1503951243 by Laurel Saville

Author:Laurel Saville [Saville, Laurel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Thrillers, Suspense
ISBN: 9781503949980
Google: tEgcswEACAAJ
Amazon: 1503949982
Publisher: Amazon Publishing
Published: 2015-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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