Good Dirt

Guesthouse

Guesthouse

A fter only three weeks in France, Ebby has let down her guard. As she leans over a flower bed outside the entrance to the riverside cottage, she has no premonition, no suspicion, no hunch. She has no idea, when she hears the car door slam, then another, then the sound of luggage being hoisted out of the trunk and wheeled across the gravel, that her life is about to be turned on its head.

Again.

Because the sound of that car is precisely what Ebby has been waiting for. The visitors have arrived at two o’clock on the dot, as promised. The guesthouse out back is ready for them. Ebby smiles to herself as she hears the distant crunch of stone mixing in with the call of the cicadas and the close-by hum of bees in the lavender. It is a blessing, this easy sense of anticipation, this absence of worry. This is why Ebby has come this far, to a village of seven hundred people, a day’s worth of travel across the Atlantic. It has been the perfect place to take a breather from the crushing weight of being home.

She owes all this to her friend Hannah, her colleague from London, the owner of the house. Hannah has asked Ebby to welcome these tourists while she takes care of business back in London. When she returns, she and Ebby will take a trip together. But for now, being here is all Ebby needs.

No one Ebby knows has ever heard of this village. And who would, unless they happened to know someone who grew sunflowers or produced Cognac in central France?

“Where, exactly?” said Ashleigh when Ebby told her she was going to stay at Hannah’s place. Ashleigh, unlike Ebby, had struck out from home early on, moving all the way out to California for college, studying in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship, and taking postgraduate courses in economics and management in Shanghai. While the village wasn’t well known among Americans, this area had managed to draw the attention of foreigners like Hannah, who first gave Ebby a tour of the house during one of their video calls.

Ten percent of the people around here, Hannah told her, were retirees from Britain or other expats, most of whom could fly over in an hour or two. They had set themselves up in old stone houses and re-fabbed barns, with Wi-Fi service and vegetable gardens and indoor-outdoor cats. Two of them had convinced Hannah to come visit. They were moving north into Brittany and wanted to sell. The summers down here were getting too hot for them. But Hannah had been hungering for warmth.

On the day that Hannah first drove into the village, she stepped out of her car, took one look at the old yellow cottage and little guesthouse, both surrounded by lavender and rosemary, and fell in love. She smiled at the three sunflowers growing in the side yard, their faces turned upward as if watching her, wiped the sweat from her hairline, and said, “How much?”

Ebby and Hannah had collaborated for two years on the same project, emailing and teleconferencing across the Atlantic, before meeting in person. And, yes, Hannah really has become a friend. A luxury. Ebby has never had more than a couple of true friends, having been trailed during her school years by the history of what had happened to her as a child. She’s met people who are nice enough for a chat over drinks, but she’s never been able to shake the feeling of being observed by others as she was in those first years after Baz’s death.

Sometimes, Ebby catches people staring at her. At other times, she thinks it’s just her being self-conscious. Either way, Ebby still needs to shield herself from people, to resist the idea that what happened to her brother might be tangled up in the way that others see her. She used to think Henry saw something else in her, someone other than that little girl. But now Henry’s gone.

Ashleigh was one of the few who didn’t seem to walk on eggshells around her. The first time Ebby saw her after Baz died, Ashleigh didn’t hug Ebby, didn’t say anything, just walked up to her and plopped down in a deck chair next to Ebby, then leaned to the side until her head was resting on Ebby’s shoulder. Ashleigh had practically grown up around Baz. She’d spent part of every summer of her childhood with him and Ebby. And she would come to see the impact of Baz’s death on her own family.

Ashleigh’s grandparents, the Pittses, had been so shaken by the shooting that, like the Freemans, they felt compelled to move away from the neighborhood where it had occurred. They soon left the town where they had raised Ashleigh’s mother, selling the home where they had wanted to spend their retirement.

Ashleigh was the only one who didn’t freak out when she was with Ebby in that first year after Baz’s death and Ebby was photographed by people on the street without her permission. Maybe it was because Ashleigh’s parents were actors. She was used to being around people who got a lot of attention. She, too, had been subjected, at times, to the curiosity of people who did not know her.

Now that Ebby is grown up, people seem more interested in her looks than in her actual life. One magazine writer observed recently that the frightened girl that Ebby had been at ten had grown up to be an “elegant and reserved young woman.” And a newspaper article on a scholarship awards event sponsored by her grandparents’ foundation mentioned Ebby’s “effortless beauty.” What makes people think anything about her is effortless?

Surely, there must be people like her everywhere. People who get up in the morning, wipe their children’s noses, walk down the street, show up at work, or go to school while calling on every ounce of careful grooming and good manners to make it look like it’s no trouble at all. Surely, she is not the only person holding in a world of hurt that pushes against their skin like water against the walls of a dam.

People tended to believe that if you could go through a tragedy like the one that had struck Ebby as a child and not end up being crushed by it, then you could deal with anything else. Even Ebby had come to believe this. She had gotten through those uncomfortable years of being eyed silently by some of the kids who knew about her brother. There’d been eyes on the street where her family had moved after the shooting. Eyes in the hallway at her new school. Eyes at the club for African American mothers and children over in New Haven. Thank goodness she’d found university and the working world to be easier. The passage of time did help.

When Ebby fell in love with Henry, she felt she’d finally turned a corner in her life. She and Henry were making plans for the future. To say I will to a marriage, or to anything that important, when there were no guarantees, was an act of faith, and given what she had been through, having faith felt like a triumph. But after the wedding was canceled, Ebby was back to dodging the periodic look of panic in her parents’ eyes.

Her mom and dad were worried about her, all over again, and they didn’t even know the half of what she was going through. After Henry left her, there were days when Ebby was tempted to say, Mom, there’s something I need to tell you . Ebby wanted to be able to confide in her mother, but she didn’t want to burden her any further. So Ebby did what she’d always done. She kept the worst part to herself.

The offer to stay at Hannah’s cottage couldn’t have come at a better time. Hannah had already been bugging Ebby to get away from home, to come meet her in France. Ebby had been tempted but was too proud to put her tail between her legs and run off. She had allowed herself one week alone in Maine, to recoup. Martha’s Vineyard had been out of the question. Too many familiar faces up in Oak Bluffs, even if the summer season had come to a close. Too many people who knew her family, who remembered what had happened.

Then Ebby went back to her condo and forced herself to carry on with her work. Effortless beauty and all that. But she felt herself sliding backward, avoiding people, waking up in the middle of the night again. It was as if the old jar, hitting the ground as it had all those years ago, had been like a bomb going off in the middle of her life, and she was still trying to outrun the shock waves from the blast.

Desperation pushed Ebby to make changes. After a few months, she gave up her office at the research journal. She focused on generating the kind of flexibility that home-based editing and ghostwriting would allow. She cut her hair and changed the color for the second time in five months. Anything, she thought, to make her feel that things could be different.

Once Ebby had admitted to herself that none of this would be enough to pull her out of the slide that her mood had taken, she got on the phone and had a long talk with Hannah. She knew, from the start of their conversation, what Hannah was going to say: Why don’t you come to France? And this time, Ebby was ready to hear it.

This time, Ebby was going to say yes.

Once she and Hannah were done talking, Ebby went online and booked her flights, then took a good look at her schedule of deadlines. She wanted to spend her free time playing tourist and practicing her French language skills, but she didn’t intend to give up her job.

“The timing could be good,” Ashleigh said when Ebby told her what she was thinking. “Working online from abroad is a thing, now,” Ashleigh added. “You could blog about it.”

“I don’t want to blog,” said Ebby.

“You could do just a little bit,” said Ashleigh. “Just enough to stay on people’s professional radars. To let them know you’re not trying to, like, drop out of life.”

“But I am trying to drop out of life,” Ebby said. “Well, not really. I just want to work in peace. Take a break from having to keep up appearances. I definitely do not want to share my expat experience with the world .”

She was surprised at what Ashleigh said next. She’d thought that Ashleigh would understand her need to keep to herself.

“You can’t keep hiding out because bad things happened to you,” Ashleigh said. “Okay, so you and Henry had a shitty breakup. And you witnessed Baz’s death. That’s terrible. No one else can know what that must feel like. But you have to find a way to live with all that without constantly thinking of yourself as a victim and using that as an excuse to cut yourself off.”

Ebby felt her mouth fall open.

“What are you going to do about the rest of your life?” Ashleigh said.

Ebby pulled the phone away from her ear and frowned at it. Ashleigh continued to talk, but Ebby was no longer listening. How could her oldest friend not see what Ebby was trying to do? Ebby needed to feel invisible, precisely because she didn’t want to be reminded of her past by other people. And she needed Ashleigh to be the kind of friend she used to be, that girl who knew how to be there for Ebby without saying a word. Ebby hasn’t really talked to Ashleigh since.

Doing all right over there? Ashleigh texted the other day.

Doing great , Ebby wrote back. She didn’t ask how Ashleigh was doing. Didn’t say, Let’s do a video call . She tried to focus only on the summer and fall ahead of her.

Hannah has an extra room and an upstairs terrace large enough for eating, and Ebby has nearly three months to figure out what to do next. Three months to stay without a visa, three months to work remotely, three months to visit the bigger cities and chat with people who know nothing about Ebby, her brother, or her failed love life. All Ebby has to do is look after the place and let vacation renters into the guesthouse.

And now, her first guests are arriving. Ebby washes her hands at the garden faucet and walks around the side of the house, careful not to brush up against the bees in the lavender. Careful not to slip on the muddy grass at the edge of the river. Careful not to kick the stones at the corner of the house where last week a viper reared its slender head in annoyance. Be careful, Ebby, be careful, her mother would say. Be careful, her mother was always saying. What would her mother say now, if she knew what Ebby was about to encounter?