The Wake Up

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  A return of that tingle in the center of Aiden’s blankness. But it didn’t grow, or stay. Shocked as he was by the suggestion that he had done something to break his mother’s heart, he couldn’t imagine or understand it. So the moment slid away.

  And still his mother was talking.

  “He worries about Aiden because he thinks he’s too sensitive. My God, he’s four. Just let him grow up, you know? Which is not to say I don’t worry sometimes, too. I worry for him. Because it’s a hard way to be. But then Eddie socks him in the face for being too rough with his sister. So make up your mind, right? You either want him to be a macho boy or you don’t.” A weighted pause. “I think it’s the being laid off from work. He’s proud about that sort of thing. Being the breadwinner and all. He’s been on a short fuse.”

  “Uh-oh,” Donna interjected. “That’s the kind of thing women say right before they go back and give the guy another chance: ‘He was just under extra pressure.’”

  “I’m not doing that, Donna. I’m not stupid. He’ll be under pressure again in his life. And now I’ve seen the full range of how he can be.”

  “Good,” Donna said. “Good for you for using your head.”

  They drove in silence for a time. They weren’t going to Donna’s house. Aiden knew because he had been to Donna’s house. Many times.

  “I must admit I’m surprised,” Donna said, startling the very air in the car, which had grown accustomed to the silence. “You were awfully quick to see. Didn’t even need time to think about it.”

  “Nobody hits me twice,” his mother said. Her voice was tinged with a strange conviction. A strength, maybe even a hardness, he had not heard in her before. “But, really,” she added, more softly now, “it’s not sudden at all. Things haven’t been right with our marriage for years. Maybe more so than I’ve let on—I’m not sure. But every morning I wake up knowing it. And I have a choice. I can force a change that day, or I can get through the day and pass it off till tomorrow. Just keep kicking it down the road like an old can.”

  “I understand,” Donna said.

  Aiden didn’t. He was too young. But in another way, he did. Not in the words, but in the way they were spoken. In the silences. In the air of that car. They were going away. And Aiden’s father had somehow slipped into the past.

  Donna’s car pulled into a parking lot, and Aiden saw a sign on a building, but he was not a good enough reader to know what it said.

  “Where are we?” he asked, somehow adjusted to his new world. Accepting of the fact that everything from here on out would be different. Unfamiliar.

  “We’re at the hospital,” Donna said. “Your mom needs some stitches in that hand. And then you’ll come to my house for the night. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Aiden said. “That’s fine.”

  And it was. Or, at least, if it wasn’t, Aiden had no way of knowing it wasn’t. It was no longer something he could feel.

  It wasn’t until after the hand was stitched and they were on their way to Donna’s that Aiden noticed he was hardly breathing. He had to take in some oxygen, of course, to keep himself alive. But it wasn’t much.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Aiden at Age Six

  His mother’s face was strangely close to his own, and he could see her eyes and the shadow that had fallen across them as she worked. She was nervous. But Aiden had no idea what about.

  She was on her knees in front of him, tying a Windsor knot in a blue necktie around Aiden’s neck. Working with a strange precision. As if she would soon be harshly judged on the results. She snugged up the tie, and Aiden instinctively put a hand to his throat and used one finger to loosen the knot again.

  “Ow,” he said.

  But it wasn’t really an “ow” situation. It didn’t hurt. It was just uncomfortable. And a little scary. It made him feel as though the tiny bits of air he was accustomed to inhaling might be further limited. He’d been barely breathing anyway these last couple of years.

  She made a tsk sound with her tongue and gently snugged it again.

  “Why do I have to wear a tie?” he asked, sounding a little whiny to his own ears. Almost like Valerie, and that was something worth avoiding.

  “Because it’s important.”

  “Why is it important?”

  “It’s a nice restaurant. Nicer than we’ve ever been to before.”

  “Does the restaurant check and make sure your tie is nice and tight?”

  “No,” she said lightly, looking at him as though he were being quite silly. “Of course not.”

  “Then why is it important?”

  She had just begun to peel away from him. She had made it partway to her feet, and her body was turned half around, as if ready to tackle some other untidy kid-related disaster. But she stopped. Sank to her knees again. Looked deeply into his eyes. Or tried to, anyway. Aiden turned his own face away. The last thing he wanted was a two-way connection with anybody’s eyes. The more he cared for the person, the less he wanted them seeing inside.

  “Listen,” she said. “It’s not about the restaurant. It’s about this man. Harris. He’s my new . . . friend. He’s the reason I’ve been leaving you with Grandma in the evenings and going out. I want you and Valerie to make a good impression. Oh, wait. That’s not the best way to say it, is it now? That just ups the pressure on you. I just want you to give him a chance. Okay?”

  But Aiden sensed that the first of her statements was more accurate. More honest. Because a necktie might make a good impression. But it could not be helpful when attempting to give someone a chance.

  He tried to loosen the tie, just ever so slightly, without her noticing.

  She noticed.

  “Please,” she said, snugging and straightening it again, but more gently. Leaving it tidy but a bit less severe. “I like this man. Please just go along with this, and we’ll have a nice dinner. I just want him to like you and Valerie, and I want you to like him. It’s important to me. He’s a good man. The kind that doesn’t come along every day. Do you understand?”

  Aiden nodded.

  He did not understand, of course. He was six. He did understand that his mother was uneasy, and that it was in his hands to please or disappoint her. He also understood that, even in the course of this brief conversation about neckties, he had skimmed dangerously near the disaster of letting her down in some indefinable way.

  “I’ll be good,” he said.

  She kissed him on the forehead and rose to her feet, hurrying away.

  He wondered why he couldn’t just wear the clip-on necktie he wore when they attended Grandma’s church on Sundays, and at Grandpa’s funeral. It was hard to imagine that a dinner with this stranger could be more important than burying your own grandfather.

  He didn’t ask. Because he had skated close enough to that line of hurting her. He could not bring himself to risk crossing it now.

  “Is he coming here to pick you up?” Grandma asked.

  She was a big, soft woman, given to wearing loose housedresses—half-covered with cardigan sweaters—for comfort. She had been slimmer and better dressed before Grandpa died last year, but some thread within her had been working its way loose since then.

  “Of course he’s picking us up,” Aiden’s mother said. She sounded insulted.

  “Glad to hear it. That’s a sign of good breeding, you know.”

  “Right. As if you didn’t inject that under my skin like a tattoo while I was growing up. Look. Mom. You can’t fault this guy on manners. Nobody can outdo him in that department.”

  “Then why didn’t you bring him around sooner?”

  “I’m bringing him around now, Mother. Can we get off this?”

  They had been living here with Grandma for two years now. Here in California, where it never snowed. In a hot valley in the central part of the state, with no big cities. His mother had taken a secretarial job, hoping they could soon afford a place of their own. But everything was expensive, and besides, Grandpa had died. Grandma need
ed extra help.

  “I’m still your mother, you know,” Grandma said, apparently not ready to get off it.

  “Like you’d ever let me forget.”

  “I just want you to think about the children.”

  “I am thinking about them, Mom. They need a father again. Especially Aiden. Poor Aiden. Living in a house with three women. And now, since Dad passed away . . . He needs somebody to teach him how to be a man.”

  “I guess I can’t argue with you there,” Grandma said. It seemed to trouble her, to be unable to find disagreement.

  “Look. Mom. He’s a little older than me, Harris, and I don’t want any gibes about that. All right? Not in his presence, anyway. Wait till—”

  Just then a knock on the door stopped everything. His grandma’s sharply honed comments. His mother’s nearly perpetual motion. Even Aiden’s heart, though only for one beat. Whatever—whoever—waited on the other side of that door was life-changingly important. Even six-year-old Aiden could recognize that clearly enough.

  His mother smoothed the front of her dress, which had been plenty smooth enough to begin with, and threw the door wide.

  The man in the doorway beamed a wide, shy smile. He held flowers. Nothing formal like roses. A sunny, springlike mixture of blooms. His trousers had been pressed into neat creases in the front. He wore a sport jacket, and a blue necktie not unlike Aiden’s. His gray hair was recently cut, from the look of it. Neat and short, carefully combed back along his head, and thinning at the temples. His eyes were a light but brilliant color of blue, shiny and twinkling, like the stars at night. Aiden wondered how you got a pair of eyes to do a thing like twinkling. At the outside corner of each eye, Aiden saw a network of lines radiating out along the man’s skin.

  “A little older?” Aiden heard his grandma mutter under her breath. He did not think it was projected loudly enough to reach the site of the open door.

  Aiden looked over at Valerie, who sat on the couch in ankle socks and a yellow dress, looking bored. She rolled her eyes at Aiden.

  “Aiden,” his mother said, startling him. “Come and meet my friend.”

  Aiden walked to the door. Carefully, in case anything might be dangerous. He stood at the man’s feet and looked up into his face. He was not a tall man, but he seemed solidly built. Then again, everyone is tall when you’re six.

  The man held his hand out for Aiden to shake.

  “Aiden, this is Harris Delacorte. Harris, my son, Aiden.”

  Aiden took the hand and shook it. It was calloused and strong. It held his own small hand firmly, as if to make the point that this was a man who could be trusted to commit to a thing like a handshake. But it did not hurt.

  “Well, you seem like a fine young man,” Harris Delacorte said, his blue eyes doing that nighttime star thing again.

  “I’m not a young man,” Aiden said, because it sounded like a strange description of him. He was a kid. A boy.

  “Of course you’re a young man,” his mother said, hurrying close. Aiden caught a quiet warning in her tone, and a desperation. “That’s what you call a boy in a more formal sense. But the more important thing, Aiden, is that Harris just paid you a compliment. He said you seem fine.”

  “Yes, sir,” Aiden said. Because he figured he did seem that way. Then he caught his mother’s eye and added, “Thank you, sir.”

  He pulled a deep breath, one he feared everyone could hear, and vowed to do better. To be a better boy tonight, on better behavior. For the sake of his mom.

  The restaurant was indeed fancy. Too much so, Aiden thought. His mother had been giving Valerie and him lessons—on and off for the better part of a week. How to place your napkin across your lap. Which fork was for your salad, which for your dessert. Aiden stared at the mass of silver and glassware and remembered none of it. His brain had receded somehow. Gone on vacation elsewhere.

  He stared at his menu but didn’t know what to order. None of the words he saw listed looked like food. He was only just learning to read, but he was surprisingly good at it. If he had seen “hot dogs” or “macaroni,” he would have recognized them. There was nothing here to recognize.

  “They have trout here, Aiden,” his mother said. “You like trout.”

  “I do?”

  “Yes, don’t you remember? That time we all went camping? And you went fishing in the lake at dawn with your dad, and then we had grilled trout for breakfast? You said it was the best thing you’d ever eaten.”

  “Oh. I don’t remember.”

  It was true in one respect and untrue in another. He did not remember eating trout and liking it. But he remembered going fishing with his dad. Suddenly, just when she said it. He remembered how he’d caught only one and insisted on putting it back into the water. How his father had caught several, and Aiden had silently apologized to each and every one of the poor, doomed fish.

  It all seemed strange and long ago now, and he couldn’t remember what there had been to get so upset about. Nor did he try.

  He set down his menu, figuring he would order trout. You can’t do much better than the best thing ever. And the fate of the fish no longer troubled him, he decided. That had been a different time, back when he was silly and little.

  “Harris owns a cattle ranch,” his mother said, seeming to need to fill the air with words.

  “I do,” Harris said. His voice was deep, like a man who wields power, yet at the same time kind. But maybe the kindness was plastered on when talking to kids. Especially the kids of the pretty new woman you had been seeing. Aiden vaguely, wordlessly wondered over its sincerity. “And it has a forest of evergreen and scrub oak on one end of the land, eighty acres of it, with a year-round stream running through. We have cutthroat trout and steelhead. If you ever wanted to go fishing.”

  “Where is it?” Aiden asked, not knowing what else to ask about a cattle ranch.

  “Only about twenty miles from here. You like horses?”

  “Aiden loves horses,” his mother said, barely allowing him the chance to speak.

  “Well,” Aiden said. He felt hesitant to correct her, but some things needed saying. “I like my model horses. I never knew a real horse. I met one once. Just over a fence is all. Never really rode one or anything.”

  “You come to my place, you could ride horseback all day long if you wanted. On the weekends, anyway,” he added, seeming to remember about school.

  Aiden wasn’t sure how to respond to that. It sounded scary and almost painfully fun in equal measure.

  He looked up and around. Let the sounds into his head—the chattering of the other diners, the clink of forks and glasses. He glanced over at Valerie, who was still staring at her menu, and caught her gaze. She rolled her eyes again.

  “He might be a bit young for that,” Aiden’s mother said. “He’s only six.”

  “I have horses I’d trust with a six-year-old,” Harris Delacorte said. “I have one horse, I could put a toddler on her back and she’d go slow and take pains to be extra careful with him. I’d bet my life on it.”

  Aiden turned his attention back to the man.

  A sentence he had heard earlier that evening streamed back into his head again. As if Aiden were hearing it for the first time.

  He needs somebody to teach him how to be a man.

  That was an interesting thought. If not through this sudden new Harris Delacorte, a near stranger, how would Aiden know what it was to be a man? His mother couldn’t teach him what she didn’t know. Grandma and Bally would be no help to him at all.

  He looked into the grown man’s face, his gaze steadily returned. Just for a moment, Aiden thought he felt something open inside himself. Like a door that had been closed, locked, bolted, and barricaded with a chair. Guarded that way for a long time. Too long. He looked into those twinkling blue eyes and felt as though that might be about to change now.

  And then it happened.

  Aiden reached for his glass of water. But he should have been looking. He should have taken his eyes o
ff the man’s twinkly blue ones and watched his own hand wrap around the glass. Instead, he knocked it with the ends of his fingers and tipped it over, spilling water everywhere. On the cloth napkins. On the leather-covered menus. On his mother’s tiny, fancy, beaded clutch purse.

  His mother leapt to her feet and began wiping up the mess.

  Aiden’s door closed again. Silently, inside himself, he locked it. And set the bolt in place. And wedged a chair against it.

  Harris Delacorte would not want him now. He would not teach him how to be a man, because Aiden was clearly unteachable. Harris Delacorte did things the careful, right way. Aiden had seen that in his eyes. Harris Delacorte was not clumsy, or prone to foolish mistakes.

  Aiden felt his face redden with shame.

  He said nothing for the rest of the meal. Not even when spoken to directly. When asked a question, he only nodded, or shook his head, or shrugged. He did not look into those blue man eyes again, because they would surely act as too much of a mirror. He did not want to see the reflection of the fool he had made of himself. He did not want to think about the chance he had squandered.

  Men like Harris Delacorte didn’t come along every day. Hadn’t his mother said that, or something like it?

  And in one careless move, it can all be undone.

  After dinner they went to see a movie. It was rated G and supposed to be for the whole family, but it was boring. Aiden fell asleep halfway through.

  Harris Delacorte toted him to the car, Aiden drooped over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Aiden woke up on the walk back to the parking lot. But he didn’t let on. He just hung there, limply. Partly because he was still very sleepy. Partly because he wanted the terrible night to be over.

  He kept his eyes closed as the stocky man snugged him into his seat belt, next to his sister, in the back seat of his big American car. A Chrysler, Aiden thought he remembered.