1503951243
OTHER TITLES BY LAUREL SAVILLE
Unraveling Anne
Henry and Rachel
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 Laurel Saville
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503951242 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1503951243 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781503949980 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1503949982 (paperback)
Cover design by Shasti O’Leary-Soudant / SOS CREATIVE LLC
First edition
CONTENTS
MIRANDA AND DIX
As Miranda moved through the house, putting away a load of laundry, picking up the glass her mother left in the living room the previous night, straightening the magazines on the coffee table, removing a few dead flowers from a vase, she found herself glancing out of each window, her view of him coming and going, her perspective on him a bit different from each vantage point. He was like a man inside a kaleidoscope to her, fractured bits and pieces coming together and moving apart and then coming together again in a slightly different form.
There he was again, hoisting an ax overhead, then crashing it down on a bucked-up piece of wood with a force so fluid, so skillful, the log seemed to split willingly, happily, obediently.
Then he was on his back in the gravel driveway, his body half buried underneath the tractor her father kept for other men to use, his long, lanky legs sticking out as if they were another part of the machine itself.
Later he was up on a ladder, reattaching something to the ridge of the barn, something that had been making a gentle flapping noise in the night. It was a sound that drove her mother crazy, but which Miranda knew she’d miss once it was gone because otherwise the nights were filled with a quiet so deep, so pervasive, she sometimes felt compelled to walk out into it, to see if there was substance or feeling in it, as if it were a dark lake in which she might be contented to drown.
She paused by a window that framed his figure on the ladder. She counted the rungs partially obscured by his body. One, two, three, four for his legs alone. His stiff Carhartts—for that’s what they called them up here, not just canvas pants; no, they were a particular type of work pants that deserved the respect of a proper name—gave shape and form to his legs, which accounted for so much of his height. His hair, obviously long not by decision but by simple inattention, sprang out from under the ball cap that shaded his eyes, already framed by wrinkles earned by years of working outdoors, even though she knew he was just thirty. She wasn’t sure how she knew that. Something she had overheard. Her father pressing him about his future plans or something. A challenge Dix would have dealt with as he did most things, with the hint of a smile, a few words, and then the taking up of a tool of some sort.
“Marshall!”
Her father’s voice leaped in the open window, making Miranda flinch. The man on the ladder kept at his methodical, precise hammering.
“Marshall!”
This time a bark. Then her father came into view, reading glasses in one hand, drinking glass in the other. Miranda reflexively checked the clock. 4:19. Part of the unwritten WASP rulebook: Drinking could commence anytime after four. Any earlier would be unseemly. Unless, of course, there was a barbecue. Then beer could be consumed with impunity. After all, that didn’t really count as alcohol. Especially if it came from a can. Her father was wearing boat shoes and wide wale corduroys, a button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up. He was dark blue on the bottom, light pink on top, a green web belt delineating his middle. He was broad in the shoulders and all the way down to his hips. A square block of a man. Not fat, expansive. Steely wisps of hair rose and fell on the top of his mottled head in the early summer breeze as he strode across the lawn that the man he was yelling at had mown for him earlier in the day. He reached the foot of the ladder and tried again.
“Marshall!”
When even this did not elicit a response, Miranda’s father banged the flat of his hand against the ladder. The hammering stopped and the shaggy head up by the roof inclined itself downward.
He’ll never learn,
Miranda thought.
Everyone called the man on the ladder Dix. Like the term
Carhartt
, the single name and the way it was said had certain implications for the people in the valley. No further explanation was required. Dix. Local, competent, someone to be trusted. Someone who could take care of himself. And you. Without making you feel as if you could not take care of yourself. If only you had more time and less money. Which of course was untrue, but never stated. Because then men like Miranda’s father would try to prove you wrong. Which would lead to you being out of work and to men like Miranda’s father being injured.
Miranda could not hear what was being said but saw her father pull a piece of paper out of his pocket. A list of chores. Their first few weeks here in the summer always went like this, with Dix pointing out all the things he had done over the winter to keep the place sound and her father pointing out all the projects he wanted done to make the place look better. The items on their lists never overlapped. As a teenager, Miranda had never noticed any of the various and divergent things that either man cared about. She had barely even noticed either of the men. But things were different now.
She had been out of college for a year. She hadn’t figured out what to do next. A degree in anthropology with a minor in environmental studies didn’t give her a lot of options. Her summers had been spent with volunteer work, AmeriCorps, Habitat for Humanity, a trip overseas to interview African women about their children, how they cared for them. The only thing she felt she knew was that she wanted to help people. She wanted to help heal what was wrong in the world. But the problems seemed so big and overwhelming. So numerous and various. She had spent months removing invasive species from a conservation area and replanting native shrubs and trees. But instead of feeling accomplishment, she had felt discouraged by the knowledge that just over the next ridge, the invasives were setting seeds and sending out runners, ready to recolonize any bare patch of land. The low-income house she had helped build was given to one family on a list of dozens who were waiting and waiting. Miranda had a difficult time focusing on what had been done instead of what there was left to do. She found herself sighing a lot. Her mother hated the sound of her sighing.
Her parents had suggested she take the past year off. As if there were something concrete in front of her that she was merely postponing instead of just the empty road of an unknown future. They had told her to enjoy herself, suggested she have some fun. She wasn’t sure what that meant. She knew they thought she took herself—not the world around her, but herself—far too seriously.
The unstated subtext within this mild criticism was that she should be more like her brother. At least, that’s what the implication used to be, until his insistence on fun had resulted in such devastating consequences. Miranda had spent some time visiting a few friends, looking for ideas and inspiration as much as company, but most of them had jobs—many in the firms of their fathers or their fathers’ friends or their friends’ fathers. They were busy and she was not. She had volunteered at a women’s correctional facility and had been dumbfounded by the inmates’ casual acceptance of a stint in jail as a kind of respite from the outside world and by their sense of entitlement about all they were “due” while incarcerated. She thought they’d be appreciative of her sincere desire to help them improve themselves and had been shocked to find they were neither thankful nor interested. She looked on job-listing websites that catered to nonprofits, sent out a few résumés, but never heard back from anyone. Time drifted by—an endless, uninterrupted horizon of loosely structured days.
In the middle of winter, Miranda had moved from her family’s two-hundred-year-old, white-clad-and-green-shuttered Colonial on a leafy cul-de-sac in Connecticut where she had grown up to their imposing, traditionally built log “cabin” in the densely wooded mountains of the Adirondacks. She had wanted to get away from watching her mother fill her days with small tasks that accomplished little more than taking up time, like getting a mani-pedi, fluffing the pillows on the sofa in the rarely used living room, flipping through a catalog and folding down corners on pages with pictures of things she’d never get around to ordering, writing thank-you notes to hostesses of cocktail parties and fund-raisers, or standing over the gardener as he kneeled in the dirt, pointing out weeds that needed to be plucked or flowers that needed to be dead-headed.
Once in the mountains, Miranda put in a few hours here and there trading work for next season’s produce at a mostly fallow, local, small-scale, organic farm and tutored middle-school kids at the library two afternoons a week. She found herself astonished at their ignorance not just of grammar but of things like checkbooks, mangoes, the location or relevance of a particular European city. So many of these children lived in a moment-by-moment world with little room for what Miranda was slowly starting to realize were luxuries: curiosity, ambition, and reflection. They came in with dirt-caked fingernails, amid a swirl of acrid barn smells, reminding her of the Pigpen character in the
Peanuts
comic. They casually spiced their everyday speech with the harsh pepper of swear words. They saw their time with her as a kind of punishment, not an opportunity for enrichment. Which is exactly how their teachers had presented it to them—remediation for poor performance. In between, when the weather was decent—which it rarely was, being more commonly either too cold and too snowy, or, later in the year, too buggy and too hot—she took long hikes through the thick woods, enjoying the comfort of being hemmed in on all sides by dense walls of trees.
During the colder months, Miranda’s parents came up only one weekend a month. If that. Miranda soaked up the solitude in between their visits and avoided making any decisions.
Then her brother died.
Her mother couldn’t stand to be in the house that reminded her so much of him, so she fled Connecticut for the mountains. In the aftermath of his death and her mother’s arrival, Miranda gave up the tutoring. She had meant to go back to it, but she began to watch her mother instead. How long she lingered in the big bed made of logs, to match the house. How long she sat in the birch rocker, staring out the window, her hands trembling ever so slightly in her lap. How little tonic she mixed with her gin when she poured it into the glass with the moose printed on the side.