The Wake Up Read online

  Table of Contents

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  Also by Catherine Ryan Hyde Allie and Bea Say Goodbye for Now Leaving Blythe River Ask Him Why Worthy The Language of Hoofbeats Pay It Forward: Young Readers Edition Take Me with You Paw It Forward 365 Days of Gratitude: Photos from a Beautiful World Where We Belong Subway Dancer and Other Stories Walk Me Home Always Chloe and Other Stories The Long, Steep Path: Everyday Inspiration from the Author of Pay It Forward How to Be a Writer in the E-Age: A Self-Help Guide When You Were Older Don’t Let Me Go Jumpstart the World Second Hand Heart When I Found You Diary of a Witness The Day I Killed James Chasing Windmills The Year of My Miraculous Reappearance Love in the Present Tense Becoming Chloe Walter’s Purple Heart Electric God/The Hardest Part of Love Pay It Forward Earthquake Weather and Other Stories Funerals for Horses

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Text copyright © 2017 by Catherine Ryan Hyde All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher. Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle www.apub.com Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates. ISBN-13: 9781542047951 ISBN-10: 1542047951 Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  CONTENTS PART ONE AIDEN DELACORTE AT AGE FORTY Chapter One Clouds and Shadows Chapter Two Falling and Breaking Chapter Three Owning and Answering Chapter Four Tearing Open Everything PART TWO AIDEN DELACORTE AT AGE FORTY Chapter Five The Wake Up Chapter Six The Roundup Chapter Seven The Falling Down Chapter Eight The Parting PART THREE AIDEN DELACORTE AT AGE FORTY Chapter Nine The Remembering Chapter Ten The Tightening Chapter Eleven The Unearthing PART FOUR AIDEN DELACORTE AS A CHILD Chapter Twelve Aiden at Age Four Chapter Thirteen Aiden at Age Six Chapter Fourteen Aiden at Age Six and a Half Chapter Fifteen Aiden at Age Seven Chapter Sixteen Aiden at Age Eight PART FIVE AIDEN DELACORTE AT AGE FORTY Chapter Seventeen Tesserae Chapter Eighteen Boo Chapter Nineteen Hope Wildly Chapter Twenty Trust Chapter Twenty-One Born Chapter Twenty-Two Teeth PART SIX AIDEN DELACORTE AT AGE FORTY-ONE Chapter Twenty-Three Pride THE WAKE UP BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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  PART ONE AIDEN DELACORTE AT AGE FORTY PRESENT DAY

  Chapter One Clouds and Shadows The phone jangled Aiden out of sleep. His heart raced, and he knocked over a plastic drinking glass and the alarm clock while reaching to grab the receiver. His panic didn’t last. The voice on the other end of the line soothed him on contact. It felt like a drink of cold water, its relief spreading down through his gut on a hot and dusty day. It was only one word. But it repaired everything. “Hey.” It was feminine and smooth, that word. It felt like everything in the world Aiden had found to love. Or maybe that’s genuinely what it was. He could feel his heart expand, or at least the sensation of it filling. Swelling. It ached. It was painful in a very real way, but Aiden wouldn’t have traded it for anything. “Oh,” he mumbled, still mostly asleep. “Gwen. Hey.” “I’m sorry. I know it’s late. I know I woke you up. I knew I would, but . . .” Aiden sat up on the edge of the bed. He was wearing only boxer shorts, and the air in the room felt blissfully cool agai

  Chapter Two Falling and Breaking When Aiden swung his front door wide, all he could see for a minute was her. Though it was not a full minute in actual fact—it was two or three seconds that felt stretchy and overextended, as though they had caused time to falter. He knew he should look down at the two children who stood one on either side of her. But all he could see was Gwen. Her hair, naturally jet black, was swept up into a soft do, her eyes so dark as to be nearly black as well. And deep, as if he could swim right through them to what mattered most inside her. She wore a deep-red dress that managed somehow to be modest and show off her full curves at the same time. “Hey,” he said, and felt his face flush with embarrassment. Because her children were watching him look at her as though she were the only thing in the world that mattered to him. Had he ever felt this way about a woman before? Nothing came to mind. Everything before a couple of months ago felt like a muddled blank when

  Chapter Three Owning and Answering Aiden sat beside Gwen in the hospital waiting room, and she held his hand. Which, as best he could figure, was the only thing good to be said about his world in that moment. Elizabeth had fallen asleep in her hard plastic chair on the other side of the long, narrow room—head back, mouth yawning open. Long hair falling across her face. She looked like an angel. A sleeping angel with braces on her teeth. “I never meant for this to happen,” Aiden said again. It might have been the tenth time he’d said it. It might have been the twentieth. “You don’t have to keep saying that, Aiden. I know. I know you.” “Thank you,” he said, and gave her hand a squeeze. It felt good to hear her say she didn’t blame him. It had felt good every one of the ten or twenty times she had said it. But she was standing a few steps away from him now, figuratively speaking, in some indefinable place inside herself. And, worse yet, she had closed the door to that place, leaving him a

  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 offi

  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

  Chapter Six The Roundup It was the following week, eight in the morning on roundup day, and summer had decided to arrive early—when the calendar said barely spring. It was already over eighty degrees. Not a cloud in the sky. The bake of the sun was a bear, even at its distinct morning slant. Aiden’s property was dotted with three-quarter-ton and one-ton pickup trucks hitched to stock trailers, left to sit with their trailers’ rear gates yawning open. The neighboring ranchers came on roundup day, and they brought their horses. They brought their families. They hel
ped rope and tag and castrate. Then Aiden would feed them a good barbecue and all the beer they could drink, and when their roundup time came, he would return the favor. It’s just the way things were done. Had always been done. Aiden sat his paint gelding, Mather, in the roping pen, swinging his rope, surrounded by a shifting sea of cattle. Lowing, bellowing cattle. About a hundred head. The sound of their comments was ceaseles

  Chapter Seven The Falling Down Aiden woke suddenly to a burst of light through his eyelids and a violent ache in his skull. “Rise and shine, sleeping beauty,” a familiar male voice said. “You got fences to mend.” He opened his eyes to see Derek standing by his bedroom window, pulling back the drapes. Aiden tried to swing up into a sitting position on the edge of the bed. It didn’t pan out at all. He had forgotten about the ribs. He let out a pained grunt and lay back down again. “I don’t think I’m in much of a fence-mending condition.” “I wasn’t referring to actual fences. Oh, that too, coincidentally, but it’s just one little section on the north property line and Trey and I can get to that today. I meant mending fences with your neighbors.” “What’s wrong with me and my neighbors?” “Uh-oh. It’s like that, is it? Okay, I’m gonna go on in the kitchen and fix you a great big pot of my famous coffee. Only you don’t wanna know what it’s famous for. Couple cups of that and we’ll check back

  Chapter Eight The Parting A couple of days later Aiden woke in the morning and decided he couldn’t tolerate his neighbors’ rabbit situation a moment longer. At first it had bothered him only as he was driving by his neighbors’ property. Especially if one of them was being culled for slaughter. Or had been recently. Or was about to be. But the moments of panic had gotten more protracted, and closer together. And now Aiden could feel it even when he was home in bed. He rose, dressed quickly, combed his hair, and drove his truck to the ranch closest to his own. About half a mile down the road. Aiden honked at the gate, because it was padlocked. His neighbor Benny came out of the barn and waved to him. A little suspicious but not downright hostile. Benny walked closer. “Wait a minute,” he called to Aiden. “I’ll go inside and get the key.” “Don’t bother,” Aiden called back. “I’ll come see you on my feet.” He shut down the truck’s engine and stepped out, ducking gingerly through the boards o

  PART THREE AIDEN DELACORTE AT AGE FORTY PRESENT DAY

  Chapter Nine The Remembering By the time he had given Hannah what he thought was a brief just-the-facts outline of the recent turmoil that was his life, he looked at the ticking clock and saw that forty minutes of his session had flown away. “These are fifty-minute hours,” he said. “Right?” “That’s right.” “So my time is almost up. Just telling you about why I think I need some help here.” “True. But that background is something you only need to share once.” “What do you think it’s all about?” “Which? The troubles with the boy?” “Well . . . that needs dealing with, all right. But actually I meant the part about the wake up. I mean . . . for starters.” It was veering in a new direction for him, but that could not be helped. Granted, he had not wanted to talk about it. But now that he had, he needed to know what she thought. “I wouldn’t want to make a determination based on that little bit of input.” “What if you had to guess, though? I mean, do you think I had some kind of . . . that th

  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

  Chapter Eleven The Unearthing “But you didn’t,” Hannah said, pulling Aiden’s gaze away from the downtown Bakersfield skyline. “You stopped yourself in time. I think you get credit for that. Don’t you?” “That’s pretty much what Elizabeth said, too.” “Smart girl.” “She’s amazing,” Aiden said. He could feel the wonder that filled his voice when he spoke about her, along with the lifting of the dark cloud left by Milo. “She’s such a great kid. She makes me feel . . .” But then he realized he had no ending to that sentence. If the thought had concluding words, he didn’t know them. Yet. “What? She makes you feel what?” “Like . . .”—and then there it was. Just like that—“a father. Like I could be a father. It’s really nice.” “So you’re saying she makes it easy to love her.” “Yes, exactly.” “And Milo makes it hard to love him. But he still needs you to.” “I don’t think Milo even wants me to love him.” “He wants somebody to.” “His mother loves him.” “Good. Then there’s hope. Elizabeth was right

  PART FOUR AIDEN DELACORTE AS A CHILD MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS EARLIER

  Chapter Twelve Aiden at Age Four He woke in a darkened room, sitting up in bed. His heart was calm, in spite of the dream. It did not hammer as it often did in his waking life. And yet it had been horrid, the dream. All-encompassing and dreadful. He padded barefoot down the hall to his parents’ room. It was tricky, crawling into bed with his parents. He could talk to his mother. Tell her he’d had a bad dream. If his dad stayed asleep, it would be as easy as that. If not, if his dad woke up, he would have to help his mom get around the man and his opinions, working in ways he didn’t fully understand with his thinking mind. It was a little like moving through a darkened room. It was something you did one step at a time, working purely by feel. The door creaked when he opened it. Both his parents raised their heads and blinked at him in the mostly dark. He froze a moment, teetering in the doorway. Then his father put his head back down and closed his eyes. Maybe he was too sleepy to deal

  Chapter Thirteen Aiden at Age Six His mother’s face was strangely close to his own, and he could see her eyes and the shadow that had fallen across them as she worked. She was nervous. But Aiden had no idea what about. She was on her knees in front of him, tying a Windsor knot in a blue necktie around Aiden’s neck. Working with a strange precision. As if she would soon be harshly judged on the results. She snugged up the tie, and Aiden instinctively put a hand to his throat and used one finger to loosen the knot again. “Ow,” he said. But it wasn’t really an “ow” situation. It didn’t hurt. It was just uncomfortable. And a little scary. It made him feel as though the tiny bits of air he was accustomed to inhaling might be further limited. He’d been barely breathing anyway these last couple of years. She made a tsk sound with her tongue and gently snugged it again. “Why do I have to wear a tie?” he asked, sounding a little whiny to his own ears. Almost like Valerie, and that was something

  Chapter Fourteen Aiden at Age Six and a Half Aiden was just preparing to mount that good quarter horse mare, Bonnie. Might have been the twentieth time he’d ridden her, or it might have been the twenty-fifth. It was summer, with no school, and Aiden and his sister were being pushed onto Harris Delacorte’s cattle ranch more and more often. Close to every day now, while their mother worked. Aiden didn’t mind it, because he liked to ride Bonnie. He would have preferred to go out alone, but it seemed he wasn’t allowed. Nobody had said straight out that he wasn’t allowed. But Alfie, the seventeen-year-old son of a ranch hand, always seemed to want to go riding at the exact same moment. Once, Aiden had bravely suggested to Harris Delacorte that he might go out alone, but was told not to hurt Alfie’s feelings. Aiden swung into the saddle using two wooden crates as a mounting block. He looked back at Alfie and saw Harris Delacorte taking the reins of Wiley, the horse Alfie always rode. Taki
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  Chapter Fifteen Aiden at Age Seven “Wake up,” someone said. But Aiden couldn’t seem to manage to do as the dreamlike voice suggested. He felt a big, rough hand shaking his shoulder. But still the sleep, the dream—whatever it was—pulled him back under like quicksand. Then he was sitting up, but not of his own accord. His stepfather was holding him in a sitting position. Aiden’s eyes were open, but that didn’t mean he was awake. But it did seem to be his stepfather in front of him. He saw that as his brain cleared. “What?” Aiden said. “I’m asleep.” “You need to get up. You need to come with me.” “I want to go back to sleep.” “It’s important. Do this for me. Please.” Aiden sat a moment, shaking sleep out of his brain. The more he came around, the more afraid he became. There was a gravity in the older man’s tone, in his movements. And they had not been getting along for . . . well . . . ever. So Aiden had a bad feeling about what came next. But he breathed hardly at all, and slipped the f

  Chapter Sixteen Aiden at Age Eight Aiden was on his way out to the barn to feed his yearling when he saw them. Aiden’s new father was warming up his pickup truck in the predawn dark, his friend Teddy Flannigan in the passenger seat beside him. Aiden moved closer. They didn’t see him, so he rapped on the window. Both men jumped, then laughed out loud at themselves. As if it were a source of amazement and humor that something could startle them. Aiden’s father rolled down the window. As he did, Aiden saw that the gun rack in the back of the cab, which normally sat empty, held two rifles. “What’re you doing up so early, boy?” “Going to feed Magic.” “Why don’t you stay in bed and wait another half hour or so and the ranch hands’ll do it? They feed all the horses, you know.” “Yes, sir. I know they do. But Magic isn’t their yearling. He’s mine. So his feed should come from me. That’s what I think, anyway.” “Suit yourself, son. Say good morning to Teddy Flannigan.” “Morning, Mr. Flannigan.” T