“It’s that I’m scared now. That you’re going to drop me.”
“Why would I drop you?”
“You know why. Because of Milo. The more you know about him . . . He has a way of getting under people’s skin. He always seems to know the one thing that’ll bother a person most. The one thing they can’t take. Like with you it was the thing with animals. He sensed that right away. And I just don’t know that we’ve got enough water under our bridge, you and me, that you’re going to want to walk through all that to be with me. I just worry it’s something that gets worse from here.”
Aiden breathed for a moment before answering, weighing and measuring the uncharted iceberg floating just under the surface of this discussion. Reimagining his terrible night as a mere jumping-off place for a situation that had only begun to fester.
“We’ll work it out,” he said, hoping he sounded fairly sure.
“That’s nice to hear you say.” And a more satisfied, and satisfying, silence followed. “I also called because . . . well, I forgot to ask. There was so much going on right when you got back from talking to that sheriff. You didn’t get in any legal trouble, did you?”
“No. Nothing that . . . I mean, if it all stays peaceful from here, no harm done on that account.”
“I’ll let you get to sleep, then.”
And with that she left Aiden alone. Left him to face the fact that sleep likely could not be gotten to. Not anytime soon.
It was after eleven when Aiden sat straight up in bed, remembering the rabbits. He felt bad because he had not thought to check on them sooner. On the other hand, it was a good sign that he had forgotten them, and he knew it. If they were afraid, or in pain, he would not have been able to turn his attention elsewhere.
He would have known.
Still, he found his big battery-powered lantern in the pantry and walked out back in nothing but boxer shorts, a robe, and his cowboy boots. He let himself into their enclosure and sat cross-legged on the hard ground, waiting. It was better to let them come to him. Especially after their tough evening.
In time two or three of their white or light-brown heads appeared, reaching out from the open doorway of the hutch. With little hops of their back legs, they made their way over to him. A few of them did. Some came closer than others. It was always that way. Not everyone responds to fear with the same behaviors.
He held the lantern close to them, one by one, and checked them for blood, and ran his hands along their heads and sides if they let him. He could find no sign that any of them had been hit. He turned off the lantern and stretched out in the cold dirt, feeling like Gulliver as they climbed onto his chest and nestled in the spaces between his arms and his sides.
“Sorry, guys,” he said.
He wanted to say more. That it was all over now. That nothing like it would happen again. But he wasn’t sure if that would prove to be the truth.
Several hours later he woke on the hard soil, slightly cold and a little stiff from his awkward position.
All the rabbits had gone back inside their hutch for warmth. Except one. One lone brown rabbit was sleeping with his head tucked into Aiden’s armpit. And Aiden didn’t want to disturb him. He felt as though he’d been given an honor, a compliment, that he was not ready to give back.
So he put his head down again and let sleep take him for a few hours more.
Chapter Four
Tearing Open Everything
Aiden looked up suddenly to see her standing in the open doorway between her office and the waiting room—a woman who must have been the psychiatrist. She stood surveying the waiting room where Aiden sat fidgeting.
“I’m Hannah,” the doctor said. “You must be Aiden.”
She was somewhere between sixty and seventy, he guessed, with gray hair piled neatly on her head, and a face that seemed to have one crease or crow’s-foot for every figurative mountain she had climbed or lesson she had learned the hard way. Then Aiden wondered where that thought had come from. She wore a skirt and blouse in a deep, rich color of red that made Aiden’s gut relax.
It reminded him of Gwen’s red dress, he realized a moment later. The one she had worn to his house that night. That horrible night. The relaxation dissipated.
“I don’t call you Dr. Rutledge?”
“You can if you like. Whatever makes you most comfortable. But Hannah is fine with me.”
Aiden stood and walked into her office. Just for a moment he almost turned around and walked out again. But he had driven nearly an hour to get here. And he would probably owe her for the session anyway. It seemed like a waste.
He sat in a deep, comfortable leather wing chair. It was huge, and well padded, and he sank into its cushions. It made him feel like a child.
For several moments he didn’t speak. Just nursed an uneasy feeling that she was assessing him in some wordless way. He stared out the window at the freeway and the industrial-looking buildings of this section of urban Bakersfield.
The doctor had a clock that ticked. It made it hard for Aiden to think.
“I hate cities,” he said. “After all these years out in the sticks, I can’t stand looking at all that concrete and steel.”
“I feel exactly the same.”
“Why live here, then?”
“I don’t. I just have my office here. I live in Tehachapi and commute.”
“Lot of driving.”
“It is. But it’s worth it to me. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I get the impression that you’re a man who never imagined himself seeing a psychiatrist.”
“You got that right.”
“I know you’ll tell me what drove you to come here. But before you do, I’m curious about one thing. Why did you choose to see a woman psychiatrist?”
“Oh,” he said. “That.”
He stared out the window for another moment. Tried to see the buildings differently, now that he knew she didn’t like them, either. Tried to see her differently. It felt strange to think they had anything in common. Even something small like that.
“Only if you care to say,” she added.
“I just thought . . . based on what I need to say here . . . I thought a woman would be more likely to understand.” He knew as he said it that he was referring more to what he called “the wake up” and less to Milo. “No, wait. I’ll be even more honest than that. I thought a man would laugh at me. Maybe not right out loud, but I would know. And that would be bad enough.”
Then he pulled his attention back to the subject at hand. Or at least what he wanted to be the subject. He had come here to talk about Milo. Not himself. Aiden was not the problem. Milo was the problem.
“So you were ordered to come here by a judge?” Hannah asked, after Aiden had told her the story of his disastrous first meeting with Milo.
“No. Not ordered. And no judge. It was just something that was . . . highly recommended. I think it was kind of hinted at . . . you know . . . that things would go easier on me if anything like this ever happened again. I think the world sees me now as having anger issues. Which I don’t. Well. My little corner of the world, anyway. Which I guess isn’t much world. But it’s what I’ve got.”
“Did you come here only to get the law off your case?”
“No. Not entirely. I’m feeling more than a little bit lost these days. I could use some help sorting all this stuff out.”
“Good,” Hannah said. “Good. I’m glad to hear you say that. I think we can go with that. I think that’s enough to work with for now.”
“It was Gwen who pointed out that somehow this kid had found my Achilles’ heel,” Aiden said a few minutes later in the session. “He’d just met me, but he knew the one thing I couldn’t take. And he was all too happy to use it against me.”
“I understand,” Hannah said. “And I hope you understand what I’m about to say next. For the purposes of this therapy, Milo is not as important as you think he is. He’s important to you; I get that. You have to learn to get along with him if you wan
t your new relationship to move forward. And we can certainly deal with that. But people come into our lives and point things out to us for a reason. Right now I’m more interested in why this issue with animals is such an Achilles’ heel for you. Not that anyone wouldn’t want to protect their animals. Don’t get me wrong. But I’m sensing there’s something more here.”
“Oh yeah,” Aiden said. “There’s more. There’s definitely more.” He sighed. Paused as long as he felt he reasonably could. “I guess I need to tell you about the wake up.”
“The wake up? That’s an interesting expression.”
“Yeah, well. That’s what I call it. When I have to talk about it. If I had my way I wouldn’t call it anything at all. Because I wouldn’t even bring it up. Or better yet, it wouldn’t have happened in the first place.”
“But you’re going to tell me about it now. Right?”
“Yeah,” Aiden said with another sigh. “I guess I am.”
He sat in silence for a moment, listening to the clock ticking, and nursing an uneasy feeling. Why was he opening this can of worms?
He’d come here, he now realized, for an easy answer. What he would get would be far messier, less exact, and more complicated than he could possibly have imagined. He could feel that now.
He would have to tear open everything.
PART TWO
AIDEN DELACORTE AT AGE FORTY
THREE MONTHS EARLIER
Chapter Five
The Wake Up
There was something different about that day. There was. Even before it became painfully obvious. Even before it left Aiden no choice but to fully live it through.
He felt the something in question as he bent down to catch the cinch and pull it up around his horse’s barrel. He felt it again as he leaned forward to clip the breast collar to the bottom of the cinch. Almost as though the blood rushing to Aiden’s brain gave it power.
It was just a nagging thing, back then. A sense that something stood close behind his shoulder, crowding him. An unsettling feeling that he was holding something at bay. Maybe he always was. Maybe he always had been. But somehow, in that moment, its presence felt less inchoate, more dense and problematic.
He straightened up to see Derek sitting his bay gelding nearby, staring at Aiden as though amused by what he saw.
“What the hell’re you doing, Aiden?”
“I’m going hunting,” Aiden said. “You never saw a man go hunting before?”
“I’m not sure I ever saw a man spend ten hours riding cattle and otherwise nailing his ass into a hard saddle, then turn around and choose to do something just for the hell of it that requires more riding. No. I do believe this might be a first.”
“I’ve just been wanting to go. That’s all.”
“Some people take their trucks hunting,” Derek added.
Not to this spot they don’t, Aiden thought. But he didn’t want to share his special spot with Derek or anybody else. The last thing any hunter wanted was for that kind of information to get out.
He said nothing.
“You ain’t got but an hour or two till sundown.”
“That’s a good time to go,” Aiden said, asking his horse to take the bit.
“Trucks have lights. In case you didn’t know. Horses not so much. You could get stuck out in those woods for the night if you don’t play your cards right.”
“Like that would be the most terrible thing in the world,” Aiden said.
He pictured himself lying on his back on two saddle blankets in the warm spring night, staring up at a riot of stars.
“Whatever, man,” Derek said, neck-reining his bay gelding back toward the house. “You always were a little crazy.”
Aiden rode through the woods, allowing the slant of light through the dense trees to settle his spirits. He rode his stallion, Dusty, a solidly built gray quarter horse that he used for breeding great cow horses. He ponied his sorrel gelding Leo along behind, harnessed instead of saddled and pulling a drag sled. What the Native Americans would call a travois. But the Indians made them from the trunks of narrow saplings. This one had been made with two-by-twos from the hardware store.
Aiden could hear the distinctive thumps it made as the gelding dragged it over rocks.
For a flicker of a moment he thought he felt it again—some kind of rattling uneasiness. Something that wanted to turn him back. That was why he had to go, and he knew it. He had pushed himself into this trip for precisely that reason: to answer that nagging subconscious request with a strong and solid no.
Aiden walked upstream until he was several hundred yards from the spot where he’d tied his horses.
There was a special clearing, a break in the woods. If you looked closely, you could see the faint trail left by the deer on their way to and from the stream. They came down in the evening to drink.
Everybody and everything has to drink.
Aiden set down his deer rifle and dipped his cupped hands into the cold, flowing water. He was thirsty. He hadn’t so much as popped a can of soda during that long, hot day of riding. He hadn’t bothered to feel his thirst then. He felt it now.
He sat a few minutes, enjoying the way the wind blew the leaves over his head, shifting the dappled light that fell into his eyes. He could hear that wind, and the water tumbling over stones, but nothing more.
A movement caught his eye, and his hand instinctively found the weapon again.
He looked up to see a doe leading her young fawn down to the water. Very young, that fawn. Probably no more than a month old. Aiden had no intention of shooting a fawn that young, nor did he plan to leave one on its own to be slaughtered in the forest. There was hunting, and then there was just plain cruel. It was a line he was not about to cross.
His hand loosened on the stock of the rifle.
Not a second later he saw it. The buck. The one who changed everything. Broad chest. Flash of white on its muzzle and belly. Eight points on its rack of horns.
Aiden raised the rifle and sighted, centering the buck’s heart in his crosshairs.
He pulled the trigger.
Pain exploded in Aiden’s chest, nearly a foot from the spot where the rifle butt kicked against his shoulder. It ripped through, erasing everything in the world that was not that pain. Searing, with pressure. It knocked him backward. Threw him over.
He blacked out so quickly that, as far as Aiden’s conscious mind was concerned, he never hit the ground.
Aiden opened his eyes.
Very little time had elapsed. He knew so from the angle of the sun. At first he remembered nothing. And there was nothing to help him remember.
There was no pain.
He sat up, and gradually the memory returned to him. His hand came up to his chest. He looked down, expecting it to come away bloody.
There was no blood.
Aiden pulled his shirt away from his skin and looked underneath. No bruising. He felt everywhere. Nothing hurt. He breathed deeply, searching for any shortness of breath that might indicate a heart attack. His breathing was fine. His heart seemed to beat normally.
It was as if nothing had happened.
Well, not even as if. Nothing had happened.
So what the hell had happened?
“What the hell,” Aiden said out loud. It was not a question. It was a criticism of the moment. A complaint about the unpredictability, the sheer senselessness, of the world at times. Though, frankly, at no other time had it ever made as little sense as this.
He stumbled to his feet.
He looked in the direction of the buck. The buck was down. A perfect shot. One bullet hole, squarely in his chest. Aiden had taken him with one exacting shot through the heart. No pain. Or, if there had been pain, it must have been brief.
So why was I the one who felt it? a voice asked in Aiden’s brain. A voice that felt vaguely apart from him. Like a second Aiden, hovering over the first with its unwanted presence.
Aiden pushed the thought away again.
Aid
en led Leo to the spot where the buck lay beside the water. As he did so, he listened to the occasional thump of the drag sled and comforted himself with the feeling that all had returned to normal.
The congratulatory moment did not last long.
When they reached the buck, or close enough to the animal to see and smell it, the gelding paused in his tracks. Just one beat, but a sudden fearful jolt tore through Aiden’s gut like another phantom gunshot. On any previous day he likely would not have noticed the pause at all. On that day, fear struck Aiden’s body. A variety of terrified dread.
He looked over at Leo and saw just the slightest widening of the horse’s eye.
The gelding was afraid.
The gelding smelled blood.
The gelding understood death.
The gelding was afraid of death. Even the death of an animal unrelated to himself. Even the death of a non-equine.
And Aiden felt himself overwhelmed with that same fear. That’s when he knew it was not over. Not even close.
He arrived back at the ranch to find that Derek had not yet gone home. His other ranch hand, Trey, had driven away. Derek was sitting in his battered flatbed pickup truck, lighting a cigarette and letting the engine warm up.
The sun was recently down, the dusk thick, warm. Dry.
Aiden rode up near Derek’s open driver’s window, still ponying the gelding, the sled, the buck.
“Damn,” Derek said. “Lookit what you got. Sure didn’t take you long, neither. You weren’t gone but an hour.”
“Wasn’t I?”
“That’s a nice-lookin’ beast you bagged.”
“You want it?”
For several moments Derek just smoked and smiled. He seemed not to know much about the nature of the joke, yet appeared convinced it must be a joke of one sort or another.
Then he must have gotten tired of waiting for the punch line, because he frowned.
“What, seriously?”
“Yeah. Seriously. You want it?”
The Wake Up Page 5
