The Wake Up Page 17

  “You know my mom?”

  “Not really. I’ve heard about her.”

  She placed one hand on his head and ruffled his hair, which Aiden thought was strange. He went stock-still and cold inside, and she quickly took the hand back. Aiden wasn’t big on people who touched. Or stood too close.

  She smiled in a crooked way and bustled out of the kitchen.

  A few minutes later he heard a voice that made his heart skip one beat. A familiar voice.

  “Thanks for calling me, Roger,” it said.

  “I knew that couldn’t be right. Little slip of a thing out by himself like that? Why, he’s not much bigger than a grasshopper.”

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that boy.”

  The comment made Aiden’s ears tingle and burn. Not that he hadn’t known that Harris Delacorte didn’t like him. Of course he’d known. But there’s knowing and then there’s knowing. And, as it turned out, one of the varieties hurt more than the other.

  “He seems like a nice enough little guy, Harris. Stepkids are always hard at first. Give him some time.”

  Aiden found himself leaning in his seat. Sideways, toward the kitchen door. Hoping to hear more, and also hoping not to. If his new stepfather had a comment on Roger’s advice, Aiden never heard it.

  Seconds later Harris Delacorte was standing in the kitchen doorway. Suddenly, just like that. Aiden straightened up quickly and tried to pretend he had not been listening. Meanwhile he felt his insides solidify, like concrete setting up and curing.

  Harris Delacorte sighed. Then he sat down across the table, picked up a cookie from the plate, and tried to catch Aiden’s eye. Aiden made sure that didn’t happen.

  “You can’t even look at me?” the older man asked after a time.

  Aiden stared down at his plate and didn’t answer.

  “You know how old that mare is?”

  “What’s a mare?”

  “A female horse.”

  “Oh.”

  “You know how old she is?”

  Aiden said and did nothing. But he could feel the weight of the older man’s stare, even though he wasn’t looking. So he shook his head. Not much. As little as he could get away with and still have it be noticed.

  “She’s twenty-seven.”

  “That’s not old. That man whose house this is said she was old.”

  “Because she is.”

  “Twenty-seven’s not old.”

  “It is if you’re a horse. Horses only live to be about thirty. Sometimes not even that.”

  “Oh,” Aiden said. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why do they only live to be thirty?”

  “I don’t know. How can I know that? I’m not God. That’s just how long they live. It’s just the way things are. I’m trying to make a point here, boy. You could have killed her running her that hard. That’s my point. Her heart might have given out. Plus I’d just told you how your mom thinks you’re too young to go out riding alone. And she’s right, by the way. Plus, when I tried to catch up to you, Wiley stuck his foot in a squirrel hole and now he’s lame. Thank God we pulled up before he broke his leg. But he’s favoring it, and I don’t know how bad it is until the vet comes out, which won’t be till tomorrow. And all that trouble because you couldn’t just hold still and listen to what I had to say.”

  A long, stinging silence.

  That would be it for this new life of theirs, and maybe that would be for the best. Harris Delacorte would abandon his mom because Aiden came along in the bargain, and that was no longer an acceptable price to pay. It would hurt her, and he was sorry for that. But in time maybe she would see that they had been okay on their own. That all they really needed was each other.

  “Do you care?” The man’s voice was booming and sharp, and it made Aiden jump.

  “About what?” he asked. The two words sounded tentative. But inside he felt nothing, as far as he could tell.

  “I thought you liked that horse you’ve been riding. Bonnie.”

  “I do.”

  “Do you care that you could have hurt her?”

  “She’s okay. I walked her until she wasn’t sweaty. She’s outside drinking water and resting.”

  “You got lucky. Do you care about Wiley? Who’s lame now?”

  Aiden never answered. Just stared down at his plate and wondered why people seemed to think that was an easy question. It wasn’t. Why were people always asking him what he did or did not care about? Aiden had no idea what people expected of him when they asked it. How was he even supposed to know? His sister had done it, too, but in that case it had been less of a question and more of an accusation.

  In time Harris Delacorte seemed to tire of waiting for answers that never came.

  “Come on,” he said. “We’re going home.”

  But Aiden wasn’t sure what he meant by it. Which home he had in mind. He guessed the man was referring to his cattle ranch, a place that did not feel like Aiden’s home in any way.

  He didn’t ask.

  He followed Harris Delacorte to the front door.

  As he scuffed across the living room rug, barely lifting his feet, the husband and wife who had briefly hosted him stood watching. When he looked up at them they both smiled in a way that looked sad. Especially the woman.

  “Thank you for the cookies and the lemonade,” he said. “They were good. After I put in more sugar. In the lemonade, that is. The cookies had enough. And thanks for showing me about walking Bonnie around. I didn’t know.”

  Both neighbors turned their eyes to Harris Delacorte. They said nothing, but their eyes seemed to plead with the man to give Aiden another chance. “See?” those looks said. “He’s a nice enough little guy. He’s trying, anyway.”

  They stepped out into the midday heat together, Aiden and his regrettable new dad.

  Harris Delacorte’s truck sat parked in the loop of dirt driveway, a two-horse trailer hitched to the back.

  “Wait for me in the truck,” he said simply.

  Aiden silently did as he’d been told.

  The windows were rolled down on both sides. All the way down. But still it was hot. The sun baked him through the windshield, but he sat. Because he didn’t deserve better. He had not earned the right to complain.

  He watched in the side-view mirror, through shimmering waves of heat, as Harris Delacorte loaded Bonnie into the trailer.

  Then they drove home in silence. Crushing, stomach-churning silence.

  The following morning, while his sister slept in, Aiden tried to come down the stairs for breakfast. It didn’t quite work out.

  That man was already here. Harris Delacorte. He was already in the kitchen with Aiden’s mother. Which would not necessarily have been enough to stop Aiden from going in, especially since he was hungry. But their words stopped him. Their words were more than enough.

  “I just don’t know how to get through to that boy,” Harris Delacorte said. “I can’t figure out how to find any caring in him. I’m not saying there’s no decent boy in there, May. Don’t get me wrong. I take you at your word on that. But I can’t seem to reach in there and get to him. He won’t let me.”

  Aiden sat down hard on the stairs. The carpet runner that covered the middle of each step was scratchy against the backs of his bare legs—the part his shorts didn’t cover.

  “But you’re the one who tried to assure me he’d come around,” he heard his mother say.

  “And I’m not saying now that he won’t. I’m saying I can’t test out the matter on my horses. I don’t think I can let him ride my horses, May. They’re not machines. They have feelings. They can get hurt. They did get hurt, or one of them did, at least. Not the mare he was riding, but Wiley. The one I tried to go after him on. The vet’s been out already this morning, and he’s got a pulled tendon. He’ll be on hand-walking for months. Can’t be ridden. I just can’t trust that boy with my horses.”

  “Maybe he could ride but only with supervision.”


  “He was riding with supervision yesterday, May. He always is. He galloped away. There was nothing I could do to stop him.”

  While he waited for his mother to answer, Aiden wondered what on earth he was supposed to do at Harris Delacorte’s ranch if he couldn’t ride. Stare at the wall? Watch other people ride? And they’d be moving there soon. When his mother got married.

  Then he thought about Wiley. Pictured the poor guy only able to be walked on a lead rope by hand. Aiden tried to feel something about it, but he couldn’t. It just didn’t feel real.

  “But if you don’t trust him,” Aiden’s mother said, “then how can he ever earn your trust? I mean . . . I understand how you feel, Harris. I’m not saying you’re wrong. But if you keep sending him the message that he’s not trustworthy, he’ll believe it. And the more he believes it, the more it’ll be true.”

  “I don’t know, May. I don’t know what the answer is. I only know it can’t involve putting my horses in harm’s way.”

  Aiden strained to hear what she would say. Leaned over until his head was pressed against the bannister. He heard his mother say there would be time to think about all this, and to work it out, because they’d be going to Buffalo to visit Uncle Edgar for a week of the summer break. Then their voices grew quieter and more muffled, as if they had moved closer together, or were whispering to avoid being overheard.

  Aiden crept down the stairs and stole a glance into the kitchen. The man who wouldn’t give him a chance was holding his mother in a tender embrace. Speaking words intended for—and delivered to—only her. Words that would never make it to Aiden’s ears.

  Shoulders slumped, Aiden moved back to the stairs and collapsed on the bottom step. Braced his elbows on his knees and set his chin in his hands.

  A moment later he looked up to see Harris Delacorte walking out of the kitchen. Just as the older man passed the stairs—as it struck him that Aiden was there, was listening—their eyes met.

  Aiden expected to see all manner of judgment against his own character. Expected to be looked down upon, in more than just the literal sense. He braced himself to feel like nothing in the older man’s eyes. A speck of dust maybe.

  Instead he saw something he had not in any way expected.

  At the time he had no words for it. Later, looking back, he would realize he had seen Harris Delacorte’s shame. His inability to cope with a stumbling block in his life. His grudging acknowledgment of his own shortcomings.

  That was how their new relationship became a two-way street. That was the moment when both their failings lay on full display, and it was up to each of them to decide what they would do with the vulnerability of the other.

  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 fear down behind the partition that kept him safe from everything.

  “Put your jacket on,” Harris Delacorte said.

  It was winter—as much as it was ever winter here in California—between Christmas and New Year’s Day. It never snowed, but it was cold enough at night.

  Aiden threw back the covers, and found that it was nippy even in his room. He hopped a little on the cold wooden floorboards. He put on his warm slippers, or tried to.

  But his stepdad said, “No. Real boots.”

  So he pulled on jeans right over his pajamas, and the sweater that made him feel most safe. And his cowboy boots and down jacket.

  “Where are we going?” he asked at last, heart pounding.

  “There’s something I want you to see.”

  Aiden’s brain filled with a sudden image of one of his grandmother’s neighbors and her dog. She house-trained the dog—or tried to, anyway—by dragging it over to the spot of an accident and then thrashing it.

  Aiden assumed he was about to be thrashed. For what exactly, he didn’t know. He ran through the previous day in his mind, through any previous day he could reach out to grasp and remember. He could not recall doing anything bad.

  But maybe it wasn’t any one thing. Maybe it was the sum of Aiden. Maybe he was about to be punished for all he was, all he had been, since dropping into this man’s life to spoil everything.

  They stepped out into the front yard of Harris Delacorte’s sprawling cattle ranch. The biting air stung Aiden’s face and ears and hands. And because he was still so sleepy, he felt too vulnerable to bear that discomfort.

  “I’m cold,” he said, hearing more panic in his voice than he realized he was feeling. “I want to go back to bed.”

  “How can you be cold? You have that big down jacket on.”

  “Only on part of me.”

  “Come in the barn. It’ll be better in the barn. I have a heater on.”

  Aiden followed a step or two behind.

  He could see from their path that the barn was almost dark. Just a soft glow from within, maybe created by something like a flashlight or a lantern. He didn’t turn around and look at the house behind him, but he could feel it back there. It felt like safe harbor.

  Maybe Harris Delacorte was taking him into the barn so he could do something Aiden’s mother would never see. Maybe he was about to get the beating of his life.

  He stopped dead in his tracks in the cold night, hearing nothing but a light wind blowing by his ears and his own blood beating inside them.

  Maybe his stepfather was going to kill him.

  It would be so easy. His mother would never have to know. Harris Delacorte could simply say Aiden had disappeared from his bed that night. Run away, maybe. It was a mystery that would never be solved.

  His stepfather’s life would be so much better without him. All of the older man’s problems would be solved. Because Aiden comprised all of the older man’s problems, so far as he knew.

  For one long, strange, silent moment there in the dark, Aiden didn’t blame the man for what was about to occur.

  Then the older man’s hand took hold of the shoulder of his down jacket and pulled him along.

  “We need to get a move on,” Harris Delacorte said. “She might need my help.”

  Aiden had no idea who “she” was. But the sense of dread lifted slightly, replaced by curiosity. He allowed himself to be towed into the barn.

  They stepped together into the largest stall, the one his stepdad called the foaling stall. A sorrel horse was down on its side, clearly distressed. Harris Delacorte moved a big battery-powered lantern closer, and closed them into the stall with the horse.

  Aiden could see the animal lift its head and crane its neck around to bump at its own swelled side. As if trying to point to the cause of all that discomfort.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Aiden asked, his fear left behind in the dirt. He did not even recall that there had been fear, or that he had recently shed it.

  “She’s not a him. She’s a her. A mare. And she’s about to foal.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “She’s going to have a baby.”

  “Right
now?” Aiden asked, his eyes widening.

  “Pretty darn soon, yes.”

  Harris Delacorte lifted the lantern and set it down near the animal’s tail.

  “Look at this,” he said to Aiden.

  Aiden leaned in close and was startled by what he saw.

  Something was protruding from an area under the mare’s tail. But it didn’t look like a baby. It didn’t look like a living thing of any sort. It looked like she was giving birth to a ghost. Whatever was being expelled from her seemed to be sealed into some kind of bag, a whitish covering that kept Aiden from identifying anything that might look like a baby horse. He had no idea what part of a foal he might be viewing. He wasn’t even sure that his stepfather was correct to pronounce that it was a foal.

  “This is how life begins,” Harris Delacorte said. “I wanted you to see it.”

  Aiden said nothing in reply. He was too busy watching the mare. Watching her strain. She seemed to be trying to push. She was sweating in the cold night. Aiden knew now what it meant when a horse sweated. The little propane heater out in the barn aisle, blowing the tiniest bit of warmth under the stall door, could not have been the reason. It barely took the edge off the cold. The mare’s sweat could only have been a result of exertion.

  Just for a moment, Aiden felt her pain. It felt natural and familiar and scary and unfamiliar at the same time. It overwhelmed him, so he slowed his breathing almost to a stop and tried to put it away again. It only worked about halfway. Now and then the mare’s discomfort peered out around the partition and startled him.

  Aiden backed up into a corner of the stall.

  “Don’t you want to see close-up?” his stepfather asked.

  Aiden shook his head in silence.

  The mare committed herself to a huge burst of energy, and struggled. Aiden could see her sides heave. The bagged ghost grew longer. Aiden thought he could see two separate sections of whatever was inside the bag, but he couldn’t identify what they were, either one of them.

  “That’s the head,” his stepfather said.

  “I don’t see a head.”

  “You will.”

  For what could have been ten minutes, or could have been an hour, Aiden leaned into a corner of the stall, his back up against the cold boards. His stepfather stayed close to the mare, but did not interfere.