Axis of Aaron (54 page)

Ebon took her hand. “Don’t be sorry. It’s okay. I want your help. Or maybe for now, I just want you to be around.”
 

“I’m around,” she said.
 

“I didn’t just come here to fix up your house for you.”
 

“Good thing I’m not paying you.”
 

“Yes. Because in the spring, you’re going to realize how futile this is, and you’re going to hire contractors. Between the two of us, we may successfully spackle a wall. And fix the fireplace, before the snow falls.”
 

“Can you stay that long?”
 

Ebon sighed. “Maybe. I’m basically fired anyway. I don’t have the strength right now to go back to the city. Tell me: is it bad that I want to walk away from it all — to stay here on Aaron and live … ” He stopped. He was going to add “ … with you,” but suddenly “live with you” seemed as if it meant more than a mutual address.
 

Aimee laughed. “I’d say that’s you avoiding.”
 

“And avoiding is bad?”
 

“Not always. But you do have to deal with this, Ebon. Not to be your mother or anything, but don’t you want to
not
throw your entire career away?”
 

“What does it matter? That career made sense when Holly was around. Now that she’s gone, what’s left for me? Sure, I need a high-paying job to live in the city, but the job’s the only real reason to stay in the city, and the city is the only place that costs enough to require a high-paying job. It’s a closed loop. I’m so much happier here.”
 

Aimee was giving him a suspicious look — still psychoanalyzing him, if Ebon had to guess.
 

“What?”
 

“Nothing.”
 

“What,
Aimee?”
 

“Maybe you’re just happier here because you’re away from all that ‘Holly stuff.’”
 

“So what?”
 

“Well, again, I don’t know how healthy that is. You can’t just run away.”
 

“Why does it have to be about running?” Ebon looked around the bunk room, out the window, out at the blue bay shimmering in the late-day sunshine. “You’ve lived here all your life. It doesn’t cost much to live on Aaron.” Ebon considered working out the economics of paying Aimee rent for living with her (or possibly just mooching, since both of her places were paid for), but it felt too intimate. “I could get a cheap place. I could work in your flower shop.”
 

She laughed.
 

“Again: what?” He felt vaguely annoyed. Aimee was always like this, always slightly condescending even when she was trying her psychotherapeutic best to behave. She laughed at him first and told him what she was thinking second. That way, she could get her dig in but still come out on top as she always had.

“You can’t have a flower shop on an island!”
 

“You’ve had one forever!” said Ebon, refusing to relent on one bit of Aimee miscellany he knew for sure. “Your grandparents’ place, on Main!”

Aimee rolled her eyes. “I’ve been blabbing on at you about flowers for almost twenty years now, Ebon. How the hell can you still be this dense? The Stalk Market barely survived even back then, when they were farming local flowers and rolling the dice on big summer seasons in order to stagger through the winter. Don’t you remember my whole thing with trying to resurrect the shop after I moved out of Dad’s place?”
 

“Sure,” said Ebon, not remembering at all.
 

“And do you remember my whole rant about refrigeration and shipping costs and the charges dumped on me by the ferry once I realized I’d need to expand beyond a few summer weddings to survive? Do you remember the debacle with the Ecuadorian farms, and how I was losing three extra days with all the back and forth and shortening their shelf life dramatically, and the only way to even make it go was to order my stems from Dole?”
 

“The pineapple company?”
 

Aimee slapped him on the leg. “Don’t you listen at all?”
 

“Of course,” said Ebon, wondering if Dole was obviously good or obviously bad. It was clearly one of the two, but reading Aimee’s letters (and, later, emails) was an endurance sport. He’d skimmed past most parts, including and especially her long-winded diatribes having to do with the flower business.

“And?” she said, waiting.

There was a pause. Then Ebon said, “I like pineapple.”

“The Stalk Market is
closed
, dummy,” she said. “For almost ten years now. But if you’d like me to check, maybe the doll shop that’s in the building now is hiring.”
 

“Well, why not? Or I could work in the liquor store. Or at the co-op. Whatever. Just enough to earn rent. Enough to keep me on the treadmill. I don’t need fancy
‘things’
anymore. Holly wanted expensive stuff, because her makeup clients were all rich and fancy and she got this taste for ‘the finer things in life.’ But I don’t need or want it. Give me a chair to set by the ocean and a beach to walk on. Give me a roof and a microwave and a budget for food. That’s all I need.”
 

Aimee was still looking at him.
 

“Jesus Fucking Christ, Aimee. Just say what you’re thinking!”

“I just get this feeling that you’re not Owning Your Shit. That you’re avoiding facing reality.”
 

Ebon reached over and tapped Holly’s diary. “Reality. Faced.”
 

“You’re just angry.”
 

“Haven’t we already gone through this?”
 

“Maybe it’s not that you don’t want your old apartment. Maybe it’s just that being in it reminds you of her.”
 

“Sure. It does.”
 

“Eventually you have to go back. You have to do the hard work of clearing out your old life before you can expect to start a new one.”
 

“No I don’t.” Ebon shook his head. “I can pick up your phone and hire someone to take it all away. I won’t have to lay eyes on any of it.”
 

“I meant the hard
emotional
work.”
 

Ebon wanted to protest, but instead it was as if Aimee had let all the air out of his balloon. He felt his posture sag, his head tilting toward the floor between his slippered feet. His elbows went to his knees, and after a moment, he felt Aimee’s comforting hand on his back as she moved to sit beside him.
 

“I don’t want to think about it,” he said.
 

“I think you have to. There’s too much to untie. Like with my dad.”
 

“I just want to hate her.”
 

“But you don’t
only
hate her.”
 

“She cheated. She’s gone. End of story.”
 

The hand rubbed his back; the floor and his slippers filled his field of vision.
 

“But before that, you loved her. And she loved you.”
 

“If she loved me, why did she cheat?”
 

“I’m sure she had her own baggage, Ebon. It’s how people are.”
 

His eyes were beginning to swim. “I don’t want to think about it,” he repeated. “I just want to go downstairs and do drywall.”
 

“You have to think about it eventually.”
 

“I’ve been reading that diary all morning. I’ve thought. I’ve wallowed.”
 

“But Ebon,” she said. “You didn’t look at the first half. You’re focused on her cheating.”
 

“So what?”
 

“You have to feel all of it.”
 

Ebon wanted to snap at Aimee, tell her to stop playing therapist, to stop bossing him around like always. But he couldn’t say it. He could only focus on the purest of the now: the sensation of the moving hand, the drop of salt water now rolling toward the tip of his nose. Aimee had no right to intrude. No right to tell him who he was, who Holly had been, and what complications may lie in his nest of emotions. She certainly had no right, now that it was all over and too late, to imply that he and Aimee had had something to hide. Holly had hidden plenty. And Ebon’s hands, unlike Holly’s, had never strayed farther than a keyboard.
 

“I don’t
want
to feel all of it.” He sniffed and straightened, trying to make his body conform to his words. It had been weeks. He’d waded through fury, rage, blame, and loss. There was nothing left. He’d done his part, and now he wanted to move on. If there was more, it could be buried decently, as Holly had been. “I just want to forget it ever happened.”
 

Aimee rubbed his back. He could feel her judgment in the small circles, in the minute scratching of her short fingernails.
 

“Don’t tell me how to feel,” he added when she didn’t reply.

Aimee wrapped her arms around him.
 

“I know what happened,” he said. “I know what she did. I’ve made my peace with it.”
 

Aimee laid her head on his shoulder, completing the full-body hug. For a silent moment, they sat.

“You only have to face it enough to move on,” she finally said. “You just have to keep remembering her, because she was part of your life.”

“I’ve faced it. It’s over. She’s gone.”
 

Aimee hugged him, rocking slightly.
 

“I know exactly how I want to remember her,” Ebon said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Death Forgives Everything
 

EBON LEFT AIMEE TO FINISH TAPING and mudding the new drywall in the cottage hallway after screwing it in place and verifying that it wouldn’t fall on her while he was away. Doing so had felt decidedly manly. Before his arrival on Aaron six weeks ago, he’d never so much as touched unpainted drywall. Now he’d done two full rooms in three-eighths of an inch 4-by-8 sheetrock, plus most of a hallway. It was dirty work, but using his hands and growing calluses felt strangely cleansing.
 

The weather had grown chilly, but for Ebon the cold had yet to dull the beach’s lure. Before this trip, he’d only ever seen Aaron in full bloom, the world green, the air warm and humid, the colors bright like a painter’s canvas. The island’s autumn had turned out to be different but equally beautiful. The leaves had become a fantastic spray of yellows, reds, and oranges before falling. The sky had remained a crisp blue; the bay was dark denim capped with foamy eggshell. But since then, the rest of the island’s colors had been bled of their saturation. The cottage’s wood, siding, and decking were like something on a screen covered with a layer of dust. It didn’t feel like dying to Ebon though. It just felt different.
 

He’d seen a different side of Aimee too. And like Aaron itself, the disparity was unfamiliar yet reluctantly beautiful. She now annoyed him in a new way (this one superior instead of blindly bossy), and yet Ebon couldn’t help but admire the change.
 

She’d always seemed flighty, and had remained so. Her hair was still a mess, and she still went in six directions at once. She still stumbled when she walked because she always moved slightly too fast. But those childish foibles were now laced with maturity. She had a few gray hairs in her blonde, and a few wrinkles had settled at the corners of her eyes and mouth. Now when Aimee bossed him around her missives came from a sense of earned superiority. She’d been through the war with issues surrounding her father — but Ebon, she insisted, had not. He’d lost a friend in a car accident as a child; his first sexual encounter had been with a woman more than twice his age; he’d been torn violently from Aaron and from Aimee. And yet he’d managed to stuff it all down, to keep moving forward by refusing to open those old boxes. Aimee — veteran that she was — kept asking him to open those boxes, to look past the anger to what lay beneath. It felt more legitimate than her old breed of pestering … but no less annoying.

She watched him with irritating therapist’s eyes as he tried to go about his business. She kept asking “And why is that?” whenever he made pat remarks. But Ebon didn’t want to consider the
whys
of every tiny thing. Some events had simply occurred, and were what they were. He had months now between him and Holly’s death, and he wanted nothing more than to move on. To
close
the box, not peer relentlessly into its guts, searching for meaning in a jumble of psychobabble.
 

And so he took his walks to get away. To smell the breeze. To feel the increasingly chill wind as it bit into his skin. To see Vicky — who, encounter by encounter, was replacing those old memories with newer, more pleasant ones.
 

Ebon wondered again if he should tell Aimee about Vicky. But why should he? Despite his best efforts, things with Aimee had remained maddeningly stagnant. He’d thought, on arrival, that they understood each other. Their chats had moved into old realms, always somewhat flirtatious, often recalling forgotten tenderness as Ebon dragged old feelings topside. She’d been such a tease back then, and he’d never been able to cash in. By the time he was old enough to do so — and distant enough from Richard’s arm to try again — he’d already found Holly. But now he was a widower, and Aimee was years divorced. Finally they were both free to do as they wanted. In a way, they had only each other. And yet Aimee held back — not refusing to move into intimate territory for lack of interest but because she seemed to think it was too soon. Not for her, necessarily, but for Ebon.