Axis of Aaron (16 page)

“Oh. Of course. Let’s have coffee.”
 

“I’m screwing with you, Ebon. Go sleep if you want to sleep.”
 

“Maybe I’ll just change my clothes and splash some water on my face.”
 

“Whatever blows your hair back.” Aimee returned to the coffee pot and pressed a button to pour herself a cup. The old coffee pot had become a brand-new Keurig, near a freshly installed window box in front of a custom tile backsplash. Looking up, Ebon also saw a pair of skylights that hadn’t been there before. They were long and boxed, with the glass a few feet above the kitchen ceiling. The skylights weren’t far enough forward to interrupt his room above like the fume hood, but constructing them couldn’t have been easy. Or fast. Or possible in eight weeks.
 

Ebon stood, trying to breathe deeply. He wanted to say something — or maybe scream — but what good would it do? None of this was strange to Aimee.
He
was the faulty one.
He
was the one who’d hooked up with a strange woman and helped remodel (
reinvent
) a house without remembering a single hammered nail.

He walked to the kitchen’s original staircase, noting with a glance that Aimee had painstakingly preserved the carved-in dates left by her grandparents when they’d been building the place. He paused with his hand on the doorframe, turned to his oldest friend, and said, “Aimee?”
 

She looked over, dirty-blonde hair whipping around in a knot.
 

“How has it seemed, since I’ve been here? Weird? Normal?” He swallowed. “Surreal and supernatural?”
 

“It’s been great.” Aimee smiled a large white smile, her crooked tooth quirky in her mouth but somehow not marring her beauty — to Ebon, at least. She hated that tooth, but her hatred was more apathetic than vain. She had a no-win situation on her hands, because restoration of a snaggletooth would fly in the face of her oft-stated policy of rarely (if ever) giving a shit. Or a S-H-I-T.

“Oh,” he said. It wasn’t exactly the kind of answer Ebon had been hoping for.
 

“How has it been for you?” she said. “Is it still strange? It felt to me like you thought it was strange when you arrived. I know we’d been talking online forever, but … you know … being under the same roof again.” She looked up, then half laughed. “Well, not
again
. We’d never spent a night together before you came back.”
 

The simple sentence, even amid the unreality, hurt Ebon’s heart. She’d said “spent a night together” innocently and meant it literally, but what she’d said was true on all levels. They never
had
spent a night together … and not, all those years ago, for lack of trying.
 

“It’s been … different,” he said, knowing it to be a half answer.

“But you’re feeling better? Healing your troubled past, and all that?”
 

No.
 

“Sure,” he said.
 

Aimee came closer, then reached out and put a hand over his as it lay flat on the wood. He could smell beach on her, despite the fact that neither of them could have been doing much ocean play as the weather grew colder. They’d met over a sandcastle, but that was so long ago. Things had been simpler then.
 

“I wish you’d talk to me about it.”
 

“I’m not ready,” Ebon said. It just came out.
 

“It’s been almost six months.”
 

“Two
months.”
 

“I meant since she … since the accident.”
 

“Oh,” he said. But Aimee was wrong anyway. For Ebon, it had only been four months because he’d skipped the last two. And really, what should they be counting backwards from? From the day Holly died? From the day he first suspected her cheating — this final instance anyway? From the day he’d got his confirmation, purging his place of Holly’s belongings and discovering her journal and the hidden folders on her computer? She’d always been a party girl, and he’d always loved her. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that even after Ebon had settled into domesticity, the party would have kept going for Holly. She liked thrills (he knew she sometimes shoplifted to get those thrills), and would never stop needing them. Well … not until six months ago anyway.
 

“I feel like you’re holding it all in. It can’t be good for you, Ebon.”
 

“You always said I was quiet.”
 

“Well, sometimes maybe you shouldn’t be.”
 

Ebon wondered at his ghost-self … the version of Ebon that, from Aimee’s perspective, must have puttered along behind her over the past two months, doing small tasks like adding extra wings onto her father’s quaint beach cottage.
 

His eyes peeked up the staircase. Leaning forward, he could see that it was different up there — a splash of sunlight from a direction where there should be only wall. It looked as if the hallway above must now fork in a new direction, as if the entire second story had been reworked and expanded. That ghost-Ebon had done some of that work, despite current Ebon barely having the know-how to crank a wrench in the right direction. Was he, as he existed right now, related to that phantom? And if he were, what had it/he thought while it/he had been working? Had he thought of Holly? Had he been bottling it all inside, letting it fester? Aimee was right; it
couldn’t
be good for him. But it still wasn’t enough to explain a structural overhaul, given that neither of them were professionals, had a crew, or had access to a time machine.
 

“Why did you come here, Ebon?”
 
she asked, watching him.

“To reset. To forget.”
 

“Why else?”
 

He looked down at her hand atop his, gripping the doorframe. He blinked. For a second, both hands appeared smaller, less scarred by life. Then he blinked again, and they became normal adult hands, tired from a lost decade of holding burdens.

“I wanted you to come here so I could help you,” she said when he didn’t answer. “But that only works if you let me.”
 

“I don’t need help.” Boy, was
that
a lie.
 

“Strong and silent,” she said, smiling, now lightening her grip, looking down, running her fingers over the back of his hand with a feather touch. “Just like the boy I used to know. Except back then you always let me be in charge. I needed it, I guess. For that first year, it’s probably why I liked you best: you gave me someone I could actually feel bigger than.”
 

“Thanks.”
 

“That changed. Obviously.”
 

Her fingers, light on his hand.
 

“If it weren’t for my dad,” she continued, “things might have turned out differently for both of us.”
 

It was true. They might have become something. They would certainly have kept in closer touch, instead of Ebon being afraid to return Aimee’s letters lest they fall into the wrong hands. Eventually he’d let their communication break like an ornament dropped from a Christmas tree. He might have returned to Aaron in his sixteenth year, his seventeenth, his eighteenth. He might have chosen a different college, majored in something unimaginable. Maybe he’d have become an architect, as she’d often supposed. He never would have met Holly, nor lost her. Never would have been crushed to a thimble’s size and reminded of his banality. Holly had always wanted excitement, Aimee had lived her entire life on a tiny island, surrounded by ocean and sameness. Aimee didn’t need to move her feet because she traveled in her art. It was enough to seek her mother’s spirit through ephemeral means, rather than feeling Holly’s brand of wanderlust of thought and deed.
 

“Maybe,” said Ebon.
 

“You can talk to me. I want you to.”
 

“Okay.”

“Later,” she said. “Promise?”
 

Ebon looked up. Her eyes were on his, uncharacteristically serious. Aimee always flitted from place to place, forever in motion and typically clumsy on account of moving too fast. To see her so still was disarming. She was right; things might have turned out differently for them. Maybe now, they would.
 

“Promise,” Ebon agreed.
 

She gripped his hand briefly and smiled, then moved back to the new kitchen island, to her orange juice.
 

Ebon walked up the narrow, steep staircase toward his bedroom, noticing with a renewed sense of unsettling unreality that it wasn’t nearly as narrow or steep as it used to be. He wasn’t sure how that was possible. Without the entire second story somehow shifting backward, there was simply no room. He could see the same hallway above that he’d seen from the doorway below, the same strange splash of light indicating a new room (or at least window), as if a new section had been added. But the bathroom (new tiles, painted) was still across from him, and the same hallway walls (re-plastered, hung with several of Aimee’s paintings he hadn’t seen before) were in place. He could even see more carved dates repeated in the wood of the bathroom doorframe. So how could the staircase leading up to it have added more run to each step’s rise? How could the whole thing be longer, grander, and safer … yet still meet the same second story in the same place?
 

He emerged into the hallway, pausing to inspect one of the new paintings. It was Aimee’s, without question; he knew her unique style and had been badgering her for years about selling them — possibly online, as she’d once predicted, years ahead of her time. The painting was of a room being repaired by a workman wielding a spackling trowel while a beautiful island vista peeked through an open window. Aimee’s style was abstract, but it was clear that the workman was Ebon. So she’d painted it recently, along with the rest of the entire, thematically linked row of five.
 

He peeked into Aimee’s bedroom. There was a huge picture window right where they’d imagined someday adding one (apparently handling that small task had been no big deal), and the screen door to nowhere had been replaced with a glass slider. Beyond the slider and picture window was an expansive blonde-wood porch.
 

The room had been completely remodeled: hardwood laid, rugs in place, molding added, fresh paint applied and still fragrant in the air. Ebon’s eyes strayed toward the new bed. It was huge, with four posts at the corners and a canopy overhead. It should have seemed cramped in the small room, but looking up Ebon realized that it didn’t seem cramped at all because the ceiling was now vaulted, three skylights pocking the peaked ceiling. The huge bed looked soft and comfortable. Looking at it, he found himself thinking of the light brush of Aimee’s hand on his, downstairs. He found himself thinking of the summer of his fifteenth year, the summer of Aimee’s seventeenth. Maybe he could let his past go after all. Maybe he could fold the worn fabric of his recent years back, then stitch past to present as if there had never been errant threads in between.
 

With a nostalgic, bittersweet sigh, Ebon turned away from Aimee’s new bedroom. He passed the bathroom (the gravity toilet had been replaced by a sturdy porcelain unit and — of all things — a bidet) and peeked into the bunk room on the hallway’s other end. It was no longer a bunk room. Now there was just one bed, a queen, in the middle of a room that had been rendered unrecognizable beyond having the same approximate size.
 

Turning again, Ebon’s attention fell toward the spot opposite the bathroom where there used to be a storage area under the roof’s slant. But instead of a small storage door and a blank wall, he found himself facing an open room without a door, its center awash with sun, its double-wide entrance broad and cheery. The room was easily as large as the master bedroom, maybe larger. It had windows on three walls. Apparently it jutted far enough from the adjacent rooms to act as a giant dormer, unencumbered by the original cottage. The walls were white and clean, but the floor and every surface was an unholy mess — not of construction or supplies, but of paper and clutter.
 

Aimee had somehow moved her art studio upstairs.
 

Feeling disembodied, Ebon walked into the room. He wasn’t intruding; the lack of a door invited passerby to enter and soak up some culture. She had paintings on two different easels, both characteristically unfinished with mixed paints still slopped on nearby glass countertops, as if she’d become bored or distracted midflurry. In one corner was some sort of a clay sculpture. She’d draped it with a clear trash bag, probably to keep it from drying out between sessions, but telltale cracks where it had already desiccated told Ebon that it had been neglected for weeks.

One of her guitars had been tossed onto a settee. Ebon approached and found handwritten sheet music tossed about like litter, as if Aimee were working on several new compositions at once. He couldn’t read music, but there was a laptop nearby hooked to a small Xenyx mixer and a microphone. The machine was on and asleep, possibly idling forgotten for a month. Ebon touched the thing to wake it and saw that Aimee had a program open and waveforms on the screen. Music in progress. Ebon pressed play and listened. She’d recorded her music inexpertly, but what he heard was haunting and beautiful. Aimee had always liked music and was as good at guitar and composition as she was crap at writing lyrics. Everything he saw (a dozen or more tracks in a collection) seemed to be instrumental.