The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

by Rhonda Riley

  When they left, the salt shaker on the table undulated slowly to some music I couldn’t quite hear. One of the boys had been carrying a mandolin. “That boy must be a very good musician,” I said and pointed to the dancing salt shaker.

  Adam gave the table a long, quizzical look. We both sat down again.

  “The flowers are beautiful,” he said. I’d cut some zinnias and lantana and put them in a bottle. They danced, too. The bright pink, gold, and orange petals trembled delicately, keeping time with the salt shaker. They were the most beautiful flowers I’d ever seen. Their hairy emerald leaves curled gently, waving in a breeze. I bent and inhaled the simplicity of tart chlorophyll and sunshine. When I opened my eyes, the room glowed.

  Adam, fluctuating between the definite and indefinite, watched me. I held my arms out to him in an invitation. He was surprised, but game. I tapped time on his shoulder as we waltzed around the table. He was the most beautiful and exquisite man. So right and so good.

  The whole world was right and good and sweet and we danced. The breeze swirled around us, cooling our skin. I smelled horse, marigold, leather, dirt, and sweat on us. I heard the birds outside, an infinity of calls. The stabled horses breathed and shuffled. Farther out in the pasture, more animals and the voices of the kids, a faint echo of chirps. A car rattled down the road. Our home hummed around us. The room spun slowly and glowed as we danced. We kissed and got lost in the dark forest of kissing; I slowly sank to the floor, pulling Adam with me.

  A wave of sound washed down the tube of the hall and curled itself into and out of footsteps, then giggles. There seemed to be a million of them in the hall, thousands of young people, staring down at us. Their faces looked more beautiful and funnier than any I’d ever seen.

  “Excuse us, Mr., Mrs. Hope,” someone said in a high, tinny voice. It was the funniest thing I’d ever heard. I was gone, rolling on the floor and giggling. The joke was contagious. Every time Adam looked at me, he laughed, too. Wires of hilarity coursed through my face and stomach until I ached.

  Then, gradually, we quieted, the wires of laughter loosened. Limp, we watched the undulant ceiling form and reform itself, the skin of the room. We breathed and held hands, lying on the floor, and listened as the house breathed around us. The birdsong brimmed on and on.

  The ceiling and the birds were too active, and I turned to Adam.

  He grinned. “Why are we still on the floor?”

  “Because we can be.” I held his face in my hands and got closer. He hummed his sweet bell tone, a lilting spring-green sound. His face began to come apart, disintegrating into its individual features, but the change did not disturb me. I moved into his changing face, closer, until I could see nothing but the dark, bright black of his pupils, the endlessness of him. His features dissembled then reassembled into another complete face. A man, his mouth open in rage and pain. Then he was an Asian woman, large-eyed, expectant. Then a calm, fair child. On and on. Face after face. Each face distinct and whole, historied. Faster and faster, the changes came. Face after face. Like a current sucking me out of myself.

  I cried out, jerked away, and shut my eyes.

  Then there was just light and breath, the music of him, his essential beautiful alienness. He rose and rose and rose all around. He touched my face. The whisper of his fingertips on my cheek surged down my body and out my feet. A cry jolted me and I realized that the cry had come from me, my own voice of pleasure. I sank back onto my kitchen floor and lay beside my ordinary husband, the father of my children.

  Children. Daughters. There was a knife, dark and solid in that thought, but I could not identify it.

  I told Adam about the knife. He told me that the Kool-Aid must have something in it. He felt a little funny.

  “I’ll say,” I agreed.

  In a single fluid move, he got off the floor and took a sip.

  I angled myself up and drained my glass. To me, it tasted like too many things I could not name. “What kind of Kool-Aid is this?”

  “Exactly.” Adam peered at the glass in his hand. “This is the kind of Kool-Aid we need to ask questions about. I’ve read about kids putting LSD in Kool-Aid as a kind of test to see how ‘cool’ someone is.” I followed him to the sink and watched him rinse his glass. The swirl of pink water laughed down the drain.

  Adam picked up the pitcher and sniffed the Kool-Aid. “There must have been eight or ten gallons of this in the coolers I saw some kids lug into the kitchen earlier.” He scowled, somehow both comic and paternal. “How do you feel?”

  I rubbed his shoulder, my warmth for him erupting in my chest, radiating down my arm.

  “Wonderful.” I giggled. “Go! Go find out what it is. I want to know.” I pulled him toward the back door and pushed the screen open. “I should go lie down again. I’ll wait for you in bed.”

  He kissed me softly, then obediently set off into the darkness, an inch of brilliant candy-red sloshing in the pitcher he still held. He weaved his graceful way between the cars and vans parked behind the house. His mobility amazed me.

  I was no longer sure I had feet, but I stepped outside and looked up. The night sky shimmered with points and streaks of pinks, lavenders, and oranges. Birdcalls slid through. The dark knife remained unnamed, solemn and quiet in the press of sound and color. Odors of hay and horses and wood and young people wafted by. Days or minutes may have passed since I’d sat on the couch reading. Time had turned to rubber. I was happy, very happy until the ground went red—first the rust-red of Carolina clay then blood-red. Then, the dark knife ripped the world in two and everything came in. An animal howl filled me. Jennie! Jennie! Jennie! But I could not bring her face before me. Just darkness. The dark immenseness. Hated, hated darkness. In me, on me.

  Then I was inside on the bathroom floor, tearing my shirt off. Sorrow sparking through my clothes as I threw them down. My face was like wax in the heat, my bones too close to the surface. I had to turn from my own reflection in the mirror. I sat with my knees pulled up to my chest, afraid of the sorrow and darkness that breathed through me, faster and faster, until a large hand reached around from behind me. The hand told me that I was alone, that it was my own breath I heard. Those words spread a calm through me. I uncoiled in the thick, warm air and listened. I heard that everything was okay. Good. There was just is. Is-ness.

  Is filled the bathroom. In all directions it continued. Endless.

  After a while, I ran a bath, filling the tub with water. And the water was like water all over the earth. Iridescent. Alive.

  Naked, I saw that everything about me was good. In the moonlight through the window, the slackness of my lower belly and my breasts, the silvery stain of old pregnancy stretch marks, the little veins on my legs and ankles, the darker freckling on the backs of my hands and my arms, the colors of my hair dulling toward gray were no longer signs of age but beauty, simple and present as the joints in my wrist, as the crickets outside and the sparkle of the bath water through my hands. All was right and wondrous, sweet, infinite.

  I eased down into the cool bath. My body loosened into the water and I knew again without any doubt that the world was well and beautiful. Not all the time and not for everyone, but for the All which the individual and the singular is a part of. I had first known this, beyond any reason, when I was a child alone in the woods, and I knew it again. I breathed deeply and calmly. Stunned.

  The pale, half-drawn shower curtain, the bathroom walls, and the small square of the bathroom window seemed to breathe with me. I was in a room in a house on a ranch in a state in a nation in a world that turned.

  Then a young man appeared at the toilet. It seemed right that he should be there, peeing with his back to me, but I also sensed there was something unusual about the two of us being in the bathroom together. He sang a few bars of a jumpy little tune. He jigged his shoulders like a gnome. Then he turned and let out a yelp as he zipped up. “Mrs. Hope!” He rubbed his face and eyes. There was still something I couldn’t understand. I didn’t bother to
cover myself as we stared at each other. My inability to comprehend what was going on struck me as hysterically funny and I burst out laughing. He bumbled out the door, calling, “Everything’s cool! I’ll get help! Rosie’s right on the front porch!”

  Moments later, Gracie and Rosie exploded into the bathroom, upset over something, turning on blinding lights. They spouted a chorus. “It’s two in the morning. What are you doing in the bathtub in the dark? What happened? Are you okay?” To appease them, I let them dry me and dress me. They kept asking if I was okay. They moved too much, they talked too much, and there was too much I did not understand. Funny, sweet girls. They glowed like daughters, but finally I told them to shut up.

  They led me to the bed. I propped myself up on the pillows. The sheets glittered white around me. Then Gracie and Rosie sat in the dark on either side of me like sentinels. A good way to go to bed.

  I sighed. My body relaxed against the headboard. When I closed my eyes, I could see all my nerves swept clean. Sweet and new as the moment after sexual climax.

  “What are we waiting for?” I asked. “Adam?”

  “Where is Daddy?” Rosie started to rise from the bed. “I’ll go—”

  I touched her warm shoulder. “No, wait here with me. He’s coming back.”

  She leaned closer again. “Okay, Momma. We’re both here with you. Now, how much of it did you drink?”

  “I drank this much.” I laughed and spread my arms. But the sentinels did not laugh. Gradually, I stopped giggling, cowed by their solemnity.

  “Jennie,” I said. “She was a knife.”

  “Oh, Momma!” Gracie choked.

  “She’s okay now, Momma. We’re all okay,” Rosie took my hand.

  Gracie began to cry, softly. I reached over and rubbed her back until she stopped. Then she slept, slumped against my shoulder. Rosie fell asleep, too.

  Gradually, something like sleep moved through me. I dozed in waves of bright, dense dreams, surfacing long enough to awaken the girls and send them to their rooms. Several times, I had to assure them that I was okay. They murmured apologetically as they stumbled in the darkness toward the door.

  Then I slept, a true, deep sleep.

  When I next awoke, the brilliance of noon light washed through the bedroom and Adam lay next to me, propped up on his elbow. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded, though I had no idea how okay I was. “And you?”

  “Oh, I’m fine. But I’m sorry I didn’t get back before you fell asleep.”

  I shook my head. “It’s all right. I sent you out to . . .” I had a sudden vivid recollection of his face changing. I rubbed my eyes and pulled my head back a little to focus. His features held. In fact, his face seemed a little sharper, more distinct than normal. His eyes glowed. His skin was clear and ageless. I caught my breath.

  He placed his hand gently on my diaphragm. “It was LSD.” He studied my face. “You look a little rough.”

  “Adam, it felt a thousand times stronger than the marijuana we smoked.” Slowly, in lumpy, halting sentences, I told him what it had been like for me. He listened intently, not once interrupting with questions. His eyebrows shot up at my recitation of his strange metamorphoses.

  When I got to the part about Jennie, he closed his eyes, turned his head away, and moaned. “I’m glad the girls were with you after that. I should have come right back after I found out what was in the Kool-Aid instead of trying to find them. I searched everywhere. All those cars and vans. Even the stables. Then I came back here and found all three of you sleeping peacefully. Are you sure you’re all right?” He slipped his hand around mine.

  I managed to nod convincingly.

  He kissed my forehead. “I wanted to find the girls so badly because I heard something.”

  I felt myself smile, my face involuntarily reflecting his. “What? Why are you so happy? What did you hear?”

  “I heard one of the girls, Evelyn.”

  “What do you mean? Heard?”

  “My voice from one of them.” He pressed my hand to his breastbone. “I was on my way out to the fire circle with the Kool-Aid when suddenly I felt it.” He opened his arm and his hand swept a graceful curve above me. “So beautiful!” He laughed.

  I sat up. “What?”

  “Evelyn, I’ve never heard that except when the sound was coming out of me!” His face shone.

  I blinked.

  “It had to be one of the girls. I know what I heard. I felt it here.” He beat his chest softly.

  “Gracie? Rosie?”

  “I don’t know, but I wanted to find out. I dropped the pitcher and ran. There must have been a hundred kids around the fire. Faces, light, music. I couldn’t find Gracie or Rosie. But it had to be one of them.” He slipped off the bed. “I couldn’t sleep. I’ve been up all night. We need to talk to them about all of this, now. I called Pauline and asked her to keep Lil and Sarah at her place for the rest of the afternoon. But first let me make you some breakfast. You’ll feel better when you’ve eaten.”

  I pulled on my robe and followed him into the kitchen.

  I distinctly remembered him drinking his first glass of Kool-Aid, then at least one other after that. How could he be so normal?

  He pulled out a chair for me and set a cup of coffee on the table.

  I sat down and rubbed my eyes. The sun glared through the windows. My brain felt like the transparent, crispy edges of the fried eggs he sat before me a few minutes later. I pushed the plate away and asked for dry toast and water.

  “I’ll wake up Gracie and Rosie,” Adam said as soon as I’d finished eating.

  While he went to wake the girls, I watched the salt and pepper shakers on the table and stroked the scratchy leaves of the now well-behaved zinnias. I tried to muster some idea of how we should deal with Gracie and Rosie. Adam had drunk as much of the Kool-Aid as me, maybe more. Had he been hallucinating, hearing what he wanted to hear? Suddenly, the effect of the LSD seemed to return. For a moment, I saw Adam not as a man but as a raw bundle of intentions that could shimmer off into any direction at any moment.

  “Momma? You okay?” Rosie and Gracie stood in the doorway, their faces and pajamas rumpled.

  I nodded and pointed at the chairs across the table from me.

  “Sit.” Adam glared sternly at them. “We need to talk.”

  They wilted under his gaze. Gracie hunched at the table. Rosie poked at some crumbs left on a saucer.

  Adam paced behind them, shaking his head. “Leaving that Kool-Aid in the fridge was a stupid, stupid thing to do. Do you know what you put your mother through? Were we the only ones who didn’t know what was in the Kool-Aid?” With each pass back and forth behind them, Adam seemed larger. For a few crazed seconds, I thought he might actually be growing.

  Gracie twisted around in her chair to look up at Adam, a bare apology on her face. “It was a mistake, Daddy. Everybody else knew! A friend brought all the Kool-Aid. Someone was supposed to bring the last pitchers out to the pasture.”

  Gracie turned to me. “I’m so sorry, Momma. We didn’t mean to . . .”

  “Your face, Momma.” Rosie held her hands up to her face and then swept them back from her cheekbones. “You didn’t look like yourself.” She reached across the table for my hand. “Are you okay, now?”

  Adam paused for my reply.

  “I’ll be okay. But it was really rough at one point.”

  Adam leaned down between the two of them. “If you ever think your mother is in trouble, come get me.” His voice was low and dark. “After we realized there was something in the Kool-Aid, I left your mother alone while I went out to the fire to find out what we’d drunk. Then I stayed out there trying to track down the two of you.”

  Both their heads jerked up.

  “You had some, too?” Rosie said.

  “Yes, we both had a couple glasses. Not much happened to me, but it was very different for your mother.”

  They exchanged quick glances then stared up at Adam.

  “Y
our mother and I will discuss this and decide what to do.” He began to pace again. The only sound in the room was the rhythm of his footsteps.

  Speechless, I just shook my head. I was still stuck at his claim that “not much” had happened to him.

  For a long, withering moment, the girls sat, frozen, staring at the table.

  He came to a stop and exhaled loudly. “I have one more question.” His voice was brighter, his face softer.

  The girls’ posture relaxed a fraction.

  He tapped them each high on their breastbones. “Now tell me which of you did I hear last night at the fire?” He turned an expectant, almost tender smile from one to the other. I understood how badly he wanted them to be like him.

  They glanced quickly at each other.

  Rosie swallowed. “What are you talking about? We weren’t out there at the fire when you and Momma . . . I was on the front porch. That’s where I was when I heard Momma laughing and Jerrod came running out.”

  Adam turned a confident face to Gracie and touched her back. She looked over her shoulder, her eyes darting up toward him. Her gaze held his for a second, then she returned her attention to the table, scanning its surface. “I wasn’t at the fire then, either.”

  “She was with me,” Rosie said.

  Adam stood motionless, squinting at the top of Gracie’s head. He rubbed his chest. A quick smile crossed his lips and I thought he might laugh as he usually did when he caught one of them in a lie. Instead, his eyes narrowed. He slapped his hand on the table. “The Kool-Aid was a stupid thing to do. You didn’t tell us what was in it. Now one of you is not telling us where you were and what you did last night. I was not hallucinating. One of you is lying!”

  Gracie opened her mouth. Before she could speak, Rosie touched her arm. She flushed and pressed her lips together. I tried to recall when I’d seen that odd spasm of confusion and guilt that crossed her face.