The Wake Up

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  “Scratches could maybe even be sanded out,” Aiden said, his eyes still on the riot of porcelain colors. “I could refinish the table.”

  “Scratches are the wrong word, I guess. I think it’s more like gouges. But I’m still at work. I haven’t seen it with my own eyes. She said it’s really bad, though.”

  “It’s only a table.”

  “Yeah, that’s true,” she said, something tight draining out of her voice, leaving it smooth and calm, as if all this trouble had never happened. As if they could just be two people, exploring being together. Without this constant fear of disaster. “It’s only a table. But it’s your table. So thank you for looking at it that way. For being so nice about it. Someday soon I’ll tell you . . . you know.”

  He waited, but she didn’t go on.

  “No, I don’t know. What?”

  “What he went through. With his dad. And then you’ll understand him a little better. You’ll feel for him. I swear you will.”

  “When you’re ready,” he said with a satisfied sigh. Or it sounded satisfied, anyway. It was probably the last of the fear leaving him.

  “I love you,” Gwen said.

  It was the first she had ever said it.

  He said nothing for a moment. Just felt it. Just let it ricochet around in his gut, blessing every part of him it touched. It was a strange moment to have elicited such a declaration. But life was a tricky place, and he would gratefully accept her love without questioning its timing.

  “I love you, too,” he said.

  They both listened to silence on the line for several seconds.

  “Well,” she said after a time. “I’ll be home in less than an hour. And Elizabeth wants to cook dinner for all of us. That is, if you don’t mind spaghetti. It’s the only thing she knows how to cook.”

  “I love spaghetti,” Aiden said.

  “Okay. Good. See you soon.”

  And she clicked off the call.

  Aiden sat a minute, feeling drained from everything he had just been through. The good and bad of it felt equally exhausting. He stared at the porcelain planters as he sat, and thought about what Hannah had said about Milo—and Milo’s father—outer-directing their rage. Even though she’d said it many weeks earlier.

  The sign over the planters read “Special Blow-Out Sale—Three for $1!”

  Aiden bought five dollars’ worth of them, loaded them into an open cardboard carton, set the carton in the bed of his pickup truck, and drove home.

  “I actually brought these for Milo,” Aiden said to Gwen, indicating the box of pottery with his chin.

  They were sitting on the couch together in the cabin. Elizabeth was in the kitchen area, banging pots and pans around. Milo was staring at TV news with rapt attention, seeming not to know that anyone else existed.

  Gwen craned her neck and peered into the carton. While she did, Aiden glanced again at the gouged and ravaged wood top of the coffee table. It made him wince, every time. The violence in the heart of the person who had attacked it seemed baked in, visible to anyone who viewed the damage. It made his stomach tip slightly.

  “Oh, honey,” Gwen said. Quietly, to keep her words private. “I wouldn’t give anything like that to Milo. He’ll probably just break them.”

  “Right,” Aiden said. “That’s what I figured he would do with them. That was the idea.”

  “I was thinking . . . ,” Aiden said, and trailed off. “Maybe after dinner we could try something.”

  He was speaking to Milo, and trying to make that clear by looking at Milo, but Milo had his eyes trained down to his own plate of spaghetti, and so likely didn’t know.

  Aiden watched the boy take one tentative bite and chew the food as though it might be dangerous. Still, it was the first time Aiden had ever seen Milo eat. Even one bite.

  “When I was a kid, Milo,” Aiden said, a bit too loudly, dropping the boy’s name awkwardly to get his attention, “I used to like to smash breakable things against a tree. My stepfather used to give me things it was okay to break. It felt great. And I think it really helped me when I was angry.”

  It was a lie. A total fabrication. Aiden had never broken anything on purpose. The truth—that he had no way of knowing where the pottery idea came from, and that it might be a silly and ineffective plan—was not something he cared to share. He thought if he made it more personal, it might take on greater meaning. It seemed to need meaning.

  Aiden could tell Milo was listening, but he would have been hard pressed to explain how he knew. Milo did not look up.

  A long silence fell, during which the four of them ate spaghetti without speaking. Milo even took a second bite.

  “This is very good,” Aiden said to Elizabeth, feeling that he was trying too hard but not knowing how to stop. He had complimented her on the meal twice already. “You’re a good cook.”

  “I was thinking I could help you do chores around here,” Elizabeth said.

  In the brief moment before Aiden responded, it came into his head that maybe she was twice as good as any child he had ever met as a way of making up for her brother.

  “Now why would you want to go and do a thing like that?”

  “It’s summer. And it might be fun.”

  “Chores are not fun,” Aiden said. “That’s why they call them chores. If they were fun, they’d be called happy extravaganzas.”

  Elizabeth laughed. Maybe a little more than the situation called for.

  “I could go with you in the morning and help you feed all the animals.”

  “Right now the only ones I’m feeding are the rabbits and the horses in the barn. Other than the dog, that is.” Aiden glanced quickly at Milo as he mentioned the dog. But if the boy had a reaction, Aiden was unable to see it. “The pasture is good now because it’s early summer. Later in the year I’ll probably have to supplement with hay, unless we get some early rains.”

  “So what do you do in the morning? Anything?”

  Aiden glanced at Gwen, but her eyes and her attention seemed a million miles away from their dinner table.

  “I go around and check all the water troughs. They have these automatic fill valves. But they can get stuck, or the line can rupture. Especially when it’s hot, you have to check the water sources every day.”

  “Do you go in your truck or do you just walk around?”

  “I take the truck or I go on horseback. Lately most often the truck. It’s a little hard to walk. Pretty far. Well. Maybe not for you. But if you wanted to take on a chore, you could saddle Penny in the morning and ride around and check all the troughs. If your mom thinks it’s okay for you to ride alone.”

  “Mom?” Elizabeth asked.

  Gwen jumped, as if she’d been alone in a room when that voice startled her.

  “What?”

  “Am I allowed to ride alone every morning? Just around the property.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “Does Aiden think it’s okay?”

  “I think on Penny she’ll be just fine.”

  “Okay, honey. If Aiden thinks it’s okay, I trust his judgment.”

  “What do I get to break?” Milo asked suddenly.

  All three of their heads came up and turned to the boy, and a moment of silence reflected their surprise. It was as though a person who had been mute his entire life had spoken. None of them could have expected it less.

  “I brought home some porcelain pots,” Aiden said.

  “Why pots?”

  “I don’t know. Why not? They were on sale cheap.”

  “Okay,” Milo said. “I’m done eating. Let’s go.”

  “Aiden’s not done eating, honey,” Gwen said.

  “No, it’s okay,” Aiden said. “I’m done enough.” He wound half the spaghetti on his plate around his fork and shoved it into his mouth. “I’ll have a second helping later,” he said, his mouth still full.

  Milo stood in the late afternoon slant of sun with a bright-red pot in one hand. The first pot. His left hand, because his ri
ght arm was still in a cast. Aiden wondered about Milo’s immediate choice of the color red. Did the boy respond to it the way an angry bull might? Or had Aiden read that bulls were color blind and that old theory wasn’t true?

  The boy stood facing a sturdy scrub oak tree, maybe four feet away, and wound up for a pitch. Then he froze and looked at Aiden over his shoulder.

  “Really? This’s not a trick?”

  “I don’t understand the question.”

  “I won’t get in trouble when I break it?”

  “No. I bought them for you to break.”

  “That seems weird.”

  “Why does it seem weird?”

  “Why would you buy me stuff to break?”

  “I thought it might help you.”

  “Why would you want to help me?”

  “I’m not sure I understand that question, either,” Aiden said.

  In many ways, he did. He understood that Milo considered them enemies. And maybe he was struggling to reframe Aiden as someone who wanted to help him. Or maybe he was simply unwilling to try.

  Mostly Aiden did not understand how a question like that one should be answered.

  “Well,” Milo said. “You asked for it.”

  He hurled the red pot with all his might. It missed the trunk of the tree and fell to the dirt a yard or two beyond it, where it rolled and did not break.

  “Damn,” Milo said.

  Aiden could see the boy’s face redden. At least, for a couple of seconds. Then Milo purposely turned his face down toward the dirt and away from Aiden. He stomped off to retrieve the pot.

  Milo picked it up out of the dirt, and, as he came back by the scrub oak tree, simply smashed it against the solid trunk. No throwing involved. It shattered into dozens of pieces and fell to the ground.

  Aiden and the boy just stood and stared for a moment, the sound of the crash still ringing in Aiden’s ears.

  Milo ran to the carton of pots, grabbed a green one, and ran back to a spot only two feet from the tree. He threw hard, and the pot hit its target and shattered into green shards.

  Aiden dragged the carton through the dirt and set it under Milo’s left hand.

  For a minute or more, Milo bent, grabbed, threw. Bent, grabbed, threw.

  I should have bought more pots, Aiden thought. I should have dropped a twenty and bought them all. Because Milo was already close to the bottom of the carton. He was just beginning to tap into some deep well of anger, and he was almost out of pots.

  Aiden watched him smash the last one against the tree, then drop his hand into the box and find nothing. Milo fell to his knees and ran his hands around the bottom of the empty carton. Desperately. As though there could be more. As though there had to be more. Maybe they were invisible, or too small to be seen by the naked eye, in which case Milo was still determined to find them.

  Aiden felt a twist in his full belly as he waited to see what the boy would do.

  Milo froze for a long moment there on his knees in the dirt.

  Then he jumped up, grabbed a baseball-size rock, and ran to the base of the tree, where he fell to his knees again and began smashing the shards into smaller shards with the rock.

  Aiden heard a slight noise and looked over to see Gwen standing outside with him, watching.

  “How’s it going?” she asked. A bit warily, he thought.

  “Not sure yet.”

  And he wasn’t. Because he didn’t know yet how the experiment was going to end. Then, just in that moment, it ended. It ended with a yelp of pain from Milo. He had brought the rock down at a bad angle and cut the heel of his hand on one of the pottery shards.

  “Oh, honey,” Gwen said. “Here. Let me put something on that for you.”

  He ran to her, and she used her own hands to try to stanch the bleeding as she ushered him into the cabin.

  That left Aiden alone in the slanted sunlight, staring at a rainbow pile of broken porcelain and wondering if that exercise had accomplished anything, been worth anyone’s time and effort.

  “How did that go?” he heard a voice say.

  He turned, startled, and saw Elizabeth standing in the open cabin doorway.

  “I’m not sure,” Aiden said. “I was just trying to figure that out.”

  She wandered over and stood at his side, and they stared at the bright litter together. The suddenly created garbage.

  “It’s kind of a shame,” she said. “I mean . . . I know it was cheap and all. But it was worth something because you could do something with it. It could hold a plant. But now it’s just all ruined and it seems kind of a shame.”

  Then she sighed, and left him alone.

  Aiden spent the next fifteen minutes or so picking up every last shard with a rake and dropping it all back into the cardboard carton. He was being compulsive about catching every bit, and he knew it. Because Milo had already cut his hand on Aiden’s idea. The last thing anyone needed was to step on a piece, in bare feet or insufficient shoes, and incur another preventable injury.

  As he raked, he felt his mind go over and over the point Elizabeth had made. He felt as though he needed to find a use, a purpose, for the worthless rubble he had encouraged Milo to create. Except he couldn’t imagine what use that might be.

  It was pretty, though. In its own way. It was colorful and abstract, so it was appealing.

  Maybe it could line the bottom of a fish tank. Or sit on the dirt in potted plants, to keep the moisture from evaporating.

  Or maybe even an art project, he thought. He remembered suddenly that his sister, Bally, had brought home a cigar box from kindergarten that she had decorated with dry macaroni. Surely these colorful shards were more beautiful than plain, bland macaroni.

  When he was satisfied he’d gotten it all, he carried the carton back to his house. He set it on the back porch and rooted around in the shed, even though he was quickly losing his daylight. He found a wood-framed window screen just where he expected to find it, carried it to the porch, and spread the dirty shards on the screen.

  He was washing them off with the hose when he heard Gwen’s voice.

  “What’re you doing, hon?”

  “Oh,” he said, looking at the scene in front of him as if for the first time. “I’m not sure yet. I’m kind of figuring it out as I go along. How’s Milo?”

  “He’s fine. I just put a gauze patch on it.”

  “Doesn’t need stitches?”

  “No. It’s not that deep.”

  “Good. Because it’s awfully soon for another hospital visit. I can just hear what the deputy sheriff would say about that.” Aiden turned off the hose and looked up into Gwen’s face. “Let’s go away,” he said. “Just the two of us.”

  He watched her face change. Unbend and soften.

  “What brought that on?”

  “I just feel like we have so much on our plate here. Wouldn’t it be nice if it was just us for a couple days? We could go to the coast. Morro Bay or Pismo Beach. Maybe Etta could take the kids to her house.”

  “It would be nice,” Gwen said, bumping up against his shoulder with her own. “But I’m not sure if I could get time off work.”

  “But you could ask, though.”

  “Yeah. I could ask.”

  She moved close to Aiden and kissed him on the ear. His ear grew hot where her lips touched it.

  “Goodnight,” she said, and moved away.

  “Tell Elizabeth dinner was good.”

  “Oh, she knows,” Gwen said. “You made that plenty clear. Which is one of the many things I love about you.”

  A few minutes later Aiden sat on his back porch in the growing twilight, reading a web page on his phone. The page was a series of steps for do-it-yourself mosaics.

  “Grout,” he said. More than once.

  The website listed the materials necessary for a mosaic project. Aiden was making a list in his head of anything he did not currently own. There did not seem to be a second item to add to the list.

  He already had varnish
for finishing it off. And his life was chock-full of what the website called “tesserae,” the small items used to create the mosaic design. Examples mentioned were colored marbles, glass pieces, pottery fragments, or small tiles.

  “I think we’re pretty well fixed for pottery fragments,” he said out loud.

  Most of the other supplies listed—hammer, tile cutter, glass cutter, safety glasses—all seemed to assume that the tesserae would need breaking up.

  “I think we have the breaking part covered,” Aiden said.

  He glanced at his watch. It was 7:40. The hardware store was open until eight. If he hurried, he could get there in time to buy grout.

  Aiden was just stepping back out into the parking lot when he heard her voice.

  He shouldn’t have been surprised. The hardware store shared a parking lot with the salon where Livie worked. And the salon closed at eight, too.

  “I loved you, you stupid bastard,” the familiar voice said.

  Aiden turned to see Livie staring at him in the last scrap of the day’s light. The streetlamps had not yet come on. They would in a minute or two, most likely. So it was the darkest time of day during which he could have seen her, which spared him the details of whatever emotion he might have seen in her eyes. Aiden wondered if that was a blessing of some sort. A kindness from some unknown source.

  Oddly, her voice had not sounded angry. Mostly hurt.

  He turned and walked closer to her, his paper bag of grout tucked under his arm. When he was only a couple of steps from her, just as he stopped, she jabbed out with one fist and punched him in the shoulder. Fairly hard.

  “I’m glad I ran into you,” Aiden said, ignoring the blow. “I’ve been feeling like I owe you an apology.”

  “Oh my God, oh my God,” Livie said, stumbling back two steps. “You were seeing her before we broke up. I knew it. I absolutely knew it.” Her voice was breathy. Quiet. As if speaking only to herself. Not to Aiden at all.