Free Someone Like Her by Janice Kay Johnson Page A

looking at her face, which seemed to havemore color tonight. She could have simply been asleep. Her eyelids were traced with the pale blue lines of veins beneath the skin. As he stared, her lids quivered.
    Was she trying to open her eyes? He tensed, watching, scarcely breathing for fear of missing some tiny movement. None came, and gradually he relaxed. He’d seen some reflex, no more. Or perhaps she was still capable of dreaming. If so, did her unconscious brain weave the voices she heard into those dreams?
    He cleared his throat. “Today I was remembering how you read to me every night. The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea. I went to Greece a couple of years ago. Not to Crete, but to Athens and one of the other islands. Everything I saw was colored by those books. When you get better, maybe we could go together. I’d like to see Knossos.”
    He rambled some more, about other books they’d read, about the jokes she’d taken such childlike delight in and still did, according to Cindy. He’d gone through a phase of thinking knock-knock jokes were the funniest thing ever. His father had refused to participate in them. His mother’s face would invariably brighten and she’d say happily, “Who’s there?” She had made him feel incredibly witty.
    Adrian couldn’t remember the last time he’d told a joke. He laughed at the occasional off-color ones told in the locker room at his health club, but he hadn’t had a good belly laugh in…God. Years. Humor had never been uncomplicated for him again, after his mother went away.
    He kept wishing Lucy would walk in, while knowing she wouldn’t. She’d told him that Saturday night washer busiest of the week. The café closed at ten, but she was probably busy cleaning the kitchen and closing out the cash register until midnight or later. Visiting hours would be long over. He’d felt half-trapped by her presence before, both grateful and resentful that she insisted on being here.
    Now…damn it, he wanted to tell her what Cindy and George had said. He wanted her to talk about the perplexing woman who lay in the hospital bed and who, even in her mental illness, had been a chameleon, someone different to each person who knew her. He had a suspicion that if anyone had known her through and through, it was Lucy.
    “She made me laugh like no one else,” the middle-aged hairdresser with cheap-looking red curls had told him.
    “I know she took the food I put out back for her,” the balding grocer said, “but sometimes even when I saw her come down the alley I had trouble seeing her. You know? It was like she was a ghost. Not quite there. As though she wanted to be invisible.”
    Was it Lucy who’d said she was a chameleon? But why the protective coloration around the kind, portly grocer when she was so capable of letting loose peals of laughter around Cindy of the crimson curls? Was it because George was a man, and she was afraid of men?
    Adrian tried to remember how his mother had related to men back when he was a child, but in those memories it seemed he and Mom were always alone. She’d gone to some parent-teacher meetings, but his elementary school teachers had all been women. His parents hadn’t entertained, that he remembered. Even then he’d known Dad was ashamed of her. There had been…not fights.Just scenes, when his father, wearing a dark suit or even a tuxedo, had left the house in the evening and his mother had looked unbearably sad when the front door shut in her face.
    Had she actually been afraid of Dad? he wondered. He’d never seen his father raise his hand to her, but he’d been very good at freezing her with one look or a few scathing words. At best he wasn’t a warm man, and Adrian could recall no scrap of tenderness between them. They’d had separate bedrooms, something he’d been too young then to think twice about. Likely, to Adrian’s father she’d been more like a flighty, untrustworthy child than a wife, and a child who would never