He stood with his legs together, feeling like an intruder in the place he’d been invited to stay through the winter, and tried to read her face. It was impassive, unreadable. Her dark-blonde hair was a mess, as always, and she was wearing what looked like a yellow scarf around her neck, its ends invisible behind her back. The scarf matched the refrigerator. She had a cut-off sock on her right hand, thumb protruding, like a glove without fingers. It was a thing she always wore while drawing, so as not to smudge pencils with the oils from her hand. She’d crossed her feet at the ankles as she stood, because she was a Pisces.
“Well,” she said. “You’re back.”
No help there. Neutrally: “I’m back.”
“Where have you been?”
“Out.” It was an evasive answer, but it was also trademark Ebon to be cheeky, to answer the given question and nothing more. The one-word reply bought him one exchange; she’d either ask “out where?” as a follow-up or get mad. But Ebon didn’t know in which sea he was swimming, nor the depths of its water.
“Right,” she said. “Well? Did you have a good night?”
“Um … ”
“Was it all you’d hoped for?”
Just tell her. Tell her you’ve had an episode and that you’ve no clue where the last two months went, or what you did during the missing time. She can help. She’ll want to help.
“I guess?”
“Wasn’t it cold? Did you get bitten?”
Ebon blinked.
Aimee looked around. “And come to think of it, where’s your gear?”
“Oh. I … left it?”
“You left it? Maybe I should rephrase that: Where’s my dead father’s gear?”
Something wasn’t right. Again Ebon considered spilling, and was again stopped by some internal defense. He realized, quite suddenly, that he felt ashamed. He was weak; he’d wanted Aimee to think he was strong; he’d told her he could handle his own problems, but clearly he hadn’t. And now, it seemed, he’d been lying to her as to his whereabouts. He couldn’t half admit the truth. If he spilled, he’d have to spill everything. He’d have to tell her where he’d just been, because he now had a deep suspicion that she didn’t have a clue about Vicky. Was that good? Or was it bad? Were they still as platonic as they’d been when he’d arrived? A definite part of Ebon didn’t want that, had never wanted that. It was possible he’d merely lied, and equally possible that they were a couple now and he’d cheated. He didn’t like that option. It was too much like a certain deceased wife for comfort.
Ebon went for broke. “What are you talking about?”
Aimee closed the refrigerator door, then put a hand on each of his shoulders. Behind the refrigerator, the walls had been patched and painted. Had the quaint little kitchen always had crown molding?
“I know you’re distraught, Ebon,” she said. “But if you seriously left Dad’s tent, sleeping bag, lantern, and everything else out at the lighthouse, I’ll have to knee you in the balls right now.” She glanced down, making a show of raising her right foot onto its toe, ready to strike. Her feet were bare at the end of long blue jeans, each of her toenails painted a different color. “So let’s try this again. Did you bring everything back, or did you just decide to run up here and grab the car so you can go get Dad’s stuff before the wind blows it all out to sea?”
“Oh. I … ”
Aimee stopped his reply, her eyes flicking to the doorway behind him. A hallway ran next to the kitchen, and she was looking at its floor. He turned to see for himself. A large hiking backpack leaned against the doorframe, strapped with a rolled tent and what looked like a winter sleeping bag in a blue drawstring bag. A lantern was beside the pack. The gear was strewn across the floor, impossible to miss. He hadn’t carried it here, but how could it have always been where it was without Aimee tripping over it all night?
“Okay, good.” A small smile formed on her lips. “You had me about to knock your nuts into your throat. Don’t do that to me, Ebon. I love you too much.”
He had no idea what that meant. They’d always signed their many emails and LiveLyfe messages (not to mention their letters, back when they’d been kids and Aimee had sent them by the covert dozen) with Love, but it had always been friendly. Now she’d said it more pointedly. But when Aimee took her hands from his shoulders, she didn’t kiss him in play, and hadn’t kissed him hello. They were still only roommates — as recently, apparently, as last night, when he’d borrowed the gear and left it in her way to somehow not be noticed.
“So how was it?” She turned to reopen the fridge, this time pouring herself a glass of orange juice. “Was it freezing?”
“That’s a good sleeping bag.” Ebon hadn’t lied yet and would keep with it for as long as he could. The bag, from here, was indeed a good one.
“And you did your solo thinking? Man style? Did you make a fire and cook freshly killed meat? Did you turn the tent into a sweat lodge and smoke herbs to have a vision quest?”
“Uh, sure.”
“Did you get it out of your system? Can you sleep inside again tonight like a normal human being?”
“Yeah. I’m all good.”
Aimee looked at Ebon for an assessing second, seeming to ponder whether he was messing with her. Then she sipped her orange juice, apparently concluding that he had his quirks and seldom offered deep answers to deep questions.
Something caught his eye.
“Is that a spiral staircase?”
Aimee turned and looked directly at the wrought iron staircase in the corner. It seemed to lead directly up from the living room into her father’s old bedroom, which was hers now.
“Very good, jungle man. And this is a glass.” She raised the orange juice. “Later, I can show you a wheel and fire.”
Ebon wasn’t listening. He was slowly walking toward the staircase. He reached its bottom, put a hand on it, and looked up. How hard was it to put in a spiral staircase? Justifications fell into place: Two people working by themselves could probably cut a hole in the floor; the thing wasn’t plaster and hand assembled. But still, Ebon could see changes in the room above too, and even peeking outside he could see a new roof over part of the patio right where a deck off the mystery door above would go. Did it mean they’d built the deck too? That wasn’t simple.
“What’s up, Ebon?”
Ebon turned. Aimee was holding the orange juice in one hand and had the other on her hip. Looking past her, the entirety of the living room and kitchen area hit Ebon at once. The cabinets had all been replaced, including what looked like a few custom units nestled into the odd kitchen’s nooks and crannies. The bright-yellow retro refrigerator was matched by a much-less retro oven. The oven was no longer against the outer wall and had moved into the center of the kitchen, into a new island flanked by low, thin cabinets. There was a high-end cooktop (gas spider burners, a griddle, a warming well for sauces) above the oven, and a large stainless steel fume hood descended through the ceiling above it. Setting aside the logistics of adding a hood (the required structural work would be tricky and they’d have had to have cut through the roof), Ebon couldn’t reconcile its placement within the home’s floor plan. There should be a storage area and a corner of the bedroom he slept in directly above the hood. Was there now an insulated tube running through his room? What else had changed?
“Ebon?” Aimee looked concerned, setting down the glass of orange juice and taking a tentative step toward him.
Ebon was stepping forward, touching the stove as if to remind himself it was there. To move the oven itself, they’d have had to reroute the propane lines. They’d have had to re-mate the compression fittings and test for gas leaks. Did the thing run off a 220 electric line, or a normal outlet? Ebon didn’t trust himself or Aimee with relocating either.
“I’m … ”
“Hungry? Want me to make you something?”
“This is … this is a hell of a kitchen,” he finally said.
“Well … thanks?” She looked puzzled.
“You always said you wanted to do the work yourself,” he said.
Ebon felt lightheaded. Something was backward. Something was wrong. He looked behind him, noticing the new living room floor and what seemed to be a brand-new doorway off to the left just past the couches. Where did it lead? It looked like an interior door, not one to a porch. There wasn’t a new room added onto the house, was there?
“Sure,” said Aimee, not helping.
The room spun. Ebon wanted to sit but didn’t trust himself to stand again once he did. The floor was unsteady beneath him (the new floor, real hardwood — not fabricated laminate tiles), and he seemed to be floating. This wasn’t possible. None of it was. Not in two months on an isolated island.
“You couldn’t’ve gotten crews out here. Not this late in the year.” Ebon was still trying to say neutral things, but that was the last he had. He was seconds from ripping off his clothes and running around nude with his tongue hanging out and eyes crossed. Trying to hold on was hard. Surrender would be so much easier.
“No, I couldn’t have,” Aimee told him. “But I said from the beginning that I wanted to do it myself anyway, like a working meditation. What’s wrong? You look like you’re about to pass out. Want me to pour you a cup of coffee? Get you a bowl of cereal or something?”
Ebon sagged into a kitchen chair, losing the battle with his legs.
“This is a lot of work for two people in two months.” Even as he spoke the words, Ebon knew he was lying. Even the bit he’d seen wasn’t a lot of work; it was flat-out impossible for all but a professional contractor’s most motivated crew. They’d cut through the roof? They’d put on a second-story porch? They’d lugged appliances, staircases, and supplies into place, rerouted propane, electricity, and plumbing lines? Had it all been inspected? It must have been; their work would be visible from the outside, the neighbors were nosy, and the township was strict and in need of permit money.
Aimee shrugged.
“I think I need to lie down,” said Ebon.
“Makes sense. You just came back from sleeping, so why not sleep some more?” Aimee pouted, her expression somehow devilishly cute, accented by the bright-yellow almost-scarf around her neck. “Here I’ve been all night, alone in a dark house, eager for someone to have coffee with. But yeah, whatever.”
Ebon looked up, his inborn sense of obedience triggered even above and beyond his disorientation. It was the same trigger that almost kept him at Vicky’s (Did Aimee really not know about Vicky? Did he need to keep that a secret?), although that encounter had offered temptations that Aimee, so far as he could tell, wasn’t going to.
“Oh. Of course. Let’s have coffee.”
“I’m screwing with you, Ebon. Go sleep if you want to sleep.”
“Maybe I’ll just change my clothes and splash some water on my face.”
“Whatever blows your hair back.” Aimee returned to the coffee pot and pressed a button to pour herself a cup. The old coffee pot had become a brand-new Keurig, near a freshly installed window box in front of a custom tile backsplash. Looking up, Ebon also saw a pair of skylights that hadn’t been there before. They were long and boxed, with the glass a few feet above the kitchen ceiling. The skylights weren’t far enough forward to interrupt his room above like the fume hood, but constructing them couldn’t have been easy. Or fast. Or possible in eight weeks.
Ebon stood, trying to breathe deeply. He wanted to say something — or maybe scream — but what good would it do? None of this was strange to Aimee. He was the faulty one. He was the one who’d hooked up with a strange woman and helped remodel (reinvent) a house without remembering a single hammered nail.
He walked to the kitchen’s original staircase, noting with a glance that Aimee had painstakingly preserved the carved-in dates left by her grandparents when they’d been building the place. He paused with his hand on the doorframe, turned to his oldest friend, and said, “Aimee?”
She looked over, dirty-blonde hair whipping around in a knot.
“How has it seemed, since I’ve been here? Weird? Normal?” He swallowed. “Surreal and supernatural?”
“It’s been great.” Aimee smiled a large white smile, her crooked tooth quirky in her mouth but somehow not marring her beauty — to Ebon, at least. She hated that tooth, but her hatred was more apathetic than vain. She had a no-win situation on her hands, because restoration of a snaggletooth would fly in the face of her oft-stated policy of rarely (if ever) giving a shit. Or a S-H-I-T.
“Oh,” he said. It wasn’t exactly the kind of answer Ebon had been hoping for.
“How has it been for you?” she said. “Is it still strange? It felt to me like you thought it was strange when you arrived. I know we’d been talking online forever, but … you know … being under the same roof again.” She looked up, then half laughed. “Well, not again. We’d never spent a night together before you came back.”
The simple sentence, even amid the unreality, hurt Ebon’s heart. She’d said “spent a night together” innocently and meant it literally, but what she’d said was true on all levels. They never had spent a night together … and not, all those years ago, for lack of trying.
“It’s been … different,” he said, knowing it to be a half answer.
“But you’re feeling better? Healing your troubled past, and all that?”
No.
“Sure,” he said.
Aimee came closer, then reached out and put a hand over his as it lay flat on the wood. He could smell beach on her, despite the fact that neither of them could have been doing much ocean play as the weather grew colder. They’d met over a sandcastle, but that was so long ago. Things had been simpler then.
“I wish you’d talk to me about it.”
“I’m not ready,” Ebon said. It just came out.
“It’s been almost six months.”
“Two months.”
“I meant since she … since the accident.”
“Oh,” he said. But Aimee was wrong anyway. For Ebon, it had only been four months because he’d skipped the last two. And really, what should they be counting backwards from? From the day Holly died? From the day he first suspected her cheating — this final instance anyway? From the day he’d got his confirmation, purging his place of Holly’s belongings and discovering her journal and the hidden folders on her computer? She’d always been a party girl, and he’d always loved her. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that even after Ebon had settled into domesticity, the party would have kept going for Holly. She liked thrills (he knew she sometimes shoplifted to get those thrills), and would never stop needing them. Well … not until six months ago anyway.
“I feel like you’re holding it all in. It can’t be good for you, Ebon.”
“You always said I was quiet.”
“Well, sometimes maybe you shouldn’t be.”
Ebon wondered at his ghost-self … the version of Ebon that, from Aimee’s perspective, must have puttered along behind her over the past two months, doing small tasks like adding extra wings onto her father’s quaint beach cottage.
His eyes peeked up the staircase. Leaning forward, he could see that it was different up there — a splash of sunlight from a direction where there should be only wall. It looked as if the hallway above must now fork in a new direction, as if the entire second story had been reworked and expanded. That ghost-Ebon had done some of that work, despite current Ebon barely having the know-how to crank a wrench in the right direction. Was he, as he existed right now, related to that phantom? And if he were, what had it/he thought while it/he had been working? Had he thought of Holly? Had he been bottling it all inside, letting it fester? Aimee was right; it couldn’t be good for him. But it still wasn’t enough to explain a structural overhaul, given that neither of them were professionals, had a crew, or had access to a time machine.
“Why did you come here, Ebon?” she asked, watching him.
“To reset. To forget.”
“Why else?”
He looked down at her hand atop his, gripping the doorframe. He blinked. For a second, both hands appeared smaller, less scarred by life. Then he blinked again, and they became normal adult hands, tired from a lost decade of holding burdens.
“I wanted you to come here so I could help you,” she said when he didn’t answer. “But that only works if you let me.”
“I don’t need help.” Boy, was that a lie.
“Strong and silent,” she said, smiling, now lightening her grip, looking down, running her fingers over the back of his hand with a feather touch. “Just like the boy I used to know. Except back then you always let me be in charge. I needed it, I guess. For that first year, it’s probably why I liked you best: you gave me someone I could actually feel bigger than.”
“Thanks.”
“That changed. Obviously.”
Her fingers, light on his hand.
“If it weren’t for my dad,” she continued, “things might have turned out differently for both of us.”
It was true. They might have become something. They would certainly have kept in closer touch, instead of Ebon being afraid to return Aimee’s letters lest they fall into the wrong hands. Eventually he’d let their communication break like an ornament dropped from a Christmas tree. He might have returned to Aaron in his sixteenth year, his seventeenth, his eighteenth. He might have chosen a different college, majored in something unimaginable. Maybe he’d have become an architect, as she’d often supposed. He never would have met Holly, nor lost her. Never would have been crushed to a thimble’s size and reminded of his banality. Holly had always wanted excitement, Aimee had lived her entire life on a tiny island, surrounded by ocean and sameness. Aimee didn’t need to move her feet because she traveled in her art. It was enough to seek her mother’s spirit through ephemeral means, rather than feeling Holly’s brand of wanderlust of thought and deed.
“Maybe,” said Ebon.
“You can talk to me. I want you to.”
“Okay.”
“Later,” she said. “Promise?”
Axis of Aaron Page 11
