Ebby
Ebby
Eight Months Later
J ust seven hours. Seven hours of flight, plus the train and a car, and Ebby will be in a place where no one will recognize her, no one will look at her sideways, no one will cup their hands over their mouth and whisper, It’s that girl, you know? At the racquet and swim club, at the bagel shop, at the supermarket, people back home go through the motions of being discreet, when in reality they want Ebby to hear what they’re saying.
“What a shame about the wedding.”
“After everything she’s been through.”
They want Ebby to know they know all about her.
Only they don’t know. Otherwise, they would tell themselves to forget. Forget the wedding. Forget the shooting. The past nineteen years of her life have been punctuated by periodic articles, photographs, and media chatter recalling the murder of her brother, and the images of her younger self from that day. Ebby’s identity has been stamped by the award-winning photo of her at age ten. Her clothing, bloodied. Her face, partially shielded from onlookers by the protective arm of her neighbor Mrs. Pitts, her friend Ashleigh’s grandma.
Objectively speaking, it was an excellent photograph. Ebby can see why it won an international award. She can see why it has continued to show up in the media, especially now, with the twentieth anniversary of Baz’s death fast approaching. But every time she sees that image, or a promo for that true-crime video special, or a journalist names her in connection with the shooting, Ebby feels like nothing can keep her from sliding back under the long shadow cast by the worst day of her life. Not the work she enjoys, helping clients to write better research papers. Not her family’s achievements in business, science, or law. Not their long history as African Americans in New England, of which Ebby is quite proud.
And now her wedding plans have fallen apart in the most humiliating way.
There Ebby was, standing in the room that had been hers since she was ten, planning to walk down the garden path with a photo of her brother held close under her arm. She would have placed the picture of Baz, the last ever taken of him, on an easel near the steps leading up to the gazebo. She would have breathed in the cool air of the Sound mingled with the delicate scent of roses in her hair. Then she would have turned to face Henry.
Ebby and Henry had been planning a little surprise for the end of the ceremony. Instead of striding elegantly back down the path together, they would have done a little skip-dance. It had made them laugh to think of it. Surely Granny Freeman would love it, they’d said. She would chuckle as Ebby and Henry hopped past her, while her other grandmother, Grandma Bliss, and Henry’s mother would try to conceal their horror at the display. Those two were more alike in their snobbishness than they would want to admit.
Ebby had been looking forward to the day after, when she and Henry would have begun a slow, lazy drive north. Seeking out the rockiest stretches of coastline, then dipping inland. Following the mustards and russets of the first leaves of autumn. Wherever they stayed, they would go walking every morning, Henry with his beloved camera and Ebby with her notebook and pencil.
“What about the Maldives?” Ashleigh had asked her on a video call. “Something island-y. Or the fjords! Or how about Victoria Falls?” Her friend was into faraway vacations. “You have to go somewhere for your honeymoon,” she’d said. But Ebby had shaken her head.
“That’s not what we want,” said Ebby. Because she and Henry had talked about it at length. This was another way in which they’d been a good fit as a couple. They knew how they wanted to be in those first few days as husband and wife. New England in October was the best place in the world. And New England was their home. Only they never took that trip. Minutes before the wedding was scheduled to begin, Henry still wasn’t answering his phone.
No, all those people who say, Isn’t that the girl…? don’t know the first thing about being Ebony Freeman.
On the eve of her wedding day, Ebby woke up in the middle of the night, thinking that she’d heard the old jar in her father’s study crashing to the floor. Later, she would wonder if it had been a premonition. She hadn’t dreamed about that jar in weeks. Each time, in her dream, she would rush down the stairs toward the study, trying to stop the jar from hitting the ground, even though she’d already heard it happen. She would wake up with a drenched forehead, wishing that in her waking life, too, she could go back to the moment before she heard the jar fall.
Just one moment before.
In the moment before, her brother would still be unharmed. Her brother would be on his feet. Strange, though, how Ebby never sees her brother in that dream, only the jar. On her worst nights, the dream continues until she crouches down to gather up the broken pieces of pottery, cutting her hands as she tries to fit them back together. She knows her brother is lying on the floor right next to her, but she doesn’t see him.
When Ebby was still seeing a therapist, the doctor used the phrase complicated grief and Ebby wondered why, was grief ever an uncomplicated thing? Despite her dream, she had dusted off that photo of Baz and the jar for the wedding ceremony. If you grieve for someone, it’s because you cared for them, right? So you hold on to the memories. But Ebby needs to forget. She needs to be someone else, anywhere else. This is why she’s leaving Connecticut. She is going to board a plane to France and stay away for a good long while.