Someone Like Her (7 page)

“Mostly,” he finally said, dishing up a second burrito and adding salsa and sour cream. “Although in law school—” He stopped.

“What?”

After a moment, he shrugged. “I thought I’d go into criminal law. Most law students go through a phase of imagining themselves saving the world, or at least some lives. I ended up wooed into corporate law.”

“By money.”

He studied her suspiciously, trying to decide whether she was disgusted or simply neutral.

“That’s where the money is.”

Lucy only nodded, applying herself to her plate.

“Do you dream of doing something else?”

She pursed her lips, as if giving serious thought to the question. “I love to cook. I’ve always imagined I’d end up an executive chef at a chic restaurant in Seattle or some other city. Someplace people actually appreciate variety and unique flavor combinations. Where they don’t grumble because you don’t have that potato soup on the menu
every
day.”

Adrian grinned. “Didn’t you tell me it was one of your best?”

“Yes, but that’s not the point.” She sounded indignant. “If you want to eat the same thing every day, you might as well stay home. If you’re going to eat out, shouldn’t you want to try something new?”

“Not necessarily. I have favorites at some restaurants. Don’t you?”

“No, but I’m an adventurer.” She went very still, a couple of creases appearing in her forehead. In a much smaller voice, Lucy said, “About food. I guess not in any other way.”

She sounded sad, as though she were disappointed in herself for not living more recklessly.

Adrian sought for a way to comfort her, an unusual impulse for him, and finally settled on distraction.

“Why my mother?” he asked.

Her gaze flew to his. “What do you mean?”

“You obviously felt sorry for her. You’re kind, so why not offer her a meal now and then? But you did more than that. Something about her must have drawn you.”

She hesitated, and he wondered if she was reconsidering some glib answer, as he’d done earlier.

“A lot of things,” Lucy said finally. “I loved it when she talked about books, and gardens, and when she told
stories. I’d swear she’d
known
Bonnie Prince Charlie. Although I have to say, she made me curious enough to read a biography about him, and she was way more sympathetic to him than he deserved.” She sounded indignant, as though it were his fault his mother had been such a romantic.

“At least you didn’t have to dress up as him,” Adrian said involuntarily.

Her eyes widened. “You did?”

He couldn’t remember ever telling anyone else about the dramas he and Mom had reenacted. With a grimace, he said, “I’m afraid I wore kneesocks and an old plaid skirt of hers. I endured it only because she let me stick a steak knife in the sock. Seems as if I had a plastic sword, too.”

Lucy giggled. “Oh, dear. That’s a picture.”

“Not a pretty one.” He should have been embarrassed. Why
had
he told her? Oddly enough, her laughter let him enjoy the memory.

“Who else did you act out?”

“Oh, King Richard the First. White cross cut out of an old pillowcase, pinned on…I don’t know, a red vest of Mom’s, maybe?” He was thinking less about the memories than about Lucy, who listened as if she imagined herself playing out the productions with him and his mother. Her mouth, he thought irrelevantly, was very kissable when it curved like that. Almost at random, he continued, “Let’s see…I was supposed to be Winston Churchill once. I read a speech into a pretend microphone. Paper towel roll, I think. My dad had a hat that looked enough like Churchill’s bowler hats, I guess, to satisfy Mom. I didn’t get what he—I—was saying,
except that it was supposed to be noble stuff that would make his countrymen strong in wartime. Churchill wasn’t anywhere near as much fun as Richard going to the Crusades.”

Once again she chuckled. “History lessons wrapped in fun.”

“I suppose they were. They seemed like games to me. And I’m not so sure Mom really thought she was teaching me anything. I think we acted out stories for her benefit.”

“But you enjoyed them, too.”

“When I was younger. By that last summer, I was starting to get embarrassed. Guys didn’t dress up. I think—” He moved his shoulders uncomfortably.

Lucy finished for him. “Soon, you would have told her no.”

He nodded. “I was thinking about that earlier. I felt so protective of her. But what would have happened when I got to be twelve, thirteen, and didn’t want my friends to notice how weird she was?”

She looked at him with understanding. “So now you feel guilty about something that didn’t happen.”

“No.” He scowled. “Oh, hell. Maybe. Because I was starting to have stirrings of dissatisfaction. They made me feel disloyal. Then she disappeared, and I never faced any of those decisions. Which made me wonder—” He let out a ragged breath, surprised at the force of long-ago emotions.

“You thought it might be your fault,” Lucy said softly.

“Yeah. I suppose…Yeah.” He rubbed a hand over his chin. “Stupid, huh?”

“Natural, don’t you think? Kids are egocentric
enough to believe somewhere inside that everything happens because of them. Did you think your mom had gone away because she sensed that you were ashamed of her? Or did you think your father had gotten rid of her because he didn’t think she was good for you?”

“I don’t know,” Adrian said slowly. “I just felt guilty. Shocked and lonely and scared, but guilty, too.”

“And I suppose your father—” she named him as if he were Attila the Hun “—didn’t talk to you about her or what happened.”

He gave a grunt that masqueraded as a laugh. “Our sole conversation about Mom took about five minutes. After that, he froze me out if I tried to ask about her.”

“What a…a creep!” She pressed her lips together. “I suppose I shouldn’t say that about your father, but honestly.”

“She did embarrass him. I knew even then. As far as he was concerned, a problem was solved. Years later, he looked irritated when I mentioned something that happened when we were still a family. ‘Old history,’ he said, like that meant it wasn’t worth acknowledgement.”

He could tell Lucy wanted to burst out with another condemnation of his father and barely restrained herself. Watching her struggle amused him enough that he was able to relax.

“It’s okay. You won’t hurt my feelings,” he told her.

“Honestly!” she exclaimed again. “It’s a wonder you’re not in psychotherapy.” She flushed. “That is, maybe you are. I don’t mean there’s anything wrong—”

Adrian laughed. “No. I’m not.”

Maybe he should be, but the truth was that he’d learned it was easier to cut off that part of his life. Two weeks ago,
if someone had asked about his mother, he’d have likely shrugged and dismissed the question.
Old history.

God,
he thought.
I’ve become him.

Not a welcome realization, nor the first time he’d had it.

He couldn’t pretend to know who he’d become since coming to Middleton, though. All he seemed to do was talk about his feelings, at least around Lucy. And think about ’em. Some kind of floodgate had opened, and the past was rushing through. He’d tried surfing in Hawaii once, and hated the panic that had clawed at him when he fell from the board and the waves flung him over and over until he didn’t know up from down.

A kernel of that same panic knotted in his gut, and he didn’t like the sensation now any better. This was idiotic. He hadn’t changed because his mother had unexpectedly turned up or because he’d spent a grand total of two days in this godforsaken town. All he was doing was a research job. He’d find out what he could about his mother, then file the memories where they belonged and do what he had to for her.

End of story.

He asked Lucy…something. He couldn’t have said what, but it got her talking about Middleton with a fondness she didn’t seem to realize she felt. And put the conversation back where he wanted it: superficial, pleasant, unmemorable.

A
FTER
A
DRIAN LEFT
without asking when he would see her again, Lucy resolved to stay away from the hospital on Monday. The hat lady had her son now and no longer needed Lucy. If Lucy kept showing up there, it might look as if she were seeking him out.

If only she weren’t attracted to him, it wouldn’t have occurred to her to worry about any such thing. Since she was, she’d become ridiculously self-conscious about everything she said and did. So…the best thing was to avoid him, unless he actually came looking for her.

Having loaded the dishwasher, she added soap, set the dial to Wash and gave a firm nod. She then stood there without the slightest idea how she’d spend the rest of the afternoon, never mind all day tomorrow with the café closed.

Talk about ridiculous. Of course she had things to do. On her days off, she always had a long list of household chores and errands, never mind plans for what she’d do if only she came up with a spare hour, which she rarely did.

The trouble was, she’d gotten up extra early this morning to clean house, since she was having company, and she didn’t really need groceries. Most every busi
ness in town was closed on Sunday and she had no particular errands to run anyway.

She could be lazy and read. Pour some lemonade and take it and her book outside, since the day was so nice.

But despite the early-morning housecleaning and the cooking, Lucy still felt…restless. She wanted to think over everything she’d learned about the hat lady and her son, but she wanted to be doing something while she thought.

Maybe…why, maybe she’d dig out the flower bed under the front window that she’d dreamed about for so long. She hadn’t decided what to put in it yet, but digging the sod out and amending the soil would be plenty of work for one—or even two—days. Think how much fun it would be then to go to the nursery and pick out the plants.

A pang struck her, because the hat lady wouldn’t be with her to help decide. But this could be…well, a sort of tribute.

No, she decided hastily, having been struck by a deeper pang, not a tribute. That sounded like a memorial, and the hat lady could wake up anytime. Thinking about her as if she were dead was just wrong.

Still, if she did recover, she’d like knowing that Lucy had finally started the garden they’d so often talked about. And this single bed beneath the window was only the beginning; there’d be more the hat lady could help with.

If her son didn’t sweep her away to a nursing home in Seattle.

Adrian wouldn’t do that if she
really
recovered, would he? If so, Lucy decided she’d have her for visits. The hat lady could see all her friends and favorite haunts, and they could plan the garden.

A bed on the other side of the porch, Lucy was certain about that, and ones extending to each side of the walkway. She wanted an arch covered with roses and clematis, too, right there where her concrete walk turned in from the sidewalk. She’d always wished she had boxwood hedges, too, but they took so long to grow…

Well, it’s past time you start,
she told herself, and quit just imagining. She couldn’t even think why she
had
hesitated so long. Had she become too used to plodding along day to day, not taking time to do anything just to please herself? Or was it the other way around, that she’d been secretly afraid starting a garden was an acknowledgement that she wasn’t going anywhere after all?

She found both possibilities disquieting, but refused to examine them too closely. Today, she would make a beginning.

Leaving the dishwasher running, Lucy went to her bedroom and changed into her oldest jeans and a T-shirt with a tomato-sauce stain down the front she’d never managed to get out.

The gardening gloves she found in the garage out back were stiff from disuse and the shovel was rusting. The tire on the wheelbarrow looked a little low on air, but was still rolling. None of that was going to stop her. The gloves would become pliable, and she could take some steel wool to the shovel another day. And if she really started gardening seriously, she’d want a better wheelbarrow anyway. Maybe one of those garden carts, deep and stable.

She might as well do this right. Because—why not admit it?—she wasn’t likely, daydreams aside, to sell the café and embark on some adventure. Honestly, she
was beginning to wonder whether she was really disappointed in herself because she hadn’t overcome all obstacles to follow some inchoate dream. Maybe what actually disappointed her most was that she didn’t have any big dreams. The truth was, she was pretty contented day to day, satisfied by what she
had
achieved.

Maybe,
she thought ruefully,
I’m just not very exciting, if starting a garden is one of my big dreams.

A few minutes later, she’d dragged the hose out front and had moved it a dozen times to outline the bed she saw in her mind’s eye. She stretched the hose into a curve, but decided a rectangular shape suited the house better. Not until she was satisfied with the dimensions did she start to dig.

Her shovel bit into the sod and sank deep. With triumph, she lifted out the first shovelful, reached down and shook loose dirt back into the hole, then tossed grass and roots into the wheelbarrow.

Tomorrow,
she thought,
I’ll sneak into the hospital when I know Adrian won’t be there and I’ll tell the hat lady all about the beginning of my garden.

A real garden.

She wondered if Adrian Rutledge, buttoned-down attorney, had any hobbies or dreams. Or did he deny that side of himself because it reminded him too much of his mother?

She wondered what
he
was doing with the rest of his day. And with tomorrow.

W
ITHIN HALF
an hour of leaving Lucy’s, Adrian wished he’d lingered. What was he going to do with himself? Hang around the hospital all afternoon and evening?

He did feel obligated to drive straight there and settle in at his mother’s bedside for another uncomfortable, one-sided talk.

She didn’t look better. If anything, her face seemed more sunken today, as if the flesh had begun the process of drying up, and he was being given a glimpse of how she’d look when she was laid in her coffin. Adrian wished desperately he could see her eyes and some spark of the mother he remembered.

“I went through your things today,” he told her, because the silence was worse than hearing his own voice. “I felt bad, as if I was intruding.”

It was rather like that moment in childhood, he realized, when it struck you like a lightning bolt that your parents were regular people, not just Mom and Dad. And you had no idea how other people might perceive them. Heck, you weren’t sure who they actually were. So you went looking.

But you were afraid of what you’d find. He had been apprehensive. He still was. He wanted his mother to be the woman he remembered—sad sometimes, yes, confused, too, but also fun and wise and capable of true joy. He didn’t want to find out she’d become angry or disgusting in some way or…He didn’t know. Someone else. Someone he didn’t know and never would.

The mystery of where she’d gone and who she’d become ate at him. There was a reason he had blocked her out all these years. Her mysteries left a hollow in him, too. After walling himself off all those years ago, Adrian didn’t like knowing that any part of his deepest self depended on another person.

Lucy Peterson’s face flickered before him then, and
he wasn’t sure why. Maybe because he could imagine her shaking her head and saying, “Of course we all depend on each other!” Growing up in this small town, she’d never known a day without the interconnections of family, friends and neighbors. Maybe that’s why she’d come back after college. Thinking she wanted to strike out on her own was one thing; actually wrenching herself free of the web of roots that tangled with her own was another altogether. Probably she needed those to sustain her.

Adrian shook his head, thinking he’d be strangled by those same roots and all the well-meaning people.

“The conch shell is beautiful. Could you hear the ocean in it?” He leaned forward, watching his mother’s face for some shadow of memory. “That piece of china, too. I remember when I found it, you telling me the ocean must have washed it all the way from China. Now, I’d just think it was a broken piece of pottery and drop it back onto the beach. But you made me think it was magical. You were good at doing that, Mom. Making ordinary things shimmer, as if they were special.” He paused. “I let myself forget the way you did that. You leaving me with Dad, I guess I started seeing things more his way. I’m sorry.”

He didn’t even know what he was apologizing for. Letting his father have his way? Or the fact that in his grief and anger and guilt he’d
wanted
to forget his mother, who had abandoned him?

Adrian sat silent for a minute, long enough to become aware again of the muted beeps of the monitors, to hear voices and a shushed laugh outside the door, the brisk crepe-soled footsteps of a nurse passing in the hall. But
the quiet in here was overwhelming, the few sounds isolated and oddly lonely. Once again, he wished he’d brought something to read aloud.

“Lucy’s going to take your books back to the library. I couldn’t tell if you’d read them yet or not.” He paused. “I met the librarian the other day. Maybe I already told you. She misses you. She says you’re her favorite patron. Now she doesn’t have anybody to talk about books with.”

Was his mother’s color becoming worse, too? The word
waxen
had come to him when he first saw her, but now it seemed her skin had taken on a yellow tinge as well. Had the doctor noticed? Did that mean her organs were trying to shut down?

He sat back in the chair, feeling stunned. Wasn’t it strange how little prepared he was for the idea that she would die without ever waking up. When he arrived Friday, he’d mostly been in shock. The idea that this frail, white-haired woman lying in the bed was his mother hadn’t seemed quite real to him. Maybe it still didn’t. But the woman his mother had been before she disappeared had come alive for him again, if only in the reawakening of his memories.

Looking at the prominence of her bones and the pallor of her skin, Adrian thought,
I might not need to move her to a nursing home near me.
She might simply slip away.

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.