Good Dirt

Keeping Time

Keeping Time

2019

A fter ending the video call to her parents, Ebby does something she hasn’t done since arriving in France. She pulls her brother’s clock radio out of her suitcase, attaches an adapter to the electric cord, and plugs it into a wall socket. She is already up and moving about the kitchen the next day when the alarm goes off.

Ebby has used Baz’s alarm clock for nineteen years, often waking up ahead of time to listen for it, as she did for an entire year before he died. Every morning, it was the same music station, same deejay, same fifteen seconds to run down the hallway to her brother’s room. Because Ebby was always out of bed before Baz could reach over to turn off the clock himself.

“All right, all right, I’m up. Go on, get dressed,” Baz would say, still under the covers and looking nowhere near ready to leave.

When the alarm goes off this time, the radio picks up a French station. Up-tempo, some rap. Two deejays, chattering. Then the news. Politics, sports, the heat wave. But Ebby’s mind is already drifting away from the sound and back in time. She hears her brother’s voice, now, and allows herself that little bit of Baz in her head, his sleepy grumble, before easing herself out into a world marked by his absence. Ebby knows what Henry would think if he saw the clock there. Are you still carrying that thing around?

Once, during an argument about her nightmares, Henry pointed to Baz’s clock.

“That,” said Henry, “is proof that your therapist hasn’t done enough for you. I mean, after all this time? Isn’t it a little morbid to be setting an alarm by your brother’s schedule?”

“I don’t set the alarm. I just don’t stop it from going off, that’s all.”

“Oh, come on, Ebby. Don’t get technical on me, now. Admit it.”

“Admit what? That I miss my brother and I like hearing his alarm clock go off every morning? That’s not morbid, Henry. Morbid is the fact that two complete strangers forced their way into my family’s home and shot my fifteen-year-old brother dead. My parents saved so few things from our old house. I’m lucky to have this. So why can’t I keep the fucking alarm clock?”

To Henry’s credit, he said nothing more. He moved toward Ebby and wrapped his arms around her. Eventually, Ebby would realize that Henry was more likely to back down from a confrontation than not, and that this would cause big trouble between them. But at the time, his willingness to do so was a comfort.

“And anyway,” Ebby said into the sleeve of Henry’s shirt. “It’s not the therapist’s job to do the healing for a person. Just facilitate it. Each person is different. Each of us has to follow our own path.” She declined to tell Henry that her personal path had included stopping therapy altogether. She hadn’t been back in months.

Ebby turns off the radio, now, and listens through the window to the morning sounds around her. This is all the therapy she needs. A smattering of birdsong. The distant, gravelly hum of a tractor. Someone’s car door, opening and shutting. A feeling of beginnings. This is what pulls Ebby toward the coatrack, where she puts on a gardening smock and hat, pushes her feet into rubber boots, and steps outside to the smell of wet grass and river muck.

She tries to focus on the sound of the trowel as she shoves it into the earth. Metal cutting into dirt. The rasp of sand grains that Hannah has added to the soil. She wills herself not to think about Henry. But, of course, she is thinking about Henry. She hates to admit how seeing Henry with another woman hurts in a way that she didn’t think possible after nearly nine months.

Nine months. The time most people take to grow a baby.

Ebby could have had a child with Henry by now. Their baby would have been three months old. She never did tell him she was pregnant. No one knew, except the doctors. She’d kept the signs to herself.

“What?” Henry would say when he found Ebby, more than once, smiling at nothing in particular. She’d just shake her head and draw him close to her. She had decided to surprise Henry after their wedding with news of the pregnancy. She would give herself a bit more time to sit with the idea. Leave Henry with less to think about before the big day.

When Henry abandoned her, Ebby wasn’t sure what to do with her secret. During that first week of escape in Maine, she walked and walked alone, lay awake in the middle of the night, thinking. Sat at her laptop, researching her options. Shed tears into her herbal tea. She couldn’t decide what to do, and in not doing anything she was, in effect, making a decision.

The next time she saw her mother, she hugged her tight.

“Baby, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing, Mommy, nothing. Just this,” Ebby said, planting a noisy kiss on her mother’s cheek. Her mother dipped her head to the side and laughed, and Ebby wondered, truly for the first time, how her mother had managed to do it, all these years. She and Ebby’s dad had gotten up every day and gone on with their responsibilities. Mom had helped Ebby get ready for school in the mornings, made her breakfast, and even chewed her out if she’d left her bed unmade.

Ebby’s mom had left her law firm after Baz’s death to be home for Ebby but eventually agreed to go back to handling a couple of its clients. It meant that she might work outside the home, but not like before. She had been there, throughout Ebby’s high school years, to pick lint from Ebby’s sweaters on winter mornings and tell Ebby be careful as she ventured out in the snow. She’d been there to hug Ebby every time she brought home top grades. She had continued to say oh, look! whenever her dad’s face appeared in one of those articles on engineering, or African American innovators, as if they hadn’t all grown accustomed to it by then.

Perhaps the most important thing that Ebby had learned from her mom, and her dad, too, was this: People were wired to persevere. People were wired for hope. People might feel hurt, but they still liked to laugh. They might lose someone dear, but they still wanted to love. Ultimately, the idea of becoming a mother pleased Ebby more than it terrified her.

In the weeks that followed, Ebby wore loose summer dresses to accommodate the swelling of her waist. Tried to eat well. Avoided alcohol. Avoided her parents. Then sat in her bathroom, alone, whimpering, when she saw the blood. She called the doctor, not her mother, when the cramps began. Went to the clinic alone. Sat on the sofa alone and rocked back and forth after the miscarriage. Told her mom, I have the flu, stay away . Her parents would never know. She refused to bring more sadness into their lives.

Ebby listened as her ob-gyn reminded her of how common it was to lose a pregnancy in the first few months. She would have other opportunities, the doctor said with a soft smile. Ebby realized that everything would be easier without having the baby of a man who had disappeared on her. Still, she wept. In the doctor’s office. In her car. In her kitchen.

Tears rolled down her face and dripped into the sink as she washed the dirt off leaves of kale that she would never eat. As she left pots on the stove until her food burned. Early in her pregnancy, Ebby had secretly tracked the days and body changes on her cellphone calendar. She never did stop counting the weeks to when Henry’s baby would have been born.

Ebby reaches for her brother’s clock radio, now, and watches as the display flips from one minute to the next. She smiles at the thought of Baz’s soupy morning voice. Then she watches the display for one more minute. She is no stranger to keeping time by what she has lost.