Ed started bringing little gifts for Tina after that—a horse-shaped Christmas tree ornament, lemon-scented oil for her saddle. For her mother, pouches of French potpourri to hang in her car. I know how that barn smell lingers, he’d say, and they’d share a laugh as the unlucky parents of horse children. Tina’s mother was thrilled by the attention. She was the type of woman who went around saying she’d met Tina’s father “at the office,” allowing everyone to assume she was the receptionist. In truth, Tina’s mother was the cleaning girl for the building, the daughter of a married white man and an unmarried Mexican teenager, and Edward Eubanks’s interest in her daughter, in her, subsidized all the gaps in her newly minted Highland Park pedigree.
Ed was a figure in the community, obscenely charitable and well connected. Tina’s family found themselves invited into smaller and smaller social circles, on island vacations in smaller and smaller planes. Sometimes her parents weren’t invited at all, and it was just Tina and Ed on those islands. Ed was in his seventies and twice divorced. Tina was the same age as most of his grandchildren, and wasn’t it fun for Tina, as an only child, to go on vacation and pretend like she had siblings? From the top deck of his beachfront compound in Maui, a cowboy-hatted Ed would watch Tina and his grandkids try to surf. With the Pacific dissolving the orange fireball on the horizon, Ed would call to Tina that it was time to get ready for dinner.
Ed would bathe her in his bathroom, lapping soapy water over her nascent breasts and between her legs. The house was full of people, and no one acted like there was anything inappropriate about this. Tina’s body was developing, but she was only eleven years old, very much a child. But then she was twelve, and fifteen, and still Ed was the one to give her a bath. Complicity was reshaped—from the faultlessness of a loving grandfather taking a vested interest in a promising pupil of his daughter’s to the faultlessness of a red-blooded man taking a vested interest in a beautiful young lady he intended to marry.
Ed came to the house the day after Tina’s seventeenth birthday and proposed marriage to the whole family. He was nearing his final act in life, and he did not want to be alone at the end. In turn, he would offer Tina what no man her age could. With tears in his eyes, he told Tina and her family that he would see to it that she could do whatever she wanted with her life. Go to Radcliffe, if it called to her, and live anywhere in the world. Tina thought about the barn that Ed bought Deb right after high school, and she felt ill because she understood how it was that Deb was so miserable doing whatever she wanted with her life too.
Ed left Tina and her family to think it over for a few days. You’ll never have to worry about any of this, her mother said the next morning at the breakfast table, the electric bill splayed alongside the plate of bacon. You’ll never know this kind of tired, her father bookended when he came home from work that evening. On Tina’s wedding day, her mother pulled her great-grandmother’s veil over her daughter’s face and compared the whole thing to punching in at an undesirable job for a solid retirement package.
Tina quit riding soon after, but just before that happened, the barn hosted a group of women from a halfway house in South Dallas. They arrived on a school bus with a female psychiatrist who explained to Tina and Deb that horses were often used for therapeutic purposes, to help people feel connected to their bodies again after trauma. Deb stayed glued to the side of the counselor all day, and later, Tina discovered a scrap of paper in the office with the counselor’s name, address, and an appointment time. In the weeks that followed, she began to notice a distinct change in Deb—the whiskey bottle disappeared from the kitchen sink, and she spent less and less time with the family, and, consequently, with Ed. She seemed gentler, more introspective, and Tina was both impressed and intrigued. She wanted to know what sorts of things went on in these sessions, and a not yet awakened part of her wanted to know how to distance herself from Ed too.
Tina enrolled at the University of Dallas, majoring in organizational psychology, and met Frances when she came to deliver a lecture on a technique she had developed, known as the Strange Situation Assessment, which demonstrated the importance of healthy childhood attachments. Tina approached Frances after the lecture, and they hit it off. When Frances went back to Seattle, they remained in touch through letters and phone calls. Though, later, Frances admitted that her goal was always to extricate Tina from what she saw as a blatantly abusive and disturbing marriage.
After graduation, Frances talked Tina into moving up to Seattle. In Texas, marriage and family therapists needed to complete two thousand supervised hours before getting a license. In Washington, it was half, and Frances agreed to take Tina on as an apprentice, which would account for many of those hours. One of the age spots on Ed’s head had turned out to be cancerous, and his doctors endorsed a move farther from the equator. He built the Spanish-style mansion in Clyde Hill as an ode to the architecture of his hometown.