Axis of Aaron (4 page)

“They willed it to Dad, and he kept trying to get me to move back in. But after … ” She trailed off. “Well, you can imagine.”
 

Ebon nodded again. She’d told him about the huge fight with her father in a letter. He and Aimee had sent letters back and forth despite the antiquity of paper exchanges, but that particular letter had had the feel of being CC’d on a significant email from someone’s legal department:
Attention, Ebon Shale: you have been named in a dispute between Aimee Frey and her father, Richard, of the town of Aaron. Your attention is requested, but action is not required
.
 

“He kept trying to get me to move back in, but even after we patched things up, it never made sense. Since that last day you were here, given what happened, I’ve gotten a lot worse at denial. Started stepping up and Owning My Shit, you know?” The way she said it, Ebon could practically hear the capital letters in Aimee’s voice. “I’d gotten out, gotten myself together, and was making my own money. Living on this incestuous little island seemed like no reason to abandon individuality and live with my parents forever.” She sighed. “Anyway, after he passed away … ”
 

She stopped, and Ebon wondered if he was supposed to wrap his arms around her to provide comfort. Then she snapped up and gave him her giant smile. Even now, that smile felt slightly fake, as if Aimee were putting it on. He’d always found her wild and carefree. It wasn’t until later, until after their conversations had died and before they’d resumed six months ago, that Ebon had finally seen how damaged she’d always been. Internal pain was said to fuel great art, and Aimee had always been the most talented artist he’d known.
 

“Well,” she said. “You’re here now. So this is good. Change of guard, right? Out with the old, in with the new.”
 

Ebon wondered what Richard would think if he knew Ebon would be living in his old house with Aimee — even if the arrangement was temporary, platonic, and entirely too emotionally tragic (from Ebon’s side anyway) to feel like a threat. Part of him sneered at the thought:
Fuck Richard if he’d think anything.
But that was a very un-Ebon thought, and disrespectful of the dead. Richard had been a good man and a good father, despite what had happened. He’d done the best he could for those he loved, using his available tools. Even now, it wouldn’t be fair for Ebon to fault him.
 

“Yep.” He looked up and met Aimee’s shining green eyes, remembering the last breathless moments he’d stared into them all those years ago. “Thanks for doing this, Aimee.”
 

“Of course. What are friends for?”
 

“Still.”
 

“You know,” she said, her face tentative, “whenever you’re ready to talk … ”
 

“Sure,” he said.

She watched him for another moment, then turned back around. There was a narrow set of stairs off the kitchen that led up to the second floor at what was almost certainly a code-violating angle. She opened the door, and a primal part of Ebon flinched, slapped out of his moment of odd melancholy.
He wasn’t supposed to go up there, upstairs where the beds were. And certainly not with Aimee.
 

“Bedrooms are this way,” she said. “There’s also a bathroom up here, but the toilet is really temperamental. You’re basically peeing in a bucket.”
 

“No, I’m not,” said Ebon, looking down.
 

Aimee didn’t hear his joke and was already ascending the steps, her voice echoing slightly. Ebon followed. The staircase was even steeper than it had seemed from below, and he felt a need to grip the railing and keep himself from tumbling backward. But the railing, like everything else in the house, looked rotted beneath a carpet of grimy dust. The dust was fresh and undisturbed; it was as if Aimee never grabbed the railing. When Ebon did, the whole banister came out a half inch, the screws holding the thing unable to grip the rotted wood.
 

“Gravity toilet,” she explained, not noticing the failing support as she reached the top of the stairs and pointed into a small bathroom. “Not to be indelicate, but if you need to go number two, do it downstairs. This is a glorified hole, and the flush doesn’t seem to be working correctly.”

The bathroom was more or less across from the top of the steps. Aimee led them into it, jabbing a finger at the offending toilet. It looked like a normal commode, somewhat dingy, but had a small pedal at the base. Ebon resisted a joke about whether or not you should “floor it” when you really had to piss.
 

“Island living,” she said, shaking her head at the toilet. “Plumbing sucks because we’re right at sea level and everything below us is sand. At least we got rid of the old holding tank and put in a proper septic system. The tank backed up all the time. Once Dad had renters, and the tank overfilled, and the renters had to poop in trash cans. Didn’t even ask for their money back; it was like they enjoyed roughing it and found it quaint.” Aimee chuckled, then turned to the toilet as if meaning business. “So you just use this thing like normal — liquids only, remember — and then push this pedal to flush.”
 

She demonstrated. Something behind the pedal seemed to slip or break, and the heel of her foot snapped one of the floorboards as she brought her foot down. It might have been Ebon’s imagination, but he thought he saw the whole works rattle, lid jiggling as if she’d pushed the toilet’s base deeper into the floor. He got a vision of her sitting on it at night, then breaking through the floor into the downstairs laundry room. He wanted to warn her (he could see the headline: “Woman Killed in Toilet Collapse”), but Aimee was already moving away as if nothing about the board’s crack or shifting commode had struck her as odd. The idea of warning someone about bathroom fixtures they used daily and that their father had used daily suddenly struck Ebon as bizarre. He was the guest, and she wasn’t a kid. He really shouldn’t tell her how to pee.
 

“Shower kind of sucks.” She pointed to a tiny fabricated stall. “Never really worked right. It’s on our fix list.”

Ebon looked back at the floorboard Aimee had cracked with her foot while flushing. He looked at the mirror above the sink, which had been completely shattered, the reflective corners still anchored by stubborn hangers. How long
was
that fix list? And had she really been living this way for six weeks? She’d always been adventurous, but a tent would offer more luxury. And as a bonus, you couldn’t fall to your death from a toilet while camping.

Aimee brushed by him. Ebon found himself leaving the bathroom and following her to a small bedroom at one end of the upstairs hallway. It contained two bunk beds. The room was in the same shambles as the rest of the house, but one of the lower bunks had been dusted, and clean sheets bearing pictures of
Sesame Stree
t’s Elmo had been fitted on the bed.

“Room sweet room,” she said. “I feel a little bad about taking the good room at the end of the hall, but it was my dad’s and I just don’t feel ready — emotionally ready, I mean — to kick him out. Know what I mean? Especially since … well, anyway. I made that one up for you, but if you want to sleep on the top bunk, knock yourself out. I’ll just warn you, there may be boogers on the ceiling above it. My brother always took the top. Pretty sure he stuck things places because he was always casually gross like that.”
 

“What’s Alan doing now?” Ebon didn’t care, but he felt the need to keep his foot in the conversation’s door.

“He’s an architect. But that didn’t stop him from being gross in the past. Pretty sure he was doing all sorts of other things up there at night too. The bunk was always shaking. Sure you don’t want to sleep up there? We also have Big Bird sheets. I could make them both up, and you could alternate. What any boy wants from his beach house, am I right?”
 

Ebon looked at the bunk bed. She’d made up the less rickety of the two (the other looked like a carpentry experiment), but sleeping in the “better” one still felt like a
damned if you do, damned if you don’t
situation. His choices were to sleep on the top and probably collapse the structure on his first night, or to sleep on the bottom and possibly be crushed from above. It was as perilous as the toilet. So much in this house involved falling while in the midst of something intimate.

Again, Ebon felt an urge to ask Aimee why she was here, how she hoped to restore this mess, and why the property hadn’t been condemned. But it was his first day, and despite their frequent emails and recent LiveLyfe chats, they were still just getting to truly know one another again. Criticizing her home maintenance habits while crapping on her family residence and inheritance seemed like poor first-day manners. Besides, Aimee wasn’t stupid and was good with her hands. She’d lived in Aaron all her life, had spent many years in this house as a kid, and had managed to live here alone for six weeks so far. Ebon, on the other hand, was more like hired company. Aimee would tell him what to do, but he was hardly qualified to figure out on his own which renovation projects were terminal versus which were merely ugly.
 

“Homey,” he said instead.
 

“Okay. Now for the big reveal. You’ve never seen my father’s bedroom, have you?”
 

Ebon wondered if he was supposed to laugh, but as she brushed by him again, this time headed to the opposite end of the short hallway, he wondered if the question was legit. As they passed the bathroom, Ebon noticed plasterwork in progress that he couldn’t believe he’d missed when they’d entered a moment ago: a tub of joint compound and a few blades and taping knives laid more or less as tripping hazards near the doorway. Apparently Aimee was at work already. He dared another peek inside. He must be adjusting to the shock; the room looked better than he remembered it from all of sixty seconds earlier. There were fresh patches on the walls, and one corner had fresh paint, evidence that Aimee’s home improvement style was as schizophrenic as her attention-deficit art strategy. Why hadn’t he noticed that before?

The door at the end of the hall opened into a large room with an old and dusty dresser, an older and dustier end table, and a bed that looked as if it might have once been grand, before the vandals and gremlins had arrived. The sheets were clean (if thrown all over) and there was a light-brown comforter that had been kicked off onto the floor. It was far roomier than the other bedroom, and had held the ghost of its previous quaint beach style better than the rest of the house. The master bedroom was still rundown, but somehow different and more dignified.
 

There was another door opposite the hallway. Ebon felt a moment of vertigo. He was usually decent at keeping his bearings and was fairly sure the door had to go nowhere. From what he could tell, they should’ve run out of house. Even a window on the same wall looked out over the water.

Aimee answered his unasked question by crossing the room and opening the door to a half-glass, half-screen door and view of the bay. Ebon could see Pinky Slip in the corner, invisible from the first floor.
 

“Dad always intended to put a porch out here but … ” Aimee sighed.

Ebon nodded with understanding. Richard had been quite handy with a hammer and saw, but he’d also been a secret drinker. Before Richard had become wary of Ebon and his attention to Aimee, he’d been friendly, and played games with them on the living room floor. Even in the afternoons, Ebon could smell the juniper fumes on his breath. There were days when Aimee told Ebon they should play away from the house for no apparent reason, speaking brightly but with red eyes. She’d always pretended, for Richard’s sake, that she didn’t know how much he drank. But they both knew, and it didn’t surprise Ebon, years later, to learn that it was ultimately the drink that killed him.
 

Ebon looked through the door, a corner of the deck visible at the bottom of the vista. He wondered why he’d never noticed the floating door from the outside. It was bolted shut, possibly for the safety of renters or to keep Richard from stumbling to his death in a stupor.

“We don’t have to build a porch, do we?”
 

Aimee shook her head and laughed. “I’ve gotten used to it like this. It’s a
Twilight Zone
thing and messes with people’s heads.” She sighed. “But without a porch, the view is kind of wasted. Take a look. It’s like something from a postcard.”

Ebon moved closer to the door and looked out across the bay. He could see the mainland far in the distance: a dark strip delineating dark-blue water from light-blue sky. He could see the out-jut to the north that Aaron’s Party once made its home. Past it would be Redding Dock: a place Ebon had explored often on his own, keeping it a solo spot, private even from Aimee. It seemed like nobody walked the impossibly long, seemingly indestructible red dock to its end as he did, to watch the sun set with his toes in the water. Then he looked to the left, toward the south side of the bowl-shaped bay. Past the curve of land would be West Dock, the point, and the lighthouse. The island had a lighthouse on both ends, but the modern southern lighthouse, with the odd wrought metal shape like a curly T at the top, was the famous one. The one he and Aimee had visited once, for the romantic picnic that wasn’t.
 

Ebon turned, fighting nostalgia. When he spoke, it was as if a small, young boy inside him were making the words and he was merely mouthing them. “It’s beautiful,” he said. He meant the view, but also the town, the time, the persistence of childhood and innocence. Aimee was just behind him, her presence more felt than heard. In that moment she was a teenager again, and his own spirit felt light with no life in between. No Holly, no marriage, no betrayal. No tragedy or sorrow.