Axis of Aaron (5 page)

Surprised, Ebon felt his eyes watering. He blinked the tears away, then turned to look back into the musty room. It looked somehow different from this end than it had from the doorway, just as the bathroom had on second glance. Painting supplies had been prematurely stacked in a corner, including a long ceiling pole. He’d missed a cordless drill and a section of exposed lath on one wall that Aimee appeared to be in the process of repairing with plaster. Even the bed, which had seemed beyond repair when he’d first entered, had been laid with a new mattress that he hadn’t noticed. Had she ordered one from the mainland and had it delivered all the way up here? Why would she do that, when the room itself wasn’t finished? But then again, if
Ebon
was going to move into a renovation project, he supposed
he’d
want a comfortable place to sleep too.
 

“If we get bored,” Aimee was saying, still looking toward the door to the ocean, “I’d love to see if we can put a big picture window in here. This thing’s a travesty.” She flicked at a small window near the bed that yellowed miniblinds had half covered. “How long do you have to stay here and help me, Ebon?”
 

“I’m not here to help you,” he said, smiling. “This is a work-recovery project. Your renovations are a side effect of my convalescing.”
 

“Hmm. Well, you’ll pay your room and board with sweat equity, side effect or not. But I can rephrase it if you want to pretend you haven’t signed into a forced labor camp: How long will you need to ‘recover,’ Ebon?”
 

He chuckled, but Aimee’s face fell the moment the words were past her lips.
 

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to make light of it.”
 

“It’s okay. I just did the same thing.”
 

“I shouldn’t joke. That was really insensitive.”
 

She was looking away, clearly bothered. He put his hand on her arm. “Aimee, it’s okay. Seriously.”
 

“It’s not. I just lost my dad. I know what it’s like. I know you need time. You know I didn’t really ask you here to help me remodel, right? Take all the time you need, sit out on the beach, look at the waves, drink Coronas, whatever. Go on walks, like we used to. With or without me.”
 

Ebon voiced a small, dry laugh. “The last thing I want is to meditate for days and weeks on end. I could have done that back home. Holly is gone, and no amount of sitting on the beach will change that. I came here to move on. Don’t you want to move on from your dad?”
 

But of course, that was different. Aimee’s father might have drunk too much and might have had a hot temper, but he hadn’t cheated on her with some other daughter. He hadn’t died in a car accident, possibly with his lover’s dick in his hand. Or mouth.

“Sure. But I want to remember him too.”
 

“I’ve remembered all I want to remember.”
 

“Just like that?”
 

“No, not just like that. It’s … ”
 

“You don’t want to talk about it,” said Aimee.

He very much didn’t, but he wanted even less to
tell
Aimee that he didn’t want to talk about it. She’d take offense, blaming herself for some inarticulate wrong, if he did that. She’d opened the wound, and now he didn’t want to dress it. But it wasn’t fair to make Aimee uncomfortable, in her own house, while she still had her own grieving to do.
 

He said, “It’s a tricky situation. I don’t know if I’m sadder that she’s gone or angry about what she did.”
 

“Cheating.”
 

“Constantly
cheating. Looking back, I’m realizing now that she never stopped. But the worst part is I can’t even blame her. Not because there’s anything wrong with me, but because that’s who she was. It’s who she
always
was. Holly couldn’t settle; she was always looking for something new and adventurous. That’s why it took us so long to get married, I guess. I’d be lying if I told you that I was ever sure I’d be enough for her. I think I kind of always knew she was cheating even before finding … well, it’s not important. So: Should I be angry? Or should I accept it for what it was and couldn’t help but be? When you add in the accident and I have to add ‘Should I grieve?’ into the mix, it gets even harder. And I
do
want to grieve. I loved her, I did, and she loved me. I know she did. She was really the only person I ever loved since … ” He stammered. “ … the only person I ever loved quite that way.”
 

“I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry you had to go through that, Ebon. You deserve better.”
 

But even saying that seemed to make Aimee uncomfortable, as if she felt eggshells underfoot. Was she allowed to (or supposed to) buoy Ebon if it meant casting a sleight on Holly? Or was it better to respect his grief by
not
speaking ill of his late wife? He didn’t know what to tell her, because he wasn’t sure how he felt about it himself.
 

He glanced out the window again, at the shoreline. Although Ebon wasn’t sure how to feel, he’d come to the right place to feel it. Aaron had been an unscratched mental itch for his entire adult life — a place of quiet recollections and unfinished business. If there was any place in the world that could give him a place to escape even himself, Aaron was it.
 

“It’s my life, my wife, my sense of betrayal, and the inadequacy that comes with it — ” Ebon peeked at Aimee, wondering if he should have said that last. “— But the truth is that I don’t even know how to make sense of it all. I could walk along the shore and be angry as justifiably as I could walk the same shore the next day feeling sad. There’s no right or wrong, really. I’m allowed to feel any of those things — or all of them. But the fact that I seem to have to
choose
how to feel is a curse. The way I have to
decide
, knowing that feeling the wrong thing might make me an asshole or a monster? Hell, that’s just one more thing to feel. I’m overwhelmed, Aimee. I don’t
want
to choose. So right now, if I’m being honest, I don’t want to feel anything.” He rapped his knuckles against the wall, and plaster dust sifted onto his arm. He forced a smile. “Right now, I just want to cut boards and help you rebuild a house.”
 

Aimee watched him, seeming to assess whether he was telling the truth or merely saying what he thought she wanted to hear. Surprisingly, he realized it was the former. He didn’t want to ruminate. He’d come here to bury himself in something new and to become someone else. More than anything, he’d come to Aaron to forget.
 

“Okay,” Aimee said, apparently deciding to believe him. “Luckily, I have a home improvement project that will fit your needs.”
 

“And we
should
add a picture window,” said Ebon. “For sure, not ‘if we have time.’ The view deserves it.” Again Ebon knocked the wall, looking out on the water. “This is a beautiful place, Aim. Do you even see it for what it is? Or is it mundane to you because it’s always been home?”
 

She looked through the door to nowhere and sighed. “No. It’s beautiful.”
 

Ebon nodded. Strangely, despite his litany to Aimee, he felt better than he had in weeks. Better than he had since the policeman’s call. Better than he had since seeing Mark from Work wheeled through the hospital behind Holly, his pants more open than you’d expect from a car crash.
 

“Where are you getting all the money for this anyway?” Ebon fingered the crumbling plaster. “I’d have tried harder to hook up with you if I’d known you were loaded.”
 

He probably shouldn’t have said that; their official story was that they were friends and had never been anything more. But Aimee smiled. “Dad had a lot of money, and his will only had the two names. Forget about
my
money. Where are you getting all the time for this?”
 

“I’ve got time off. It’s not a problem.”
 

“‘Time off?’”
 

“Yes.”
 

“Months’ worth of time, maybe.”
 

“As much as it takes.”
 

“That’s a generous work arrangement. Who will coddle clients and remember their dogs’ birthdays in your absence?” He’d told her that bit of miscellany — how keeping track of the most mundane details about his firm’s clients made him a superstar among otherwise mediocre performers — on LiveLyfe. No wonder she’d found it worth repeating; Aimee’s own memory for details was like a sieve.
 

“I am being covered. I will be able to take the time you require without interruption.” He said it officially, deliberately avoiding contractions, as if reading from a pamphlet.

“How mysterious.”

“Yes. I’m known for my mystery.”
 

Aimee watched Ebon for another beat, then turned back toward the hallway, leaving the nowhere door open. The top half was glass (or clear plastic — Ebon didn’t know; he wasn’t exactly the home improvement expert he was impersonating during his stay), and the lower half was a screen. A pleasant early autumn breeze wafted into the room behind them, tinged with the scent of salt and leaves. Before leaving the room, she put her hands on her hips and looked around, nodded with apparent satisfaction, and led the way back out.
 

Ebon took a quick look of his own before following, wondering how she could be so blasé about the renovation project of the decade. But the floor wasn’t as bad as he’d thought, now that he looked again, and while the plaster was worn at least it wasn’t falling out in huge chunks. The bed would probably go or be replaced. All in all, it was rough but salvageable, and he wondered at his own first impression of the place as if it were an unfounded prejudice. The cottage had struck him as impossibly ramshackle (condemnable, really) when he’d first seen it, and the downstairs living area had seemed the same. But looking around now, at a room in slight disrepair (as if the occupant had become sick then died a year ago), Ebon wondered if he was being unfair. Maybe he was still blaming Richard all these years later, taking his remaining hatred out on the home that Richard had left behind.

Maybe. But wouldn’t that make him a son of a bitch?

Reentering the living room and kitchen, he found that his perceptions of the first floor had similarly reset. Plaster he’d thought to be in dire shape was merely battered and worn. Furniture that had looked ravaged by wild animals was merely old and beaten by decades of wear, then subdued through lack of attention as its owner grew ill. The room’s corners looked dusty and full of black mold, but even some of the apparent mold was just drifts of the tiny bugs that were as much a part of Aaron life as the sand. The carpet was threadbare, and spiders had spun thousands of webs. That, at least, was par for the course. Spiders on Aaron worked supernaturally fast. You could wake up and walk through a web spanning a doorway you’d used the previous night on your way into bed.
 

He walked to the couch, noting several holes and cigarette burns in its upholstery that hadn’t been there in his youth. He smacked his palm into a cushion, raising a plume of dust. It was only dust. Just as the cracks and crumbles he’d seen all around the room seemed to be mostly the artwork of spiders and flies.
 

It was an old house in need of attention. A father’s place waiting to be made into a daughter’s, one generation giving way to the next in life’s great circle. The cottage wasn’t in a state of advanced decay after all. He’d been surprised earlier, that was all. Since Holly, Ebon hadn’t been sleeping well. Now that he was here — now that he’d finally come home without any baggage except for one stuffed duffel — he could begin to feel right again. He could start to see things as they were, rather than through the rose-colored lenses he’d unwittingly worn for so long.

Ebon looked again at the couch, considered sitting, then decided that gross was still gross and pulled out a wooden chair instead. He brushed its seat to clear the worst of the grime, then sat.
 

“I guess it’s not too bad,” he said. “We’ll just need easy access to a Home Depot. There are a few of those on the island, right?”

CHAPTER THREE

A Girl He Knew From ...

EBON, REALIZING HE PROBABLY LOOKED LIKE a caricature of a man combing beaches to ponder his lost past, left the house wearing khaki cargo shorts that came to his knees with a long-sleeve shirt meant to cut the cool air’s bite. According to the weather forecast, Aaron was expecting heat later today — maybe rising into the upper eighties — but now, at an hour past sunrise, the slight breeze coming off the bay was cool. Ebon stuffed his hands into his pockets, feeling it ruffle his thick black hair, wondering if he should have worn long pants.
 

Aimee wasn’t awake. He’d slept surprisingly well in the small bunk bed and had risen as the sun leaked down the hall from the window and open faux door in Aimee’s room, then made coffee and paced the house, wondering why he’d overreacted to its condition the day before. Yes, the place would take work. They’d need to re-glaze most of the windows and replace a few; they’d have to patch a ton of holes and caulk the tub; they’d need to tighten the shower head upstairs and, Ebon feared, break into the wall behind the inset and do some work on the copper to make the thing work right. The floor was worn in places and would need some TLC, and Aimee had already warned him that the pipes had frozen the prior winter and that only strategic emergency shutoffs were keeping the home from leaking like a kid’s sprinkler playground. The burst pipes, of course, were under the house. Richard’s house was supposed to be fully insulated below deck, but things had shifted over the years. Ebon wasn’t looking forward to climbing under the house, carrying wrenches and wearing a hat to keep the spiders from his hair, but it seemed like the worst of manners to make Aimee do it.