The Wake Up

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  They drove through darkened streets. Aiden flickered his eyes open in between streetlights. He saw that his mother had moved over closer to Harris Delacorte on the bench seat of the Chrysler. She was in the middle of the seat, right next to the driver, who had his arm around her shoulders.

  “I worry about Aiden,” he heard her say.

  “How so?”

  It hurt to hear them speaking about him. As if he were laid out on a table for no other purpose but their inspection. To invite their judgment. There were no words in his head to accompany this observation. But the muted buzz of feeling was undeniable. And denying what was there to be felt had become something of a specialty of Aiden’s.

  “He’s just so shut down. If you had known him before we left his father . . . he seems like a different boy. He used to be so sensitive. He cared about everything. Maybe too much, I used to think. For his own sake, I mean. Now I don’t even know where he is. It’s like he drew all the curtains and I can’t see in. I know he must be in there somewhere, but I feel like I haven’t even seen him for two years.”

  A silence. As though her words required chewing before digestion.

  “He’ll come around, I expect,” Harris Delacorte said simply.

  “It’s been two years, Harris. A third of his life. Sometimes I feel like this is the way he’ll always be now. This little missing person.”

  Aiden focused on the buzz in his belly. It tried to grow, but he shut it down again instead. It really wasn’t hard once you got the hang of it. Just breathe even less, if such a thing is possible, and let everything slip behind the wall. Where it can’t find you, so it can’t hurt you.

  “It’s been a tough time for him is all, May. Bring him out to the ranch. We’ll do some fishing and horseback riding. Someone just needs to take an interest in him. He’ll come out of his shell.”

  She didn’t answer. Didn’t offer any odds as to how right or wrong she thought Harris Delacorte might prove to be. She only laid her head down on the man’s solid shoulder.

  Aiden knew he would not come out of his shell. Because he could not be himself in the presence of Harris Delacorte. Because he had humiliated himself in front of the man. And that was a strike Aiden knew would be held against him, whether the man admitted so or not. Harris Delacorte did not knock over glasses or spill water over all those nice things. Harris Delacorte didn’t make stupid mistakes. Harris Delacorte would never truly accept him because Aiden was not worth the acceptance. He did not deserve such consideration.

  And, because he knew he never would be truly accepted, Aiden decided the relationship was not worth seeking. That the older man would not earn Aiden’s trust.

  In his six-year-old brain, though, it existed as a simpler thing: Aiden didn’t like Harris Delacorte.

  He would go along with dinners and movies and rides on horses because it was not in him to hurt his mother’s feelings, or let down her hopes. But he would stay inside himself where it was safe. In the cautious blank space Aiden had constructed for himself. Where he belonged.

  His sister came into his room at about seven o’clock the following morning. Which was weird all in itself, because she never sought him out. In fact, rarely did she deign to notice him at all.

  He was still in bed, due to the lateness of the previous night. He didn’t want her to see him in his pajamas because they had cartoon characters on them, and he thought she would make fun of him for that. So he just sat halfway up, the blanket pulled up to his throat, and stared daggers at her.

  She chose not to notice.

  “So what do you think of this new guy?” she asked him, fingering the model horses on his dresser as a way of keeping her eyes well away from his.

  “What are you doing in my room, Bally?”

  “I’m asking you a question.”

  “But you never come in my room.”

  “Well, today I did. I don’t like him.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Well . . . he’s not our father. Is he?”

  “No,” Aiden said. “He’s not.”

  But he couldn’t help wondering if not being their father was an unexpected point in the man’s favor.

  The sun had mostly risen outside Aiden’s bedroom window, and it glinted off the glass of the hummingbird feeder that hung there. Shone into Aiden’s eyes. He squinted as best he could, and tried to ignore it, but it made him feel vulnerable. Everything did.

  “Would you please get out of my room, Bally?”

  “So you like him?”

  “No,” Aiden said. “I don’t.”

  “Well, we better think of something to do, and fast. Because they’re probably going to get married. And then we’ll be told that he’s our dad and we have to call him that, and listen to him when he tells us what to do.”

  “They won’t get married. That’s stupid.”

  “No, you’re stupid, Aiden. It’s true. I heard her talking to Grandma about it.”

  So there it was. Another whole segment of his life, spinning away. Another father who found him defective and unworthy of love, slipped into place. And there was nothing he could do about it. There was never anything he could do about it. Except put it away.

  Valerie was standing in front of him now with her knees pressed against the bed, staring at his face at close range.

  “You don’t even care,” she said. “Do you?”

  “Not really.”

  “You don’t care about anything.”

  “No.”

  “You’ve been so weird. Ever since we left Dad. I can’t even figure you out anymore. It’s like you’re not even my brother.”

  “You didn’t like me the old way anyway.”

  “Well, I don’t like you the new way, either,” she said, and flounced out.

  It was the most attention he’d received from his sister in as long as he could remember. That seemed sad. Or at least it would have, if sadness had been something Aiden could feel.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Aiden at Age Six and a Half

  Aiden was just preparing to mount that good quarter horse mare, Bonnie. Might have been the twentieth time he’d ridden her, or it might have been the twenty-fifth. It was summer, with no school, and Aiden and his sister were being pushed onto Harris Delacorte’s cattle ranch more and more often. Close to every day now, while their mother worked.

  Aiden didn’t mind it, because he liked to ride Bonnie. He would have preferred to go out alone, but it seemed he wasn’t allowed. Nobody had said straight out that he wasn’t allowed. But Alfie, the seventeen-year-old son of a ranch hand, always seemed to want to go riding at the exact same moment.

  Once, Aiden had bravely suggested to Harris Delacorte that he might go out alone, but was told not to hurt Alfie’s feelings.

  Aiden swung into the saddle using two wooden crates as a mounting block. He looked back at Alfie and saw Harris Delacorte taking the reins of Wiley, the horse Alfie always rode. Taking them away as if he planned to ride the horse instead.

  “I thought I’d go out with Aiden today,” he heard the older man say.

  Aiden felt his face flush, hot and red. He figured he was in some kind of trouble he knew nothing about.

  He pressed his heels into Bonnie’s sides. The heels of the now-scuffed cowboy boots Harris Delacorte had given him for a present. The mare surged forward. Aiden pressed again, urging the mare into a trot. Thinking he could leave this new father-person behind. But a moment later he heard the loping hoofbeats closing the distance between them.

  “Slow down, Turbo,” the older man said.

  Aiden sighed and reined Bonnie back into a walk.

  “Why?” he asked as Harris Delacorte rode up beside him.

  “Why what?”

  “Why you and not Alfie?”

  “I thought we could have a talk.”

  Aiden’s body set about tingling. His face and his gut exploded with it. He didn’t want to talk about whatever the older man had in mind. So he filled the air with saf
er words.

  “But you said Alfie loves to go out riding and that he likes having somebody to go with, and you said it would hurt his feelings if we don’t let him come along.”

  They rode in silence for a few seconds. Aiden wondered if he should say more. Keep up more of a steady word wall against whatever was headed his way. But his mind felt blank. Strangely blank, like a freshly painted white wall.

  “You’re six years old, Aiden.”

  “Six and a half.”

  “Right. Six and a half.”

  “Almost seven.”

  “Fine, whatever you say. My point is, your mom doesn’t want you riding alone.”

  So there it was. Aiden had known it. In some deep part of himself, he had. It still hurt to have it forced to the surface.

  They rode in silence, headed up the hill toward the evergreen and scrub oak forest that formed the west half of Harris Delacorte’s ranch. Aiden wanted to turn back to the house, but he knew it wouldn’t help. The man would only follow.

  “So . . . ,” Harris Delacorte began. Hesitantly. With enough trepidation that Aiden caught the fear. Nothing seemed to frighten or trouble this man. So if Harris Delacorte was afraid of it, it must be a hell of a thing. “I guess you know that your mom and I have been seeing each other for a while now.”

  If Aiden hadn’t been on a horse, he might have pressed both hands to his ears. But he didn’t want to drop the reins. So he tried to shut off his ears from the inside. The same way he shut off everything else.

  “And we care a lot about each other. I love your mother. And I think I’m safe in believing she loves me in return.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Aiden’s irritation burst up and out like a volcanic eruption. “I don’t want to hear this.”

  “But you need to hear it, actually.”

  Harris Delacorte reined his horse to a halt, then turned the gelding with near-invisible leg pressure to face Aiden. Aiden’s horse had stopped, even though he hadn’t asked her to. Bonnie seemed to obey her real owner more faithfully than she did the kid in the saddle.

  “I’m trying to tell you something important, Aiden.”

  “Well, I don’t want to know it.”

  “You need to know it anyway. Because it’s going to happen, and you’ll know it then. I would think you’d rather have some fair idea of what’s coming.”

  Aiden squeezed his eyes shut and said nothing. He tried to disappear. It only worked about halfway.

  “Last night I asked your mom to marry me.”

  Silence.

  “She said yes.”

  More silence.

  “But I’m telling you, Aiden, there’s nothing in the world more important to me than making that woman happy. And it’s not lost on me that you’re not my biggest fan. You’re not the first boy who ever felt that way about a new dad. I think that’s how just about any boy would feel. But May—your mother—is only going to be happy if she thinks you’re happy. If we’re getting along, you and me. So I’m hoping you’ll give us your blessing.”

  For what might have been almost a minute, the world consisted of nothing but the hard feel of the saddle under his bones and the hollow sound of wind blowing across his ears.

  Then Aiden surprised himself by speaking.

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Which part of the thing?”

  “The blessing.”

  Actually, Aiden had heard the word many times in church, but he could not imagine it meant the same in this context. If it did, how could it be within Aiden’s power to give it? He wasn’t God, nor a pastor.

  “It means . . . how do I say it? It means you tell us you’re good with it. Like giving your permission. Not that we actually need permission from anybody, but you’re so important that we’d feel better having it all the same.”

  Aiden took a few seconds to try to make sense of the moment. But that’s the problem with shutting everything down. You can more or less understand a thing in your head, but you don’t have your feelings about it to guide you. So it all ends up looking blank and muddy, like something you could stare at all day without it ever coming clear.

  “I want to go back now,” he said.

  “But we only just started our ride.”

  “I don’t want to ride anymore.”

  In the silence that followed, Aiden stole a glance at the older man’s face. He looked crestfallen. Like a soldier in a war movie after a losing battle—a defeat that Aiden could read in the older man’s eyes.

  Aiden did something in that moment that did not seem to spring from a thought. He watched himself do it with surprise, as if viewing the behavior of a stranger. He drummed his heels into Bonnie’s sides and flicked her flank hard with the ends of the reins. The mare took off at a gallop. They headed for the woods.

  He glanced over his shoulder to see Harris Delacorte closing in fast. Aiden leaned over the saddle horn, over the mare’s neck, flicking her again and again with the rein ends, elbows flapping. He waited for hoofbeats to overtake him from behind but they never did.

  In time he glanced again over his shoulder.

  Harris Delacorte had dismounted, and was leading his horse back toward the barn.

  So he doesn’t really care about me being out here alone, Aiden thought.

  He galloped on.

  It might have been a half hour of trotting later when he finally found his way to a road. But what road, and leading to where? He reined the mare to a halt, feeling her sides heaving, and looked up and down the dirt byway. He saw a mailbox at the end of a graded driveway, at the break in a white board fence. In the other direction, nothing at all.

  Aiden urged the horse into a trot in the direction of the mailbox. It wasn’t Harris Delacorte’s mailbox, but it was somebody’s. It was the first sign of life Aiden had seen since galloping away. And he was well and truly lost. He had known it for some time.

  He rode Bonnie up to the mailbox, but saw no signs of life. No house could be seen from his vantage point on the road. Not even when he stood up in the stirrups. The gate was closed.

  Did he dare open it?

  “Your horse looks hot.”

  The voice made him jump. So much so that he almost lost his balance in the saddle. He turned to see a man trimming one of the many trees that lined the property inside the fence. He was a younger man than Harris Delacorte, but not young by Aiden’s standards. He had a long face, like a horse, and smiling eyes.

  “Yes, sir,” Aiden said, though he had no idea how a horse shows heat, and how you can see it just by looking.

  “You want to water that horse?”

  “Yes, sir,” Aiden replied. Because he had made a connection with someone who might help him get found again, and he didn’t want to break it.

  “What about you? Glass of lemonade?”

  “That would be nice, sir. Thank you.”

  Aiden swung down off his horse and dropped into the dirt. He took the reins over her head the way he’d watched the ranch hands do it, and she lowered her head to allow it. He led her to the gate. As he did, he noticed her neck was foamed with sweat where the reins had brushed it. And her chest was wet with it. That must be how horses show heat. Her nostrils were flared wide. Aiden could hear the exaggerated sound of her breath blowing through them, flaring them even further.

  The man opened the gate for him.

  Aiden led the mare, who followed a step behind him, onto the man’s property.

  “Where do I put the horse?”

  “Nowhere till you cool her down proper.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “You have to hot-walk her.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “You just walk her around till she cools down and stops blowing. You don’t give a horse a drink of water when she’s this hot. You have to cool her down first. Especially if she’s an old girl like Bonnie.”

  “Oh,” Aiden said. “I didn’t know that. How do you know her name? And how old she is?”r />
  “I know all Harris’s horses. I’ve ridden many a roundup next to Bonnie. She’s a good mare and she deserves proper care. You just walk her around in a big circle. Right here in front of the barn. I’ll go inside and ask Nadine to make up a glass of lemonade. But first you get the horse cool and watered. That’s the most important rule of horsemanship. First you make sure your horse is okay. Then you take care of your own needs.”

  “Why does the horse come first?”

  “Because the horse has no choice in the matter. The horse is trained to do what you ask, up to and including running too fast and for too long. So we have a responsibility not to take advantage.”

  “Yes, sir,” Aiden said.

  Aiden had not realized, until that moment, that there was any such thing as too much running for a horse. They were horses. Aiden had thought they could do anything, all day long.

  The man disappeared inside the house, and Aiden walked around in a circle, as he had been instructed, Bonnie following faithfully behind like an old dog.

  When Aiden got tired, and the sun got too hot, and he thought he couldn’t go another step, he stopped just long enough to draw a few extra breaths. Bonnie caught up with him, and dropped her head down over his shoulder, as if inviting his affection. Aiden wrapped his arms around the huge, bony head and held it. He almost kissed her, but decided that was not a boy thing to do.

  Then he walked again, even though it was hard. But he learned something in that moment, something he would never forget: the difference between a horse and a person. A good old horse won’t hold your mistakes against you. The horse will let you have another chance.

  The man’s wife gave him cookies. They were from the store, but still tasty. And she put the sugar bowl next to his lemonade glass, which he appreciated. Because he wanted it much sweeter than she had made it.

  “You must be May’s boy,” she said.

  The man had mentioned his wife’s name, but Aiden could no longer remember it. And he wouldn’t have called her by it anyway. That would have been rude.