaths now, without feeling like I’m going to burst.
And every time I plant a flower, it’ll be like I’m braiding it into your hair.
Yours,
Robert
Dear Dr. Grant,
Hi. It’s Colby. Mr. Grant tells me that he writes to you sometimes, so I thought I would too. The community garden project is going pretty great. Mr. Grant and BS are basically best friends (Mr. Grant says that she’s “tolerable,” which he’s only said about you, me, and Maggie, so I figured.) He comes to all my ranger shifts and we go hiking on the weekends sometimes. Even after all that time in the school garden with you, I still get some of the plants mixed up. He gave me your old field guide for help. When he flips through it, he brushes his fingers over the margins, like you’re buried in the corners.
He took me to Terry Falls a couple times, and the water was freezing. He said something about it being good for your knees. I remember staring at my reflection, seeing every blurred curl and the creased haze of brown skin in the ripples below. The rushing noise of foam and froth seeping into my ears. My beating heart. Mr. Grant got out of the water before me and started to change, and there was an orange-red flash in the trees.
At least she stole the red pair this time.
We’ll take care of him, Dr. Grant. Just thought you should know.
Sincerely,
Colby
P.S. I thought you might’ve forgotten me, but there are pink azaleas in the garden. I remember telling you that they were my favorite.
