Aiden could hear that she was crying. He wanted to do something to help. Anything. Wipe her tears away, at least. But nothing moved. And there was nothing he could do to help with this. It had happened. And now Gwen had to live with it. And Milo had to live with it. And nothing Aiden said or did would lift it away.
“I didn’t want to believe it,” she said. “But I took him to a doctor. And he examined him. You know. For signs. Of . . . And it was true. There was physical evidence . . .”
She never finished the sentence. Then again, she didn’t need to.
As her words and their meaning sank in, something strange began to happen in Aiden’s head and chest and gut. They filled with guilt. Guilt over not having protected Milo. Not being his champion and setting his life on a better course. But he hadn’t been there. He hadn’t even known Milo. But the feeling was so complete and so real. The grief was so utterly overwhelming. Debilitating.
It took a good minute or two before Aiden could understand that it was Gwen’s guilt and grief. But Aiden was experiencing it. That had never happened with another person before. And Aiden hadn’t thought it ever would. He had not seen this development coming.
He instinctively pulled his arm back from around her and rolled away.
He heard her sobs grow louder and more pronounced.
“You do blame me,” she said.
“I don’t. I absolutely don’t. I blame him. You left as soon as you found out. I mean . . . didn’t you?”
“Oh, God yes. That same day.”
“I don’t blame you.”
But you blame you, he thought. He didn’t say it.
“Then why did you pull away?”
“I just felt so bad for Milo I couldn’t stand it,” he said.
They sat outdoors on an upstairs patio of their hotel, drinking coffee and preparing to order breakfast. A surprisingly cold wind blew off the water, and Aiden stared transfixed at the view of the harbor at Port San Luis, with its long wooden pier and its breakwater jetty, dozens of dots of sailboats moored in between.
He knew he should feel light and happy. Free of the pressures of his life back home. He felt nothing of the sort. Instead, the image of Milo trapped in his room in the dark, helpless, played in and out of his head. And he could feel it. He could feel the sickening fear, the pain of betrayal, the degradation.
“You okay, hon?” Gwen asked, lightly setting her hand on his. “You look a little green.”
“The cattle are leaving today,” he said. Which was true, even if it wasn’t the primary topic on his mind. “They’re probably being rounded up right now. They must be scared.”
She was looking into his face. He could see that. But he did not look back.
“Can you feel that? Or are you just imagining it?”
“It’s a little hard to sort out the difference,” Aiden said.
At dusk that night they pulled up to the curb in front of Etta’s home, an ancient little farmhouse with peeling sky-blue paint, shutters askew where their hinges had rusted away.
“You’d better let me go in first,” Gwen said. “See where we stand with the project.”
“I’ll walk with you to the door anyway,” Aiden said.
They stepped out of the truck into the shocking heat.
“Damn,” Gwen said. “I got used to being cool and I almost forgot.”
They walked down a cobblestone path together toward the door. With every step Aiden took, a pressure in his gut grew heavier. But it was more than just heavy. It was sickening. His abdomen felt clammy—a glass of ice sweating on a hot day—and unwell, as though he were incubating something like a stomach flu.
But Aiden knew he wasn’t getting sick. He recognized the feeling. It had been with him all day. It accompanied any thought of poor Milo in his bed in the dark, being forced to endure pain and fear and humiliation that nobody deserved. It was the same feeling, but it was getting stronger as Aiden moved closer to the boy.
Aiden veered off the path and bent over himself for a moment, resting his scarred palms on the knees of his jeans. He breathed deeply to try to pull himself together. Gwen’s hand settled on his back, warm and steady through his thin shirt.
“You okay?”
“I will be, yeah. Just felt weird for a minute there.”
“You getting sick?”
“I don’t think so. I hope not, anyway.”
A brief silence. Then he forced himself to straighten.
“I think I know what’s going on with you,” she said, and he avoided her eyes in case it was true. “I think ever since I told you about Milo’s abuse, you’re feeling for him like you do for the animals.”
He allowed his gaze to flicker up to meet hers. Then he looked down at the cobblestones again.
“Guilty as charged, I suppose. That won’t make life any easier.”
“Might make it better, though. In the long run, anyway. I’m sorry if it’s hard for you, but it gives me hope for you two. You wait here. I’ll see what’s what.”
She stepped away, and Aiden stood. And breathed. And watched the setting sun at the horizon, obscured on and off by the blowing leaves of Etta’s trees.
“Hey,” Aiden heard a small voice say. Elizabeth. “You guys have a good trip?”
“Pretty good,” he said, moving closer to the girl, who stood just outside Etta’s closed front door. “It was hard. Leaving all this home stuff at home. But we did our best, and I think we managed. What’s going on with Milo?”
But he knew. He could feel it. Milo was in a full-on panic. Aiden just didn’t know why yet.
“He’s kind of melting down. The table is done. He even put the varnish on it. So now he needs to show it to us. But he’s scared it’s not good enough, so he’s just falling apart at his seams instead.”
“Do you think it’s good?”
“I haven’t seen it lately. Etta has a den and he’s been able to hide it in there. You can come in. It’s in the den with the door closed.”
Aiden stepped up onto Etta’s front stoop and followed Elizabeth into the house. Gwen was standing in the living room talking to Milo, who was on his feet. Well, foot. Leaning his armpits onto his crutches, back hunched, face red with emotion.
“Honey,” Gwen said, “we either have to leave it here or take it home. Those are the only two choices.”
“I want to take it home,” Milo whined, desperate and almost nasal, “but I don’t want you guys to see it.”
“Is it as good as you can make it?” Aiden asked.
Milo looked up and saw Aiden standing there. The weight of the boy’s emotion hit Aiden’s belly like a hard-swung baseball bat. For a moment they just stared at each other and nothing was said.
Milo was scared, but also sad and self-loathing and disgusted with everything he did. And sure that others would share that disgust if they ever got a good look at anything that meant something to him.
Aiden wished he didn’t know all that. But wishing wouldn’t change much.
For several seconds they just stood in that swirl of negative emotions, the ones only Aiden knew they were sharing. The boy’s face turned sunburn-red. Then Milo nodded almost imperceptibly.
“Then that’s all you can do,” Aiden said. “I heard you put the varnish on it and everything. So it’s done. So sooner or later you have to let us see it. You just kind of have to let the chips fall where they may. Know what I mean?”
For a moment, no one moved. Or even seemed to breathe. Aiden glanced up to see Etta move into the room from the kitchen.
“If you can get him to do that,” she said, “you’re a better man than all of us.”
“I can’t watch this,” Milo said.
He moved for the kitchen with surprising swiftness. He had gotten quite proficient on the crutches, swinging his bad leg above the ground as he loped along.
“But I have your permission to open the den door?”
Nothing. Silence. Milo had reached the refuge of the kitchen. And he was not talking.
“Milo?” Aiden asked again. “Permission, please?”
“Yes,” Milo whined, sounding angry and terrified at the same time.
Aiden opened the door.
In the middle of the den sat the coffee table. Its top had become a colorful sky full of suns. Milo had created a sort of sky background out of green and blue, like the surface of a sea shifting in tone and picking up highlights. Against this backdrop half a dozen suns shone, bright red at their cores, then going to orange and then yellow at the tips of their wavy, stylized rays. If Aiden had seen it in a store or a craft shop, he never would have questioned that an adult craftsperson had done the work. And the pattern itself was deep and compelling, like a fictional world. Like a fantasy that draws you in and changes the way you see reality just in that moment while you’re staring at it.
He felt a presence behind him and turned to see Gwen, Etta, and Elizabeth crowded close to his back, staring with him. And a flash of Milo. At the open kitchen doorway, Aiden saw the boy poke just enough of his head out to look with one eye.
“Milo, it’s amazing,” Aiden called out.
A silent moment, followed by more of Milo emerging. A crutch, and half a body. Then the boy’s whole head. Aiden could feel part of the weight, the cramp of emotion, lift from his own gut.
“You think it’s good?”
“I think it’s great.”
“You did a beautiful job, Milo,” Gwen said.
“But I want to know what Aiden thinks,” Milo said.
“I think I couldn’t have done nearly this good a job myself. How did you get everything so even? And get the grout in there without getting any on the porcelain?”
“It’s called tesserae,” Milo said, swinging closer on his crutches. His sister and the women stepped out of his way, and Milo moved over to Aiden and stood at his side, and they stared at the table together. “And the grout does get on it. You can’t help that. You just have to wipe it off real good after.”
“I still don’t know how you did such a perfect job.”
“It’s perfect?”
The boy was looking up at him. He could see it in his peripheral vision. But Aiden couldn’t take his eyes off the mythical suns.
“As far as I can see.”
“Well, what you do,” Milo said, suddenly the expert, the artist explaining his process, “is you just keep ripping it apart again if it isn’t perfect. And you just do it again and again. And you don’t leave it alone and put the varnish on until it is.”
For the first time since Aiden had tapped into the energy of Milo’s internal crisis, the landscape of that pain held still for one brief, grateful moment.
“So I think I had something like another wake up,” Aiden told Hannah the following day, in a session he’d called her and asked her to fit in—as an extra—if she possibly could.
He sat on her couch, perched too close to the edge. Too tentative, and a little jumpy. A sudden move could have landed him on his butt on the rug.
“I didn’t realize any part of you was still asleep,” she said, nibbling on the end of her pen.
“Me neither, I guess. But did you ever stop to think about the fact that I feel with animals but not with people?”
“I have. Yes.”
“And what did you make of that?”
“Hard to say at this point. I guess I see it as more of a situation where we take a couple of years or more and make something of it together.”
“How can you not be curious, though? Take this, for example. Think about this. Ever since I had that experience at the roundup, I haven’t eaten beef. I guess I’ve been feeling like some kind of vibration of what the animal went through at slaughter will still be hanging around the meat. Even though I have no idea if it’s true or not, because I never get very close to any. But I eat chicken and fish. Chickens and fish feel pain. They have lives. Why cut off at mammals?”
“Because you have to cut off somewhere,” Hannah said.
“Why? Why have a cutoff place for empathy?”
“I would think you could answer that question better than anyone I know, Aiden. Because it consumes your whole life. It’s exhausting to feel the emotions of everybody and everything around us. It’s hard enough to sort out our own. But why am I speaking for you? You’re going through it, so you know. Let’s say, hypothetically, that you somehow manage to extend your empathy to all forms of life, including the ones that are less like us. It’s always easier to feel for those who remind us of ourselves. But let’s say you find yourself empathizing with birds and fish. Then you have to be a vegetarian. But why stop there? Plants have a rudimentary form of consciousness. If someone is going through a room full of plants hacking them to pieces, researchers can use instruments to record a type of alarm on the plants’ part. So now you have to extend it to plants. Now you have nothing to eat. Your house will be overrun with insects and vermin, because you won’t kill them. They’ll infest and contaminate what food you’re still able to stomach, and there won’t be a thing you can do about it.”
She glanced out the window as if wanting to see what Aiden found so fascinating. But he was only looking away from the truth of her words until he could digest and accept them.
Seeing nothing to hold her attention there, she continued.
“At some point you just have to start prioritizing yourself, Aiden. I think there’s a tendency to take a word like empathy—a concept like it, I guess I should say—and make it black and white. Empathy equals good. Lack of empathy equals bad. Yes, it’s bad to have too little. But you’re walking proof that a person can also have too much. It’s one of those areas where we try to strike a balance. I do have to say, though . . . I think it’s a form of progress, if you’re saying you’re open to people instead of just animals. I think people who relate to animals only are closed off from the people around them. I don’t say it to insult them. It’s just a fact, and they have their reasons. But I think this new development is some clue that you’re more open to human interaction. And I like that.”
They sat quietly for a moment, just looking at each other. There was not one other person on the planet, Aiden realized, with whom he could sit in silence while meeting his or her eyes. But now there was Hannah.
“So what was the new experience?” she asked after a time.
“While I was out of town with Gwen, she told me about Milo’s past. What his father put him through. It was kind of a shock to hear it spelled out like that. And it changed something in me when I heard it. It woke something up. And all of a sudden I knew what Gwen was feeling. I didn’t tell her that, though. Because that’s just too weird. Or it might seem too weird to her—to be with somebody who knows what she’s feeling all the time. It might feel like not having any privacy at all. Sooner or later I have to tell her, I guess. But I don’t really know when. Or how. And then whenever I thought about what Milo went through, I knew what he was feeling, too. When I got home, and got close to him, I was carrying all his stuff on top of everything else. And that’s a big one to have riding around on my back, believe me.”
“I can imagine it is. What about other people? Elizabeth, say?”
“Not as I know of. Not that I can tell. Seems like it’s Gwen and Milo. Maybe because they both have so much to feel.”
She didn’t answer. Didn’t confirm or deny his theory. So he opened his mouth again and more words came out in a rush.
“At first I was just so angry. I wanted to go find the guy and pound him into the ground. But then I remembered what you said. About how the guy was probably twisted into that shape by some kind of abuse when he was growing up. And then it felt the same as it would feel to think about pounding Milo into the ground. I thought about the moment when I almost tightened that rope around his neck, and I saw in his eyes how scared he was. And I know now that he was always scared, that he’d been scared all along, and scaring him and hurting him was how we’d gotten into this mess to begin with. It sure as hell wasn’t going to get us out of
it. And then I just got really tired and depressed. And now I don’t know what the answer is.”
A silence. Hannah still did not fill it.
“Maybe you do,” he added.
“Have the answer to all the hurt and fear in the world? Know the solution for generational cycles of abuse? I’m afraid not. I’d be a very famous woman if I did.”
“So there’s no answer?”
“You break the cycle in the case you have in front of you,” she said. “You help this one little guy heal as best he can. Enough that he doesn’t take it out on his own kids when he has them. And that’s enough of a contribution for one person. And in case you hadn’t noticed, you’re only one person.”
Aiden waited a moment before answering. Feeling the weight of that assignment ricocheting around inside him.
“That’s no small order,” he said.
“I never claimed it was,” she replied.
Chapter Twenty
Trust
“Elizabeth’s birthday is this week,” Gwen called in from the bathroom.
Aiden was still in bed. Propped up, hands laced behind his head. Savoring the fact that they woke up together now. That they were together in the most literal sense of the world. It was their third morning all living in the big house.
“What day?”
“Tuesday. And before you say anything, you’re absolutely right. I should have told you sooner. I’m sorry, Aiden. With everything that’s been going on with the move and Milo starting therapy and all, I let that slip by me. And I don’t just mean telling you about it, either. I almost forgot her birthday. I can’t believe that, but it’s true. I know you probably wanted more notice to think of something to get her. But if it helps any to know, so did I.”
Aiden waited a moment to see if she would emerge from the bathroom. Or if she had more to say. When nothing happened, he decided to move forward with his thoughts. He had been planning to run his idea by Gwen, but there had been no real time frame for doing so. Now, suddenly, there was.
“I actually had something in mind for a gift for her,” he called in.
The Wake Up Page 24
