There might not be any need for dutiful visits. He’d never done one single thing for his own mother. He hadn’t even been the one to find her.
“God, Mom…” His voice came out broken, raw. “If only I’d known…” Without thinking, he reached for her and gripped her nearest hand hard. It was warmer than he’d expected, and smaller than he remembered.
How often had he laid his hand in hers, confident she’d return his clasp, that she liked holding hands with him. ’Cause Mom and him were always gonna do something.
A sound tore at his throat, shocking him.
Her eyelids twitched.
Adrian stiffened and stared. A small shudder seemed to move over her face, flaring her nostrils briefly. Behind closed lids, her eyeballs moved. Was she trying to open her eyes?
“How is she?” Ben Slater asked from beside Adrian.
He started violently, then tried to cover up by straightening and rolling his shoulders to loosen the muscles.
“I don’t know. Did you see how her face was moving?” It had gone still now, as if to make him a liar. “Her eyelids were twitching and she seemed to be…I don’t know, trying to frown or say something or—”
The doctor laid a hand on his shoulder. “It might just have been reflexes, you know.” His voice was gentle. “A random firing of neurons.”
“I was thinking her color looked worse today,” Adrian said.
Dr. Slater stepped closer to the bed. “I can’t say I see a change, but we’ll keep monitoring her kidney function.”
“You don’t think she is going to wake up.”
“I didn’t say that. Were you talking to her when her face became mobile?”
“Yeah, but I’ve talked to her every time I came.”
“It could be the coma is becoming lighter.”
Adrian suspected he was being patronized. He could imagine the cherubic doctor patting him again and saying, There’s always hope.
What kind of hope would they be talking about anyway? he asked himself with a surge of impatience. No matter what, she wouldn’t be the mother he remembered, who balanced on a high wire between sanity and a world that was only in her head. The hat lady was a homeless woman who pushed her belongings in a stolen shopping cart and was as crazy as the current administration’s monetary policies. If she did wake up, she’d have to be institutionalized.
Maybe what he should be hoping was that she didn’t wake up, hard-hearted though that was.
For a moment, he let himself imagine his father’s reaction if he’d still been alive. He’d be impatient, disdainful, distant. You’d never know this woman had ever meant anything to him. He’d have driven over here to Middleton, looked to verify her identity, made the decision immediately to move her to long-term care, then put her from his mind except to instruct his assistant to pay the bills.
And maybe he’d have been right to be quick, ruthless and unsentimental. Adrian had no idea what, if anything, he was accomplishing here.
The doctor was watching him with kind eyes. “I hear Lucy has been introducing you around town.”
“She thought I could learn something about what Mom’s life has been like.”
“Is it working?”
“Yeah.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Yeah, it is.”
“She was unconventional, at least by Middleton standards, but loved.”
“Not by everyone.”
Slater shrugged. “There are narrow-minded folks anywhere. Got to have someone to look down on.”
It sickened Adrian to know that he would have been one of those people. Oh, he’d have been polite and maybe even given her his pocket change, the way he sometimes did with the bleary-eyed bums on First Avenue in Pioneer Square. Pity didn’t rule out disdain.
“It she schizophrenic?”
“It’s a good possibility, from what Lucy tells me. I didn’t know your mother well. The wife and I go to a different church, and me, I’ve dedicated myself to whacking a white ball around eighteen holes and sometimes even thirty-six at least five days a week. Our paths didn’t have occasion to cross much.”
“Can she be medicated?”
“If she comes out of the coma? Sure. Will she become instantly normal? Probably not. Twenty years have made her what she is.” He surveyed Adrian keenly. “Try to remember that she’s a good woman who has made countless friends, who’s a stalwart at her church and at the thrift store. She’s well-read. One of the things Lucy told me she appreciates most about your mother is that she notices beauty everywhere, instead of letting her eyes pass over it the way most of us do. Normally we see with new eyes only twice in our lives—once when we’re children ourselves, and seeing everything for the first time, and then when we have our own children and see through their eyes. But your mother gave the people who cared about her the gift of seeing afresh. I think some of them like Lucy won’t altogether lose it.”
Adrian knew exactly what the doctor meant. His mother had never lost the ability to see with wonder.
Adrian had lost it the minute he came home to find his mother gone.
Lost it? His mouth twisted. Or thrown it away?
Or maybe he’d already been losing it, like any boy heading toward puberty. Maybe that was the gulf he’d felt opening between him and his mother: he’d started caring about other people’s perceptions. Pretty soon he would have cared more about them than hers, and she would have been left all alone.
However his father had driven her away that summer, he’d only hastened the inevitable.
Dr. Slater moved past Adrian and took his patient’s hand, talking pleasantly to her for a moment as if she could hear. His arm blocked Adrian’s view of his mother’s face.
Slater’s voice sharpened. “You’re right. Her face is becoming more mobile. Hmm.” He stepped back from the railing. “You talk to her.”
Adrian stood and reached for his mother’s hand again. “Mom, it’s me, Adrian. I’m still here. I’m all grown up. I don’t look much like you remember me, but I’m the same person.” Was he? He shook off the thought. “I can hardly wait to talk to you. Find out about your life. Maman has missed you so much. We could fly up there for a visit. She’s kept your bedroom the same all these years. Wouldn’t you like to see her?”
“Will you look at that?” the doctor murmured.
She seemed to have multiple tics. Her eyelids twitched, her mouth worked, muscles in her cheeks jerked.
“Something’s definitely going on.” Slater watched her with narrowed eyes. “When were you planning to move her?”
The question jolted Adrian. He should be heading back to Seattle Tuesday afternoon. He’d expected Carol would have a list of assisted living facilities for him to check out then.
Now, he couldn’t even remember what his Wednesday appointments were. He hadn’t opened a file on his laptop since he got here. He couldn’t imagine being able to concentrate if he did.
“Ah…I hadn’t gotten that far,” he admitted. “I guess I was hoping for a change.”
“Good. I’m going to ask that you not move her until we see whether her condition is changing.”
Adrian nodded. “Fair enough.”
“Thanks.” Slater held out his hand and they shook. “I’m going to talk to your mom’s nurses, make sure they’re keeping a close eye on her. I might check back in later tonight.”
“Thank you,” Adrian said, his voice gruff.
“You’re welcome. Your mom’s somebody special.” Dr. Slater nodded and left.
Lucy, Adrian thought with a surge of excitement. He should call her. She’d want to know there’d been a change. He pictured her rushing right over to sit beside him.
Then he remembered the family get-together and the fact that she’d spent all morning and the early afternoon with him for his benefit. He couldn’t keep expecting her to drop everything.
And all those twitches might mean nothing at all. They might indicate—how had the doctor described it?—the random firing of neurons. Slater mig
ht have been pretending to more excitement than he felt, another metaphorical pat on the back. Did med school include classes on dealing with the patients’ loved ones?
Forget it. She’s responding to you. Keep talking to her.
He pulled his chair as close to the bed as he could get it and still accommodate his long legs, held his mother’s hand and talked. Talked until he was hoarse. He started by telling her about himself: his first girlfriend, getting his law degree, the friends he’d lived with through grad school, the first time he’d addressed a jury in a courtroom, making partner at his firm. A couple of different nurses came and went, adjusting his mother’s pillows and the height of the bed, shifting her slightly, talking cheerfully to her.
He moved on to rambling about anything and everything that entered his head: the Mariners coming close to making the World Series last October, their lousy beginning this spring, a pro bono case he’d taken on a couple of years ago, snippets from the newspaper.
A couple of times her eyeballs moved or her mouth puckered, but eventually he realized he wasn’t getting any response. He’d probably worn her out. Deciding to think of her as taking a much-needed nap, he gently laid her hand back on the coverlet and said, “I’m going to go get some dinner, Mom. I’ll come back for a little while this evening. You get some rest, okay?”
No answer.
Big surprise.
Adrian stood, stretched and walked out.
He was vaguely surprised to walk out of the hospital to find it was still full daylight. Barely past five o’clock. He hadn’t been there as long as it felt. He guessed he’d head back to the bed-and-breakfast, maybe check e-mail, then decide what to do for dinner.
Lucy’s house wasn’t a quarter of a mile out of the way. He could drive by, see if her car was there. She’d want to know about his mother. He could keep it brief, undemanding.
A block from her house, Adrian saw her car in the driveway. She must have gone out at some point, because it had been moved. Half a block nearer, and he saw her sitting on the front porch steps. She’d been working out front, since the lawn was cluttered with a wheelbarrow, shovel, rake and a heap of what looked like discarded plastic bags.
Then he grinned. She’d dug out that flower bed she had talked about. By the time he pulled to the curb, he could see the newly turned earth. He guessed from the bags she’d dug in manure and who knew what else.
Lucy spotted him before he came to a stop. Alarm widened her eyes and she rose to her feet as he got out of the car.
“Adrian! Is everything okay?”
He’d seen the wince as she stood. She was filthy. Even her face was dirt-streaked. Her hair must have started in a ponytail, but it was straggling out now, a strand sticking to her forehead.
“Fine,” he said. “If by that you mean Mom. I stopped by to tell you she’s making some facial expressions. I thought for a minute her hand even tightened on mine. It might just be reflexes, but Dr. Slater seems hopeful.”
“Really? She’s been completely unresponsive. Oh, Adrian!” She glowed. “I was so afraid…Oh, my goodness.”
“I thought you might like to know.”
Her teeth sank briefly into her lower lip. “Of course I do!”
He nodded toward the dark, turned earth. “Appears you’ve had a busy afternoon.”
“And I look disgusting,” she said ruefully, but without the self-consciousness he might have expected if he’d caught any of his former girlfriends in a similar state. “I was just trying to work up the energy to go in and shower.”
“It looks good.”
“It will when I’m done. I just dug in a ton of manure and peat moss and bone meal. I was planning to go to the nursery in the morning. There’s a great one in Sequim.”
He rested a foot on one of the lower stairs, enjoying the play of emotions on her face.
“What do you have in mind?”
“A climbing rose, for starters.” She turned to survey her creation. “It can climb up the porch railing. And maybe a clematis, too. They can twine together. Then a couple of shrubs. Maybe old roses. I’ve always wanted to grow some.” She laughed. “I already told you that, didn’t I? Oh, and perennials, and probably some annuals to fill in this year. It’s going to be such fun. I’m awfully tempted to start digging on the other side of the porch, too. Because now it looks unbalanced, doesn’t it?”
He had a sudden impulse. “What if I came and helped in the morning? I can’t spend all day at the hospital. I don’t know much about plants, but I can dig and haul the sod away.”
She gazed at him as if he’d gone nuts. “Are you serious?”
“Sure.” He felt oddly light. “I could sweat out all my frustrations.”
A laugh escaped her. No, a giggle. “Now that you mention it, all that labor was therapeutic.”
“Will I be depriving you?”
“Something tells me I’m going to hurt in the morning. I think I can do without too much more therapy.”
Adrian grinned at her. “You don’t hurt right now?”
She made a face at him. “Oh, yeah. Why do you think I was just sitting here?”
“Why don’t you shower?” he suggested. “I could take you out to dinner.”
“Oh, you don’t have to—”
“I was thinking pizza. Unless you don’t eat it unless you’ve hand-rolled the crust from organic, whole wheat flour and canned the tomato sauce yourself?”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“Wouldn’t think of it,” he assured her.
“Pizza and beer sounds really good, if you don’t mind waiting. Um…do you want to come in?”
“I’ll just sit out here,” he said. From somewhere, he added, “Hollyhocks.” At her startled glance, he shrugged in embarrassment. “I was just thinking of Mom.”
“The flowers that reach for the sky,” Lucy said softly.
“Yeah.”
Her smile was as glorious as any rose in full bloom. “Definitely hollyhocks.” She crossed the porch and opened the screen door. “I’ll hurry.”
“Take your time,” Adrian told her, and sat on the top step, his back to the newel. Waiting, he felt better than he had all day.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ON THE WAY HOME from the nursery, Lucy cranked up the radio and in happy abandonment sang along with the top ten hits even though she couldn’t carry a tune. Her trunk was tied down with a bungee cord, and her backseat was covered with newspapers and buried in a forest of greenery, some of which waved in her vision when she glanced in the rearview mirror.
She was happy. Ridiculously, gloriously, absurdly happy. She tried to tell herself it was because she’d actually accomplished something this weekend that pleased her and not spent it stripping the kitchen floor and picking up a prescription at the pharmacy and grocery shopping and hearing all the latest, trivial family gossip at her mother’s on Sunday night.
But she knew she was kidding herself. She was floating on a wave of euphoria because Adrian Rutledge had stopped at her house yesterday and invited her out for pizza. And because, better yet, he was at her house right this minute, not only waiting for her, but also slaving in her yard because he apparently wanted to.
She was being an idiot. He’d be gone soon. Probably tomorrow, and if not then, within the week. He appreciated what she’d done for his mother. He was thanking her. Heck, he might even be a little bit lonely. It could be that he was thinking of her garden, as she had, as something that would be meaningful to his mother.
He was not falling madly in love with her, Lucy Peterson. The plain Peterson sister. Nobody ever had, and he was a particularly unlikely candidate to become the big exception.
But just for today, she refused to listen to reason. She’d had fun last night. For once, they hadn’t talked about his mother. He’d listened with incredulous amusement to tales of her family instead. He’d asked about other people he had noticed around town, including several of the nurses and Jason Lee, the editor of the Courier.
/> She told him more about Elton Weatherby, the aging, courtly lawyer, and how residents of Middleton had had to drive to Sequim or Port Angeles to find an attorney until the 1950s. That was when Elton returned from law school at the University of Puget Sound and set up practice in his hometown.
Looking stunned, Adrian had paused with his beer stein halfway to his mouth and said, “He’s been practicing for fifty years?”
“Most people have been doing whatever they do for close to that long when they retire,” she pointed out. “Think about it. You start work as an auto mechanic right out of high school, you don’t retire until you’re sixty-five, and that’s assuming you can afford to retire then, you’d have been working for, um—” she had to calculate “—forty-seven years.”
“Good God,” he’d said, and swallowed.
“Besides, Mr. Weatherby told me he loves the fact that he meets so many people and hears so many stories. No day is the same as the one that came before, is how he put it.”
“Is he planning to keep tottering into court until the day he turns up his toes?” Adrian asked.
“No, he’d like to find someone to buy the practice. Or even a young attorney to bring in to take over. He had bypass surgery last year. Mrs. Weatherby would like them to go to Arizona during the winter. Her arthritis is bad when it gets cold.”
This time he shook his head. “Good lord.”
Lucy had wondered from his amazement whether he actually liked his job. She’d had the impression he couldn’t imagine going into his office every day for nearly fifty years. Of course, he probably wouldn’t have to. Clearly, he made plenty of money. He could probably retire at fifty and…and do whatever rich people did. Sail the Caribbean. Lounge on the beach in Cabos San Lucas. Lucy wasn’t quite sure. She thought she’d be bored without work.
Turning onto her street, she began to smile. Maybe she wouldn’t be bored, not if she had a huge English cottage-style garden to maintain and kids and grandkids to cook for.
Just don’t fool yourself they’ll be Adrian Rutledge’s, an inner voice warned.
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