Page 104 of Good Dirt

Soh

January 2020

T oday is Baz’s birthday. Twenty years since his death. In other years, Soh would have avoided the television news, kept the radio turned off in her car, blocked the news pop-ups on her smartphone, and, back when her parents still had newspapers delivered to their door, thrown the day’s edition directly into the recycling bin without reading it. Just in case. She would have gone to visit Baz’s grave, then stayed indoors for the rest of the day. She would have avoided answering phone calls from anyone but family and the Pittses. Always, the Pittses.

Adelaide Pitts had been the first one to reach Ebby after Baz was shot and she had understood that Soh needed to hear everything about what Adelaide and Bob had seen at the house that day. Quietly, but without holding anything back.

Adelaide also got something that many people didn’t: that Soh needed to be able to talk about Baz’s life, not just his death. How Baz had run into the Pittses’ house the week before to tell them about joining the debate team at his high school. How every week he seemed different, rapidly moving toward manhood. How Baz had doted on his little sister. Always giving in to her almost constant schemes to play. That this was the way that Soh would live from then on. Between tears and laughter. Between loss and love.

This is why Soh has never gone back to the group meeting for grieving families, despite her therapist’s recommendations. That first time, everyone was encouraged to talk about how they had lost their children. That was natural. That was helpful. To be in a room of other people who would not flinch at the tears. At the anger. But as time went on, as new people with fresh wounds joined the group, Soh wanted to talk more and more about how her son had lived.

Soh also wanted to ask that most terrible of questions, which not everyone was ready for. Not why did this happen to her son, but how could she be sure that nothing bad would ever happen to her daughter. The one who had been left behind to face public curiosity. The one who had to cross the street to go to school, who had to use the school bathrooms where meningitis might be lurking. The one who would soon be drawing the attention of boys and men twice her age. The one who would be learning how to drive.

Soh’s daughter was the only reason she was still alive. Soh had never stopped loving her husband. Not even when he had closed in on himself. But Ed was not the reason why Soh had kept herself from driving her car into a tree all those years ago. She had aimed right for the bank of trees one night, so desperate was she to simply turn down the volume of the rage in her head. But she’d had Ebby to think of. Her second-born. Her baby. And Soh had willed herself to be there for her daughter. It was the only thing that she felt she could offer Ebby. Herpresence. Her determination to keep her daughter alive.

But things are different now. And today will be different.