Axis of Aaron (6 page)

The place was just old. Once the cobwebs were cleared, windows were thrown open to invite the breeze, and the detritus was all cleared (Aimee was a contributor to that detritus; her projects had attempted to stay in her studio but had failed and were now in every room), Richard’s home would show itself for what it was: an old cottage on the island shore, where the effects of weather were magnified. Even looking back now, as he paced away and onto the beach, the facade wasn’t nearly as bad as Ebon had thought on arrival. The shingles, which had been a quaint blue gray, had turned a sickly shade of decay, paint chipped to the brown and weathered wood below. Many had broken away in storms; shutters had come loose or fallen, and the dark roof was bare in patches. (That might explain the ceiling stain he’d noticed inside last night. Water always found a way in when you allowed it to, especially near the ocean.) Exposed metal was rusting in the caustic air. There were three or four thermometers mounted around the home’s exterior, on the large and yellowing porch, and the metal mounts had practically turned to dust.
 

It was all cosmetic. All easily justifiable, given the place’s age, the fact that it had been abandoned for nearly a year, the ocean’s proximity, and the prior occupant’s inability, in his twilight years, to climb ladders or use a drill.
 

He’d been foggy yesterday, was all. A rushed packing job, a long car trip, a boat ride with a choppy start, a return to a place and a girl (now a woman) from his past. The agency had let him take his “leave of indeterminate duration” way too easily too; his feeling that they’d miss him was less than convincing, given how scattered and half-there he’d been over the past weeks. Moving and death were both supposed to be major life stressors, and both were said to unseat people in the best of cases. Well, Ebon hadn’t truly
moved
, but in a way what he’d done was far more extreme. And death? He’d stared that in the eye.
 

He turned to the right, heading north along the island’s west coast. He wouldn’t be able to see Aaron’s Party (or the out-jut where it
used
to be) unless he was willing to walk for a while, but a distinct part of Ebon felt drawn toward it anyway.
 

Sand sifted between his toes, thanks to the foot-glove shoes that Aimee had seen in his bag and laughed long and loudly at. When they’d been kids, they’d done everything barefoot, but it was cold, and he might need to walk across shells. The breeze was kind. The sun was bold where it came between the cottages, but it was hardly oppressive.
 

He walked and, without meaning to, fell into a meditative rhythm as his feet clapped the sand.
 

After a few minutes, he met the piled-up rocks that sat on the apron of Pinky Slip, where Captain Jack (like the Billy Joel song; could he get you high tonight?) had left him. The path split and moved up the hill to the top of the steps he’d climbed just yesterday. After taking a few steps onto the lower path, Ebon remembered why they hadn’t come this way instead: the tide came and went, and when it was high the rocks were slippery and dying to break a walker’s ankle. He managed with effort, then was rewarded as the path returned to beach on the far side.
 

Past more cottages. One had a floating dock on the water that appeared heavily damaged, and Ebon, who’d only spent three summers here, wondered why someone with a permanent home would do something so dumb. A floating dock? Really? It’d be dashed to pieces in the first storm.
 

He passed another stretch of beach beyond the dock house, then had to clamber over more rocks in front of a blue house with a high porch. He felt like a trespasser being so close as he passed, but if you lined your beach with boulders, you had to accept that people would have to practically knock on your door when they walked past.
 

He came down. More beach. A few dead fish and a quickly passing scent of decaying guts. Some garbage, which Ebon tried to ignore, lest his impression of the picture-perfect ocean be sullied by pollution. He already felt himself turning inward without meaning to, his consciousness rattling around inside his skull as if searching for treasure. It was the air and its smell that was doing it. The shifting feel of sand underfoot, and the waves’ hypnotic rhythm.

Ebon found himself ruminating on the most random of thoughts:
 

His apartment in the city, frozen in suspended animation as he’d exited. Had he left a faucet running? Had he left a light on? He wouldn’t be back for who knew how long, and the water or electric bill would be a bitch if he had.
 

His grandparents’ cottage, somewhere up ahead. He remembered the summery slap of the screen door and Grams’s always-accompanying shout, telling him to close the door slowly. The rattle of the little hook on the door as it banged shut, the hook that held the door fast in storms when the cottage was empty.
 

Himself walking this same beach at age twelve, in the other direction, seeing Aimee for the first time. She’d been fourteen and had shown him how to build a sandcastle, despite the fact that at twelve he was perfectly capable of building one by himself. Ebon hadn’t wanted to stop walking, or get a lesson, but Aimee had called him over, then given him one anyway.

You have to get the sand wet, but not too wet
.
 

He’d known that, and it had been stupid of Aimee to assume that he was a dumb kid who didn’t, but her hair had become a tangled bird’s nest of spun hay in the breeze, and he’d been intrigued by the small beauty mark on her chin that he later discovered she hated enough to call a wart.

Getting ice cream at Coney’s near West Dock that last day at age fifteen, somehow
knowing
it was his last time. And he’d been right; until now he’d never come back.
 

Letters exchanged with Aimee.

Kisses exchanged with Holly. She’d always loved him, truly and with her whole heart. But Holly’s constant hunger had been stronger than her heart, and he’d never been adventurous enough to meet her needs. Ebon thought of their good times: snuggled under a blanket, on vacation in Cape Hatteras, sitting around his apartment on their wedding night and joking about how their honeymoon would be spent watching
Seinfeld
reruns. But what the hell; Ebon wasn’t a slave to convention, and Holly outright eschewed it.

Finding Holly’s journal as he’d combed through her things. Resisting its pull. Opening it to find the first half empty and unused, the second half damning and sharp like a blade.

His father, a psychologist, asking somewhere in the back of Ebon’s mind if he was actually seeking a new start on Aaron, or just trying to run and hide from his problems.

Holly as she’d been back in college, both of them standing in line at the philistine box office waiting for advance tickets to see a concert by … who? He should remember that; it was when they’d met again, for the second time, the time that they finally stuck. But right now it felt as if Aaron’s waves were washing the memory away.
 

Ebon found a stray boulder, leaned against it, and unstrapped one of his toe shoes to sift the sand from it. Who the hell had they been buying tickets to see?

Oasis
.
 

Yes. That
had
to be it. Ebon felt guilty for his uncertainty, just as he felt guilty for not being sadder. The thought made him angry, but then more guilt arose to smother his anger. His wife was dead. Shouldn’t he be sitting somewhere in a corner, knees to his chest, bawling into his whiskey?
 

But it wasn’t Oasis they’d been buying tickets for after all, he decided. He was confused by the fact that someone, in one of the nearby cottages, was playing an Oasis song just loud enough for the beach to hear, like breath on the breeze. It was “Wonderwall,” from the (
What’s the Story) Morning Glory?
album. He knew the album well enough; it had been top of the charts for the first of his summers on Aaron, and the public fights between Liam and Noel Gallagher had topped the news during the other two. He and Aimee had listened to that album over and over on the small CD boom box they set in the sand beside them while they played and sat and read and talked. He knew the entire lineup by heart. If the cottage DJ nearby was playing the album instead of a '90s radio station, he’d hear “Don’t Look Back in Anger” next. Given the number of times Richard Frey’s CD player had run the album off for two kids over the course of three summers, Ebon’s mind had stitched the songs together as surely as if they were a single song in two acts. “Wonderwall” would be incomplete if its partner didn’t follow behind.
 

Looking down, back still to the boulder, Ebon rubbed the place where his ring should’ve been and sighed. Holly had been a flirt and a liar and a cheat, but she’d never meant any of it. She hadn’t thought she was doing anything wrong. She’d been incorrect about that, of course, but she hadn’t been malicious. If Ebon had arrived at the hospital before the life had drained from her — if he’d held her hand as she’d died — Holly would have looked up at him with those deep-green eyes and said,
I love you with all my heart.
 

She’d have meant it. Ebon would have known, and meant it right back.
 

He reached up and wiped moisture from his eyes.
 

Instead of moving into the next song, “Wonderwall” repeated somewhere behind him. Apparently the cottage DJ wasn’t going to advance the album, but Ebon thought the brothers’ next song was good advice, even though it turned out they couldn’t take it themselves when it came to intra-Gallagher relations.

Don’t look back in anger.
 

Unfortunately, that left only sadness and guilt. It felt so much better to be angry at Holly. Anger was a fortifying emotion. Sadness and guilt felt like the corrosive kiss of salt air, degrading the supports that kept him upright and moving forward.
 

Ebon stood.
 

Ahead was more beach, eventually wrapping to the end of the crescent-shaped inlet and around the bend to the shoreside carnival’s former location. He looked there now, seeing how the sun had already shortened the shadows on the beach, feeling the warmer air. He found that he no longer wanted to see the Party, or where it used to be. There were too many sharp-edged emotions there — for this early in his trip anyway. Would he be overwhelmed by its loss, feeling a part of his past erased? Would he pine for the kiss exchanged with Holly at the top of the …
 

But it hadn’t been
Holly
he’d kissed on the Danger Wheel. It had been Aimee, more than half a lifetime ago. Now Holly was gone, and Aimee was merely a friend. His memory was rich with possibility and fresh starts, but his present was empty. Something had gone wrong. Promises had been broken. Who had he been, all those years ago, and who had he thought he’d become? Aimee had never truly returned his affection — not back then anyway — and even her most tantalizing offers had soured before blossoming. He remembered feeling that the best was yet to come, and now it seemed like the best was behind him. Somehow he’d been lapped without experiencing the middle: thirty-one with his life mostly over. What a gyp.
 

Don’t look back in anger.

Ebon had lost another few minutes feeling sorry for himself (looking back in anger, to tell the truth), and “Wonderwall” was now playing for the third time. Distant. Tinny. Fragmented and indistinct, but definitely there. The water had a strange way of tossing sounds about, washing some away while pushing others forth like an hidden wave. The song could be coming from anywhere.
 

Ebon looked back and forth along the beach, knowing he neither wanted to head up to Aaron’s Party nor back to Aimee’s. There was public beach access behind him, and he remembered Aaron’s geography well enough to know it would lead him into the row of stores and bed-and-breakfasts that served as the island’s downtown. The wide, cottonwood-lined span between cottages was ratty grass, but the access path itself had been trodden to sand. It was hard to pinpoint the sound as it bounced about, but it seemed like it might be coming from one of the cottages farther back. It was as good of a white rabbit to follow as any.

Ebon walked, his head stubbornly refusing to budge from the quiet and contemplative mood it had so easily found on the beach. He didn’t want to think; he wanted to forget. He didn’t want to process his emotions, or figure out what it all meant. He wanted to bury his head in the sand — and sand was something of which Aaron had plenty. There was nothing wrong with turning a blind eye. Apathy was underrated. He’d done nothing to trigger his situation. It had been done
to
him. One moment he’d been a man with a beautiful, sexy, fun, charming wife who loved him, and the next he’d found himself the guilty widower of a whore. A whore, it turned out, that he still loved plenty. It was too much. Too conflicted. He hadn’t asked for any of it, and he didn’t deserve …
 

Ebon stopped as if snapping out of a trance. He was facing the front window of Sweetums, the candy shop that had claimed the island as home for as long as the liquor agency. Aaron couldn’t support a grocery store, but candy and liquor did fine. Sometimes, during winter’s shortest, grayest days, you wanted to get loaded and eat caramel nut clusters.
 

The song was gone, as if it had never been playing.
 

Ebon looked around, disoriented. Behind him was the beach access, but it was farther back than he thought it should be. He’d walked a long section of McComb Street, past the inn and tavern and the historical society that could close its doors and have no one notice. He had no real memory of passing any of them, but he’d been deep inside his head. Maybe if he went back, he’d hear Oasis playing again and could locate its source. But what would be the point? Had he been planning to break into whatever home was playing it and click Repeat to kill the circuit? Had he planned to chastise the occupant, advising him to quit burying himself in a loop and move on with his life … and with his album?