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The next morning before he left for work, Dix brought Miranda, who was lingering in bed, a cup of coffee. She was sitting up, propped against the pillows, staring off into the middle distance. She did not turn when he came back into the bedroom or thank him for the fragrant mug he set down on the bedside table. He sat on the edge of the bed. He brushed her hair from her face.

“Miranda?”

She sighed lightly but did not answer.

“Miranda? I’ll come. I’ll see what you’re up to out there.”

She turned to him then, but her pale eyes did not warm when they took in his face.

“How about this afternoon? I can finish early and swing by before it gets dark?”

She smiled at that, just a slight turning up at the corners of her mouth. She thanked him for the coffee. She lifted his hand from the bed and kissed it.

There,
he thought.
That makes it worth the effort.

He left her holding the mug in both hands and blowing on it. By the time he got to his truck, he admitted to himself that the real reason he was going was not to appease her but to find out what was going on out there.

It was a cold, wet day. As Dix drove up the pitted drive, he noted that the plow had done a poor job against the early snows, and dangerous ice buildup was likely to follow for the rest of the winter unless they got an unexpected thaw and then started to do a better job. He told himself to alert Miranda to this. He hoped he’d not find too many other things to alert her to.

As he got out of his truck, freezing rain spit in sharp taps against his face. He waited for Miranda to appear. While looking around, his eyes involuntarily lit on the mistakes and the poorly executed, the out-of-level and the un-thought-through. The siding patches that were uneven and made with the wrong sort of wood. The lopsided concrete blocks under the trailer hitch that would sink in the first thaw and cause the camper to topple over. The porch supports set on flat rocks instead of Sonotubes. The half-done tree-house platform with the poorly secured blue-tarp roof that was snapping in the wind. The bicycle and lawn tractor left in the yard instead of under cover in the barn. Dix had expected a bit of a duct-tape-and-baling-wire approach, but not this degree of patched-together work. It looked like something a bunch of unskilled teenagers had done. He reminded himself that that was likely exactly what it was.

Miranda appeared, smiling widely, pulling a wool hat over her head as she came out of the farmhouse. She looked happy. It pained him to recognize this, but it was true. Then he wondered what sort of happiness it could be if she had found it out here, in this rough hollow, with this man he suspected was nothing more than a New Age charlatan peddling feel-good bromides. She ran down the steps, grabbed his hand, and led him from place to place like a child on visiting day at school. She showed him the henhouse that would not keep out a fox, the new garden plot planned for spring in an area bound to be far too wet, a couple of ornery goats in a stall that needed mucking out. She rattled on, excited about all the things he knew would never come to pass—the chicks would be eaten instead of growing into hens, the plants would mold instead of bearing fruit, the goats would get diseases in their feet. He kept quiet.

She took him into the school bus, the one they wanted to convert to a bunkhouse. Most of the seats had been torn out, and a few foam mattresses and sleeping bags had been tossed about. Miranda gestured here and there, talking about imaginary desks and curtains and double-decker bunk beds. Dix immediately noticed an offending odor. He sniffed. Miranda stopped talking and stared at him. Kerosene. He sought the source of the smell. An old heater with an open flame was tucked into the rear corner.

“Miranda,” he said, warning in his voice.

“Don’t start, Dix,” she said, her hands up and her head shaking.

“Sweetie,” he went on. “It’s the heater. It’s dangerous. Too close to the wall. Unprotected. And the fumes.”

“Do you always have to immediately find what’s wrong, Dix? Do you have to be so negative?”

Dix stared at her, uncomprehending. “It’s not negative, Miranda. It’s dangerous.”

She rolled her eyes with an exaggerated motion. “Whatever,” she said. “We’re not going to be that stupid. We’re not children out here.”

Oh yes, you are,
Dix thought. What he said was, “I thought you wanted my help.”

“That’s not help,” Miranda insisted. “That’s just bad vibes.”

Dix stepped away from her, moved the heater away from the wall, and kicked at a piece of foam mattress that was in danger of melting.

“Forget it, Dix,” Miranda said, annoyed. “Let me show you the house.”

They crossed the muddy yard, Miranda no longer holding his hand but striding out in front of him, and went in the back door to the kitchen. It was a small space, already crowded with four women working at the stove and a tin-top table, pouring a bright-green, strange-smelling concoction from battered pots into mason jars. They wore skirts with leggings and heavy wool socks and kerchiefs over their roughly cut hair. Dix wondered what Miranda might look like dressed and shorn as they were. The thought made him shudder. Miranda didn’t really introduce him but pointed at the women and ticked off words that must have been names, but which seemed to Dix more like nouns removed from their rightful object.

Sunshine and Violet, Luna and Willow.

These were words that belonged to bright and beautiful things, not to these young women who had dumbed down their looks and personalities with drab clothes and sour expressions. Dix looked around for teenagers, the youth they were allegedly helping, but saw none. Miranda asked someone, Heather or Moonlight or something, where Darius was.

“He’s unavailable,” was the woman’s blunt answer.

“Really?” Miranda was undaunted. “Are you sure? He was expecting us. He wanted to meet—”

The woman shook her head, averted her eyes, and placed a top on a pot with a clang.

Dix knew he was unwelcome. He began to wonder if Miranda was as well.

“Bummer,” Miranda said, affecting a childish pout as she turned to Dix. “We’ll have to come back again when he’s here. He wanted to meet you! He wanted to ask you about some building stuff.”

They stood awkwardly in the kitchen. The women moved slowly, silently, methodically, around them.

“What about Travis?” Miranda asked the room in general. “Is he here?”

The women shook their heads.

“He has an interest in carpentry,” Miranda told Dix. “I wanted him to meet you.”

Dix put his hand on Miranda’s arm. The room was cold. He wanted to go. He wanted Miranda to come with him. She let herself be led from the room. They walked carefully over the slippery ground back to the truck.

“Are you going to follow me home?” Dix asked.

“Later,” Miranda said. “I want to help them finish up.” She closed the truck door on him. “Go ahead and eat. I’ll probably be late.”

Dix rolled up his window and watched her walk away. He started the truck and was just about to put it into gear when he had an unsettling feeling. Miranda was already at the front door. She closed it behind her. Light drifted through the window out into the darkening day. Dix kept looking. It took a few moments for his eyes to find what some other sense had known was there. A figure, a dark-haired man, came into view, a subtle silhouette against the dim glass of an upstairs window. Dix felt as if he were in a deer stand and a buck had slowly materialized in a patch of woods he’d already been staring into for some time. The man’s body was turned to the side. Clearly, he was hoping to see without being seen. Dix’s mouth opened, but no sound emerged. The other man let the curtain drop and disappeared.

Because she was rarely in the house, Sally absorbed what was happening at The Source through scattered clues and snippets of overheard conversation. One evening, she noticed that the garden had gone to weeds, and produce was being left on the vine where it was undoubtedly rotting in the unusually wet weather. Then, a few nights later, she tiptoed past a “community gathering” in the living room as she was on her way upstairs. She heard Darius’s voice coming through her floorboards, patiently scolding the assembled women and teenagers for not “honoring the garden and its bounty” by caring for it properly. She listened as he told them that he was busy writing a book about their efforts and The Source’s way of life, a book that would sustain them with its expected sales, so it was their job to keep the garden prolific. Within a few days, the kitchen calendar was updated with chores, as well as meals laid out by day and person.

Another time, she came across Sunshine or Moonbeam—she could never keep the names the women gave themselves straight—comforting Lily or Violet, who was crying in deep gulps because she’d let one of the goats, or maybe it was the cow, get loose. The animal had injured itself on some old barbed wire, which had apparently necessitated a costly visit from the vet after their home remedies and balms had failed and the wound began to ooze and stink. The vet stitched things back up and administered antibiotics, which the women feared would somehow contaminate the milk and cheese they were planning to make.

Then there was the night, as Sally smoked a cigarette in a dark corner of the porch and watched through a dirty, cracked-open window, she saw everyone gathered in the living room. One woman sat on a chair at the center of the group, and one by one, each person described her flaws and failings. Every complaint was punctuated by the eventual call and response, “I do this with love,” to which the seated woman, her head hanging down and her face obscured by hair, responded, “I accept your correction with love.” These “correction” sessions became standard practice. Darius would gather the women to impart some piece of instruction or wisdom Sally recognized he had filched from one of his self-help or pop-Buddhism books. Then he would end his little speech by calling out someone for “correction.” She was struck with dumb awe at their clumsy efforts to improve one another. Yet she did not intervene. She knew anything she did would be received with hostility. And she didn’t care enough about any of those people to step in. She saw the entire enterprise as some kind of comic and consensual adult camp for the spoiled and searching. For her, it had become entertainment.

In spite of Darius’s claims to want to help teenagers, few delinquent youth came to The Source. Sally quickly sized up whatever issues the occasional stragglers brought with them, and she saw only overly hormonal teens sick of fighting with their parents and bored with the very few things that could occupy them in small towns tucked in the midst of dense mountains. But the lack of anything with a screen on it at The Source and the abundance of dirty vegetables and tasteless grains in the refrigerator quickly dampened whatever enthusiasm they may have had for getting away from home. They came and went with an unabated listlessness.

That is, until Maverick and Cassandra showed up. When Sally walked into the kitchen one cold, late October evening after work, expecting to see the usual coven of women sitting around the table straining curds or carding wool, she found just Darius and two teenagers. Sally started to sidle by, as she usually did, scurrying up to her room to get out of the way, but Darius put his hand on her arm. His fingers pressed into her flesh, suspending her movement.

“Sally, I’d like you to meet our two new guests, Maverick and Cassandra,” he said, his lips stretched back in a practiced smile as he gestured with his free hand.

Sally looked at her arm where he held it. His grip was firm, and the feel of his fingers made her insides tingle. She looked at his face. Crazy handsome. A face from a fashion billboard. His gaze a caress. His voice pitched to soothe and charm. Sally was embarrassed that it was all working on her. Involuntarily. But still.

I should know better,
she thought.
I do know better.
She wrenched her arm free.

“Hey,” Sally said to the new arrivals. “Welcome to the funny farm.”

They hadn’t had teenagers for a while. Darius must be happy to have new recruits, she thought.

“They’ll be staying out in the trailer,” Darius said. “We’re fixing it up for them now. They’ve come all the way from Montreal to be with us.”