Good Dirt

Ebby

Ebby

2019

B reakfast in the village feels like an act of defiance to Ebby. To sit outside, in public, and breathe in the absence of attention. To feel the sun on her arms before it gets too warm. To note the sound of an old wooden shop door being unlocked. To listen to the world while hiding in plain sight.

Ebby hears footsteps approaching from the street and looks up to see a man, maybe a bit older than she, glance her way as he walks by. A flash of bright eyes under a mop of dark hair. But he is not imposing. Not intrusive. She revels in the idea of it. That a man might look at her, just to look, without seeing Ebony Freeman. It’s rare for her. She likes that he looks at her, then looks away. To be admired, just because, but without pressure.

Sitting there, Ebby wonders if this could be part of the answer to her problems. To stay away from home. Maybe not forever, but for more than just a few months. She would be leaving behind much of what has made her feel exposed. But she’d also be distancing herself from everything that has made her feel loved. Is there a place where she can feel less stress without being isolated? She had thought this village could be that place, with Hannah spending part of her time here. Until Henry showed up.

A bee buzzes near Ebby’s cheek. She keeps perfectly still. Breathes slowly and quietly. She doesn’t want to agitate the bee. She knows that trying to back away could be a mistake. She hears her mom’s voice. Be careful, Ebby. Be careful. If Ebby simply stays put, if she allows herself to be part of the bee’s world, she should be fine.

Hannah would love it if Ebby decided to extend her stay. And Ebby needs to be around more people like Hannah. Distanced as Hannah had been from Ebby’s reality back home, and uninterested as she had been in certain magazines, programs, and websites, she hadn’t come into their working relationship with a preconceived image of Ebony Freeman. It seemed that Hannah had been interested in Ebby only as a colleague and, later, as a friend. Not as someone marked by a family tragedy.

Then Ebby met Henry and felt, for the first time, that the same thing might be possible in love.

Henry, with that way he had of pulling her under his arm. Henry, with the way he lowered his head to hers. Henry, scuffing his shoes along the sand and complaining every time he trailed grains into the car. As if the man hadn’t been raised on the Connecticut coast. As if he didn’t drive a Range Rover. What was the point of a car like that, Ebby reasoned, if not for sand and mud?

“Why don’t you just take off your shoes, if you don’t want sand in the car?” Ebby asked him the last time they took a wintertime drive together down the coast.

“You ask me that every time,” Henry said. “The sand is cold, Ebby. It’s winter . I can’t believe you’re walking barefoot.”

“It’s not like walking on pavement. The sand has a different composition.”

“You’re just pretending the sand isn’t cold to prove a point. It’s like that nasty seaweed you insist on eating because it’s supposed to be healthy.”

“I am not the only person who eats dulse. People in Canada eat it. People in Washington eat it.”

“It’s algae, okay? It’s fishy.”

“You eat fish, don’t you?”

“Fish are fish. Fish are supposed to be fishy. But fishy vegetables? No, thank you.”

“You eat sushi, don’t you?”

“Sushi is fish.”

This part of every argument with Henry always cracked her up. How Henry, with all his intelligence, education, and professional experience, was, ultimately, an innocent. He never noticed how Ebby’s voice slowed down as she came in for the kill. Never saw the logic of it circling his head like a lasso, waving through the air, then dropping around his shoulders before being pulled tight.

“Babe, sushi can be wrapped in seaweed.” She nudged him with her shoulder as she said, “A fishy vegetable. Hah!”

The thing about Henry was, he was so good-natured, he’d just make a face in a situation like that one, then laugh it off. He would admit defeat. It wasn’t easy to get on his nerves. Henry, for Ebby, had represented a world of possibility. The way he simply listened and nodded the first time Ebony talked to him about Baz. The way he made her stomach flip, just by breathing against her face. The way he made Ebby feel embraced. Up to a point. Until she sensed that the emotional injuries with which she still lived were beginning to weigh on him.

“You can’t go on this way for the rest of your life,” Henry said one morning, after a particularly rough night. “You need to talk to your therapist about this.”

“At what point are you supposed to stop reacting to trauma?” Ebby had asked one day, when she was still seeing a therapist. “At what point are you supposed to stop thinking about it?”

“It’s normal to think about your brother and his death,” said the therapist. “This was a huge thing in your life. Your challenge is not to erase all memory of what happened, but to find a way to live with it.” But Ebby, after years of this, was tired. Tired of being the survivor.

The man who was walking across the café patio a minute before has taken a seat at the far edge of the group of tables. He looks at her and nods slightly. She looks down, shyly, but breathes in the pleasure of it. He’s a good-looking guy. This feeling, a kind of buzz, is the feeling she’s been trying to get back to since her time with Henry. Henry had noticed her, liked her, wanted her, Ebby. Not Ebony Freeman.

Until he no longer did.

Every once in a while, some other man has looked at Ebby in the way that this French guy is looking at her now. His expression has grown hopeful. Every once in a while, she has held someone’s gaze and smiled slightly, opening the door to something more. Sometimes, she has allowed herself to be touched by someone who seemed to want only that. Even if only for a night. Usually, only for a night.

“Bonjour, Aline,” the man says as the waitress approaches him. The sound of his voice makes Ebby tip her head. What is that sound? It’s as if the man is humming the waitress’s name.

“Bonjour, Robert!” says Aline, who juts her chin out toward the man before stopping at Ebby’s table.

Row-BEHR! Ebby thinks. Could this be the famous Robert of the phone calls she keeps getting? Just last night, the phone rang again as she was trying to figure out what to do about Henry’s surprise appearance.

“Yes?” she had said, a bit too roughly, perhaps. The person on the other end of the line hesitated, then cleared his throat. That was all Ebby needed to hear to know who it was. That was how often he’d called.

“Robert?” the caller asked.

“No, there is no Row-BEHR here.”

“Robert isn’t there?”

“No, Robert is not here, monsieur. What is your name?”

“Gregoire. Where is Robert?”

“I don’t know, Monsieur Gregoire.”

“When is he coming back?”

“I don’t know. He does not live here,” Ebby said.

“ Zut, ” the man said. “ Mais …”

Ebby was thinking she should just pull the cable that connected the phone base to the wall. No one else used this number anyway. They would call the smartphone that Hannah had left for her. But the man had a slight crack in his voice that made her think of her gramps. What if this were her own grandfather, several years older and sitting in a room on his own? Ebby felt a smile creep across her face at the thought of Grandpa Freeman. And just like that, she found herself talking to him, in a softer voice this time.

“And this Robert? C’est ton fils? ”

Robert, apparently, was not Monsieur Gregoire’s son but his grandson. Ebby tried to find out more about M. Gregoire, why he was calling this number, and where he was calling from, but he ignored her questions and launched into a long spiel about his day. Ebby put the telephone receiver on the speakerphone setting and laid it on the kitchen table. She let the man yammer on for a minute while she poured hot water from the kettle over fresh mint leaves. She cut a slice of lemon, twisted open a jar of honey, and he was still talking. She wondered, Was someone taking care of M. Gregoire? Was it Robert? And where, indeed, was Robert?

When M. Gregoire suddenly stopped speaking, she put the phone to her ear, but her mystery caller had hung up.

Ebby squints now in the direction of the man at the café, as if she might recognize him as the Robert in question. There must be a million men in France with that name. But how many of them live in this village?

“Another coffee?” Aline says in English.

Aline is used to Ebby by now. Clad in her usual white T-shirt and black apron, she stands there, waiting, with an open face. Ebby can tell from Aline’s expression that she knows nothing about Ebby’s past, only her present. She knows only that the américaine usually orders a second cup of café with lots of milk. That instead of the brioche that she ordered the first time, Ebby has become hooked on la tartine, a chunk of baguette with butter and jam, the one made from strawberries grown on the ?le de Ré. That although Ebby has parked the car nearby, having errands to run, she is likely to linger.

This is all Aline knows about Ebby, and Ebby loves that.

“ D’accord, ” Ebby says, “ un autre café .” And from the soft upturn of Aline’s mouth, Ebby senses that her accent still amuses the waitress.

When the bread arrives, still warm in the middle, Ebby breathes in deeply and focuses on the scent of the baguette as it absorbs the butter. The weight of the jam as she spoons it onto the bread. The sound of two people at the other end of the place greeting each other with soft laughter before sitting down, falling silent, and knitting their brows over a chessboard. The little ways Ebby has learned to stay in the moment, over the years. To allow herself the joy of being alive, until the edges of her life grow raw again.

Hold the moment, she tells herself.

As Ebby takes another sip of her café, she looks up and sees Robert looking her way again. She meets the man’s gaze and nods a greeting.

He smiles.

She smiles back.

Ebby pulls at a cherry-colored twist of her hair, then lets it spring back into place. Carpe diem, Ebby thinks when Robert stands up and walks toward her table.