THE VELVET by Elise Juska
The dead moose sprawled across the highway with legs bent at awkward angles, an open red gash on its side. It was the closest Carlene had ever been to a moose, even after living in Maine her whole life. She tried to pull her eyes away but couldn’t stop staring at the thickness of all that fur and flesh, the mighty antlers like soft brown cradles next to the ambulances and smashed cars. One car had flipped over completely, airbags swelling under the crushed windows. It seemed an impossible collision of things – the airbags, the glistening torso, the Burger King not a quarter-mile behind them where Carlene had just stopped to use the bathroom and get a small bag of French fries and a cup of tea.
She drove slowly, thinking maybe she should pull over, as other people were doing. The time her own car had spun on a patch of black ice, saved by a snowbank from tumbling into a ravine, the experience, after the initial terror, had reinforced her faith in people – the unhesitating response of other drivers, the kind face of the Triple A man who arrived to pull her out of the snow with his truck and his chains, the woman whose name she always regretted not getting who ran across the slippery highway in her long puffy coat offering her phone. Once her car had been freed, Carlene left the scene at a crawl, blinkers on, wiping at her eyes, overwhelmed by the fragility and the goodness of things.
But these drivers, the ones who collided with the moose, could not have been so lucky. One look at the bloodied animal and the upturned car and you felt for sure there were casualties.
Carlene searched for the story online early the next morning, on the slow computer on the sunporch. She typed “accident car moose Maine” into the computer and sipped her tea while the little cursor twirled. Suddenly, there it was: Moose Causes Turnpike Accident. She set her teacup down. Six cars had hit the moose – the one car had flipped over it completely – until the animal finally buckled and went down. The other cars had scattered, hitting vehicles and guardrails. Four people were taken to the hospital. One died. A girl, eight years old. She’d been riding in the backseat. The parents survived.
Carlene stared at the words on the screen. Blood stormed her ears. The girl was the same age as the third-graders at the K-8 island school where Carlene worked in the main office. The family was from Connecticut – tourists. Somehow this made it worse. To die tragically in your own town, your own life, the life you chose, was one thing. But to be away on vacation – things like this shouldn’t happen on vacation. And then to return home to life before you left it, the house a frozen flurry of trying‑to‑get‑into-the-car, the coat closet thrown open, the bedroom floor covered with discarded bathing suits and flip-flops and beach toys, wishing you had never gone.
“You’re up early,” Grey said, stepping into the porch, just inside the door. He was dressed for work at the boatyard, in his stiff blue jeans and steel-toed boots.
“I found it online,” Carlene said. “An article about the accident.”
When she’d arrived home the night before, Grey was already in bed. Carlene had stood just inside the bedroom doorway, telling him what happened, heard the frown in his voice in the dark. What would a moose be doing in this part of the state?
Now he said, “Christ, Carlene.”
“Someone died, Grey. A child.”
“You need to stop looking at all that morbid stuff.”
“This is different,” she said. “I drove right past it. It could have been me.”
Lately Carlene had grown attached to tragic stories in the news – school shootings, wildfires and hurricanes. The girl who drowned up in Acadia, swept out to sea by a giant wave. How quickly and horrifically a life could change. This wasn’t any revelation; she didn’t mistake it for something profound. The close shaves, the difference a second, a minute, a cup of tea could make. She knew it didn’t do any good to think about it, but there was a great gulf between knowing a thing and doing it.
“The girl was only eight years old,” she said.
Grey sighed and ran a palm across his thinning hair. She knew he worried that her preoccupations weren’t healthy – no, worry wasn’t right. Lately he seemed more annoyed.
“There’s always something terrible happening somewhere,” Grey said. “You can’t go through life thinking about it all the time.”
“You’re right,” she said. “That’s true. I know.”
Maybe, she thought, if she’d had her own children she wouldn’t project her worries onto other people’s. This she kept to herself.
Carlene knew it was misleading to say she lived on an island; it suggested a more rigorous life than the one she led. Over time, she’d gotten in the habit of saying “an island you drive onto,” the same way she’d learned to say “grey like the sky” when introducing her husband to strangers. Funny name, her father had said, the first time they met, but once he grew to know and like Grey, recognize in him a fellow quiet person, he never mentioned the name again. Carlene’s parents had both been quiet too – shy, though she wouldn’t have thought to describe them that way when they were living. They’d died three years ago, one after the other, the way she’d always known they would, two posts holding up a house. Her father of a heart attack, her mother pneumonia; nothing extraordinary. The kinds of deaths people died all the time.
“You’re twitching,” Grey said. They were driving across the bridge to the mainland, the narrow metal grate quivering beneath their wheels. Carlene pressed her foot on the imaginary gas pedal. The ghost pedal, Grey called it.
“Don’t call it that,” she said.
“That’s what it’s called.”
“You know I don’t like it,” she said.
“Well, stop doing it then,” Grey said. Sensible; he always was.
An hour before, when Grey walked in from work, he surprised her by saying he felt like going to the wharf for dinner. Normally this would have pleased Carlene – Grey was usually too tired at night to do more than eat and sleep – but tonight she just wanted to stay home. All day, she had felt extra anxious. She’d checked the knobs on the oven to make sure nothing could catch fire. Driving to Hannaford for her weekly shop, she’d kept one eye on the rearview mirror, bracing herself for the car behind her to come crashing into her bumper. Now, crossing the bridge, she was acutely aware of the narrow space between their car and the tourists strolling in the pedestrian lane beside them. It was a warm summer night, a Thursday. There were people everywhere.
“It just seemed like you were going fast,” she said, chewing a nail. “At the stop sign. I wasn’t sure you were going to stop.”
“I always stop,” Grey said, glancing at her. “Have I ever had an accident in my life, Carlene?”
But that didn’t matter, Carlene knew, as the bridge turned to asphalt. She watched the tire place swish by, the Domino’s and Dairy Queen. You could think you were careful, but there was no logic to it. All day she’d followed the story of the tourist family, the Grants; an article in their local paper in Connecticut had appeared online this afternoon. The father was a high school history teacher – she pictured the man who taught social studies at the middle school, his friendly bearded face – and the mother a physician’s assistant. There was no earthly reason their daughter should have died. Her name was Becca. She did soccer and ballet.
But she hadn’t told Grey any of this. He wouldn’t understand; she’d stopped expecting him to. After the miscarriages, he would say, What’s the sense of being sad about it? What good does it do? She knew he was trying to help, in his way. Grey didn’t see the point in dwelling on things, and Carlene could see the sense in this, but she couldn’t help wishing Grey had been more sad. It would have been easier, to be sad together. Instead they talked about regular things – weather, neighbors, projects around the house that needed doing. They didn’t fight; they never had. Sometimes she felt relief when Grey went to work and she was left at home, just herself and the quiet and the view off the sunporch, the tangled tomato plants and smudged, unnamed islands in the distance. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him, just that she had accepted that with marriage came this other part, this loneliness.
The next morning, Carlene ran into her neighbor Susan at the post office. “Did you hear about that accident the other night?” Susan said. Carlene said that she had, and wasn’t it terrible – eight years old – but she didn’t admit she’d seen it up close. Because she knew Susan would ask what she was doing on the highway alone on a Wednesday night and she would have to either lie or admit she was coming home from her therapist in Portland. Sandra, the therapist, had had an emergency that afternoon, so Carlene’s four o’clock appointment had been pushed to six. No one knew about Sandra, apart from Grey, and that was how Carlene preferred it. Not because she was embarrassed, exactly. But in a town so small, a life so small, an island, it was nice to have something completely her own. The first time she went, she’d come home bracing herself for Grey to ask all about it, but he hadn’t said a word, then or since.
For the past year, Carlene had seen Sandra every Wednesday. She’d begun thinking of her office as an oasis – the wide windowsill lined with smooth sticks of driftwood and spongy pink coral; the picture of colored squares that, when Carlene asked, Sandra told her was by Rothko; the white noise machine purring on the floor. Sandra herself seemed some sort of gleaming object, with her bright jewelry and smooth silver hair that dipped beneath her chin. Her office was the one place Carlene could be really honest. It had been easy things, at first. She told Sandra how she and Grey met when she was twenty-nine, a potluck for a sick neighbor; he was seven years older. How she’d always assumed they would have kids – two, at least – but they never really discussed it. How she wished now they’d started trying sooner, but Grey made most of the decisions – no, decisions wasn’t right. It was more like just how things were. How she’d never felt comfortable talking to Grey about things she read on the fertility web sites. The time she suggested he try acupuncture, his jaw hardened like a stone, and he walked out of the room; she’d never mentioned it again. How sex was fine, but she wouldn’t say she enjoyed it. How these days, they hardly had sex anymore, and she got sad thinking of it being just the two of them forever. The first few times Carlene admitted things like this – sometimes I think I’m happiest alone – it terrified her to hear the words come out, inscribed permanently in the world, but she’d been comforted by Sandra’s reaction, or lack of it, just a reassuring hum and a nod, sometimes even a one-shouldered shrug, like this was all a perfectly normal way to feel.
Carlene admitted to Sandra that she’d thought a baby might cure her loneliness; now, of course, she’d never know. She was forty-three. At thirty-nine, she’d lost her parents. At forty, the babies. Maybe it was grief that did it, maybe nerves. After the third miscarriage, she’d wanted to see a fertility doctor but Grey said they couldn’t afford the expensive treatments. All that money, he said, for something that probably won’t work. It made sense. They could use that money for the new septic, or to build a deck or buy a boat. At forty‑one, she stopped believing there might be some kind of miracle, the thing you hear about when couples stop focusing on getting pregnant and it sticks. Now, though, Carlene wished she’d pushed harder. This was her habit, with Grey – Sandra had helped her see this – to accept whatever he said as truth. It was like there was no cushion between Carlene and the world – she soaked it up, like a bough bending, a thumbprint pressing into a soft cookie. Things went right inside.
Monday night, there was an article online about Becca Grant’s funeral. Carlene sat on the sunporch after midnight, pulling at her thumbnail with her teeth. She couldn’t stop staring at Becca’s school picture. A white turtleneck, side ponytail, missing front tooth. Outside, the high white moon cast a silver ribbon on the water. She could hear the water splashing roughly on the rocks; there was weather coming.
“What are you doing down here?”
Carlene jumped. Grey stood in the doorway, squinting as his eyes adjusted. He was wearing his boxer shorts, gut swelling softly over the waistband. His arms were half-brown from the sun, and still strong, though the muscles were getting a little slack. Soon he would be fifty, Carlene thought. He rubbed the back of his head with one hand, the way he did when he was tired, or bothered.
“Nothing,” she said, and shook her head, kept her eyes on the screen. “I just can’t stop thinking of those parents.”
“What parents?”
“The parents of that girl.”
He gave her a weighted look. “Carlene.”
She said nothing, folded slightly inward. “I know. It’s just, her funeral was – ”
“I’m going to cancel the Internet,” Gray said.
“You could try having a little more compassion,” she said, surprising herself.
“I do,” Gray said sharply. Then he went quiet for a minute. “I feel bad for these people, Carlene. But it’s not like I know them. And neither do you,” he added, lowering his voice as if anyone in the world might hear.
At her next appointment, four o’clock on Wednesday, Carlene told Sandra all about the moose and the girl, Becca Grant, eight years old, who liked soccer and ballet. Sandra had heard about the accident but didn’t know the details.
“It’s just so sad,” Carlene said, squeezing her purse in her lap.
Sandra nodded as she spoke, but said nothing. Carlene’s gaze was restless, moving around the room.
“Can you imagine?” she said. “What those parents must be putting themselves through? Thinking what if they just hadn’t gone on vacation? Just stayed home?”
They’d be driving themselves crazy, Carlene knew. She’d been this way about the miscarriages, going over and over what she might have done wrong, done different – not put Caesar dressing on her salad or let herself get so nervous or one time, the last time, eaten a plate of shellfish. She hadn’t known you weren’t supposed to. That time, the baby had died inside her; they’d had to take it out. Riding home from the hospital, fogged with drugs and grief, all she could think of were those scallops – she must have eaten a dozen of them – cooked in the cast-iron pans Grey liked, the ones that filled the house with thick greasy smoke. It was after that, when she couldn’t get out of bed for a week, Grey said they were done trying. And I think you should talk to somebody, he said.
“Grey says I’ve been thinking about her too much,” Carlene said. “The girl. He thinks I worry too much about people I don’t know.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Carlene said. “Probably I do.” She settled her gaze on the windowsill, the spray of pink coral and the spiky conch. “He just doesn’t understand, though.”
“Doesn’t understand what, Carlene?”
“Just – how sad it was,” she said. Her voice trembled a little. Then she gathered herself and pulled her eyes back to Sandra’s face. “But you can’t ask another person to really understand what you’re feeling, can you? I mean, not completely. Not even your own husband. Not really. Isn’t that true?” And then she waited, heart pumping, for Sandra to confirm this. She so needed her to say yes.
But Sandra just looked at her gently. “It sounds like it’s hard for you to even imagine,” she said. “Asking Grey to try and understand what you feel.”
Driving home, there was no way for Carlene to avoid the highway, so she stayed in the outside lane, going forty. Grey would tell her she was driving so slow that it was actually more dangerous, but Carlene didn’t care. She was approaching the benign glow of the rest stop Burger King. Just beyond it was the spot where Becca Grant had died and the moose had lain. She remembered its antlers, how they looked like huge, soft fingers. The velvet – this was the soft stuff that covered the antlers until the bull shed it, leaving them bloody and bare and hard. Was that a dark stain on the road? A bloodstain? Trembling, Carlene made it to her exit and started the long, looping back roads home. It was only five-thirty, but it was August now and the light was changing, the pines forming a dappled tunnel that made the road seem darker than it was.
When Carlene reached the bridge, the trees parted. Metal thrummed beneath her wheels. The water was still swollen from yesterday’s rain, silvery and calm as a bed of glass. The sky over the cove was a deep bowl of pinks and blues and violets – even after a lifetime, the beauty of this place could still make her breath catch. Then the bridge turned to road again, the asphalt smoothed. The air smelled like water. She was almost home. Up ahead, just past the bend, Carlene spotted something in the road. It looked to be lying across the oncoming lane. As she slowed down, she saw that it was a row of small fuzzy animals, black and white. Skunks. A mother and her babies, making their way across the island road. Carlene stopped. The mother skunk had not even reached the double yellow line; her babies were strung out behind her in a row. If a car came flying from the other direction, she thought, they’d all be crushed. She put her blinkers on to alert any cars coming up behind her, praying one didn’t come flying over the hill in the opposite lane. She whispered hurry, hurry, hurry. She counted seven babies. They moved so slowly; they had no idea the danger they were in. She bit her thumb, peeling the nail right off and exposing a raw rim of pink. When they were halfway across, she saw a truck fill her rearview mirror, pull to a hard stop. Another car stopped behind it. When the skunks were all in front of Carlene’s car, she let herself breathe – they would not be run over. One by one, the skunks made it safely across, and Carlene felt even a little choked up as she watched their small furry bodies disappear into the woods.
“I saved a family of skunks tonight,” she told Grey. They had just sat down to dinner, shrimp prepared with too much black pepper in one of his cast-iron pans.
“Did you?” He picked up his fork and took a bite.
“On my way home,” Carlene said. “They were walking across the island road, one after the other, and I saved them.”
He frowned. “Saved them how?”
“I held up traffic,” she said, “so they wouldn’t get run over. They were babies. A mother and her babies.”
Grey looked at her then, a long look, and set down his fork. Carlene stopped chewing. He leaned back in his chair and placed his palms on either side of his plate. “You’re going to have to get over this sometime, Carlene,” he said.
She swallowed her lump of food and looked at the table, at the oily pink shrimp, the old plastic tablecloth checkered red and white. “I know,” she said, quietly. “But it’s just not easy.”
He waited. Outside, the water lapped quietly at the rocks.
She took a breath, adding, “It’s different for you.”
“Well, sure.” He rubbed the back of his head. “I wasn’t there.”
Carlene looked up quickly. “What do you mean?” she said, and her voice rose. “What do you mean, weren’t there? What are you talking about, Grey?”
“I mean the accident,” he clipped. “The moose. The girl. What we’re always talking about.”
“Well, I was talking about the babies,” she told him. “Our babies.”
“Oh,” Grey replied, his face tightening a notch. He moved his eyes to the window, toward the rocks.
“Did you even really want a baby?” Carlene asked him, then stiffened, bracing herself – it was terrifying to hear the words leave her mouth, walk into the world to do what they would.
But Grey merely shrugged. Not unkindly, he said, “I guess I could have gone either way.”
Carlene stared down at the thick plaid plastic of the tablecloth. She guessed she’d always known it, but still it hurt to hear. Her plate swam before her, face filled with heat. She felt her own smallness, the vast reaches of her loneliness, deep and endless as the sky over the bridge. They didn’t want the same things, they never had; she had known this for too long.
When she looked up again, Carlene was almost surprised to find that Grey was still sitting there. He was watching her sadly, but tenderly, and she watched him back, and despite the distance between them – bigger than tonight, bigger than just this – Carlene felt closer to him then than she had in a long time. And she remembered the moose, how near she had been to the beast, near enough to see the soft, delicate fur on his flank as the blood pooled beneath it.
Elise Juska is the author of five novels, including The Blessings (Grand Central Publishing, 2014) and If We Had Known (Grand Central Publishing, 2018). Her short stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, The Hudson Review, Prairie Schooner, and Harvard Review.