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She began to realize that she thought of the people who came from these mountains in a generalized way as “disadvantaged.” She knew herself to be “advantaged.” She thought the distance between these two conditions was something she could help a teenager or two, maybe as many as three or four, bridge—not with money but with exposure to ideas about education, engagement, ambition, curiosity. It never occurred to her that these kids might be completely disinterested in whatever she offered. That their parents might not want them to cross that bridge and leave their family behind. She’d already, or perhaps willfully, forgotten the frustrations of her earlier experiences tutoring local kids.

On an uncharacteristically warm day in mid-October, when she was sick of her own swirling thoughts, Miranda grabbed a sweater and her knitting and found a spot on the porch, protected from the breeze, in a patch of increasingly infrequent sunshine. She tried to focus on deciphering the pattern in front of her, of working out the code to a new stitch, and making her knitting needles behave. She heard Dix’s boots on the floorboards. The yarn was puddling in her lap and at her feet, and she felt surrounded by a fog of frustration and discontent. She knew she might cry, so she didn’t look up as he approached. She was sick of seeing her own sadness reflected in his eyes, in trying to explain feelings to him that she didn’t understand herself. She didn’t look up even when she felt him place a light blanket over her shoulders. Not even when she realized that, yes, in fact, she was cold, that the blanket was welcome. Dix was like that. He didn’t wait to be asked. He saw what was necessary, what was needed, and took care of it without drawing attention to the act.

“How’s the sweater project?” he asked, squatting, closing the gap between his standing height and her seated self.

Miranda felt an unexpected wave of relief at his presence, but she was not quite ready to give up the perverse comfort of her irritated mood.

“Damned needles!” she said in mock exasperation. “I swear they are out to get me!”

“Come sit here,” he said, patting a footstool.

Miranda complied, and as she did so, he took the needles from her hands and smoothed the tangled strands of yarn as if they were hairs on a truculent child’s head. Then he wrapped his arms around her from behind and gently guided her fingers through the motions of creating one smooth stitch after another. She allowed herself to be led and watched the knitted stitches obediently line up, one after another, on the needle. Then he turned the work and guided her fingers over the purl row.

“How do you know how to knit, Dix?” she said. Then, before he could answer, she added, “Is there anything you can’t do?”

She was glad he was behind her and could not see the hot tears that sprang to her eyes as she was once again stung with a feeling of deep inadequacy. She wanted desperately to be good at something. Really good at something. She just couldn’t seem to find what that thing was.

“My mom was always knitting,” Dix replied quietly, ignoring, as he always did, the jab of her last remark.

Miranda couldn’t even be successful at getting a rise out of him.

His fingers touched and nudged hers, helping them find and make the stitches.

“She knit my father and me sweaters,” he continued. “She also knit lots of stuff to give away or sell at the church bazaar. Her hands were always busy making something.”

“My mother’s hands were always busy drinking something!” Miranda said, surprised at the anger in her own voice.

Her fingers stopped cooperating with his, and the work fell into her lap. He let it go and scraped a chair up beside hers. He kissed the top of her head before sitting down. He took her hands out of her lap, where they were tangled with yarn, and held them in his own. He said nothing. He looked into her face and waited.

“I wish I was good at something, Dix,” she sighed, her voice now quiet, defeated.

“Would you like me to tell you all the things I think you’re good at?” he asked.

“Oh, sure,” she answered for him. “I’m good at gardening and canning and making pies. But those are easy things. I want to be good at something hard.”

“Do you have any idea what that hard thing might be? What hard thing you want to take up? I have no doubt you could become good at anything you put your mind to.”

“No,” she said, embarrassed that her voice sounded like a petulant child’s.

His thumbs rubbed the top of her hands.

“It’s just that . . .” she started, then stopped. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s gotten into me. You know how to do so many things,” Miranda said. “Everything you do, you do better than anyone else does without even seeming to try. Shit, your jam is even better than mine, and you know it.”

Dix let her hands go and sat back in his chair.

“Miranda, everything I do well I learned how to do from my father or my mother or my professors or some other person who had tons of experience. I made lots of mistakes, but I learned from those mistakes. That’s just part of the process. There’s no secret about how to get good at something.”

“All my father knew how to do was make money,” Miranda said. “And all my mother knew how to do was throw cocktail parties.”

“When you’re good at making money, you don’t need to be good at other things,” Dix said quietly.

“I don’t even know how he made all his money,” Miranda said. “Wall Street. As if that’s the only explanation anyone needs.”

“Well, we know how he lost it,” Dix said. “Maybe that’s the more important thing to know.”

“On lawsuits and nursing homes,” she answered, her voice a cold snap bursting into the warm day.

“By being in opposition to the world,” Dix said quietly.

“Thinking the rules that apply to others don’t apply to you,” Miranda added. “Thinking you have all the answers.”

And in that moment, she knew what she would tell Darius. She knew exactly what she had to say.

The cluster of seen-better-days buildings was again eerily quiet when Miranda drove up the muddy drive for the second time. The silence was not a no-one-is-home sort of stillness but a we’re-home-but-don’t-want-you-to-know kind of hush. Unlike her first foray, when she pulled into the yard and sat in her car, this time she immediately stepped out and slammed the door, full of conviction and intention. She stood there and waited. She’d imagined Darius would show himself. Immediately. Almost as if he’d been waiting for her. She stood at the side of her car, suddenly unsure what direction to take. Her courage began to seep away, a small cup of water in dry sand. She hoped someone—preferably Darius—would show up before it dissipated entirely. She craned her neck, looking to see if there was activity in the dark cavern of the barn, but the interior was too dim to make out animals or people. It was the middle of the day. Where was everyone? Where were the women and teenagers? A slight squeak of metal on metal interrupted her thoughts. She looked toward the sound. In the far corner of the farmhouse’s front porch, shadowed by a scrappy, overgrown alder, was a swing. Darius was there, gently pushing himself forward and back, forward and back. He’d been there the whole time, she realized. She suspected he had enjoyed watching her squirm in the driveway.

“So,” he said, his voice pitched to carry just to her but not farther. “You’ve returned.”

Miranda nodded and took a few steps toward him, attempting to be undeterred by this strange reception. She saw his stare harden. She stopped.

“And what,” he said, “do you have to tell me this time?”

“I have an answer to your question,” she said.

Darius narrowed his eyes and nodded. A cackle of laughter, quickly shushed, came from an upstairs window. Miranda shifted her weight back and forth between her feet.

“Do go on,” he said. “I’m dying to hear.”

The swing squeaked rhythmically.

“My answer to your question . . .” Miranda began, lifting her chin, trying to project her insubstantial voice. “Is that I don’t have any answers.”

She pushed her heavy honey-colored hair over her shoulders. She wasn’t sure if she should go on. She was waiting for some sort of sign from the man on the porch. He gave her none. She knew that this was some sort of a test and that she had to persevere.

“The truth is, I don’t know if they’ll talk to me,” she went on. “I don’t know what I might be able to contribute. But that’s what I’d like to find out. I admit it—this is more about me than them, right now. I think, I believe, if given a chance, that will change. I intend to make sure that changes.”

Darius stared at her, his face expressionless. She tried to hold his unflinching gaze but eventually gave up, looked away, up into the more forgiving but equally chilly blue of the sky overhead. She felt the vexation that seemed to be always simmering in the pit of her stomach these last few months threaten to bubble over.

“I know why you’re here,” Darius finally said.

Miranda furrowed her brow. “What?” she asked, puzzled. She tried for a light laugh, but it came out as a choking sound. “You do? OK, you tell me, then,” she said.

“You want to make amends,” Darius replied, his voice heavy with seriousness.

His tone scattered whatever Miranda had been feeling and replaced it with something more ambitious, more enticing. Something also dangerous.

“Amends? To who?” she asked. An icy heat was spreading outward from beneath her navel.

“Oh, it’s not to who,” Darius said knowingly. “It’s for what.”

They stared at each other for a few moments.

“Listen, Miranda,” Darius said as he stood up. He leaned against the porch post with his arms crossed. “Andy. I know you have some unfinished business. I know you’re hurting.”

Miranda shivered at his words and longed for the sweater she’d left on the passenger seat in the car. “Hurting?” she said.

“You’re carrying the hurts of others,” Darius continued. “Your father. Your brother. What they did. The pain they caused.”

The hair on the back of Miranda’s neck lifted, and goose bumps rose on her arms. “What are you talking about?”

“I knew your brother,” Darius said.

Flashes of the past came to her as if she were flipping at high speed through a photo album. The back deck of the log house. Her brother and his friends out on the lawn playing badminton or croquet or bocce. This other man—boy, really, back then—not with them. Instead, with the younger version of herself. This teasing, knowing way about him, it had been more cajoling back then, less confident. But still. She remembered how unsettled she had felt with him then. And now, here, again. Back then, the feeling had repelled her; now, she was drawn to it. Being near him gave her a dizzy, lightheaded sensation, as if she’d just stepped off a roller coaster.

I miss that house,
Miranda thought.
So much. I miss my brother. I miss his friends. I miss my parents. I miss that life.
She stared at Darius.
So strange that this man knew my brother. He was in our house.

And then,
He is so handsome.

“You knew my brother,” she whispered.

“Yes,” Darius said.

Miranda watched his eyes flicker for a moment, as if he was unsure of what he was about to say.

“I knew him well,” he continued, with sudden conviction. “Admired him. Great guy.”

“He was,” Miranda said, her eyes filling with tears. “I loved him so much.”

Darius smiled. He seemed spurred on by her emotion. “The problem is, Miranda, because your father and your brother are no longer here, they can’t face the consequences of what they’ve done,” he told her from his perch on the porch. “They can’t make amends. The universe can’t conduct its karmic balancing act on them. Of course, they paid a price, Miss Miranda. You’ve paid a price, too, Miss Andy. Perhaps a bigger one since you’re still here and living with their tattered, sad legacy.”

Miranda wanted him to stop saying her name. She wanted to understand what he was getting at. She wanted him to stop insinuating things about her family, stop clicking his tongue in judgment and condemnation over their failings. Everything Darius said seemed true and false at the same time.

“There is the law of man, Miranda,” Darius continued, spreading out his hands. “And then there is the law of nature. Mother Nature keeps her own score. The natural world is always finding ways to rebalance, to heal wounds, to restore itself after insults. To restore her children, which we surely are, as much as the deer in the woods and the plants in the garden and the fish in the stream are. This balance will be—must be—restored, Miss Miranda, even if it takes generations.”

Miranda began to feel, deep inside herself, that what this man said was right. She felt bitter relief at admitting to herself just how right he was.

“That’s what we do here, Miranda,” he said, sitting again, squeaking the swing, elbows on knees, his voice now soft and professorial. “We restore balance. We restore balance by showing respect for nature and natural rhythms. We restore balance to the world by removing ourselves from the world.”

Balance. Yes, that’s what Miranda wanted. That’s what she had been missing. And amends. That, too. She did have amends to make. She felt terrible about what her father had done—cheating, bending laws meant to protect the natural world. She was also ashamed that her brother had taken another life by driving drunk. People had said it was just an accident, he was barely over the legal limit—no, it was a stupid, arrogant action. Both of these men had destroyed life and welfare. They had manipulated the system and taken advantage of the world. They had been takers, not givers, greedy guzzlers of resources. They had destroyed themselves in the process, but they had ruined so much else before their deaths had halted them. Her mother had done nothing to stop them or to try and fix things. She’d been a sponge, soaking up whatever came her way. Her passivity made her complicit. Miranda had never realized, up until that moment, just how bad she felt about it all. She didn’t want to carry her family’s legacy forward. She wanted to create a new future, to erase all that had come before. She wanted to leave things better than she found them, to be someone who evoked smiles instead of sneers. She began to slowly, unconsciously, nod her head.