Axis of Aaron (33 page)

He looked back. The storm was closer and had swelled in size, eclipsing the whole of Aaron’s shoreline sufficiently that Ebon could no longer see the island. It was as if the storm had eaten it. The wind blew hard at his back, ruffling his blankets like capes. He heard the crackle of lightning heating the air like a stove’s element, then the rending boom as it sundered the sky.
 

Ebon drove faster. The sun-lit mainland ahead was taunting, as if it were a painting of Eden put there to mock him as he was tossed in the tempest. The engines felt like they were losing their grip on the water, the stern rocking too hard in the waves for the propellers to push against them. The rudder was similarly sloppy, failing to find purchase in what felt like empty air.
 

The waves pushed. The sky flashed, darkness coming from behind. Booming volleys of thunder threatened the air, their force pushing against his back like hot blasts from a furnace. Ebon turned. It was close.
Too
close. The land ahead was growing, but he was no longer sure he could make it at all, let alone find a place to dock.
 

He jammed the throttle ahead, knowing it was already at full but urging it forward anyway. Land grew closer, the storm at his back insistent. The sun was so bright, it seemed impossible to believe the storm was so near. He got a mental picture of an idyllic paradise, its hapless inhabitants unprepared for what was coming.

Faster.
Faster.

At this speed, he was going to plow into the shore instead of kissing it, but it no longer mattered. The storm was now wetting his hair through his hat, whipping its arms around him in an embrace. It was trying to push him down onto the deck, to grab him and throw him into the surf. The waves tossed the ship like a toy, engines now decidedly louder with each pitch, the props for sure leaving the water. He couldn’t imagine how he hadn’t capsized, but then a realization dawned, and he understood.
 

The storm wasn’t getting any closer. It was chasing him like a cattle dog chases a stray: with purpose.
 

It wasn’t pursuing him. It was
leading
him.
 

Ahead, Ebon saw the sun glint off the Danger Wheel’s fresh paint at the end of the pier, the big machine’s wheels turning in lazy circles as ant-like people milled at its base. He saw the sun wink off the comparatively slight waves in front of the cottage beach, where he and Aimee had played as kids, where even now he could see the blue-gray shake shingles, the roof simple and lightly weathered, the pool there somehow immune to the storm surge. He saw the sun kiss Redding Dock, its boards new, its paint fresh and vibrant.

Ebon’s hand slipped from the throttle, then from the wheel. A fork of lightning struck to the right as the bow listed starboard, threatening to topple him into the surf.
 

Keep moving. Keep going.
 

He wasn’t sure if it was the voice of his own self-preservation, the voice of sanity, or the voice of the storm, licking its chops as it got exactly what it had craved from the outset. Ebon might be heeding the ocean’s demands, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t kill him anyway.
 

He watched the shore approach in suspended disbelief, the boat’s throttle at top end well into the no-wake zone. Too late, Ebon throttled back. His momentum, assisted by the waves, couldn’t be arrested. He skidded toward the stone breakwaters. The engine coughed and protested. His slide deepened, and he struck the stones with bone-shattering force. He found himself tossed overboard, now underwater, now into the blackness, a wild part of his attention with its eye peeled for the anchor he’d lost on the outbound trip.
 

He surfaced blinking, his eyes unwilling to adjust to the blinding December sunlight that had no right to be here in the storm’s throat. But even so he barely had the strength of mind to register the chill in his bones because what he saw in the sky stole his breath.
 

Ebon had seen the phenomenon before, but never so strikingly. Something about the island’s convection, as it sat in the cool ocean, often caused storms to divert around it. If an approaching eastbound system was large, he’d seen clouds seem to split, some of the storm passing to the north while some passed to Aaron’s south.
 

But this storm hadn’t just split. It had
cracked in half.
The pall of deluging rain and forks of lightning weren’t more than a quarter mile out, but Ebon, at the slip’s mouth, found himself bathed in sunlight. Clouds were wrapping the island like smoke curling around an obstruction. To the west, there was storm. To the north and south, there was storm. But on Aaron itself, there were blue skies and an endless wintertime summer.
 

Something floated by as the icy water asserted itself against Ebon’s skin, urging him to swim for shore and, finally, to return to Aimee’s for shelter, warmth and companionship.

It was the severed bow of his new boat, tipping on end before making its way down.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Worth Waiting For
 

THE STORM PASSED AS IF IT had never been there.
 

Ebon watched for a few hideous minutes while he bobbed in the frigid water, then climbed out and shivered on the dock. He found more dry blankets inside a small and blessedly unlocked supply locker at the dock’s end, then wrapped himself and sat on a bench that was little more than three short pieces of treated two-by-eight lumber. For mid-December, he found himself strangely comfortable. The sun was almost too warm and bright as the thunderheads wrapped and then passed Aaron. Once he was mostly dry, it was almost possible to believe it was early autumn, or even late summer. Maybe it was because he’d been so chilled, but the air had warmed into what felt like the mid-seventies, maybe warmer.
 
A place of eternal sun and fun — that’s what Aaron had always been for Ebon, apparently including now.

After a few more contemplative minutes, Ebon felt warmed enough by the sun enough to remove the blankets. He draped them over a pylon, making a mental promise to return them to the locker after they’d dried. It somehow felt easy to stay where he was, on the dock at Pinky Slip, watching pieces of his short-time boat sink or float. Even if his hat, coat, and gloves had all remained dry, he’d have taken them off. It was like a blast of hot air had propelled the storm east.
 

He found he couldn’t stand the thought of returning to Aimee’s cottage. Not now.

The lapping waves were finally calming. Ebon began to feel anchored — pulled down by a weight he didn’t realize he’d been hefting. The last few days (Was it days?) had been tumultuous, but not for the reasons he would have thought. It wasn’t feelings about Holly or her infidelity (
repeated
infidelity, according to her journals) that occupied Ebon's mind. Nor was it her death. It was Aaron itself.
 

Ebon sighed. Stood. Walked up the staircase rather than taking the lower path in front of the cottage, along the beach. And once at the top, he didn’t turn south. Instead, he turned north, away from Aimee’s. His feet moved without permission, and an unknowable time later he found himself at the base of Redding Dock.
 

Ebon put his hands on the dock’s posts, feeling the smooth paint (or varnish, or lacquer; who knew how these things were done?) under his grip. Everything around him, now that he was finally back at his old thinking spot, suddenly felt so new and genuine. That’s the word that came to mind:
genuine
. Things at Aimee’s were new too, but things at Redding Dock had the earned authenticity that came from persistent seniority. Redding hadn’t been rebuilt in the years he’d been away; he could tell that just by seeing some of the familiar names carved into its wood. It had survived. It had
endured
. With all the oddity he’d been feeling lately, it was a comfort to touch something that not only still was, but had always been.

Ebon looked toward the bay. The island's inhabitants had left the long and meandering dock deserted. Looking down its length from the shore, unable to see where it ended, Ebon felt the recurrence of a childhood thought: that the snaking planks might go on forever. When he’d come here as a boy (when he’d
fled
here as a boy, to tell the truth), he’d fantasized that he could step onto Redding Dock and walk … and walk … and walk. Maybe the end would brush the mainland … if it didn’t wind all the way out into eternity.
 

Despite knowing better as an adult (and knowing better as a kid; fantasy wasn’t the same as dumb belief), Ebon felt the same sense of unreal expectation as he walked the planks above what was now an almost supernaturally calm and inviting ocean. But of course the dock had an end. It had survived winter after winter; it had survived rising ice and storms during particularly cold snaps; it had survived the passage of lost boats and rafts that, due to its length, often became ensnared as if on a net. Whoever had built the dock hadn’t been thinking. The thing was too low to be useful. Too feeble to be practical. Too unreinforced to endure. And yet while everything else on Aaron had shifted around Ebon, Redding alone felt safe and unchanged.
 

He reached its end, then sat on a low fishing bench into which hundreds of people had carved initials — many separated by plus signs and surrounded by hearts. He ran his fingers over the letters, remembering them all. Ebon could even see a foggy, inexpert set, still sharp as if cut yesterday, that seemed to read “BS + AP.” The B had once been an E and the P had once been an F, but Ebon had changed both himself a day after carving the true initials, at age fifteen. The odds of those carved initials being discovered and deduced had been small even back then, but he’d been shy and afraid of what it might mean to truly love Aimee. It had felt safer to return the next day and alter the past than it did to admit — to himself and the world — what was really true.
 

Sitting on the bench, wondering how many lovers’ initials could mar the wood before it grew too weak to support weight, Ebon stared down at the water. In the height of summer, his routine was to sit on the dock’s end instead of the bench and dangle his feet in the water. The idea felt a bit too cold now (not to mention downright inappropriate; it was December, and he was thirty-one fucking years old), but maybe he’d feel differently in a few minutes. The sun really was warm in the storm’s aftermath. The dock’s end even smelled like summer — a sort of organic edge to the water that spoke of algae and the occasional rotting fish. And were those gulls he could hear? Didn’t gulls fly south? Ebon wasn’t sure. Maybe they were the Captain Jacks of the air, nestling in for the winter with a sea dog’s hearty chuckle.
 

For the first few minutes, Ebon didn’t think. He merely sat on the bench, looking out across the water, and let the sight submerge him in memory. The air was warm; the sounds and smells were summery; familiar graffiti filled the bench including the forever marks of infatuation made by his own timid hand. The sky had turned a brilliant blue, kissed azure at the horizon and the dark of denim in the shadows. The sky's few clouds were the brushstrokes of angels, white at first glance but clearly blushing pink on their flat bottoms on further inspection, as if resting on an invisible glass ceiling. Water lapping the dock’s pilings was like liquid ice, bluer in its heart than near-winter should allow. He even thought he could see fish swimming below as if eager for a hook: moving shapes in aqua greens and the deep cerulean of scales, flashing silver as they caught the glare.
 

It could have been a day in August.
 

It could have been sixteen years ago.
 

Ebon let himself sink into the feeling. He ignored the truth, which was that he clearly was having some sort of a breakdown. Maybe there was something wrong with Aaron (and his nemesis, the sea) and maybe there wasn’t, but one thing seemed obvious: His reaction to all of it wasn’t normal. He’d almost been capsized in open water during a terrible storm,
had
been capsized near shore in a terrible storm, had experienced time loss, had become so disoriented that forward had become backward and backward had become forward … and his solution to it all had been to stroll down the shore, sit on the dock of the bay (wastin’ time), and pretend he was a kid again.
 

Right. No matter what was truly happening around him, this wasn’t a healthy solution.
 

Aimee would be nervous for him, if she’d been able to pull her eyes up from baking cookies for long enough to notice the storm. His still being gone would have her in a panic, and if Aimee walked down to Pinky Slip to find his boat in toothpicks, she’d be in frantic tears. His clothes were still wet; it wasn’t entirely impossible that his body was imagining the unseasonal warmth and that he was, in fact, slowly slipping into some sort of hypothermic coma. He had to be in shock; there was a second Ebon watching him from above that knew heading
away
from his current home —
away
from warmth and security and dry clothing — was the act of someone halfway to catatonia. He’d sat; he was staring out at the blue waves and bluer sky. Perhaps he’d lose whatever grip remained, and they’d find him here too late. Maybe it wasn’t warm. A chill made more sense. And why couldn’t he perceive the weather wrong, if he was losing his mind? He’d thought east was west. He’d thought the water was out to get him. Maybe he was slowly freezing into an Ebonsicle. He’d be stiff when they found him, frozen into a z-shape by his soaked shirt and pants.