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He quickly cooked up a batch of rice and ground venison. He also dialed the vet, made an appointment for the next day, and got some advice on how to care for her in the meantime. He brought a bowl to her, blowing on it as he crossed the yard to cool it down. The dog’s nose twitched at the smell of the food. She wriggled out of his pack, ate delicately, and merely sighed when he took the bowl away.

“Not too much too soon,” he told her, patting her head.

He wiped at her injured paw with some antibiotic ointment and wrapped it with gauze. She licked his hand as he worked. He left her once more and raced to the feed store, where he got a collar, leash, kibble, and flea treatment. As he was standing in the checkout, he picked up a bag of rawhides and a stuffed toy. He drove back home, gave her water, a little more food, and squeezed the small container of flea treatment between her shoulder blades. He tucked the stuffed duck between her paws. He was going to leave her then. He thought he’d let her rest. But as he backed away, she whimpered. When he started to close the door, she scrambled to get up.

“Easy, easy girl,” he said as he reentered the stall and slid to the floor, his legs stretched out, his back against the boards.

She crawled over to him and rested her long jaw on his thigh. He stroked her head and she slept. The barn grew dark as the sun set. He did not move for more than an hour, and when he did, it was merely to stretch out alongside her in the straw and go to sleep himself.

The next day, the vet gave her an exam and told Dix he wanted to take X-rays. As the dog recovered, he popped the films into a viewer. Dix saw the outline of white bones and a strange scattering of white dots.

“What are those?”

“Birdshot.”

“Someone shot her?”

“Yeah. Not uncommon for hunting dogs to get in the way from time to time, but she’s not a hunting dog. Someone must have thought she was a coyote.”

Dix shook his head.

“There’s more,” the vet said. “One of her back legs was broken and never set properly, so it healed crooked. There’s some arthritis there, and in the other leg as a result. She’s also mostly blind in one eye. Hard to say why. I suspect blunt-force trauma.”

“You mean someone hit her. Hard.”

The vet nodded. “Nothing to do about the shot,” he said. “It just sits in the muscle tissue, mostly. She’ll probably always limp. Might bump into things from time to time, especially as the vision continues to deteriorate. Good news is the trap actually didn’t do much damage. Just surface wounds. Fortunately, she was sensible enough to not fight it and cause greater injury.”

“Or maybe just too tired and weak,” Dix said.

“That, too,” the vet said. “Lucky for her that you were wandering by.”

“Not much luck in her life so far, I’d say,” Dix grumbled.

“No, but her luck’s apparently just changed,” the vet said as he filled out paperwork. “Got a name for her?”

“Seems like you just named her for me,” Dix said.

“Lucky?”

“Yup.”

“Well, it fits.”

“She’s so sweet and trusting,” Dix said. “After all that abuse, how can she be such a nice dog?”

“Dogs don’t hold on to the bad,” the vet said. “They have no emotional attachment to the things that others do. They don’t take things personally. They live in the present.”

“Too bad more of us humans aren’t like that.”

“Take her home, feed her, love her, and she’ll be your best friend for the rest of her life,” the vet said as he closed the file.

Dix did just that.

Sally lay in her bed, swathed in blankets, listening to the sounds of the house waking up, something she herself did not want to do. The floors creaked and complained as the women rose and began to move about. The plumbing rattled the walls as the old pipes filled and emptied of water. It was impossible to hide in an old farmhouse. It telegraphed every movement. The sounds were fewer than they had been. Quieter, too. There were only three or four women living here anymore, by Sally’s count, although she paid little attention to them. Even fewer than before. Restrained movement and hushed voices had entered the air since Miranda had died. Sally knew the other women hadn’t liked Miranda much. She was too sweet, too guileless, too eager. Her pregnancy had made her too special to Darius. But still. Her death was a blow to everyone. There had been too many losses recently. The winter had been brutally cold. Spring had come and summer was starting to extend the days, but Sally could not warm herself to the season. Darius’s mood was foul as well. He spent ever more time in his attic, and when he emerged, his eyes were hooded, his face grim, his expression glowering.

Sally had screamed and yelled and railed at him for days after Miranda’s death. Weeks. How could they have done this? What had they been thinking? Why hadn’t they called an ambulance?

They hadn’t realized how serious it was, he’d insisted. She’d passed away in the middle of the night. They were all asleep and found her in the morning.

How could they have cremated her? Sally had demanded.

It’s what she wanted, what she asked for, he’d hollered, pacing. She had no family, she had broken with Dix, there was no one to notify—The Source was all she had, all she wanted, he’d told Sally over and over.

In a crazy way, it made sense. It was all true, within its own twisted logic. Sally could easily imagine Miranda, ill, delirious, in what seemed to be about the last month of a pregnancy she had refused to share with real doctors and Western medicine, asking for cremation. Still, Sally had been insane with rage and agony over her death. And guilt that she might have prevented it. Now she was spent of feeling and emotion, a dirty dishrag, twisted and wrung out.

She turned her head toward the window. The gray sky, thick with clouds, was only a few shades lighter than it had been hours ago. The place had become intolerable to her, as emotionally polluted as the trailer the women continued to clean and tend and fuss over, as if it were a suppurating wound. She was rarely here anymore, creeping in at night after everyone had gone to their rooms, rushing away in the mornings before anyone was stirring. She no longer pondered why she stayed, just how and where and when to go. Still, she felt like a stagnant pond.

Today,
she told herself.
Today, I will get the paper, look for apartments, find a way to walk away from this cursed place and not look back.

She would rouse herself, go into town, sit at the Fishing Hole diner, circle items in the “For Rent” section, jot down phone numbers from notices stuck to the tackboard, go to the library, and get online. She’d start. Today.

She heard footsteps overhead. Darius. This was early for him. The sounds were of purposeful movement. Also unusual. Eventually footfalls on the stairs. Then down the next flight to the kitchen. A few words, lost as they drifted upward, filtered through the house. Dishes dropped into the sink. The back door opened and closed. The truck departed down the drive. Strange. When was the last time he’d left the house? How would she know? She was almost never here. Lying in bed like this, her body weighted down with weariness, was unusual for her. The back door opened and closed a few more times, and the house settled into quiet. Now would be a good time to get up, while everyone was out in the barn, the garden, trying to clean up the trailer. For what, they would not say. The whole place had become eerily quiet these last few weeks, a hush filled with secrets. Sally pulled on a faded terry-cloth robe and shuffled out of her room.

I need a long, scalding shower,
she thought, hoping the hot-water tank had not been emptied by the others.

As she closed the door to her room, the small displacement of air caused another to crack open. The door to Darius’s room. Always shut tight, an impenetrable barrier. She’d tested it before. Always locked. And yet here it was, left unlocked, unlatched. Again, strange. He must have been preoccupied. The dark, slender gap beckoned to Sally, an irresistible invitation.

She listened to the rare silence that surrounded her. No one else was in the house. She tiptoed through the doorway and up the dim stairway to the close attic space. The ceiling came down to the floor in sharp angles. A small, high, dirty window leaked in a little light. Sally stood at the top of the stairs, took shallow breaths of the fetid air, and looked around. There was a lumpy futon mattress with a faded quilt and flattened pillow. A stray sock on the rough wood floorboards. A small pile of dirty and discarded clothes. A mug with a dry, dark stain in the bottom and a chipped plate with a curled rind of cheese on the floor next to the bed. A dead plant, the soil cracked and desiccated. A pile of cheap spiral-bound notebooks and a plastic card file box on a small table next to an old schoolroom desk.

So grim,
Sally thought.
So depressing.

She listened again. No sounds came from the house. She squatted down and picked up a notebook. Many pages had been torn out, leaving serrated strips of paper stuck in the twisted coil. She opened the cover and flipped through the pages. Most were blank, but the first few were covered in dark blue ink. The writing was heavy and florid, the pen pressing down so hard in places it had torn through the paper. There were snatches of what seemed to be poetry, free-form verse attempting to articulate indistinct and incoherent ideas. Short paragraphs read like outbursts of thoughts that were thinly veiled counterfeits of well-worn bits of advice from his collection of self-help and back-to-nature books.

This was the manifesto he’d been working on? There was not even the hint of one original notion to be found.

There were a plethora of doodles along the margins of the pages. Geometric and hard-edged shapes had been scribbled everywhere as if, without anything substantive to record, Darius’s restless pen had searched for some other outlet. Sally replaced the notebook and did not examine any of the others. She knew, without looking, that if she opened them she’d just find more of the same. She opened the file box and pulled out a card. There was a woman’s name at the top, a real name, not one of the groovy names they took for themselves.
Anne Reynolds
. So plain. No one she recognized. There were a few notes.
Massachusetts. Father = banker. Not very bright. Outward Bound. Rehab for prescription pills. Credit cards = trust fund. Overweight. Said she ran away. Has car??? Bites fingernails.
Sally fanned through the cards. Each had similar notes about other women. Sally closed the box. She felt dirtied by what she had found. Darius was worse than she’d even imagined—dumber, less substantive, more petty. Like a bratty high school girl.

She stood and looked around. A shirt spilled from the open drawer of a small bureau. A stained towel hung limply from a bent nail in the wall. She didn’t want to touch anything else. She moved to depart. As she turned, something in a far corner of the room caught her attention. It took her a moment to focus into the gloom. There, in the darkness under the eaves, was a pile of backpacks, purses, shoulder bags. The things the women had carried when they arrived here. Emptied and discarded. Sally wondered why were they here, why was he collecting them. She took a step closer to the pile. Everything in it looked deflated. She bumped into the desk. She looked at its empty surface. There were a few childish scratches there. A few doodles she recognized as Darius’s. Some impulse caused her to lift the top. What she saw took her breath away. Scattered there in the well within were a dozen bank and credit cards. Several checkbooks. A handful of driver’s licenses with photos of tidier, better-dressed versions of the women who had come, gone, or stayed at The Source.

Christ,
Sally thought.
How did he get these cards and checks? How did he convince them to hand everything over? Did he make it a condition of their staying?

Then, she realized that this was how he controlled them, kept them here, funded this place. She imagined his cloying, charming voice, speaking as if in confidence, telling an addled woman that it was necessary for her to break her ties with the evils of capitalistic society and, in order to show her commitment, give him all the tools that the bureaucratic, financial, and government institutions used to control her. Then, without those tools, they could hardly return to the world they had left. Darius hardly had to steal their money when they seemed so willing to abandon their common sense.

Sally lowered the desktop and left the attic.

That’s it, I’m done, it’s over,
she told herself as she showered and dressed, her thoughts racing and pinging inside her head.
I’ve got to get out of here. I’ll find a rental. I’ll stay at a motel. Anything is better than this. I can’t watch over this shit show anymore. I can’t fix it. So what if he stops paying me? I can’t take any more of his money, because it’s not his money. It’s never been his money. The first ten grand, his down payment, was his grandfather’s, and now it’s from these trust-fund hippies. And I’m complicit in his swindling these people. If I take stolen goods, I’m a goddamn accomplice. I won’t do it anymore.