Miranda would set aside her dark fantasies and perverse longings for a time. She would tell herself to focus on the tasks at hand. She would discipline her thinking. She would succeed for a few days, but she invariably grew restless and agitated, full of physical and emotional discomfort. She became increasingly fearful that the baby growing within her was feeding from a vessel polluted with all the psychic toxins she had taken in throughout her life. She wanted to bring her child into the world with a purity of intention she felt unable to attain just by meditating and puzzling over passages in the Tao. She needed something that would shock her system and her senses into a new relationship with the world. She wanted a cleanse.
The image of Miranda so full of child and yet empty of beauty rattled endlessly in and out of Dix’s head. He would be frying eggs for breakfast, and the smell of them burning untended in the pan would bring him back from his painful reverie. He’d find himself driving down the road, a mile past where he had intended to turn. Or still in bed, staring out the window, long after the sun had crept its way into the slow-to-warm spring sky. He wondered how far along she was. He wondered when she was due. He wondered how she had become pregnant so easily by Darius, and, if she had become pregnant by Dix, whether she would have stayed. If that would have been a good thing in the long run. If things weren’t better this way. If it wasn’t better that she left when she did, before their lives were even more entwined. He told himself to put her out of his mind just as she had put him out of her life.
One day, some two months after his last visit to The Source, he was out in the barn sharpening mower blades on his grinder. As he stared at the long blade, guiding it carefully along the spinning stone, watching as it ground away the dull metal and created a new, shiny, sharp surface, Miranda’s silhouette clouded his vision, dulled his hearing, and pulled him down. Pain snapped his senses back to attention. He dropped the blade, and it landed with a thud against the top of his boots. He watched as drops of bright red blood began to decorate its surface. He changed his focus and looked at his hands. Both were bleeding, one from his knuckles where a bump into the hard stone had instantly scraped away soft flesh, the other from a precise incision where the blade had caressed it as it fell to the ground.
Enough, Dix thought. She’s taken enough of me already. I can’t let her have my hands, too.
He began to banish the thought of her when it came, shooing her away as if she were a buzzing insect. But still she persisted in her insistent, noisy need for his attention. So he began to go through the house, packing up reminders of her. Gradually, he filled a couple of boxes with her clothes, then another with her toiletries and jewelry, trinkets, and hairbrushes. He kept another box open and dropped things into it as he happened upon them: a pair of sunglasses from a drawer, a small bottle of lotion she kept by the sink, a favorite feminine coffee mug, a nail file on the side table, a framed snapshot of her with her brother, her knitting basket. Then finally, the small stuffed bear she had kept propped up in a rocker in the bedroom. Her father had given her that bear. It was the only sentimental thing she had kept from her family. Everything else from them—remarkably little once they had cleaned out the house and put everything up for auction—was in a small self-storage unit they had rented. As Dix taped up his boxes and carried them to the garage, he remembered Miranda murmuring the single word someday as she had lowered the door on the storage space and locked her past away.
Someday. A word full of hope and sadness.
Dix spent the next weeks refilling the empty spots she’d left in the house with his own things. He had no need for hair conditioner. A large container of bargain shampoo took the space where she’d once had two floral-labeled, scented bottles. The rocker where the bear had sat was now a place to toss his dirty work pants at the end of the day, until he took them up again the following morning. He adopted a cat. Her gray, furry form circled in on itself and slept in the spot that had held Miranda’s basket of yarn. The house absorbed his footfalls when he came home in the evening, the cat curled herself against the small of his back at night, his coffee mug was front and center when he opened the cabinet in the mornings, but still the boxes neatly stacked against the garage wall mocked him every time he went to his truck.
Finally, one Saturday in May, when there was a chill in the air as the tentative spring tried to break through the vestiges of winter and the budding leaves seemed to shrink back against the tree branches, Dix pawed through the kitchen junk drawer until he found the key he was looking for buried under a pile of change. He loaded the boxes into the back of his truck and started toward the storage unit. As he drove, peevishness and resentment moved from a low simmer to a full boil in his gut. Here he was, once again, taking care of Miranda’s stuff. This was what he’d done for years, first because she couldn’t, then because she wouldn’t.
And why? For what?
For the small pleasures of being able to run his fingers through her hair, seeing her face crinkle with shy gratitude when he helped her in the garden, sinking his teeth into a slice of her pie? And yet, to gain even those tiny victories, he’d had to spend countless hours trying to coax her out of her petulant, anxious mantle.
No. Enough already. He berated himself as he turned away from the direction of the self-storage place and instead onto a particular dirt road and then into a ratty driveway next to a listing mailbox. Enough. Let her take care of her own crap for once.
This was the third time he’d come up this drive but the first time he wanted to leave something behind instead of hoping to take something away. He stepped from his truck and surveyed the scene. Nothing had changed. The deadened stillness that hovered here seemed deeper, thicker, a fog no sun could burn away. He moved to the bed of his truck, grabbed a box, and carried it toward the porch. He didn’t care if he saw Miranda. He just wanted to get rid of her stuff.
The door to the farmhouse opened. Dix tried to avoid looking up. A man’s voice saying his name stopped his forward momentum.
“Dix.”
The single note was a warning. Not of danger but of bad news. Delivered in a voice swelled with sanctimonious comfort.
There he was. Darius. The man who seemed to have given Miranda everything Dix was unable to provide. Dix met his eyes and waited for what was to come.
Darius’s voice came at him like distant thunder that broke his sentences into truncated phrases: “sad news,” “did all we could,” “so very sorry,” “it was not meant to be.” Dix’s eyes burned as he tried to make sense of what Darius was telling him.
Darius paused, bowed his head, and said, “She’s gone, Dix. She is gone.”
Gone? Gone where? Dix wondered, confused, unwilling to accept what he was hearing.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“We carried out her wishes,” Darius said in answer to Dix’s question. “At the end, when the fever broke and it seemed she might recover, she asked to be cremated. Here. She fell asleep then. She didn’t wake up. We made a funeral pyre. As she requested. She wanted to stay here. She wanted her ashes to be spread here. Not by us. By the four winds. So she could stay with us forever.”
Miranda? Cremated? Miranda? Dead? Dix murmured the words, testing them on his lips. “But the, the baby . . .” he stammered.
Darius just shook his head. “She’s at peace on the other side, Dix.”
Peace? No, Dix thought, not at peace. Dead. Burned in this ugly, shitty, damp, cold place.
Even in death she was torturing him by insisting on this ad hoc cremation. Miranda was gone. Forever. Grief came then, like a swarm of bees. Dix dropped the box where he stood as sorrow began its crawl all over his body, down his throat, into his ears, packing every orifice with its buzzing and stinging. His mind ran from this impossible news—Miranda, dead—the fact of it an insect horde raising a din in his head. His body took some moments to catch up to his thoughts, to come into motion, but his legs, leaden at first, gave way to what Darius had said.
Dix ran from the man,
from his voice, his news, his words. He ran from the man with the eyes as blue and empty as a clear sky. He leaped into his truck and drove, spitting mud and gravel, down the drive. He steered along increasingly narrow and rough dirt roads, with no thought other than Away, I must get away, until he came to a dead end and could drive no more. He left his truck and continued to flee from what Darius had told him. He stumbled in the weeds and grasses, and his legs went haywire on the slippery leaves left over from the last year. He fell over himself as he hit the woods but scrambled forward even as he tripped over rocks and roots. Tree branches slapped at his face and still he blundered on, the hive of grief in hot, noisy pursuit. Away he went, and then up, up, up through the still-frozen mud, and then higher still, until he found the remnants of the winter just past, the season of his sorrow. Finally, he fell and had neither the will nor the strength to lift himself again, so he splayed out into the cold comfort of the snow, his fingers clawing at the punky flesh of the decayed tree he had crashed into, his howls of agony and loss absorbed by the dense immensity of the conifer limbs that waved their dark benediction above him.
DIX AND SALLY
The chill murk and damp cling of sadness became Dix’s constant companion, the only company he wanted. Without consciousness, he indulged in the ancient rituals of mourning: he drew the curtains, stopped shaving, unplugged the phone, and sat for hours, staring at nothing other than the changing color of the sky. He let the weeds take over the lawn. Spring flowers bloomed and faded without him as witness; the garden went unplanted. He scrounged directly from the pantry or refrigerator, his hands his only utensils. He fell asleep on the sofa, allowed the mice to eat from the detritus he left in the kitchen, let the mail pile up, unplugged the phone. His customers could find someone else. There were plenty of capable men around who were more in need of work than he was. He watched with only the most impassive interest as the swallows returned to nest in the barn and a pair of fawns nibbled on the lettuce that had self-seeded in his compost pile. He became long-haired, bearded, and gaunt, a semiferal version of himself.
Sometimes he disappeared into the woods for days and days, living in rough shelters, foraging and fishing as needed. He dodged the tourists, not only because he didn’t want to see their $350 hiking boots, $600 tents, and $1,200 backpacks he knew would get a few times of use before collecting dust in some attic in Westchester but also because he did not want to be seen himself. He knew they came because they wanted to view wild scenery, not wild men. In any case, he did not require the well-marked and mapped trails others used. He was guided by the angles of the summer sun and the terrain itself. His long, loping gait allowed him to easily step over downed trees, across rocks that dotted the small streams, and up and down hillsides strewn with ferns, decaying logs, red dogwood, witch hazel, sumac, and white birch. He saw nothing living other than the occasional squirrels and chipmunks scratching in the leaf litter.
One late spring day, as he was prowling the woods with nothing in his pack but a compass, some venison jerky, a bottle of water, and a pair of binoculars, he stopped in the middle of a deer track. Something unbidden had come to him, a sense that something familiar and portentous was nearby. He had not meant to come this way, but when he paused and realized where he was, a dark curiosity came over him. He looked around and then up into the trees, his hand shading his eyes from the brighter light overhead. He was like a wild animal testing the wind for a scent. After a few moments of scanning, he stepped over to a large beech tree, crouched, loaded his legs like springs, and leaped upward. He grabbed a branch with both hands and swung his feet up, overhead. Hand over hand, foot over foot, he climbed. When he had ascended into the very top of the ancient tree and was among the branches that could still reliably hold his weight, he hung his pack from a small snag, settled himself against the gray trunk that was, at this height, not much wider than his back, brought the binoculars to his face, and turned them northward.
He was a hunter without arms or the intent to kill. He was simply torturing himself by trying to lay his hungry eyes on a prey he could not figure out how to pursue. Miranda was gone. She had made her incomprehensible choices. He had mourned her when she left him, and then after she died. But nothing had allayed his hatred for the man who took her from him. Twice. Dix’s head was beginning to clear. And into that emptiness a desire for retribution was beginning to stir.
That first day in his perch, he saw nothing of interest. He watched until the sun fell too low for his binoculars to be of use. He climbed down from the tree, made his bed in the leaf litter, used a decayed log for a pillow, and slept the deep, dreamless sleep that comes after long hours of intent focus and complete attention. He repeated his ascent in the morning. A rooster crowed, a dog barked, a cow lowed. A baby wailed and was soothed. All these sounds, made diffuse by distance, drifted to him from indistinct directions. Then the farmhouse door he had framed in his binoculars was flung open. Hard. A moment later, the slam came to his ears, the sound emptied of emotion by the ensuing distance. He watched as a woman stepped onto the porch, put a cigarette to her mouth, bent her head, and cupped her fingers around a match. She was neither tall nor feminine in bearing. Impatience infused her motions. The ember glowed. It took Dix a moment to register the disconnect.
Cigarettes? At The Source?
Before he could think the contradiction through, the dark head and slight frame that he knew belonged to Darius came out on the porch. The man’s neck jutted forward from his shoulders like a running chicken’s. His hands gesticulated in obvious anger, and he repeatedly poked an index finger toward the woman’s chest. She began to mirror his motions. Finally, the woman stepped back, took the cigarette from her lips, placed it between her thumb and forefinger, and flicked it right in Darius’s face. Then, as he stood gaping, she clumped off the porch.
Dix dropped the binoculars in amazement at what he had just witnessed. He smirked inside and silently cheered this unknown woman’s brassy fortitude in the face of the man he hated. Then, he felt something unquiet in himself settle down. He felt less alone. He climbed down from the tree, free of any desire to return to his vigil. He sensed something was somehow being set right out there, that he had an unknown ally.
He wandered slowly back through the woods, meandering across slivers of trail few other humans would notice, much less take. There was no hurry anymore. There was no one waiting for him at home. He crossed a stream and stopped. A small noise in the quiet woods had caught his attention. He listened carefully and moved toward the weak whimpering. He had to push through a clump of underbrush to find the source. An animal, mottled gray and brown like everything on the ground around it, scrabbled and twisted at his approach and was then caught short. Its foot was in a trap attached by a chain to a stake in the ground.
It’s not trapping season, Dix thought.
Then he got mad. This trap had either been left behind by someone who was too lazy or distracted to check all his gear or who just didn’t care if an animal suffered a slow, agonizing death because he was less than scrupulous about keeping track of the traps he had set and left behind. Dix pushed aside his emotions. There was a job at hand. He lowered himself to the ground to appear less intimidating to the frightened animal. He moved forward bit by bit, at a crouch. The animal gave up in its efforts to flee and collapsed in a heap, eyes closed and sides heaving against visible ribs. Dix broke off a piece from the jerky in his pocket and tossed it to the animal. It was ignored. A serious sign of stress. Dix wished he had gloves. He knew that trying to release the coyote from the trap would put him at risk of getting badly bitten. Opening the old trap itself put him at risk of another sort of injury. Maybe the coyote was too weak to bite. Dix took off his shirt, wrapped it around a hand, and extended it toward the animal to test its response. It remained prone and merely opened its eyes in weary resignation. They were not yellow. Warm brown. No coyote. This was a dog.
Dix relaxed. He reached over and gently ran his hand over the dog’s side, his fin
gers dropping over each rib. He poured water from his bottle into the dog’s mouth and watched its tongue work gratefully over the liquid. He got a stout stick, pried the pan of the trap apart, held it open with his boot, and the dog pulled its foot free. Dix gently probed the paw with his fingers. The dog flinched, so he stopped. The skin was torn and broken; Dix hoped nothing else was. He slung his binoculars around his neck, shoved his water bottle into a pocket, cradled the exhausted dog in his arms, and slid her butt-first—because he’d seen it was indeed a female—into his pack and hoisted her onto his shoulders. She settled her weight into the pack and rested her forepaws and chin on his shoulder as he walked, darting her tongue out from time to time to lick his ear. When he got home, he took her to the barn and set her down in a long-empty stall. He was concerned she might be infested with fleas, ticks, worms. She made no effort to get free of the now-grounded backpack, merely let her head fall into a pile of straw and closed her eyes.
“I’ll be right back,” he said, backing out of the stall.
He quickly cooked up a batch of rice and ground venison. He also dialed the vet, made an appointment for the next day, and got some advice on how to care for her in the meantime. He brought a bowl to her, blowing on it as he crossed the yard to cool it down. The dog’s nose twitched at the smell of the food. She wriggled out of his pack, ate delicately, and merely sighed when he took the bowl away.
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