The Trouble with Joe

by Emilie Richards

  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 Middlesomething? 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 wish I knew...” he murmured, unsure what he wished. For the true story of that summer, and the year that followed? To find out what happened after, how she’d washed up here, how she had come to grasp for identities that had only a given name in common with her true self? All of the above?

  “Ah,” said a voice behind him. “You must be the son.”

  Adrian let go of the railing and turned. The doctor who’d entered was an elderly man, short and cherubic, head bald but for a white tonsure. He wore a lab coat open over a plaid golf shirt. Smiling, he held out his hand and they shook.

  Then he looked past Adrian and shook his head in disapproval. “Lucy, you’re back. You know, she won’t float away if you go home and watch a sitcom, take a long bath, get to bed early.”

  Adrian supposed that was a good way to describe his childish fears about his mother: that she might float away if he let go. There had always been something insubstantial about her, not quite anchored to the here and now.

  Lucy smiled, but said, “I didn’t want Mr. Rutledge to feel abandoned.”

  Adrian knew vaguely that women like this did exist—caretakers, nurturers. Or perhaps he was jumping to a conclusion where she was concerned. Maybe it was only his mother who inspired this fierce need to protect.

  “It sounds as if Ms. Peterson went to a lot of effort to locate me,” he said.

  “And thank God she succeeded. Ah...I’m Ben Slater.”

  “I appreciate your taking care of her, Doctor. I’m hoping you can tell me more about what’s going on with my mother so that I can make decisions about her care.”

  “I haven’t been able to do much. The truth is, with brain injuries we’re most often left waiting. However much we learn, there’s more we don’t know. Someone who got a minor knock on the head dies, someone who falls ten stories to the sidewalk barely has a headache. I wish I could tell you how much damage she sustained, but I can’t. She has a broken hip and ribs as well as some internal bleeding from the impact of the car, but the real problem is that she was lifted in the air and flung a fair distance onto the pavement. She struck her head hard. We did relieve some swelling in the brain, but it’s subsided satisfactorily. She may yet simply open her eyes and ask where she is.”

  And she may not. Adrian had no trouble hearing what Slater didn’t say.

  On the other hand, how many head injuries had this small-town doc actually seen? What was he? Their trauma specialist? They did have an E.R., so they must have a specialist.

  “Has she been seen by a neurologist?” Adrian asked, knowing the answer.

  “Oh, I’m a neurosurgeon,” Dr. Slater said cheerily. “Retired, of course. My wife was from Middleton, and we always intended to retire here. But I still do some consulting.”

  This fat little guy in the plaid shirt was a neurosurgeon? Was that possible?

  Barely managing to suppress his you’ve-got-to-be-kidding reaction, Adrian asked, “Where did you work?”

  “Ended up at Harborview in Seattle. I was on the University of Washington faculty.”

  Adrian’s preconceptions didn’t quite vanish—it was more like watching a piece of paper slowly burn until only grey, weightless ash hung insubstantially in the air. His mother wasn’t being cared for by some small-town practitioner who’d probably been in the bottom quarter of his class. By bizarre chance, her doctor might be one of the most highly qualified specialists in the country.

  “My mother is fortunate you happened to be here.”

  “She would have been if I could fix her. I can’t.”

  “And you don’t think anyone can.”

  He shook his head, his gaze resting on his patient’s face. “It’s up to her now. Or to God, if you believe. Lucy—” he smiled at the young woman “—may do more good by sitting here talking and reading to your mother than I can with all the technology at my disposal.”

  Neurosurgeons were not known for their humility or fatalism. Adrian still had trouble believing in this one. But perhaps a lifetime of trying to salvage brain-damaged people made a man both fatalistic and humble.

  Dr. Slater talked some more, about reflexes and brainwaves, but Adrian had begun to feel numb. The guy noticed, and abruptly stopped. “We should talk about this tomorrow. I understand you haven’t seen your mother in years. You must be in shock.”

  “You could say that,” Adrian admitted.

  “Lucy,” the doctor said briskly, “did you make arrangements for him for the night?”

  Rebellion stirred, but honestly Adrian hoped she had a better suggestion than the crummy motel with kitchenettes he’d seen half a mile back.

  “Yes, Sam’s holding a room for him,” she said. “If that’s all right,” she added, looking at him.

  “Sam?”

  “My sister Samantha. She owns a bed-and-breakfast. It’s very nice.”

  He nodded. “Then thank you.”

  “And unless you had dinner on the way...” Seeing his expression, she said firmly, “We’ll stop at the café on the way. It’s late, but we’ll come up with something.”

  “Good.” The doctor patted her hand, shook Adrian’s, said “I’ll see you tomorrow,” then departed.

  Lucy picked up her book and started toward the door in turn. “I’ll leave you alone with your mother for a few minutes. Just come on out when you’re ready.”

  He was ready now, but in the face of her faith that he wanted to commune with this unconscious woman, he once again stepped to the bedside and looked down at her face. The resemblance to the mother he remembered was undeniably there, but in a way that made him uncomfortable. Age aside, it was like the difference between a living, breathing person and an eerily real cast of that person at a wax museum. He might as well have been standing here looking at his mother’s body at the morgue.

  But he knew why Lucy had been reading aloud. The silence had to be filled. “It’s Adrian,” he said tentatively. “I missed you. I didn’t know what happened. Why you went away. I still don’t know. I’d like to hear about it, when you wake up.”

  He couldn’t quite bring himself to touch her. Not surprising, given that he wasn’t much for hugs and hand-holding. Maybe he was afraid he’d find her hands to be icy cold.

  “Well. Ah. I’ll be back in the morning. I’ll probably make arrangements to move you to Seattle, where you can be close to me.”

  An uneasy sense that she might, in fact, not like his plan stirred in him, but what the hell else was he supposed to do? Leave her here and drive back and forth for obligatory visits? Did they even have a long-term nursing facility here, assuming that’s what she required?

  He cleared his throat, said, “Good night,” and escaped.

  * * *

  LUCY WAS PRETTY sure she didn’t like Adrian Rutledge, but she was prepared to feel sorry for him when he walked out of his mother’s hospital room. This had to be hard for him.

  However, his expression was utterly composed when he appeared. “You needn’t feel you have to feed me. If you just want to tell me the options and directions to the bed-and-breakfast.”

 
“I have to stop by the café and see how they’re doing without me,” she explained. “I own it. Friday evening is one of our busiest times. I’m usually there. I may not have time to sit down with you.”

  He didn’t look thrilled to be going anywhere with her, but finally nodded. “Fine. Should I follow you?”

  “My car’s right out front. Yours, too, I assume?”

  He nodded again, the motion a little jerky. Maybe he wasn’t as cold as he seemed. Lucy tried to imagine how disoriented he must feel by now.

  Be charitable, she reminded herself. For the hat lady’s sake, if not his.

  Lisa Enger, the night nurse, greeted them. “I’ll keep a good eye on her,” she promised.

  They rode down in the elevator silently, both staring straight ahead like two strangers pretending the other wasn’t there. Lucy was usually able to chat with just about anybody, but she was pretty sure he wouldn’t welcome conversation right now. Not until they were out in the parking lot did she speak.

  “There’s my car.”

  He nodded and pointed out his, a gray Mercedes sedan.

  “I’ll come down your row.”

  “All right.”

  Her small Ford Escort felt shabbier when the Mercedes fell in behind it, and she sympathized. She felt plain and uninteresting in his presence, too. She and her car had a lot in common.

  He parked beyond her on Olympic Avenue half a block from the café, then joined her on the sidewalk.

  “I’m sorry you had to take the day off to drive all the way to Seattle.”

  “Would you have believed a word I said if I’d just called?”

  He was silent until they reached the door. “I don’t know.”

  Well, at least he was honest.