boy would be around to object or ask questions when Elizabeth was sent away.
Supposedly she’d gone to a mental hospital. His father had never taken Adrian to visit, probably never visited himself. Perhaps a year later he’d told Adrian that she had checked herself out of the hospital.
With a shrug, he said, “Clearly, she didn’t want to get well and come home. I doubt we’ll ever hear from her again.”
Subject dismissed. That was the last said between them. The last that ever would be said; his father had died two years ago in a small plane crash.
Adrian moved his shoulders to release tension. Let the good citizens of Middleton stare; he didn’t care what they thought. He was there to claim his mother, that was all.
What if he didn’t recognize her? If he gazed at the face of this unconscious woman and couldn’t find even a trace of the mother he remembered in her?
Ask for DNA testing, of course, but was that really what worried him? Or did his unease come from a fear that he wouldn’t recognize her on a more primitive level? Shouldn’t he know his mother? What if he saw her and felt nothing?
He grunted and started the car as the line in front of him began to move. God knows he hadn’t felt much for his mother. Why would he expect to, for a woman he hadn’t seen in twenty-three years?
Usually, he would have stayed in his car during the crossing and worked. But his mood was strange today, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to concentrate. Instead, he followed most of the passengers to the upper deck, then went outside at the prow.
This early in the spring, the wind on the sound had a bite. He hadn’t bothered to change clothes at home, had stopped at his Belltown condominium only long enough to throw what he thought he’d need into a suitcase. He buttoned his suit jacket to keep his tie from whipping over his shoulders, leaned against the railing and watched the gulls swoop over the ferry and the lateafternoon sunlight dance in shards off the choppy waves.
Why would his mother have chosen Middleton? Adrian wondered. How had she even found it? It was barely a dot on the map, likely a logging town once upon a time. Logging had been the major industry over here on the Olympic Peninsula until the forests had been devastated and hard times had come. Tourism had replaced logging on much of the peninsula, but what tourist would seek out Middleton, for God’s sake? It wasn’t on Hood Canal or the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the north. It was out in the middle of goddamn nowhere.
Why, Mom? Why?
He drove off the ferry at Winslow, on the tip of Bainbridge Island, then followed the two-lane highway that was a near straight-shot the length of the island, across the bridge and past the quaint town of Poulsbo. From then on, civilization pretty much disappeared but for a few gas stations and houses. Traffic was heavy, with this a Friday, so he couldn’t eat up the miles the way he’d have liked to. No chance to pass, no advantage if he’d been able to. He crossed the Hood Canal Bridge, the water glittering in the setting sunlight. Summer homes clung like barnacles along the shore. Then forest closed in, second-growth and empty of any evidence of human habitation.
Reluctance swelled in him and clotted in his chest. A couple of times he rubbed his breastbone as if he’d relieve heartburn. The light was fading by the time he spotted the sign: Middleton, 5 Miles.
He was the only one in the line of traffic to make the turn. And why would anyone? Along with distaste for what lay ahead came increasing bafflement at his mother’s choice. How had she even gotten here? Did the town boast a Greyhound station? Had she gone as far as her money held out? Stabbed her finger at a map? Or had some vagary of fate washed her up here?
So close to Seattle, and yet she’d never tried to get in touch with him.
So weirdly far from Seattle in every way that counted.
The speed limit dropped to thirty-five and he obediently slowed as the highway—if you could dignify it with that name—entered the outskirts. He saw the Safeway store almost immediately, and his foot lifted involuntarily from the gas pedal. Here. She was hit here. Flung to one of these narrow paved shoulders. With dark encroaching, he couldn’t see where, or if any evidence remained.
Ahead, he saw 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