Axis of Aaron (3 page)

“Come on.” She took his hand. Then, rather than simply leading him to the staircase, she practically dragged him.
 

The stairs, as Ebon climbed behind Aimee, held firm despite the tenuous way they seemed to cling to the rock. A few minutes later they were at the top, at the pair of white newel posts Ebon always saw in his mind when he thought of this place. Their destination was a quarter mile down the hill on the opposite side, where the shoreline hooked around and returned them to sea level. He saw the familiar beach before he saw the cottage. But before Richard’s place came into view, Aimee stopped, turned, and took both of his hands in hers.
 

“I’m glad you’re here, Ebon. I missed you.”
 

“I missed you too, Aimee.”
 

“And I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry about Holly.”

“It’s okay.”

“But I know you need a friend. And I’m glad I can be that friend for you.”
 

He nodded, his words uncertain.
 

Then she turned, and they walked the final bit hand in hand. As they rounded the last dune, they found themselves facing her father’s house: their renovation project until it was finished, or Ebon felt himself healed.
 

“Welcome home, Ebon,” she said.

The last time he’d seen the cottage, it had been bright and beachy, covered in gray shake cedar shingles. Richard’s cottage had always been Ebon’s embodiment of summer, its white-paned windows opened to the soft, sighing breeze. When she’d shown him photos on LiveLyfe (“so you know what you’re getting yourself into”), it had looked slightly dingy, a few shutters in disrepair and the interior somewhat pocked by unattended wear.
 

But as he stood beside Aimee on the beach, the place from Ebon’s distant memory was nothing like what she’d shown him in any photo. Its insides were visible through the windows, gutted and hanging with gouged plaster, unrecognizable.

CHAPTER TWO

A Moment of Vertigo
 

EBON WASN’T SURE IF THE HOME’S decay was pleasing or not. On one hand, its extremity was jarring and made him feel as if he’d lost his center. But on the other hand, his memories of Aaron had been forcibly soured the last time he’d seen this place, and a part of him couldn’t help but feel that the old beach house had got exactly what it deserved.
 

“I was surprised by how much he let it go,” said Aimee, walking from the kitchen into the living room. The familiar old furniture looked like it’d been shredded by animals — but not cats and dogs; more like wolverines and tigers. The bricks lining the fireplace, which Ebon had never seen used, were shattered or missing. She turned to face him, a few paces ahead, arms out like a realtor trying and failing to sell the place. “You remember how it used to be. Well … ” There seemed to be more but wasn’t. She sighed again, then continued toward a door off the living room that Ebon remembered as leading into her art studio. “And this? Remember how messy and scattered I used to keep this room?”
 

Ebon was trying not to think about it. He’d eagerly anticipated seeing Aimee, and once he’d hugged her (or rather, once
she’d
hugged
him
), he’d found himself feeling inexplicably at home, recent pain smoothed like sand under water. The house, however, had punched him in the gut and knocked him from his reverie. This tour was already burning a sore on his childhood memories, making things better and worse all at once.
 

Aimee pushed the door open to display a room that was blessedly, horribly scattered. But its wretched condition, in contrast to the rest of the house, hadn’t been caused by Richard Frey or Father Time. This room was — as it had always been — all Aimee.
 

“It’s like I’ve stepped into yesterday.” Ebon wrapped his fingers around the doorframe, the metal of his wedding ring clattering on wood. Driven by an odd compulsion, he’d fished the ring out and put it back on as soon as he’d lugged his bag into the front hallway.
 

“I know, right?”
 

She crossed the room, her feet crumpling papers and stepping in puddles of paint that, based on the absence of footprints as her tromping continued, must be drier than they looked. There was a canvas on an easel to one side, several lumps that looked like failed pottery experiments on a side table, and a dozen or so 35mm camera lenses scattered about. The spectrum of in-progress projects made the place look more like a brochure of possibilities than an actual working studio. It was as if someone had announced: “Art goes in here,” and teenaged Aimee, all those years ago, hadn’t bothered to break things down any further.
 

Ebon, fascinated, walked in and peeked around the room. He didn’t totally trust his recall (despite its reputation at work for being flawless), but he felt sure the studio wasn’t just
similar
to the room he remembered from twenty years ago. A lot of it, he thought, was
exactly the same
. There were somewhat juvenile but still-excellent pencil sketches of Aaron’s eastern shoreline in winter, shelves of ice broken and peeking upward from repeated cycles of freeze and thaw. She’d drawn the lighthouse over and over; there were a few paintings (and even a sculpture) of the modern-looking, flutes-and-whorls structure. Several of the pieces were familiar enough to steal his breath.
 

He reached out and snatched a piece of stiff art board from the middle of what was either a collage or an explosion in progress. It was almost new-looking except for a slight curling at the board’s edges. The board was meant to be framed or used as mat in a frame, but Aimee, despite being an excellent framer (it combined her father’s wood craftsmanship with her mother’s flair for art, both original skill-holders now dead with their only legacy living inside Aimee), had never bothered. She’d simply stuck the small painting on a wall — or, more likely, dropped it onto the floor or into a box somewhere — before moving on to the next thing.

“I remember this,” Ebon said.
 

In front of him, the small rectangular watercolor painting made a window. He felt as if he might fall into it, out of this ramshackle building and into the south coast in summertime, where gulls screeched and waves lapped the shore.
 

“You might have been there when I painted it,” she said, shrugging.
 

Ebon turned, feeling the most genuine smile he’d worn in weeks.
 

“I might have
been
there?”
He laughed, then came and stood beside her, their upper arms brushing. “Aimee, I’m
in
it.” He pointed. Next to the modern lighthouse was an enormous pile of five-foot boulders, placed there by the island’s council as a breakwater to protect their iconic beacon. There was a form atop the boulders: longer and leaner than Ebon could believe he’d ever been. He wasn’t exactly stocky now, but was decidedly solid. The fifteen-year-old kid in the painting could have been an assembly of thin sticks. He hadn’t been strong, but Ebon remembered one acutely satisfying thing about that summer from his own photos, when he found the strength to look through them: he’d been lean enough and yet pre-adult enough to have a shadow of skinny-boy abs that, for that one summer, had been sexy more than merely prepubescent. They’d vanished by the time he was seventeen, when genetics and youth had finally been defeated by Nintendo-related inactivity.

In the watercolor, small and indistinct, the boy version of himself had his shirt off. Fifteen was young to capture anyone’s attention as a would-be Adonis, but Aimee had only been seventeen herself. He remembered trying to flex throughout the entire painting session, her ostensibly working and him ostensibly “chilling out” and probably “being cool.” He remembered how hard it had been to hold a pose that was both cool and sufficiently flexed. He also remembered thinking that if she could see his not-quite-washboard stomach, he wanted to make sure she got all the sexy right, and thought about every line as she painted.
 

Looking now, he almost laughed. He was barely a smudge; she hadn’t given his physique a passing glance. All that clenching for nothing.
 

Aimee looked over and laughed, her face close enough for her hair to tickle the side of his face. She took in the painting for a few seconds, then voiced a huge, not-at-all ladylike guffaw.
 

“Oh, my God!” She took it from him, turning in a circle as if the light might be better from various angles. “I remember! We took a picnic. In an actual picnic basket. You insisted, even though I told you to just throw it all in a backpack. There was nowhere to spread out a blanket, so we ended up sitting on the lighthouse steps.”
 

“Seagulls had shit everywhere,” said Ebon. “We pulled branches off one of the big cottonwoods and made leaf blankets to sit on so that we didn’t get gull shit on our pants.”
 

“Didn’t one of them … ”
 

“Yes,” Ebon said, the old memory suddenly vivid. One of the offending gulls had shit on his back. That was why he was out on the rocks in the painting; he’d ill-advisedly dipped into the choppy water to wash off and was air drying like a snake in the sun.
 

It was a funny story, but as he looked at the small watercolor, the incident strangely felt as unamusing as it had back then. Ebon remembered being furious about that gull. He and Aimee had sizzled that final summer, and he’d tried entirely too hard to temper that sizzle with sugar.
You have to treat a girl right,
he’d decided.
You have to be smooth.
You couldn’t make dumb mistakes like letting gulls shit on you. When gulls shit on romantic picnics, it ruined the mood. That was true even when the picnic never really happened, when you felt stupid lugging a wicker basket through buggy, overgrown trails, and when the girl didn’t even realize that any of it was supposed to be romantic in the first place.
 

Aimee laughed again, bringing the back of her wrist to her mouth as if trying to stifle a snort. Ebon tried to laugh for her, but those old feelings remained stubbornly where they’d lodged. They’d had a summer interrupted thanks to this house. Thanks to the place they found themselves returned to now, as if to correct the past.
 

She took the art board and placed it on a worktable against the wall. The table’s placement was almost accidental. Ebon had the distinct impression that she’d needed a table out of the way, and “against the wall” had felt right. Then, with a new surface available in the studio, Aimee’s mishmash of unfinished projects had attacked like a plague of locusts and covered it.
 

“Well, come on,” she said. “I’ll show you the rest.”
 

Once they left the preserved studio and reentered the living room and kitchen, the oddness of the cottage reasserted itself. Ebon felt his senses conflicting, old and new overlaying one another as if seeing a double exposure. This part of the house, at least, he recalled as well as anything in his life. He could almost see the old place as they walked: a layer beneath a thick coating of dust, barely out of sight under what the house had become.
 

The place looked like it had been abandoned for years, not so much as winterized and left open to the elements. It was hard to believe that Richard was just over a year dead — harder still to believe that Aimee herself had felt comfortable enough here to move back in. Why hadn’t she opened the windows to vent the musty air? Why hadn’t she swept the main room as she must have swept (and, now that he thought about it, dusted) the studio, which had been free of the living room’s fuzz? How could she live like this, even while renovating… and more to the point, how had he?
 

He looked the cottage over as Aimee backpedaled through it, still waving her arms and pointing things out as if they weren’t in a place that Ebon’s formative years had committed to mental concrete.
 

There was the kitchen, where the cabinets didn’t have fronts and where you had to remember to turn the glasses upside down lest they fill with tiny bugs. There was the kitchen window that you had to prop open with a small rod. That window looked out on an old garden — rarely attended even all those years ago — where Richard had buried compost.
 

As Ebon followed along on the redundant tour, it was like his eyes were adjusting to the dark. The deeper frequency that shone beneath this ramshackle hut was still fresh, and he could see it better by the moment even though most of what he saw had vanished years ago.

There was a TV cabinet that nobody ever opened, so sufficiently fastened that Ebon wasn’t even sure there was a TV inside. He could see the ghosts of driftwood sculptures Aimee had made, resting on shelves. He could see the dishes of smooth-edged beach glass she’d filled in their youth, piece by piece, and the paper snapshots that were always tucked between knickknacks, slightly curled, legends and time stamps written on their backs in her father’s precise, blocky handwriting.

“When did you move back in?” he asked, interrupting her unceasing narration.
 

“My lease was up at my other place six weeks ago. I was back and forth before that, but I’ve been here full time since I was otherwise homeless. Did you know my grandparents built the place?”
 

Ebon nodded. Of course he did. The long conversations they’d had. The time they’d spent hiding and exploring around Aaron, traipsing through the fields and sneaking into the old quarry, hunting for arrowheads. The times they’d sneaked down to Aaron’s Party, sometimes above the boardwalk and sometimes below it. They hadn’t had a summer romance. They’d had a summer
almost
. But conversations — mostly one-sided and held from Aimee’s end — had never been in short supply.