Unhinged

by Barbra Leslie

  Fred had come back from his “fishing trip” a couple of days before school started. He was happy to see the boys; even I could see that, and I was one antidepressant away from clocking him with a cast-iron pan. The night before school started, we had a pizza party in the gym, all of us, and after some prodding he said the trip wasn’t as fruitful as he had been hoping. He was going to “regroup”, as he called it. He definitely wanted to start a new business, he said, but the business plan he and Cliff had put together had not, apparently, garnered much excitement from the venture capitalists.

  I had capital, and Fred knew it. Not as much as I had before – buying and renovating the bakery to our specifications had cost more than I could have dreamed possible. We joked that we should have just bought our own island in the Caribbean; it would have been cheaper. I wondered if Fred would ever have the nerve to ask me for seed money for whatever it was he and Cliff wanted to do. Not in a million years would I give him any – it was my late husband’s hard-earned money, and it was for the family, for the boys. But there was something changed in Fred again. Darren and I whispered about it late one night when Fred, Dave, and Jonas were all playing the Xbox with the boys. The cold and confident master of the universe that Fred had been when he was making his money had deflated after Ginger had been killed. But lately, since getting beaten up outside the strip club and then reconnecting with Cliff, Fred was getting a little of that cockiness back.

  I should have been happier that he was happier. But I hadn’t liked that Fred. That Fred had brought all of this evil into our lives in the first place. My rational mind knew that Fred had more than paid for his folly, but, as we all knew well, my rational mind wasn’t always in full working order.

  I was trying. Dr. Singh was helping. Dave was helping. Darren wasn’t helping, because if anything, he was even more attached to Matty and Luke than I was, and sometimes I was worried that he would do something really crazy if Fred actually intended to take the boys away.

  One afternoon, a week into the semester, Fred and I decided to pick the boys up from school and take them shopping for new shoes. While they were in a private school, it was an informal, no-uniform school, so regular sneakers were the order of the day. As the boys were both growing an inch a month – or so it seemed – they were complaining that if they didn’t get new sneakers they were going to just cut holes in the fronts of the ones they were already wearing. They’d spent the summer barefoot indoors and in flip-flops the rest of the time, so even they hadn’t really noticed until now.

  The four of us were in Rosen’s SUV, which was the safest of our vehicles. Matty was saying that he was at the point where he was curling his toes under to be able to fit his feet into his shoes.

  “I saw something on the Discovery Channel about this once,” he said. “In ancient China, they would bind women’s feet, just fold them right over in half, when they were really young and their bones were soft. Then their feet grew all deformed and they could never walk right.”

  “Yes, because men decided that women should be delicate and tiny and not be able to move around properly,” I said.

  “Good thing you didn’t live in ancient China, Auntie,” Luke said. He liked to call my footwear “canoes” because my feet were so big.

  “Can you imagine their disappointment when, even after folding my feet, they were still bigger than everybody else’s regular feet?” I said. “And it wasn’t just ancient China. It persisted well into the twentieth century. There are Chinese women alive today whose feet are deformed because they had their toes broken and folded under.”

  “Your aunt is a feminist, Luke,” Fred said, “which is admirable. But there were lots of sociopolitical reasons why such things persisted.” He glanced at my face. “Not that it was a good thing, by any stretch.”

  I breathed deeply, and reminded myself that Fred was driving, so therefore it would be unwise to kill him just now. I continued. “It wasn’t that long ago that women had to wear corsets made of whale bones to keep their waists tiny. Then their internal organs would actually rearrange themselves, and some women couldn’t breathe properly.”

  “Is that why women in those old books and movies are always fainting?” Luke said.

  “It certainly didn’t help.”

  “Women wear things like that now,” Matty said. “Corsets and stuff.”

  I turned around and looked at him. “Oh, really? And how would you know that, Matthew?” Luke laughed and punched his brother in the arm. Matty kept a straight face, but it was red.

  After a moment, he rolled his eyes. “Because we have this little thing called the Internet, Auntie. You should check it out one day.”

  “I am attempting to educate you young whippersnappers about the subjugation of women throughout history,” I said, in my most annoying voice.

  “That’s good, Auntie, but you don’t have to worry,” Luke said. He reached forward and knocked me on my head, gently. “We won’t subjugate any women.”

  “I’m very glad to hear it,” I said.

  “You’re the toughest person we know,” he continued. He was looking at his phone now, presumably reading a text from the lovely Moira. “And it’s important for young guys to have strong female role models.”

  I was floored, and trying not to be. Fred looked at me with eyebrows raised, and I shrugged, like don’t ask me.

  “Moira’s a feminist too,” he continued. “She’s teaching me a lot.”

  “I’m… thrilled to hear it,” I said. “How about you, Fred?”

  “Thrilled to hear it. Absolutely. Yes.” Fred stole a glance over his shoulder and I saw him grin at Matty.

  I was glad to see it. I was glad to see Fred interacting with his sons at all, really, other than the spate of video gaming lately. I needed to know that Fred could see past his current obsession with business. I needed to know that on his list of priorities, his sons came first.

  Matty started asking if he could watch the next time Jonas gave me a massage – he wanted to see how the muscles and ligaments all worked together, he said.

  “Abso-fucking-lutely not,” I said. Fred looked at me. “I’m sorry,” I said to him. “Boys, have I not been curbing my use of the F-bomb lately? Have you noticed?”

  “If you say so,” Matty said. “It doesn’t bother us.”

  “Thanks, honey. And no. You may not witness my massage.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’ll be naked, Matt. When you get a massage, they don’t do it through your clothes.”

  “Oh! Never mind. God in heaven, never mind!” He pretended to scream in horror, and then Luke and Fred joined in. They reminded me so much of Skipper, Laurence, and Darren, and I had a moment of pure happiness, just like that. The kind of moment that you want to hang onto, and remember, and be able to come back to.

  “You people are hysterical,” I said, grinning. “But seriously, especially where the sciatic nerve is, it’s basically lower back and butt and down my legs. You really don’t need to see that.”

  “No, sir, I do not,” Matty said, and Fred and I laughed. “But wait – doesn’t Dave mind that Jonas touches your… nakedness?”

  “Well, one: Dave doesn’t own me,” I said. “And, two: Jonas is a professional. And we’re friends.”

  “Moira and Luke are friends,” Matty replied. “So does that mean it’s okay if he massages her naked?”

  “Zip it, smartass,” I said. We were sitting in traffic, because of course we were going halfway across town to a specific store that specialized in the shoes both boys wanted. I looked over my shoulder at Luke, who had a big grin on his face as he was typing away. “What’s up, buttercup? Entertain us.”

  “I’m just texting Moira this conversation,” he said. “She’s digging it.”

  “I’m so glad,” I said, glancing at Fred again.

  “No such thing as privacy with kids around,” he said quietly.

  “Or with cell phones around,” I said.

  “Oh, guess w
hat? We’re doing a field trip to the Royal Ontario Museum,” Matty said. “It’s a history and art thing.”

  “Oh yeah. Somebody has to sign permission forms,” Luke said.

  “Remind me later,” Fred said.

  I wanted to be able to sign those forms, and for Darren to be able to. We had to get our legal rights sorted, and quickly. As things stood, despite everything, Fred was the boys’ parent and legal guardian. Their sole guardian. We needed to have that conversation with Fred about our legal rights. And with his moods, we needed to pick our moment, and pick it well.

  When we parked in front of the store, I got out and stretched a bit. It wasn’t the best day, pain-wise, and I elected to lie down in the backseat while the boys shopped. I took half a Percocet and stretched out. Within a couple of minutes I was asleep.

  * * *

  I’m at Helen of Troy. The music is loud, much louder than it really is in the club. I’m walking through tables of customers, but I’m on crutches, and I can’t move quickly. A dancer is being grabbed roughly by a man, but I’m far away and I can’t get there quickly enough. My crutches keep getting caught on chair legs as I try to move, so I throw them down and try to walk. I get closer, but the pain in my hip is unbearable. I don’t know if I can go on, but I must. She’s blonde, the dancer, she’s Ann, and I have to stop them from throwing her over a shoulder and making off with her. It’s very important, and no one else is watching. There are no other staff on duty. But when I am nearly upon them, I see that it’s not Ann. It’s Ginger. I’m only vaguely surprised. She’s wearing huge fake eyelashes and some kind of gold lamé tube top. She looks like something from Austin Powers, like she’s playing the role of a stripper. She’s crying, but she doesn’t want me to get any closer. She puts her hand up to stop me, and I’m trying to see who the man is who’s got her on his lap. More important than saving her, I have to see who the man is.

  “It’s too late for me,” she’s telling me, “but not for her. Then it can be over, Danny.”

  I reach the man and I start to put a key in his ear, but it’s not a key, it’s a knife. I don’t hesitate. I push the knife slowly into his ear, and then I fall to the floor. I never see his face. I just see his blood.

  * * *

  It came back to me days later, the dream, but by then it was nearly too late.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The day of the field trip was rainy and blustery, and felt like the first real day of autumn.

  “It always rained on field trip days,” Darren said over coffee in our kitchen. He was back from taking the boys to school with Rosen, and had witnessed them getting on the bus. “Don’t you remember? And we always had to go to that experimental farm thing. That place that pretended it was an eighteenth-century working dairy farm or whatever. And we’d all be trudging around in the mud. Miserable.”

  “Oh God, yes,” I said. “They made me use a butter churn.”

  “I would have paid good money to see that.” Dave came into the kitchen and messed up my messy hair.

  “I think it’s where I learned to swear,” I said. “Anyway, the boys will be inside all day. But God, think of it. Hordes of teenagers tramping through the antiquities. Some docent will have a coronary.”

  I was trying to be cheery, but Dave was leaving that evening for a job in Florida. Jonas had flown ahead, and Dave promised it would be a week, max, and nothing dangerous. I’d gotten used to him being here, sleeping with me every night, being able to curl up to him when I woke from nightmares I couldn’t remember. We’d avoided talking about the future, i.e. whether or not I would ever want to work with him again, or how – if – we could make whatever it was between us work. But his presence was a balm to my damaged soul.

  Fred came up to our kitchen and sat down, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. I liked him best in the morning. He reminded me most of the boy I’d met back in Maine, who worked at McDonald’s with my twin sister and ate most of his meals at our house.

  “I said I’d go for the after-lunch part of the field trip today,” Fred said. “There’s some kind of lecture about ancient pottery? Or glazing? I don’t know. But they needed another parent chaperone to fill in for someone who has to leave early.”

  “Better you than me,” I said. “I’d probably start snoring. Bad example for the young ’uns.”

  “I stayed up reading about antiquities online and I actually drank Scotch,” he said. “Why did I do that?”

  “Because reading about antiquities made you feel like a grown-up, and you associate drinking Scotch with being a grown-up,” Dave said. “Ipso facto.”

  “You’re right. And I fell asleep with my head on the keyboard.” He showed us the position he’d woken up in, and for Fred, it was funny. He wasn’t much of a laugh-riot lately. But then again, which of us were?

  “I will make us all breakfast,” I said, and all three of them turned to look at me. “What? I can make breakfast.”

  They all pretended to look at their watches and began mumbling about places they had to be until I started throwing napkins at them.

  “Somebody put avocados in our fridge,” I said. “I will make us smashed avocado on toast.”

  “Get you,” Darren said. “Did you go to a vegan brunch place sometime in the last year, Beanpole?”

  “Jonas made it for me. Get this: It’s toast, with avocado smashed onto it.”

  In the end, I had to get Dave’s help with how to properly take the insides out of an avocado, but I made breakfast. And a fresh pot of coffee.

  “Maybe I should be a waitress,” I said, once everybody was eating. “I sort of liked having a job. You know, except for…”

  “People dying?” Darren said.

  “Getting tackled and tied up in an alley?” Dave added. We were all silent for a minute.

  “You should have asked for hazard pay,” Fred said.

  “Hey! I never got paid! That company owes me money.”

  “You’re right,” Fred said. “But the club is closed, right?”

  “But the parent company isn’t,” I said. “I’m going to call them and demand my… whatever it is. Two hundred bucks.”

  “Leave it, Bean,” Darren said. “You heard Belliveau. Don’t get involved with these people any further.”

  “It’s a phone call, Darren,” I said. “I’m not exactly rushed off my feet here. I can do it from the privacy of my own bathtub.”

  “That was random,” Dave said. “I’m going to get some things packed and maybe have a quick nap. While the job in Florida won’t be dangerous, it will be both boring and involve sleep deprivation. I want to bank some shut-eye.”

  “I’ll help you,” I said. I wanted to be horizontal with Dave as much as possible before he had to leave for the airport.

  “I’m going to shower and get ready to be scintillated,” Fred said.

  “And I guess I will clean up,” Darren said, and called after us all, “It’s fine. You all go off to your lives. I’ll just take care of the grunt work.”

  I trotted back into the kitchen – still not in running form – and hugged him. “I love you more than avocados on toast,” I said.

  “Things are sort of okay, aren’t they,” he whispered. He was hugging me back, wearing his washing-up gloves. The boys and I had got him a pair that went nearly up to his elbows, with pink marabou trim. Sometimes he wore them down to dinner at Marta’s, which made Marta giggle and Mama Estela shake her head and roll her eyes.

  “Shhh. Jinx.”

  “I know. I shouldn’t have said that. Sorry.” He pushed me away. “Now go and conjugate with your boyfriend, while I do man’s work.” He started singing Peggy Lee, “Is That All There Is?” and I went upstairs.

  * * *

  Dave left for the airport while I was still napping. After the, uh, conjugating. He left me a present on his pillow: a very sweet note, and a new pair of Kevlar fighting gloves tied up with a ribbon.

  Some women might prefer jewelry, but I’ll take tactical armor any day of the we
ek.

  The evening started out quietly. The boys told us about their day – Matty had loved the ROM, Luke less so. Moira hadn’t gone to school that day, and so he’d had to endure the field trip without her. We discussed plans for the boys’ thirteenth birthday, which was coming up. Rosen took them through some defense drills when they claimed to have no homework. Darren and I watched a documentary about Scientology in the main TV room on the boys’ and Fred’s floor.

  Fred was reading a book, lying on a couch in the room with us, but he seemed edgy.

  “I’m going for a run,” he said finally. “I let it kind of lapse for a while but I’m going to get out there.”

  “Raining out,” I said, barely moving my head. I felt like a sloth. I had barely moved in weeks.

  “Good for you,” Darren said. “Put hair on your chest.”

  I debated going with him. The pain was getting better nearly every day, and I hated the idea of losing my fitness because of this injury. Plus, I presumed Fred would be pretty slow, and would probably do a lot of walking breaks.

  “Mind if I come?” I said. “Just to see how I do,” I said to Darren, who was glaring at me.

  “No way,” Fred said. “Sorry, Danny, but I’m not always in the mood to feel like the klutzy one, you know? If I run alone in the dark, nobody really notices the fact that I’m barely shuffling and I can’t breathe. And I don’t have to be an object of Cleary comedy over breakfast the next day.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay.” I sat up and looked at him.