Another huge crack opened twenty yards to the north and fell away. Beyond it was more void. More gone. More nothingness.
There was no future. There was no past. There was only now.
There was no Redding Dock.
The wheel had no axis.
You can control this, said a voice. You can stop it.
But Ebon didn’t know how.
Start with what’s real.
He couldn’t.
Have the courage to tell the truth.
He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. The pain. The guilt. How much of what he’d lived had been real in the past years? How much of it did he have the strength to face?
“Jesus, Aimee,” Ebon said, taking her hands. “I’m so afraid.”
She wrapped her arms around him and pulled him close. The world continued to shake and fracture. He could hear the splitting of rock through the muffling bulk of her coat.
“Shh.”
“I’m so afraid. I’m so scared.”
“Shh,” she said. “I’m here, Ebon.”
Something seemed to catch in his mind. He blinked against Aimee’s coat. Then the sounds, the wind, the cold, the heat, and the breeze all stopped at once.
Ebon looked up to see that they were on a tiny circle of land, floating in a vacuum with nothing around them. There was no ocean. No sand. No sky. Only a single patch of existence, held steady while everything else crumbled around it — the center of a wheel held intact while the edges flew asunder.
“It’s all gone,” Ebon said, blinking into the void.
“Shh. I’m here. I’m here for you.”
Ebon met Aimee’s eyes. Her serious eyes. Her eyes that were often playful, often sarcastic, often crude, often sheltered and guarded. But always there.
“There’s nothing left,” he said.
Aimee smiled. “Not for always,” she said. “It will get better.”
Ebon thought about the warmth of her father’s cottage — a place that encapsulated his worst fears and his very best memories. A place he’d loved as much as he’d hated, because nothing in life was just one thing. Every moment had all the facets of a cut jewel, and could be turned to reflect light from any angle.
In the distance, a small strip of beach boiled into existence. Atop it, Ebon saw Richard Frey’s cottage. Its siding was blue-gray, faded with age.
Just an old house. And at the same time, so much more.
“There’s so much to say,” Ebon said. “So much to sort through.”
Aimee put her hands in his.
“Tell me everything,” she said. “From the beginning.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Something Tangible
“ARE YOU WARM ENOUGH?” AIMEE ASKED as she prodded the fire, stirring sparks.
“Plenty warm,” said Ebon.
He snuggled deeper into the blanket Aimee had wrapped around him after they’d returned to the cottage. She’d done it as if he were a child, unable to clothe himself. But then again, maybe her attention wasn’t out of line given how few things he could do these days and how many he couldn’t. The world was still fragile. Ebon didn’t want to chance losing it in a vain grab for dignity — so if he had to be swaddled to make things easy, so be it.
He looked out the window and shivered at the wire frame of reality now visible in the dark sky. The strip of snow-covered beach they’d walked during the return trip had been nothing more than a ribbon in the middle of nothingness, a floating isthmus running through a featureless void. There had been no pier, no beach, no ocean, no sky, no anything at all. He was building the world anew piece by piece as he needed it, adding nothing until it was required. Now, as he looked, he saw a kind of skeleton — that single backbone they’d walked finally growing the thinnest of ribs. None of it felt in his control — and yet it all seemed, deep down, to be. Nothing was amiss from Aimee’s perspective. To her, he was helpless. But that was okay, for now.
Aimee gave Ebon a small, patient smile and set two more logs on the fire. The wood was dry and caught immediately. It looked like the flames came from within, radiating comforting warmth. It was almost too much for Ebon’s near-frostbitten skin.
“Do you want something to eat?” she asked.
Ebon shook his head. She’d already brought him coffee. The coffeemaker had stopped working after the kitchen’s faulty wiring had burned it out, but the microwave was working fine. Richard had always stocked at least a small jar of instant.
Aimee sat a few feet from Ebon, also opposite the fire, cross-legged. He’d wanted the lights low to remind his body to relax toward sleep, and in that sparse illumination the firelight flickered across Aimee’s features. She seemed younger than her years … but that was just because it was how she looked, not because Ebon’s mind was falsifying her appearance. There had been times that she’d changed while he’d stayed here, sure, but he felt confident she wouldn’t change anymore. Now, Aimee was his center, and she was stable. She’d become what he’d thought Redding Dock was supposed to be. She’d probably been that thing all along, with him too blind to see it.
The anchor. The middle of the wheel.
Around them, as Ebon’s eyes took in the firelit room, parts of the cottage still waxed and waned in flux. The changes were slowing, though, settling into fixed normality as Ebon allowed himself to remember the truth around him without resistance. But even as the walls and corners cycled, Aimee stayed unchanging. She was a girl who’d grown into a pretty woman, her hair still a mess but now strewn with a few silver strands. A girl he’d never stopped loving. A girl who’d become his archetype for infatuation, edging out anyone else who tried to fill that spot in his heart. Like Holly.
“I’d turn on the TV for you,” she said, “but unfortunately, after you left me alone today, I went against your advice and used the jigsaw.”
Ebon moaned. It felt good to participate in a joke. Normal. Like something a sane man would do.
“I told you not to do that. Florists can’t operate power tools.”
“I’m an artist.”
“It’s even truer for artists. What did you do?”
“I cut the power cord.”
Ebon gave a small laugh, then cautioned himself to stay focused. It was easy to be lulled into believing this moment was as normal as Aimee’s gray hair — to forget she’d just rescued him from something like a psychotic episode and that he’d watched the world crumble around him. It was tempting too to forget that he had no real assurance it wouldn’t happen again. Other than the feeling. The feeling told him he was on the right track. And he desperately wanted to believe it.
Just keep telling the truth, he thought. Especially to yourself.
“I have a surprise for you,” said Aimee. “Do you remember this?” She’d been hiding something behind her back. She pulled it out, and Ebon felt his heart stir with nostalgia. It was the small CD boom box they’d listened to during their lost summers, all those years ago. In Ebon’s mind, the thing would always look out of place away from the warm sand, its plastic case slowly bleaching in the summer sun as Richard Frey complained about its constant cost of D-cell batteries.
“Oh, sweet 1995,” Ebon said, reaching out to touch it.
“I found it yesterday in one of the upstairs closets. And look — ” She opened the top to show him a CD that had sat on the spindle unspun throughout their entire adult lives. Then she closed the top and turned on the box, which worked perfectly. The disc began to play. “Talk about 1995. Remember this one?”
The song was “Wonderwall,” by Oasis.
Ebon felt his eyes close. “Turn it off. Please.” He looked up to see Aimee, confused, pressing buttons before setting the boom box aside.
“That was the song that was on when she died.”
“Holly?”
Ebon nodded. Swallowed.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
Aimee waited for Ebon to continue, but he didn’t want to go on. She’d asked to hear everything, and h
e’d already told her most of what mattered. He’d told her that he’d known about Mark and Holly before their relationship had turned sexual. He’d told her that he was sure he could have stopped the affair in its infancy, but that he’d stayed his hand. Holly’s having a “friend” made it easier for Ebon to justify Aimee’s being a constant “friend” to him. He and Holly had been husband and wife, but their marriage had been a half relationship for them both. Their distance wasn’t entirely Holly’s fault. She’d tried to let Ebon in. She’d tried to hold him close. But in his world, there had been no room for more of Holly than what lived at her ebullient surface, thanks to Aimee’s residency deep in his heart.
Ebon found himself continuing anyway.
“When you found me out there,” he said, nodding toward the window, “it was like I was dreaming. But more than dreaming. I was remembering Holly.”
Aimee made a sympathetic face.
“I don’t think we had a chance,” he said. “Because of me.”
Again he looked out the window. The world was still fractured and missing. He was the one changing the world, but only for himself to see and feel and hear. There had been enough untruths. Enough self-deceit. He could face the truth and become whole again, or insist on perpetuating the lie and stay in pieces. Lies were like burrs in a rope: they would slowly saw their way out from the inside, causing the firmest of connections to snap.
I let Holly stray. I encouraged her to do it, so I’d be off the hook myself. So I’d be available for my backup, whenever she finally came calling.
Through the window, a strip of ocean bay shimmered into existence beside the isthmus of beach.
“You can’t blame yourself,” said Aimee.
Ebon nodded slowly, then sighed. “Do you know what made me so good at my job?”
Aimee blinked, disarmed by the topic’s sudden change.
“I could remember everything. I knew what each of my clients’ favorite suits looked like. I could remember their birthdays and wedding anniversaries. I could remember which men didn’t shave every day, and whether they’d ever rattled on to me about it, as if it meant something to them. I could remember spouses’ names, kids’ names, pets’ names, which foods they liked and which foods they were allergic to, whether a given client would try to pick up the tab when we dined — and, of those, which clients actually wanted to pay versus those who were merely making a gesture and would resent the bill later if I let them win. Knowing those things made my clients love me. Because everyone, no matter what they say, wants to feel like they are the center of the universe. And when someone remembers trivial details about them, it means that they, as people, must be worth remembering. It was a great career enhancer: everyone loved working with me because I made them feel good about themselves. Like they mattered.”
Aimee shifted, pulling a blanket around herself. The motion nudged her a few inches closer to Ebon. She probably didn’t even see what she was doing, but Ebon did. It was his gift. Others always talked, but his specialty was to observe and listen.
“But the more I paid attention to my clients and made them feel good, the more I started to realize about them. I noticed that there was the truth about how they all lived … and on the flip side, there was ‘the truth.’” He made air quotes for Aimee, so she’d smell the bullshit as he’d learned to. “People told me what they wanted to believe about themselves rather than what was actually true. At first it bothered me — I thought they were phony or putting on airs — but then I realized they weren’t even doing it on purpose. A man would complain about slow service, and I’d watch him yell and carry on at the waiter. But then he’d turn to me and he’d tell me how the waiter was being disrespectful. He’d tell me how, thanks to huge tips, the waiters at a given restaurant made more money than the chefs. He’d paint a picture of the waiter’s job as a racket … and somehow, through all of this, he’d paint himself as someone who, through his bad behavior, was actually righting a wrong. Standing up against a scam. Righteous.”
Aimee nodded. Outside the window, snow continued to fall. The ocean expanded, its reality deepening. Ebon watched the moon pop into existence. He blinked his eyes to reset — to accept the sudden appearance of a moon from nothing, to pull away from his own mind and try to see things from a distance. He wasn’t making things appear in the sense that mattered. In the sense that mattered, he was only accepting the truth. The truth, and nothing more.
“I got too good at seeing both sides of those coins, I think,” Ebon said. “It was easy to see what Holly was doing and convince myself that I wasn’t doing the same.”
“You cheated?” said Aimee.
Ebon shrugged. “In all the ways that counted most, yes.”
“With who?”
This time, he nodded toward Aimee.
“But we never … ”
“You were always my backup. Wasn’t I always yours?”
Aimee sighed.
“I could have stopped things with Mark,” Ebon continued. “Easily. All I’d have had to do was talk to Holly. She had this ravenous appetite, but it only came out when there was nothing more important holding it down. She wore me out, and she’d still want more. But that’s not why she was with Mark. Oh, I imagine they shook things off the walls with the best of them — ” the brute nature of those words felt like cutting himself on purpose, but he forced himself to go on, “ — but Holly made me a promise. She didn’t break promises.”
“She broke them, Ebon.”
“I broke them first.”
Ebon stood, the blanket hugged around him like a cape. He went to the window. They’d replaced them earlier in the fall, and the insulated panes kept the chill from stealing his skin’s new warmth. He pressed his hand against it like a child, knowing he’d leave an oily print. Before his eyes, the beach thickened. Cottages slowly grew into their correct forms like skeletons emerging from underground graves. Stars salted the sky. And somewhere, miles away, Ebon’s dresser top in his city apartment would be filling with framed photos of a couple who’d been happy and well matched both above the neck and below the belt, yet had always hugged each other with a ghostly bolster between them, keeping their hearts at a distance.
All those things were returning now, as he allowed them. Because they were all true.
“I never really moved on,” he said. One hand became a pointer, and Ebon jabbed his index finger into the glass. “Out there, right there.” He looked back at Aimee, still an Eskimo by the fire. “Do you remember when you stopped me, on my way to Aaron’s Party?”
She smiled.
“Why did you do that?”
“I was bored.”
“You seemed like you wanted to save me from myself. From spending my money on something ‘lame.’”
“That too.”
Ebon shook his head. “I can’t believe it’s been half my life. More than half my life, closing on two-thirds. I’m over thirty years old, and yet I feel like I’m still stuck back then, all those years ago. Boy meets girl. Boy falls for girl. Girl’s father … ” He sighed.
“Like Romeo and Juliet.”
“Did you love me, do you think?” he asked.
Aimee smiled. It was kind, but almost bittersweet. “In our way. You?”
The answer was almost out of Ebon’s mouth when he felt something timid inside him calling it back. It was so incredibly raw. That “yes, always” made him pathetic. It made him damaged. That one sad fact — that he’d never dropped the torch he’d carried — had set the stage for all that followed: Julia, Holly, Holly’s attempt to deepen their relationship, Ebon’s rebuke. All of it had happened because he’d never truly stopped loving Aimee. It was so much easier to believe that he’d let her go forever during the autumn of his fifteenth year, and that the hangover of Richard’s beating and Aimee’s turning away hadn’t led to what had happened with Julia. It would be so much easier to keep telling Aimee the lie.
Ebon watched Aimee as she sat, fighting with himself. Behind her head the firep
lace turned gray with age. Paint soured and flaked, revealing what seemed to be patterned wallpaper beneath. Richard’s wallpaper, glued to plaster and lath walls that had been excavated weeks ago, replaced with sheetrock and joint compound. Plaster sifted to dust. Lath slats peeked out from behind. Spider webs of decay formed as the floor creaked and paled to dulled hardwood.
Tell the truth, he thought. Especially to yourself.
“I guess I never really got over you,” Ebon admitted.
Aimee looked away a little when she smiled this time, the wall behind her becoming new and painted, the floors regaining their shine.
Aimee stood. For a moment, she simply looked out the window as she held space beside him. She took his hand and squeezed it.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m getting there.”
“When I found you out on the beach … ” She stopped, then tried again. “When you called me … ”
“It’s complicated,” he said.
“I thought you were having some kind of a breakdown.”
Ebon looked outside. The world was still in pieces. He didn’t know how much of it he’d perverted. How much he’d changed. How much of his own reality his mind had idealized so that he’d be the hero of his own story rather than the reluctant villain. The only way to find out was to relearn it all, piece by piece. It meant starting over. You couldn’t go home again, but as he looked out the window and then over at Aimee, Ebon realized the small blessing within the curse: that this, for better or worse, was as close to a do-over as anyone ever got.
“You could say that,” he said.
“You told me the world was falling apart. You were asking me strange questions.”
“It’s better now.”
“You should see someone. There’s a woman on the island who has a psychiatric practice in the city but takes clients at home over the winter. If you want to keep staying here, you have to go see her. If I have to drag you, I will.”
Axis of Aaron Page 43