“You can,” Aiden called back. “Use a little inside rein. Then nudge ’em with the outside foot. And kiss ’em. They’ll go right into it.”
Both riders reined their horses to a stop and stared at him.
And no, looking back, Milo was not there. Aiden had lost track of him. Everybody had lost track of him.
His new love and her teenage girl rode their horses to where he stood at the pipe fence.
“My daughter and I think our ears need a good cleaning,” Gwen said. “Because we’re both pretty sure you said we have to kiss the horses if we want them to canter.”
Aiden laughed. It was a genuine thing that rose up out of his belly and surprised him. He hadn’t laughed from that place in as long as he could remember. Or maybe he never had.
“It’s an expression,” he said. “Which I forgot you would not be familiar with. Kiss ’em means you make this little noise at the horse.”
He pursed his lips and made a little kissing sound that just about anyone, even if only from having seen western movies, would identify as encouraging a horse to move faster.
“Got it,” Elizabeth said.
Then they were loping around the big pen, and Aiden was happy. Genuinely happy. He watched the way they held the saddle horn with both hands—meaning they weren’t steering at all—and the way his good horses correctly assumed they were to follow the pipe rail around in a circle, and complied.
He glanced at the sun, which had sunk nearly down over the tops of the trees on the forested western edge of his land. He noted the way the scrub oak leaves had built up on the orangey California tile roof of his one-story stucco ranch house. And even though it meant he would have to clean them off to keep the rain gutters unclogged, it still made him happy. Because this was his home.
And it was a big thing, to be happy. A huge thing. It was something Aiden had sought after all his life, but it had always stayed a few steps ahead. And every time he had reached out to grab it, it had disappeared around a corner, leaving Aiden to start over.
And now here it was.
He felt so good that he thought he could bring himself to try having a conversation with Milo. Who, quite honestly, he had forgotten all about.
Aiden turned 360 degrees, looking for Milo.
The boy was nowhere to be seen.
Aiden caught Gwen’s eye and held up one finger to let her know he’d be gone a moment. She reined Pharaoh down to a walk and cupped her hands around her mouth, yelling out, “Where’s Milo?”
And that good horse did not even spook.
“That’s what I’m about to go figure out,” Aiden called back.
Aiden found Milo out behind the house, where Aiden had built his new rabbit hutch. The rabbits were surrounded by a tall fence of sturdy four-by-fours and closely hatched welded wire. Because wild animals love to get in and slaughter your rabbits. So you have to build a fence that might stand a chance at stopping them.
But now, Aiden realized, they had all come face to face with a wild animal no one had anticipated.
Before he even truly understood the scene before him, Aiden felt it. Felt the rabbits’ panic. It surged through his own gut and he experienced it just as surely as the animals did.
Because that’s what his life was these days. That was Aiden’s curse.
Milo had scaled the seven-foot fence and sat straddling the top rail, securely up above the rabbits, waiting. Holding something in his right hand. The rabbits crouched inside their shelter, despite the fact that there were still several heads of lettuce outside in their feed pan in the corner. They should have been out gorging themselves. But there was a predator in their midst. So they huddled inside.
As Aiden crossed the ground from the house to the fence, a bold rabbit stuck its head out into the unguarded air.
Milo’s right hand drew back, and he lobbed something at that innocent head. It missed the rabbit—who jolted backward inside the shelter—and tumbled harmlessly into a corner of the hutch. A rock about the size of a golf ball.
“Hey!” Aiden shouted, and broke into a run.
He expected Milo to clamber down from the fence, but no such thing happened. Instead the boy reached into his jeans pocket and produced another rock.
Aiden reached the fence and wrapped his fingers through the wire. He had to. It was how he kept his hands off the predator. Which he felt constrained to do, despite the fact that his absolute synchronicity with the rabbits’ fear put Aiden squarely on their side.
“Milo,” Aiden said, trying to calm his voice. He looked up and saw mostly the boy’s blue-jeaned butt. “Get down from there. Now. I won’t have this.”
Milo did not get down.
Instead the boy cocked his arm back for another throw.
Aiden reached up as high as he could, which involved a jump. A lifting of his feet off the ground. He grabbed the offending arm and pulled it back again. Stopped its forward trajectory.
But then the trouble came.
Aiden was still holding the boy’s arm as his jump was inevitably overcome by gravity. And when Aiden came down—when his feet touched earth again—he pulled down on the small arm without meaning to.
The boy tumbled off the fence.
Aiden watched him fall as if in slow motion. He watched the rock come free from Milo’s hand.
Aiden still had hold of Milo’s arm. And somehow—misguidedly, in retrospect—he thought his grip on the arm was a good thing. He thought it meant he still had a chance to break the boy’s fall. So he pulled up on the arm as if to save him. Spare him the bulk of the impact.
It was a singularly wrong move.
Aiden knew he’d made a big mistake as soon as Milo thumped into the dirt. Because the impact happened anyway. But it happened with the boy’s arm twisted up into an unnatural position.
Aiden let go.
He stood a moment, too shocked to know how to proceed. Just looking down at the boy. Hoping in spite of all evidence that Milo would jump up, dust off, give him the finger, and saunter away.
“Milo,” Aiden said quietly. “You okay?”
For a moment, nothing.
Then Milo split the air with a cry. Something that might spring from a wounded animal. A wild, unrestrained shriek of pain.
Chapter Three
Owning and Answering
Aiden sat beside Gwen in the hospital waiting room, and she held his hand. Which, as best he could figure, was the only thing good to be said about his world in that moment.
Elizabeth had fallen asleep in her hard plastic chair on the other side of the long, narrow room—head back, mouth yawning open. Long hair falling across her face. She looked like an angel. A sleeping angel with braces on her teeth.
“I never meant for this to happen,” Aiden said again. It might have been the tenth time he’d said it. It might have been the twentieth.
“You don’t have to keep saying that, Aiden. I know. I know you.”
“Thank you,” he said, and gave her hand a squeeze.
It felt good to hear her say she didn’t blame him. It had felt good every one of the ten or twenty times she had said it. But she was standing a few steps away from him now, figuratively speaking, in some indefinable place inside herself. And, worse yet, she had closed the door to that place, leaving him alone on the outside. Exactly where he had been his whole life, minus a couple of wonderful months.
“I’ll take care of the bill,” he said. “Don’t worry. I don’t know what you have for insurance, but I won’t let any of it fall on you.”
“But how? You’re not exactly—”
“I don’t know, but I will. I’ll figure it out.”
It flitted through his mind that just an hour or so earlier he had been happy. But it felt unreal, impossible. So he let it go again. He sat staring at his hand entwined with hers, and at the finely patterned hospital linoleum beyond.
“The evening wasn’t a total loss,” Gwen said.
“How do you figure?”
“Eliza
beth just adores you.”
Aiden burst out laughing. It was a bitter laugh. It did not come from that place inside that feels genuine happiness. Or genuine anything.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t laugh. Nothing is funny right now.”
“It’s okay, I know you’re not laughing at him getting hurt. What? What seemed funny?”
“I was just thinking of that joke. That old one-line joke. ‘But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?’”
Aiden saw a movement above him and glanced up.
Standing over him was Jed Donovan, in uniform. Jed was a sheriff’s deputy in this county. Had been for twenty years or more.
“Aiden,” Jed said as their eyes connected.
“Jed,” Aiden said in return. “Please tell me you just saw me sitting here and came by to say hello.”
“Wish I could, Aiden. But we both know it’s not gonna be like that. I need to ask you some questions.”
Jed stood outside his patrol car in the parking lot, puffing on a comically fat cigar. Aiden sat on the edge of the back seat of the vehicle, with the back door standing wide open.
It was full-on dark by then, but their meeting was illuminated by light poles in the hospital parking area. Even the second-longest day of the year had to end sometime. Aiden wasn’t sorry to see this one go.
“So what you’re saying, then, Aiden,” Jed mumbled around the butt of his cigar, “is that you pulled the kid down off a high fence to protect a rabbit.”
“No,” Aiden said. “No, no, no.” It was one “no” for every time he had told the story and Jed had recited it back to him slanted and wrong. “I just took hold of his arm to stop him getting off another throw. The rest was pure accident. I swear.”
“Why didn’t you just tell him to get down off the fence?”
“I did. He paid me no mind.”
“I see.”
Jed opened the driver’s side door of his patrol car and reached his upper body across the front seat. He emerged with a clipboard.
For a few moments the deputy made notes in silence.
“Okay,” Jed said, as if talking to his clipboard. “Okay.”
Then he looked down at Aiden. Their eyes met. But with the deputy’s face backlit by the parking lot lights it was hard to know what was there in his eyes. Aiden wondered if Jed could see his own eyes clearly and, if so, what he thought he saw there.
“You know why I have to ask these questions,” Jed said. “Right?”
“Yes and no.”
“It’s a legal requirement in a case like this. Kid shows up at a hospital with a broken arm. If he’s been riding a horse or a bicycle, maybe we let that go by. Stuff happens with kids, after all. But when we hear it happened in the course of a dispute with his mom’s new boyfriend, well . . . that just puts us in a different territory. That sets off what you might call alarm bells.”
“I understand that,” Aiden said. “The part I don’t understand is . . . well, it’s me, Jed. It’s me. I’ve lived in these parts thirty-four years. Since I was six years old. You know me. When have you ever known me to cause any trouble?”
Aiden looked up into the deputy’s mostly shadowed face and thought he might have seen Jed’s eyes narrow. Or it might have been an illusion. A trick of the light.
“Yeah, I do know you, Aiden. And I hate like hell to say it, but that’s part of our issue here. Everybody in these parts knows you, and we all know you’ve changed of late. This real sudden change nobody can understand or follow. That’s another red flag, my friend. A sudden change in personality, or . . . I don’t know. Beliefs? Habits? I don’t even know what to call it. If I understood it, we might be done with this little talk by now.”
“But it’s just the opposite,” Aiden said, paddling hard within himself. As if swimming against a strong current. As if only just realizing what he was up against. How deeply he was sinking into this mess. “I changed into a person less likely to do violence to anyone or anything. Not more.”
“Yeah, I catch your drift, but it doesn’t set my mind to rest. All of a sudden you’re changeable. Maybe it goes back and forth, how do I know? All I know is . . . I just have no idea what I should expect from you anymore.”
They sat silent for a time. Well, Aiden sat. Jed stood silent.
Aiden looked up to see that the moon had risen, huge and filmy over the top of the rise to the east. Just a couple of days off full.
“What do I have to do to prove this was an accident?” he asked after a time.
“Don’t know as you can. But at the same time nobody else can prove it wasn’t. There was nobody there to witness it except you and the boy. The rabbits aren’t talking.”
Aiden wasn’t sure if that had been intended as a joke. He did not laugh.
“What’s Milo saying happened?”
“He’s not saying anything at all. He’s a recalcitrant little bastard. Don’t think I don’t know his story, too. Barely over three months in town and already the department’s been called to the school twice to sort out some disaster of that kid’s making.”
“What kind of disaster?”
“That I would not be at liberty to say. But you got your work cut out for you with that one. I’ll just say that much and leave it. I don’t envy you having that little miscreant suddenly dropped into your life. Hope you really love his mom a lot, because something’s got to pay you back for what he’ll put you through. But enough about that, because it’s only my opinion anyway.”
Jed’s hand came up to his cigar. He pulled it from his lips for a moment, spat a shred of tobacco off the end of his tongue, then shoved it back into the corner of his mouth again, clamping down on it with his molars.
“Now as far as tonight,” he continued, “we more or less take you at your word. For now. You say it was an accident and nobody else says otherwise. But it’s a suspicious accident. I’m not gonna lie about that. But there’s not much evidence to charge you with anything. But if something like this were to happen again . . .”
“It won’t,” Aiden said quickly.
“You don’t know that. I might know this boy better than you do, though I don’t claim to know him well. Disasters follow him around. People get mad in his presence. Nothing good comes of it.”
“We’ll be fine,” Aiden said. Then, after an awkward silence, he added, “Are we done here?”
“Not quite. I’m going to make you a suggestion. I’m going to advise you to get some help with your anger.”
“I don’t have trouble with anger. Never did.”
“Fine. Call it what you want. But even you admit that all of a sudden there was this big change in you recently. You don’t even care to know why?”
“Are you talking about . . . ?” But then Aiden couldn’t bring himself to pin it down in words.
“Psychiatric help. Yeah. I can’t insist. I’m not a judge. What I can do is tell you that if we find ourselves in this bind again, it’ll go well with me to know you been making an effort to get your own self figured out. Get what I’m saying?”
“Yeah,” Aiden said, and pulled to his feet. “Yeah, I got it.”
They drove back to Aiden’s ranch in silence, Aiden occasionally glancing over at the side of Gwen’s face. Especially as they passed under streetlights on the two-lane backcountry highway.
Both kids were sleeping on the small back seat of Aiden’s extra-cab pickup, Milo with a ridiculously bulky cast on his right arm. Aiden had carried the sleeping Elizabeth out to the truck over his shoulder. Milo had climbed in of his own accord, but the painkillers had knocked him out as soon as the hum of the driving settled in.
“Are we okay?” Aiden finally asked Gwen.
It made her jump. They had both been so solidified into that silence.
“Of course,” she said.
But it wasn’t entirely true—he could hear that it wasn’t. She probably wanted it to be true. But she was still on the other side of that invisible door. Maybe she couldn�
�t even help it, but those were the facts. Aiden needed only to be present to know it.
“I know things happen with Milo,” she said. “Not usually things with animals. He never hurt an animal before. But it’s always something. Just different things with different people. I don’t know how to say it any better than that. Perfectly nice people get into bad situations with him. People who would never have trouble with anybody else they meet. It’s like he brings out the worst in people. Just in the last few years. I really think he can get past it, because it wasn’t always like this.”
“That sounds like . . .”
“What?”
“Like you’re saying you think it wasn’t an accident.”
“No, I didn’t mean it like that. At all. I just mean . . . oh, hell, Aiden. I don’t even know what I mean.”
And because it had been such a miserable evening—because he had run out of emotional energy and had nothing left to give to the moment—Aiden didn’t try to press the conversation to a more satisfactory ending.
She called him not ten minutes after leaving his ranch. She must have just walked in her own door.
“You weren’t in bed yet, were you?” she asked without bothering to say hello.
“No.”
It wasn’t entirely true. He was in bed. But not anywhere approaching sleep, so he decided that was close enough.
“I figure I’ve woken you up out of a sound sleep enough for one lifetime.”
“Only once,” he said.
“That’s enough.”
A long silence fell. It felt more awkward than an in-person silence, because there were no visuals to help him judge the tone of her. Her mood.
“It’s not what you’re thinking,” she said.
“What’s not what I’m thinking?”
“I know I’ve been kind of quiet tonight. And kind of . . . I know you think I’m mad at you, or that I blame you. But it’s not that.”
She fell silent again, and Aiden only waited. To see what it was, if not that. He did not feel he had a right to ask her. He was not sure what rights he had, if any—not only with her, but in the world in general. So he waited.
The Wake Up Page 4