“The fact that I assumed is a problem.”
Vicky rolled her eyes up and sighed, as if frustrated with herself. “See? I’m not good at relationships. I’m too selfish.”
Ebon had been thinking the opposite. She took care of him. She soothed his sorrows. She was his rock. Nobody had ever been that for him before, or had ever even tried. Even Aimee, though she’d given him a place to stay and an ear to hear him, was too flighty for Ebon to feel stable. Over the course of just a few months, Vicky had become his port in the storm — the fully realized woman that Aimee had never really become, that Holly had never aspired to be, and that Ebon was slightly ashamed to admit he needed, both because of the way he was wired and because more and more recently he felt like he was falling apart.
The disorientation. The skipped time. The spinning reality; the fact that seaside carnivals vanished and reappeared. It was easy to pretend that the lies weren’t there with Vicky by his side.
“You’re not selfish.”
“Stay. Go. You can choose.” She watched him, waiting.
“I’d like to stay at least for a while longer.” It was a non-response and a non-decision, but seemed to do the job. Vicky softened. Ebon sat back down on the divan and resumed sipping his cocoa.
“You were mumbling when you were passed out.”
“I was … dreaming … about Holly.”
“Who’s Holly?”
Sip. “My wife.”
“You’re married?”
“Of course I’m … ” Ebon trailed off as he raised his left hand to point out his rather obvious wedding ring, but apparently he hadn’t worn it today. During the pockets of time when Ebon seemed to be in control, he’d been about fifty-fifty with the ring. On some days, he was nostalgic for his early times with Holly before she’d shown her true colors. On other days — often those on which he read her journal and saw the monster under the surface — he took it off. Today must have been one of the latter.
“You’re kidding, right? You’re not actually married.” Vicky sounded as if she was trying to turn the words into reality, rather than waiting to see if they were objectively true or false.
“Was married. You know this.”
“How could you not tell me?”
“It was … ” He was about to say … a long time ago, but it had only been a few months. Ebon’s sense of time was distorted and sloppy, like an overly cluttered room. He changed tacks and said rather bluntly, “She died.”
“When?”
“This spring.”
“This spring?” Her hand went to her mouth, flat across like a Norman Rockwell of surprise.
“I told you all of this,” Ebon said. But was that true? He’d discussed it in depth with Aimee, but had just assumed with Vicky, given all their time together.
“No, you did not. I feel pretty sure I’d remember it. How did she die?”
“In a car accident.” Ebon thought about stopping, but something bitter made him add, “With her lover.”
“Oh, my God. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing! How could you not tell me?”
Ebon wanted to say, I assumed I had, but decided it would do more harm than good.
“Ebon, Jesus! So, what … she was cheating?”
“Yes.” Part of him wanted to go on and tell Vicky all about what a cheating, filthy, traitorous whore Holly had turned out to be, but another part — a surprisingly strong part — held his tongue. Something about the dream (or whatever) was pushing against him, shouting that telling her all of that wouldn’t just be inappropriate and unfair to Vicky, but that it would also not be the whole truth. And yet it was the truth. He’d caught Holly red-handed barely an hour after she’d died, then repeatedly afterward while browsing her private, handwritten pages. He’d been the most stable notch on Holly’s bedpost, but nothing more. She’d been his world, but all he’d been to her was an earner, a sometimes-friend, and a toy.
That internal hand held him back. He felt a psychic aftershock that only dimly made sense: the feeling of a shaking room, of the world crumbling away. Something that shouldn’t be said, or recalled.
“I’m so sorry.”
“It is what it is.”
“How have you been dealing with it? Did you talk to anyone about it?”
“I talked to Aimee.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t understand you, Ebon.” Vicky shook her head. “You won’t talk to me about any of this, but you’ll talk to her?”
“Jesus, Vicky. Of course I’d talk to her about it. And I’m telling you now.”
“What do you mean, of course you’d tell her?”
Ebon felt frustration mounting. He was tired of not knowing where he stood, tired of hiding without the benefits of choosing to hide, tired of not being able to trust the ground underfoot — literally, it seemed, in some cases. He wanted to keep peace with Vicky (and ideally get some of the sex he seemed to need), but was done with niceties and eggshells.
“I’ve known her all my life!”
“So what?”
“We played on the beach as kids! We did all those stupid teen things together! She taught me how to kiss, Vicky!”
“She … what?”
Ebon was on a roll, now more broken and angry than tentative. “When you’ve known someone that long, you talk to them. Don’t you have childhood friends who you … ”
“I thought you were just renting her father’s cottage.”
“What? No. I’m staying there with her.”
“As lovers?”
“No, but … ”
“You said you have a past. She’s an old girlfriend.”
Ebon was tired of charades. He stood. “Old girlfriend! And even then, just barely! Look, what the fuck did you think was going on? You asked about checking in with her. I always mention that she’s there, and — ”
“Because you’re helping to fix up the cottage. I didn’t realize she was sleeping there too.”
“What fucking difference does it make?”
Vicky crossed her arms. When she spoke, her words were spiteful, bitter. “You’ll have to give me a minute to process. I just learned about two of your past intimate relationships in the span of sixty seconds. A wife and a girlfriend, both kept from me.”
“They weren’t kept from you.”
“And yet,” she said, “I had no idea.”
“Well, what does it matter?” Ebon spat back. “I’m not allowed to stay here and invade your ‘alone time.’ I guess that gives me some idea where I stand in your life.” Ebon felt his own arms cross. He probably looked angry, but was actually hurt. Vicky was his anchor, and she’d just broken the chain before his eyes. How could someone be your port in the storm when it was clear she wanted no layabout ships bobbing idle in her docks?
“That’s not fair.”
“Like hell it isn’t! What have you told me, Vicky?”
“I tell you everything!”
“And yet,” he said, mimicking her from earlier, “I know nothing.”
“This is ridiculous! It’s not the same! How could you not tell me about your past with Aimee? How could you not tell me about your wife?”
“Because she’s fucking dead!”
Ebon’s shout surprised him as much as it surprised Vicky. The room was dead silent for a beat. Vicky waited, standing in place, disarmed. Then Ebon sat. Slowly, Vicky sat opposite him.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not. I guess I should have said something.” He wanted to clip “I guess” from the sentence, but it was the best he could do. Some other Ebon had forged the relationship with Vicky. Ebon couldn’t take responsibility for it, even though that responsibility paradoxically seemed to be his. He felt as if he had a doppelgänger — one who’d lived an idealized version of events while he, the real Ebon, was left behind to struggle through the muck. They were a pair
of mirror personalities, each fighting to control the today that would become tomorrow’s official history.
Vicky kept her body language open. She looked almost maternal, no longer angry but still dead sexy. Ebon had to fight to keep his mind clean through the moment’s sobriety.
“Did you know she was unfaithful before she died?” Vicky said softly.
Ebon, looking at his shoes, shook his head.
“How did you find out?”
“They brought them in together. I guess she was still alive when the EMTs arrived, and they told me she said my name, and … ”
Ebon felt something hard settle into his gut. He blinked, and the room shimmered for a moment. Then the feeling was gone.
“ … And they thought he — Mark, that was the guy’s name; they had him on a stretcher nearby and … ” Ebon couldn’t tell Vicky what he’d seen, the way his fly had been open and too much had been visible. It seemed to sully a hard moment, though it had all been true. That was Holly, through and through. Sex in the fast lane right up until the moment the driver crossed the middle line, jarred by a spasm biology had intended for no man to control. “ … And they thought Mark, the driver, was me. It all unraveled from there.”
Vicky put her hand on his leg, urging him to continue.
“When I was cleaning out her stuff, I found a journal. I know I shouldn’t have opened it, but I did.” Ebon clearly remembered that journal. It had been massive, book-sized and meant for recording decades and earning its permanent spot on a shelf. The first hundred pages or so had been blank, and Holly had started writing fresh in the middle, giving no clue as to why she she’d ignored the beginning. “She … well, it was obvious, reading through it, that she hadn’t been faithful for long after we were married. And definitely not while we were dating.”
“She must have loved you enough to marry you.”
It was a presumptuous thing to say. Ebon was suddenly sure that regardless of what he’d thought earlier, Vicky didn’t know him well enough to say such a thing. He didn’t like her talking about Holly. It felt too tender, too precious and damaged. But he didn’t rebuke her.
He thought about what she’d said. Strangely, his memories of those times weren’t as rose colored as he’d expected. They felt dark to him now, every tick of Holly’s eyes sinister, full of lust. He recalled times they’d had sex, and with them he recalled the many times her needs had been too much for him and she’d left unsatisfied. Where had she gone? He didn’t know. Those jumbled memories formed a soup of desire and writhing, with little emotion holding them together. He saw timelines like jumbled filmstrips, all in a pile and out of order, no rhyme or reason between them. In his mind’s eye, the pile was full of burnt ends, as if the film had been caught in a projector and burned behind the white-hot bulb. His memories of Holly were half ashes, damaged and charred. Too many were missing — or scratched raw by someone’s angry blade until they were no longer visible for what they’d once been.
Ebon felt his head wanting to swim. He held it firm, trying to summon a pleasant memory with Holly. He saw only fire and twisted metal. He felt only empty.
“I suppose,” he said.
“How did you meet?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Vicky reasserted the comforting hand on his leg, then moved to sit beside him on the divan.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to talk to me about it, so long as you talk to someone.”
“What are you, a psychiatrist?”
“Almost. I came close to becoming a psychologist — not a psychiatrist, but close enough — before meeting the woman who became my first design client a week before my final exams.”
“I don’t really want to lay down on a … ” Ebon chuckled, realizing he was already sitting on something very much like a stereotypical shrink’s couch.
“What have you told Aimee?”
“Everything.” Or at least, everything that was comfortable to tell, or that felt good to say because it was cathartic. Aimee had heard about the worst of Holly, surely suspecting that it was skewed from reality. But Ebon had needed to get it off his chest.
“And you’re not mixing signals?”
“How?”
“If Aimee was an old girlfriend, she might not be the best person to talk to about this because one set of memories and impressions will color the other. You’ll tend to project one woman onto the next.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Did you and Aimee ever sleep together?”
“No.”
“Did you want to?”
“I don’t really want to be psychoanalyzed, Vicky.”
“I’m just trying to help.” She smiled, but Ebon, looking at her, flinched back. For a moment — really just the blink of an eye — she’d looked very different. For that fraction of a second, he’d been looking at a slimmer woman, less buxom, with narrower but still attractive features. Her skin had been darker, her hair still red but somewhat more artificial, as if she was natural but had enhanced the depth of nature’s gift. Then it was gone, and she was back to being Vicky.
“Aimee and I are just friends. What we had — what we almost had — was a long time ago.”
“But you carried a torch, right?”
Again, the scene shivered. The other woman was in front of Ebon, but seeing her was like trying to outrun your reflection.
“No.” He hadn’t. Really. They’d run into each other on LiveLyfe just after Holly’s death, and they’d started laughing at old times. It had been platonic, and remained so. In the intervening years, he’d barely thought about Aimee at all. Just as he wasn’t thinking about how his hand, beside Vicky’s, had become that of a rotting corpse.
Ebon jumped up, away from Vicky. His hand went behind his back but his other hand was afraid to touch it, fearful of what it might find.
“What?” said Vicky.
“I should go.”
“Right now?”
Ebon breathed. Slowly, keeping his arm side-on and away from Vicky, he slithered his hand out from behind his back and peeked covertly down. It looked normal. Totally and completely normal.
A stark but crystal clear thought marched into Ebon’s mind: You’re going crazy.
With neutral eyes on Vicky, Ebon watched his internal vision as puzzle pieces slotted into place: losing Vicky on the beach, that first day he’d seen her. Becoming disoriented and lost without reason, in the empty subdivision. The strange, changing nature of Aimee and her cottage; the pushing of the ocean; the way Aaron’s horizon had seemed to tip and spin. He’d lost wedges of time, initiated an intimate relationship with a woman he didn’t know. He’d sailed west and ended up east, twice. He’d seen a carnival vanish, then reappear.
The problem wasn’t Aaron. It wasn’t the others. It was him.
“Stay,” Vicky whispered. “Stay with me and dance.”
“Dance?”
She stood to meet him, then reached over and clicked on an old radio. It was the kind of thing that nobody owned anymore. He’d only seen this kind of radio once before. His parents had owned one, and had kept it in their living room through his teen years.
Vicky clicked on the radio and took Ebon’s hands, leading the left one to her swaying hip.
“I love this song,” she said.
It was “Wonderwall” by Oasis.
Ebon swallowed, compliant, his hands and feet nudged around the large open space beside Vicky’s dining room table, its top still set with finery and food. The song ended, then started again, on a loop.
“I have to go,” he said.
“Don’t go.”
“I shouldn’t be here.”
“This is where you belong.”
“No. It’s not right. Nothing is right.”
“Aren’t you comfortable?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It’s cold outside.” Vicky pulled back and looked Ebon in the face. In another odd blink, she became the other woman. Then Vicky. Then
the other woman. “If you leave, you’ll have to go out into the dark.”
“Only for a while.” Aimee’s cottage was maybe a ten-minute walk. It would be unpleasant, given the drop of mercury that happened after dark, and he’d almost certainly trip over everything due to the lack of a decent moon. But he couldn’t stay. Suddenly, his anchor of comfort felt uncomfortable. He had to get back to Aimee.
“Don’t leave, baby.”
“‘Baby?’”
“Stay with me.”
“I’m … I’m … ”
“You’re what?”
I’m falling apart, he thought. I’m losing my mind. I can’t tell which end is up and which end is down, but at least I’m beginning to see that I am the problem. And while it’s true that I can run but not hide, there are plenty of reasons to run. And to fight for what must, somewhere, be true.
Ebon pulled his hands away from Vicky’s hand and hip. She held tighter than he’d thought, and his hand felt raw, rubbed to bruising. The sensation was like the ripping of a Band-Aid, but once Ebon was moving, moving further became easier.
“I’m tired,” he said.
Vicky looked almost hurt. “So lie down here.”
“I can’t.”
She tipped her head in a way that was almost condescending, seeming to say, Oh, sweetie, you don’t see what’s right in front of you. “Of course you can. You should. You must.”
“This isn’t right,” he repeated.
“Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t,” she said. “But doesn’t it feel good regardless?”
Ebon stepped backward, moving toward the door. Vicky seemed to shimmer, becoming one woman and then the other. Thoughts of Holly and Aimee, stirred like angry wasps, swarmed in his head as the old song looped on the much older radio. Aimee the friend. Holly the whore. Good conversation. Good riddance. And Ebon a pawn in between, out of his mind only if he chose to be.
Axis of Aaron Page 29