Switched at Birth by Barry Rachin Read Free Book Online Page B

the nurse’s station a colored woman
was writing in a patient’s chart while a male orderly sorted pills
in paper cups arranged neatly on a medicine tray. A stocky,
attractive woman with short dark hair and pink smock exited a room
carrying a carton of juice. The woman hurried past toward the
nursing station. There was no recognition. Nothing.
“Adrian?”
    The woman abruptly turned and came
back. Staring at him for the longest time, her features dissolved
in a wispy smile. “Jason Mangarelli all grown up!” She leaned
forward and, as though it was the most ordinary thing in the world,
brushed her lips across his cheek.
    At the nurse’s station a telephone
rang. The fellow with the pill tray was locking the medicine
cabinet with a brass key. For a split second, it was like they were
back on the sofa at his parent’s house. On the television screen,
Bart Simpson was telling the French gendarme that he had been
abducted by evil wine merchants, who were watering down the spirits
with automotive antifreeze. “I’m off duty in ten minutes. Wait for
me outside in the parking lot.” Like an apparition, Adrian floated
off down the corridor disappearing into an adjacent room. Jason
went outside and sat in his car. He felt mildly disoriented, as
though time had begun flowing in the wrong direction, bleeding back
into the past and forward into an as yet, unfathomable future -
Einstein’s theory of relativity turned upside down. A dozen years
flushed down the toilet. Nothing had changed.
    Well, that wasn’t completely
true.
    The girl Jason knew back in Thatcher
Elementary School was a husky tomboy through and through. Back
then, Adrian Flanagan’s lower torso was fused with the upper half,
as though a ramrod was solidly fixed from tail bone to the nape of
the neck. Now her hips rocked with a supple, feminine grace. Adrian
had blossomed into a woman.
    A little after eleven o’clock, a steady
stream of employees began dribbling out of the building. “Want to
grab a coffee?” Jason asked.
    Adrian shook her head. “Got to get home
to my baby, but I only live a few miles down the road. You can
follow in your car.
    Jason went back to where he parked.
Adrian was a mother. Yes, a rumor to that effect circulated for
years. At fifteen, Adrian delivered a baby out of wedlock but
signed away maternal rights at birth. A month later she was
pregnant with a second child. Sadly, like everything else, the
ephemeral truth lay buried beneath a bruising avalanche of tall
tales, hearsay, melodrama and patently bad fiction.
     
    Adrian lived on the second floor of a
modest apartment complex in the Maryville section of town. When
they opened the door, a small dog barking hysterically rushed to
greet them. “My baby,” Adrian said by way of
explanation.
    “ And I thought …” He left
the sentence hanging.
    In the kitchen Adrian removed a plastic
container from the refrigerator. Scooping a serving into a bowl,
she warmed it in the microwave and placed the food on the
floor.
    Adrian held the container under Jason’s
nose. “Bowtie macaroni, sweet potato, peas, carrots, corn, sliced
apples, chicken livers and ground turkey.” The dog, a dirty gray
shiatsu, devoured a chunk of turkey then went to work on the
macaroni. Wolfing down the entire bowl in less than thirty seconds,
it licked its chops, then began rushing about the kitchen in a
frenzy with its corkscrew tail arched over the hind
quarters.
    “ You cook your own dog food
from scratch?”
    Adrian nodded. “The glutton wants more
but that’s all she gets.”
     

    Adrian’s dog, Mitzi, previously
belonged to an elderly woman brought to the nursing home from the
West End Trailer Park. Multi-infarct dementia - the lady had
suffered a series of mild strokes each of which further sapped her
sanity and physical strength. The addled resident had been living
at the Brentwood Nursing Home the better part of a week before she
let slip that her dog was locked up, abandoned in the