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“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 women, 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.

“Miranda, my dear. What brings you back? You seem upset.”

“No, Darius. I’m not upset. I’m ready. Ready to join. To stay for good.”

There was quiet for a moment. As if Darius was taking this all in.

“Well,” he said, “this is delightful news. Of course. Yes. We are thrilled to have you and all you bring with you.”

Sally winced at his liberal use of the royal “we.” He missed, either willfully or ignorantly, all the many signs of petty rivalries between the women, the significant looks that passed between them when he gave one or the other a compliment or praise. In spite of the communal vibe, there was a lot less camaraderie between the women than he thought there was.

“It’s time,” Miranda said. “I can’t have my life split in two anymore. I need to choose. I can’t . . . it’s just . . .” She sighed. “I choose The Source.”

“What a momentous decision,” Darius said. “I admire your resolve. We will talk more in the morning. In the meantime, we will find you some space in the front bedroom.”

“No. I mean, yes, thank you. But wait,” Miranda said.

“What is it, Miranda?” Darius asked.

“I want you to cut my hair,” Miranda said.

There was silence again.

“Now?” Darius asked, sounding uncharacteristically unsure of himself.

“Yes,” Miranda demanded. “It will make my transition away from the egotistic concerns of the outside world complete. It will mark my commitment to The Source and our values. Please. Yes. Now. I want to be like the other women here.”

Sally listened as a chair scraped, a drawer opened, silence descended. Moments passed quietly. Then the chair scraped again, and she heard two sets of footsteps approach the stairway. She closed the door to her room. She heard them enter the other bedroom, where there were a few whispered voices that quickly settled down. Then, Darius took the stairs to the attic. Sally returned to bed and slept fitfully, dozing and waking, startling easily from the middle of disturbing dreams where unseen pursuers chased her through dark alleys, over rickety fire escapes, across hallways that would not end. She finally rose from bed, wrapped herself in a robe, and tiptoed down the stairs to have a smoke on the back porch. It was cold, so she only smoked half of a cigarette, then came inside to douse it in the sink. She opened the cabinet to throw the butt into the garbage and gasped.