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She made her choice. She turned the car and drove it very slowly down the rutted, narrow, barely graveled drive. She stopped again before any sort of building came into view. She wondered what she was doing, what she’d say once she got to whatever was at the end of the driveway. She looked for a place to turn around. Reversing was impossible. She was afraid she’d put the car in a ditch. She had no choice but to go forward. She soon found herself in a muddy clearing fringed by scrappy bushes. There was a long-unpainted, compact farmhouse at the far edge of the opening in the scrub. It seemed to be reverting back to the wild, its cupped siding fading to the same color as the bracken and dirt around it.

A feral house,
she thought. Like the cat that had started hanging around the barn at home.

Home.
The word lodged in her throat. Home? Her home? Or was it Dix’s home? It was supposed to be theirs. But she still felt like a guest, she realized. Just like she had in her parents’ house.

Not mine,
she thought.
None of it is mine. I’m just a visitor in other people’s lives.

She shook the thought away and looked around. There was a pop-up camper parked next to a medium-size barn. And farther away, beyond the garden, at the end of a small, muddy path through the yard, there was a trailer. She could see its concrete-block foundation through the broken skirting. The camper tilted drunkenly at the corner where a tire was flat. The dilapidated buildings seemed like a collection of fantastic hags, full of secrets and recipes for wicked brews. Miranda had expected activity. Some sort of comings and goings. Teenagers in the yard. A woman carrying a wooden garden trug overflowing with flowers and vegetables. A cat arching its back in the barn doorway. A dog trotting out to greet her, barking tentatively. A cow lowing. But it was silent. Even the chilly breezes that might have freshened the area did not reach this hollow. She didn’t know what to do. She considered tapping her horn. No, that would be too confrontational. It was something her father would have done. She sat in her old Subaru and waited. She scanned the view outside the familiar confines of her car. She watched for movement of any sort.

It came from a window in the trailer home. A faded sheet tacked there moved a few inches and then dropped back into place. Then a door opened at its far end and a woman with a kerchief over her head, wearing what appeared to be men’s clothes, walked down the steps, along the path, across the yard, up onto the porch of the farmhouse, and entered the front door—without ever looking in Miranda’s direction. A dog crawled on its belly out from under the porch of the farmhouse, stretched backward from its front paws, and threw itself into a small patch of trampled, dead grass in a sudden spot of sunshine. All these small movements seemed to her to be connected, as if some sort of silent communication was taking place.

Minutes passed. The farmhouse door opened again, and then there he was, standing on the porch. He was shorter than she remembered. Smaller overall. He looked directly at her, his eyes glowing across the space between them.

Cold,
she thought, surprised as her breath caught in her chest.
I didn’t know blue eyes could look so cold.

Then he smiled and his entire demeanor altered, an actor slipping into character. Somewhere deep inside herself Miranda recognized that he was giving a performance, and yet she did not care. It didn’t seem to matter. She was willingly transfixed by the play. He came down the steps, skipping over the last one, and strode to her car. She remained frozen in her seat. He bent at the waist and looked in her window.

His eyes. Lit from within on this day of moving and mottled light. His smile. So much conviction of some sort behind it. None of the sweet, stable, unobtrusive deference she was used to from Dix. Dix who seemed to not even displace the air he moved through. This man’s face, his expression, was that of an animal scouting for prey. The click of her door handle startled her out of her reverie. A blast of cool air, as if he had brought it with him, surrounded her when he opened the door.

“Welcome,” he said, reaching forward with his hand to help her from the car, his voice an oily caress. “I am so glad to see you. So very glad you found us.”

She was shocked that he recognized her. She’d been so nervous that she’d be intruding, that he’d question her and her intentions with a burst of brusque skepticism. She was so relieved by his welcome that she obediently swung her legs out from under the steering wheel and placed her hand in his. She had no idea what to say; the simple act of getting out of the car took all her concentration. She stood. He remained standing a few steps from her. She felt pinned between him and the car. It was not an unpleasant sensation. He dropped her hand, crossed his arms over his chest, and ran his eyes up, down, and over her. His look was an unembarrassed, proprietary assessment without a whiff of sex or flirtation.

“What brings you here?” he finally asked.

“I . . . I . . .” She found it impossible to hold his gaze. She dropped her eyes to the dirt, as if she might find an answer there. “I thought maybe I could help out.”

“Help out?” he said, not a question to her, more a question to himself.

“Yes. I . . . I . . . I heard you take in children, um, teenagers, who . . . who are having a tough time. I don’t know what kind of an operation you have—”

“Operation?” There was something teasing, maybe even mocking, in his tone.

“Well, you know, like what services you offer. What you might need. If there are formal programs or if it’s more, I don’t know, ad hoc.”

He shifted his weight, cocked a hip. A smile played on his lips.

“Formal,” he whispered, trying out the word. “Ad hoc. Hmmm.”

Miranda was entirely captivated and squirmingly uncomfortable at the same time. “I don’t know,” she finally stammered, giving in to the awkward feeling that consumed her. “I just thought that maybe I could be useful.”

“Miranda. Andy,” he said.

She nodded. She wished she knew his name.

“I know you,” he said.

“You do?” she replied, alarmed.

He nodded.

“What do you mean, you
know
me?”

“Ah,” he said. “Not to worry. I merely mean I know where we’ve met before.”

“Yes, at the farmers’ market.”

“Yes. And no. From before that. Long before that.”

Miranda was getting confused. “What do you mean?” she asked.

He smiled at her, his grin a refusal to explain.

Miranda was rattled. All the social niceties she was so familiar with did not apply here, in this yard, with this man, who was familiar and strange at the same time. “May I ask your name?” she said.

“My name? I am Darius.”

“Darius. I don’t know anyone named Darius.”

“No, I don’t suppose you do.”

Miranda narrowed her eyes at him. His features were impossibly regular, balanced, symmetrical, a dictionary definition of what handsome was supposed to be. She was surprised she hadn’t noticed that about him before. But she hadn’t been looking at him so directly or with the intention of trying to grasp something, anything about him. There was nothing crooked about the smile, no faint scar that might have a story behind it, no hint of ethnicity in the features. She looked for something recognizable but didn’t find it. She wondered if he was teasing her. Something her brother used to do. His friends, too. Other girls would have called it flirting. To her it felt more sinister. Like baiting. Miranda knew she didn’t have enough experience with men to distinguish between flirting and charming, to understand that the former was to compliment another, and the latter was to compliment the self. Darius shifted his weight, straightened his spine, and changed the subject. Miranda was thrown off balance again, this time in a different direction.

“What do you want, Miranda? What is it that you want?” he asked her.

His expression was so neutral, his voice so bland, the question so large, that it sparked a wave of existential dread in her.

“What do I want?” she repeated, stalling for time, trying to bluff her way through feeling so completely confounded and rattled.

“Yes,” he said. “Why have you come? Why have you come
here
?”

“I met you at the farmers’ market,” she said, trying to find an adequate explanation, some solid ground.

“Yes,” he said, “I know. We’ve established that. I remember. I gave you a ring.”

Now, added to the mix of her bubbling emotions was the mortification that she wasn’t wearing the ring and panic that she’d lost it. She was totally unprepared for his interrogation. She felt exposed, scrutinized by him, and also by other eyes she could not see yet suspected were peering out at her from behind the curtained windows. She returned to the script she had tried out loud first with Dix, in the truck, that day they first passed here, a day that seemed strangely long ago, and then silently with herself, adding to it, embellishing it, over the following days. She cleared her throat.

“I heard that you do work with teenagers here,” she said. “That you help out kids who maybe have a rough home life. I admire that. I’ve always wanted to do volunteer work with kids. There are not many opportunities around here, and what programs there are don’t appeal to me. I did some mentoring and tutoring in college. It’s been a while. I thought I might get into it again. I thought . . . I thought maybe I could be useful.”

“Ah,” Darius replied, jutting his square chin slightly forward. “Useful.” He nodded. “You keep using that word, Miranda, Andy. Yes, useful. Isn’t that something we’d all like to be? Useful.”

He made the word she’d meant to be generous sound like a selfish conceit.

“Well, yes,” she plundered on. “Useful to the children in some way.”

“Useful.”

Why is he repeating that word?
she wondered.
Like it’s a bad thing. Isn’t that a good thing to want to be? Why am I feeling so mixed up?

“Yes,” she said, working her jaw against her mounting confusion. “Helpful. I thought I could maybe help with homework assignments. Maybe, you know, just be another adult they could talk to.”

He looked away. She watched his eyes flick over distant things in the landscape, a moving bird, a swaying branch. He nodded a few times at some internal thought before turning his attention back to her. His voice was urgent now, almost a growl.

“And why, Miss Miranda, do you think anyone here, anyone to whom we are offering shelter, would want to talk to
you
?”

He stared at her intently. She began to tremble. Her mouth opened but nothing came out. They locked eyes in silence.

“Well, well,” he said, satisfied by her stupor. “Why don’t you come back sometime when you have an answer to
that
?”

He spit out the last word, spraying her face with a few drops of saliva. Then he turned and left her. She stared off into the middle distance, into the space he’d just occupied, her eyes unfocused, her skin tingling with goose bumps.

Miranda went home and tried to rid herself of the tumult of feelings the strange experience out at the farmhouse had created. She got online and looked into other mentoring programs. There wasn’t much going on locally, and besides, she was concerned about working with kids from families she might run into at the hardware store. She looked into programs up in Plattsburgh. It was a drive, but she had time, she reminded herself. She’d make it into an overnight. See a movie. Take herself to dinner. Do some shopping. It’d be good for her to get out. But the truth was, she didn’t want to get out. She didn’t want highways and restaurants, sidewalks and traffic lights. People. Lots of people. Having to decide what to wear, if she should fix her hair. She didn’t want to leave the confines of the mountains that surrounded her. The more time she spent under their stoic embrace, the harder it was to extricate herself.

When Dix came back from his trip, she didn’t tell him that she’d gone out to the “guru’s” place. It felt like a betrayal to keep this detail from him, but also like a gift to herself. He knew everything about her life, her past, her family, every embarrassing moment of weakness and shameful episode. Holding back information about her visit and her internal struggle felt like a necessary act of defiance over the imbalance she was experiencing in the structure of their relationship.

She tried to brush it away, but the question Darius had asked kept making itself manifest. As she was sweeping the floor, turning the compost, feeding the chickens, she found herself wondering, indeed, what she had to offer. Why would kids from rough backgrounds open themselves up to her? Why would anyone open themselves up to her?

“Well, I never had, but always wanted, a little sister,” she responded under her breath to an absent interlocutor. Or, she’d try this for an answer: “I took a lot of education and psychology courses in college.” Sometimes she murmured, “I would like to give back—I’ve been so fortunate.”

Even as she said them, she recognized that all these phrases sounded canned and trite. They were also answers to some other question Darius had not asked, only implied. She realized she was describing holes in herself that working with these kids could fill for her, not describing what she might be able to give someone else. She knew nothing about the kids Darius was allegedly helping. She had seen no sullen teenagers at the farmhouse. She had seen a few around town from time to time, their hair hanging in greasy hanks around their excessively pale faces, with their big cheeks, soft chins, and too-small, too-close-together eyes, but she had never so much as said hello to one of them. In fact, she avoided them. They sneered at adults, and when they spoke among themselves their sentences were filled with casual and repetitive swears and slurs that took her breath away. She imagined their dirty trailers, mangy dogs, and overweight and underemployed parents.