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She shook her head as if trying to rid herself of something. Dix tried again, his words full of caution. For her, but now for himself as well.

“I’m worried about you, Miranda. I just wonder if this kind of work isn’t better left to professionals. Darius doesn’t have credentials. You know that. And these kids are tough. They come from really rough backgrounds. I know. I went to school with lots of kids like this. I know their families. You haven’t been exposed to these kinds of people before. They are so unpredictable. They have nothing—and nothing to lose. I worry. I worry about you, Miranda. I worry you’ll get hurt. Like you have. This all could have been so much worse. So easily so much worse.”

Miranda still said nothing.

“And. And I miss you, Miranda. I just miss you.”

Dix hung his head, overcome with feelings made more acute by the act of saying them. Miranda stood up.

“You miss me, Dix? You?” she said, her voice shaking. “You miss me? Why don’t you think how much these kids have missed, Dix? Think about that for a change of pace.”

With that, she left the room, and Dix sat staring into the empty space where she had once been.

After the night of the fire, Dix and Miranda were tentative and polite with each other. Dix used a softer voice and kept a safe distance. Miranda adopted an aggressive cheerfulness and fluttering affection. They curled in on each other at night, handling each other gently. Miranda spent just as much time at The Source but now answered the question “How was your day?” with stories of cheese-making and garden planning instead of her usual evasiveness. She told him that the meth-making kids had run away from The Source the night of the fire. They were not replaced with others. It was apparently just Darius and a handful of women out there now, all engaged in relatively benign, back-to-the-earth activities. Miranda used the word
community
all the time when referring to the group. This was clearly something important to her. Something necessary. Dix found space within himself for a new kind of contentment that was informed more by her happiness than his own. They set aside time for a trip to Burlington, held hands as they walked the streets and wandered the shops filled with the residue of last season’s tourists. He bought her some silver earrings, a pretty hat, some cashmere socks. She thanked him and immediately donned the gifts, yet never wore any of the items once they were home.

From this near distance, Dix watched Miranda. She knitted mittens and hats—she was now skilled with the needles, as someone at The Source had helped her—which she planned to give away to those in need at Christmas. She slept, her eyelids twitching from the depths of a dream she would not remember or would claim to not remember when he asked her about it in the morning. She swept the kitchen floor, murmuring some mantra over and over under her breath, swinging her hips, which he noticed had widened into a graceful curve spreading from her waist. She was no longer the skinny girl he had once watched puttering in the garden he had prepared for her mother at that huge log house. He saw she was growing more beautiful as the callowness of youth left her face and body.

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.