1503951243

by Laurel Saville

  When Miranda had started to show, she had gained a new and different position in the community. Sally watched Darius single her out for one-on-one, whispered conversations, a coach conferring with his star athlete. She saw the other women begin to sidestep her, not as a pariah, but in deference. Sally searched for a moment when she could speak to Miranda privately. Back when Miranda was just a day camper, she would meet Sally’s eyes, initiate conversation, and invite connection. But after she joined The Source full-time, there was an initial and short-lived bloom of enthusiasm and engagement with everything, and then Miranda’s face grew increasingly somber and her energy turned inward, a tendency that increased when her pregnancy became clear. It was harder to talk to Miranda than it used to be. To even share a simple greeting. From what Sally could tell, it appeared that Miranda still participated in the orchestrated events and chores, but she spoke less and kept to herself more. Sally recalled Miranda telling her once, just before she moved to The Source, that she and Dix had been trying to get pregnant. She wondered if Dix knew they’d succeeded. Or if their estrangement was so complete that Miranda was keeping this all to herself. Sally watched her as closely as she could or dared, and caught the knowing glances Darius shot at Miranda. They seemed intended to nudge, instruct, perhaps remind her of something. Sally knew the asexual Darius was not the father, but he seemed to be trying to exert some sort of ownership over Miranda’s pregnancy, as if he saw it as an opportunity. For what, Sally could not imagine. She knew the only way she could find out was to get Miranda alone.

  The days were short and Sally was restless, often awake in the predawn hours, standing at her window, willing the day to come on, wondering why she was still at The Source. Saving money, watching the house, morbid curiosity—she mentally ticked off the reasons. She also felt as if she was waiting for something to happen; she just didn’t know what or why. And now, there was also her concern for Miranda. Miranda was one of those people, Sally recognized, who incited worry in others. There was a delicacy and callowness to her that made one want to put away sharp objects, cover pointy corners, strew clean straw in her path. None of which Miranda was aware of. Which made the effort that much more compelling.

  One clear, dark morning when the stars were bright pinpricks in the indigo sky, Sally stood at her window trying to talk herself not so much into leaving as out of staying. Then she noticed a dim light warming a window in the trailer. The structure had been abandoned, a chemical pariah, after the fire. But as she watched, a distinctive silhouette came into view through the busted-out window. Sally quickly pulled on boots and a coat and tiptoed out of the house, across the yard, and into the trailer. Miranda turned as Sally closed the door behind her. Her expression was troubled, her skin sallow. Sally wondered if she was ill. The thought scared her, as it came to her more as a premonition than a question. Some women glowed with vibrancy when pregnant. Miranda appeared as if the baby was draining the life from her as it grew.

  “Miranda, honey,” Sally said gently, as if she were approaching a spooked horse. “You shouldn’t be out here. It’s cold. This place is polluted.”

  “It’s OK. The windows are open,” Miranda said, her eyes drifting over the sharp shards that framed the opening above the stove.

  Sally decided against explaining how little the open window would help clear the place from chemicals used to cook meth. “Miranda, are you OK?” she asked instead. “Is everything OK with you? With the baby?”

  Miranda slowly bent over, righted a metal chair from where it was lying on the floor, and with exquisite exhaustion, sank into it. Her shoulders looked thin. The swelling in her womb seemed to be drawing sustenance from her other body parts. “Oh, the baby is fine.” She patted her belly and a wan smile drifted onto and then off her face. “I’m not sleeping very well,” she said. “That’s all.”

  “Me neither,” Sally replied.

  “Guess I’m a little frustrated,” Miranda said. “Seems we’re never going to be a haven for wayward youth, after all. Kind of a disaster here. And now, apparently, word on the street is that this place is a big ‘drag,’” she sighed, making air quotes with her fingers.

  Sally was surprised and unsettled to hear this accurate but dismal assessment of the situation at The Source from Miranda, the truest of its true believers.

  “Well, maybe there will be a new generation of teens who show up,” Sally said tentatively.

  “A new generation,” Miranda said. “You sound like Darius.”

  “That’s a little scary,” Sally joked.

  Miranda spread her hands over her extended midsection and stared at them.

  “That’s what Darius wants,” she said. “To create a new generation, totally free from the distractions and seductions of modern life. With only Mother Nature as a teacher and guide.”

  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Mother Nature can be quite a bitch,” Sally said. As Miranda described Darius’s vision for her baby, Sally heard skepticism battling against belief. This was a first, coming from Miranda. Sally needed to find a way to take advantage of this, to steer Miranda further from Darius and back toward Dix. It was a delicate, risky moment.

  “Miranda?” she said. The other woman did not look up. “Are you thinking about when you’ll return with the baby to Dix?”

  “Return?” Miranda said, her face still turned downward, confusion furrowing her brow. “Oh, I don’t think that’s possible. Darius wants me to stay. Wants us to stay. We’ll fumigate and fix up the trailer for the two of us. We’ll all raise the baby together. The baby will be free and innocent and become a model of what’s possible in the world. He says he has realized that individuals get too damaged, in too many ways, too quickly, so repair and restoration become impossible. We need a ‘tabula rasa,’ he says.” She’d made the air quotes again. “My baby came at just the right time, a gift from the universe, a gift we need to give back to the universe. That’s what Darius thinks.”

  Miranda’s tone was entirely unconvincing. Another rote retelling of someone else’s vision. Sally felt prickles of sweat break out under her arms and on her lip and brow, even though the room was cold. “But, Miranda,” she said.

  “I agree with him, Sally.”

  “But.”

  “I know. I know,” Miranda sighed. “The child is not mine alone.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Dix did want a baby. I think he did, anyway. Actually, I’m not so sure. It was always more my idea. I was the one who was pushing for it. He kept saying we had plenty of time. He was just indulging me. Like he always did. He didn’t really care if we had a child or not. I realize that now.”

  “Still. He is the father,” Sally said.

  “I know. But these ideas of ownership,” Miranda hurried on. “Of owning another person. She’s mine. He’s mine. That child is hers or his. That child needs to grow up to reflect my values, be an expression of me, the parent. Just like my car and address and job title are a reflection of me. That’s not a baby—that’s a doll you dress up. Wouldn’t it be so much better to just let my child have many parents and guardians and teachers? To wander outdoors instead of being chained to a chair in a classroom? Isn’t that the more natural way? A much better way? Darius says my baby could have a birth mother, a garden mother, a house mother, an instructional mother. That all seems so much better. And Dix would hate all of that. He’d never support me in the way I, the way we want to raise this baby.”

  Miranda seemed to be trying to talk herself into the words that were bubbling from her mouth.

  No, no, no, Sally wanted to say. That’s just Darius-talk.

  But before she could reply, the door opened again and the man himself walked in. His eyes flitted from one woman to another, and a forced smile split his face in two.

  “What’s going on out here?” he asked with an obvious effort to keep his tone friendly. “Getting a head start on making this place your own?” Sally saw his obvious effort to ignore her. He inclined his head toward Miranda
. “But you should be in bed, my dear,” he went on, touching Miranda on the shoulder. “This place may still have some chemical vestiges that are not good for our baby.”

  “Our” baby? Sally thought, outrage heating her face. She wanted to smack Darius across his temple with the large wooden spoon lying close by on the counter. I can’t leave her here alone. I can’t leave her and her baby undefended from this man.

  Darius ran the back of his hand along Miranda’s arm a few times, then wrapped his fingers around her biceps and coaxed her, unresisting, from her chair. He nudged her toward the door. She crossed the small space in a few shuffling steps. Darius crossed his arms over his chest and watched her go.

  Once Miranda was outdoors and on her way back to the house, he turned and hissed at Sally, “Stay the fuck out of this.”

  Then he was gone, leaving Sally in a miasma of garlic and manure, acetone and char, cold air and fear.

  Things were not working out as Darius had planned. Not that there had been a plan. That would have been far too confining and restrictive. But there had been a vision. Lambs cavorting in a field, chickens scratching in the dirt, bushes laden with fruit, lush rows of green vegetables neatly tied to bamboo stakes, sweet smells emanating from the kitchen windows, a woman at a loom, another at a butter churn, the sun on the well-defined muscles of his sweating back as he showed a group of teenagers how to build a shelter from supplies found at hand in the woods.

  What he had instead was a cold and muddy few acres, chickens that didn’t lay eggs and were eaten by foxes, an ornery couple of goats, diseased produce, a bunch of scrapes, and pulled muscles. Darius wanted young people, cynical and worn-out already, whom he could scrub clean, return to their wide-eyed and open-hearted state, and then slowly refill with a new way of being in the world. He wanted the satisfaction of seeing their expectant faces and empty souls absorb his nutrient-dense diet of natural law and timeless truth. He wanted to watch as they went out and seeded the country around them with his ideas and insight. Instead, what he had was a gaggle of sullen, unskilled women with soft hands and needy egos continually looking for the indulgence of his kind word or warm look.

  And he had Sally still hanging around. He had thought of her for some time as just an annoyance, a stray dog looking for scraps. He had figured she’d wander off eventually, bored, hungry, sick of being ignored. But she had stayed. She had become emboldened. Especially with Miranda. He felt she had developed a superior air, as if she was waiting and watching for him to screw up, so sure of her own prophecy of his inevitable demise, on the lookout for when she could pounce. He had tried to shoo her away. He had not been able to scare her off. He didn’t know how hard he could push her. He felt that he was on her territory. She held the mortgage. She owned more of the house than he did. She was part of the “system” he despised. She knew cops and lawyers. He was concerned that her skeptical presence was making his flock of misfits more skittish than they otherwise might be. That she was keeping other, better specimens away.

  Darius wanted to be sought out. He wanted to step out onto his porch and see people plodding up the path, asking for his succor and enlightenment. He envisioned himself up at a podium, heads in the audience nodding at his words, at a desk in a bookstore signing his manifesto, flipping through his busy calendar as he fielded requests that he speak at a conference or retreat. What he had instead were rape allegations, a burned-out trailer, and a few notebooks filled with a random collection of his own stubbornly disorganized thoughts and observations. He was growing frustrated and impatient.

  He tried, in fits and starts, to instill discipline and structure into the few followers he had. A calendar in the kitchen with assignments—a technique cadged from grammar school—worked for a few weeks, but then the dishes, compost, and laundry began to pile up, the barn filled with manure, and the weeds took over the garden. The women blamed one another or whomever had recently left. He felt like a harried single mother with a passel of brats, not a man full of wisdom needed by a society that had lost its way. He began lecturing the women, taking cues on topics from his notebooks, and at first, their faces were rapt. But he always ran out of things to say and his sentences devolved into harangues and complaints that caused the women to bow their heads and to hide their eyes, which darted about in discomfort and embarrassment. Even Miranda, his golden girl, his own personal Madonna, full of the child he recognized was not physically his but felt was spiritually his offspring, was growing morose and unresponsive.

  He felt disgust with them all rise in his throat like heartburn. He could not punish the goats or the garden, the weather or the world, but he could punish them. He could school them and show them there were consequences to their weakness and self-indulgence. It was not mockery, he told them as he tied a piece of cardboard with the word Slob around the neck of a woman who had been slapdash in her dishwashing and kitchen-cleanup duties. It was instruction. It was not meanness, he insisted as he used a black marker to draw an anus around the mouth of a woman who had used profanity. It was a reminder. It was not punishment, he assured them as he stomped his boots onto a collection of hairbrushes and makeup he found in one woman’s backpack. It was liberation.

  And then, after the fire in the trailer, when he began his furtive forays into the women’s bedroom when they were outdoors at chores, secretly inspecting pockets and purses, shoes and drawers, he discovered that Phoenix had smuggled in a cell phone, which she was keeping in a slit in her mattress. He read her texts. She apparently had found a spot on a small ridge behind the barn where she got just enough signal to send messages back and forth to Cassandra. He found her invitation to Cassandra and Maverick. They’d told Darius they’d heard great things about the place, and he’d assumed they meant from other teenagers. But no, it was Phoenix they’d heard from. She knew them, apparently through drug connections. She’d said, in her texts, that they’d be able to lay low here for a bit. She’d told them there was an empty trailer a convenient-yet-ample distance from the main house. She’d reminded them about what ingredients and equipment to bring, and where to find the unused feed barrel in the barn that they should use to hide everything. Darius read the messages that insisted they all pretend not to know one another and that described how they should behave to win Darius’s trust. But what made his face turn red and his hands shake with anger were the texts that made fun of him. She wrote that he had “short-man syndrome,” was a “eunuch” and a “wuss.” She mocked his philosophy. She said The Source was a “dump.” It was all too much. It could not be condoned. She would make an excellent example. He began to formulate something special for her. When the appointed evening arrived, he told the assembled community there was going to be a “cleanse.”

  Miranda was not there to see the cleanse. She had not been feeling well. Her pregnancy had been plagued with all kinds of digestive and sleeping upsets. She worried that something was wrong with her, that her body was not welcoming to her baby for some reason. The night that Darius had designated for the cleanse, she had taken a calming draught, gone to bed early, and fallen deeply asleep. She didn’t know that Darius had ground some sleeping pills into her tea. He didn’t want her there. He was afraid the presence of a pregnant woman would make the other women timid.

  By the time Miranda awoke the next day, Phoenix had disappeared. Miranda began to inquire. Where had Phoenix gone? Why did no one seem to care that she’d disappeared? She’d heard a bit of a commotion in the night. What was that all about? The others dodged her questions. But she pieced things together through murmurs and whispers. It was a tale shared behind hands and with eyes averted. It became the stuff of myth. There was the time before the cleanse, when The Source was polluted with the likes of Phoenix, Cassandra, and Maverick, and the time after, when evil had been purged and purity restored. It was a pivotal experience the other women had shared with Darius, and Miranda had not.

  Miranda was put out. She felt pouty. She thought that having missed the event, like her once-long hair, m
arked her as separate from the others. They’d all bonded over the test that Phoenix represented, and she’d been excluded from both the challenge and the victory. Miranda was also deeply disappointed in Phoenix. She hardly knew the other woman but felt sure she should have stayed on after the cleanse, contemplating the lessons the experience certainly had to teach and, having been scrubbed clean of her past and embedded notions, evolving her spirit in fresh and new ways.

  I would not have left, Miranda thought. I would have benefited deeply. I would have embraced the opportunity.

  Thoughts of the cleanse became an obsession for Miranda. She pressed the women for details, collected the whispered bits of information, and reassembled them into a fantasy mosaic. She imagined the excitement of so many hands circling her body at one time, the bittersweet taste of soap in her mouth, the cascades of cool water flowing over her face, breasts, and legs, the chills and shivers met by a bracing scrub with rough towels and then comforted away with a cocoon of warm blankets and bodies curled in on hers. She wondered what she could do wrong in order to be singled out by Darius for the treatment. She considered ways to provoke him and was strangely delighted by this fresh rebellious streak she found in herself. It was a new toy she wanted to play with. One evening she allowed a plate to slip through her hands as she dried it. She was looking forward to the resulting crash, the flash of anger in Darius’s face as he turned to her, the feeling of the hard floor against her knees as she picked at the scattered, broken bits of crockery. But the dropped plate hit her foot, bounced, and merely wobbled in place a few times before coming to rest. The resulting sound was insufficient to arouse Darius from the conversation he was having with Violet about how to redistribute Phoenix’s chores.