Axis of Aaron

by Johnny B. Truant

  But it wasn’t Oasis they’d been buying tickets for after all, he decided. He was confused by the fact that someone, in one of the nearby cottages, was playing an Oasis song just loud enough for the beach to hear, like breath on the breeze. It was “Wonderwall,” from the (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? album. He knew the album well enough; it had been top of the charts for the first of his summers on Aaron, and the public fights between Liam and Noel Gallagher had topped the news during the other two. He and Aimee had listened to that album over and over on the small CD boom box they set in the sand beside them while they played and sat and read and talked. He knew the entire lineup by heart. If the cottage DJ nearby was playing the album instead of a '90s radio station, he’d hear “Don’t Look Back in Anger” next. Given the number of times Richard Frey’s CD player had run the album off for two kids over the course of three summers, Ebon’s mind had stitched the songs together as surely as if they were a single song in two acts. “Wonderwall” would be incomplete if its partner didn’t follow behind.

  Looking down, back still to the boulder, Ebon rubbed the place where his ring should’ve been and sighed. Holly had been a flirt and a liar and a cheat, but she’d never meant any of it. She hadn’t thought she was doing anything wrong. She’d been incorrect about that, of course, but she hadn’t been malicious. If Ebon had arrived at the hospital before the life had drained from her — if he’d held her hand as she’d died — Holly would have looked up at him with those deep-green eyes and said, I love you with all my heart.

  She’d have meant it. Ebon would have known, and meant it right back.

  He reached up and wiped moisture from his eyes.

  Instead of moving into the next song, “Wonderwall” repeated somewhere behind him. Apparently the cottage DJ wasn’t going to advance the album, but Ebon thought the brothers’ next song was good advice, even though it turned out they couldn’t take it themselves when it came to intra-Gallagher relations.

  Don’t look back in anger.

  Unfortunately, that left only sadness and guilt. It felt so much better to be angry at Holly. Anger was a fortifying emotion. Sadness and guilt felt like the corrosive kiss of salt air, degrading the supports that kept him upright and moving forward.

  Ebon stood.

  Ahead was more beach, eventually wrapping to the end of the crescent-shaped inlet and around the bend to the shoreside carnival’s former location. He looked there now, seeing how the sun had already shortened the shadows on the beach, feeling the warmer air. He found that he no longer wanted to see the Party, or where it used to be. There were too many sharp-edged emotions there — for this early in his trip anyway. Would he be overwhelmed by its loss, feeling a part of his past erased? Would he pine for the kiss exchanged with Holly at the top of the …

  But it hadn’t been Holly he’d kissed on the Danger Wheel. It had been Aimee, more than half a lifetime ago. Now Holly was gone, and Aimee was merely a friend. His memory was rich with possibility and fresh starts, but his present was empty. Something had gone wrong. Promises had been broken. Who had he been, all those years ago, and who had he thought he’d become? Aimee had never truly returned his affection — not back then anyway — and even her most tantalizing offers had soured before blossoming. He remembered feeling that the best was yet to come, and now it seemed like the best was behind him. Somehow he’d been lapped without experiencing the middle: thirty-one with his life mostly over. What a gyp.

  Don’t look back in anger.

  Ebon had lost another few minutes feeling sorry for himself (looking back in anger, to tell the truth), and “Wonderwall” was now playing for the third time. Distant. Tinny. Fragmented and indistinct, but definitely there. The water had a strange way of tossing sounds about, washing some away while pushing others forth like an hidden wave. The song could be coming from anywhere.

  Ebon looked back and forth along the beach, knowing he neither wanted to head up to Aaron’s Party nor back to Aimee’s. There was public beach access behind him, and he remembered Aaron’s geography well enough to know it would lead him into the row of stores and bed-and-breakfasts that served as the island’s downtown. The wide, cottonwood-lined span between cottages was ratty grass, but the access path itself had been trodden to sand. It was hard to pinpoint the sound as it bounced about, but it seemed like it might be coming from one of the cottages farther back. It was as good of a white rabbit to follow as any.

  Ebon walked, his head stubbornly refusing to budge from the quiet and contemplative mood it had so easily found on the beach. He didn’t want to think; he wanted to forget. He didn’t want to process his emotions, or figure out what it all meant. He wanted to bury his head in the sand — and sand was something of which Aaron had plenty. There was nothing wrong with turning a blind eye. Apathy was underrated. He’d done nothing to trigger his situation. It had been done to him. One moment he’d been a man with a beautiful, sexy, fun, charming wife who loved him, and the next he’d found himself the guilty widower of a whore. A whore, it turned out, that he still loved plenty. It was too much. Too conflicted. He hadn’t asked for any of it, and he didn’t deserve …

  Ebon stopped as if snapping out of a trance. He was facing the front window of Sweetums, the candy shop that had claimed the island as home for as long as the liquor agency. Aaron couldn’t support a grocery store, but candy and liquor did fine. Sometimes, during winter’s shortest, grayest days, you wanted to get loaded and eat caramel nut clusters.

  The song was gone, as if it had never been playing.

  Ebon looked around, disoriented. Behind him was the beach access, but it was farther back than he thought it should be. He’d walked a long section of McComb Street, past the inn and tavern and the historical society that could close its doors and have no one notice. He had no real memory of passing any of them, but he’d been deep inside his head. Maybe if he went back, he’d hear Oasis playing again and could locate its source. But what would be the point? Had he been planning to break into whatever home was playing it and click Repeat to kill the circuit? Had he planned to chastise the occupant, advising him to quit burying himself in a loop and move on with his life … and with his album?

  Hello, hey now; roll with it, and don’t look back in anger. What’s the story, morning glory? Some might say there’s a champagne supernova in the sky.

  A sign in the corner of the Sweetums window said, Salt Water Taffy on sale — take a piece of the ocean home before fall!”

  Ebon felt a chuckle rise. It was technically still summertime, but only the calendar held that ridiculous opinion. For Aaron, summer ended on Labor Day weekend, when the crowd winterized its cottages and the ferry schedule moved to its off-season schedule. The ferry was Aaron’s bloodline to the world. In the dead of winter, the only way off was via shaky prop planes. Luckily, Aaron didn’t need that blood for survival. It had a hard shell and accepted the outside world’s commerce without requiring it. It was a poisonous cone shell, perfectly capable of defending itself despite its pretty exterior.

  Ebon wondered if the salt water taffy was still on sale, given that the shopkeeper had clearly forgotten to remove the sign. All of a sudden, he very much wanted some. The craving was strong — almost a compulsion. They’d eaten it by the fistful over summers of Aaron past because it was a weakness shared by Richard and Ebon’s grandparents, both always boasting dishes filled for the taking. Aimee’s father’s place was nicer than his grandparents’ and the beach was less littered with seaweed, but even if Richard’s gazes forced Ebon and Aimee away, they could binge on taffy elsewhere. In his mouth now, the memory of taste was a beacon. You couldn’t go back in time, but your taste buds could.

  Except that he hadn’t brought any money.

  Ebon rummaged, hoping he’d tucked a few dollars into one of his shorts’ many pockets a while back and forgotten about it. Nothing. He could run back to Aimee’s, but that would break the spell, and he wasn’t ready to end his meanderings. Aimee would surely be up by now (Ebon
could barely believe she’d been able to sleep through the morning sunlight glaring through her room’s windows for as long as she had), and if he returned he’d feel compelled to sit with her and chat. He wanted to talk to Aimee plenty, but not now. Now, he wanted taffy.

  Maybe he could bargain with the shopkeeper: taffy now and payment later, like how Wimpy from Popeye would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. The island was small, and its inhabitants tended to be trusting. He remembered his grandfather gassing his car at the south end once, then being sent north to the co-op for payment. They’d assumed he’d be a good boy and comply, and he had.

  But that was absurd. Ebon was thirty-one fucking years old, and thirty-one-fucking-year-old men didn’t beg or barter for salt water taffy. Thirty-one-fucking-year-old men walked the half mile back to the cottage where they were platonically staying with the woman they’d always wanted to have sex with, grabbed their grown-up wallets, and paid with cold, hard cash. Possibly while smoking a pipe and reading the New Yorker.

  Ebon put his hands against the window. Then he turned away, feeling stupid for a reason he couldn’t identify.

  McComb Street was quiet in the early morning, and as he looked down its length, soon pacing a bit farther and gazing down Main where it intersected, Ebon realized that almost nothing had changed since his last visit. It was as if sixteen years had frozen in his absence.

  There were only a few people milling about. None were really shopping except for two women making an early-morning beer run (Drunks, he thought; it was barely 9 a.m.), but a few people were landscaping, storing summer boats and toys beside their cottages, and sitting on decks and sipping their coffee. It was a pleasant morning that would have been at home in the height of tourist season.

  Smiling, Ebon began to walk, noticing Aimee’s family’s flower shop, The Stalk Market, on the corner, still closed for the morning but with a display window bursting with roses. Aimee wouldn’t go in today, of course, but soon one of her employees would arrive and fling the doors wide to greet the pleasant day’s breeze.

  As he walked, Ebon found himself wondering if he was the only unfamiliar face these people would see today. Summer had faded; it was a mid-September Thursday, and even those who hadn’t completely closed for the season would only be on Aaron for the weekends. The population would have dropped precipitously, leaving the island as the exclusive domain of year-round residents. In a town this small, everyone sort of knew everyone. Ebon would be a familiar face after a while spent at Aimee’s (Weeks? Months? How long was he planning to stay?), but not yet. He wondered if he should make eye contact and wave, like people did during the summer. Even while driving Aaron’s narrow roads, people stuck their hands out the windows to wave.

  Ebon suddenly felt the need to sit. His stroll had been pleasant, but now that he was in town it was starting to feel surreal. He was still tired. Why was he thinking about taffy and being unfamiliar and waving? He was merely a man walking a street. Why did he feel the need to inspect his own behavior, and wonder if it was appropriate?

  Before he could find a bench — or better yet head back to Aimee’s for breakfast and coffee and conversation — he saw a flash of something brilliantly red. The splash of color screamed like a gunshot cutting through silence. The sky was clear and blue, but he hadn’t really noticed how the colors around him were somewhat muted until now, as if autumn’s hues left a different heat signature on Aaron than the summer palette he was used to. Ebon hadn’t realized it until that red flash, as strangely discordant to his eye as songs on the beach had been to his ear.

  Blinking, he saw it again. The blotch of brilliant color moved out from behind a planter, and he saw that it was a bright-red sundress worn by a woman with flaming-red hair tied up into a messy knot.

  Not entirely understanding why, Ebon turned and began to approach her.

  The woman was two full blocks down, her dress a beacon that cut through the streetside decay of grays and browns and suddenly non-vibrant greens and blues. She’d be impossible to lose. It was almost as if she’d worn that dress (and that hair, of which there seemed to be a lot, contained though it may have been) specifically to make tracking her easy.

  Ebon felt his pull for the salt water taffy wane as the woman’s pull began to grow. Strangely, the two stimuli had the same flavor. A moment ago, he’d been desperate to taste salt water taffy — not because he was hungry, but because he felt the dragging hand of nostalgia. Again, Ebon wondered if coming back to Aaron was a good idea. Everything around him was as it always had been, but that was somehow more disorienting than if he’d arrived to find six sky-scraping hotels, paved streets, and a FedEx sorting facility.

  As he had in front of Sweetums’s, Ebon kept wanting to remind himself that he wasn’t twelve; he wasn’t thirteen; he wasn’t fifteen. He was thirty-one years old; his proper place was in the city; he worked as an agent and was goddamn good at his job because while other agents faked networking Ebon was naturally gifted thanks to his excellent memory for meaningful details. Maybe he’d sometimes forgotten to wear socks in his teens or allowed soup to burn, but these days — here and now, where salt water taffy was candy and strange women were nothing more than the things they appeared to be — Ebon was a human Rolodex. He remembered whose aunt had a birthday approaching, which producers actually liked to be reminded of their divorces because they felt they’d “won” them, and who liked to pretend that their lover was, in fact, their wife or husband — and thought that Ebon wouldn’t know the difference.

  The woman in red had curvaceous, swaying hips. He watched her retreat. As she walked, she fluffed her arms as if overly warm, then waved to other sitting or walking people nearby. Each time her arms left her sides, Ebon caught a glimpse of the sideways shapeliness of her top half, her breasts seemingly buxom enough to be visible at a from-the-rear three-quarters vantage point. He found himself intrigued, more entranced than aroused. Although there was some of the latter swelling below his belt too.

  Who was this woman? Ebon felt like he knew her. That had to be why he felt drawn to follow. Because if he didn’t think he knew her — if his plan wasn’t to catch up and find out for sure — then he was just a creepy guy who’d seen a woman on the street and decided to stalk her.

  Ebon stopped. But then, despite his revelation that he was doing something odd (following a strange woman as if he were a freak or a rapist or a serial killer), he felt like he had an invisible hand shoving him from behind. His feet ceased their shuffling, but his upper half didn’t bother to arrest its momentum. Ebon teetered on those momentarily still feet, threatening to spill face-forward into the dust. He had to place his right foot to stop himself from falling. And then, with the right foot launched, the left followed, and he found himself walking again with barely a hitch.

  He moved up Main Street, past the inn. There was a first-floor bar (it doubled as an appropriate-for-families greasy spoon before dark) and rooms above. Twentysomethings without cottages of their own always booked rooms at the inn. Big kids with credit cards and proper ID. The inn had always been a forbidden place for older people. The fact that those college kids were a decade his junior these days felt like a blurred funhouse mirror, too strange for reality.

  An old man was on the deck, his face weathered like a sailor’s, hair almost gone but immaculately combed almost in defiance of its thinning. He was looking at Ebon in a very un-Aaron way. In the past, all faces had held wide, welcoming expressions of greeting. But this man’s was almost judgmental, as if he was keeping an eye on Ebon to make sure he didn’t try to cause trouble. It had to be his stutter step — almost stopping but then keeping on after the woman in red. He probably looked drunk. Intoxicated at 9 a.m., the man probably thought. Just like those fucking bitches at the liquor store.

  Looking away from the old man’s hectoring face on the inn porch, Ebon realized with a shock that he’d lost the woman. His heart skittered; he felt a shock of raw panic for only a beat, the feeling replaced with a sense
that he might be drunk, that somehow the two casual beers from his night with Aimee had hidden in his stomach, waited, and had now dumped into his bloodstream all at once. He felt a beer bong’s worth of absurdity — not stumbling drunk, but decidedly out of his head.

  Why was he doing any of this?

  Another red flash from ahead. Ebon exhaled. The woman had stopped for a moment, possibly to peek through a store window. She’d come out shopping (there was a plastic bag hanging from one pale arm; Ebon had a thought that bothered him for some reason: that she’d picked up something for a husband or boyfriend) and was taking in the island’s ambiance, looking through the quaint shop windows with her eye peeled for a later return. Perhaps with the husband or boyfriend.

  Ebon was closer now, thanks to the woman’s dawdling and pausing. Close enough, in fact, that he could call out to her. He had no reason to, but he could pretend to think she was someone else — and really, that wouldn’t be much of a stretch. She seemed so familiar.

  As Ebon shuffled hurriedly forward, he searched his Aaron memories for the woman’s identity. Was she a favorite shopkeeper his topmost memory had forgotten? Was she a girl he used to see on the beach? Her set of stimuli — bright-red hair, pale skin, wide, smooth curves that did nothing to make her look even a little obese (so far as he could see from a block back anyway), and a face that for some irrational reason Ebon felt certain would be blushed and beautiful — were unique enough that she’d be hard to confuse for anyone else.

  Maybe she’d been a regular beach walker in the ‘90s, back when Oasis had been popular and he and Aimee had stolen away to Aaron’s Party together. Maybe she’d been a girl in her late teens or early twenties then, porcelain skin visible above, below, and between the halves of a two-piece swimsuit. She’d stayed on the island and he’d found her again, now feeling the same pull he’d felt in the Sweetums window. He could ask Aimee if she remembered a red-haired walker from their past — or, hell, a red-haired resident from the present. This wasn’t the kind of woman anyone could forget or mistake for another. But for some reason, Ebon didn’t want to say a word about the woman to Aimee. It felt wrong, like a secret betrayed.