The Wake Up Read online

  “No. I wasn’t. It’s not that at all.”

  “Well, what is it, then?”

  And on that line, she snapped more fully back into being Livie. As though she had seen him crossing the parking lot and reached for her shield, but had only just that moment snugged it into place. It felt familiar in a way that made him ache. That defensive posture and tone of hers. Not good, just familiar.

  “I only wanted to say that I know now I was a terrible, terrible boyfriend. I have no idea how you put up with me. I mean, I was so shut down. I couldn’t feel anything. And I can see now, looking back, how you tried everything to get some kind of reaction out of me. Some kind of caring. And there was just no getting through. No wonder you were always so frustrated with me. Anyway. That’s all, I guess. Just . . . sorry. I was doing my best, I swear I was. It wasn’t very good, though.”

  A long silence fell. Aiden tried to watch her face to see how his confessions were being received. But it was too dark. Whatever Livie was feeling was free to remain her secret. If she didn’t tell him, he would never know.

  “I have to go,” she said, and peeled away in the direction of her car.

  There seemed to be a light quaver in her voice. As though she was crying, or something close to it. But in the dark, Aiden would never know for sure.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Boo

  Aiden began the morning by doing something he never did. He drove straight to the cabin. On the passenger seat of the truck beside him sat the carton full of clean pottery shards with cans of adhesive, grout, and varnish perched on top.

  He carried the box to the door and knocked, and Gwen answered in her robe, a mug of coffee in one hand.

  “I’m really sorry,” Aiden said. “I think this is exactly what I swore I would never do. But I’m just kind of excited about this. I hope that’s allowed. And that maybe you’ll forgive me for it just this one time.”

  “Tell you what,” she said. “This will cancel out the time I called you in the middle of the night. Now we’re even.”

  But Aiden saw a definite shiny, light quality in her eyes, and could tell by her voice that she was not the least bit sorry to see him. It made his chest feel warm and buoyant.

  “Now what have you got there?” she asked.

  “It’s a project I thought I could do with Milo.”

  “With Milo? Oh, I’m not so sure about that, hon. Milo’s not a with kind of guy. But anyway, come on in and let’s take a look.”

  Aiden stepped into the living room of the little cabin and set the carton down on the ravaged coffee table, covering as much of the damage as he could before settling on the couch.

  “Coffee?” Gwen asked.

  “I’d love some. Where are the kids?”

  “Milo’s getting dressed in the bedroom and Elizabeth is in the shower. Or maybe at this point it’s the other way around. Jeez, honey, I just realized I don’t even know if you take anything in your coffee. That’s weird.”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Just black.”

  She brought him a steaming mug and set it on the coffee table near the carton of potential art project. Then she leaned back and took a sip of her own coffee.

  “Now let’s see what we’ve got here,” she said.

  Aiden stole a glance at her face. She wasn’t wearing makeup, and he had never seen her without it before. But she must not have worn a lot, ever, because she didn’t look all that different. She looked nice, in fact. Natural and fresh. Someone with whom Aiden would enjoy waking up in the morning.

  She caught him looking and he smiled shyly, and she smiled in return.

  “These are all the pieces of those pots he broke up yesterday. I thought we could use them to do a mosaic project.”

  She leaned forward and stared into the box, as if needing to see everything with her own eyes.

  “Aiden Delacorte, I swear,” she said, her voice hushed with wonder. “If this was something you planned all along, you are a parenting genius. I can’t believe how cool that is. It’s like . . . it’s like showing him that something can be broken all to pieces, but you can still turn it into something beautiful. Which for Milo is the perfect message. Did you figure all that out in advance?”

  “Yes,” Aiden said brightly. “Only . . . no.”

  He had phrased it that way on purpose to make a joke of it. And it worked. She laughed.

  “Well, you figured it out in the long run, and that’s pretty darn good. Milo can be really artistic. But I do have to warn you about one thing, though. He probably won’t let you do it with him. He either won’t get anywhere near a thing like this, or he’ll get real compulsive about it and work on it for hours on end and not eat or sleep and not let anyone else get close to it.”

  “I don’t care about that. If he wants to do it himself, he can. If he doesn’t want any part of it, I’ll do it. And then he’ll still see that broken things can be beautiful.”

  Gwen surprised him by sliding her hand across the couch and under his hand, and he closed his fingers around hers and held them. It was warm, her hand, and it settled something that had been lurching around in his stomach.

  “I don’t know what I did to deserve you,” she said, her voice dense with affection, “but if I ever figure it out, I’m going to do it again.” Then, as if the emotion of the moment had grown too heavy, she said, “Now show me how you do one of these mosaic things. Don’t you have to do it on some kind of surface? You can’t just mosaic the air, right? Don’t you have to have something to attach it to?”

  “I thought I’d take him out to the shed where I keep scrap wood. Let him take his pick.”

  “And I hope you have a drop cloth. I bet it’s messy.”

  “It might be messy. But you could do it on this coffee table. Nothing that happens to this coffee table could be worse than what happened to it already.” He pulled the box down and set it on the rug, and stared at the marred surface. And there it was in his head, the whole plan. The correct course of action. Just like that. “We can do it on the coffee table,” he said. “We can make a new mosaic top for the coffee table.”

  “Whoa,” Gwen said. “Now that is a plan. I suppose you had that all figured out in advance, too.”

  Of course, it had been obvious that he had just thought of it. It had apparently been a gentle tease.

  “Yes,” Aiden said. “Except no.”

  They smiled at each other for an embarrassingly long moment.

  “Let’s go away today,” Aiden said. Suddenly. He hadn’t even known it was in there waiting to come out. Or maybe it hadn’t been. Maybe it was an idea he’d had just as the words flowed out of him. “Today and tomorrow. These are your days off, right?”

  “Well, yeah, but . . . that’s a pretty short trip.”

  “It’s only three hours to the coast.”

  “And short notice for Etta. But let me call her and ask her right now. It sure would be nice.”

  She rose and hurried out of the room.

  Aiden sipped his coffee for a moment. Then he looked up to see Milo standing in front of him, dull reddish hair freshly slicked back with wet comb marks, wearing a clean white shirt and khaki shorts. In his hopelessly vulnerable-looking bare feet.

  “What is all that?” Milo asked, pointing down into the box.

  “It’s a mosaic project.”

  “I don’t know what mosaic is.”

  “I’ll show you some pictures of finished ones. We’re going to make a new mosaic top for the coffee table.”

  Milo narrowed his eyes and stared into Aiden’s face for a brief moment. Aiden thought the defensiveness in the boy’s gaze was due to the mention of the coffee table he had so badly damaged.

  But Milo cleared up that misunderstanding with his next terse sentence.

  “Who’s we?”

  “Could be you and me. Could be you. Could just be me.”

  “She can do it!” Gwen fairly shrieked, running back into the room. “She can take them!”

  �
�Take us where?” Milo asked in that same defensive tone.

  Gwen crossed the room to him, leaned over to his level, and draped an arm over his shoulder. “You and Lizzie are going to go to Etta’s today and tomorrow. So Aiden and I can go on a little vacation.”

  “I don’t want to go to Etta’s,” Milo whined. “Why do you need a vacation?”

  “I need a vacation,” Gwen said, her voice firm, “from exactly the kind of stuff you’re doing to me right now. This is not negotiable. You’re going to Etta’s.”

  Elizabeth’s voice came out of nowhere. Or seemingly so. “We’re going to Etta’s?” A moment later Aiden saw her, standing in the bedroom doorway in a thick robe more her mother’s size, a towel wrapped around her wet hair. “Why? For how long? Oh! Aiden’s here! Good morning, Aiden!”

  She ran the three steps to him and sat beside him on the couch, staring down into the box.

  “What’s all this?”

  “Milo and I are going to do a mosaic project to rescue this coffee table.”

  For a moment the girl said nothing. Just stared at the pieces of art project, as though building them into an imaginary mosaic in her own head.

  Then words burst out of her with surprising enthusiasm. “Oh my gosh, that’s brilliant! You’re brilliant! So it does still have a use!”

  “I think it’s about to.”

  “And you planned that all along?”

  “No. Actually.” He glanced up at Gwen, then at Milo, who had given up on them and flopped in the chair in front of the TV. Which was not turned on. But the boy had a remote in his hand, so Aiden figured it would be. “Yeah, that would make me really smart. If I had. But you were the one who put that idea in my head.”

  The sound of cartoons drowned out nearly everything in Aiden’s world.

  “Still brilliant,” Elizabeth said, raising her voice to be heard over the din. “Why are we going to Etta’s?”

  “So your mom and I can get away for a couple of days.”

  He tried to glance at Gwen again, but she was across the room talking to Milo. Fighting with him over the remote. Probably trying to turn down the volume, or get him to.

  “Well, that’s good,” Elizabeth said. “You and my mom should get away.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah. You’ve been really, really patient. You know. With Milo and me.”

  “No patience required for you,” he said, fairly quietly.

  Unfortunately, just as he said it, the TV volume came down ten notches or so. And everybody heard Aiden’s private words.

  “Teach me to check the water troughs,” Elizabeth said. Brightly and suddenly. As if adult enough to know that the conversation needed a decisive turn.

  “I need to take a shower first,” Gwen said. “If both of you are going someplace, you need to wait while I take a shower. Please. Because I need somebody to be with Milo while I’m in the bathroom.”

  “He can come with us,” Elizabeth said.

  “Can he?” Gwen caught Aiden’s eye as she asked it.

  “Yeah. Fine. If he’ll go,” Aiden said.

  “He doesn’t get a choice,” Elizabeth said. “Let me just get dressed, and then I’ll put him in the truck, and then we’re going.”

  They stood on the crest of a hill, in the dry tan rattlesnake grass, several yards from the parked truck. Staring into a watering trough in the corner of the farthest pasture. All three of them.

  “I like the sound this grass makes,” Elizabeth said. “The way these little . . . what are they? These droopy tops. Seed pods? They look a little like wheat. Not exactly, but a little. I like the sound they make in the wind.”

  “Something like seed pods,” Aiden said. “They call this rattlesnake grass.” Out of the corner of his eye Aiden saw Milo jump at the word. “Because of that sound,” he added quickly. “It makes a rattling sound when the wind blows it. Or when you walk through it.”

  Milo extended both hands away from his sides, about waist high, and began to walk around in the grass, brushing against its tops to create more of the rattling sound. He stopped short when he saw cattle.

  The cattle were drawing in closer, because Aiden was here. About forty head of them. The presence of people often meant the presence of hay. Aiden watched to be sure they stopped well short of the boy.

  They did.

  They stood about twenty paces away, staring with fixed gazes and lazily moving jaws. Big, dark, liquid eyes.

  Aiden turned his attention back to Elizabeth and the trough.

  “So, you see, it has this valve. Right here.” Aiden wrapped his hand around the valve, which involved plunging it into the cold water. His hands had finally stopped shaking, he noted. “The valve has a float. When the water level goes down, the float goes down.” Aiden yanked down on the float, pressing it below the surface. Water flowed into the tank with an audible hiss. “So then the water comes on. Fills it back up. And when the float goes up to the right level, the water turns off.” He let go of the float and it popped back up to the surface. The hiss of flowing water fell silent. “So you look at the level of the water to be sure it’s full, but it never hurts to work the valve by hand like I just did. Make sure it’s not sticking. And that sound you just heard? The sound of water flowing? If you hear that when you come up to the tank, there’s a leak somewhere. In this drought, we can’t afford leaks.”

  “Got it,” she said. “That’s easy.”

  Aiden straightened up and turned to check on the boy. To his alarm, Milo had walked closer to the cattle. Much too close. He stood at nearly arm’s length from a black-and-white cow and her calf. And the calf was looking inclined to take a step closer.

  Aiden opened his mouth to yell the word “no.” To tell Milo to slowly, calmly back up.

  He never got that far.

  Before he could even push out a word, Milo threw both hands in the air and rushed at the baby calf.

  “Boo!” he shouted.

  The calf spun on its haunches and skittered away.

  Milo turned to Aiden, a small, twisted smile on his face. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “I didn’t hurt him. I just scared him.”

  But while his back was turned to the cattle, the mother of the calf burst into defensive action. Which Aiden had known, for a split second, to expect. Because Aiden felt her rage.

  “Milo!” Aiden yelled, and sprinted for the boy. “Milo, look out!”

  Milo spun around to see what the danger might be. And saw it. Immediately. The cow was bearing down on Milo fast, seeming prepared to both stomp him into the ground and ram him with her head at the same time.

  Before Aiden could take three sprinting strides she was on the boy, stamping hard at his sandaled feet. Aiden heard Milo let out a bellow of pain. Then she hit him hard in the chest with her forehead, and Milo went down.

  The cow spun in her rage and came around full circle. And moved in fast to finish off the dangerous boy.

  Aiden reached them. But he was still not sure if he had reached them in time. Aiden was leaning down, trying to grab a piece of Milo’s white shirt, and the cow was moving in for the kill.

  It was a toss-up. No one could have known at that moment. It was impossible to guess which would happen first.

  Aiden grabbed a handful of shirt in his fist. He pulled hard. The cow’s cloven hooves came down and landed in bare dirt. The shirt ripped, and the boy fell free again. But Aiden had moved Milo just far enough to make the cow miss.

  He stood tall between the downed boy and the cow, raised his hands high—making himself threatening and big—and shouted at the animal.

  “Git! Go on!”

  The cow froze for a moment. Aiden looked into her eyes. She was furious. Rabid with anger. Aiden could feel it. She might be about to go after him, too. There was nothing he could do but hang in that moment and see.

  What felt like minutes later, but might have been a second or two, she turned her head away. Broke off that deadly gaze. That’s when Aide
n knew it was over.

  He scooped up the injured boy and slung Milo over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.

  Then he looked back at the cattle.

  The aggrieved cow had retreated now. Settled. She had gone back to her calf and was offering solace.

  Aiden jogged all the way back to the fence and scrambled over, boy and all. He paid no attention to the fact that the barbed wire tore at his palms and made him bleed.

  “Well,” Gwen said. With a long, deep sigh. “There goes our vacation.”

  She sat on a hard plastic bench beside Aiden in the waiting area of the emergency room at the county hospital. That same familiar waiting room.

  He looked over at her face and watched it twist with revulsion and shame.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh, Aiden, please don’t ever tell anybody I said that. I can’t believe I even said that. I must be the worst mother in the history of the world. I am a terrible, terrible person.”

  “You’re not,” he said. “Not at all. You’re a great mother. You’re just upset and tired.”

  He looked up to see Elizabeth walk back into the room carrying a can of soda and a packet of peanuts from the vending machine. Beside him, he heard Gwen begin to cry. Quiet but audible.

  “He’ll be okay, Mom. It’s just his foot. It’s not anything he could . . . you know. He won’t die from it or anything. It could’ve been bad. But Aiden didn’t let it be. He was like a superhero.”

  And on that final, lovely word, two uniformed sheriff’s deputies appeared in the doorway behind her. One was Jed Donovan, the other his sometimes-partner, Walter Mann. Walter was a tall, thin man with dark hair and a nervous tic under one eye. Quiet compared to Jed. Then again, just about everybody was.

  “Well, well,” Jed said, locking eyes with Aiden. “Anybody else got a spooky sense of déjà vu?”

  Jed waited, as if expecting Aiden to say something in his own defense. But Aiden had been silenced by his own luck. His own life. The way his circumstances seemed to spiral downward, then break through the floor of what Aiden had assumed was the absolute lowest he could go. And spiral down further.