Axis of Aaron

by Johnny B. Truant

  Ebon turned from the approaching slip to face the man in yellow.

  “The liquor store,” he said.

  Ebon could connect the remaining dots on his own, but found himself wishing Jack would continue anyway. Despite the motor — now throttling down, entering the no-wake zone — the place seemed too quiet. The air felt crisper than it had even at top speed, and for the first time Ebon realized that he had never worn long pants or long-sleeve shirts when stepping onto Aaron’s shores. The air smelled like autumn already. It should have been a refreshing scent, but wasn’t. To Ebon, who’d always known Aaron as a green place of warm sun and hot sand, it smelled more like endings and decay.

  He could see a lone person descending the weathered staircase from the bluff, now the size of his thumbnail on an arm held straight out. For the first time, Ebon’s guilt rolled his excitement over and pinned it down, suddenly dominant.

  Was this a mistake? he wondered.

  You couldn’t go home again, or turn back the years. Time changed everything, and Ebon was no longer the awkward kid he’d once been. All this time he’d been looking forward to seeing Aimee again, but he’d been focusing on how she might have changed and forgotten the many ways in which he definitely had. He’d barely begun puberty when last she’d seen him. Yes, they’d “seen” each other online after Aimee had found him on LiveLyfe, but casual snapshots weren’t the same as in-person impressions. Aimee might think any number of unflattering things about Adult Ebon. She might find him too quiet when he wasn’t speaking or too mumbly when he was. She might not like the lips he thought were too large, the eyebrows he found too bushy. Sixteen years was an eternity, even without the fragile balance lent to cherished memories. They’d had three beautiful summers together and many messages since. He might be about to break what they had, polluting a pristine past with an inferior present.

  As the boat throttled down, Ebon thought of Aimee as she’d been at seventeen — fully blossomed into a young woman from the child he’d first met, her smile the same, her wavy sandy-blonde hair always riffling in Aaron’s ever-present breeze. Her smell, when they’d kissed those few times, had always been pleasantly infused with salt. As he’d seen Aimee in her online photos, few things had changed now that she was in her midthirties. She barely looked twenty — far younger, in fact, than Holly had looked at the end. Aimee had somehow remained vibrant and young. Ebon, however, had aged — a lifetime with another woman come and gone in the interim.

  She’d stayed on the island, weathering those off seasons in her home on the opposite side of Aaron from her father’s place. Ebon, never a resident, had gone and never returned. He could have come back once he’d turned eighteen, but by then the past had turned sepia, safely sealed in yesterday’s capsule. You didn’t reopen old boxes until time and souls were ready. If you did, you risked disturbing their delicate contents.

  According to her online profile, Aimee had stayed true to her scattered artistic interests, still involved in a hundred creative projects but offering no evidence of a single one finished. Ebon had sold out his childhood interests, moved into the heart of the city, and begun making deals. If he’d become an entrepreneur or even a generic businessman, that might not have felt like a betrayal, but he’d become an agent. Instead of advancing his own desires, Ebon had spent his career pushing the longings of others for around seventy hours a week. What would Aimee think of that? They’d been idealists together, once upon a time. Now he was a cog in a machine, while she remained free.

  The boat drew closer. Captain Jack remained blessedly quiet. Aimee had reached the bottom of the steps and was already halfway down the main dock. Ebon watched her, now able to see the color and length of her hair, her slim and almost spare body, and her aging air as she leaned against a weathered wooden pylon. Even from the remaining distance, Ebon could see how she stood with her legs crossed at the ankles as she’d always done. I’m a Pisces, she’d told him once, rolling her pale-green eyes with trademark condescension. We stand like this because it makes our legs look like a tail fin.

  Ebon found himself wanting to shave. He wanted to suck in his gut. He wanted to duck below, into the tiny ship’s head, and attempt to thin out his eyebrows in the mirror. But at the same time, he didn’t want to do any of those things because he was here to start new and forget, and nothing more. At least not yet.

  The boat pulled behind the breakwater. The captain lined up then throttled briefly back to arrest his forward momentum, leaving them to drift slowly toward the pilings. He reached past Ebon and grabbed a blue-striped line that had one end already secured to a cleat at the boat’s side. Aimee had come forward to greet them, but she’d barely looked over before Jack tossed her the line. A moment later the boat was secured temporarily in place, the single bow line run through the dock cleat and then looped back and cinched as if Aimee greeted nautical visitors all the time. But then again, Ebon told himself, she’d grown up on an island. She’d spent her childhood only a handful of yards from a staircase to the ocean, with a father who’d kept a boat of his own in this very slip.

  It was a little emasculating to stand by while Captain Jack and Aimee shored them up for the few seconds it took Ebon to disembark. He did it with averted eyes, feeling like cargo: a damsel that two hearty seafarers needed to handle because he couldn’t handle himself.

  His feet found the dock, and the feeling vanished, replaced by a powerful wash of bittersweet nostalgia. He looked briefly over at Aimee. She tossed him a smile before untying the line, giving the fishing boat a shove, and throwing the line back aboard. Ebon waved goodbye, his business with the sea dog done and paid in full. The engine throttled up, and a few seconds later they were alone.

  They’d stood side-by-side for maybe two minutes during the docking and sending off, but only once Jack’s wake was cutting water from the inlet did Aimee turn fully toward him. She did look different. Still beautiful, but older than she’d seemed online. There were a few bits of not-unattractive gray in her hair and tiny lines at the corners of her eyes as she smiled. He was momentarily disarmed (how could the online photos have been so different?), but the sensation evaporated as she wrapped her long arms around him.

  She pulled away and assessed him, old light in her changed face. Ebon felt himself swept back in time, having caught a whiff of that salt scent on her skin. Time had passed, but she was still captivating. Ebon felt his heart respond, then guilt rise to meet it.

  “Who would have thought we’d ever have our fourth summer?” Aimee’s smile stretched from cheek to cheek as if trying to escape her face.

  Ebon looked around, realizing he was actually going to talk about the weather.

  “I think summer is over,” he said, unsure how else to respond. Then, hating himself a little, he added, “But still, it’s such a beautiful day.”

  “You don’t think you’ll stay with me until it’s summer again?”

  For some reason, the words with me clanged deep inside. Of course he was staying with her; that had been the plan from the beginning. He was supposed to keep his hands busy refurbishing so his mind would have something to do besides dwell on the recent past. Still, it stirred his insides because the invitation had been open ended. They could, if they wanted, plaster and paint her father’s cottage forever. Maybe they could even repair more than walls. They could see what else, beyond a mere building, could be made young again.

  “Come on.” She took his hand. Then, rather than simply leading him to the staircase, she practically dragged him.

  The stairs, as Ebon climbed behind Aimee, held firm despite the tenuous way they seemed to cling to the rock. A few minutes later they were at the top, at the pair of white newel posts Ebon always saw in his mind when he thought of this place. Their destination was a quarter mile down the hill on the opposite side, where the shoreline hooked around and returned them to sea level. He saw the familiar beach before he saw the cottage. But before Richard’s place came into view, Aimee stopped, turned, and took both of hi
s hands in hers.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Ebon. I missed you.”

  “I missed you too, Aimee.”

  “And I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry about Holly.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “But I know you need a friend. And I’m glad I can be that friend for you.”

  He nodded, his words uncertain.

  Then she turned, and they walked the final bit hand in hand. As they rounded the last dune, they found themselves facing her father’s house: their renovation project until it was finished, or Ebon felt himself healed.

  “Welcome home, Ebon,” she said.

  The last time he’d seen the cottage, it had been bright and beachy, covered in gray shake cedar shingles. Richard’s cottage had always been Ebon’s embodiment of summer, its white-paned windows opened to the soft, sighing breeze. When she’d shown him photos on LiveLyfe (“so you know what you’re getting yourself into”), it had looked slightly dingy, a few shutters in disrepair and the interior somewhat pocked by unattended wear.

  But as he stood beside Aimee on the beach, the place from Ebon’s distant memory was nothing like what she’d shown him in any photo. Its insides were visible through the windows, gutted and hanging with gouged plaster, unrecognizable.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Moment of Vertigo

  EBON WASN’T SURE IF THE HOME’S decay was pleasing or not. On one hand, its extremity was jarring and made him feel as if he’d lost his center. But on the other hand, his memories of Aaron had been forcibly soured the last time he’d seen this place, and a part of him couldn’t help but feel that the old beach house had got exactly what it deserved.

  “I was surprised by how much he let it go,” said Aimee, walking from the kitchen into the living room. The familiar old furniture looked like it’d been shredded by animals — but not cats and dogs; more like wolverines and tigers. The bricks lining the fireplace, which Ebon had never seen used, were shattered or missing. She turned to face him, a few paces ahead, arms out like a realtor trying and failing to sell the place. “You remember how it used to be. Well … ” There seemed to be more but wasn’t. She sighed again, then continued toward a door off the living room that Ebon remembered as leading into her art studio. “And this? Remember how messy and scattered I used to keep this room?”

  Ebon was trying not to think about it. He’d eagerly anticipated seeing Aimee, and once he’d hugged her (or rather, once she’d hugged him), he’d found himself feeling inexplicably at home, recent pain smoothed like sand under water. The house, however, had punched him in the gut and knocked him from his reverie. This tour was already burning a sore on his childhood memories, making things better and worse all at once.

  Aimee pushed the door open to display a room that was blessedly, horribly scattered. But its wretched condition, in contrast to the rest of the house, hadn’t been caused by Richard Frey or Father Time. This room was — as it had always been — all Aimee.

  “It’s like I’ve stepped into yesterday.” Ebon wrapped his fingers around the doorframe, the metal of his wedding ring clattering on wood. Driven by an odd compulsion, he’d fished the ring out and put it back on as soon as he’d lugged his bag into the front hallway.

  “I know, right?”

  She crossed the room, her feet crumpling papers and stepping in puddles of paint that, based on the absence of footprints as her tromping continued, must be drier than they looked. There was a canvas on an easel to one side, several lumps that looked like failed pottery experiments on a side table, and a dozen or so 35mm camera lenses scattered about. The spectrum of in-progress projects made the place look more like a brochure of possibilities than an actual working studio. It was as if someone had announced: “Art goes in here,” and teenaged Aimee, all those years ago, hadn’t bothered to break things down any further.

  Ebon, fascinated, walked in and peeked around the room. He didn’t totally trust his recall (despite its reputation at work for being flawless), but he felt sure the studio wasn’t just similar to the room he remembered from twenty years ago. A lot of it, he thought, was exactly the same. There were somewhat juvenile but still-excellent pencil sketches of Aaron’s eastern shoreline in winter, shelves of ice broken and peeking upward from repeated cycles of freeze and thaw. She’d drawn the lighthouse over and over; there were a few paintings (and even a sculpture) of the modern-looking, flutes-and-whorls structure. Several of the pieces were familiar enough to steal his breath.

  He reached out and snatched a piece of stiff art board from the middle of what was either a collage or an explosion in progress. It was almost new-looking except for a slight curling at the board’s edges. The board was meant to be framed or used as mat in a frame, but Aimee, despite being an excellent framer (it combined her father’s wood craftsmanship with her mother’s flair for art, both original skill-holders now dead with their only legacy living inside Aimee), had never bothered. She’d simply stuck the small painting on a wall — or, more likely, dropped it onto the floor or into a box somewhere — before moving on to the next thing.

  “I remember this,” Ebon said.

  In front of him, the small rectangular watercolor painting made a window. He felt as if he might fall into it, out of this ramshackle building and into the south coast in summertime, where gulls screeched and waves lapped the shore.

  “You might have been there when I painted it,” she said, shrugging.

  Ebon turned, feeling the most genuine smile he’d worn in weeks.

  “I might have been there?” He laughed, then came and stood beside her, their upper arms brushing. “Aimee, I’m in it.” He pointed. Next to the modern lighthouse was an enormous pile of five-foot boulders, placed there by the island’s council as a breakwater to protect their iconic beacon. There was a form atop the boulders: longer and leaner than Ebon could believe he’d ever been. He wasn’t exactly stocky now, but was decidedly solid. The fifteen-year-old kid in the painting could have been an assembly of thin sticks. He hadn’t been strong, but Ebon remembered one acutely satisfying thing about that summer from his own photos, when he found the strength to look through them: he’d been lean enough and yet pre-adult enough to have a shadow of skinny-boy abs that, for that one summer, had been sexy more than merely prepubescent. They’d vanished by the time he was seventeen, when genetics and youth had finally been defeated by Nintendo-related inactivity.

  In the watercolor, small and indistinct, the boy version of himself had his shirt off. Fifteen was young to capture anyone’s attention as a would-be Adonis, but Aimee had only been seventeen herself. He remembered trying to flex throughout the entire painting session, her ostensibly working and him ostensibly “chilling out” and probably “being cool.” He remembered how hard it had been to hold a pose that was both cool and sufficiently flexed. He also remembered thinking that if she could see his not-quite-washboard stomach, he wanted to make sure she got all the sexy right, and thought about every line as she painted.

  Looking now, he almost laughed. He was barely a smudge; she hadn’t given his physique a passing glance. All that clenching for nothing.

  Aimee looked over and laughed, her face close enough for her hair to tickle the side of his face. She took in the painting for a few seconds, then voiced a huge, not-at-all ladylike guffaw.

  “Oh, my God!” She took it from him, turning in a circle as if the light might be better from various angles. “I remember! We took a picnic. In an actual picnic basket. You insisted, even though I told you to just throw it all in a backpack. There was nowhere to spread out a blanket, so we ended up sitting on the lighthouse steps.”

  “Seagulls had shit everywhere,” said Ebon. “We pulled branches off one of the big cottonwoods and made leaf blankets to sit on so that we didn’t get gull shit on our pants.”

  “Didn’t one of them … ”

  “Yes,” Ebon said, the old memory suddenly vivid. One of the offending gulls had shit on his back. That was why he was out on the rocks in the painting; he�
��d ill-advisedly dipped into the choppy water to wash off and was air drying like a snake in the sun.

  It was a funny story, but as he looked at the small watercolor, the incident strangely felt as unamusing as it had back then. Ebon remembered being furious about that gull. He and Aimee had sizzled that final summer, and he’d tried entirely too hard to temper that sizzle with sugar. You have to treat a girl right, he’d decided. You have to be smooth. You couldn’t make dumb mistakes like letting gulls shit on you. When gulls shit on romantic picnics, it ruined the mood. That was true even when the picnic never really happened, when you felt stupid lugging a wicker basket through buggy, overgrown trails, and when the girl didn’t even realize that any of it was supposed to be romantic in the first place.

  Aimee laughed again, bringing the back of her wrist to her mouth as if trying to stifle a snort. Ebon tried to laugh for her, but those old feelings remained stubbornly where they’d lodged. They’d had a summer interrupted thanks to this house. Thanks to the place they found themselves returned to now, as if to correct the past.

  She took the art board and placed it on a worktable against the wall. The table’s placement was almost accidental. Ebon had the distinct impression that she’d needed a table out of the way, and “against the wall” had felt right. Then, with a new surface available in the studio, Aimee’s mishmash of unfinished projects had attacked like a plague of locusts and covered it.

  “Well, come on,” she said. “I’ll show you the rest.”

  Once they left the preserved studio and reentered the living room and kitchen, the oddness of the cottage reasserted itself. Ebon felt his senses conflicting, old and new overlaying one another as if seeing a double exposure. This part of the house, at least, he recalled as well as anything in his life. He could almost see the old place as they walked: a layer beneath a thick coating of dust, barely out of sight under what the house had become.

  The place looked like it had been abandoned for years, not so much as winterized and left open to the elements. It was hard to believe that Richard was just over a year dead — harder still to believe that Aimee herself had felt comfortable enough here to move back in. Why hadn’t she opened the windows to vent the musty air? Why hadn’t she swept the main room as she must have swept (and, now that he thought about it, dusted) the studio, which had been free of the living room’s fuzz? How could she live like this, even while renovating… and more to the point, how had he?