In addition to this slow accretion of physical changes, Dix noticed that over the past few months, her nervous, self-doubting edges had been replaced by conviction and self-containment. He knew he should be happy about these things. But those qualities had been created in a space and time that was beyond and outside him. He didn’t trust their genesis. He knew somewhere deep within himself, even as he told himself he should not judge, that there was something false and fragile in her newfound clarity.
Miranda was a puzzle to Sally. Although she seemed to be from the same privileged social class, she was unlike the other women Darius attracted. She was wounded in some less obvious, more subtle way, and needy in some more flagrant, less complex way. When Darius spoke, the other women listened, subdued, submissive, soaking in his words; Miranda leaned forward, took notes, was eager and attentive. Sally overheard Miranda asking Darius questions about how he thought celebrity worship subjugated women or how she could calm her thoughts during meditation practice. Miranda brought in tattered library books from the 1970s on the back-to-nature movement, offered ideas on natural refrigeration and more intensive farming practices, and suggested printing up pamphlets on what The Source had to offer and handing them out at the high school after hours to attract more teenagers.
Darius told her that people must “discover” The Source on their own.
Miranda was also the only woman who talked to Sally, apparently oblivious to or unconcerned about the general moratorium on making direct contact. Once she found out Sally was a social worker, she asked how much schooling she had, what the certification requirements were, if the work was gratifying.
That word, said with deep earnestness, gave Sally pause. “Gratifying?” she repeated.
Miranda nodded, smiling, practically squirming with delight at the expectation of the answer she hoped for. A dog waiting for a bone. It pained Sally in an unfamiliar way to know that she was going to disappoint her.
“Not as gratifying as you might expect,” she replied, trying to soften the truth of her work.
They were sitting on the front porch. Sally had gone out into the cold to smoke. The one concession she made to the community was not smoking indoors. She was trying to quit anyway. Miranda, as she sometimes did on the rare occasions when they were both at The Source at the same time, had followed her. She remained undaunted by Sally’s response.
“Really?” she asked. “Why not gratifying? Isn’t it great to help these people improve their lives, get onto the right track? I mean, you must have such an impact on them! How can that not be gratifying?”
Sally finished her cigarette, doused it out in a mound of snow, and wished she had a joint. Something else she was trying to quit. She felt a sudden tenderness toward Miranda.
“Here’s the thing,” Sally said. “I know it’s hard to imagine, but most of these kids don’t really want to get off what we’d consider the wrong track. They’re really pretty content with the track they’re on. So are their families. So are their friends. The so-called right track would take them away from everything they know. Everything that’s familiar to them. So mostly I just try to get them to do less damage to others, because they don’t really care about the damage they do to themselves.”
“But there must be some you can help,” Miranda insisted. “Some you have helped.”
Sally thought. There was the woman with kids whom Sally had gotten into a shelter just a day before her husband had set their trailer on fire and shot himself in the face. She now had a job as a health aide. There was the girl who had almost a dozen siblings, none of which had the exact same combination of mother and father because her father got women pregnant in between his bouts in jail for drug dealing, while her mother got pregnant every time her social-service checks were about to run out; that girl was now attending college on scholarship and planned to join the military upon graduation. There were those, yes. There were others, too. But these were the exceptions. The world was full of so many sorts of evil that Miranda, with all her upper-class, white-girl, emotional neglect could never imagine. Sally didn’t want to be the one to tell her.
“There are a few cases that stand out,” Sally cautiously said. “But honestly, Miranda, for those people who get out of the tough circumstances of their birth, they just have it in them. If they hadn’t come across me, they’d have found someone else to help them.”
“Yes,” Miranda said, “but it was you. It is you. It isn’t someone else. That must be so grand.”
Grand? Hardly, Sally thought. This girl is a soft person looking for a hard problem.
She lit another cigarette. She gave up trying to school Miranda. Let her figure it out on her own. Let life be her teacher, bitch that it could be.
Miranda was also the only woman who was a “day camper,” as Sally thought of her. Miranda spoke obliquely about her life outside of The Source, with offhand comments like, “I’ll ask Dix. He’ll know how to fix that.” Or, “I’ll bring something from home tomorrow to repair that—Dix won’t mind if I borrow his stuff.” Dix. Sally knew she’d never met him but wondered if they had ever crossed paths. Unlikely. They worked with very different clientele. As Sally listened to Miranda describe him, Dix seemed to attain almost mythic status—a kind, generous, competent, indulgent soul with an endless reserve of practical knowledge, as well as tools to implement his wisdom. Miranda did not, however, seem to speak of him as a romantic partner. They lived together, Sally knew, in a house that sounded stunning from even Miranda’s generalized description. She suggested they were lovers, made passing reference to a desire for a baby. But there was something missing from Miranda’s regard for the man, some passion or connection. Even so, Sally was surprised that Miranda would forgo what she surmised were the considerable comforts of life with this Dix person for ever-increasing hours and days with the grungy vagaries of life at The Source. Even if something or several things were absent from her life with Dix, it still had to be a lot better than this place.
In mid-December, the tentative calm of Miranda and Dix’s quiet detente was disrupted. Dix heard the tittering of abruptly shut-down gossip one day when he went into the post office. He had become used to this—people in town knew Miranda was now associated with the “guru,” so their whispering halted when Dix appeared—but this was something different. Now people were staring at him. He picked up a copy of the local paper and a cup of coffee on his way home. What he read, sitting in his truck in the gas station parking lot, left a stone in the pit of his stomach. When he got back to the house, he left the newspaper carefully folded on the kitchen counter so Miranda could not fail to see the headline when she came home. Then he sat in the gathering gloom and waited for her to arrive. He did not stir from his living room chair when he saw her car come up the driveway, when he heard the back door close, not even when she called his name. Lights went on behind him. There was a pause followed by the sound of the newspaper being shaken out. He waited a few moments, then stood and joined her in the kitchen where she was making tea. He cleared his throat.
“Did you eat already?” she asked pleasantly. “I hope you didn’t wait for me. Had a heck of a time getting the chickens into the coop this evening. Mercury is still in retrograde, though. It’s to be expected. Another week or two of that and then the planets and stars will realign—”
“Miranda.”
The grim tone in his voice silenced her. He watched her back stiffen. She coughed into her hand.
“It didn’t happen, Dix. That’s all I have to say.”
“Those are some pretty serious allegations,” Dix replied.
“Yes, well, they are also untrue,” Miranda said, turning to him and flashing a mocking smile.
“Don’t try and tell me there’s not plenty of crap going on out there, Miranda.”
“Whatever you may think, there’s nothing debauched going on out there, Dix. I know. I’m there. You’re not.”
Debauched. Dix rolled the word around in his mouth. A big word for the most common
, the most low, of behaviors.
“She’s a minor,” he said.
“Yes, and as you have pointed out so many times, minors are not innocent, especially the ones we’re trying to help. When evil has been done to you, you become capable of perpetrating more evil. The evil is in the allegations, because they are false, not in the action, because it did not happen.”
“More riddles and platitudes,” Dix said. “Not facts. Facts are that allegations of rape are rarely falsified.”
“Whatever, Dix,” Miranda sighed.
“Whatever?” Dix was shocked at her disregard. “That’s all you have to say about this?”
“No matter what I say, you won’t believe me. So why should I bother?” Miranda shot back.
“Seriously, Miranda, this is a place you choose to be associated with? There are so many ways to help. You don’t need The Source or whatever they call themselves. First meth, now this?”
“These things are related, Dix. They came from the same person. These are things she did. Both of them. These are not things we did. I will not even speak her name. Gossip is not truth. Accusations are not deeds, Dix.”
“Miranda, this is serious. This is a matter of law. Whether it’s true or not, you could be charged. As an accessory. This could go on your record.”
“On my record? That’s what you’re worried about? Some piece of paper in some bureaucrat’s office? As if that kind of thing has any power over me. I can see you’re worried about what people think of you, Dix. Thankfully, I am not. Not anymore.”
“This has nothing to do with opinions, Miranda. This has the potential to destroy your future.”
“Future? I’m not looking for a future, Dix,” Miranda said, throwing her arms about. “I’m looking for a present, a way of life in the here and now. And I’ve found it. I have nothing to be afraid of. The truth will always win out. We may not be able to see the path it takes, but the truth always finds its way to the light, eventually.”
“For Christ’s sake, Miranda. The girl is pregnant!” Dix seethed.
“For your information, Dix—even though I am not supposed to discuss The Source or its rules with outsiders, with people like you, who are so full of preconceived notions and judgments, because what we do there is sacred and the world is a hostile place for the sacred—if you must know, in fact, sex is not allowed at The Source.”
“What?” Dix said.
“Sex is a distraction from clarity of purpose,” Miranda said with practiced serenity. “It clouds the mind with passions, desires, jealousy. It takes us inside our own desires and makes it harder to see what we should be doing to heal the larger world. It makes us pursue carnality instead of spirituality. Sex is not allowed among those who make The Source their home.”
“No sex? Please,” Dix said, giving full voice to a snide sarcasm he didn’t know he was capable of. And also to a suspicion he had been harboring but was uncomfortable admitting. “A bunch of hormonal teenagers with not enough to do, hanging out in a trailer? One dude in a house full of young women? Who are you kidding? It’s like a B-grade porn movie waiting to happen.”
“My, haven’t you gotten vulgar and degrading in your insults?” Miranda said dismissively.
They stared at each other, uncomprehending. Neither knew what to do with the distance that had grown between them. Neither knew what to do with the other. They stood on the opposite shores of a river of distrust that raged between them and saw the bridge they had tried to build for the rickety thing it truly was.
“I’m sorry, Miranda. I’m sorry for my tone,” Dix finally said. “But none of this makes sense to me. The truth is, the bigger truth—the one that is more important to me than The Source, the kids, the meth, or these charges this teenager is bringing that Darius raped her—is, it’s just that, I fear I’ve lost you. I have lost you. You’re so rarely here anymore. And when you’re here, you’re not really here. Your thoughts are elsewhere. It feels like you’d rather be elsewhere. It feels like you’re merely fulfilling some duty by spending time with me. I just want you back. I just want us back.”
Miranda was quiet for a moment. Dix hoped she was reconsidering, softening. He hoped she would come nestle her head against his chest, wrap her arms around his waist. Instead, what she said next hit him like a wet towel slapped across his face.
“I am not yours, Dix,” she said, her voice icy. “There is no me to get back. There is no us to get back. I am not an object to be kept and coddled and held onto. I have found my passion and my path and you don’t approve. So be it. For me, there is no going back, coming back, whatever you want to call it. I ask you, Dix, do you really love me? Oh, I know you think you do, but it has become clear to me that it’s much more likely you love some picture you have in your head of who you think I am. Which is who I have been. And not who I am anymore.”
She turned and left the room. Dix listened, pinned into place by her completely unexpected and staggering pronouncement, as she moved down the hallway, then in and out of a few rooms and out the back door. He watched the red lights on her car recede down the driveway. He gasped into the empty, airless space she left behind and wondered how he had managed to drive her away when nothing could have been further from his intentions.
She did not come back that night. Or the next night. Or the one after that. Or after that. He would pick up the phone to call her and then remember that she’d left her cell phone behind. It wasn’t allowed out there. Out there. It never occurred to him that she might have gone somewhere else. Where else would she go? He checked his own phone obsessively. Never a message or text. Days turned into a week. He considered driving over there, but he thought she needed time. He thought she needed to return to him when she was ready. He was also afraid she’d reject him again. He didn’t want to force her hand.
Because he could not look forward, Dix looked back. He knew Miranda had been slipping away from him, bit by bit, for months, but still her departure was a shock. He wandered the echoing house and tried to find her in the things she had left behind. He stood in front of the bathroom cabinet and stared at her hairbrush, fingered the long strands that tangled themselves in its bristles. He picked up a half-finished mitten, still forlornly attached to a ball of yarn, and set it back in the knitting basket. He stood in front of her half of the closet. There was a large gap. He opened her drawers. Mostly empty. He realized both of her winter coats were missing from the hall closet. She hadn’t taken time to pack when she left.
When did these other things disappear? he wondered. Had she been planning her departure, stockpiling items out at The Source? Had she come back to the house when he was out working and collected things then? Or did she just leave her things behind out there accidentally, as she had the tools?
He tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. He told himself that she’d always been absentminded. But his excuses for her could not stand up in the face of her absence. As the days passed and the stupor of his sadness lifted, it was replaced with a resentment that bordered on rage. He was angry at her for abandoning him and them as a couple, at Darius for seducing her with his smarmy platitudes, at the teenagers for seducing her with their raw-woundedness. And then at her again for being so easily taken in.
These were unfamiliar, uncomfortable feelings for Dix. Nothing in his life before had destroyed his innate equanimity. He tried to use work to distract himself from the twisted emotions Miranda had left behind. There was plenty of it, as the out-of-towners were full of need for him and his fixes and prepping their places for Christmas family gatherings. When he had finished with his customers’ projects, he cleaned and sharpened his own tools. He took apart his tractor and put it back together again. He organized his shop. He beat back every bit of old dust and cobweb in the barn.
None of this brought her back. All of it reinforced his loneliness and vexation.
Dix tried to imagine Miranda out there at The Source. He pictured her in some kind of neurotically happy bubble, surrounded by those scruffy wom
en, an ad hoc family so unlike the one she had grown up in. What a relief she must feel to be able to drop the elaborate and limited code of acceptable behaviors that were part of the playbook her class of people used. Yet, he knew and wished she could see that she had merely exchanged the old set of rules for a new set. Neither was hers. Both had been given to her by charismatic and controlling men. Dix knew he was neither of those things. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe that was how he’d failed her. Had he not given her enough space? Or too much? Had he been too soft? Too self-contained? As he searched for explanations, he missed the most obvious one: some people don’t want to find their own way and are in fact searching for a path someone else has already made.
Christmas came and went. Dix spent the days when others were celebrating with hours of hiking the mountains alone in the knee-deep snow. After the holidays, he kept hiking. Then one day, soon after the first of the year, he opened the paper and saw that the rape charges had been dropped. He immediately had the jealousy-induced thought that of course Darius wasn’t having sex with the teenagers, he was having it with Miranda. Probably had been all along. Why else would she be so taken with that foul place, that superficial man? Dix shook off his reeking, painful thoughts and focused on the news, reading and rereading the brief article several times. He was looking for something, anything, between the few lines of text. All it said was that the charges were dropped and the state would not be pursuing the case. End of story. He knew that dropping charges didn’t mean the rape had not happened. Maybe it was too hard to prove. Maybe she was scared. Maybe she was paid off. Maybe it really hadn’t happened and the girl was just looking for attention. Or money. He told himself, over and over, that maybe it really hadn’t happened. Maybe none of this was quite what it seemed.
After the fire, Sally noticed a new seriousness in Miranda’s habitual expression. It wasn’t just because of the lightly scorched hair of her brows and crown, sustained when she ran into the trailer on the erroneous assumption that Cassandra or Maverick was still in there, stuck on the wrong side of a small kitchen blaze, in danger of injury, when in fact they had almost blown up the trailer with their idiotic attempts to cook meth, bolted at the first sign of a flame, and kept running without warning a soul or trying to douse the conflagration they’d created themselves. No, it was that some light in Miranda had been absorbed by shadows. Then, after Cassandra brought the rape charges, Miranda’s face had turned grim. Sally thought—hoped, really—that these changes were the beginning of her disillusionment with The Source. She had become fond of Miranda and hoped she would break free of Darius’s spell and go back to her strong, silent, macho mountain man, Dix. Instead, Miranda arrived one night with a duffel bag. It was late. Darius came down from his attic lair. The other women were already tucked into their beds. Sally listened through a crack in the door as Miranda and Darius spoke in the kitchen at the bottom of the stairs.
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