Axis of Aaron (45 page)

Aimee. Julia. Holly.
Three beads on a braid. They weren’t just Ebon’s key relationships, independent and valuable for what they’d been. They were tied together, each an arrow toward the next.
 

“Why did you really come here, Ebon?”
 

He closed his eyes. Focused. When he opened them, she was ordinary Aimee — in her early thirties with soft, dark-blonde hair around her friendly face, somewhat tan but unlined by the sun. She had that crooked tooth, which she’d never cared to fix despite the way she hated it. She had the beauty mark on her chin, which she also hated. Somehow those flaws made her real. This was
Aimee.
The one he was supposed to see. He took her hand. She looked down, seeming pleased by his affection. But really he just had to hang on.
 

“I wanted to start fresh.”
 

“And you left your job. Just took all that time off, free to return whenever you wanted.”
 

“Yes.”
 

She shook her head. “Why did you
really
come here?”
 

Ebon sighed. “To forget.”
 

“You didn’t come for me.”
 

“I wanted to see you, of course.”
 

“But not …
for
me.”
 

“No.”
 

Again the room wilted. One of the walls fell, and Ebon found himself looking out across the untidy, sparse-grass lawn in front of the dunes. The weeds had taken over, volunteer bushes and trees edging out even the tall and hearty beach grass. The wall decayed where it had fallen, the weeds seeming to surround and swallow it. Sun streamed from above, and Ebon looked up to see great holes in the ceiling. They were sitting around a rickety metal table in two wrought iron chairs that had turned into a rainbow of mold.

“Do you see this?” he said.
 

“Of course.”
 

“What does it mean?”
 

“I don’t know, Ebon.”
 

“What should I do?”

“Maybe you should let go.”
 

“‘Let go?’
What do you mean?”
 

“I don’t know what I mean. You don’t know what I mean.”
 

“What the hell are you talking about?”
 

“Tell me about us.”
 

“What about us?”
 

“Tell me about Holly.”
 

“I’ve
told
you about Holly!”
 

“Was she a monster? Did she betray you?”
 

“You know she did.”
 

“Were you a victim?”
 

“Aimee … ”
 

“Were the two of you too different from the start? Was she a sex fiend, caring about nothing else, unable to adapt into something more, unable to grow, caring only about herself, stealing for thrills when she wasn’t screwing around to feed something inside, something you never had and didn’t know how to accept?
Did
you accept? You tried, didn’t you, but she said she had no filter and really that meant that she only saw what she wanted to see, only lived how she wanted to live, only looked at your relationship through her own lens and never yours, never offered more, could never become more, was just a party girl who you should’ve never hooked up with because you weren’t right for her any more than she was right for you, because some people never change, and … ”
 

(I could be your —)

“… and you tried and tried, didn’t you, but there’s no pleasing some people, there’s no getting through to people who you just can’t match, who are selfish, who don’t believe in quid pro quo, who don’t believe in fair trade and give and take, who don’t so much as
not believe
in compromise as
never consider
compromise because they live myopically, a horse wearing blinders, not bad but not good either, not willfully cruel but not voluntarily kind, like a manic breed of Asperger's, or ADD, you were sure she had ADD because she never stopped trying to find the next thing just because she was born clutching selfishness in her fists, and … ”
 

(I have my own painful past)

“… and sometimes, like the expression goes, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, or maybe if you can’t even join ‘em, you let ‘em go … ”
 

(Let go)
 

“ … and every person is responsible for themselves, of course, and it wasn’t your responsibility to tell anyone how to live, not me and not her and not Vicky, not Julia, it’s not your job to fix everyone; you’re a good guy, and you do your best, but they were all big girls,
we
were all big girls, and you can’t hold a person’s hand through every step of life. Some lessons you have to learn on your own, the hard way. So you want to leave, Ebon? Well why don’t you just goddamn go already?”
 

Aimee stopped. Ebon found himself staring gape-mouthed. Behind her, the walls pulsed as if breathing. They bloomed from the ruins like vines, coloring from dust gray to bright white and brighter blues and yellows and reds, then cycling down, decaying, growing holes, mending apertures, sewing the ceiling shut, growing the roof high like a double-story great room. Décor changed; years marched backward and forward. Framed photos leaning on shelves changed occupants, tarnished, grew polished, curled and aged in sepia.

“‘Leave?’” said Ebon, shell-shocked.

“I like this game where you just repeat what I say,” she said.
 

“Where should I go?”
 

“You can control it, can’t you? So control it. Leave the island. Leave me behind. Get out of the loop, and you know you’ll be free. Go back to your life in the city. Beg for your job back — ”

“I still have my job. I’m on sabbatical.”
 

“Beg for your old job back. Grovel. Get on your knees. Catch up on your rent. Pay your bills. Move on, and let it all go. All you have to do is to choose.”
 

“Choose what?”
 

“To leave. To go.”
 

“I’ve been
trying
to go.”

“Have you?”
 

“Jesus. Yes!”
 

“So do it. Go.”
 

“How?”
 

“Take your boat.”
 

“My boat was destroyed.”
 

Aimee gave a little laugh. There was some odd emotion in it that Ebon couldn’t place. It was part humor, but it was mostly a mishmash of a dozen other things.
Scorn. Irritation. Loathing.
Self
-loathing? Impatience. Condescension.
 

“What?”
 

“Un-destroy it,” she said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Weathered Boards
 

EBON REACHED THE FOOT OF PINKY Slip to find his boat whole and undamaged. It even looked like someone had come down in the middle of the night and given it a fresh coat of paint. He’d told Aimee that his plan included removing the boat’s many shiny pieces over winter and making them even shinier, but that was a laugh; somehow, despite owning the boat for just a few days, he’d already done it … this time without losing time to a mysterious skip.

He’d had his fill of boating from the day before but couldn’t help taking a peek. The vessel looked ready for puttering about on the bay, ignorant of the month and coming winter. Its snap cover had been replaced with a new one that hadn’t yet met the savage, relentless abuse of daily UV exposure. Most of the dock lines had been upgraded and were coiled into nautilus-like spirals on the planks.
 

Ebon opened the cover and stepped into the cockpit. There were photos taped to the dash of him and Aimee together, open water behind them and their hair whipping in the wind. She was wearing a bikini top and looked stunning. Ebon realized that he hadn’t seen that much skin on Aimee since she’d been seventeen. The thought made him shiver, as if he’d just barely missed something important without seeing it. As if he’d been racing a car and had missed a pedestrian by inches.
 

He turned from the photos and looked into the cabin. The downstairs had been tidied, the bunks reupholstered, upgraded plates and utensils in the small galley. But Ebon still smelled the slight stink of fuel, and peering into the bilge he saw the same rainbow sheen standing atop the small amount of bilge water. He pressed the bilge pump button, which ran without needing the key. Were all boats like that? Ebon wasn’t sure. He watched the rainbow of fuel sift into the water, feeling a flush of environmentalist’s guilt, seeing it broken apart almost immediately by the gentle surf.
 

He climbed out of the boat, then buttoned it up. His thoughts were churning. Not only because of his most recent surreality with Aimee, but because his mind had become a soup, all inputs equally valid and worthy of his attention. He should be afraid. He should feel like he was grasping a relic as it turned to sand and sifted through his fingers. But he didn’t. Somehow — deep, deep down — this was all acceptable. This was, in some way Ebon couldn’t articulate, to be expected.
 

He glanced back at the boat. Before his eyes, the snap cover grew old and ripped, then became whole. The boat rusted, then turned pristine. He watched the water freeze, its temperature far below thirty-two degrees, the compacting grip of ocean ice clutching the vessel’s sides like an iron fist. Metal buckled. Wood splintered. Holes appeared, and as the water thawed it flowed in through the holes and the boat began to sink. But then, as the water returned to normal, the boat healed and was new again.
 

Ebon focused:
The boat is old.

The cover ripped. Rust grew. Holes appeared in the deck.
 

The boat is new.
 

It became new.
 

Ebon stood on the wood, staring down at the shiny boat in the slip, its dock lines barely used, coiled into spirals on the deck like sleeping snakes. Aimee was right. She’d simply repeated what he realized he’d always known.
He could control this.
 

He walked to the top of the rise, then looked down at Richard Frey’s old home on the beach. That bastard. That asshole. That bitter old motherfucking cocksucker of a drunk, who hadn’t known Ebon even then, not for real anyway, and wouldn’t know him now, even as good of a man as he’d become, because that’s how Richard was. Richard had acted first and thought second, and Aimee had had to stand by him even at the end, even after what had happened to them that final summer, because blood was cursedly thicker than water. And when he’d died, Aimee’s family had buried him in a rich drunk’s grave, somewhere opulent that they all knew was really God’s gutter, where sons of bitches woke daily amid their puke, even in Heaven.
 

Ebon made the house something from a ghost story, its walls denuded of paint, windows sagging inward to holes like an old man’s collapsed gums. He imagined Richard inside, suffering.
 

Things could have been different.
 

He thought of Aimee. Of Julia. Of Holly. Three women who’d lined up in his life like dominoes, each leaving a legacy to be filled by the second. How could his relationship with Holly not have been what it was? That was Julia’s fault. And how could things with Julia not have turned out as they had? Aimee had left no choice.
 

But Ebon didn’t want to think about Richard anymore. So the cottage became something quaint, timeless, nostalgic in the way only artifice could be. It was in its own beam of sunlight, a garden thriving outside, a pink-painted mailbox visible near the road despite the fact that mail on Aaron was delivered to centralized group mailboxes. There was a white fence on the home’s roadside. If Ebon were to head back, he’d probably find Aimee in an apron, her hair done up, wearing heels. A 1950s sitcom portrait of the ideal way things had never been.
 

Ebon tried to believe it. He tried to accept it. And for the slightest of moments, he almost could. But the effort was nearly impossible. Something inside knew full well that Aimee had never worn heels. The cottage had never had a mailbox. And he and Aimee had, from those early summers on, never completely fallen out of …

A beam of sunlight disappeared behind the shifting clouds. The cottage on the dunes was suddenly ordinary — an old place, under slight construction. The cold wind reasserted itself, forcing Ebon to pull his coat tighter around his body. In a few weeks, if he believed the calendar, it would be Christmas. How would he and Aimee celebrate? She had a brother. He had siblings, parents, grandparents. Would they make a meal, get a tree, and sing carols? Would they trade presents like friends? Like lovers? Would their holiday extend to where it rightfully belonged: to those off-island family and friends? Or was his life now here: contained, isolated, wanting for nothing beyond it?

Ebon walked.
 

Controlling what he saw became harder, as if he was exhausting some internal muscle. In order to make anything change, Ebon found he couldn’t just alter that thing. He had to change all he’d already seen, because life wasn’t lived in a bubble that extended only to the horizon of sight. The cottage was out of view, but Ebon knew, as he looked at a ramshackle set of stairs and tried to polish them with his mind, that the cottage
existed
somewhere behind him. If he wanted to see the steps as new, he had to march progress forward for all of Aaron — to make all he’d seen so far more new, more ideal, more perfect. Yet there were flaws everywhere, and fixing them all created a complicated web. Making the steps shine meant making the cottage gleam along with his boat. The job was getting too big. It wasn’t difficult to see one small thing falsely (something that had been said that should be forgotten, some misstep that he wished he could go back in time to fix but chose to grow blind to instead), but it was so much harder to change the world all at once.