Someone Like Her Read Online Free Page A

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 childwho 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