Axis of Aaron (19 page)

“You think I know how to rewire an outlet?”
 

“Apparently not, since you think it needs to be ‘rewired.’ I’m sure it’s just the outlet itself. We’ll just swap it for a new one. I may even have a spare. It’s fine; I know what I’m doing. Turn off the breaker, take this one out, put a new one in. That may keep it from sparking at us anymore. I’d just tighten the screws on this one, but it looks like Dad was shoving toast into it or something, so I say we pitch it.” She jiggled the coffeemaker cord. The outlet didn’t spit sparks, but it did look filthy and rusted where metal protruded. Ebon knew enough about outlets to know it was grounded and hence more or less safe, but he suspected that the ground wire could be loose too.
 

“Then we consolidate,” Ebon suggested. “Try to focus on one room.”
 

“If you insist.”
 

“I do. I also insist on working the whole fucking day, doing your work for you.”
 

“Well, good.” Aimee took her half of the plated omelet from Ebon’s hand, then pulled two forks from a drawer and sat. “I can accommodate that request.”
 

She took a few bites. Ebon slid into his chair and sat beside her. He couldn’t sit opposite because there was a circular saw and a heavy-duty jigsaw on the table’s far side. Knowing Aimee, one or both were likely plugged in.
 

She looked over. “What else, Ebon?”
 

Ebon looked over, his mouth full of eggs. “Mmf?”

“What
else
do you want to do today?” She raised an eyebrow. “Or maybe more pointedly, what
aren’t
you going to do?”

“Hrmm-mm.”

“That’s your answer every day.”

Ebon swallowed. “There’s no way I’ve said that every day. For one, this is the first day I’ve made eggs.”
 

“When are you going to relax?”
 

“I don’t want to relax. I want to work. We talked about this.”
 

“Yes, we talked about it last week. But this is
this
week. I know it’s on your mind. We had a deal. You help me; I help you.”
 

“You are helping me. By keeping my hands busy.”
 

“That’s nice of you, but it’s not true. So fess up, Ebon.”
 

Ebon looked over, meeting Aimee’s strong light-green eyes. For a moment they were two kids again, on the sand, arguing over a sandcastle. She’d liked him because he was passive and naive, and because she’d been able to boss him around. They’d matured and become adults, but there were ways in which that had never changed.
 

“I don’t know. I don’t really want to talk about it.” Ebon’s eyes were back to his plate, but hers were still on him.
 

“It was her stuff,” said Aimee. “You know that, right?”
 

“What was her stuff?”
 

“Every person needs to Own Her Shit and take responsibility, not slough it off on someone else. She cheated because of something inside her. It didn’t have anything to do with you.”
 

That was only partially true. Holly had cheated because she couldn’t sit still, both literally and in life. Ebon had learned a lot about his longtime girlfriend and short-time wife as he’d guiltily read her journal in secret these past few weeks. The truth he’d found in those pages (the ones she’d actually written on anyway) had shocked him until he’d realized it shouldn’t surprise him at all. Holly had always been no more and no less than herself — a girl that, if Ebon was honest, he had to admit he’d known all too well.
 

There had been Mark, of course, but Mark hadn’t been the first man she’d slept with even inside their six-month marriage. She hadn’t written as much, but Ebon was sure he’d simply bored her in bed. She’d continued to love him, but love and sex had always been separate things for Holly. Ebon had wanted to settle down, but he’d never wanted to participate in any of Holly’s proposed extracurriculars: fucking in public bathrooms, fucking in elevators, fucking in parked cars or trying to fuck in moving ones. But even if he had, Ebon would always be Ebon. And although “Ebon as he was” had remained dear to Holly, he couldn’t help being only one man.
No
single man could ever satisfy an adrenaline seeker like Holly.
 

But Aimee was right; that was all Holly’s stuff. Holly had a lot of stuff, and not all of it had to do with sex. As it turned out, she’d also shoplifted. She had justifications for both transgressions, and homespun remedies to justify her behavior. Holly believed herself to be a good girl, so she saved what she stole for thrills and, every few months donated it all to the Salvation Army. As to infidelity, her journal’s pages read as if she found nothing wrong with it — nothing Ebon would even take issue with if he’d known. She kept her heart true to her boyfriend and husband while using her body with multiple partners, not much different from playing racquetball against several regular opponents. She even used protection as a justification: If the men wore condoms (which Ebon didn’t), they weren’t technically even inside her. She believed all of it too; she had to believe it if she were to look herself in the mirror each morning. Holly had been a master of self-deception. She’d always told Ebon that she had no filter, but that wasn’t true. She just had a very specific kind of filter: one that sifted out anything that contradicted her justifications, that might suggest she was doing something wrong.
 

Ebon said, “I know.”

“Do you?” said Aimee. “Because when I went to therapy, that’s one of the things I had the hardest time understanding. What my dad did was about
him
, not me. He loved me with all his heart, and probably loved parts of you too. But he wasn’t just my dad, he was also plain old Richard Frey, and
Richard
was his own man outside of the father I knew. He had his own demons. It’s why he drank — and
my
demons were part of the reason I pretended I didn’t know about it even at the very end.
 

“When I was a kid, I felt my mother’s death in this deep way that scabbed over in time, but it was still in me like a tumor, shaping who I became. But for Dad? Mom was his
wife
. She was his
partner
. I had no concept of that at the time, and still have a hard time seeing it — truly
seeing it
— even now: There was a time when it was just the two of them, before Alan and I were born. When Mom died, I took it hard and assumed it was the same for Dad. But I was narrow-minded and naive; the truth was he was taking it in a way I didn’t —
couldn’t
— understand. Her death changed him like it changed me. And it changed how we were together. He simultaneously loved me and was terrified for me — and terrified of losing me like he’d lost her. Love caused him to do all the things he did and to be how he was. It took me years to learn to hate some things about my father, while still being able to see the love behind them.”

“You’re saying I should feel loved by Holly.”

“I’m not saying you should feel anything. I’m making a suggestion.”
 

“Hmm.”
 

“And it’s not your fault, Ebon.” Aimee’s eyes were again serious, as if reaching a key point. “You need to get that.”
 

“I get that.”
 

“I realized I felt responsible for Dad because I left to live across town when I was eighteen. ‘Left him to drink himself to death,’ was how it felt. But that was
his
stuff, not mine.”
 

“His stuff.”

“So just because you weren’t with Holly when she died, that doesn’t mean … ”
 

“I really don’t want to talk about it.” Ebon put his hand on the table, near hers, to soften the words. “Just … not yet, okay?”
 

“Sure. But whenever you want to.
If
you want to.”
 

“Thanks.”

She looked down at her plate, neither meeting his gaze nor avoiding it. She really was just letting it go, moving on, and thinking about renovation. Ebon had never been able to do that. When he and Holly had had problems — the kind that came out into the open, rather than festering under the skin like a wound — Ebon had always wanted to dissect and discuss them for hours. To him, it was about facing issues and trying to puzzle out a workable solution, but Holly had seen it as beating a dead horse. She had no filter; she was a fun party girl; she lived in the now rather than in the past or the imagined future. She’d always wanted to let things go and
not
discuss them to death, but whenever that happened Ebon grew uneasy and vaguely angry at her — an excuse of wanting to “confront problems instead of turning away from them” that, if he was honest, was more passive-aggressive than proactive. It was probably why she’d kept so many secrets from him. Maybe Holly had been right after all. Just look at where holding onto the past had got him so far.
 

Ebon watched Aimee, wondering if he’d taken a wrong turn. The thought felt like pooling acid. He’d loved Holly more than anyone, and thinking about Aimee now felt like betraying the dead. But still, it had a certain merit. What if those summers had never ended? What if Ebon had come back to Aaron all that time ago, and what had almost been between them had been allowed to bloom? How would life have been different?

Or … could it
still
be different? He’d closed the loop. All things came back around if you were patient enough.

“Hey, Aim.”
 

She looked up, her messy hair practically in her food.
 

“What made you stop me, that day on the beach?”
 

She shook her head.
 

“The day we met. I wasn’t looking to hang out with you and build sandcastles. I just wanted to go to the carnival. I didn’t ask for your opinion, yet somehow you forced it on me anyway.”
 

Aimee shrugged, her mouth full of eggs.
 

“You do that,” he said.
 

“I do?”
 

“Yes. For instance, why do I know your thoughts about my furniture? You’ve never even been to my apartment.”

“You just seem like you’d buy a lot of mass-produced, overly expensive crap because someone told you it’d make your place look more impressive.”
 

“See? And yet you’ve never seen it.”
 

“But I’m right, aren’t I?”

“I don’t know. I have some stuff from IKEA. It’s modestly priced.”

“Mass-produced.”
 

Ebon swallowed a forkful of food, then said, “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You’ve got all sorts of opinions. So on that day, did you just kind of decide I was some dumb kid looking to ride the Danger Wheel and maybe the old carousel, but then you figured that was wrong of me, and so you …”
 

“You were way too old for the carousel.”
 

“The carousel is a historical landmark!” Ebon blurted. But then, recalling what Captain Jack had told him on the boat ride in, bittersweet nostalgia hit him like a wave and he added, “Or it
used to be
anyway.”
 

“‘Used to be’?”
 

“Until they got rid of it.”
 

“They never got rid of the carousel.” Aimee stood to pour herself coffee. “Why would they do that? It’s a historical landmark.”
 

“I meant when they got rid of Aaron’s Party. As a whole.”

Aimee gave Ebon an amused smile.
 

“What?”

“Aaron’s Party isn’t gone, Ebon,” she said. “It’s still there on the pier, right where we left it.”

CHAPTER TEN

Double Exposure

BUT THAT WAS ABSURD. OF COURSE Aaron’s Party was gone.
 

Ebon was walking down the beach, his feet bare in the still-warm September sand, waves crashing at his left side. The air was warming as he’d suspected it would, and though he’d left the house in a long-sleeve shirt, he was already pushing those sleeves up, feeling the ocean’s spray on his salt-kissed skin.

Aimee was still back at the cottage. Ebon had repeated what Captain Jack had told him, and she’d laughed and said, “Well, then I take it back. If the Gorton’s Fisherman said it, it must be true.”
 

“He said that nobody went anymore, so … ”
 

“It’s
closed
,” she said, nodding, “but it’s not
gone
. You either heard him wrong, or he was drunk. Or both. Probably both.”
 

“But I … ”
 

“Are you really arguing with me about this?”
 

“When I went to the dump, I stopped at Redding Dock. I looked
right at
the pier and saw that it was empty. I
saw
it.”
 

“It wouldn’t even make sense to dismantle it, Ebon. Seriously. Think about it. We’re on an island. They’re going to take all those big rides apart bolt by bolt, truck them over to the ferry, and pay to get rid of them? Does that sound like something you do when your amusement park is already bleeding you dry?”