by Rhonda Riley
“Go!” I waved them away. “Now. Go get dressed.”
I could almost smell their relief as they scrambled out of the chairs and down the hall.
Adam came around the table and knelt beside my chair. “I know I heard her.” The certainty in his words belied his puzzled frown.
I held his face in my hands. “It’s not like Gracie to lie, especially to you. You drank the Kool-Aid, too. Maybe you imagined it.”
He shook his head. “Time sped up. Things were a little brighter and funnier, the volume turned up. But I didn’t see or hear anything that wasn’t there. I know what I heard, Evelyn! I don’t understand why she won’t admit it.” He pulled me closer. His face looked no older than it had when we’d married.
“Don’t cry, Evelyn. Everything will be okay.”
“I’m not crying,” I muttered into his collar.
He laughed at my lie.
We kissed. He tasted different. Like water. But what resonated softly from his mouth and chest, pouring into me, felt ancient. Older than Addie.
Overwhelmed, I spent the rest of the day in a stupor, napping while the girls moved softly up and down the hall, taking care of the day’s chores. Adam brought me soup and crackers for supper.
After I’d eaten a second time, I finally felt coherent enough to discuss what we should do about the girls and the drugs. The power of the LSD awed me, and our daughters were so young and so delicate. I wanted to ban everything like it from the property.
But Adam disagreed. “If it is happening, we should know what’s going on. For me it wasn’t any stronger than marijuana, Evelyn.”
That shocked me into a momentary silence. The drug had hit me like a sledgehammer.
“No. No, Adam, we have to do something! We can’t just let them take these drugs. And they did something careless and stupid.” I felt my panic rise higher each time I said no.
“Evelyn, did you see their faces when I said the drug had little effect on me? I think it’s the same for them. I don’t think we can assume that any drug will affect them like it does their friends. Or you.”
I remembered what the doctor had said about the uniqueness of Adam’s brain and hoped they were like him in this. “Yes, Adam, they may be like you but their friends are not. And even if you think it’s fine for all of them to experiment, they should not have disguised drugs lying around. Plus, it’s against the law!”
He nodded his concession and sighed. “We need some rules. Still, we can’t control what our daughters do every minute of every day. And we’ve never tried to. We’ve always trusted them. Gracie is twenty and Rosie is seventeen. If we jerk the reins, especially now, Gracie will pull away and Rosie will run in the opposite direction. And Lil and Sarah will see them do it.”
“They are not horses, Adam.”
“They are horses. You’re a horse and I am a horse. We need to lead them, not take the responsibility from them.” Then, with a tender exasperation, he added, “Evelyn, trust me. I once trusted you with what the girls should do. Trust me now.”
A nauseating wave swept through me. I suddenly understood what I’d seen on Gracie’s face earlier that day—the same dissonance of shame and confusion I’d seen there after Jennie’s funeral, when I’d stilled her father’s voice.
My resistance collapsed. “Okay,” I whispered. “We won’t jerk the reins.”
The next night at dinner, Adam rapped his knife on his glass of iced tea. All four girls were immediately silent. Adam looked around the table at each of them, his gaze stopping at Gracie. “Girls, your mother and I trust you. We know you trust us to take care of you. We all have to take the responsibility for ourselves and for others. This is what your mother and I want from you.” He glanced at me and his voice grew firmer. “You will never have anything in this house again that does not look like what it is. No disguises. No more Kool-Aid and no funny brownies. Hallucinogens can be very powerful. If you are going to take them, you must do it at home and only rarely. Nowhere else. You must tell us if you or one of your friends is tripping. And if you get caught with anything illegal, we will not mortgage our home and livelihood to bail you out and pay a lawyer’s fees. Is that clear?”
There was a round of nods and “Yes, sir.”
“Gracie and Rosie, we have more to say to you after dinner.” Then Adam raised his glass as if for a toast. “Daughters, you have to know what a thing is and respect its power. You don’t fly the Apollo spacecraft to the corner store. That is waste, ignorance, disrespect. Respect the vessel you are in. And we will respect you. Evelyn?”
The tension in the girls’ faces had already softened to gratitude as they turned to me for my response. I had nothing more to add, but I vowed to myself that I would keep a much closer eye on all of the girls.
After dinner, Gracie and Rosie were contrite. Without complaint, they accepted our list of extra chores and restrictions.
A couple of days later, while Adam was out on horseback, I approached Gracie as she folded clothes in the laundry room. All the girls had been more attentive to the housework since my accidental trip.
“Almost everybody else had some of the Kool-Aid that night,” she confirmed. “But I didn’t. Rosie either. We didn’t bother.” She shrugged. “I’ve tripped before. But I just felt good. The world was very pretty. And louder. That was all. It’s overrated if you ask me. I agree with Daddy.”
“Obviously it doesn’t affect everyone the same way. Your father wasn’t hallucinating. So what did he hear the night of the party?”
Gracie slowly picked up a big towel and folded it. For a long moment, she did not reply. Since the LSD, she and Rosie had treated me with an unnerving self-consciousness, as if they thought I might burst into flame at any moment. She squatted to retrieve more clothes from the dryer. “Momma, you remember when you told us the facts of life?”
“Yes, of course.” I frowned at her obvious attempt to change the subject.
“Well, you told us we could ask you anything about sex. I want you to know that I’ve always appreciated that. I know girls whose mothers never told them anything.” She paused to fold another towel. “But you also said that we all have a right to privacy and some things should remain private. We could ask you anything about sex as long as it wasn’t about what you had done, personally. And you promised not to ask us the same sort of questions, right?”
I nodded, curious.
She continued only after she saw me agree. “You said it was your duty to make sure we were using protection and you had a right to ask us about that, but the rest was our private lives. You also said you wanted us to tell you if any man ever hurt us.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I said. You called it ‘limited disclosure.’ ”
She smiled when I quoted her. “That was the deal.” She studied my face as she closed the dryer. “So the night you and Daddy drank the Kool-Aid, I was well protected and nobody was hurting me. But, like you with Daddy, I probably wasn’t as quiet as I should have been.” She glanced away and I heard the slight challenge in her tone.
“Oh.” I recalled the perfect, long-resonating sound of her father’s climax with me the night before and understood why she’d blushed when Adam confronted her. I also realized, with relief, that I had been wrong. Her denial had nothing to do with me or what happened after Jennie’s funeral.
Gracie ignored my red face and squeezed past me with her basket of folded laundry. “Mom, I’m going to be a junior next year. I really need my own apartment. I think I’ve found a good place, cheap. Close to campus.”
That night, Adam came in late from the stables. He’d been checking on a mare who would foal soon. He undressed in the dark, and spooned up close behind me.
I repeated everything Gracie had said earlier.
He laughed, flipped on the bedside lamp, and sat up. “Of course, that’s why she lied! Sex is the one time it’s so difficult not to . . . Evelyn, I heard a burst of pure joy from her. As if something enormous swam past me in a flash. Somethi
ng powerful and beautiful whipping by. Then a long bubbling wake of warmth. I could almost see it.” He shivered and wiped his eyes. “What’s his name?”
“You really think I’d ask for details at the end of that conversation?”
“Well, no, but that’s okay. We’ll hear more about him, I’m sure. He made her very happy.”
I’d expected at least a little paternal bluster about his daughter having sex. He was, after all, a man. Instead, he placed my hand on his chest and drew me into his arms.
“You’re not surprised, are you?” I asked.
“Oh, she surprised the hell out of me that night.” He turned his face sideways to look down into my face, smiling at the memory of her voice. “But I’ve always felt it was a possibility.”
I nodded against his chest.
“I’ve heard other things,” he said. “Once in the middle of the night when she was dreaming, Sarah muttered something—funny, almost like a warble of surprise, but she wasn’t speaking, her mouth was shut. And Rosie with the horses—there’s something going on with her since we moved to Florida. She uses a voice with them. But I’ve never heard anything close to what I heard the other night.”
All these years, I’d been listening and heard nothing. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
He didn’t answer, but I saw the response on his face, the memory of Jennie’s funeral. Again, I felt the crushing weight of that day and what I had asked of him.
Regret choked me.
“Evelyn, it’s okay. You were right. It is a powerful thing. For a long time I thought they were not vocal like me. But I decided to let them discover it in their own way if they were—I have to respect the vessel they are in. I’m happy to let them come to it in their own way. And they will. We don’t have to push anything. We can leave Gracie with her privacy.” He searched my face. “You’ve never heard anything from Rosie?”
I shook my head dumbly.
“Hers may be too high-pitched for you to hear. It’s like a whistle. But if you watch closely, you’ll know. The dogs and horses turn to her a split second before she speaks and sometimes they respond when she’s given no obvious signal.”
“This has been going on and I didn’t know?”
“No one’s been keeping anything from you, Evelyn. I think there are times Rosie’s not even aware of what she’s doing.”
All this time I’d spent with him and I still did not know him. One thing I was certain of: he was without guile and incapable of deception.
It saddened me to think of how he must long for company in his unique gifts. I understood that desire and its insidious burdens, for I had so often craved company in my longing to share what I knew of him. I wondered how much a similar desire had motivated him to take on my form so many years ago.
The world of my daughters seemed so different. Or rather, I had begun to feel my difference from them more keenly. All mothers feel that way to some degree as their children become adults, but I harbored those other questions about who they were and what they were capable of. But I began to realize Adam was right. The answers to those questions would be theirs, not mine, and they might carry the gifts of their father privately.
For the rest of that summer, all the girls spent more time at home. They sang together in the evenings. Their voices, carrying through the house or across the back porch to the garden, always filled me with a calm tenderness.
In the fall, Gracie moved into her own apartment, a large wood-frame house near downtown that she shared with a menagerie of hippies. Within months, Rosie was accepted at the University of Florida, in pre-vet studies. She followed Gracie, the center of her world shifting away from the ranch.
Sarah painted and Lil read her fantasy novels. Soon enough, they also had parties with their friends in the pasture. They both decided not to wear bras or shave their legs. But they were there for supper every weeknight. Their grades were good, their eyes clear, and their friends respectful.
Lil turned fifteen the following spring. Her birthday seemed to incite a restlessness in her. A new name began to pop out any time she discussed school: Bryce. I recognized the cadences of infatuation in her voice, but there was something else, something not said. I asked Sarah about the boy, but she’d never met him. He was a new kid at school.
Sarah and I were in the living room when Lil and the boy pulled into the driveway. She peered out the side of the window. “Incest,” she hissed just as the front door opened and they strolled in.
Not exactly identical, Lil and the boy were certainly strikingly similar. The same shade of red curly hair, Lil’s shorter by only an inch or two. The same green eyes, the same tall lankness. His nose was larger, his eyes closer together. Adam, who had joined us, recovered first and offered his hand. The boy’s gaze darted past our surprised faces, and then swept the room as Lil introduced him.
Moments later, Adam and I stood in the kitchen and watched the two of them saunter to the stable to meet Rosie and the horses. Adam leaned against the sink, hunched forward for a better view. “I don’t like him,” he said. “He looked away every time I spoke to him.”
Lil laughed and leaned toward the boy, letting her hair sweep toward him.
“There’s nothing we can do,” I said.
“Sarah’s right. It looks incestuous.”
“She lost her twin. She likes him because he looks like Jennie and a lot of the people on my momma’s side of the family. Every red-headed, freckled one of us,” I said.
“He reminds me of Roy Hope. He wants her, but he doesn’t see who she is.”
“You got your skin and face off of Roy Hope. And other parts.” I patted his crotch.
“Your point?”
“She’s getting something off of this boy that she needs now. That’s all she sees—what she needs. I’ll bet she’s not seeing him any more than he sees her,” I said.
Adam glanced quickly at me, as if to speak, but said nothing, then turned his attention back to Lil and the boy.
I continued. “I know she’s vulnerable, but I trust her heart—her eventual heart. If we take the offense now, she’ll take the defense.” I realized that this was exactly the argument he had made after we drank the LSD Kool-Aid. “She’s infatuated and working through something. Let’s just keep our eye on it—on her. We can do that. She still lives here.”
“Okay. But I don’t want him hurting her.”
Before they reached the stable door, Lil took the boy by the shoulders, turned him to face her, and kissed him. I recognized that certainty and directness.
“Shit,” I said. “She’s in love.”
Adam nodded and turned away from the window.
Within a few months, Bryce took up with another girl and avoided all contact with Lil. She sequestered herself in her room to write poetry, refusing to come out even for meals. With only two daughters at home, her withdrawal shifted the balance of the house.
“Let her be,” Adam told me when I insisted she come to the supper table.
But he stopped by her room each night on his way to the table.
“I’m not hungry, Daddy,” she told him.
After days of this, Sarah arrived home from visiting one of her middle-school pals and announced, “I have had enough of Lil’s broken-hearted moping. Time for a cure.” Ceremoniously, she set a large, obviously heavy box on the floor. Gleaming gold satin with geometric designs covered the box and lid. “A surprise for later. Don’t ask.”
Gracie and Rosie showed up for dinner that night. Still, with all five of us at the table, Lil declined to come out of her room.
With a nod to Sarah, Adam said, “Let’s go.” He scooped up the pot of chili and tilted his head in the direction of Lil’s bedroom. Rosie, Gracie, and I loaded up, taking the rest of dinner with us. Sarah followed with the mysterious box.
Lil remained sullen and quiet as we set up the meal on the floor of her bedroom. No protest, no acknowledgment. But she couldn’t resist all three sisters. By the end of the meal, she joined in the c
onversation, asking Rosie about vet school, telling us about her new math teacher.
After we’d eaten, we pushed the dishes out of the way and Sarah sat the box in the middle of our circle. She took out three objects, each nestled inside a larger one, and carefully unwrapped them.
“Singing bowls!” she announced with a flourish of her hand. But they were not like bowls for serving food. They were cylindrical, their sides straight and high, the largest about eighteen inches in diameter. They were made from opaque glass, each one a slightly different creamy shade. Light from the hall shone through them, leaving one side shadowed. Carefully, she arranged them in a triangle on the floor.
Gracie smiled up at Lil. “You have to be near them.” She patted the floor next to her. Lil shrugged and obliged.
Sarah took out two mallets. She held on against the rim of the largest bowl and moved it slowly around the inside edge. A tone reverberated, vibrant and soothing, through the room. I almost jumped from the shock; I’d never heard anything so similar to Adam’s voice. I glanced quickly at Adam, who sat across from me, between Rosie and Sarah. But his eyes were closed, his head rolled back. The girls leaned in closer as Sarah picked up a second mallet and swirled it gently in the smallest bowl. The timbre and volume changed. Adam’s hand moved up his chest. Lil smiled, open-mouthed in surprise. The first interest I’d seen on her face in days.
Adam sighed and shivered, his eyes still closed. The girls inched closer to the bowls. Sarah concentrated. Her breathing was deep and measured as she pressed the mallets slowly, around and around, deeper then higher in the bowl, varying the tone and resonance. Without looking up, she motioned to a third mallet sitting next to her and said, “Gracie, yours.”
When the third mallet touched the middle bowl, I heard the sharp intake of breath around me. I felt the harmony in my solar plexus, a sweetness that made me smile. The tone of the three bowls seemed to mingle into a peak, then separate in a broad pattern. As it changed, rising and falling, my family moaned around me. Lil had slumped back against the footboard of her bed. Rosie stared, unfocused, at the bowls, her hand on her belly. Lil blinked, and her eyes rolled back in her head as her back arched slightly, then dropped again. Her face softened. Adam exhaled sharply. Gracie lurched forward in a small spasm and clutched her chest with her free hand. Something I could not see or feel moved through them like a wave, orgasmic.
