The Wake Up Page 23

  Chapter Nineteen

  Hope Wildly

  Hannah was wearing a green jacket at their next session. A tailored blazer in a deep, rich shade that made something buzz in Aiden’s chest. It was a strangely comforting sensation.

  He had been here for almost fifteen minutes, telling her about the week’s developments, but had just realized that the deep jewel tone reminded him of the green shards of pot that Milo was using in his art project at home. But there was more involved in his reaction to the color than that. He just couldn’t get a bead on what it meant to him.

  He didn’t realize he’d been staring. He hadn’t meant to stare.

  “I give up,” Hannah said. “Do I have a stain? Missing button?”

  “Oh. No. Sorry. It’s just that color. Partly it’s the color of some of the pots in Milo’s mosaic. Well. Former pots. But it’s more than that. But I can’t say what exactly. I just have a reaction to the color.”

  “That’s not unusual,” Hannah said.

  “It’s not?”

  “No, not at all. Colors evoke feelings in people. Even if they’re not consciously aware of it. Why do you think people have a favorite color? So, just clarify one thing for me. Milo is at home working on a mosaic tabletop right now? Didn’t he have a very complicated surgery on his foot just a few days ago?”

  “Yes. And yes. And I was surprised too.”

  “And his arm is still in a cast?”

  “No, that’s off now.”

  “Oh. Still. You’d think he’d have his foot up on a pillow and be resting.”

  “Well . . . ,” Aiden began.

  He stared out the window, breaking off his relationship with deep green. A woman in an office building across the street was standing with her hands on the glass, staring out onto the street. She was too far away for Aiden to see much more than that, but her body language made him feel lonely. He pulled his attention back into Hannah’s office.

  “He is resting the foot. He sits on the Persian carpet in the living room with his foot up on a pillow. But his legs are under the coffee table. And then when he moves from one area of the mosaic to another, somebody has to help him move. His mother or Elizabeth or the babysitter. I haven’t seen him doing this with my own eyes. I’ve just been told about it. He seems to want to work on the mosaic in private as much as possible. He’s very . . . determined about the project.”

  “How does it look?”

  “I have no idea. He won’t let me see it. I went over there to see how he was doing, and he wouldn’t let his mom answer the door until they’d covered up the project with a drop cloth. So I guess she’s seen however much of it he’s done. And maybe Elizabeth has seen it. He doesn’t have much choice about that. It’s a small cabin. But he told me very firmly that I can’t see it.”

  “Did you ask him why not?”

  “I did. He said, ‘It’s not good enough yet.’”

  “Ah,” Hannah said, and scribbled a few brief notes. “A perfectionist. Poor kid. Have you thought more about whether to bring him in here?”

  “Yes. We’re going to. But Gwen wants to wait until she’s been working long enough at the market for their insurance to kick in. I’ve covered them for the two hospital visits, because I really felt like the accidents were at least partly my fault. But she won’t let me cover this. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

  “Did you ask if she’s ever gotten him any kind of counseling?”

  “Yes. She has. Or she tried to, anyway. It was when they were living with her husband. He was dead set against it. Vehemently against it. She had to take Milo in secret. She had to save the money from her household budget and sneak him into the appointments while her husband was at work. It was hard, but she did it for months. And then the therapist told her that Milo wasn’t saying a word and he didn’t think the sessions were accomplishing anything. And then a week or two later she took the kids and left.”

  He waited in silence while she scribbled. The conversation had turned away from something that felt important to Aiden. He wanted a chance to turn it back.

  “That thing Milo told me,” Aiden said. “About how I couldn’t see his project until it’s good enough. I’ve been thinking about that a lot. I feel like . . . like maybe he’s saying . . . maybe he doesn’t even mean to let on, but . . .” Sooner or later you have to spit this out, he told himself. “It seems like he wants to impress me now. Since I hauled him out of that bind with the cow. It seems like he’s saying he wants to put his best foot forward for me on this art project, and do something I’ll think is great. Which seems like kind of a breakthrough in our relationship. But then I think, well, maybe I shouldn’t get too wrapped up in that idea. Because if I’m wrong . . .”

  Aiden couldn’t manage to finish the thought.

  “It’ll break your heart,” Hannah said, sounding surprisingly matter-of-fact for such a weighty pronouncement of gloom.

  “So that’s why I think I shouldn’t get too wrapped up in believing it.”

  Hannah set down her notepad. Leaned back in her chair. She had a cup of tea on a side table next to her elbow, and she picked it up and sipped at it. Aiden figured the tea must be cold by now. He stared at her jacket once more, and the deep green made his chest buzz. Again. It helped just a little.

  “I know you don’t have a lot of parenting experience,” Hannah said. “So let me lay my thoughts out for you like this. You hope for the best for your kids. You want them to be happy, and you want to feel close to them and help them. So when you see them moving in what you think is a good direction, or think you see it, you hope. You hope wildly. And, as a result, having a child tends to mean getting your heart broken on a regular basis. It takes courage to hope for something you know you might not get. But the alternative is not to believe in your child or hope for great things for him. So I’m a big fan of the heartbreak method myself.”

  Aiden stood in the dirt, in the early morning light, not far outside the cabin door. Waiting. His pickup truck idled nearby, its driver’s-side door wide open.

  It was a little early to be making good on that trip he and Gwen had planned. Maybe. Then again, it felt as though they had been needing it for a long time. In fact, it felt as though they’d been needing it for years, which was impossible since they had only known each other for months. But still that strong feeling hovered.

  After a minute or so of waiting, the door creaked open and Elizabeth stuck her head out.

  “We have a slight . . . ,” she began, “. . . well, what my mom called a complication.”

  “Okay. What sort of complication have we got?”

  “He won’t go to Etta’s without his mosaic project.”

  Aiden felt his eyebrows inch up. “The whole coffee table?”

  “Right.”

  “We could put it in the bed of the truck.”

  “Right. That’s what we were hoping you’d say. But he won’t do that until we get it all covered up. And I mean covered up so the wind can’t blow the cover off it when we drive. Because then you would see it.”

  “And it’s not good enough yet.”

  “Right.”

  “Okay. I’ll stand here. You guys do the covering part. I can get it on the truck when the time is right.”

  “Thanks.”

  Her head disappeared and the door slammed shut.

  Aiden stretched his neck and back while he waited. He looked down at the palms of his hands. The stitches had come out just the day before.

  He glanced at his watch. They would be half an hour late getting out of town. He felt himself ruffle over that. Then he silently let it go. They would get to the coast when they got there, and being tense about it was exactly the opposite of everything the trip represented.

  The door opened again, startling him slightly. He had been lost in thought.

  Gwen slid out and pulled the door closed behind her. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on the cheek. Then she pulled back, dropped her arms, and looked into his face.
/>
  “It’s too soon,” she said. “Isn’t it?” Her face twisted into something like a self-deprecating smile. “Or am I just being a mother?”

  “Not sure,” Aiden said. He cupped his hand around his mouth and shouted, “Elizabeth! Milo! Come out here a minute, please.”

  For a surprising length of time nothing happened. Even knowing there were crutches involved, it still seemed like too much delay.

  Then the door swung wide. Milo stood braced on his crutches in the doorway, Elizabeth at his side. Milo had come out of the surgery with external metal rods holding the bones in place, with pins that went right through the skin. But the whole contraption was wrapped in something like a loose elastic bandage. Partly to keep it clean. Partly so no one had to freak themselves out by looking at it.

  Aiden looked beyond them to see the coffee table covered in an old sheet and many wraps of duct tape.

  “What?” Milo asked.

  “Is it too soon?”

  “Is what too soon?” Elizabeth asked.

  “For us to go away. It hasn’t even been quite two weeks since Milo’s surgery. So I think your mom needs you to tell her it’s okay.” Then he took a deep breath, let go of his expectations and his anticipation of the trip, and added, “But only if it’s the truth.”

  “It’s not too early for me,” Elizabeth said.

  All eyes turned to Milo.

  “I don’t care,” he said, as though all of this was simply too irritating and too slow. “Here or Etta’s. It doesn’t matter. I just want to work on my mosaic.”

  The hardest part of the trip to Etta’s was getting Milo’s foot in a position that he could sustain. Hanging off over the edge of the truck seat did not work out. It made the boy yelp with pain—just the weight of his foot, and the metal structure that supported it, pulling down on that broken ankle.

  After experimenting with positioning Milo’s rump off the front of the seat, feet resting on the mats, Aiden ended up seating Elizabeth in the middle and Milo on the outside with his back against the door, his feet propped up on his sister’s lap.

  “Is it back there?” Milo asked as Aiden pulled away. The boy craned his neck to try to see into the bed of the truck.

  “Milo,” Aiden said. “You watched me put it back there with your own eyes.”

  “I just asked,” Milo said, a bit whiny.

  Aiden mostly watched the road as he drove to the gate. But one time he glanced over at the boy, who was staring at the side of Aiden’s face. Milo quickly cut his eyes away.

  As he stepped out to open the gate, Aiden looked up to see a couple dozen head of his cattle grazing in the distance. At the top of a hill, under a stand of scrub oaks.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, barely above a whisper.

  He might have been talking to the cattle, or he might have been talking to the late Harris Delacorte. It was hard to tell.

  Then he turned his attention back to the task at hand.

  Five times on the drive over to Etta’s Aiden glanced over to see if Milo was staring at him. Five times Milo was, but quickly looked away.

  Aiden and Gwen were driving down the 101 freeway over the Cuesta Grade—south before turning west again to the ocean—when he decided it might be better to question her silence. He had been going back and forth about it for dozens of miles. The discomfort growing in his gut finally overpowered him. He had to speak.

  “You seem far away,” he said.

  She was staring out the passenger window, her head turned mostly away from him. Aiden could see wisps of her dark hair and the set of her jaw, but not much more. If he took his eyes off the road for a moment, he could see muscles working in that jaw. As though she were grinding her molars together.

  For a strange and upsetting length of time she didn’t respond.

  Then, quite suddenly, as if sputtering up to the surface from a deep sleep, she turned her face to him.

  “Wait. What?”

  “Where were you?”

  “Sorry. Did you just say something?”

  “I said you seem far away.”

  “Oh. Right. I’m sorry, Aiden.”

  She reached across the seat and offered her hand for Aiden to hold. He took it. The roiling turmoil in his midsection drained away, just like that. Like water out of a tub when the plug is pulled. It swirled down the drain and it was gone.

  “I’ve never left the kids,” she said. “Thirteen years.”

  “I figured that was it.”

  “Oh, I mean I’ve left them. Obviously. To work. Only recently, though. Before I left home, I never had a babysitter. I was the babysitter. Always. My husband worked and I didn’t. I stayed home with the kids. And he wasn’t big on going out, either, my husband. So it would be the three of us during the day and all four of us at night.”

  A silence fell. Aiden felt compelled to fill it.

  “What was his name?”

  “My husband?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Milo. The Milo you know is actually Milo Junior. But we dropped the Junior when we left home. Because there’s no chance of confusion anymore. Why?”

  “No reason,” he said as they passed the sign that stated they were entering San Luis Obispo. “Just making conversation.”

  It wasn’t entirely true. He wanted to get the measure of the man somehow, the way he might if presented with a photograph. He wasn’t sure how the name helped, but it seemed the only available measurement.

  Another long silence. From the north end of the college town to its southern border.

  Then Gwen said, “I know I’m supposed to put all this aside. That’s the point of the trip. That I’m so worn down from the kids . . . well, the kid . . . and I need a break from that. But I just keep feeling like something terrible could be happening.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s Milo.”

  “Oh,” Aiden said. “Yeah. But you have your cell phone right where you could hear it, don’t you?”

  “Oh. Right. Yeah.”

  “So if Etta’s not calling, then nothing terrible is happening. Right?”

  Aiden heard nothing for a second or two, then a long, deep sigh.

  “I’ll settle down and enjoy this trip, Aiden. I will. I swear I will. Just . . . please, can you be patient with me if it takes me a silly length of time?”

  “I’ll be patient with you no matter what it takes,” he said.

  They lay together in a hotel bed in Avila Beach, on impossibly clean and crisp sheets. Aiden had one arm thrown over her, his chest pressed up against her back. He could feel her breathing through the soft motion of her shoulder blades.

  In that moment every cell in Aiden’s body, every inch of his internal landscape, felt clear and smooth. If he had been asked, he would have been unable to remember anything like a care or worry. If asked what troubled him, he might have puzzled over the word, no longer able to recall its definition.

  He wasn’t sure if Gwen was asleep. So it surprised him a little when she spoke.

  “I’m going to tell you this now,” she said, “because you’re not looking at me. And I can only tell you this when you’re not looking at me.”

  Aiden felt the muscles all through his abdomen tighten. He wondered if Gwen felt it, too. Maybe that was my vacation, he thought. Maybe that’s all the happiness I get.

  “Milo’s dad . . . ,” she began. Then she stalled for a time. But at least Aiden knew where she was headed. “He was hard on Milo, at least as he got bigger. Not so much on anybody else. He really singled Milo out. Elizabeth he loved. I think he loved Milo, too, but in this . . . fierce way. In this way that made the poor kid a lightning rod for everything he—my husband—didn’t like about himself. He was hard on me, but verbally and emotionally. He never raised a hand to me. But he screamed at Milo and hit him. And in really unpredictable ways. Like Milo would do some little nothing thing . . . say something that was never meant to offend his dad, and my husband would stew over it for hours and then haul Milo out of b
ed in the middle of the night and smack him around. I know I should have done something. I knew it. But they loved each other. I swear they did. In both directions. It was just . . . in such a toxic way.”

  A pause. Aiden thought maybe he was supposed to fill it, so he did.

  “That’s why you don’t want me looking at you. Because you’re worried I’m thinking it’s your fault for not leaving sooner.”

  “Well . . . yeah. I think that. So why wouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t think it was your fault. I think it was his fault.”

  “I think it’s both.”

  “What tipped the scales? Why did you finally leave?”

  Aiden could feel her back change. The muscles tightened. Her breath froze into something that barely moved. The way Aiden’s used to do. “I was seeing a counselor. Like I told you when I first met you. And she helped me with knowing I needed to leave. But I didn’t leave right away. I . . . kind of . . . stuck for a time. And then Elizabeth told me something. Something I didn’t know. But I should have known it. It was my job to know. It was my job to protect him. So much would be different if I had known. I should have known.”

  In the silence that followed, Aiden tried to hold her closer, more lovingly, to see if he could soften any part of her. But now she was made of gemstones and concrete. He didn’t know when she would finally tell him what it was, but he knew she would—that she would not have started this if she didn’t plan to go there. So he just waited, though the time seemed to stretch out forever. He felt as though someone had left him to hold something heavy, an anvil or a safe, until they came back to relieve him of it. He could feel himself growing shaky with the strain.

  “Elizabeth told me he was going into Milo’s room at night. And staying maybe twenty minutes. But a quiet thing. Not like hauling him out of bed to slap him around and yell at him. And then after he left she could hear Milo sobbing for the rest of the night. I guess she had insomnia by then, which was not too surprising.”