Good Dirt

Unhinged

Unhinged

W ell, that boy deserved to have his face slapped. And the sight of his wife doing the slapping made Ed bark with laughter. At first. Then, as Ed turned away from his bedroom window and started down the stairs, he found himself slipping back toward that dark corner he’d been inhabiting of late. Because the mirthful satisfaction produced by what he’d just seen gave way to the disturbing realization that his wife was not the type to slap someone, not even if that someone was a spoiled brat who had broken their daughter’s heart in the most public of ways.

In short, it felt like Ed’s wife was becoming unhinged. And that wasn’t Soh’s style, despite her worrying over Ebby. In the first months after Baz’s death, amid the grief that seemed to fill every crevice in their lives, Ed and Soh had managed to move house, go back to work, and put their daughter in a new school. Soh later arranged for a leave of absence, which would later morph into her years as a stay-at-home mom and part-time attorney.

Ed and Soh had been, if nothing else, organized and disciplined in their grief. Determined to do what they could to protect Ebby and each other. To counteract the image that most people now had of their family life. The image that they themselves had, of a life that had been torn apart and appeared to be irreparable. Without discussing it, they’d both decided that if they could undo this impression, then reality might just follow.

They went through the motions, based on memory. And this rote behavior had its value. Sometimes, all a person had was a routine, or a series of rituals, to hold things together. Without structure in their lives, Ed, Soh, and Ebby would have been like crumpled pieces of paper being buffeted about by their emotions. Drifting here and there. Before Baz was killed, the four of them together had formed a unit, each one linked to the others. Without that fourth section, without Baz, they no longer knew the shape of themselves. Their old habits at least provided them with a kind of container until they could figure it out.

Soh was the first to move toward the new form that her life would have to take. She regained the impeccable appearance for which she had been known and made sure their daughter followed suit. She made Ebby study hard and go back to practicing the piano. In her daughter, she honed the unflappable air with which their family would become associated in public. For the most part, it worked. Except late at night, when their daughter’s mask slipped away in her sleep and she revealed the full extent of her distress.

Still, Soh persisted. She seemed to have understood, sooner than Ed and Ebby, that their lives would never again be private. Whenever an article or a photograph of their family would pop up online, or appear in a printed newspaper or magazine, Soh would bat her hand in the air as if sweeping away a fly.

“Let’s see, is this actionable?” the lawyer in Soh would ask. “Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm, hmmm,” she would say as she read. “Nope,” she would say most often, because usually such things were not worth going to court for. Whenever she did think it was worth a legal complaint, she wouldn’t handle it herself.

“Oh, heather,” Soh would say, instead of oh, hell, and get on the phone. “Heather, heather, heather.” She’d long ago told Ed that one key to her mental health was letting someone else be the attorney on family issues.

In the early years after Baz’s death, Ed would feel compelled to rip up offending news pages, stuff them in the trash, and take a walk down to the beach to stomp out his agitation. But over time, he, too, grew to ignore most of what he saw. Took to straightening his back when the paparazzi showed up. At events. At restaurants. At the botanical gardens. Ed was learning from Soh and her cool public demeanor. It was only when it came to any kind of separation from Ebby that Soh became wobbly.

Ebby was twenty-nine now. She’d been living on her own for several years, but, still, Soh could barely tolerate her absence. Where was Ebby going? What was Ebby doing? Should they do this for Ebby? Should they do that for Ebby? Be careful, Ebby, Soh was always saying. Be careful. And now, with Ebby in France, things with Soh felt like they had gotten out of hand. It wasn’t that Ed didn’t worry about his daughter. It wasn’t that he didn’t think, Be careful, be careful . It was that he tried not to say everything he was feeling. He didn’t think a person could, constantly, voice that level of distress.

What if Ed were to say the half of what he was feeling?

Yes, seeing Soh slap Henry’s face had unnerved Ed. But then Soh slipped back into her old groove. She tilted her head toward the side of the house and said to Henry, “Come.” Henry followed her and Ed around to the back of the house and they sat down together on the deck. They let Henry fold his tall frame into an Adirondack chair and talk. They had little choice. Wouldn’t look good to have a white man standing out in the front yard getting worked up the way he was doing now. There were some loud words. And Henry actually had tears in his eyes at one point. It couldn’t undo what he had done to their daughter. But it was better to know the boy felt bad about it.

Somehow, it had escaped Henry’s notice that Ed and Harris knew each other as well as they did. Around these parts, everyone’s dad had been at school with someone else’s father, so he might not have remembered, or even known. But not even Soh knew that Ed felt comfortable enough with Harris to have talked with him about the jar and the day on which Baz had been shot. They’d never really talked about that with anyone, except their own parents.

Ed felt better after the conversation with Henry, and Henry himself left the house looking relieved. Soh, on the other hand, did not look happy at all. After Henry left, she was very quiet. Ed knew they would have words, eventually. Ed had talked with Harris about the day of the shooting but he hadn’t told Soh. Ed, who lately had refused to talk to a therapist or even his own wife much. But for the moment, Soh was focusing her energy in another direction. When she finally spoke, she said, “We need to go to France.”

Shit, Ed thought. “No-no-no-no-no,” he said.

“But you heard what Henry said. Ebby is still suffering from nightmares.”

Ed was still shaking his head.

“She’s been keeping this from us,” Soh said. “She’s been having a tougher time than we thought but she didn’t feel she could talk to us.”

“I know, but maybe she simply didn’t want to talk to us, baby.”

“You mean the way you haven’t wanted to talk to me? So you talk to Harris instead?”

“I already explained to you. I was talking to Harris about our home insurance. It was right after Baz had been killed and it just came out, you know? We were talking about Baz and I told him about the jar being broken. Harris is my buddy. I’m allowed, aren’t I?”

Ed looked down to avoid the expression he knew he’d see on his wife’s face. He fought to keep his voice even, now, as he looked up again.

“Listen, Soh,” he said. “About Ebby. She wanted to go away, don’t you see? Maybe what she needs is the chance to figure things out for herself.”

“What do you know about what people need?” Soh said. It was the way she said it that struck Ed silent.

The tone in his wife’s voice.

After so many years.

A bitterness.

In that moment, Ed understood that Soh might blame him for the death of their son. Ed was the one who first spotted the For Sale sign on the house where, ten years later, Baz would be killed. It was the thought that Soh, the love of his life, might have these feelings that she had never voiced that led Ed to pack his overnight bag and put it back in the hallway closet while his wife was down in the kitchen. It was this thought that led him to drive away the next morning while Soh was still in the shower.