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The first time she saw the doe, it was the summer of 2014.
LA in summer was like nothing Max Caulfield had experienced before—a dry, blustery heat that seemed to wick every last drop of moisture until you were roasted inside-out by your own bones. Days like this, she found herself wishing for the shaded cedar forests of her childhood. With her parents in Seattle, perhaps.
Or Arcadia Bay.
She glimpsed it beneath the deep red of the pre-dawn sky: the unmistakable silhouette of a deer in the middle of the street, framed in the tiny window of the front door as she passed on her way to the washroom. She stared and stared, not daring to move or blink. It was too real to be a dream, even at this hour. Then the sun crested the horizon, and for the briefest moment it seemed to shine straight through the doe’s body before its intensity forced Max to screw her eyes shut.
When she opened them again, the doe was gone.
“Rachel?” she mumbled hours later, having failed miserably at falling back asleep despite the slender arms curled gently around her waist. “Are there deer here?”
Rachel Amber stirred, pulling Max close as she stretched and sighed into wakefulness.
“Pretty sure the only one in the city is in bed with me right now, babe.”
Her voice was gravelly with sleep, irresistible, and when she trailed kisses up the nape of Max’s neck, it was blissfully easy to forget about the doe.
The second time she saw it was during finals season, two years later. UCLA certainly wasn’t near any forests, but there were more trees here than in the city proper, and one hazy November evening a familiar shadow was there to greet Max as she stumbled out of the library, under-fed and over-caffeinated. She glimpsed it peeking out between two tree trunks off the edge of the sidewalk, ears flicking as it returned her gaze with black, bottomless eyes. Students on bikes and skateboards and scooters continued on by, oblivious, as if a wild deer showing up here wasn’t about as likely as a polar bear.
She held out her phone, pulled up the camera app, and snapped a picture. Two trees, but no doe. When she lowered the phone, it was gone from the real world, too.
Maybe she imagined it.
There was a photo collage in the bedroom, of course. It didn’t make sense for her to change her habits here, and getting back into it was easy enough once she focused on how the click of her instant camera sounded nothing like the leaf-shutter of a Hasselblad.
There were boxes more polaroids under the bed, but those she never touched, not even when Rachel begged. She should just get rid of them.
Some nights, she dreamt of finding a picture of a blue morpho butterfly in the bottom of one.
It was spring again, and the stars must have aligned, because both of them had about a week of downtime between their chaotic schedules.
Max suggested a road trip.
“That’s how you want to spend our vacation?” Rachel asked, perched on the kitchen countertop in her cut-off tee and a half-quirked smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “After all the effort we went through to finally escape that black hole?”
“Joyce wants to see us,” she replied simply, and because it wasn’t a lie, Rachel couldn’t see through it.
And so it was that they finally returned to Arcadia Bay on April 22, 2017.
They wandered, first around town, then the beach, then the woods. Neither of them acknowledged it. Neither of them so much as said her name, but they both knew what was happening.
They spent the day chasing memories of Chloe Price.
They spent the evening at the Price household—the Price-Madsen household now. David, seemingly mellowed out with time, made small talk with Max about school and work and gallery submissions. Joyce, however, was only interested in the past, her eyes darting to Rachel every once in a while with hints of sorrow as the conversation circled the drain.
Abruptly, inevitably, she started talking about Chloe. The ruckus she would cause with Max. The hell she would raise with Rachel. Even David joined in, his voice uncharacteristically thin with regret, murmuring apologies to a girl who would never have the chance to accept them.
They didn’t stay long after that. The food was mostly gone, anyway.
The house was so quiet as they left.
Midnight found them sitting on the bench by the lighthouse, thighs pressed lightly against one another. The darkness of the sea stretched out below them, vast and bottomless, so calm it appeared a seamless extension of the night sky. Two full moons shone back at Max, above and below the horizon, impossibly bright.
The balance of nature, restored.
“Why are we here, Max?” Rachel whispered, blonde hair drifting in the gentle breeze.
Max’s eyes unfocused as she gazed out over the water. A storm raged behind them, churning the sea into a massive waterspout, ionizing the air with horizontal bolts of lightning, superimposed onto the scene until it was all she could see. Again and again and again. A hundred different routes to the exact same outcome.
“I…” Her voice trailed off as the tears spilled over.
“Max?” Rachel was so close now, her hazel eyes wide with confusion.
Max opened her mouth, and time seemed to slow. In that moment, she almost found the words.
Instead, she screwed her eyes shut, falling more than leaning to close the gap. She kissed Rachel hungrily, desperately, trying to translate the frustration and the guilt of every failed timeline into a language they could both understand.
Rachel let her. Rachel kissed her back.
When they finally pulled apart, Max glimpsed the doe over her shoulder. As she watched, it turned and disappeared into the trees.
The first time she saw the doe was on October 7th, 2013.