She searched his face now with a hunger that echoed his own. “You look like someone.”
“Dad. Do you remember him? Your husband?”
She shrank back against the pillow, inching away from him. “Am I married? I don’t want to be married.” Her voice had become more tremulous. “I don’t have to be, do I?” she asked the room at large.
Pity gripped him. “No. No, you don’t have to be. You haven’t been in a very long time. You and Dad got divorced. Do you remember him?” Adrian asked again. “Max Rutledge. He died. I know I look like him.”
“You look like someone,” she said, in a small frightened voice.
“I wanted to be a ferryboat captain. You took me down almost every day to watch the ferries load and unload. The seagulls would sit on the pilings until the ferry horn sounded, and then they’d screech and soar around it. Sometimes we’d see sea lions. And do you remember the divers? We’d watch their heads bob up.”
“It smelled good,” she said unexpectedly.
“Yes.” Tears burned the back of his eyes, and he, too, could smell the salty, fishy scent of the sound mixed with the exhaust from cars waiting in the ferry line and the aroma of food cooking in the dockside restaurants. For a moment, he wasn’t here at all; he was a child again, holding his mother’s hand and reveling in the sound of the ferry horn, the sight of water opening between it and the dock, the workers bustling importantly in their bright orange vests as they blocked the wheels of cars and operated the ramp on the dock itself.
Without thought, he held out a hand. His mother slowly, tentatively, lifted her own and laid it in his. It was somehow a shock that his was so large and hers so small instead of the other way around, jarring him from the so-vivid memory. And yet the clasp felt right. They held hands, and they looked at each other, and a knot inside him loosened for the first time in all these years.
“I do remember,” she whispered. “That little boy was mine, wasn’t he?”
“Yes.” He had to clear his throat. “Yes. He was yours.”
“But...but who are you then?”
“I’m that little boy, all grown up,” he repeated.
Confusion furrowed her brow. “I tried to find him. I know I did.”
Choked up, he could only nod.
“I think I tried to go home.”
He felt the wetness on his cheeks. “Do you remember your garden? The roses, and the bright blue and purple delphiniums? And your peonies? People would stop their cars to admire the peonies.”
“Peonies like manure, you know,” she told him. “You have to feed them.”
A lump in his throat, he nodded. He did remember. He could almost hear the buzz of honeybees and feel the sun on his face and the carpet of grass he sat on as he watched his mother work in the garden. She often talked, telling him what she was doing and why. He helped her grow seedlings in the small greenhouse attached to the back of the garage. His tomatoes hadn’t been quite as big as the globe in his elementary school classroom, but they’d grown fat and red and tasted better than any tomato he’d eaten before or since.
Mom and me grow better tomatoes than anyone, he’d bragged.
“Most plants like to be fed,” he said, in a choked voice.
“Do you have peonies in your garden?” she asked.
He used his shirtsleeve to swipe at his cheeks. “I don’t have a garden.”
Unhappiness deepened every line in her face. “I don’t think I do, either. I wish I did.”
“Maybe you can again.”
Her hand went slack in his. “Who are you?”
He closed his eyes and let her hand go. He was intensely grateful when Dr. Slater stepped forward and said, “You look tired. Perhaps it’s time for a nap.”
She looked from Adrian to Slater with suspicion and confusion. “Why are you here when I don’t know you?”
“I’m the doctor,” he said patiently. “You’re in the hospital. You hit your head really hard on the pavement.”
Lucy came to Adrian’s side then. “Elizabeth, I’m so glad to see you awake and talking again. I’m Lucy.”
“Of course you’re Lucy. Who else would you be?”
Lucy laughed, as naturally as if her sister were teasing her. “Nobody at all. That was a silly thing to say, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. I know Lucy,” Adrian’s mother told the two men.
“Of course you do,” Dr. Slater said comfortably.
“Do you have a headache?” Lucy asked.
“I feel...” Her face worked. “I don’t know what I feel.” She struggled suddenly to sit up straighter and grabbed for the bars. “My cart! Where’s my cart? Did somebody take my things?”
“No. No, all your things are at my house. Do you remember crossing the highway to go to Safeway? You were hit by a car. I took everything home to be sure it stayed safe while you got better here in the hospital.”
It went on that way: comprehension, bewilderment, all answered by Lucy’s steady warmth and reassurance. Adrian backed away from the bed, drained, stunned by how much he felt for this frightened, prematurely aged woman who could summon only fleeting memories of him, her son.
Lucy sent him away to get breakfast. He went back to her place, showered and packed his overnight bag again. About to close her front door behind him, he turned around and went back to the bedroom where she stored his mother’s paltry belongings. He picked through, taking a few things he thought might mean something to her.
Ten minutes later, he checked in at the bed-and-breakfast.
As he was signing the book, Samantha watched him with a frown puckering her forehead. The expression was startlingly like Lucy’s when she was perturbed.
“Are you all right?”
All right? Adrian didn’t know. The ground beneath his feet had shifted.
“My mother regained consciousness. Lucy’s at the hospital. I’m going back as soon as I—” For a moment he couldn’t remember what he was supposed to be doing. “I don’t suppose you’re still serving breakfast.”
“Not officially, but I’ll put something together for you,” she said immediately. “Why don’t you drop your bag off upstairs and then come to the dining room?”
Samantha’s “something” turned out to be scrambled eggs, thick slabs of whole wheat toast smothered in homemade blackberry jam and pastries that melted in his mouth. Adrian ate as if he were starving, which seemed to please her.
He went back to the hospital to release Lucy, who murmured, “Ssh, she’s napping.” One of the gift-shop volunteers had offered her a ride home, she said. “So you can stay.” She kissed him on the cheek, then added, “I’ll try to pop in midafternoon, between the lunch and dinner crowds,” before she departed. She didn’t question the small carton he carried.
His mother’s sleep was more peaceful than the coma had been, although the similarity was great enough that Adrian couldn’t seem to tear his eyes from her. Sitting there at the bedside, he couldn’t help wondering whether people ever slipped back into comas. What if she never opened her eyes again?
An hour passed. Two. Where the hell was Slater? Adrian wondered angrily.
Having breakfast. Or lunch, as late as it was. Shaving.
Adrian rubbed a hand over his own stubble. Should have done that himself. He didn’t want to scare her.
A nurse came in several times, checking monitors. He was touched when she brought him coffee from the cafeteria.
He was taking a swallow of it when he realized his mother’s eyes were open. She stayed very still and stared at him with all the alarm of a wild creature cornered.
“You’re awake,” he said, careful to speak quietly. “You’re in the hospital. Do you remember getting hit by the car?”
“I don’t want to be in the hospital! I don’t like hospitals!”
She sat up and grabbed for the bed rail, her gown slipping to bare a protuberant collarbone. “Let me out!”
He hit the Call button, and with the nurse’s help calmed his mother.
He had to explain all over again who he was.
“I did have a little boy,” she said again, eyeing him with deep suspicion.
“I brought pictures.” He opened the carton he’d set at his feet, hoping this was the right thing to do. He regretted having left her driver’s license and that long-ago Mother’s Day card at his condo in Seattle. But he handed her a school photo of him that she’d kept all these years and watched her stare down at it.
After a moment she lifted her gaze from the picture, examined his face minutely, then returned to the photograph.
“Yes, that’s really me,” Adrian said.
She looked at the other pictures, including the one of herself as a girl. That one she stared at the longest.
Adrian talked, telling her about her parents and the home in Nova Scotia where she’d grown up.
“I can’t remember how to get there,” she said sadly.
He had to swallow several times before he could speak. “I know.”
After a minute he lifted the conch shell from the box and saw her smile. He set it on the bed beside her.
“I always wanted one of those,” she confided. “I tried to bring one home once, from Hawaii. But he wouldn’t let me. He said it was too big.” Her eyes clouded with the memories. “I found that one at a garage sale. Imagine! They were selling it for two dollars.”
“You were lucky.”
“Lucky?” She nodded, stroking the satiny interior. “Sometimes I am, you know.”
His heart was damn near breaking. “You were lucky to meet Lucy.” Or was he the lucky one, because she’d brought Lucy into his life?
“Do you know Lucy?” His mother gazed at him in surprise. “She has me to lunch often. We’re good friends.”
“I know you are.” He smiled at her. “Lucy said she’d be by for a visit this afternoon, between her lunch and dinner crowd.”
Her face brightened. “Have you eaten her soup? It’s very good.”
Adrian agreed that he had. He got her talking about meals she’d eaten at the café, and told her he’d met Father Joseph. His mother confided that she didn’t really like to listen to sermons, but she did enjoy the children. “And they need me,” she told him with simple satisfaction. Her forehead creased. “This isn’t Sunday, is it? Because they count on me.”
“No, it’s Saturday. And they know you won’t be there tomorrow, since you’re in the hospital. Some of the other mothers are filling in.”
“Oh.”
Back and forth. One minute she remembered, the next she was confused. Adrian was handicapped by not knowing what she’d been like before the accident. She hadn’t remembered her past, or had professed not to. So, okay; that part might be normal for her. But he guessed the present had been in clearer focus for her, or she wouldn’t have remembered the classified ads for garage sales and which started on Friday and which on Saturday, that this day was Sunday and she needed to be at the church, and so on.
Slater did show up and examined her, then talked to Adrian privately in the hall.
“Her mental acuity is actually quite remarkable considering.” He shook his head in apparent admiration, his cherubic face glowing with delight.
“She’s still pretty confused.”
“Wouldn’t you be?” the doctor said simply. “And yes, I feel confident she’ll be back to herself in no time, champing at the bit to be out of the hospital.”
Remembering her panic, Adrian said, “She doesn’t like hospitals.”
“If your father did commit her...”
God, yes. This bed, with the railings that looked like bars, might feel like prison to her. “Lucy says that most of the time she refused the offer of places to stay.”
“Because she didn’t like being obligated?” Slater rocked on his heels, thinking. “Or because she feels trapped if she’s indoors for any length of time?”
Adrian shook his head, mute. His own mother, and he knew next to nothing about what was going on in her head.
“Perhaps this is a good time to evaluate her mental-health issues,” the doctor suggested. “She might make further improvement on an appropriate drug regimen.”
Adrian nodded numbly. “Yes, in a few days.”
Slater clapped him on the back. “Give her time before you make any decisions.”
Watching him stride down the hall, Adrian thought bleakly, What choice do I have? She obviously couldn’t take care of herself.
Lucy came again and went, as did Father Joseph, whom she’d called with the news. Adrian used his visit to have a hurried dinner in the cafeteria before returning to his mother’s bedside. The nurse greeted him with relief.
“She’s agitated when you’re gone.”
“I keep having to explain again who I am.”
She gave him a gentle smile he would once have interpreted as pitying. “But I think maybe, deep inside, she knows.”
Lucy came for him after she closed the café. By then his mother was sleeping. He stood wearily, and they both looked down at her.
Lucy’s hand crept into his. “Today felt like a miracle,” she said softly.
Did it? He moved his shoulders to ease knotted muscles. Maybe. His mother had remembered him, if only through the haze of a great distance.
He couldn’t claim his memories of her were much sharper. Bits and pieces kept coming to him, but he’d been dismayed to realize how much he had shut out, either to please his father or in self-defense. Most recalled memories were good, but today, as he had patiently explained yet again who he was, he’d suddenly remembered walking in the door from school one day, just like any other day until then, to have her start violently at the sight of him and stare at him with wild eyes. She’d cried, “Go away! I won’t listen to you! You’re not there. You’re not! You’re not!”
“Mommy?” he had whispered in fright. “It’s me. Adrian. Who are you talking to?”
“Nobody! I won’t listen!” Clapping her hands over her ears, she had whirled and run from the kitchen, shutting herself in her bedroom. He had gazed longingly at the phone, wanting to call his father and say, “There’s something wrong with Mom.” But he hadn’t, because... He didn’t know why, just that his job was to shield his mom from everyone. Even Dad.
Especially Dad, Adrian thought now, in the hospital. He wondered whether she’d been on medication in those days. Whether she’d resisted taking it. Whether his father had been scared for him, coming home after school to her. In his own way, had he thought he was doing the right thing?
Maybe, Adrian thought again. If only his father had talked to him, if not then, later.
“You’ll follow me home?” Lucy asked, her hand still in his as they rode the elevator down.
He studied her face. In the harsh white hospital lighting, she looked like she had bruises beneath her eyes. Freckles stood out in heightened relief. Neither of them had slept much last night, and the phone call from Slater had come early this morning.
“You look exhausted.”
“I am tired, but—”
“I checked in to the B and B,” he reminded her. “My stuff’s there. Samantha will expect me.”
She frowned at him. “Why did you do that?”
“Because I was trying to protect you from gossip. I’d made the reservations last week, you know.”
“I don’t care what my family thinks.”
They’d reached her car and stopped. Running his hands up and down her arms, which were bare despite the cool night air, Adrian said roughly, “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure,” she snapped, just vehemently enough he didn’t b
elieve her.
“We’re both tired,” he said. “Why don’t you come to Sam’s for breakfast in the morning?”
After a moment she dipped her head, her expression still sulky. “Oh, fine.”
He kissed her, feeling extraordinary tenderness. It heartened him that she was prepared to defy her family for him, although he was discovering that he didn’t like the idea of their disapproval. He didn’t want her to lose more than she had to, only because she’d made the decision to love him.
He drove behind her—stupid as it was, considering she’d been getting herself home without his protection for years—then pulled to the curb until he saw her unlock her front door, give a wave and disappear inside. He looped back to her sister’s, where it appeared everyone had gone to bed. A note taped to the stair newel told him about the snack he could help himself to in the kitchen if he was hungry.
A tired grin pulled at his mouth as he turned that way instead of starting up the stairs. The Peterson sisters did like to feed people.
* * *
THANK GOODNESS THE café was closed the next two days. Lucy spent most of them at the hospital with Adrian.
She liked that he’d brought the conch shell to his mother. It was something she’d loved, and was better than flowers, although he did bring those, too. Sunday he called a florist in Port Angeles and had a huge bouquet of peonies delivered. The hat lady cried. When she grabbed her son’s hands and pulled him close until his forehead rested against hers, Lucy eased out of the room. She waited for several minutes then wiped tears from her eyes before she went back in.
He did come home with her Sunday and Monday nights both, but wouldn’t stay to sleep.
“Sam won’t know,” she protested one night.
“Yes, she will. She leaves me a snack every night.”
“Maybe you weren’t hungry. Maybe you got up and left early.”
He laughed. “Who’d turn down anything either of you have cooked? And there’s no way I’d get up earlier than she does. I swear she’s already in the kitchen baking by six.”
Lucy made a face. “She always liked mornings.”
“But you don’t?”
The Trouble with Joe Page 40
