1503951243

by Laurel Saville

  Miranda felt as if she was the complete opposite, fumbling through life, all thumbs. She was no good at cocktail-party chatter. She was best in a sincere one-on-one conversation. Or even better, alone with a book in her hand or surrounded by woods. She had none of Scott’s charms, nor did she wish for them. But she missed them. She missed how his presence in a room allowed her to relax because he took up all the air, space, attention. He was supposed to be here, still. He was supposed to be getting ready to return to law school. He was supposed to lend balance: a father and a mother, a boy and a girl. Without him, everything was off-kilter. Without his smooth and slick veneer, the raw rot at the core of their family was exposed.

  She went back to her job at the CSA farm as an excuse to get away from the desiccated feeling in the house. There were more hours to be had there in the summer season. Kneeling on the dry ground, clods of dirt in her hands and under her fingernails, salty sweat dripping from her brow, helped settle something in her that fluttered constantly and erratically when she was at home. Her father started to go golfing again, but Miranda suspected he really just went and hung out at the club. Her mother did not start anything again.

  Miranda watched what was and was not happening around her and wondered what to do. She tried looking forward but saw only a dark road with a sharp curve that obscured her view of what might be coming. So she waited for something to happen, for something to break the spell they were all under.

  Her mother said, “Leave it alone, Chick.”

  Her father said, “Shut up, Bunny.”

  Her mother set her teeth, silently pushed herself up from the sofa, and moved to the sideboard. She began very methodically using silver tongs to pick up ice cubes from the matching silver bucket and drop them into her just-emptied glass. How many times had Miranda’s mother told her the bucket and tongs had been passed down from her grandmother? She didn’t even bother with that, anymore. Miranda winced at each small clatter of ice against glass. Her father was at the back door, sitting on a bench, jamming his feet into tall Bean boots. Strong gusts of wind rattled the windows. Rain pelted down so hard it sounded like someone was throwing fistfuls of rocks at the house.

  “Let Dix take care of it tomorrow, Chick,” her mother said as she unscrewed the cap from the gin bottle.

  “Shut up, Bunny,” her father repeated. “Have another drink and let me take care of this.”

  He snugged his laces tight with a savage tug.

  Miranda stood at the kitchen counter, her heart squirreling around in her chest, looking from one parent to the other. Her father stood, shoved his arms through the sleeves of his jacket, and clamped a hat on his head. He yanked the door open. Rain blew in. Miranda watched the drops sparkle as the lamplight touched them for a moment before they were absorbed into the worn area of wood by the back door.

  Dix was going to fix that spot, she thought.

  He was coming by next week to revarnish the mudroom floor. Then the drops would just sit there, waiting to evaporate or be wiped way.

  The door slammed. It was late August. Heat, humidity, and thunderstorms had filled the month. Her mother opened a bottle of tonic water. It hissed in the quiet her father had left behind. The two women looked at each other, and her mother nodded, once, silently agreeing to an unspoken solution. The usual solution. The only solution. Miranda stepped to the phone and tapped in the numbers. It always took him a long, reluctant time to answer.

  “’Lo,” he said.

  “Hi. It’s Miranda. Sorry to call in the storm. It’s late, I know. Such a crazy storm,” she chattered nervously. “There’s a tree out there, the big one by the garage, making a bad sound. I don’t know, some kind of a groan, and Dad’s gone out to give it a look. Afraid it’s going to come down on the roof, damage something.”

  “If it comes down, it comes down,” Dix said, his voice a low, comforting rumble. “Not much he can do about it right now. Nothing I can do about it, either.”

  “Other than talk some sense into him,” Miranda said. “Mother’s afraid he’ll get hurt.”

  Dix didn’t respond.

  “You know how he is, Dix,” Miranda said quietly.

  “I was on my way out anyway,” Dix replied.

  Miranda doubted this was true but appreciated the lie.

  “Gotta go check on the Rawlings’ place. I’ll swing by.”

  “Thank you, Dix. Thank you so much.”

  Miranda and her mother sat side by side on the sofa, in silence, listening to the storm. It sounded like a madman trying to break into the house. Her mother sipped. Miranda fidgeted, picking at a hangnail. She imagined her father glaring at the offending tree, as if his stare alone could bring it into compliance. She hoped he’d just gone out to the workshop. He had a lounge chair out there. A few books and magazines. A bottle of bourbon. Sometimes he used the excuse of some sort of an outdoors project to get out of the house and went there instead. Miranda was afraid to go look, to check up on him. That would make him mad. So she and her mother waited for Dix to come and fix things. That was what he did. That was what they, and many others, counted on him for.

  The gusts and slaps of wind were punctuated by cracks of thunder and flashes of lightning. The distance between light and sound shortened. Miranda counted the seconds. She got to three and then, thankfully, the interval began to lengthen again. There was a lull in the nerve-racking noise. Miranda held her breath. A new sound began. A low moan at first, it rose into a violent crescendo of pops and tears, which ended with a shuddering crash that shook the ground beneath the house. This was followed by a vacuum of silence. The sounds of the storm filtered in again, much more distant, the gaps between thunder and lightning greater and greater as the chaos moved away.

  Miranda and her mother stared straight ahead and waited. Before long, there was the crunch of truck tires on gravel. They relaxed. Soon enough, they knew the door would open and the men would come in, stamping off the rain and discussing the next day’s projects. Which would now include cutting up the fallen tree or branch or whatever it was that had broken free. Her father would insist Dix stay for a cup of coffee. Dix would politely decline, saying he had to get over to some other house, some other project, some other problem. But his presence, however brief, would restore her father’s mood; he was not fond of the company of women.

  They both counted the minutes. In fewer than expected, the door swung open, banging rudely against the wall. Stamp, stamp. Two boots. No voices. Miranda stood. Dix strode into the room and met her eyes.

  “Call 911,” he said.

  It seemed that Dix never left after that day. Of course he had, Miranda knew it, looking back over the year that followed her father’s sudden and instant death as he’d stood, looking up, blinded by sheets of rain, deafened by thunder, into an ancient tree full of invisible interior decay that allowed a waterlogged branch to split from the trunk and fall onto his head. Dix had other clients, other homes, that needed attending. He went home to shower, to eat. When the season came, he went hunting. But he found some reason to show up at least a few times a week. Mow the lawn. Put equipment away for the fall. Repair a stuck door. Take down the window screens. Miranda frequently offered him coffee. As her father would have done. He always demurred. Then, once, he accepted. They sat at the kitchen table together and said nothing. There was no tension or discomfort in the silence. When his cup was empty, he stood, squeezed her shoulder, and let himself out.

  Miranda’s mother’s depression thickened into a cloak she pulled tighter and tighter around herself. Miranda found herself spending a large part of every day urging her mother to eat, to get outdoors, to call a friend. Eventually she even had to urge her to brush her teeth, take a shower, get out of bed. Her mother resisted with almost unyielding stubbornness. Sometimes she sighed. She often wept. For several months after her husband’s death, she’d rouse herself once in a while, take two hours to shower, dress, dry her hair, carefully apply lipstick, and drive off to replenish her stock of gin. That erra
nd took her a while. Sometimes hours. As she came back into the house one day, carrying a bag with two half-gallons of cheap gin instead of her usual top-shelf brand, Miranda asked her where she’d gone. Her mother had shrugged, grunted out the phrase, “For a drive.” Miranda suspected she had started going several towns away, maybe as far as Plattsburgh, to buy booze. She probably didn’t want anyone in town to know how much she drank. In spite of everything, she was still trying to keep up appearances. But as the snows came on in earnest and driving got hazardous, Miranda’s mother dropped that pretense. The bags she carried into the house, bottles clinking against one another, bore the name of the nearest liquor store. Eventually, she didn’t even bother going out at all. She began working her way through everything else in the well-stocked liquor cabinet. Then she went through the cases of wine in the cellar. Then the cases of beer. Her husband’s stash in the shop. When all that was gone, she stopped drinking altogether. That was when Miranda got really worried.

  Miranda had nothing to do with her own worry, sadness, and discomfort. It hung around her like a smell she could not locate or disperse. She did the small tasks of life—making coffee and toast, doing a load of laundry, washing a few dishes, sweeping the floor. She wandered slowly from room to room, only to find herself sitting on the sofa, staring out the window, not knowing how or when the scene outside had moved from the brilliant sunshine of the day to the inky darkness of night. When she heard her mother rouse herself from bed to use the toilet, she was always startled, forgetting that she was not alone. The days shortened. The gloom of winter outdoors matched the dark mood inside.

  Miranda stared out the windows and found herself wanting to trudge through the snow, even if only on some fabricated errand to the barn, just to get away from the oppressive atmosphere of the house. But it was bitter out there. The deep cold in those mountains was the sort that immediately announced its ability to kill you. No matter how Miranda layered herself in scarves and hats, gloves and coats, which collected in the mudroom, the air seared her cheeks and assaulted her nose. The evergreens that rimmed the property and staggered up the steep hillsides all around—the trees she had always loved—began to resemble sinister beings to her, their feathery branches waving in the wind like malevolent arms trying to reach out and grab her. Miranda gave up on her attempted forays and stayed indoors, sipping cup after cup of tea and staring out at the endlessly swirling storms of white flakes and the mounds of snow that Dix piled high when he plowed the almost-never-used driveway. She spent hours in her brother’s room, fingering the clothes that still hung in his closet, slowly turning the pages of his high school yearbooks and photo albums, drowning herself in deep pools of the past. She carried one of her father’s pipes in her pocket, pulling it out from time to time and inhaling the fading aroma. When she ate, she consoled herself with chicken noodle soup, grilled cheese sandwiches, and chocolate pudding. The foods of her childhood.

  Dix’s arrivals and departures were the only break in the spell of her dazed mood, the only reminder that there was a world beyond the thick walls of logs that surrounded her. Seeing his truck come up the drive, spraying snow in front of it, seeing him make purposeful movements around the house as he beat back the accumulations of winter gave her a vague sort of hope. Then suddenly the snows stopped and were replaced by mud and muck and dark puddles. There was nothing more to plow. It was just wet and cold, the threat of winter still in the air. The lonely month of March passed. Then April, with its teasingly warm days and cautiously cool nights.

  May arrived and, with it, the sound of truck tires on the gravel again. He was back. She watched as he dropped the tailgate and came around to the front of the house with a flat of annuals balanced on one arm and a bag of soil clenched in the other fist. This was once a task her mother had loved. The visit to the local nursery, where she’d wander among the bright flowers under the first hint of warm sun moderated by a still-cool breeze. Then back home, where she’d sift through the airy, salt-and-pepper potting soil, tuck in the plant pods, step back and admire how the pink, purple, and yellow blooms filling the various planters around the house stood out against the ruddy logs.

  For the first time, Dix was doing what was not his to do.

  Seeing Dix on his knees in front of the green planters with black dirt and bright annuals arrayed around him broke something loose in Miranda. She stood and shook herself as if she were a wet dog. She went into the bathroom, splashed water on her face, slapped color into her cheeks, and dragged a brush through her hair. She thought of her father and brother, and for the first time, instead of a blurry sadness, she was filled with the clarity of anger. She saw their deaths not as tragedies but as foolishness. Both killed in stupid, preventable, ego-fueled accidents of their own making. They hadn’t been taken from her and her mother; they’d abandoned her and her mother. Dix had not. Miranda pulled on a pair of jeans and cinched them over her diminished frame. She went outdoors into the tentative sunshine of spring, knelt beside Dix, and wordlessly got to work. He smiled and made room for her at his side.

  In the following weeks, the energy that had been dormant in Miranda all winter came forth like a bright yellow daffodil from a bulb buried for months in the frozen ground. She found a bucket, filled it with soapy water, and began wiping down surfaces around the house. She stripped the beds, working around her mother when she would not rise, simply pushing her from side to side as she freed the sheets, leaving her sprawled across the bare mattress. She washed windows, threw out rancid food, got her hair trimmed, plucked her eyebrows, and asked Dix to make her a few raised beds where she could grow vegetables. Her head cleared. Her frame filled out. The house sparkled.

  Then, one day, the phone rang. A voice full of cigarettes, whiskey, and the past said her name.

  “Miranda, it’s Richard Stone.”

  She recalled wispy hair, pouchy cheeks, chino pants with boats embroidered on them, and alcohol-scented breath. Her father’s friend from Yale. A lawyer. The man who took care of her father’s affairs. She fought the urge to call him Mr. Stone, as she had when she was a child. She’d seen him briefly at her father’s funeral. She recalled how he had gripped her small hand in both of his large ones as he wept.

  “Hello, Richard,” Miranda said, her voice a question.

  “I’ve been trying to reach your mother,” he said, his voice also a question.

  “Yes, she’s been . . .” Miranda searched for the right word. “Struggling.”

  “Miranda, there are things that need attending to. Things we should discuss. I’m sorry to have to bring these things up with you, but, well, there is no one else.”

  Miranda had never thought about her isolation this way before. But it was true. There was no one else. Both sets of grandparents were long dead. Her father was an only child. Her mother had a brother somewhere in the Midwest, but their only contact was the annual exchange of a formal, impersonal holiday card, invariably signed without even a brief note or family update. Miranda had never wondered at the strangeness of this ritual, had never thought to ask herself why they bothered. She had accepted, unquestioningly, the notion that some things, many things, were just the way things were done. At least among a certain class of people. Her mother’s class of people.

  “Yes,” she acknowledged to the man on the phone. “I suppose that’s true.”

  “I think it best that we do this in person,” Richard Stone said, his voice suffused with warning.

  An image of the Connecticut house swam in front of Miranda’s eyes. Like a picture on one of those Christmas cards, it appeared to her as perfect, stately, and fake. She’d thought to keep the cleaning lady on, asking her to keep an eye on the house. Other than that, she’d forgotten about the place. She realized that she had been quietly, blindly, hoping her mother would rouse herself and return to the house. To life. Soon. Any day. Hoped even that somehow, on the sly, when Miranda was out in the garden or at the store, her mother had gotten to her desk, made a few calls, taken care of some
correspondence. Acted like an adult. A parent.

  Miranda now knew, with painful clarity, that she couldn’t wait any longer. For her mother. Or for her own life. The situation was ridiculous and untenable. She made a date to meet the lawyer in New York. She pushed it out two weeks. She didn’t know why. She just knew she wasn’t ready. She felt sure there was something, perhaps many things, she should do to prepare. She started to speak to her mother about it several times. But faced with her mother’s blank stare, the words Miranda might have said became marbles in her mouth. Finally she did the only thing she knew how to do when confronted by a problem she didn’t understand. The only thing that had ever resulted in a solution that worked. She called Dix.

  “I have to go back home, Dix,” she said. “I mean, back to Connecticut. I have to check up on things. Talk to my dad’s lawyer. Take care of . . . of . . . of stuff.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I imagine a lot of that has piled up down there by now.”

  His voice, his steadiness, was such a comfort to her. Something she felt she could actually lean into.

  “I don’t know how long it will all take. I’m worried about . . .”

  He broke in, relieving her of the need to finish. “I understand,” he said. “I’ll come by the house every few days. I’ll check up on your mom.”

  “Oh, Dix,” she breathed, relief that he had answered the question she didn’t even know how to ask flooding her voice. “Thank you so much.”