Axis of Aaron (65 page)

“She’s something you made up,” said nude Ebon, sounding less certain. “This isn’t real, so she isn’t either.”
 

Clothed Ebon smirked. “Believe whatever you want. But if your version of the future requires Aimee Frey to not see through your bullshit or call you on it, I think you’ll be very disappointed.”
 

“She’s not part of this,” nude Ebon repeated. To clothed Ebon’s ears, the words were exactly the same as he’d said them earlier, down to the smallest inflection.
Exactly
. He was like a robot in a loop, without the programming to push through something unforeseen.

“She is. The minute she wakes up, she is.”
 

“I don’t need her approval,” said nude Ebon. “I just won’t talk to her about Holly. I’ll only talk about us. Things she can’t contradict.”
 

But the tables had turned. Clothed Ebon took Aimee’s hand. She looked over at him, a very real, very
Aimee
smile forming on her wide lips. Together, they took two steps forward.
 

“I’ll never stop pestering you,” she said.
 

“The past is the past,” the nude man said weakly.
 

“I’ll never stop prying. I’ll never stop asking questions. I’ll never stop rehashing the past.” She lowered her voice to a near whisper.
“I’ll never stop making you feel more guilty than sad about Holly’s death … until you Own Your Shit enough to move on.”
 

“I have nothing to feel guilty about,” said nude Ebon.
 

Aimee took another step, now leaving clothed Ebon’s side. He knew she was just a projection of his own mind — no more “real Aimee” than the woman who’d worn high heels during one of his episodes, baking batch after batch of cookies — but still her every word surprised him, as if they were genuinely her own. Her tone was sufficiently bossy, her pitch perfectly blending condescension with pity. Aimee might be sleeping by the fire in reality, but
this was what she’d actually say,
and they both knew it.
 

Repression wasn’t the same as forgetting. Repression was pushing down, but Ebon’s Aimee memories weren’t like his Holly memories. Holly was dead and forever mute … but as long as the real Aimee was around to call Ebon on his bullshit, the things Ebon knew deep inside, regarding Aimee, would have enough strength to fight back.
 

“You hated the way I pushed you to remember, Ebon,” she said. “You ran off to Vicky when I pushed. But Vicky wasn’t who you wanted, was she? She wasn’t even the woman you thought you’d seen that day, with the red hair and the porcelain skin and the big curves. Vicky was just a stand-in for Julia, and Julia was some strange blend of me and your mother. You’ve seen through your projections before, Ebon. You saw it at Vicky’s, when you finally began to realize who she truly was and who she’d never actually been. But you didn’t like realizing that either, did you?”
 

Clothed Ebon watched his naked double blink. No, he hadn’t liked that at all. When the veneer of Julia-ness that Ebon’s mind had laid across Vicky had finally thinned, the realization pushed his world to spinning. He couldn’t go forward to back. His only choice was to wipe the world clean and restart with the one person who might be able to help him. The one person who’d never faltered, never left, never relented.

“You might hate what I do,” Aimee continued. “You might hate what I say. You may get tired of me telling you what to do, silently judging you, patiently and maddeningly waiting for you to get your head out of your own naked ass and see what’s right in front of you. But you always come back to me. And that’s why you will never, ever be able to forget the truth, fake Ebon:
because you want to spend your future with me … and I won’t let you forget!”
 

Nude Ebon backed up, his retreat arrested by Richard’s ottoman. “We’ll talk around it,” he said. “I’ll tell you what you want to hear, but won’t believe it myself.”
 

She laughed. “Do you think I’ll
ever
stop talking about it? What have I ever stopped talking about?
When do I ever stop talking,
fake Ebon? Is there anything, by now, that you don’t know about my father? Anything you don’t know about my mother, my grandparents, my family history on this island, my boyfriends and lovers, my
motherfucking love for flowers?”

As she finished speaking, the stark, firelit room seemed to explode into vibrant color. Lilies first: white, yellow, pink. Orchids followed, blizzard-colored blooms with bright-purple throats. Antique hydrangeas blossomed behind them, tinted in lavender, terra-cotta and cranberry. Roses exploded through the room, embellishing every surface in hues that shouldn’t exist. Ebon could smell the sweet lavender roses, which he remembered held their scent from the moisture in their petals, alongside the almost sickly pungent perfume of pink lilies.
 

“What do your flowers have to do with any of this?” asked the nude man. But it was barely a question; it was almost cowering and defensive — the verbal equivalent of lying on the floor beneath someone with a raised fist, holding up arms for protection. “I choose to believe you ran into town for these. You took the truck. You went down to Main Street and you loaded the bed with thousands of …”
 

“YOU CAN’T HAVE A FLOWER SHOP ON AN ISLAND!”
Aimee yelled.
 

“But what…”
 

“YOU CAN’T FORGET IF YOU’RE AROUND ME! I WON’T ALLOW IT!”
 

There was a heavy beat of silence. Clothed Ebon blinked. Both Aimee and the other Ebon had frozen like the last scene of a play’s second act.
 

In that moment he saw all four players in the room for what they really were. They were his own mind warring with itself. Two against two: an Ebon in denial and a passive, sleeping Aimee versus himself and Aimee as she truly was. But the fight was already over. The disparate versions of Ebon’s memories could spar for years, but Aimee’s presence gave clothed Ebon an unfair advantage. Aimee had always held the upper hand in their relationship — and Aimee, as long as she stood by him, would never stop being Aimee.
 

Ebon’s head turned on a swivel, taking in the room’s suddenly vibrant colors. Screaming purple and white lisianthus, gloriosa so red and yellow they looked licked by live fire, tiny vases stuffed with snow white lily of the valley, bright blue muscari, and rich chocolate cosmos. Ebon knew them all by name and shape and color. All those long, tedious, one-sided discussions about floral arranging. All those hours spent watching her work and all the floral links she’d sent him online. All those boring stories about trying to resurrect the family’s island flower shop before finally deciding to close it. It had sunk in after all. Ebon didn’t care about flowers in the least. But he cared about Aimee with all his heart.

As long as Aimee was around, the truth would follow whether he liked it or not. If he didn’t free it now, the truth would forever be a burr in his mind’s braid, slowly sawing its way out from the inside.

“I don’t want to remember Holly,” said nude Ebon. His voice was quieter, less forceful. He’d grown shorter, his hair now darker. Diminishing. Becoming small. “I want to
let her go.”

Aimee, her demeanor now calm, walked toward the other Ebon and took one of his hands in both of her own. The smaller man looked up. He’d seemed so sure and intimidating moments ago, but now he looked frightened. He’d grown even shorter, summer clothes now shimmering onto his body as if emerging from his naked skin. His features had softened, becoming less edged and more rounded, less whittled away by life’s relentless grinding stone.
 

By the time Aimee pulled him into a hug and he began to sob against her shoulder, she’d changed as well: growing younger and smaller, the gray vanishing from her hair. Ebon had become the fifteen-year-old boy he’d once been — beaten and bleeding, wearing the same clothes he’d worn on the day Richard Frey had murdered his innocence. Aimee became the seventeen-year-old girl who’d once taken her father’s side in a one-sided fight — now mature enough to Own Her Shit and take Ebon’s instead.

“That’s what you aren’t seeing,” young Aimee told the boy. “You don’t have to choose between remembering and letting go.”
 

The boy looked up.

“You can do both,” she said.
 

Ebon — now the only true Ebon in the room — watched them embrace, watched the boy cry into the girl’s chest. Then they faded like a sepia photograph in the sun, ghosts before they were nothing at all.
 

Snow outside returned to falling. The day, arrested just after sunrise, slowly broke. Ebon looked down to see Aimee — the real Aimee;
his
Aimee forever more — stirring in front of the fire’s red-gray pile of coals and ashes.

He looked around the room. The flowers were gone, and everything was back to normal. It was dusty beyond the circle they’d cleared in front of the fire, tools everywhere and tubs of joint compound in the center. The scene was appropriate, Ebon decided, for a day several months into a renovation project conducted by two non-professionals who were in over their heads.
 

Beyond the piles, through the window, Ebon saw Aaron sleeping beneath a white blanket. Down the snow-covered beach, there would be an old deserted carnival on a pier and a small path emerging from the brush where a red dock had once been, now as gone as the summer crowds.
 

Aimee rolled from one side to the other and turned to face him. She blinked as if sensing something amiss, then craned her neck to look at the boom box, still playing the Oasis CD on a loop.
 

“Has that been playing all night?” Aimee asked.
 

The song currently spinning was, of course, “Wonderwall.”

Ebon said, “I hate this song.”

But then it ended, and the next song began. It was “Don’t Look Back in Anger.”
 

“Come down here.” Aimee beckoned with a finger and a sly smile.
 

“It’s over,” Ebon said, looking at the boom box. “It’s finally over.”
 

“I don’t think so.” Aimee’s smile was becoming a grin, her hair a rat’s nest of I-don’t-give-a-shit disorder. “If you ask me, it’s just begun.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Choices in Time
 

“THIS IS STUPID,” AIMEE SAID.
 

EBON looked over. She was bundled into an enormous pink coat with white fur at the hood and cuffs. Ebon had never seen Aimee in the winter, but he felt sure that she’d had the coat as a teenager, purchased large and built to last. She looked ridiculous, but Ebon had already sufficiently mocked her about it. He’d get more digs in later, but right now the impression he was trying to project was different: rebuke, not mockery. He met her eyes, waiting.

“Sorry,” she finally said.

“You asked what I wanted to do on my birthday. This was what I wanted to do.”
 

“Sorry,” she repeated. “This is brilliant. Best idea ever. Why doesn’t everyone do this?”
 

Ebon looked over at Aimee with a warning glance. She returned his smile, still making fun of him, still shitting on his idea but willing to play along. She’d swapped her giant mittens for smaller gloves that allowed for greater dexterity, but they were filthy with sand and soaked with melted snow. Her hands had to be equally frozen, but this had become a battle of wills: Ebon versus Aimee, a war for all the marbles.
 

“Hand me that turret mold,” said Ebon. His knees were numb as he knelt in the cleared patch of snow, but the sand was moist and the cold was like current through a wire. The sand
had
to be wet, or else you couldn’t shape it.
 

“If you put a turret on top of that pile of crap, it’ll fall right off,” said Aimee.

“Are you literally unable to refrain from giving orders, or are you just an asshole?” Ebon replied.
 

Aimee rolled her eyes and passed Ebon the mold. He packed sand into it, pushing to firm the brick, then slapped it atop his half-assed castle wall. The wall was little more than a long mound (owing in part to his own chilled hands and wet gloves), so the heavy turret crippled the fortification and made it crack along the bottom. Ebon raised the mold, and the turret stayed inside it, refusing to dislodge.

“Slap the sides,” Aimee said.

“I know how to get sand out of a mold.”

“I keep telling you, it’s freezing as fast as we’re building it.”
 

“Then it’ll last a long time,” Ebon retorted.
 

“If you can build it in the first place,” she said. “Maybe I should go get some hot water.”
 

“Because that’s the way to build a sandcastle. Pour hot water on it.”
 

“Did I say I wanted to pour it anywhere? I meant that we could dip the molds into it between scoops. Then you, you know, work fast.” Aimee made a complex set of gestures with her hands that were apparently supposed to explain the choreography of using hot-dipped sandcastle molds.

“That’s stupid,” said Ebon.
 

“You’re
stupid.”