Page 85 of Good Dirt

Hide-and-Seek

E bby watches a couple walking along the beach. Jeans cuffs rolled up. Zigzagging, laughing, holding hands. Young women who might be adolescents still. Nuzzling like puppies. One of them has dyed her hair a cerulean blue. That’s a tough color to pull off on dark hair like her own, Ebby thinks. Maybe impossible? Still, Ebby makes a mental note. Cerulean. Like a rich daytime sky. Free of mist. Free of pollution. Full of possibility.

Ebby thinks of the Swiss chemist who developed the color from cobalt stannate. Playing with chemicals to re-create a natural atmospheric phenomenon. The irony of it. She chuckles to herself, but soon, she turns pensive. Ebby is thinking about how to talk to her parents. About her doubts, her fear, her guilt. About the fact that she has never told them everything about the day Baz was killed. How she’d been terrified to say how much she’d witnessed.

At the start of their game of hide-and-seek, Ebby had taken off her sandals and scurried along the floor, her bare feet clammy against the cool wood. Baz was still downstairs, but she knew that at any moment, he would stomp upstairs and start calling for her, checking closets, peeking under her parents’ bed, because that year Ebby was still small enough to squeeze under there. But Ebby, though only ten, was old enough to figure out that she needed to do something different, something unexpected, to elude her brother’s search for as long as possible.

Her father had been fond of saying that their entire family had been built on people who had done the surprising thing. People who had been underestimated. Well, Ebby was a Freeman, wasn’t she? She was the daughter of a Bliss, too. Ebby had just reached the farthest point on the upper floor, her parents’ bedroom suite, when she decided to double back and go in the opposite direction.

Ebby went back toward the staircase to find a place just beyond that to hide. Baz would underestimate her. Baz would walk right past her hiding place and never think to look for her so soon. She smiled to herself with satisfaction as she pulled open the upstairs broom closet.

Ebby didn’t hear the front door of the house open. When you lived in a house like theirs, it was entirely possible for people to enter and exit the house without being heard from upstairs. It was possible for people to be in the kitchen cooking or making noise with silverware and plates at the dining table and not be heard from above. But there was a funny point on the ground floor, in the hallway, near the entrance to the study, where the sound traveled up in just such a way that you could hear every word. Acoustics, her dad had explained.

Acoustics.

This was the part that Ebby had been too afraid to tell the police or her parents. That she’d heard a man talking in the hallway. He’d sounded surprised. He’d said a bad word. Her mother would have said young man! in a threatening tone if she’d ever heard Baz say such a thing. Then Ebby heard a short, soft sound from Baz, not really a word. She crept out of the closet and leaned over the banister to look down. She had been thinking to run downstairs, but what she saw and heard made her freeze.

“Where is it?” a man with a ski mask was saying. Ebby saw a gun, and the gun was pointed at her brother’s face as he walked backward into the study with two men following him. They were being robbed! Ebby knew what she should do, she should call Emergency, the way her parents had taught her. She only had to run for the phone in her parents’ room. She was barefoot. They wouldn’t hear her. She only had to run. But Ebby was so scared she couldn’t move. Not even Henry knew this part. No one knew that on that day, the day her brother was shot, Ebby froze instead of calling the police.

Then she heard the jar fall.