Content note: mental and physical abuse

 

Eleanor’s heart is in the kitchen, stashed behind the spices, because Severine doesn’t cook. At first, it was hidden in the sugar canister, but then all Eleanor could think about—all day long—was tiny grains adhering to the venae cavae, the valves, the ventricles, and dissolving into glaze. So she gave her grandmother’s porcelain cookie jar an extra good scrubbing, rinsed the heart and placed it carefully inside, and slid it to the very back of the cupboard, behind the little jars of cumin and cinnamon and star anise. Sometimes, when Severine stands with her hand on the cabinet handle, the heart beats faster, as Eleanor thinks what if she notices, what will I say? But Severine never does anything more than glance into the cupboard, realize she meant to fetch cereal rather than spices, and slam it shut again.

Eleanor’s spleen is in the middle drawer of her desk. The top drawer is a bric-a-brac of hair elastics and dry pens and sugarless gum, but the middle drawer is perfectly organized: a ream of printer paper, extra toner, a stapler, and a spleen. She is not sure what, exactly, a spleen does, but whatever it is, it seems to do it just fine in the stale darkness of the drawer. She is not bloated or jaundiced; her hair has not lost its luster; she can still run a 5k without much effort. She does not suffer from dizzy spells, and whatever bruises she sports cannot be blamed on the spleen, or any other part of her, except perhaps her gullible, spice-guarded heart.

Eleanor’s hart is a foundling she bottle-fed, now grown. Severine despises the deer. Something about the undeniable maleness of him, Eleanor suspects, that ostentatious rack of antlers and the way he leads with his sternum as he comes through the meadow behind the house in the early mornings to tap against their bedroom window. Severine calls him “the filthy beast,” with a curl of her lip, and makes a great show of checking Eleanor for ticks whenever she has been petting him. She likes to remind Eleanor that fawns are almost never actually abandoned, that most people who are trying to save them are in fact stealing them while their mothers have gone off to find food. But Eleanor knows what she saw, that the fawn was so thin he could barely stand, his eyes dulled with starvation, his mother presumably killed by a hunter or an SUV. She fed him until he was strong again, until he wandered farther and farther into the woods at the edge of her land. But he has never stopped coming back. When he comes tapping now, the velvet of his spring antlers sliding against the window glass, she slips from the bed without waking Severine and walks to the kitchen, where a head of cabbage is waiting in the crisper. She cuts off a chunk and feeds it to the deer, running her fingers delicately across his forehead.

On Fridays, Severine often stops working at noon and spends the end of the day gossiping and drinking cocktails in the break room with her boss. Severine is a high achiever and sometimes is not home until eight or nine, but on Fridays she arrives at six on the dot, loose-limbed, her blazer slung over one perfect shoulder, ready to laugh at anything. She walks in the door and doesn’t even say hello before she pulls Eleanor into her arms, kisses her throat, says she tastes so good there should be a drink named after her. Eleanor puts down the lettuce she was washing and leans into the softness of Severine’s body, pushes her face into the curls of her hair. In the cupboard, her heart jumps like a puppy, hopeful and wriggling. Her cheeks flush with blood, her brain with dopamine. Severine draws her to the couch and slips Eleanor’s shoes off and says, “Mon coeur, what a day. What a blessing to come home to you.” She turns Eleanor away from her and begins to knead her back as she asks about Eleanor’s latest projects and her unpleasable clients and what the two of them are having for dinner that night.

Eleanor lets the feel of those fingertips sink into her. She wants to absorb and store the love of those hands, parcel it into the empty cavities of her body. Severine’s embrace is the warmest place in the world.

After the couch they will make love and after that Severine will set the table while Eleanor cooks, and then they will watch a movie, or read side by side in bed, or maybe drive back to town and join some friends for a drink or a show. They will move together as smoothly as the components of a watch, each balance and wheel turning without friction. At the end of the night, Eleanor will fall asleep with Severine’s arm around her waist, Severine’s sweet, lithe body spooned against Eleanor’s back, joyful and at peace.

Probably. Hopefully.

Eleanor has a splendid garden. It’s true that it’s a long drive to town on the rare occasions that she has to go to the office, and that when they visit Severine’s co-workers for social events, Severine remarks pointedly that it must be nice to have a grocery store nearby, to be able to walk to a Starbucks. But when Eleanor looks at her beds of thyme and basil, or the hills of fountain grass that shade into farmland which she has let go to wildflowers, she is never sorry. A patch of woods stretches across one side of the property, maple and hickory and pitlolly pine, with a small creek that runs dry in the summertime. Sometimes, when Eleanor is working in the garden, she puts down her trowel or her pruning shears and looks at the forest where it comes up against the far side of the yard. A moment later the mingled brown of the trees fragments, and the deer comes toward her, walks a serpentine path through the yard. He doesn’t visit every day. Sometimes he is off doing what deer do. Grazing. Rutting. Drinking from the creek. This is fine with Eleanor. Sometimes even when he does come, he stops just long enough to look at her, not even close enough to touch, and when he leaves he melts back into the forest so completely that she could believe he is standing there all the time, benevolent and invisible.

“How have you had that thing three years and not even given it a damn name?” Severine is fond of saying from the doorway, as Eleanor stands in the yard, the tall grass dampening the bottoms of her jeans while the deer nuzzles her palm. But Eleanor is not sure she has the deer at all. In the wild, most deer live only a handful of years. In captivity, they can get to be as old as twenty. Eleanor doesn’t know whether her deer qualifies as feral or domesticated. If his life is almost over, or just beginning. He is not fenced nor leashed nor even housed, but he is cared for in a way few wild things are. Beloved. When Eleanor first met Severine he was only a yearling, clacking his first set of antlers against the fence. By the time Severine moved in it was the following spring, and now, a year later, he is fully grown, robust and muscled and sporting an expanding crown of branching bone. Eleanor has never given much thought to whether he is a pet or not, but now, as he comes into his third year, now that his life seems to hang in the balance, the question feels suddenly important. Kept or free, hers or not? The distinctions have grown indistinct.

Eleanor is in bed, stretched out on top of the comforter, releasing the tension of a day full of failed test systems and panicking managers as she talks to Ruth, an old friend from her first job out of college. Ruth lives in Omaha now, and they haven’t seen each other in a few years, but her calls are always a pleasant surprise. She is complaining about her children—“Why do they have to be touching me all the time, I don’t understand. They just adhere to my body like little starfish”—and Eleanor laughs, pleased with the image. They have talked so long that the phone has turned warm against her cheek. She hasn’t started dinner yet and is toying with the idea of takeout. She’ll ask when Severine gets home.

“You and Severine still taking that trip to Berlin?” Ruth says.

“We decided to wait a little while.” Eleanor looks around the room, does an inventory. The storage chest in the closet that holds her winter pajamas, her wool sweaters, her liver. The bathroom drawer where her left kidney shelters in a box that used to house expensive soap, a gift from Severine. The ovaries, the gall bladder, the thyroid. They each have their place.

Ruth sighs. “Are you kidding me? You two are childless and rich. You should be snorting coke off the kitchen counter and flying to some tropical island every weekend. Live for the rest of us.”

Eleanor laughs again. “I really ought to go.”

“Yeah, me too. Good to hear your voice, though.”

When Eleanor opens the bedroom door, Severine is sitting on the couch, reading a magazine. The picture window behind her is flooded with the green light of the yard and Severine is backlit, but her posture is a scowl. Without taking her eyes from the page she begins to laugh. It is a strange laugh: forced, harsh, exaggeratedly coquettish.

“What?” says Eleanor.

“Oh, nothing. Sometimes I just like to laugh like a flirty whore. You know how it is.”

Eleanor’s face gets red but she says nothing. There is nothing to say that will lead to anything good. “I was thinking I could order pizza for dinner?”

“Who were you talking to?”

“Just Ruth.”

“Let me see your phone.” Severine stands up from the couch, moves into the bedroom, where the phone is still lying on the bed. Eleanor follows her. “Did you put a passcode on this?” Severine says.

“It just seemed safer. If it ever gets lost.” Eleanor has backed herself up against the wall farthest from the bed. Farthest from Severine.

Severine drops the phone onto the dresser and sweeps a handful of silver bangles to the floor. In the process, she nudges a carved wooden box to the dresser’s edge. Eleanor almost cries out. Not because her mother brought her the box from a trip to the Seychelles a year before she died, but because Eleanor’s right kidney is hidden inside that box, loosely wrapped in a green silk scarf. “You are fucking shameless,” Severine says. She doesn’t even look as she reaches for whatever comes next. A hairbrush, as it turns out, but as she grabs it, she knocks the wooden box over the side of the dresser. The hairbrush hits the wall beside Eleanor; the box hits the floor; Eleanor crumples to the ground. She feels like she can barely draw a breath, curled on the carpet with hot pain radiating through her side.

“Stop being such a drama queen. It didn’t even hit you,” Severine says and stalks off to the kitchen.

Long minutes pass before Eleanor feels she can rise from the floor. She can hear Severine scraping food onto a plate, hear the microwave door open and close, the beep of the timer. The smell of salmon curls through the door. At last she pushes herself up onto all fours, crawls to the wooden box, pulls it with her into bed. She listens for the clink of Severine’s fork against the plate. Then Eleanor opens the box, unwraps the kidney. She doesn’t dare even take it in her hand, because every movement hurts. On one side of the kidney is a small, purple swelling. “I’m sorry,” whispers Eleanor. She drapes the silk back into place and sets the box gently on the bedside table. She pulls a sweatshirt from the foot of the bed and throws it over the box as camouflage before she cries herself to sleep.

Eleanor stands in the yard, her side still stiff and painful, and watches the deer leap the back fence. He looks like he is flying, like it is no effort at all. Like the fence is there for the pleasure of his jumping it, not to keep anything in or out.

The day that Eleanor has to drive to the office at six a.m. to deal with a catastrophic databased failure and doesn’t get back until bedtime, she comes home to the smell of Thai food, and wine already in the glasses. “My little genius,” says Severine. “They should be kissing your feet.” They drink until the deepest part of the night and then Severine says, “Wait!” and disappears outside, and returns to lead Eleanor out to the glow of a small fire. They sit huddled together under a wool blanket, listening to the sharp chirr of cicadas all around. Severine pulls Eleanor onto her lap and sings softly with her chin hooked over Eleanor’s shoulder. Eleanor wonders if the deer is nearby, listens for the sound of his footsteps, but a moment later Severine’s hands are running warm under her shirt, up her ribs to her breasts, and she forgets about the deer, about work, about everything except Severine.

Eleanor hooks a set of garnet earrings, a gift from Severine, through her ears by their golden wires. She smooths the front of her dress, checks her teeth for lipstick, goes to the bedroom and settles herself on the bed with a book. A moment later Severine passes through from the bathroom in nothing but a bra and panties, talking on the phone. To one of her friends, it sounds like, something about a new bar near work. Severine opens the closet and absentmindedly flicks through outfits without selecting anything. She clangs one hanger against the closet bar harder than necessary, and Eleanor feels a faint tremor through her abdomen; the vibrations have shaken her stomach, which she has recently hidden in a ratty old purse that hangs from the other end of the bar.

Severine selects a blue dress, throws it indifferently on the bed, continues talking and sifting through her jewelry box. Eleanor reads a few more pages before she looks at her phone for the time. Half an hour until they are supposed to meet her boss for dinner, and the restaurant is twenty-five minutes away. When Severine turns her way Eleanor taps her wrist gently, where a watch would be if she wore one, and blows Severine a kiss.

“I have to go. OK. You too,” Severine says and ends her call. To Eleanor she says, “Are you in a hurry?”

“We’re running late,” Eleanor says, making sure to keep her voice light, making sure not to mention that she was ready half an hour ago. “And that blue dress looks beautiful on you.”

“Well, it’s all wrinkled. You obviously want to go without me. Just go.”

“Of course I don’t.”

“You’re a terrible liar.”

Severine takes the dress in one clenched fist and leaves the room. Eleanor flinches for the slam of the door, but it never comes.

Adrenal glands are small, like a pair of fleshy fortune cookies perched atop the kidneys, when they are in their proper place. Eleanor’s are concealed among the lightbulbs in the basement, and she feels them do their work—the thudding of her heart in the small cavern of the cookie jar, the sweat prickling her hairline, her breath sharp and fast through her nostrils as the adrenaline sets in—but she knows from experience that if she were to pull the adrenal glands out right now and look at them, they would look no different than they do at rest, nonchalant, as though nothing were happening at all.

After a few minutes, her pulse slows. She forces herself to leave the bed and peek into the living room. No sign of Severine. She moves through the room like a heroine in a horror movie, always awaiting the jump scare, but there is nothing. When she reaches the garage she finds Severine’s car gone. She flicks the garage light off and on again, as though this will change things, but there is still an empty space.

“Severine?” she calls, but there is no answer.

Uncertainly, she slips her feet into her shoes, collects her car keys and her purse, her phone. Where did you go, love? she texts, and then I’m sorry and then You’re still coming to dinner, right? She makes sure her ringer is turned up, and then she gets into her car, backs into the driveway, her thoughts scattered. Part of her expects to find Severine storming up the driveway, still half naked with her dress in her hand. But the driveway is just a long stretch of gravel fading into darkness past her headlamps, and anyway Severine’s car is gone. Eleanor’s thoughts turn to what to tell her boss. She can say Severine is sick, but what if Severine has gone ahead to the restaurant, or decides to show up eventually? Then a lie will only make things worse. But Eleanor’s so late now—she has to say something. She is turning sweaty with humiliation and shame. She calls Severine, but the phone rings and rings and no one answers, and as she hits the button to call again she sees a flash of eyes in the darkness and stomps the brake, throwing herself forward as the car stops. The deer stares at her, frozen in the middle of the gravel drive, his eyes two small green mirrors crowned with antlers. He lowers his head toward her slightly, as though he might charge. For the rest of the night—as Eleanor apologizes to her boss and orders the least expensive entrée as some kind of arcane penance and glances compulsively toward the door, terrified that Severine will appear and smash her polite lie to fragments; when she declines dessert and aperitifs and returns home to find Severine in bed, already asleep—this image will flicker back to her: those shining eyes, those antlers lowered in challenge as though to block her way. Though in reality, that moment in the driveway lasts only a second before the deer springs sideways across the fields. From the footwell of the car, where it has landed, Eleanor’s phone stops ringing, connects again to Severine’s voicemail as she says, “Leave a message. I’ll call back soon.”

Eleanor hides more and more of herself. As her chest empties, she feels the remaining organs sway and roll. Her lungs expand in the unaccustomed space. She finds she can take very deep breaths, can fill them with enough oxygen to last two full minutes, and sometimes does, as she listens to the thunk of books hitting the wall beside her head or silverware being dumped from its drawer in a jangle of stainless steel. “Cunt,” says Severine, but that is right where it belongs, nestled between Eleanor’s legs, not anywhere near the silverware drawer. After all, there are some things she can’t hide. Severine would notice if her eyes went missing. Her hands. Her tongue. The exterior stays more or less the same as it always was, but inside, Eleanor is becoming a museum of empty rooms.

Eleanor is weeding the herb bed when she hears Severine scream in fear. She runs into the house, still wearing her gardening gloves, and sees Severine in the kitchen, trembling. Eleanor’s grandmother’s cookie jar is on the counter, the lid beside it, and Severine is looking down into it. Eleanor moves toward her cooing, “It’s all right, it’s all right,” though she has no idea whether it is all right or not.

“What is it?” says Severine, and Eleanor removes her gloves and sets them on the counter. The heart beats faster. The nakedness of it, there in the open jar, the feel of the afternoon sunshine that spills onto it from the kitchen window, anointing the myocardial muscle as it expands and contracts, makes her feel vulnerable and very, very afraid. She curls her fingers protectively around the rim of the jar.

Severine begins to cry. “Is this yours?” she says. She gathers Eleanor to her chest with her shaking arms. “Why would you do such a silly thing?”

Severine cries until she has emptied herself out, and then she walks to the sink and splashes cold water on her face. When she turns to Eleanor her expression is serious. “Can I touch it?” she says. She returns to Eleanor’s side and wraps an arm around her waist, stands looking down at the heart. Eleanor believes she can see it contract with her anxiety, but she nods.

Severine lifts the heart with infinite gentleness, as though she is cupping a fallen nestling in her hand. Eleanor can feel the curve of Severine’s palm, the warmth of her skin, against the heart’s slick exterior. She doesn’t dare breathe.

Severine nods at Eleanor to place her own hand on the heart’s surface, and they stand there together like that a moment, the heart beating in the nest of their fingers. Then Severine lowers it into the jar again and replaces the lid. She washes her hands in the kitchen sink, dries them, and puts the jar back reverentially before turning to Eleanor and kissing her. “You’re beautiful, bien-aimée. Every part of you.”

Eleanor kneels in the garden, tamping down the earth around the roots of a rosemary bush she has transplanted, so intent on her work that she doesn’t hear the deer until he lowers himself behind her and sits in the grass. Eleanor puts down her trowel. She breaks off a sprig of the rosemary and offers it to him, though it is a stupid thing to do. She doesn’t want him tearing up her herbs to eat them, and he never has. But he doesn’t eat it, only flares his nostrils to take in the smell of the plant, and looks at Eleanor. She is the one to look away first. She gathers soil with her gloved hands and presses it down, down, down.

At first, that Wednesday feels like just a Wednesday. Eleanor has a late-afternoon dentist appointment in town. By the time she leaves, traffic is terrible, and she is late getting home. She skips the shower she’d really like to have and starts making dinner feeling tired and cranky. When Severine comes in she kisses Eleanor breezily and disappears into the bedroom to relax until the food is cooked and plated.

She comes out several minutes later with a piece of lavender paper in her hand, and when Eleanor sees it the color plucks at some faint memory. The paper is a love letter to Eleanor, from Deirdre, her first real girlfriend, back in college. A painfully shy girl who made Eleanor feel bolder by comparison and loved Eleanor with a devotion that, Eleanor knows now, she did not deserve. That no one could ever deserve. Eleanor was the one who broke things off, but that letter has remained between the pages of her college copy of Wuthering Heights, Deirdre’s guileless, looping declarations of love read and re-read many times in a short span and then, eventually, forgotten. Who knows what has compelled Severine to choose this book, which has sat untouched on the bookshelf for the entirety of her and Eleanor’s relationship, on this day. Eleanor’s first impulse is to explain, and then to apologize, but there’s no time for any of that.

Severine sweeps the steaming dinner plates to the floor with one arm, so that the ground between them instantly becomes a minefield of broken china. Eleanor says nothing, stands beside the refrigerator in her T-shirt and sweats and her bare feet, looking at the floor, waiting for things to shift, waiting to see what happens next.

Today, this seems to enrage Severine. “You think you can just ignore me?” she says. Her whole body is shaking with anger. “Look at me!” But somehow Eleanor cannot lift her gaze. She doesn’t look up until she hears Severine move, sees her knock a water glass to the floor for good measure as she strides to the corner cabinet. The spice bottles hit the ground and Severine stands with the cookie jar in her hands. Eleanor watches, motionless. She wonders if she can stand still enough to disappear completely. What will happen next feels like something she has no control over.

Severine lifts the cookie jar above her head and throws it at the tile floor as hard as she can. The porcelain shatters; the pieces scatter in all directions; Eleanor’s hand flies to her chest, and the two of them look at the floor. There are pieces of asparagus and chicken. The white china of the plates. The yellow and blue of the cookie jar. There are glinting splinters of glass.

What there isn’t is the purplish red of Eleanor’s heart, or the garnet splash of blood. Eleanor can feel her heart pumping as though it will burst, sealed up tight in a waterproof box in the garden, beneath the roots of a rosemary plant. She’d been afraid, at first, of worms, but some things are clearly worse than worms. Some risks are necessary and others are just foolishness and wishful thinking.

Severine stares at the floor in disbelief. Eleanor backs away from the kitchen. She takes her purse from the hook beside the front door and gropes inside for her car keys.

Eleanor cannot see Severine where she crouches on the floor behind the kitchen island. She can only hear the sound of Severine’s hands sifting broken crockery, and then a sharp suck of breath, as though she has cut herself. “I’m sorry, Ely,” says Severine. There are tears in her voice, maybe blood on her fingers. She needs a bandage. Perhaps she needs stitches. Eleanor isn’t going to find out.

She doesn’t waste time closing the door behind her as she steps across the threshold. She crosses quickly to the car, slides in, and begins to drive.

When Eleanor comes home the next morning she checks first for Severine’s car—gone—and then for the deer. She is sure she is living in a tragedy, that she will find his body prone in the tall grass, butchered in the night.

But that doesn’t happen. The deer doesn’t come around until three days later. By then, Eleanor’s had the locks changed and cleaned the kitchen floor. By then, she’s carefully packed all of Severine’s things into sturdy plastic storage bins and dropped them off with a mutual friend, which is still, somehow, the worst she can bring herself to do. It’s after Eleanor has cried half the night on the couch, and woken up to the sound of birdsong, wishing for the tap of antlers. Wishing there was some magical connection between her and the deer, that he could scent her sadness from across the fields and come running just when she needed him. He can’t. But three days after she narrowly manages to avoid her own death, there he is, knocking at the glass, breathing vapor into the chill morning air.

Eleanor has slept in her clothes. She rolls to her feet, hurries to the kitchen, runs outside with a handful of carrots, without bothering to put her shoes on. The grass is wet and cold against her feet. The deer eats from her hands and then stands perfectly still as she leans against his neck. He turns his head and licks the fingers she places on his muzzle, because this is all he is here to do: to still be here, alive and solid, when everything else has shattered. To be something she can love without doubt.

When Eleanor goes inside, the deer returns to the forest. He will not come back until he wants to. But he will come back.

Eleanor walks to her bedroom and begins to open drawers and boxes. To gather things together. To weigh the pieces of herself in her hands.

© 2025 Anjali Sachdeva