Axis of Aaron

by Johnny B. Truant

  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.

&
nbsp; 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.

  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?