1503951243

by Laurel Saville

  “Canada. Huh. How handy,” Sally scoffed.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Darius asked.

  “Rich runaways always think they can get easy drugs and out of raps for possession by going to Canada.”

  “Suspicion is a rather unattractive character trait,” Darius said, his voice filled with unguent disappointment. The normal brightness of his eyes was muted by the netting that hung down from his hat.

  “It’s not suspicion,” Sally said. “It’s experience.” She slapped at a mosquito on her cheek.

  “Would you like a sprig of catnip to help deflect the mosquitoes?” Darius asked.

  “Catnip?”

  “Yes, I planted some. It’s coming in nicely. It’s proven to be quite effective at warding off mosquitoes.”

  Sally lit a cigarette. “So is this,” she said, blowing smoke in his face.

  Mandy did not stay long. She drifted idly about the house, barn, and garden and then disappeared a week later, taking with her all the cash from Sally’s wallet, which fortunately amounted to only about forty dollars, a bag of homegrown pot Sally had stashed in the back of her sweater drawer, and a brand-new backpack, bedroll, and pair of hiking boots Darius had just bought.

  “Who knew she had man-size feet?” was all Sally said to Darius by way of reprimand about the incident.

  She watched with pleasure as he winced at her remark. She had intended to wound him. She knew his reaction was not just because of what Mandy had done, but also because he was sensitive about his stature—he was only five foot eight and had rather small feet. She also knew she got too much pleasure from her thinly veiled insult and from being right about Mandy. She hoped the episode would teach Darius a lesson.

  However, it seemed to have no impact on his new, increasingly sanctimonious, air. He told Sally that he and Mandy had had several long, serious conversations while she was there, and in spite of her actions, he was confident she was on the right path. Besides, he said, she had more need for the items she’d taken than he did, and he was glad he could provide her the tools she required for her journey. He reminded Sally that he had repaid her the money Mandy had taken. Sally hadn’t told him about the missing pot. But nonetheless, her hackles rose in irritation as she listened to him offer what she viewed as complete nonsense and retroactive justification for bad judgment. This was the same kind of stuff she heard from her cases at work.

  Although she disliked talking about her work, wanted to leave it behind at the end of the day, in her increasingly infrequent interactions with Darius, she found herself increasingly telling him stories about the kids she dealt with. She described the varieties of deception and cunning they used to manipulate the adults and the systems in their lives. For sure, they had had tough childhoods, Sally allowed, but plenty of people did, herself included. That was no excuse for acting like you were entitled to a pass from the world no matter what you did or how you fucked up, she’d tell Darius.

  She was trying to school him in a subject she knew he thought he already understood. Like a bright but arrogant teenager, he listened to her from a distance, as if she were behind a screen. He went on about his household and garden chores. He wrote in notebooks, pulling a small one from his back pocket while out in the barn and jotting down a few words, or sitting at the kitchen table at night, head bent, an earnest expression on his face, filling page after page of a spiral-bound book with his loose longhand. Sally wanted to read what he wrote, but he kept the notebooks either with him or hidden somewhere. She was curious to see what was happening to him, where these changes were going, where they’d end up. She thought she’d find a clue in his diaries. Slowly, steadily, he was becoming another of her cases. She found herself puzzling over his psychology and wondering if the spell he was under would dissipate and blow away, like the clouds of blackflies would once the summer progressed far enough into July.

  Instead, a few weeks later, she found someone named Vanessa shelling peas at the kitchen table. Vanessa explained that she was trying to get clean and had been stranded by her old car as she was fleeing a bad scene with a heroin-addicted boyfriend. Sally watched the woman’s bitten-down fingernails work over the green pods and nodded as Vanessa told her that, thankfully, Darius had stopped after so many cars just passed her by on the side of the road. She said he’d saved her life, was full of wisdom, a true old soul. Vanessa took up residence in the guest room, where she was shortly joined by Priscilla, a runaway from abusive parents and a creepy uncle who was inappropriate with her.

  “Allegedly abusive,” Sally corrected Darius as he told her Priscilla’s story.

  “Still so suspicious, Sally,” Darius said as he shook his head in the guise of indulgent disappointment. “You, who are in a helping, healing profession, can surely understand the impulse to aid someone in need. It’s just simple human kindness.”

  Sally stared at him. “In need? Those two trustafarians in there? Hardly,” she said. It was obvious to her that these women were not afflicted with the insults bestowed by low incomes and a poor education, like the people she saw at work. These were refugees from financial comfort, slumming it on purpose to tweak their parents and social class. “And, oh, by the way, who the fuck are you, and what did you do with the guy who used to live here, who used to have a beer and sex with me?” she added.

  Darius tsked his disapproval and walked away. He also stopped sleeping in what had been their bed. A pillow and blanket decorated the sofa, but she rarely saw him actually asleep there. He was always up before she was, always reading or conferring with someone when she went up to her room at night. She wondered if those items were just props and he actually spent his nights curled up with one of the other women. She thought not. The energy between him and the women was all wrong for that. Far too paternalistic and avuncular. Condescending. She also suspected that his impotence was not reserved just for her. He had become asexual, his charms directed toward enticing women to listen to his advice instead of taking him to bed.

  Another evening, Sally came home to find a truck with gaping rust wounds in the side panels and a beat-up camper top C-clamped to the bed parked alongside the barn. Two giggly twentysomethings emerged, one with a buzz cut, the other with long dreadlocks, both heavily pierced and tattooed. The bittersweet scent of clove cigarettes wafted over to her on the humid summer air. In the mornings, Sally now regularly dodged a woman—or two—making acrid-smelling teas as she tried to brew coffee and toast an English muffin. She was woken up at night by whispered conversations from the next room. There were frequently damp footprints coming from the other bathroom and only cold water left when she went to take a shower. Sally started locking her purse in her truck at night and stuffing the keys under her mattress. Then a calendar appeared on the kitchen wall. Names had been written into each square for morning, midday, and evening meals. She saw hers had been written in for the following night. She smirked, and on her way home the next day, bought two pizzas. When she dropped them on the table, Darius’s face filled with distaste.

  “Pepperoni and sausage,” he said flatly.

  “Yup, our favorites,” Sally said, grinning maniacally.

  “Astrid is a vegetarian. Vanessa is vegan. You know that.”

  “Whatever,” Sally said. “They can pick off what they don’t like. There are plenty of vegetables there, too.”

  “Sally,” Darius said with a tone of great forbearance, as if about to explain something to a small child, “this is a hostile, provocative act—”

  Vanessa stopped him with a hand on his arm. “It’s OK, Darius,” she said, her voice a sing-song. “No bad vibes here. I’ll make us a salad. The kale in the garden is beautiful.”

  Later that night, after the house was quiet, Sally went looking for Darius and found him in the living room, propped up on the sofa, reading a Robert Bly book. She sat in a chair, pulled her feet underneath her, and asked him what was going on.

  “What do you mean, ‘going on,’ Sally?” he said, closing the book ov
er his index finger.

  “With you. With these women. What’s going on?” she said again.

  He stared at her, his face free of emotion.

  “Are you fucking them?” Sally asked, wanting to crack Darius’s mask.

  “Don’t be vulgar, Sally,” he responded primly.

  “Vulgar?”

  “Yes, vulgar,” he said, reopening his book. “These women are vulnerable. To sleep with them would be exploiting them.”

  “In other words, it’s not just me you can’t get it up with.”

  Darius pinched his eyes shut. “Sally, I am trying to do something here.”

  “Here, like now, right here? Or here at the house?”

  He set his book aside, leaned his elbows on his knees, and spoke to her with the fabricated sincerity that had become his permanent demeanor. He had a vision for the property, he explained. He had been building it in his mind. He felt now that he had been working on this vision for years, even though his clarity of purpose had only recently been made manifest. It was clearly his calling. Just as she had hers, working with youth in the system, he had his, working with people outside the system. He was here to provide a way station, a haven for people in need, in transition.

  “You mean for self-indulgent, silly women trying to ‘find themselves,’” Sally said.

  “These are the people who have crossed my path, Sally. I cannot turn them away.”

  “How convenient,” she said. “For them, certainly.”

  “There are no accidents, Sally,” Darius said, reopening his book.

  Oh yes, there most certainly are accidents, Sally thought, toting up the endless unplanned pregnancies she’d seen, the child who died in a house fire when her mother fell asleep with a cigarette in her hand, the guy who peppered his hunting partner in the back with birdshot when he dropped his gun, the teenager who went sailing through the windshield and severed his spine on a rock after swerving to avoid a runaway horse, the rich old guy from Connecticut who had been killed standing under a tree in a thunderstorm when a branch broke free and hit him on the head. She didn’t say any of this to Darius. She didn’t want to waste other people’s tragedies on him.

  “So, um, this is news to me,” she said instead. “When were you going to let me in on all of this?”

  “Sally,” Darius said with his new, fabricated, maddening patience, “this has been my plan for some time. You are, of course, welcome to participate.”

  “Participate?”

  Darius stared off in the middle distance and went on again about his dream, his vision, his plans. The property, his property, he told her, would be a sanctuary. He would offer simple work, few distractions, the salutary effects of getting one’s hands dirty. He would take these stray individuals into the backcountry and teach them survival skills. He’d get a couple of pigs, a few cows, more chickens, a beehive. They would grow and can and sell wholesome food and crafts at the farmers’ market. He was looking into building a windmill with them. He was thinking of getting a portable pizza oven to use at fairs and festivals, where they’d offer gluten-free, vegetarian pizza. He’d get a pottery wheel. A loom. They would make things, and by making things together, they would create a community together—a community bonded by work and set apart from the materialistic culture of the modern world. They would make and grow and harvest what they needed. They would sell the excess to raise funds to cover their few other needs. There would be no sex and no television. No cell phones or video games. He was especially interested in bringing teenagers there. Runaways and abused kids.

  Sally listened, incredulous, but now also fearful. He was ridiculous but also serious. And in that way, dangerous. She modulated her feelings before responding.

  “Darius, I honestly don’t think you know what you’re getting into,” she said, her voice filled with genuine concern and perplexity. “I appreciate the impulse. I understand it. I truly do. But I have to assure you, these people, these kids you’re talking about, they are not sweet and misunderstood. They are cagey and manipulative. They’ve had to be to survive. I know. I work with them every day. I’ve got tens of thousands of dollars in student loans from studying them and their fucked-up psychologies. A little gardening is not what they need. Their problems are bigger, deeper than that. They’ve been hurt in ways you’re just not getting. They’ve been damaged in ways those women having an extended slumber party upstairs would never understand.”

  “That’s why I was hoping you would help,” Darius said, smiling at her now. “Your experience and training. I thought that’s how you’d fit in.”

  Fit in. Sally choked on the phrase. Fit in? To his master plan?

  She was appalled. “Darius, I work with these kids all day,” she said calmly. “The very last thing I want to do is live with them.”

  “Well, I do want to live with them. And help them. I believe I can offer them something. Something unique and life altering.”

  “Darius, you have good intentions, a big ego, and a shelf of self-help books,” Sally said, even though she didn’t believe there was an ounce of generosity in his ambitions. “I’m afraid that’s not going to cut it.”

  He looked at her quizzically. “Sally, if you saw someone drowning in a pool and wanted to jump in to save them, I wouldn’t try to stop you just because you’re not trained as a lifeguard.”

  “But because I’m not a lifeguard, there’s a good chance I’d drown us both!” Sally said, exasperated.

  “I will not turn away from them. Everyone else has. They need me.”

  “You are in over your head,” Sally told him. “Growing tomatoes, making clay coffee mugs, and shivering under a tarp in the mud for a few nights will not fix what’s wrong with these people.”

  “It’s better than what their parents are giving them,” Darius insisted. “Frozen dinners and reality TV. All creating desires for things they can’t and won’t ever have. This is what causes their sickness. This longing for all these material things. This is what leads them to drugs and other efforts to over- or understimulate their senses.”

  “Oh my, Darius,” Sally said, drawing out the words, trying to tamp down her impatience. “What gobbledygook, New-Age crap have you been reading now? Just because you attended rich-boy camp does not make you a survival expert. Rowing crew at prep school does not qualify you to lead canoe voyages in the backcountry. Volunteering once with Habitat for Humanity because you needed the community-service credit does not mean you can rewire this house. Taking a few psychology courses at college does not prepare you for helping kids deal with low IQs, grinding poverty, and being slapped, kicked, or fucked by their fathers.”

  “There’s no need to be so coarse,” Darius sniffed.

  “Coarse?” Sally said, exasperated. “You think this is romantic. To you it’s just a game. This is no fucking game to them. This is real life for these kids. You have means, money, and rich parents. But what happens to them when they get tired of living out here with you, when they bust a finger or burn something down or start fighting with each other or just want their goddamn Game Boy back? Then they have to go back to their fucked-up families with no skills, no education, no jobs, and no fucking teeth. You get to stay in your little trust-funded utopia and do it all over again.”

  Darius stood suddenly, dropping his book to the floor. For a moment, Sally thought he might cross the room and slap her. Or better, tear off his clothes so they could fuck their way out of this conversation.

  Wrong man, she reminded herself.

  That was how things got resolved with her previous boyfriend.

  Darius’s hands were balled into fists at his sides, and his jaw was clenched. Sally pushed herself farther into her chair. He stepped toward her, kicking Robert Bly in the head as he approached. He stopped. The sound of his teeth grinding against one another and the warm, moist air of late summer rattling through his nostrils was the only thing Sally heard.

  “You’re a hard bitch, Sally,” he finally said.

  “Yo
u’re an arrogant fool, Darius,” she returned.

  After that night, that conversation, there was not a day that Sally did not think about leaving, moving out, putting it all behind her. But she stayed. She was protecting her investment, she told herself. She was keeping an eye on things. She was doing it for the money, because if she left, Darius might stop paying and she’d have the hassle of evictions to deal with. Plus, staying there meant free rent. She had multiple student loans, had run up her credit cards on basic living expenses, and had two ill, inactive parents living in a modular home and collecting disability—her father for a back strain sustained when he tried to break up a fight at the prison where he had been a guard for twenty-three years, her mother for an infection she picked up as a nurse’s aide at the hospital, which, combined with her obesity and diabetes, had meant they had to amputate her foot. Sally had a brother out there somewhere but hadn’t seen or heard from him in several years. He had disappeared following yet another drug arrest. He was no help, but at least he was no longer a hassle.

  Darius set up a bedroom for himself in the attic. Behind a door he kept locked, Sally noticed one day when she tried to snoop. She kept the room they had once shared and was left to use the small bathroom next to it by herself. The rest of the women filled the other two bedrooms with bunk beds and mattresses on the floor and took turns in the larger bathroom. Given Darius’s long hair, facial scruff, and smell of garlic and sweat, it seemed he rarely groomed himself at all.

  The changing cast of characters living in the house shifted their weight aside when Sally passed by, a shoal of fish in the presence of a shark. They avoided eye contact and stopped talking among themselves whenever she came into the room. Without decree, she was left half a shelf in the refrigerator and part of a shelf in the pantry—her very few grocery items a stark, shiny, prepackaged contrast to the messy comingling of dirty vegetables, jars of homemade yogurt, bottles of green smoothies, blocks of tempeh and tofu, and bags of nuts and grains that cluttered most of the shelves. Her name was removed from the community meal calendar.