The Wake Up

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  “Gwen,” Marge added. “I mean you.”

  Gwen turned around. Her hands stopped moving—froze in space with a bag of barbecue potato chips in one and a pint of vanilla ice cream in the other. And just for that moment, she caught his eye and did not scan anything. But the belt kept rolling, and the groceries began to bunch up at the register.

  Her face lit up when she saw him there.

  He wanted to be happy about that. Or just happy in general. But all he could think was how she was about to be out on the street with her kids. And maybe about to move to someplace too far away. Someplace he couldn’t see her the way he could now. At least, if his plan to prevent such a catastrophe failed.

  “What’re you doing here?” she asked, but not in a bad way.

  “I thought you were about to get off work.”

  “I am.”

  “Okay, good. I wanted to show you something.”

  “Ooh,” Marge said. “Sounds mysterious.”

  “Ten minutes,” Gwen said.

  Then she went back to scanning groceries.

  “But I have my car here,” she said as he walked her out to his truck.

  He had one hand on the small of her back, gently. Barely touching. Maybe because he wanted to touch her but couldn’t think of a right and proper context in which to do so.

  “I’ll drive you back to your car.”

  “What’s it all about, Aiden? Really.”

  “Just trust me for a minute, okay?”

  He opened the passenger door of the truck for her, and she climbed in.

  Aiden hopped in and fired up the engine, and they drove in silence for a time. He turned the air conditioning up full blast to make it more livable inside the truck’s cab. He turned down the radio because the combination of the fan on high and country-western music made it hard to think.

  She reached her hand across the seat and he took it and held it.

  “Sorry I haven’t been keeping in touch so well the last couple of days,” she said.

  “It’s all right.”

  “I’m not having second thoughts about us. I hope you know that.”

  “I do.”

  But it wasn’t true. He had worried some about it.

  “I just sort of felt like . . . I thought maybe you were having second thoughts. And I wanted to give you some time and some space to have them.”

  “I don’t need time or space. I know what I want and it’s just what I’ve wanted all along.”

  She gave his hand a comfortable little squeeze.

  A mile or two passed in silence.

  “So, I had my first session with that psychiatrist today,” he said.

  “Oh. Right! How did it go?”

  “Okay, I guess. I’m not really sure about . . . well, I guess I don’t even know how to say it. I told her a bunch of stuff about my life, and maybe now I’m wondering how that’s supposed to change anything. But I like her.”

  “I felt that way, too. At first. With my counselor. It takes a while. But you’ll start to feel the difference it makes. Honest you will.”

  “I’m glad you told me you had a good experience with counseling, or I swear I never would have tried it. Sheriff or no sheriff. The whole idea was just so foreign to me.”

  He pulled up in front of his own gate. Jumped out and opened it.

  As he climbed back into the truck, he braved a quick glance at her face. She looked curious. A little nervous. But not as though she were about to ask questions.

  He swung left at the house and took the graded dirt road that wound around the roping pen and up the hill.

  “What’s back here?” she asked.

  “You’ll see in about a second.”

  Sure enough, before he could even finish the sentence they had crested the hill, and the caretaker’s cabin came into view.

  It was smaller than the house. Much smaller. But it had the same orangey tile roof and stucco sides. The same rustic wooden door and window frames. The same shutters. Like a miniature of his ranch house.

  He pulled up in front of it and set the hand brake. Turned off the engine.

  They sat in silence for a second. Maybe two.

  “What’s this?” she asked. As if it could be poisonous.

  “It’s a little house I used to offer to a ranch hand. Usually the main one. The guy who was most useful to me. That way if I needed to go out of town for any reason, there was always somebody here to look after the stock. But my last hand, Derek, he had his own house in town that he liked. So he never moved in. So nobody’s lived here for five years at least. It’d take some fixing up.”

  He opened the door of his truck and stepped down into the dirt.

  A moment later she stood at his side. She tried to look into his eyes, but he kept them averted.

  “Somebody told you,” she said. “Who told you?”

  “Well. Small town. You know. Somebody rents out their place just as the bank’s about to foreclose—that’s gonna get around. You know how it is.”

  “I suppose,” she said. “Yeah.”

  “It’s small.” He walked to the door, and she followed. He wiped the dirt off the soles of his boots on the dusty mat, but it might have made them worse, not better. “Only one bedroom. So I don’t know how you fit three people in only one bedroom. But the thing about it is, it’s available now. So if you’ve got a place to live now, but it’s small, and you have to figure out how to do better, well . . . seems to me that’s less of a problem. I mean, you’ve got a roof over your head at the end of the day. A door that locks.”

  As he spoke, he sorted through the keys in his hand. When he found the right one, he reached out to place it in the lock. Her hand touched his arm—touched bare skin where his sleeve was rolled back—and he froze.

  “You know,” she said. Then she didn’t go on for a few seconds. “If you hear I’m having a problem, you don’t have to step in and fix it for me.”

  Aiden felt his face redden. Still, he froze there, one hand reaching the key out toward the lock on the cabin door.

  “I know that,” he said. “I know you’re absolutely capable of solving your own problems. I know you can always make a home for yourself and those kids. But it likely won’t be around here, and we both know it. Not much for rent around here. So if anything, I’m being selfish. I just don’t want you to move away, okay?”

  Her hand left his arm and dropped to her side. In time he glanced up at her face. She seemed to teeter just on the edge of tears.

  “The place we’re just leaving is only one bedroom,” she said.

  “Is it? I didn’t know that.”

  “Elizabeth and I have been sharing the bedroom and Milo sleeps on the couch.”

  “So this won’t be a step down.”

  “Not at all,” she said, and then breathed deeply a few times before saying more. “Let’s take a look, then.”

  He turned the key in the lock and let the door swing wide.

  It was dusty inside. He could have written his name with one finger on just about any piece of furniture. Rustic wood chairs and coffee table and a big battered leather sofa mostly covered with a Native American blanket. Kitchen table in more of a nook of a kitchen than its own room.

  “It’ll need a good cleaning,” he said.

  “I’m not worried about that.”

  “What are you worried about, then?”

  Gwen sighed. Then she began to wander around the place, looking at the dusty furniture close up. It didn’t take long.

  “We’re pretty new for this. You and me, I mean.”

  “For living together, yeah. I agree. It would be too soon. But you can’t even see this place from the main house. And it’s not like I’d be popping in all the time, acting like your life is mine because it’s on my property. I’d let you have your privacy. And if it doesn’t work out, well then . . . whatever. It doesn’t work out. It’s still a place for you three to be in the meantime. It still gives you more time to figure out where you can live long
term.”

  She didn’t answer for a strange length of time. Just stood in the swirling dust motes, in a beam of light from the open front door. She was looking up slightly, toward the ceiling. As if waiting for something to be delivered from on high.

  Aiden didn’t know what to say, or even if he should disturb her.

  “And how much would it cost us to live here?” she asked in a small voice.

  “Oh, come on, Gwen. It’s just sitting here and you know it.”

  That look came across her face again. As if she might be about to cry. It made him look away, though he couldn’t quite figure why.

  A second later she rushed him. Appeared right in his line of vision and just kept coming, and he threw his arms wide to receive her, and she wrapped herself around him. He breathed deeply and held her in return.

  Everything that had been weighing on him fell away, and he was okay. The kind of okay he’d been trying for all his life.

  “You know this means Milo would be living here on your ranch,” she said into his ear.

  “I know that.”

  “With all your animals.”

  His muscles tightened, and he wondered if she could feel it. Strangely, he hadn’t thought things through that far.

  “Not that he usually hurts animals,” she added quickly. “But I just had to say it. Make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into. But that thing with the rabbits, well . . . like I said. Nothing like that ever happened before.”

  Still holding her, Aiden felt all that recently gained okayness drain away again. Abandon him.

  An image filled his head. Milo standing over the freshly dug grave of a bird he had personally murdered. Playing a tune on some kind of child’s wind instrument.

  “We’ll figure it out,” he breathed near her ear. “It’ll be okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  Chapter Ten

  The Tightening

  Aiden could hear the sound of the television program Milo was watching. It was raucous and disturbing. Aiden was standing in his own kitchen, trying not to be troubled by the noise, and working up the nerve to go in there and start some kind of conversation with the boy.

  Maybe having them here at his house—instead of at their new cabin with a babysitter—had been a bad idea. And yet it was Aiden who had insisted.

  He pulled a deep breath and straightened his back. Somehow Milo was his new family now. He couldn’t avoid these interactions indefinitely.

  He marched into the TV room, a converted spare bedroom.

  Milo raised his eyes to Aiden’s eyes and then quickly looked away again. He was sitting slumped on the sofa, his back curled, his head tilted forward at what must have been an uncomfortable angle, his chin nearly touching his collarbone. He was wearing shorts, and his legs looked so impossibly thin that Aiden felt a pang of empathy for the boy. Those legs didn’t look much wider than the bones that ran through them. The cast on his arm was so huge it seemed to swallow him up. Overshadow him.

  “Where’s Elizabeth?” Aiden asked, shouting to be heard over the too-loud television blare.

  Milo muttered something, but it was much too quiet to hear.

  Aiden moved closer and sat down on the far end of the couch from Milo. The boy moved farther away, though there wasn’t much farther to be had. Still, he scooted his butt over until he was pressed into the very corner of the couch, as far from Aiden as possible.

  Aiden slid his hand over and grabbed the remote control. He punched the volume down by four or five notches.

  “There,” he said. “Now I stand a chance of hearing . . . well, anything but what’s on TV. Where did you say she was?”

  “Out in the barn talking to the horses,” Milo mumbled. Even at close range, and even with the TV at normal volume, the boy’s words came out so wispy and small that Aiden could only just catch them. They barely took their rightful place in the air.

  “The horses aren’t in the barn. Except two or three. They’re almost all in those two pastures between the house and your cabin.”

  Milo only shrugged. It was a stiff, overdone gesture that pulled his shoulders up too high around his ears and held them there too long. Meanwhile the boy’s eyes never left the screen.

  “What are we watching?” Aiden asked, trying to sound breezy. Light and normal. Not unduly stressed by the conversation.

  It didn’t go well.

  Milo shot him a brief glance. He held it just long enough that Aiden could see the derision in the boy’s eyes. As if the idea that “we” could do anything together was absurd. Offensive, even.

  “I am watching cartoons,” Milo said after a time, a strangely mature formality in his words and an ominous emphasis on the word “I.” He could not have stated it any more clearly. Whatever he was doing, Aiden’s participation—his mere presence—was not invited.

  “Listen,” Aiden began, “I just want to say again that I’m sorry for—”

  He never got to finish the sentence. Milo leapt upright, landed on his feet, and began moving. Away.

  Aiden followed him to the front door, but the boy was surprisingly fast.

  Milo threw the door wide. He strode out into the warm and sunny morning without bothering to close the door behind him. Aiden followed, calling his name and gaining ground.

  “Milo! Milo, wait!”

  Milo did not wait.

  “I don’t want you going back to your cabin. I mean it. I promised your mom I’d watch you, and we’re going to do that at the big house. So come back in. Now.”

  Milo kept walking.

  It struck Aiden that it would be a terrible mistake to let him go. The boy was testing him. If Aiden stated very clearly how he needed something to be—as he just had—and then allowed Milo to do the opposite, it would set a terrible precedent for their relationship. He could be sunk before they ever really started.

  He decided it was time to act parental. However that was supposed to work.

  “Milo,” he said again, and surged forward. He grabbed a handful of the back of the boy’s shirt.

  Milo hit the end of that tether, strained for a moment, then came to the desired halt.

  “Look, I get it,” Aiden said. “I was trying to talk to you and you don’t want me to. Fine. I won’t do it anymore. But you have to come back into the house.”

  Milo broke into a sudden flurry of forward activity. Except none of it resulted in his moving forward. But he thrashed against the restraint of his shirt in Aiden’s fist. Unsuccessfully.

  Then Milo did something Aiden had not seen coming. Something that could only be described as a meltdown.

  He screamed. Shrieked, really. He dissolved into a heap at Aiden’s feet, thrashing his legs and his unbroken left arm. Pushing out a noise that pierced Aiden’s eardrums and psyche like a nearby siren. Keening.

  Aiden stood hunched above him, wincing, still holding a handful of the boy’s shirt, utterly unclear on how to proceed.

  After a terrible moment Elizabeth appeared at Aiden’s side. Aiden had never been so happy to see anyone. At least, not that he could recall.

  “What happened to him?” Aiden asked her, shouting to be heard over the siren wail of Milo’s panicky tantrum.

  She leaned close to his ear to answer. To give him half a chance to hear her.

  “Anytime somebody makes him feel . . . like, when they take hold of him . . . so he can’t get away . . . and they have power over him like that, he freaks out.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  Aiden released his handful of the boy’s shirt.

  Silence fell. It felt shocking. As if the very air were vibrating, stunned to have all that sound subtracted so quickly.

  “I just need him to go back in the house,” Aiden said. “My house. I agreed to watch him at my house, and I need him to stay there.”

  “Okay,” Elizabeth said. “No worries.”

  She knelt down beside her brother and spoke a few words into his ear. Aiden couldn’t hear them and didn�
��t try.

  Next thing he knew she was helping Milo to his feet, one arm around the boy as if to shelter him from the world. From everything. The two walked together back toward Aiden’s house. Aiden stood rigid in the sun and breathed, and tried to shake the feeling of being deeply rattled. But you don’t simply shake off a thing like that. It’s too bad you can’t, but you can’t. It’s in your bones, it’s in your cells. It needs time to move through you.

  A moment later he looked up to see Elizabeth walking back in his direction. Alone.

  “Hey,” he said, relieved that it was only her.

  “Hey,” she said back.

  “Is he okay?”

  “Yeah. He’ll be all right. He’s back in front of his cartoons.”

  “Think we can trust him to stay there?”

  “He hasn’t moved off the couch all day. He kind of hasn’t moved off the couch since his arm got broken, except just now when you tried to talk to him. So I figure, yeah. He’ll probably stay put.”

  “Did you find the horses? Milo said you were going out to see the horses.”

  “I didn’t find too many of them. There are three in the barn. I like that big gray.”

  “Oh yeah. That’s Smokey. He’s my stallion. He’s the daddy of all these horses I breed here. And quite a few others around the county.”

  They turned and walked toward the barn together, as if following some invisible prearranged agreement. As if they could move in a sort of living choreography without any discussion before the fact.

  “And then there was a young-looking one in there,” she said, words spilling out of her in a fairly typical teenage rhythm. “And one that looks really fat. No offense.”

  Aiden laughed. “None taken,” he said. “That’s one of my brood mares, Misty. She’s with foal.”

  “Pregnant?”

  “Yeah. Pregnant.”

  They stepped into the barn together. Then they both stopped. It was more of that natural choreography that came so easily to them. It was cool in the shade of the barn aisle, and moist feeling. The air had a tropical feel and an earthy smell.