the blue hospital sign, but some impulse made him turn the other direction, toward downtown. The Burger King on the left seemed the only outpost of the modern world. Otherwise, the town he saw under streetlights probably hadn’t changed since the 1950s. There was an old-fashioned department store, churches—he saw three church spires without looking hard—pharmacy, hardware store. Some of the buildings had false fronts. All of the town’s meager commerce seemed to lie along the one main street, except for the Safeway.
A memory stirred in his head. Wasn’t there a Middleton in Nova Scotia? Or a Middleburg, or Middle – something? Had this town sounded like home to his mother? Had she stayed, then, because it felt like home, or because people here were good to her? Lucy Peterson had expressed guilt that they hadn’t done more, but she’d obviously cared.
More than Elizabeth Rutledge’s own family had.
His jaw muscles spasmed. If this woman was his mother, he’d have to tell his grandmother, who was frail but at eighty-two was still living in her house in the town of Brookfield in Nova Scotia. Would she be glad? Or grieve terribly to know what her daughter’s life had been like?
He ran out of excuses not to go to the hospital after a half-dozen city blocks. There wasn’t much to this town.
The hospital was about what he’d expected: two-story in the central block, with wings to each side. He parked and walked in the front entrance. The white-haired woman behind the desk looked puzzled when he asked for Elizabeth Rutledge. Then her face abruptly cleared.
“Oh! The hat lady! That’s what Lucy said her name is. You must be the son.” She scrutinized him with interest and finally disappointment. “You don’t look like her, do you?”
With thinning patience, he repeated, “Her room number?”
She beamed, oblivious to his strained civility. “Two sixty-eight.” She waved. “Just go right up the elevators there and then turn to your left.”
Despite a headache, he forced himself to nod. “Thank you.”
The elevator door opened as soon as he pushed the button. Not much business at—he glanced at his watch—7:13 in the evening. The doors opened again almost immediately, and he had no choice but to step out. He turned left, as ordered. A white-capped woman at the nurses’ station was writing in a chart and didn’t notice him when he passed.
Most of the doors to patient rooms stood ajar. TVs were on. Voices murmured. Laughter came from one room. From another, an ominous gurgling. In 264 a woman in a hospital gown was shuffling to the bathroom, her IV pole going with her, someone who might be a daughter hovering at her side. 266 was dark.
The door to 268 was wide open and the first bed was unoccupied. The curtain around the second bed was pulled, blocking his view. He heard a voice beyond the curtain; a nurse, maybe? Adrian stopped and took a deep breath. He couldn’t understand why this was bothering him so much. Whether she was his mother or not, this woman was a stranger to him. An obligation. No more, no less.
He walked in.
Hooked to an IV and to monitors that softly beeped, a woman lay in the hospital bed.
One look, and he knew. Still as death, she was his mother. For a moment, he quit breathing.
Beside the bed, Lucy Peterson sat in a chair reading aloud.
Poetry, of all things.
She had a beautiful voice, surprisingly rich and expressive for a woman as subdued in appearance as she was. For a moment, he just listened, wondering if his mother heard at all. Was the voice a beacon, a golden glow, that led her back toward life? A puzzle that no longer made sense? Or was she no longer capable of understanding or caring?
However quiet his footfall, Lucy heard him and looked up, with a flash of those expressive blue eyes. She immediately closed the book without marking any place and set it on the table. “You’re here.”
She sounded ambivalent; pleased, maybe, in one way, less so in another. Glad he’d lived up to his word, but not sure she liked him?
He didn’t care, although he was equally ambivalent about her presence. He wanted to focus on this woman in the bed—his mother—with no witnesses to his emotional turbulence. And yet he felt obscurely grateful that Lucy was here, a buffer. For once in his life, he needed her brand of simple kindness.
In response to her words, but ignoring her tone, he said, “Why so surprised? You beat me here.”
“I didn’t have to stop to pack.”
He nodded. And made himself look fully at his mother’s face.
After a long moment, he said, almost conversationally, “Do you know she’s only fifty-six?”
“When I saw her driver’s license.”
“She looks…” He couldn’t finish.
Very softly, Lucy said, “I thought she might be seventy.”
His mother’s face was weathered and lined far beyond her years, although the bone structure was the same. The slightly pointed chin, too, that had given her an elfin appearance. He’d noticed it most when her mood was fey, although it was nearly sharp now, whittled by hardship. Her hair was white, and thin. Her hands, still atop the coverlet, were knobbed with arthritis.
This was what a lifetime without adequate nutrition or medical care or beauty products did. Elizabeth Rutledge had been a beautiful woman. Now she was an old one.
Still, he devoured the sight of her face, the slightness of the body beneath the covers, the tired hands, with a hunger that felt bottomless. Inside, he was still the child who needed his mom and knew she needed him. He stepped forward, gripping the round metal railing on this side of the bed. The pain in his chest seared him.
“Mom.” The word came out guttural, shocking him. He swallowed and tried again. “Mom. It’s me. Adrian.”
Of course, she didn’t stir; no flicker of response twitched even an eyelid. She breathed. In and out, unaided, the only sign of life beyond the numbers on the monitor.
“I wish I’d known where you were. I would have come to get you a long time ago.”
If he’d come two weeks ago, before the accident, would she have known him? She had changed, but at least in his memory she was an adult. How much did he resemble his ten-year-old self? Even his voice would still have been a child’s. What were his chances now of getting through to her?
After a minute, in self-defense, he raised his gaze to Lucy Peterson, who watched him. “What was that you were reading?”
She glanced at the book. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I think I told you—” she bit her lip “—how much your mother liked her poetry.”
So much, she’d believed she was Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And a host of other Elizabeths, real and imaginary. Just never herself, Elizabeth Hamlin Rutledge, once daughter of Burt and Lana Hamlin, then wife of Maxwell Rutledge and mother of Adrian.
Perhaps when he went away that summer and let go of his grip on her hand, she’d forgotten who she was. Had she lost herself that long ago?
“I
