Rebuilding
Rebuilding
B ack at the cottage, Ebby watches the afternoon light deepen to gold and dreads the approach of another night of troubled sleep. She keeps being pulled back to the past, try as she might to cancel it out. She needs to find a better way to live with herself. To rebuild her relationship with her family’s history. There is more to her personal story than hurt. She reaches into her tote bag and takes out a pencil and the lined notebook that she uses as a journal. She curls her legs up onto the sofa. She knows what to do. She has always known, hasn’tshe?
She feels her eyes grow wet as she writes.
Dad has been asking me, for years, to write down the jar stories. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I just didn’t feel like doing it. He used to tell me and Baz that Old Mo was a reminder that life could bring good things, even in the worst of times. The fact that the jar had lasted as long as it had was like a promise for the future. Then my brother died, and it felt like that promise had been turned on its head. But lately, I’ve been hearing the jar stories in my mind. And thinking. Maybe it’s time I stopped trying to close them out.
Ebby stops scribbling. She hears something that pulls her to her feet and draws her toward Hannah’s office. This is her favorite room, the one with the fireplace and the kind of view that compels you to stop whatever you’re doing and stare out the window for minutes at a time.
Yo-ho-ho!
She hears it again. But where? Ah, there it is. An orangey-brown bird with its unmistakable black-and-white-striped wings and tail feathers. It stops, ruffles its black-tipped crown, then pulls it back down against its head and proceeds to stab its long beak into the grass. That goofy, beautiful little creature reminds her of how easy it can be to love life.
She edited something on birds, not too long ago, and there was something about the hoopoe. Upupa epops . Found in Africa, Asia, and Europe. The paper told how these birds had been seen farther north than usual. They had overshot their regular migration path and had lingered, confused, perhaps, by the changing climate. This struck her at the time. How a creature could be in the wrong place but feel all right anyway, and so manage to get by for a while. She thinks of herself, here in France. Is she like those birds? Has she been blown off course? Or is this the path she’s meant to follow?
Her work as an editor can be torturous, at times. Many capable researchers are wobbly writers. She’s offered a couple of workshops to help people strengthen their academic writing skills, and now her clients are asking for more of the same. But Ebby is not a born teacher. What Ebby really wants, what she needs, is to work on other kinds of writing. Not necessarily educational or technical. Something more story based.
Hannah says she knows people with literary projects that would be perfect for Ebby.
“Think about it,” Hannah says. But Ebby’s already given it some thought. She just hasn’t said. She doesn’t want to edit someone else’s literary work. She wants to write her own. Create her own body of writing. Now she sees the jar stories could be part of that. Strange to think of it, but Henry once said the very same thing.
“It could be good for you,” he said. “To go all the way back to what made you love that jar in the first place.”
As if summoned by her thoughts, there he is.
Henry.
Knocking on the kitchen door.
Ebby knows that sound. The particular weight of his hand on the wood. His knuckles, squarish and pale. She doesn’t need to see him to know who it is. This is the man she nearly married.