Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Miranda studying me from the passenger seat, so I turned toward her and asked, “What?” The right-front tire teetered on the edge of the pavement, and I twitched the steering wheel to avoid hurtling into the ditch. Duncan Road meandered along ridges and hollows about ten miles west of downtown Knoxville and UT. Decades earlier Duncan had been a rural farm road, but lately weathered farmhouses had given way to sprawling estates and cul-de-sac housing developments, with just enough shacks and rusting trailers to impart a tumbledown, seedy charm.
“What do you mean, what?”
“You’re looking at me funny. What is it?”
“Nothing,” Miranda said, “except watch the road. And slow down.” After a pause she added, “And are you okay?”
I chose not to comment on the driving advice. “Not really.” The truth was, I dreaded what lay ahead. I’d rather be fishing a bloated, slimy corpse from the river, I realized — and floaters were about as unappealing as corpses got, in my opinion — than embarking on this errand with Miranda.
“Slow down. It’s on the left. There.” She pointed into the twilight. “There.”
“Where? I don’t see it.”
“You just missed it.”
I stopped. “I missed it?” Looking out the window, I glimpsed rectangles of golden light slightly below us, crosshatched by bare branches, pine foliage, and glossy rhododendron leaves. “Where the hell’s the driveway?”
“You passed it.”
“Are you sure? I didn’t see one.”
“It’s hard to see in the dark. That’s why I told you to slow down. Twice.” One of the interesting features of my relationship with Miranda was that our interactions ranged so widely across the spectrum: Sometimes I dispensed knowledge as her professor and mentor; sometimes we teased each other mercilessly and happily; occasionally we bickered like an old married couple. “I’ve been out here half a dozen times,” she added, sounding less snappish, “and I have trouble spotting it even in the daylight. It’s just a tiny gap in the tree line. If you blink, you’ll miss it.”
I backed up twenty feet, grateful there was no other traffic on the winding road. Sure enough, the forested darkness on the left was broken slightly by a narrow opening, barely wide enough to accommodate my truck. I cut the wheel and eased into the notch. The headlights illuminated branches and treetops, and the earth seemed to drop off beneath us into the night. “Whoa. Is this a driveway or a cliff?”
“It’s definitely an oh-shit experience the first time or two.” She laughed. “If you think careening down it now is interesting, you should try slithering up it on a rainy day in the fall, when it’s coated with wet, slippery leaves. We had to call a tow truck to get me out of here one night. And then we had to call a bigger tow truck to pull me and the little tow truck out.”
The vertiginous ribbon of concrete was no more than a hundred feet long, but it dropped fifty vertical feet in that distance. It was flanked by a pair of contemporary houses, storklike in their slender verticality; they perched on the steep hillside on stilts, as if they, like the trees themselves, were rooted in the ground and reaching for the sky, stretching toward the top of the forest canopy.
The driveway’s pitch lessened toward the bottom, and Miranda pointed me to a broader, flatter parking pad notched into an embankment. English ivy — some of it freshly nibbled, perhaps by deer — cascaded down a waist-high retaining wall. A black Subaru wagon was tucked alongside the wall; in front of it was a Nissan Xterra I recognized, its yellow paint mottled by brown leaves and dead twigs the size of finger bones. Eddie’s car hadn’t been driven in a while. I drew a deep breath and asked, “Ready?”
“What do you think?”
“Me neither. But let’s do it.”
Our doors opened and closed in unison. They swung slowly, reluctantly. “It’s the house on the left.” A long wooden ramp, a cross between a boat dock and a drawbridge, angled from the parking area up to a decklike front porch. The front door was a large panel of insulated glass, framed by honey-colored wood; the entry hall was floored in pale oak covered by a long runner, a rug of wool woven in diamonds and stripes of black, red, gold, and green — Central or South American, I guessed. The rug ran down a lighted hall to the doorway of a dark room. Miranda reached up to a bell beside the door and gave a tug on a braided cord dangling from the clapper, and the bell pealed with a high, clear tone. Inside, I heard a clatter and then the thud of footsteps on wood and wool.
The door was opened by a sad, haggard woman with a toddler slung on her left hip. “Please come in,” said Carmen Garcia.
She’d asked me to come talk with her at home about her husband’s treatment and recovery and job situation — all serious concerns, I knew — and I’d brought Miranda along for moral support. It was cowardly on my part, maybe, but also potentially helpful. Miranda knew the Garcias far better than I did; in fact, several months before Eddie’s injury, Miranda had begun volunteering to baby-sit occasionally for the Garcias’ toddler, Tomás, so Eddie and Carmen could have a date night now and then. It wasn’t as if they couldn’t afford to hire a teenager to baby-sit; Garcia was a physician, after all, and clearly they lived in a large, interesting house, but for whatever reason — because they were new to Knoxville, or because their house was hard to find in the dark, or because they worried about entrusting their baby to a young stranger — they’d not had many evenings out until Miranda started the date-night plan. Truth be told, she wasn’t just thinking of the Garcias when she made the offer. She’d had them over for dinner about six months earlier, to welcome the new M.E. and his family to town, and she’d been instantly smitten by the sweet, dark-eyed, dark-haired boy. The attraction was clearly mutual, for when he saw Miranda at the door, Tomás stretched out his arms and practically dove off his mother’s hip. “Randa, Randa, Randa,” he chirped, his face beaming.
Miranda hoisted him off Carmen’s hip and transferred him to her own, nestling him there as naturally as if he were her own child. “Hola, muchacho,” she said, and then repeated the greeting in English: “Hey, dude. How’s my little dude, huh?” She punctuated each word with a wet, smacking kiss, and laughter burbled up out of the boy. The pure, musical sound brought a smile to my face and, I was happy to see, to Carmen’s as well. Tomás pointed at a staircase in the hallway, and Miranda clambered over the safety gate and headed upstairs with him.
“I just made a pot of tea,” Carmen said. “Would you like a cup? Come, let’s sit.” She turned and led us around a corner into a large, open room in the shape of a semicircle. A galley-style kitchen ran the length of the one straight wall; on the other side of a full-length butcher-block counter, a long, curving wall of windows defined the living room. I walked to the center of the room and looked around me. It was now fully dark outside, so the arc of windows acted as mirrors, reflecting ten images of myself back at me.
“What an amazing house,” I said, and when I spoke, my voice sounded as if it were coming not just from within me but from slightly in front of me, too. “And the acoustics are interesting.” The effect was similar to hearing my voice amplified by a microphone and a high-fidelity speaker.
“Yes,” said Carmen. “It’s because you’re standing right at the center of that curve. It’s like the — oh, what’s the English term for punto focal? — the focal point of a lens. A lens of sound. Eddie and Tomás love the way it makes the sound big. I find it a little bit…um, haunting? Spooky?”