The Wake Up

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  “What did you dream?”

  Aiden shrugged.

  There had been a dream. He was not making that up. But it was not something he could pin down in words. Even if he had known where his words were hiding.

  The dream was always the same. In the dream, there was him. And there was the Earth. The planet. But either Aiden was much bigger or the planet was much smaller, because he could see and feel the curve of its sphere under his feet, like the globe on his dresser, but bigger. And that was not all he could feel. The Earth seemed to groan with the weight of its own emotion. It was angry. It was afraid. It was in pain. Physical pain, but other, more nebulous types of pain as well. And Aiden could not separate himself. He had wanted to jump off. In the dream, he had tried to jump. To fly free. But his feet had been forever rooted to the desperate soil.

  Now how exactly was a four-year-old supposed to describe a thing like that with his words?

  “Tell me about it,” his mother said quietly. “Anything you remember.”

  “Sad,” Aiden said. He forced his voice out of hiding with the assurance that it would not need to do much difficult work.

  “Doesn’t sound like a nightmare, honey. Nightmares are scary.”

  “Yeah. Also that.”

  She sighed. Then she pulled back the covers and allowed him in. He crawled in on the outside, away from his father, and made himself as small as humanly possible. She rolled away, and he moved close. He could feel the warmth of the small of her back. He could draw from it. Use that warmth. It sustained him through the moment. He knew then that he could be okay. That okay was at least possible.

  “Such a sensitive boy,” she mumbled.

  She shouldn’t have. She should have let the moment lie still.

  “Too sensitive,” his father said, his voice strong. Definitely awake.

  “Leave him alone, Eddie.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with wanting him to be a man.”

  “He’s four years old. There’s everything wrong with it.”

  “I’d like to see us headed for that at least.”

  “Go back to sleep.”

  Silence. Stillness. Aiden lay curled and frozen, waiting to see if the moment would hold.

  Sometime after that he must have fallen asleep again. But it was something that happened outside his awareness. It was rare—a blessing—for something to happen that Aiden could not feel.

  He woke slowly, aware of pain across his ribs. He was being carried, a strong arm wrapped underneath his midsection. His arms and legs dangled free, almost dragging onto the hardwood of the hall floor. He tried to lift his head, but it was too difficult. Gravity and sleepiness fought him too effectively.

  Then he was let go, dumped unceremoniously. He winced, expecting to hit hard wood. But he landed with a light bounce on his own bed.

  “This is where you sleep,” his father said simply.

  Then he walked out, closing Aiden’s bedroom door with a thump.

  Aiden lay awake, shivering, for several minutes. It was not cold. They were not that kind of shivers. He willed himself to stay awake, but in time sleep caught him and dragged him under.

  The Earth was still there. Waiting for him. Sobbing. Raging. Gasping. And still he could not get away. He could not jump off.

  The following day Aiden sat in the backyard grass, under the rosebushes that lined the fence on all four sides, and watched his sister, Valerie, play.

  She was a bigger kid than Aiden. Nearly six. She attended kindergarten in the morning, which commanded a great deal of Aiden’s grudging respect. But now she had arrived home for the afternoon. He wondered, though not in specific words, how it would feel to live a life so heavy with responsibility.

  Her hair was done up in two braids, but it had gone messy. She had been changed out of her good school dress and into khaki shorts and a pink tank top. She stood in the driveway, under the giant maple tree, picking up whirlybirds—the little seed pods that spun down like helicopters when thrown into the air—and releasing them to the warm wind with evident joy. Evident to him, anyway. He could feel her joy. Yet sometimes Aiden would say a thing like that out loud—how obvious it was what someone was feeling—only to be met with a look of confusion. Now and then she stopped gathering long enough to do a strange dance, stomping the concrete of the driveway in front of their garage.

  Aiden eased closer to see what she was stomping, his stomach suddenly a panicky knot of stress. If she was stepping on bugs, it would be too much. It would be more than Aiden’s heart could bear.

  Valerie paid him no attention as he crept closer, crawling on his belly to see the concrete near her feet at closer range. When he saw what was happening, he stopped. Froze, in more ways than one. His gut turned to ice water at the sight of the disaster.

  It was even worse than Aiden had feared. It was ants.

  Aiden had an ant farm in his bedroom, and he watched the industrious little heroes for hours a day. Every time his father, who had been laid off from his job and was feeling extra touchy, sent Aiden to his room for being “weird,” Aiden watched his ants. They were real, like us. They had jobs. They had a world.

  Now their world was in a state of catastrophic disarray, like the scene of an epic battle in a war. Their dead lay everywhere. Live ants mobilized around each tiny corpse, lifting it by one end and attempting to drag it away. But there were so many. Too many. And Valerie was still stomping.

  Just for a split second, Aiden felt overwhelmed with the sick dread of the scene. Then he bolted to his feet and pushed Valerie. Rammed her with his shoulder, hard, and pushed her into the rosebush-lined fence. She shrieked as the thorns scratched her bare arms and legs and snagged her clothing. Then she bounced forward off the chain link and fell onto her face in the driveway. When she sat up, her nose was bleeding. Bright-red blood ran down her upper lip. Shockingly red. A drop landed on the front of her pink top. She held her hands out, as if to show them to Aiden. But more likely she was assessing the damage herself. The heels of both hands had been scraped raw. For a beat or two of time they looked white. Strangely white. Then blood rose in individual drops.

  Valerie burst into tears.

  “You little creep! I’m telling!” She struggled to her feet and ran for the house. “Mo-o-o-om! Daddy!”

  Aiden watched her go, thinking only about the ants she was running over on her way.

  There was punishment in his future, but he couldn’t focus on it. Not yet. He would make his way inside and face it. Get it over with. But first he had to figure out how to cross the concrete without slaughtering any more ants.

  He reached his face down and blew lightly on the pavement. The ants lifted away and flew. That could not be pleasant for them, certainly. But which was worse? To be blown several feet away by a strong and sudden wind? Or to be crushed into oblivion, never to see the light of another day? He was doing the best he could for them.

  He set one sneakered foot down in the clear space he had created. Then he reached his face down and blew again. Stepped again.

  The world went dark. Or darker, anyway. A shadow fell across him, like a sudden cloud blocking out the sun. Aiden looked up to see his father standing in his path. Standing on ants.

  “Look out for—” he began.

  He was never able to finish.

  The back of his father’s hand caught him across the face and sent him flying. He landed on his back on the driveway, smacking his head hard. On the whirlybirds. And yes, of course, on more ants. There was nothing he could do.

  “Leave your sister alone,” his father said, his voice booming. An instrument to erase all doubt.

  Then he seemed to go. Aiden thought he could hear him go.

  He reached a hand to his face. He felt a tickle of something underneath his nose. He touched there. It was wet. He drew his hand back again and saw blood. And an ant. An ant was walking on that hand, desperately seeking refuge from all the carnage.

  He brought the hand closer to his face again.
>
  “I’m sorry,” he whispered to the ant. “I’m really sorry.”

  Aiden spent the rest of the day in his room playing with his horses. They were not real horses, of course. Just some kind of molded plastic. But imagination could do a lot. Great things.

  He couldn’t bear to look at his ant farm.

  He had washed the blood off his face with moistened toilet paper and held the bridge of his nose until the bleeding stopped. Because he knew that’s what his mother would do. His nose had bled before and she had cleaned it just like that.

  He had his horses all laid out on the rug, one palomino mare at the front of the herd, the others arranged facing her. An audience. As if she had something important to say.

  The door to his room opened and his mother came in.

  His eyes came up to hers, and Aiden saw shock there. She was shocked to see his face. Aiden hadn’t seen his own face recently. Not since he’d wiped off the blood. But it must have looked bad. Maybe it was swollen. Maybe it was bruised. It felt a little swollen. But the color of a bruise is nothing you can feel.

  It was interesting. It tickled at his mind and perplexed him—how some things only could be seen with your eyes. They had no sensation. Most things had a sensation. Too much of one.

  “What?” he asked her.

  She sat on the end of his bed. Gingerly, it seemed. As though she might hurt the bed, or herself, by doing so.

  “Come sit with me,” she said.

  Aiden did as he had been told.

  She looped an arm over his shoulders. It felt like coming home. Like being saved. Like the end of all strife.

  If only it had been the end of all strife. If only it hadn’t been the beginning.

  “This is not like you,” she said. “What happened?”

  “With Bally?”

  He called his sister “Bally” because he could not wrap his mouth around her full name.

  “Yes.”

  “She was stepping on ants.”

  “It’s hard to avoid them sometimes.”

  “Oh no,” Aiden said. Sure and authoritative. “She was stepping on ants on purpose.”

  “I see. Well. I know you like them. But don’t you like your sister, too?”

  “Not really,” Aiden said, “no.”

  “Aiden! How can you say that?”

  “’Cause it’s true.”

  “Just because she stepped on some ants? You always used to like her.”

  “No,” Aiden said, shaking his head with solemn gravity. “I never really did.”

  “That’s distressing news.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means I don’t like to hear that.”

  “Oh,” Aiden said. Feeling bad now. “I’m sorry.”

  “Still. No matter how you feel about her. It’s not right to hurt her. I know you feel bad for the ants. But don’t you feel bad for her, too? She got hurt. You pushed her down in the driveway. She was bleeding.”

  “I didn’t really push her down. I pushed her back into the fence. The fence pushed her down.”

  “That’s not an excuse, Aiden, and I think you know it. I still want to know why you felt sorrier for those ants than you did for your own sister.”

  “I don’t know,” Aiden said. “But I didn’t mean for her to get hurt. I just wanted to make it stop.”

  His mother sighed. Her arm disappeared from around his shoulders, which felt tragic.

  “It was wrong, what you did. Do you understand that, Aiden?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” But he wasn’t entirely sure he did understand. Not in this case. Not with countless lives to be saved.

  “And it was almost as wrong of her to hit you back, but I understand it more. I think you brought it on yourself.”

  “Bally didn’t hit me.”

  “Then what happened to your nose? You look like somebody hit you in the face.”

  “Daddy,” he said simply.

  He dared to look up at her face. It was whiter than he was used to seeing it. Still pretty, but white. And getting whiter as he watched.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I have to go have a talk with your father.”

  It was only a few minutes later when everything fell to ruin. Aiden’s whole life. Everything he had known.

  He had rearranged his horses so they were all running in one direction, following the palomino mare. As if running to safety. Which seemed prescient, looking back.

  Aiden heard a little cry, like a gasp of pain or fear. Or maybe it didn’t start out little. Maybe it had gotten smaller as it made its way up the stairs and reached him. It was followed by a thump and a crashing sound like breaking glass. He ran out of his bedroom to the top of the stairs, where he froze.

  He got there just in time to see the last of his father’s back walking out the door. He waited, unsure of how to proceed and too frightened to move, until he heard his father’s car start up, and the sound of its engine disappearing from the driveway. Then he crept down the stairs.

  His mother lay sprawled against the wall under a living room window. She had pulled the curtain down around herself with the fall. A vase had been broken, and somehow she had fallen with one hand, her left, braced on its shards. Blood ran into the fibers of the carpet. Aiden felt his body waver, sway as though his bones had turned to rubber. The world went white at its edges, like being forced into a dream when you weren’t even sleeping.

  She looked up at his face. Her left eye, or rather the area around the outside of it, was swelling. And something had happened to cause that eye to bleed inside. Aiden could see the red stain spreading in the part that should be only white.

  In that moment, suddenly, Aiden felt . . . nothing. Well, not nothing. But not enough. Not a normal amount. He loved his mother more than he loved anyone or anything. But as he reached for his feelings about what was happening, they ran farther away. Following the palomino mare to safety, maybe.

  “What should I do?” he asked her. His voice sounded strangely calm.

  “Call my friend Donna.”

  “How do you call on a phone?” he asked.

  He had not yet mastered the art of a simple phone call, and if she had been thinking more clearly, she would have known that. He was struggling with learning to tell time. He could count to ten forward and backward, and that was huge, like scaling Mount Everest. It was a source of pride.

  He was only four.

  “Just bring me the phone,” she said. “And go get me a clean rag or a towel or something. Please. Good boy.”

  The phone needed to plug into the wall, but it had a longish cord. And then the receiver was on a cord as well, but one that spiraled. It was twisted, and wouldn’t stretch far enough. He had to unsnarl it. As he did so, he registered a distant feeling that he should hurry, and that the pressure of that time crunch should be causing fear. But he felt solid inside, as if stuffed with something from head to toe that did not react.

  It was such a relief.

  She got tired of waiting, maybe. Because she slid a few feet across the floor toward the phone, carefully brushing away the porcelain shards.

  He handed her the receiver and ran to the linen closet for a towel. As he did, he heard her on the phone, talking to Donna. She called his father a bad name. She told Donna she needed her help. Right away.

  The towels were too high for him to reach, so he brought her two washcloths.

  She kissed his forehead when he delivered them, and she was crying.

  “Where’s Valerie?” Donna asked, her voice crisp.

  She was pacing around the house, looking for his mother’s purse. She reminded Aiden of the policemen on TV, looking through a house that might still contain a bad guy. She was a big woman, years older than his mom, with carefully styled, bleached-blonde hair and solid bones. She looked as though she could take care of herself, and not just because of her size, either. Some of that formidable presence lived on the inside.

  “She’s staying overnight at her friend Mar
tha’s,” his mother said. She had a nonstick pad for wounds, and a roll of gauze, and some of that white tape you can use on skin. She was trying to stop the bleeding and cover the cuts on her palm. But the blood was already soaking through.

  “Okay. Fine. We’ll get her in the morning. Look. May.” That was his mother’s name. May. “The most important thing we can do right now is get out of here. I’ll come back later for your things. I’ll bring the police with me if I have to. I’ll do whatever I need to do to keep you and the kids safe. But you have to make me a promise. You swore this was the first time he ever hit you. Is that really the truth?”

  A tingle filled Aiden’s gut. Well, not even filled it. It stayed fairly small. But it was there, lighting up the middle of all that otherwise-inert stuffing. He hadn’t realized. He had somehow managed to believe it had all been a terrible accident.

  “I swear it on a stack of Bibles, Donna. This never happened before. If it had, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Okay, good. That’s what I want you to promise me. I’ll help you. I’ll do anything. But you have to promise me this is the last time, too. That you won’t give him the chance to hurt you again.”

  “I promise,” his mother said.

  Aiden wasn’t entirely sure he knew what it all meant. What it added up to. But he felt next to nothing. The inside of his head felt like the dead air of a television station when broadcasting ends for the night.

  Empty static. White noise. A fancy form of nothing.

  They rode in Donna’s car, Aiden in the back seat. He stared out the window, his mind miles away. But where it was, he didn’t know. There were no thoughts. Or at least none he could pin down.

  Donna and his mom were talking. And they were close enough that Aiden heard everything. But he hadn’t focused—or put any weight—on their words. Until his name came up.

  Donna asked, “What brought it on all of a sudden? I mean, if he’s never done this before?”

  “He hit Aiden in the face earlier today. I wasn’t there. There’d been some kind of scuffle between the kids, but I don’t really know what happened. But I had to confront him about it. I had to tell him you don’t do that to him. I mean, a swat on the butt, maybe. If it’s really called for. But in the face! You saw his face. His nose is all bruised and swollen. It bled. I found the bloody toilet paper in the bathroom trash. He wiped it up all on his own. It was heartbreaking.”