1503951243

by Laurel Saville

  “How’s the sweater project?” he asked, squatting, closing the gap between his standing height and her seated self.

  Miranda felt an unexpected wave of relief at his presence, but she was not quite ready to give up the perverse comfort of her irritated mood.

  “Damned needles!” she said in mock exasperation. “I swear they are out to get me!”

  “Come sit here,” he said, patting a footstool.

  Miranda complied, and as she did so, he took the needles from her hands and smoothed the tangled strands of yarn as if they were hairs on a truculent child’s head. Then he wrapped his arms around her from behind and gently guided her fingers through the motions of creating one smooth stitch after another. She allowed herself to be led and watched the knitted stitches obediently line up, one after another, on the needle. Then he turned the work and guided her fingers over the purl row.

  “How do you know how to knit, Dix?” she said. Then, before he could answer, she added, “Is there anything you can’t do?”

  She was glad he was behind her and could not see the hot tears that sprang to her eyes as she was once again stung with a feeling of deep inadequacy. She wanted desperately to be good at something. Really good at something. She just couldn’t seem to find what that thing was.

  “My mom was always knitting,” Dix replied quietly, ignoring, as he always did, the jab of her last remark.

  Miranda couldn’t even be successful at getting a rise out of him.

  His fingers touched and nudged hers, helping them find and make the stitches.

  “She knit my father and me sweaters,” he continued. “She also knit lots of stuff to give away or sell at the church bazaar. Her hands were always busy making something.”

  “My mother’s hands were always busy drinking something!” Miranda said, surprised at the anger in her own voice.

  Her fingers stopped cooperating with his, and the work fell into her lap. He let it go and scraped a chair up beside hers. He kissed the top of her head before sitting down. He took her hands out of her lap, where they were tangled with yarn, and held them in his own. He said nothing. He looked into her face and waited.

  “I wish I was good at something, Dix,” she sighed, her voice now quiet, defeated.

  “Would you like me to tell you all the things I think you’re good at?” he asked.

  “Oh, sure,” she answered for him. “I’m good at gardening and canning and making pies. But those are easy things. I want to be good at something hard.”

  “Do you have any idea what that hard thing might be? What hard thing you want to take up? I have no doubt you could become good at anything you put your mind to.”

  “No,” she said, embarrassed that her voice sounded like a petulant child’s.

  His thumbs rubbed the top of her hands.

  “It’s just that . . .” she started, then stopped. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s gotten into me. You know how to do so many things,” Miranda said. “Everything you do, you do better than anyone else does without even seeming to try. Shit, your jam is even better than mine, and you know it.”

  Dix let her hands go and sat back in his chair.

  “Miranda, everything I do well I learned how to do from my father or my mother or my professors or some other person who had tons of experience. I made lots of mistakes, but I learned from those mistakes. That’s just part of the process. There’s no secret about how to get good at something.”

  “All my father knew how to do was make money,” Miranda said. “And all my mother knew how to do was throw cocktail parties.”

  “When you’re good at making money, you don’t need to be good at other things,” Dix said quietly.

  “I don’t even know how he made all his money,” Miranda said. “Wall Street. As if that’s the only explanation anyone needs.”

  “Well, we know how he lost it,” Dix said. “Maybe that’s the more important thing to know.”

  “On lawsuits and nursing homes,” she answered, her voice a cold snap bursting into the warm day.

  “By being in opposition to the world,” Dix said quietly.

  “Thinking the rules that apply to others don’t apply to you,” Miranda added. “Thinking you have all the answers.”

  And in that moment, she knew what she would tell Darius. She knew exactly what she had to say.

  The cluster of seen-better-days buildings was again eerily quiet when Miranda drove up the muddy drive for the second time. The silence was not a no-one-is-home sort of stillness but a we’re-home-but-don’t-want-you-to-know kind of hush. Unlike her first foray, when she pulled into the yard and sat in her car, this time she immediately stepped out and slammed the door, full of conviction and intention. She stood there and waited. She’d imagined Darius would show himself. Immediately. Almost as if he’d been waiting for her. She stood at the side of her car, suddenly unsure what direction to take. Her courage began to seep away, a small cup of water in dry sand. She hoped someone—preferably Darius—would show up before it dissipated entirely. She craned her neck, looking to see if there was activity in the dark cavern of the barn, but the interior was too dim to make out animals or people. It was the middle of the day. Where was everyone? Where were the women and teenagers? A slight squeak of metal on metal interrupted her thoughts. She looked toward the sound. In the far corner of the farmhouse’s front porch, shadowed by a scrappy, overgrown alder, was a swing. Darius was there, gently pushing himself forward and back, forward and back. He’d been there the whole time, she realized. She suspected he had enjoyed watching her squirm in the driveway.

  “So,” he said, his voice pitched to carry just to her but not farther. “You’ve returned.”

  Miranda nodded and took a few steps toward him, attempting to be undeterred by this strange reception. She saw his stare harden. She stopped.

  “And what,” he said, “do you have to tell me this time?”

  “I have an answer to your question,” she said.

  Darius narrowed his eyes and nodded. A cackle of laughter, quickly shushed, came from an upstairs window. Miranda shifted her weight back and forth between her feet.

  “Do go on,” he said. “I’m dying to hear.”

  The swing squeaked rhythmically.

  “My answer to your question . . .” Miranda began, lifting her chin, trying to project her insubstantial voice. “Is that I don’t have any answers.”

  She pushed her heavy honey-colored hair over her shoulders. She wasn’t sure if she should go on. She was waiting for some sort of sign from the man on the porch. He gave her none. She knew that this was some sort of a test and that she had to persevere.

  “The truth is, I don’t know if they’ll talk to me,” she went on. “I don’t know what I might be able to contribute. But that’s what I’d like to find out. I admit it—this is more about me than them, right now. I think, I believe, if given a chance, that will change. I intend to make sure that changes.”

  Darius stared at her, his face expressionless. She tried to hold his unflinching gaze but eventually gave up, looked away, up into the more forgiving but equally chilly blue of the sky overhead. She felt the vexation that seemed to be always simmering in the pit of her stomach these last few months threaten to bubble over.

  “I know why you’re here,” Darius finally said.

  Miranda furrowed her brow. “What?” she asked, puzzled. She tried for a light laugh, but it came out as a choking sound. “You do? OK, you tell me, then,” she said.

  “You want to make amends,” Darius replied, his voice heavy with seriousness.

  His tone scattered whatever Miranda had been feeling and replaced it with something more ambitious, more enticing. Something also dangerous.

  “Amends? To who?” she asked. An icy heat was spreading outward from beneath her navel.

  “Oh, it’s not to who,” Darius said knowingly. “It’s for what.”

  They stared at each other for a few moments.

  “Listen, Miranda,�
� Darius said as he stood up. He leaned against the porch post with his arms crossed. “Andy. I know you have some unfinished business. I know you’re hurting.”

  Miranda shivered at his words and longed for the sweater she’d left on the passenger seat in the car. “Hurting?” she said.

  “You’re carrying the hurts of others,” Darius continued. “Your father. Your brother. What they did. The pain they caused.”

  The hair on the back of Miranda’s neck lifted, and goose bumps rose on her arms. “What are you talking about?”

  “I knew your brother,” Darius said.

  Flashes of the past came to her as if she were flipping at high speed through a photo album. The back deck of the log house. Her brother and his friends out on the lawn playing badminton or croquet or bocce. This other man—boy, really, back then—not with them. Instead, with the younger version of herself. This teasing, knowing way about him, it had been more cajoling back then, less confident. But still. She remembered how unsettled she had felt with him then. And now, here, again. Back then, the feeling had repelled her; now, she was drawn to it. Being near him gave her a dizzy, lightheaded sensation, as if she’d just stepped off a roller coaster.

  I miss that house, Miranda thought. So much. I miss my brother. I miss his friends. I miss my parents. I miss that life. She stared at Darius. So strange that this man knew my brother. He was in our house.

  And then, He is so handsome.

  “You knew my brother,” she whispered.

  “Yes,” Darius said.

  Miranda watched his eyes flicker for a moment, as if he was unsure of what he was about to say.

  “I knew him well,” he continued, with sudden conviction. “Admired him. Great guy.”

  “He was,” Miranda said, her eyes filling with tears. “I loved him so much.”

  Darius smiled. He seemed spurred on by her emotion. “The problem is, Miranda, because your father and your brother are no longer here, they can’t face the consequences of what they’ve done,” he told her from his perch on the porch. “They can’t make amends. The universe can’t conduct its karmic balancing act on them. Of course, they paid a price, Miss Miranda. You’ve paid a price, too, Miss Andy. Perhaps a bigger one since you’re still here and living with their tattered, sad legacy.”

  Miranda wanted him to stop saying her name. She wanted to understand what he was getting at. She wanted him to stop insinuating things about her family, stop clicking his tongue in judgment and condemnation over their failings. Everything Darius said seemed true and false at the same time.

  “There is the law of man, Miranda,” Darius continued, spreading out his hands. “And then there is the law of nature. Mother Nature keeps her own score. The natural world is always finding ways to rebalance, to heal wounds, to restore itself after insults. To restore her children, which we surely are, as much as the deer in the woods and the plants in the garden and the fish in the stream are. This balance will be—must be—restored, Miss Miranda, even if it takes generations.”

  Miranda began to feel, deep inside herself, that what this man said was right. She felt bitter relief at admitting to herself just how right he was.

  “That’s what we do here, Miranda,” he said, sitting again, squeaking the swing, elbows on knees, his voice now soft and professorial. “We restore balance. We restore balance by showing respect for nature and natural rhythms. We restore balance to the world by removing ourselves from the world.”

  Balance. Yes, that’s what Miranda wanted. That’s what she had been missing. And amends. That, too. She did have amends to make. She felt terrible about what her father had done—cheating, bending laws meant to protect the natural world. She was also ashamed that her brother had taken another life by driving drunk. People had said it was just an accident, he was barely over the legal limit—no, it was a stupid, arrogant action. Both of these men had destroyed life and welfare. They had manipulated the system and taken advantage of the world. They had been takers, not givers, greedy guzzlers of resources. They had destroyed themselves in the process, but they had ruined so much else before their deaths had halted them. Her mother had done nothing to stop them or to try and fix things. She’d been a sponge, soaking up whatever came her way. Her passivity made her complicit. Miranda had never realized, up until that moment, just how bad she felt about it all. She didn’t want to carry her family’s legacy forward. She wanted to create a new future, to erase all that had come before. She wanted to leave things better than she found them, to be someone who evoked smiles instead of sneers. She began to slowly, unconsciously, nod her head.

  Darius smiled, his teeth large, white, lined up perfectly like soldiers. He stood, moved to the porch steps, and held out a hand. Miranda came forward and took it.

  Soft, she thought. So much smaller and softer than I thought it would be.

  “So what exactly is it that you’re doing out there?” Dix asked.

  Miranda had been humming as she chopped onions. She stopped when he asked this question. He was surprised at how relieved he was. He hadn’t realized how much her incessant background noise had been annoying him, a fly banging against a window, trying to get out.

  “You sound skeptical,” Miranda said in a breezy voice that was new to her. Laughter seemed on the tip of her tongue.

  Dix was grateful to hear the lightness in her tone. This was something that had changed, for the better, since she’d been spending her afternoons at the farmhouse.

  Or was it more than her afternoons? Was it all day? He didn’t really know. She didn’t really say.

  She was home when he left in the morning and when he returned. Most of the time. He knew that when he drove back into the driveway in the early evenings and her car was absent, he was disappointed. Irked. He hated to admit that last part. She had started to smile more, even as she had become more vague and evasive about how she spent her days. He was relieved that she had found something that made her happy, but it was true, he was skeptical. Which she didn’t seem to mind. Which made him more skeptical.

  “I’m not questioning you. I’m just interested,” he said, touching her back, trying to mean what he said. “Just curious.”

  She was already firmer and more muscled than she used to be. That told him something. Her appetite had increased, too. At dinner, she ate almost as much as he did. And her appetite for him had increased as well. That was a change that he didn’t mind but still found unsettling.

  “Curiosity,” Miranda said, whacking him gently with the back of a wooden spoon, dodging his query. “We all know what that did to the cat!”

  Dix leaned back against the counter and crossed his arms. “Seriously, Miranda,” he said, his voice now reflecting his words, “what goes on out there?”

  She looked at him over her shoulder. “Seriously, Dix,” she said, lightly mocking his change in tone, “nothing you need to worry about.”

  “I’m not worried,” he said, although her cagey avoidance of his question was making him that way. “Just wondering why it’s all such a big secret.”

  “Because it’s sacred, that’s why,” she said.

  Dix scoffed. He thought she was making a joke. She wasn’t.

  “It is sacred, Dix,” she insisted. “And it’s personal and private. Besides, you know how people can be. How people are. How they talk and make everything mean and ugly, even when it isn’t. Especially when it isn’t.”

  “I’m not ‘people,’ Miranda,” Dix said. For the first time since they’d been together, he wished he could say, “I’m your husband,” and exert some kind of relational influence over her. Instead he said, “I care about you, Miranda. If something is this important to you, I’d like to know more about it.”

  “And you want to know if the crap you’re hearing in town is true, right? Don’t deny it, Dix,” she sniped back at him.

  “Sure, of course, I want to hear things from you, not just idle gossip. Jeez, Miranda, you make it seem like I’m not on your side.”

  “T
here are no sides, Dix.”

  Dix fought the urge to shake his head.

  Where did she learn this maddening and oblique way of talking? he wondered. She used to be so straightforward.

  “I don’t think there are sides, either,” he said. “That’s why I can’t understand why you’re so evasive about that place. Remember, I was the one who said I supported his efforts. Before you even went out there, I defended him. But if you act like you have something to hide, people get suspicious. It’s only natural.”

  “We don’t have something to hide, Dix,” Miranda said. “We have something to protect.”

  She stirred her onions. She sliced some tofu. She was giving up meat. They were increasingly eating different dinners, together. She was still cooking for him but using only specially designated pans for what she had begun referring to as “flesh.” Dix sighed and rubbed his cheeks. He watched her flick her eyes at him. She seemed to be assessing or testing him. As if she wanted to see how far she could push him. He’d always indulged her. He realized that. Maybe it was time to set some boundaries. To stick up for himself more. He’d never had to do that. He wasn’t sure how. He felt frustration building, a pressure in his head and chest. He sighed again. Shuffled his feet. Refused to look at her. These small expressions of exasperation seemed to have an effect.

  “OK,” she finally said. “I’ll share. A lot of what we do is just simple work. Taking care of the animals. Repairing the house and barn. Of course, in the spring, there will be gardening. Right now, we’re planning. Building a cold frame. Thinking about a small greenhouse. The inherent value of hard work is part of what we’re trying to teach these kids.” She sprinkled tamari over her tofu cubes. “Sometimes we just talk. Try to get them to open up about what their lives were like, what they could be like.”