The Wake Up

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  Something pinged against his head and he cried out loud from the pain of it.

  “Ow!”

  He turned to the open doorway of his room, rubbing a stinging spot behind his ear. Valerie was there, a bowl of walnuts—still in the shell—in her left hand.

  “What the hell, Bally?”

  “You cursed.”

  “And you hit me in the head with a walnut. That’s worse.”

  “You deserved it.”

  “Why? What did I do?”

  “I thought you were on my side. I asked you if you liked the guy, and you said you didn’t.”

  “That was a long time ago. I changed my mind.”

  Valerie let another walnut fly. It caught him just above the left eyebrow.

  “Ow! Stop doing that!”

  “You always were a traitor. I never liked you.”

  Just for a moment, Aiden almost said he’d never liked her, either. It was true enough. He probably loved her, in some deep place in himself. Some inaccessible place. He had probably loved her since he was a baby, far too young to know she would only torment him and never love him—always make him feel bad about what he was, about who he could not help being. Or maybe you had no choice but to love your sister. Maybe it was impossible not to. But you could dislike her. Aiden knew that for a fact.

  He didn’t say it. He couldn’t. It wouldn’t come out of his mouth. It was just meaner than he could bring himself to be. So Aiden said nothing.

  “I can’t believe you think you want to go hunting. You used to cry if I stepped on bugs.”

  “Did not.”

  “You did, too, you idiot. I was there. Ask Mom. You used to cry like a baby if anything died. Even an ant or a fly.”

  Just as he opened his mouth to issue another denial, some tiny scrap of memory opened up to him. And he could no longer deny it.

  “Well . . . that was before. I was stupid and young.”

  “And now you’re older and even more stupid. You won’t be able to shoot a duck or a deer. I can’t believe you think you can. You’ll cry all the way home.”

  She lobbed another walnut at his head, but he ducked it.

  Then she was done tormenting him for the moment. He could tell because she turned and walked away. If she was there with him, there was torment. If she left, she was done and he could relax. For the time being.

  Except this time she left him with a nagging doubt.

  Could he shoot a duck or a deer? Or would he cry all the way home?

  It was probably six weeks later, or it might have been seven or eight, when Aiden lay in the woods just before dawn with his father and Teddy Flannigan.

  They had found a downed tree, and were stretched out on their bellies in front of it, only their heads and hands and rifles protruding over the top of its broad trunk.

  Aiden had to stretch his upper body higher than the men did, to see over. There were bugs on the log. Ants and pill bugs, and maybe some other living things that Aiden would not have wanted walking on him. So he lifted his chin still higher, even though it was making his neck hurt.

  It was cold. It was all Aiden could do to keep his teeth from chattering. He couldn’t stop it, but he tried to chatter silently. His bare hands shook. But he knew in some deep part of himself that it could be ninety degrees out here and his hands would still be shaking.

  “Cold, boy?” Teddy Flannigan whispered.

  You always whispered when you were hunting. Because the deer have good ears.

  “Yes, sir,” Aiden breathed back. Barely moving his numb lips.

  “I got just the thing for that.”

  The older man reached into his coat pocket and brought out a small, flat bottle. A fifth of whiskey.

  “Teddy,” Aiden’s father whispered. “He’s eight.”

  “One snort. Just a good swallow. It’ll warm him up some.”

  Aiden took the bottle. Felt the warmth of it on his hand. It had been pressed closely to Teddy Flannigan’s side, and it was warmer than everything around it.

  In that moment, even before he sipped at it, Aiden already knew. He knew he had found the answer to something that had eluded him.

  Maybe they called it spirits because it really did have a spirit to it. Like a living being. Because as Aiden unscrewed the cap and the smell came up to greet him, he seemed to get a message from it.

  I have what you need.

  He took a deep swallow.

  It burned going down. But it didn’t matter. It felt good to be burned. He did not cough. Just lay still, eyes stretched wide, and felt the heat of it radiate all the way down through his gut.

  Both men were watching him. They seemed to be waiting for a reaction that never came.

  “What?” Aiden asked, looking first to one and then the other.

  “I’ll be damned,” his father said.

  “Thought he’d cough that right up again,” Teddy added. “Didn’t you?”

  Aiden tipped the bottle back and took another long swallow.

  “Ho, ho, whoa, boy,” his father said. A little too loudly, what with the deer and all. “Go easy on that.”

  “Natural born drinker,” Teddy said. “Got to watch that.”

  “Don’t give him any more, Teddy. Or it’ll be us that gets shot. Either out here in the woods, by him, or later when I bring him home drunk to his mom.”

  But it didn’t matter.

  Aiden had swallowed the exact amount of whiskey he needed. And he would never forget the feeling. He knew he wouldn’t. You didn’t need too much. You needed just enough.

  His hands stopped shaking. He could breathe more deeply. There was no sense of any emotion about anything trying to sneak through. Nothing poked out from behind the partition. Everything lay down inside him, perfect and smooth.

  And twenty minutes later, when a long parade of deer came ambling through, their hooves crunching in the dry leaves, and Aiden was allowed to take the first shot, the shot he took was perfect.

  He had been practicing for weeks, and he did it just the way he had practiced it. The deer went down. Just like that.

  If it was in any way different from plinking cans off a fence, Aiden couldn’t feel how. He couldn’t feel much of anything. Which was perfect.

  He did not cry all the way home.

  When it came time to learn to dress out the deer, it was light and warm out. Teddy Flannigan had taken off his jacket and hung it on the limb of a standing dead tree. Aiden slipped the bottle out of the jacket pocket and took another long swallow.

  Nobody noticed.

  Nothing hurt.

  PART FIVE

  AIDEN DELACORTE AT AGE FORTY

  PRESENT DAY

  Chapter Seventeen

  Tesserae

  Aiden sat back on the couch and watched Hannah take notes. It was four sessions later, unless it was five and he was remembering wrong. One session seemed to blend into the next. Each had been used to fill in the newly remembered details of his childhood. Some details had seemed to be remembered almost the moment he’d spoken them. And surely there was still more he was forgetting. But four or five fifty-minute sessions added up to a lot of details. Especially for a man who had forgotten his own past for so many years.

  “Hmm,” Hannah said, and bit down on the end of her pen. She stared at her notes for a second or two. “I think we can agree that’s awfully young to start drinking. I don’t mean it as a judgment. And I’m certainly not suggesting you’re the first.”

  “I didn’t drink a lot, though,” Aiden said.

  He didn’t say it defensively. He didn’t say much of anything defensively anymore. Not to Hannah. They had shared too many sessions for that. He had told her too many things. Her office had become too safe a space for such worries.

  “I guess my point was that any alcohol at all is a lot for an eight-year-old.”

  “Looking back, that sure feels true enough. At the time I guess it just felt . . . normal. Weirdly normal.”

  “I can’t imagine you we
re able to get your hands on much at that age.”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised.” He stared out the window and into other windows in other large, impersonal office buildings in downtown Bakersfield. Into the lives of other people. Was he the only one tearing his own life apart? Opening it for inspection and possible repair? “Because I didn’t need that much, so it wasn’t hard to hide whatever I was taking. I mean . . . two good swallows. When I was little, that is. Later, just two drinks. Two beers or two shots. That’s all I really needed. I already had the talent of barely breathing. If you can call that a talent.”

  “I’m not sure if I would, but it’s a common tool people use when they don’t want to feel. Especially kids. Because kids don’t have a lot of tools at their disposal. How much do you drink now?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Not at all?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  He expected her to ask why. Instead they fell into a calm silence that directed Aiden’s attention to the ticking of the clock. He hadn’t been aware of it for many sessions. It had grown normal, and had not consciously broken through for some time.

  A few ticks later he realized she wasn’t going to ask. It so obviously required an explanation that she was simply waiting for him to provide it.

  “A few months ago . . . ,” he began. Then he paused. It was a place he did not enjoy going. So he stopped. Took a breath. Then he went there anyway. “Magic died.”

  “Oh, that’s right. You said that in your first session. And I said we’d come back to it. And we haven’t yet. I’m sorry. Go on.”

  “Well. He died. Natural causes and all. He was almost thirty-three. That’s old for a horse. I was lucky he lived as long as he did. He had a good life.”

  “You sound like you think that should help you through the grief of it, though,” she said. “I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way.”

  “So I found out. After the vet came out and . . . humanely . . . put him down, I went into the house. I poured myself a shot and I slugged it down, just like always. And then I slugged down another. And that should have been it. Just enough to tip me over into not being able to feel much. But then something happened that’d never happened before.”

  “You couldn’t stop,” Hannah said. It wasn’t a question.

  He didn’t ask how she knew. He had long outgrown that. Hannah knew all sorts of things Aiden didn’t think she should be able to know. Asking about every one of them would only waste precious session time.

  “I went on like that for a couple or three weeks. I mean, I was just drowning in the stuff. I couldn’t work. I wasn’t getting dressed in the morning. I was a hazard on the road when I drove out to get more. I’m lucky I didn’t die. I was putting the stuff down so fast. Alcohol poisoning wasn’t out of the question. But I guess I have a pretty strong constitution. I made it through. But then my girlfriend—my ex-girlfriend now—and my employees at the time, and my neighbors . . . well, they’ve known me a long time. They . . . intervened. I won’t say it was anything like a formal intervention, because they didn’t get together and hit me all at once. It was like this series of mini-interventions. Once I had three people come through my door in one day and tell me they weren’t going to sit idly by and let me kill myself. So I just stopped. I don’t know how exactly. I know I let Livie pour everything I had down the drain, and she sat with me until I cleared it out of my system. And then once I got my brain back a little, it was more my brain making decisions. You know. Rather than the booze deciding for me. And that was it. I haven’t had a sip since. I haven’t broken over even the tiniest bit, because I have this fear that once I start, it’ll happen all over again and I won’t be able to stop.”

  Aiden fell silent and watched her scribble notes on her pad.

  It was probably close to a minute later—sixty ticks, give or take—when she looked up at him and spoke.

  “And this was how long before you had that waking-up experience?”

  “Couple weeks, I guess.”

  “Was that the first time you’d tried going hunting since . . . ?”

  “Yeah. It was the first time I’d ever hunted stone-cold sober.”

  “That explains a lot. Doesn’t it?”

  They both sat on that moment, that turning point in their therapy, for an extended time. Aiden felt lost in his thoughts. And yet if someone had asked, he might have had trouble voicing what thoughts they were.

  He glanced at the clock to see they only had six minutes left.

  “I’m interested in your reaction to that,” Hannah said.

  “Right. I guess I’m wondering why in God’s name I needed you to tell me that. I mean, I’m me. I’m the one having these experiences. And something as obvious as that . . . and you’re the one who has to figure it out.”

  “I didn’t figure anything out, Aiden. I just listened to you. You told me what happened. I just mirrored back to you what you were saying. We all need that sometimes. It’s easier to see the big picture when you’re standing a few steps outside it.”

  “I still have a question, though.” Aiden crossed his legs. Uncrossed them again. He felt his breath go shallow, but he overrode it. Pulled in oxygen. “Let’s say I’m one of these extremely sensitive people you talked about. Which seems really likely at this point.”

  “An empath,” Hannah interjected.

  “Right. An empath. That thing that happened with the deer. Feeling like I shot myself instead of him. I mean . . . is that normal? Is that within the range of what happens to these sensitive people? Seems to me it’s a little above and beyond all that.”

  “It’s . . .”—she paused, as if choosing her words carefully—“it’s an unusually intense example.”

  “But not outside the range?”

  “That’s a hard question to answer, Aiden. You’re right that it’s an experience most people have never had. And never will.”

  “Even for an empath.”

  “I would guess, but it’s hard to say. People have experiences that never go on the record. That they never tell anyone about.”

  “I feel like maybe it was still . . . kind of . . . bigger than anything in this world can explain. So I guess I just want to hear how you would explain it.”

  Hannah set down her pad. Set it on the end table beside her chair. She took off her reading glasses and connected her gaze directly with Aiden’s eyes.

  “Everybody explains things from their own experience,” she said. “It just seems to be how we are. If you were talking to a psychic, they would probably explain it as a psychic experience. But you’re not. You’re talking to a psychiatrist. So you’re going to get a psychiatric take on the thing. I think your subconscious played a trick on you to get you to see something you were trying not to see.”

  “Okay,” Aiden said, and broke his gaze away. It still felt more comfortable to look at the patterned rug. “I can live with that.”

  “Then again,” she added, just when he was ready to put the whole thing away, “to paraphrase what Shakespeare wrote, ‘More things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies.’ If you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah,” Aiden said. “I’m afraid I know what you mean.”

  He was four-fifths of the way home when his cell phone rang. He glanced down just long enough to see that it was Gwen calling. He didn’t want to talk and drive at the same time because it was illegal in this state, and this stretch of rural route was particularly well patrolled.

  He reached an intersection just in time and pulled into the parking lot of a locally owned home and garden store.

  “Hello,” he said quickly, after sliding his thumb to pick up the call. “Don’t hang up, Gwen.”

  “Oh, good,” she said. “You’re there.”

  “Just let me pull into a parking place here.”

  Aiden nosed his truck into an open space at the side entrance of the store. In front of his bumper sat an outdoor shelf full of brightly colored porcelain planting pots, a rainbow that c
aught his eye and held it as he spoke to her.

  “Okay, I’m here again,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “You’re not home.”

  “No. I was at Hannah’s.”

  “Oh. That’s right. I forgot.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  The silence that followed brought a burst of panic to his poor tired gut. As though someone had hit him in the stomach with shock and fear, and his skin had been incapable of stopping it from coming right in. It was only a second or two of silence. But it spoke.

  “I’m at work,” she said, “but I just got a call from the babysitter . . .”

  There was always a babysitter now. Every minute Gwen was at work. Ever since the Buddy incident. Which is why she hadn’t bothered to memorize whether or not Aiden would be home.

  “What did he do?” His voice trembled slightly on the asking.

  “Well . . . you know that really nice table in the cabin?”

  “Table?”

  “Yeah. Not the kitchen table. That nice wood coffee table. The one that looks sort of antique.”

  “He hurt a table?”

  Aiden could hear himself nearly laughing, a breath of air coming out with the words that sounded almost like lightness. Like mirth. In truth, it was only a world of fear breathing out of his gut. Meanwhile his eyes remained fixed on those bright red and green and orange and blue and yellow pots.

  “Yes, I’m sorry.”

  “Gwen. It’s a table. I don’t care about a table. Tables don’t feel pain. We’ll buy a new damn table.”

  “It was so nice, though. It was a nice thing.”

  “Yes,” Aiden said. “Emphasis on the word thing. I think I got it at a swap meet. Or a garage sale. I didn’t pay an arm and a leg for it.”

  “Well, I’ll be watching those yard sales from now on. Maybe I can find a nice one to replace it.”

  “What did he do to it, anyway? It’s a pretty sturdy table. I can’t imagine he’d even be strong enough to break it.”

  “She . . . Etta, she accidentally fell asleep. Just for a minute or two. But don’t worry that he could be out roaming the place if that happens, because she always has the dead bolt on when she’s in the cabin with him, and the key is in her pocket. Anyway, I guess he got a paring knife out of the knife block in the kitchen and just scratched the hell out of the wood tabletop.”