1503951243

by Laurel Saville

  “It’s not at all what I expected,” she eventually whispered.

  “No,” Dix said. “I imagine not. Bet you thought I’d live in an old trailer or something.”

  Miranda flinched at the slight rebuke in his voice. Then conceded to herself that it was fair and due.

  “Not that, exactly,” she replied. As she spoke, what she had pictured, without really knowing it, came to mind. “I guess I expected a little old farmhouse with a big barn and a couple of dogs on the porch, chickens scratching in the yard. Something that maybe your grandmother once owned.”

  Dix sniffed his amusement. “My father designed this house. He was an architect,” he said, then waited a beat, as if he knew that information would be unexpected, would need time to sink in. “My mother was a landscape architect.”

  Miranda’s mouth fell open in surprise and embarrassment. She realized suddenly that she had admired Dix but also made assumptions about him as a “local.” She had figured he had a poverty of experience and exposure, that his competencies had come more by hard-won experience than sought-after education. She had never considered him as a professional person because, in what she now realized was her own limited experience, serious careers were available in cities and in offices, not in the out-of-doors. Then she realized that almost everyone mistook him. Maybe that was OK with him. Maybe it was more than OK. Perhaps it was a willful and welcome protective mechanism.

  She turned to say something to him, to apologize for herself, but he was already unfolding his body from the seat and the moment was lost. He stood in the drive and waved her out of the car. She got out and took a few steps in the direction of the main house, drawn there, intent on seeing how its sophistication played out on the inside, but Dix was heading in a different direction. She turned and followed him along a faint path that had yellowed the lawn to a far corner of the cleared part of the property. A giant beech tree shaded a small building. Spent nut casings—husks peeled back like miniature brown, bristled tulips—littered the mossy ground. She’d expected a cabin, something modeled after a traditional log lean-to. But this was a cottage. The style was Craftsman, not Adirondack. When they went inside, she found the bed was iron, not wood; the cover chenille, not quilted; the walls whitewashed bead board, not peeled logs; the curtains linen, not lace; the rocker on the little porch simple Shaker, not birch twig. It was a spare, unfussy hideaway. Miranda imagined that the woman who created it, Dix’s mother, had been someone full of art, ideas, good taste, and the confidence and skill that allowed her to express restraint. And also a woman who must have remembered and called upon the daydreams of the girl she once had been.

  Miranda did not want to leave. There was so much comfort to be had here. She turned to Dix and smiled. He nodded. The deal had been struck, accepted, wordlessly. He left her alone in the cottage, closing the door quietly behind him. Miranda listened to his few footfalls on the porch. Then, they were lost in the grass beyond. A raven gurgled and was answered. Ducks quacked at each other as they flew somewhere overhead. She sat in an upholstered chair in the corner of the room and levered off her shoes. Silence settled. She closed her eyes. This was a place where she could heal. She felt that. And at the same moment, she was overwhelmed with the realization of just how much healing there was for her to do.

  DARIUS AND SALLY

  His given name was David, but he called himself Darius. It was not a nickname. It was a name he had chosen for himself. He liked that both his names shared the same first letter, but the new name had a not-easy-to-place exoticism to it that thrilled him. He’d always felt the name his parents had chosen for him was generic and bland. He’d known too many others with that name, and they were all boring, he’d decided. He’d been named after a grandfather he didn’t like much, someone who had started life in a small town in rural Pennsylvania, built a chain of hardware stores, and, while he made tons of money, stuck to frugal, simple ways. Unsophisticated, Darius thought. Antiquated. Vaguely embarrassing. His grandfather was someone who smelled of dust.

  Darius’s father had taken the hardware-store money to Wall Street, where he grew it exponentially. In contrast, he created a lifestyle that expressed his wealth in the subtle ways that were visible to other wealthy people: the Harvard MBA; the blonde, sincere but insubstantial wife who served on cultural groups’ boards; the leather briefcases; the shoes and belts with discreetly placed logos that identified high-end brands; the monogrammed shirts; the summer house—not in the Hamptons, where one might have to mix with crass celebrities—but in an older-money enclave in Rhode Island.

  Darius had first heard his new name when he was in high school. He had been playing a video game and drinking pilfered gin and tonics in the basement of a friend’s house while an adult cocktail party carried on overhead. A heroic warrior character in the game was named Darius. Then, after dropping out of college and while driving across country, the name came back to him, and David decided to become Darius. The new name was part of his effort to describe, and maybe even begin to release, a man he was sure was lurking somewhere deep within himself, someone more grand than he yet was, someone destined for greatness, who needed only naming to become flesh and blood.

  He had left college during his senior year without telling his parents. He had no plan. He had simply joined a friend on a skiing trip to Jackson Hole over winter break and then never returned to the University of Vermont. When the friend went back to college, he told Darius—then still David—that he could stay in his parents’ condo because they were skiing in Europe over the winter. Darius and the friend had filled their days on the mountain slopes and their nights with an easy après-ski social life, but once his friend left he wasn’t sure what to do with himself. Returning to college seemed retrograde.

  He started bartending—his sparkling blue eyes, aquiline nose, eraser-pink lips, and chestnut hair that rode in soft waves over his forehead made for good tips. He also bought a few grams of coke with the intention of cutting it and selling it, but instead blew it with the waitresses, who took furtive snorts from the fake fingernails they dipped into his plastic bag while they stood shivering on the back porch during a smoke break. Then his college friend called and said his parents were on their way to the condo to do some fly-fishing, so he’d better clear out and make sure he got rid of any evidence he’d been there. He spent two days doing laundry and cleaning but got his friend in trouble anyway over a pair of women’s lace underwear that had gotten kicked under the bed, a burn mark on the sofa from a dropped joint, and a grimy grill he’d forgotten to scrub.

  Darius didn’t know where to go next, so he spent a few weeks camped out on the lumpy sofa of a lifty he’d met. He went to the bank one day to get some beer money and found his account had been frozen. Apparently, parents had told parents. There was a serious phone call with his father where words like responsibility, accountability, and appreciation were used. Darius promised all of the above, as well as a return to UVM in the fall, with summer classes at a community college to catch up so he could graduate within the year. His account was reinstated and his monthly allowance reinstalled.

  But it was a balmy, brilliant April and summer sessions were not starting for a bit. So he loaded up his Saab and, instead of heading east, turned his car toward the setting sun. He thought he’d try Southern California, maybe score a modeling gig so he could distance himself from financial reliance on his parents, learn to surf, get a tan. Classes could wait. However, after just a few weeks of squinting in the sunshine and wiping sand from his feet, he had become disillusioned. He was surprised to find California inchoate and inhospitable. There were so many other handsome, young, unemployed men around that no one took any notice of him. His charms were too East Coast, preppy, snarky, and filled with lingo and code that carried no weight in the airy, sunny, dry atmosphere. Surfing was also much more difficult and physically demanding than he had anticipated. Instead of showing off easy grace, he continually slipped and fell. He left the water dazed and bruised, his lun
gs burning with inhaled salt water. The sun was harsher than he’d expected, and he freckled, burned, and peeled instead of bronzing. He couldn’t find the glassy, modern apartment on the beach he had imagined himself in, because his allowance wouldn’t cover the rent even if he shared with several others, so after a month or so camped out in a friend’s pool house, lying to his father during their occasional and uncomfortable phone calls, he repacked his car and headed back East.

  Thinking there was little to do or see in the middle of the country, he got on the highway and drove and drove, stopping at rest areas to snatch a few hours of sleep when he needed it, filling the passenger-side floor of the car with crumpled wrappers from his fast-food meals. As the blacktop whizzed by beneath his tires, he resigned himself to a return to Burlington, Vermont, where he figured he’d reconnect with some pals, see if there was a late-summer class at the community college he could take to rack up a few credits, apologize sincerely to his parents for his six months of truancy, and try to make his words and deeds begin to match each other.

  About an hour before he was to hit the dock of the ferry that would take him across Lake Champlain and back into the life he’d abandoned, he stopped. He’d left the highway hours earlier and had been driving along twisted two-lane roads lined with dense greenery, in-need-of-upkeep houses, and the gone-to-seed small towns of upstate New York. He was hungry. He passed a few restaurants with names like the Dew Drop Inn, but they all had pickup trucks in their parking lots and men with well-worn ball caps and dirt-caked boots coming and going through their front doors. He told himself these were not his sorts of places, that they were undoubtedly grimy and greasy. In truth, he was intimidated by the blatant demonstrations of rural masculinity. Finally, he found himself on a stretch of road with a gift shop that had hanging baskets out front, a store that advertised expensive and brand-name hiking and camping gear, signs pointing to a golf course. He slowed at a sign for the Fishing Hole diner and took note of a few lean folks emerging who were wearing pants with zip-off legs, high-tech sweat-wicking shirts, and web sandals with wool socks. He stopped. Just for a sandwich. Which, somehow, led to a life. Of a sort.

  If pressed, Darius would not be able to say why, after lunch, instead of continuing to the ferry, he stopped at a multicolored farmhouse on the main road that had a ROOMS FOR RENT sign out front. And why, when the middle-aged, retired-from-schoolteaching-in-New-Jersey husband and wife who owned the B&B asked how long he wanted to stay, he said, “A week.” He would not be able to tell you why, later that evening, back at the Fishing Hole diner, he picked up the local paper and turned immediately to the “For Rent” section. He was not self-aware enough or given to self-reflection enough to consider that he was once again simply avoiding college and his parents and the obligations they represented. He did, however, recognize something dark and protective in the landscape that surrounded him. There was also something vaguely familiar about the area that nagged at him. It took him several weeks before he remembered a visit here—or somewhere near here, somewhere like this—over a weekend in his last year of high school. A friend already two years into college had invited him to come along with a group. He didn’t really jibe with the other boys, almost young men. They seemed to all be old-money WASPs, self-satisfied and jocular, where he was newer-money, brooding, uncomfortable with the assumptions and entitlements of the crowd. He felt slightly off balance with everyone. He got their jokes a moment too late and then not completely. There had been a sprawling log house where they stayed. Just before the trip, he had broken a bone in his foot when he took an awkward step off a curb after a night of drinking. A stupid accident that required a cast and kept him from the other boys’ lawn games. There had been a younger sister. Shy, serious, pretty. They’d chatted a bit. He tried flirting with her, but she had not flirted back. There was only that one visit. He’d never been asked back. He drifted away from that crowd. Or maybe they quietly closed ranks against him. It was hard to tell. He had heard stories afterward. The guy whose house he stayed at had been in a car accident. Drunk. Killed a friend. The father—a total bastard, sleazy, double-dealer—had died in some freak accident involving a tree and a thunderstorm. Darius got these pieces of gossip as so many others did: tidbits passed around at a party, something offered up like a canapé.

  But these memories were not what kept him there. It was the mountains themselves that appealed to him. It was the density of them. Unlike out west, there were no vistas. You couldn’t see the mountains on approach. You were just suddenly in the midst of them, caught in the thick of their deep, forested web. He knew no one here. It seemed a place where he could lie fallow for a while until he figured out who he was, what he wanted to be. Until he reinvented himself as some sort of a more interesting, memorable sort of a man.

  Darius rented, month to month, a one-room-with-sleeping-loft, unheated, uninsulated camp. He was supposed to “keep an eye on things,” as the owners were splitting up and would be putting the place on the market once the divorce was settled. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to keep an eye on—the owners suggested there might be intrusions by teenage squatters or black bears, but he never saw any signs of either. He stopped at the local feed and hardware store and bought himself some canvas pants and flannel shirts because that was what he saw the locals wearing. He wanted to distance himself from the hiking, antiquing, summering, fly-fishing, seasonal crowd. He had no idea that the contours of his face and speech gave him away no matter what he wore. He tried on the clothes, looked at himself in the mirror, and decided he needed a two-day scruff and ball cap to complete his look. He found an already worn-in hat with a John Deere logo on it on a hook near the door. But the pants and shirts were perplexingly stiff and uncomfortable. He went to the laundromat and washed them over and over. The shirts softened, but the pants still left welts at his waist and on the backs of his knees. He put them on, crawled on his knees in the dirt, rubbed black mud into the canvas, jammed them into a canning pot full of water, boiled them on the stove, and then washed them a few more times. Finally, they were, if not quite comfortable, at least not painful to wear.

  He started taking note of the postings on the tackboards at the diner and the hardware store. He took down a few numbers and called about odd jobs: mucking out a barn, stacking wood, cutting brush, shoveling manure. He’d thought that these tasks would give him a sense of the people who lived here, would allow him to step over a line between visitor and resident, a boundary that could be felt but not seen. However, all the jobs turned out to have been posted by recent transplants or vacationers from New Jersey, Connecticut, or downstate, people who said they came for the untamed beauty of the mountain landscape but, once there, spent their money and other people’s time trying to beat back and tidy up the nature that surrounded them.

  Darius did the work he was paid a few folded twenty-dollar bills to do, and in the evenings, admired the calluses growing on his hands, the muscles starting to create definition in his arms and back. He stopped going to the diner, feeling that he was not yet ready to be seen much around town, that he was still working on developing the man he wanted to eventually reveal. He picked up sandwiches or prepared meals at the local Stewart’s convenience store and spent the evenings reading paperbacks he found stacked up on two simple shelves tacked to one wall of the camp. There were dozens of them, all romance and self-help. He had little patience with the romances but read them anyway and found them instructive in methods for charming women, something he’d relied on his looks to do for him in the past. Looks that he hoped were changing, becoming less refined and more rugged. The other books all had titles with words and phrases that were new and strange to him. Siddhartha, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Book of EST, Dianetics, What Color Is Your Parachute?, I’m OK, You’re OK. Their subtitles and prefaces were puffed up with words like awaken, unleash, take charge, ultimate, and destiny.

  Women’s books, Darius decided. All of them books for unhappy women.

  He told his pa
rents he was staying with a friend and attending community college. They were disappointed by, but also somewhat accustomed to, this erratic approach to his education by now. His mother thought it was partially her fault. She’d had him held back from kindergarten for a year, thinking he was not emotionally ready for school, and feared that had set a pattern. He’d missed a semester in high school when he got sick with mono and pneumonia. He’d taken a gap year between high school and college that had turned into a year and a half of listlessness and hanging out at the country club, where he occasionally taught tennis. He’d always been older than his classmates. Never quite fit in.

  In between his dirty jobs, Darius took out a few cash advances, as much as the ATM would allow at any one time. He told his parents, who were watching his accounts more closely than they used to, that the money was for tuition and books, but instead, he stockpiled into a new account in preparation for the inevitable moment when his parents cut him off again. He wasn’t sure what he was doing, but he felt sure something would turn up. As it always had before. Then, in the middle of August, he turned twenty-six and received a phone call from a lawyer who had the crackling voice and throat-clearing habit of an old man. This lawyer told him that he now had access to a trust his grandfather had set up for him. The existence of the trust was complete news to Darius. He wondered briefly if his father had known and never spoken of it to him on purpose, or if his grandfather had kept it a secret. The two men were polite to, yet suspicious of, each other and their opposing ideas about whether money was best used for security or show. The lawyer told him there would be an initial outlay of capital, $10,000, and then a regular stipend of $1,500 a month for five years. The lawyer said his grandfather’s hope had been that he would invest the money wisely and find himself with a great deal of financial security in his future. Darius rolled his eyes on the other end of the phone.