The Wake Up

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  Aiden hoped she would go on. Maybe even go on to recognize the son in question. She never did.

  Not an hour later both kids bundled up and ran out into the front yard to play in the snow. But the outing didn’t last more than ten minutes.

  “It’s cold,” Elizabeth said as they tumbled back through the door, a gust of cold wind and a puff of snow coming in with them.

  “Yeah,” Aiden said. “Snow is like that.”

  “It’s all down in my boots,” Milo whined, pulling them off and leaving them on the mat by the door.

  “Come on, honey,” Gwen said to him. “We’ll go upstairs and change your socks.”

  “Not yet. I have to show them something.”

  Milo pulled his phone out of his coat pocket. Aiden winced, wondering if the snow had gone down into the boy’s pockets as well. If they were about to have to buy him a new phone. But Milo tapped the screen on the device, and slid his fingers across it, and seemed to be finding what he needed.

  He crossed the rug in his wet socks and held the phone out to Uncle Edgar. Way out. He stayed a good six feet away, leaning and reaching. When it was clear Uncle Edgar couldn’t cover the distance from where he sat—especially considering that when Edgar leaned closer, Milo pulled farther away—Aiden took the phone and handed it over.

  “Oh my,” Edgar said in his booming voice, staring at what Aiden could just barely see was a photo of Tess. “What a lovely young horse. Is she yours?”

  “She is,” Milo said, his voice dripping with pride. “She’s a yearling.”

  “She’s quite a beauty,” Edgar said, passing the phone to May. “Those long legs and that jet-black coat. And I love the marking on her forehead. It looks exactly like a crescent moon.”

  “That’s what everybody says.”

  Gwen was at the boy’s shoulder now, still hoping to steer him in the direction of dry socks. But Milo was off and running talking about his horse, in which case it was generally best to settle in for the long haul.

  “Her name is Tess. Aiden gave me to her the night she was born. I was scared of her. But he taught me how to work with her and all. But . . . can I tell you a secret?”

  “I think you should,” May said. “I always like secrets.”

  “Don’t tell anybody, though. Okay? Well, I guess you can’t, because you live all the way out here in Buffalo, and you probably don’t know one single person I know. So I’ll go ahead and tell you. I’m still scared of her. But Aiden helps me. And I just sort of have her anyway.”

  It was only a few minutes later that Aiden found himself alone with his mother. Uncle Edgar had gone to the store to pick up a traditional Christmas Eve turkey dinner that he had chosen not to try to prepare on his own. Instead he had ordered it fully cooked from the supermarket, and was off to get it in the snowy darkness.

  Gwen had taken the kids upstairs to get them unpacked so they could change into clean, dry clothes for dinner.

  Aiden sat in silence with his mother for a time, nursing a feeling of shock over how much she had aged. She sat on the couch next to Aiden, still holding Milo’s phone. Still staring at the photo of the yearling. Now and then she used her thumb to wake the display back up when the photo disappeared.

  She was a handsome woman even now, and not terribly old. Seventy-four. Her hair was still a golden brown, but shot through with gray. She had age spots on her hands that Aiden could not remember having seen before. But all in all, she looked well for a woman her age, if not for her eyes. If her eyes had been clear and sharp, taking in the world around her, she would have looked essentially the way he remembered her. But every time he’d seen her in the past decade or so, her eyes seemed to have sailed further and further away.

  “This reminds me of when we lived on the ranch with Harris,” she said.

  It startled Aiden. Partly because she had spoken at all. Partly because her words seemed full of facts. Memories of the world the way Aiden knew it.

  Then he remembered what Uncle Edgar had said: that she would have access to very old memories if she snapped into any memories at all.

  “I still live on that ranch,” he said.

  “That’s lovely,” she said, staring at Tess.

  Aiden did not expect her to say more. For quite some time, maybe two or three minutes, she didn’t. And then, out of nowhere, she did.

  “The boy reminds me of you when you were little,” she said.

  “Milo?”

  “Oh, is that his name? The boy who gave me this picture of the yearling. He’s so proud of this foal, but he’s afraid of her, too, just like you were when Harris gave you that colt.”

  Aiden sat a moment, feeling a tingling along his arms and legs. He couldn’t decide if he should reply. He was sure his mother was remembering their past incorrectly. Maybe even sure that her window into lucidity had closed again. But he wasn’t sure if he should correct her.

  Still, the idea that he had been anything but successfully bonded with Magic was a statement he could not bring himself to let stand.

  “I was never afraid of Magic.”

  “Oh, honey,” May said, and looked up from the photo of Tess for the first time since taking hold of the phone. “You were terrified. Harris thought you might never get over it. He thought he might have made a mistake by giving him to you. That maybe he should have given you an older, well-broken horse. He said it all the time.”

  “I . . . I don’t want to sound argumentative, Mom, but I took to that foal right away. I slept in the stall cuddled up with him that very first night.”

  May nodded with surprising vigor. “That you did,” she said. “That you did. But then he got big and strong and frisky. He knocked you down, and he stepped on your foot, and he bit you. And then it was ages before you felt comfortable with him again.”

  “He bit me? Why don’t I remember that?”

  But his mother didn’t answer. She seemed to be lost in the photo again.

  “I want to ask you a question, Mom. While you’re . . .” He wanted to say, “While you’re here.” He had almost said it. But it felt rude to point out how rare it was for her to be completely present, rather than physically with him but otherwise gone. So he took a different tack. “While we’re together and talking like this. I wanted to ask you a question about my dad. Harris, not my birth dad. You know how he left me the ranch when he died. And the cattle, and his horses. But I sold off all the cattle last year. I don’t run cattle on that ranch anymore. I just . . . I couldn’t do it anymore. Emotionally. Sending them off to slaughter like that. And somebody I knew—somebody who knew my dad—said he’d be ashamed of me for that. And that’s stayed with me this whole time. It’s really bothered me. So I just wondered . . . do you think Harris would be ashamed of me?”

  He waited. Watched his mother’s cloudy eyes. They were still taking in the photo of the yearling, Tess.

  He thought—or, perhaps more accurately, irrationally hoped—that she was putting together a thoughtful answer. But no answer ever came.

  “Mom?” he asked after a time.

  She did not look up.

  “Mom?” he asked again. A bit more insistently this time.

  Her eyes came up to his, just for a brief instant. And in them Aiden saw . . . nothing.

  “I’m awfully sorry,” she said. “Who did you say you were again?”

  Uncle Edgar always smoked a pipe of cherry-scented tobacco after dinner, but never in the house. It didn’t matter if it was dark and cold. It didn’t matter if snow was swirling down, as it was that night after their Christmas Eve dinner.

  May had insisted on doing the dishes, and Gwen had volunteered to stay and help her.

  Aiden bundled up and sat out on the railing of the back deck with Edgar, a railing they had carefully cleared of snow with a whisk broom. The only light on their scene was a soft glow from the kids’ upstairs guest bedroom, and a soft beam from the streetlight on the corner.

  “The boy seems troubled,” Edgar said, blowing a blast
of smoke out into the frigid air and accidentally into Aiden’s face.

  “He is,” Aiden said. “I thought I’d shared that with you already.”

  “You said he was a handful. But that was a good year and a half ago. I was hoping things were better now.”

  “Oh, they are,” Aiden said, his lips already surprisingly numb. “If you had known him back then . . . I mean, this is huge, where we are now. But he was seriously abused. He’s not going to spring back from it overnight. In some ways he probably never will.”

  “He has a hole in his heart,” Uncle Edgar said, and then puffed again. “So many of us do, but I expect his is bigger than most. We think we’ll fill it up someday, somehow, but in most ways we never do. We just learn to live a good life with a hole in our heart. We make space for it. We work around it. You were a boy with a hole in your heart, and I’ll bet anything it’s still there.”

  “Not as big as Milo’s.”

  “Big enough. It’s really not so much a matter of degree.”

  “That’s what my psychiatrist says, too. Anyway. It’s definitely still a challenge with him. He’s as much trouble as any three other boys put together. But we just keep putting one foot in front of the other, and we’re still here. We survive each other. Against all odds, believe me. And every now and then there’s some nice little moment that barely makes it all worthwhile.”

  The snow picked up, flurrying now, falling on Aiden’s eyelashes and the little wisps of hair that extended beyond his warm knit hat. It threatened to dampen Uncle Edgar’s pipe, but the older man just puffed more vehemently.

  “She had a moment with me,” Aiden said. “While you were at the store.”

  “Who? May?”

  “Yeah. I think it was the combination of seeing me and then looking at a photo of a young horse. She started remembering when we lived at the ranch with Harris. But I think she got parts of it wrong. She told me I was afraid of Magic. That he got big and frisky, and he knocked me down and stepped on my foot and bit me, and I was afraid of him. But I would remember that if it had happened. I know I wasn’t afraid of Magic.”

  Uncle Edgar laughed out a billowing cloud of smoke to be dampened down by the snow. “Oh, beg to differ, my boy. You were quite wary of going near that colt for almost a year. I don’t know if it was fear. First of all, I wasn’t there. I just heard about it over holiday dinners. And you were so shut down, I’m not sure any of us knew for a fact what you were feeling. I suppose May knew best. But that first year, Harris wasn’t sure if it was a mistake to give you that horse. He didn’t think it was going to work out at all. I don’t know if the colt knocked you down and stepped on your foot, but he definitely bit you. When he was about six months old you came to Thanksgiving dinner with one thumb swollen up like a sausage.”

  “Huh,” Aiden said. “Funny.” The words sounded strange and dull to him, almost slurred by the numbness of his lips. “I don’t remember that.”

  “Human nature. After something works out, we forget the frustration of the steps we took in getting there.”

  “Maybe,” Aiden said. “I guess. Can I ask you a question? You knew Harris fairly well.”

  “Fairly well, yes, seeing as he was my brother-in-law for eight years. I didn’t know him as well as you did, and of course May knew him better than anybody. But go ahead and ask your question, and I’ll try.”

  “You know I don’t run cattle on that ranch anymore.”

  “Don’t you? I didn’t know. How do you make your living?”

  “Just breeding horses. It’s tight, but I manage.”

  “Why did you stop running cattle?”

  “I just couldn’t do it anymore. Emotionally. The things you have to do to handle them. The tagging and roping and throwing them down and castrating them. And then knowing you’re sending them off to be slaughtered. I just suddenly didn’t have the heart for it anymore.”

  “Ah,” Uncle Edgar said. He nodded to himself for a surprising length of time. As if shaking his thoughts into proper order. “I’m not surprised. All that sensitivity came back, didn’t it? I always thought it would. I really didn’t expect you could keep it shut down forever.”

  “Yeah,” Aiden said. “It woke up. Anyway, I had a couple of employees. And of course they were disgusted with me. Didn’t understand at all. One of them had known Harris. And he got right in my face and said if Harris could see what I was doing, he’d be ashamed. And, you know, it was more than a year and a half ago. Maybe closer to two years. And I never really shook that off. I still carry a little chunk of shame around in my stomach, wondering if maybe he was right. So I just wondered. I was just hoping there was somebody who remembered him well enough to tell me. Do you think he’d be ashamed of me if he knew?”

  Edgar puffed on his pipe, then turned his face up into the falling snow. As if seeking to ask Harris directly. Aiden thought he saw something like a little smile at one corner of his uncle’s mouth.

  “I think you know the answer to that,” Edgar said.

  “I think I don’t. Or I wouldn’t be asking.”

  “Oh, come on, Aiden. As well as you knew Harris? What would he ask you if he were here right now?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “He asked it all the time. He was practically known for it. When he started the sentence, people would roll their eyes because he asked it so much.”

  “I’m sorry,” Aiden said, thinking he had reached the limits of his resistance to cold and would have to go in now. “I really don’t remember.”

  “He would say, ‘Are you doing what your heart says to do?’”

  “Oh. Wow. That does sound familiar, now that you say it. Yeah, he did ask me that a lot.”

  “So . . . were you?”

  Aiden looked up into the falling snow the way his uncle had done, and closed his eyes. He thought back to the awful time in his life when he had decided not to be a cattle rancher anymore. Then he stopped thinking about it and just felt it.

  “Yeah. I was listening to my heart—as best I knew how, anyway.”

  “That’s all any of us can do. And he would have been proud of you for it, and you damn well know that.”

  “Thanks, Uncle Edgar. I better go in now. I’m freezing my butt off out here. Besides, I have to tell Milo about how I was afraid of my foal. And how he bit me. He’ll really get a kick out of that.”

  But the kids had gone to bed by the time he got back inside.

  Aiden sat on the couch with Gwen for a few minutes, his arm around her shoulder. They watched through the window as snow piled up in the yard, illuminated by a soft glow from the streetlight.

  “Our lives are so much better with you,” she said.

  Aiden wanted to say something in return. He meant to. But he was a little embarrassed by her words. More to the point, they created an emotional intensity so thick it was hard to push words through it.

  “Especially Milo,” she added. “The way you’ve stretched yourself for that boy. I’m not sure who else would have done all that for a guy like him. It’s really above and beyond.”

  He still couldn’t seem to manage words, so he gave her shoulders a squeeze.

  Gwen might have been embarrassed herself. Because she kissed him quickly on the lips and jumped to her feet. “I’m going to go take a shower before bed.”

  “Okay, hon. See you in a few.”

  She trotted up the stairs, and Aiden sat by himself and watched the snow pile up. For about two minutes or so. Then he felt the bounce of somebody flopping on the couch beside him. He turned his head to see Milo settling in his pajamas.

  “Aiden? You think they’ll like their presents that I made?”

  “I know they will. They’ll love them. Those trays are absolutely one hundred percent good enough. What’re you doing up?” But the question came out mellow and friendly. Not like the third degree at all.

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Why is that, do you suppose?”

  “I think maybe I’m
excited that tomorrow is Christmas?”

  It was a statement turned into a weak question, and delivered with almost no conviction. Plus it didn’t match with anything Aiden knew about Milo.

  “You weren’t excited for Christmas last year.”

  “Okay.” Deep sigh. “I lied. I get scared when I have to sleep in a new place.”

  “Ah. Got it. You want to sleep in the big guest room with your mom and me? I happen to know there’s a cot. We could set it up at the end of the bed so you know we’re close by.”

  “You would let me do that?”

  “Sure. Why not? Come on.”

  But, oddly, no one moved. Only the falling snow outside the window.

  “It’s too bad about your mom,” Milo said. “You know. How she doesn’t remember people and stuff. She seems like a nice lady.”

  “She’s . . . yeah. She’s really quite lovely.”

  “Is she . . . ?”—it was a sentence that could have gone a hundred directions—“kind of like . . . my grandmother?”

  “Yeah. I’d say so. She’s your step-grandmother. I’m sorry you didn’t get to meet her when she was more herself.”

  “I’m just glad I get to meet her.”

  “Come on,” Aiden said, and pulled himself up off the couch. “We’ll go get that cot for you.” They walked toward the stairs together. “And while we’re setting it up, I’ll tell you a story.”

  Milo looked up at him, eyes full of skepticism. “What kind of story?”

  “It’s about a boy who gets knocked down and bitten by his own foal.”

  They climbed the stairs together.

  Milo rolled his eyes. “I think I know that one.”

  “Oh no,” Aiden said. “Not this one. You haven’t heard this one. This is all new.” He draped an arm around Milo’s shoulders. The boy didn’t yell out or flinch away. “And I just know you’re going to enjoy it.”

  THE WAKE UP BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

  Aiden has a deep level of empathy for both people and animals. Do you believe some people are more highly sensitive than others? Do you see this as an asset or a liability?