The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

by Rhonda Riley

  My question seemed to surprise Adam. “I don’t think there’s really anything to warn her about. What good would it do? It would just upset her, like you were before she was born. The girls were all fine and our grandchildren will be, too. And that’s all that matters.”

  I recalled my anxious examinations of the girls when they were little. My question suddenly seemed disloyal and overly fearful. But Adam’s face, as he answered, was devoid of anxiety, open and free of judgment. Something in his eyes then reminded me of Addie’s response, years before, when I’d asked her if it bothered her to have no past, no explanations or stories for herself. “I am,” she’d simply asserted. Unlike me, A. had never needed explanations or stories. It also occurred to me then, as it had in those first moments of Gracie’s life, that whatever Adam saw in his children or grandchildren, however unusual to anyone else, might seem natural and familiar to him.

  I soothed myself with lighthearted warnings to Gracie and Hans about the particularly intense “newborn” look of Hope babies, but did not share my anxieties. In those last months, when Gracie grabbed our hands and pressed them to her swollen belly and asked, “Did you feel that? You feel it?” the thrill of that firm thump against my palm vanquished any residual worry. The ripple of our first grandchild turning in his mother’s womb was mortality and continuity. Adam was right. Nothing else mattered.

  We loved Baby Adam at first sight. I had expected to love my grandchild, but couldn’t imagine it possible to love any other child with the intensity that I felt for the children who came from my own body. Yet, from the first touch, my love for Gracie’s son was immediate, so visceral it startled me, and equal to my love for her.

  His features lacked the flat, slightly unformed quality our daughters had when they were born, but his skin looked uneven as theirs had. Exhausted from labor, Gracie cried when she first saw him. Hans tilted his new son in his arms so we could take our first good look. Adam lifted the blanket. Swollen testicles propped up a little stiff pod. Definitely a boy.

  “At last, another doolywhacker in the family,” Adam laughed. Within hours, Baby Adam’s features smoothed. There was no discussion of tests or problems.

  Baby Adam was only twenty-four hours old when Adam and I returned to the hospital. The two of us sat on the bed, flanking Gracie, while Hans took a much-needed coffee break in the cafeteria. Adam cradled the baby, and the three of us watched in fascination, cooing each time he sucked his fist or blinked or wiggled in his blankets. Round face, blond fuzz. Eyes blue as the waters of a Florida spring. Perfect, beautiful.

  Then a nurse walked in. All bustle and efficiency, she whisked Gracie’s food tray aside and checked something on the chart. She glanced at Adam, smiled, and said, “You should give the baby back to your wife.”

  Adam slid off the bed and came around it toward me, holding our grandson. I opened my hands to take the child.

  “No.” The nurse laughed. “Your wife. It’s feeding time and your wife is down for breast-feeding. Grandma can’t do that.”

  Adam flushed, then wordlessly turned and handed the baby to Gracie, who took him hungrily. He gave me one quick, confused glance, muttered something about coffee, and left.

  “Some daddies don’t like to watch, but he’ll get used to it, honey.” The nurse fluffed a pillow and slid it under Gracie’s arm.

  “It’s his first grandchild,” Gracie volunteered.

  This registered on the nurse’s face. “Well,” she said.

  As the nurse left, Lil and Sarah popped their heads in the door of the room. “We saw Daddy in the hall,” Sarah said. “Everything okay?”

  I nodded and motioned for them to join us.

  They sat enraptured on the edge of the bed, watching little Adam grunt as he audibly sucked his mother’s breast, his eyes shut tight. Gracie leaned back against the pillows and closed her eyes. I walked over and looked out the hospital window. I kept seeing the look on Adam’s face, its rapid change from reverent pride to an expression I could not define. Embarrassment? Surprise? Shame?

  “Are you okay, Momma?” Sarah asked.

  I nodded and joined them again at the bedside.

  “Why have you two always lied about Daddy’s age?” Gracie asked, her eyes still shut, her face serene and tired.

  Lil looked to me for an answer. Sarah leaned across the bed, cupped the baby’s head, and smoothed his hair down.

  “He doesn’t know how old he is,” I said. “We had to make up something for the courthouse when we got married.”

  “How can he not know?” Lil asked.

  “There were no records of his birth, and he didn’t really know his mother,” I replied.

  “Still, how can he not know how old he is? He should at least know what year he was born? Didn’t his mother . . . ?” Lil continued.

  Sarah put her hand on Lil’s. “Daddy’s special.” She glanced from her sister to me with that expression on her face that always made me wonder how much she knew and how she knew it.

  Gracie raised her head and looked at me. “However special Daddy may be you must have come pretty close to actually robbing the cradle. He was weaned when you met him, right?”

  “Yes, young lady, but he could barely feed himself.” It was true. For a second, I pictured Addie’s hand wavering as she reached for her first biscuit and blackberry jam.

  Gracie laughed and gazed down at Baby Adam, who made a loud puppy-grunt of satisfaction at her breast. “Momma,” she said and patted the bed beside her where she wanted me to sit. She shifted the baby from one breast to the other, and the newly exposed nipple continued to spurt, the stream of milk landing on her knee.

  Sarah and Lil leapt back, squealing and giggling.

  The baby startled, lost suction, and then sneezed at the second breast now spraying milk into his face.

  “I didn’t know they could squirt like that!” Gracie laughed.

  Gracie, Hans, and the baby moved out to the ranch. Their apartment lease had expired, but Hans still needed to finish up his doctoral work. Soon, they would leave for the Netherlands to introduce the baby to his Dutch relations. Then they would live in Washington, DC, for Gracie’s Foreign Service training. After that, she would receive her first international assignment.

  That summer and through the fall, Adam and I spent as much time with our daughter and grandson as we could. Adam postponed his usual trip to the mountains.

  He did not say so, but he missed his time of solitude. I sensed a restlessness in him that went beyond the normal energy and distraction that comes with having a newborn and a new mother in the house. His tautness relaxed only when he held his grandson.

  Late one night, I found Adam asleep in the recliner. Baby Adam, exquisitely new and tender, slept slack-mouthed, drooling on his grandfather’s chest. I knelt next to them and studied Adam’s face. I didn’t want to wake him then, but longed to touch him, to assure myself of his substance.

  He opened his eyes, in that abrupt way he sometimes woke, without movement or speech.

  I pressed my palm to his jaw, and then cupped the baby’s head with my other hand. “You two remind me so much of all those long nights when Rosie had colic,” I whispered. “You look exactly like you did then. You haven’t changed at all.” I felt an intense longing for the past. He and I would never again be a young couple with children. Yet, I could see on his face, on the very surface of his skin, that he could have all those things again.

  He stroked my cheek. “The first time I opened my eyes, I fell in love with you. Before I knew what love was or who you were. Then, at night, I lay beside you absorbing you as a child does the world. I fell into you. And you met me in everything I wanted or did. It was a sweet, complete immersion to take your form. I didn’t expect it, or try to make it happen.”

  I nuzzled his hand as he continued.

  “With Roy Hope, I had to literally push myself into him. I stole from him. And it took two weeks.” Adam took a deep, slow breath and gazed toward the dark rectangle of win
dows. Past the reflection of the three of us, moonlight shone on the yard. Beyond our yard and the faint line of the road lay the darker area of gentle slopes and the sky. I could make out one star. I wondered if he saw the same one.

  “Evelyn, it’s been years since you had to explain anything about me. But that will change soon. I look at men in their fifties and sixties. Older men, men who . . .” He glanced at me and, mentally, I finished his sentence: “Are your age.”

  “Adam, I can’t keep the inevitable from happening.” I felt impotent.

  “I know. I don’t expect you to. But we need a solution.” He looked down at our grandson on his chest. “Before he knows me like this. Before more people here mistake me for his—” He hesitated and then recovered. “I’m not sure what to do or what I can do, but give me time.”

  I pressed my finger to his lips. “He has a perfectly wonderful Grandpa. And you have all the time I can give.”

  Baby Adam moaned and rocked his head. Adam rubbed the baby’s back and his tiny body relaxed immediately. Then he pulled me toward him for a kiss. A tender, sweet kiss. I closed my eyes. His mouth was the world. Hope was a hard, dark seed in my chest.

  I reached up, turned off the lamp, and then wedged myself into the recliner next to him. With our arms around each other and our grandson nestled between us, we fell asleep.

  During the night, Gracie retrieved the baby and covered us with a blanket. As I woke, dawn light pinked the sky outside the window. My hips ached from being cramped in the recliner.

  “Good morning.” Adam planted a kiss on my cheek and, in a single fluid motion, pushed down the footrest and stood up.

  For the last time before Gracie’s departure, the girls performed together in a coffeehouse near campus. They all sang. Gracie and Rosie on guitar, Lil played the fiddle.

  When Adam and I, the official baby-sitters, arrived, the café tables were already crowded with the familiar faces. Many, whom I could barely see in the low lights, greeted me and Adam by name. They cleared a center table for us as the women cooed over the baby, who slept in my arms.

  The lights above the small, open stage brightened and the room quieted. Hans joined us at our table. Carefully, I slipped Baby Adam into his father’s arms. The girls, far more poised than during their first performances years before, began with a pretty song about bringing a baby home.

  Through the whole set, the baby slept against his father’s chest, oblivious to the music.

  For their last song, they put their instruments down and stepped to the edge of the stage, in front of the mics. An expectant hush swept across the tables and through the bar in the back of the room. Sarah, in her sweet, full soprano, sang a short song that ended with the line: “Mother Earth will swallow you. Lay your body down.” She was the smallest, only eighteen, and still bone-slender. She started the two-line song again, and, one by one, her sisters joined her. They sang in rounds until Gracie’s single voice finished. The girls stepped down off the stage and sang the two lines once more in unison. Their voices mingled and swelled. Again, I had that strange sensation of hearing not four but five voices as they sang. I thought of Jennie as I watched Lil close her mouth on the final syllable of that strange, short song.

  In the second of silence that followed their voices, Adam took my hand and squeezed it, a strange blend of sorrow and pride on his face. He brought my hand up to his lips and I felt a tear.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but the audience burst into applause and shouts for an encore. Little Adam woke with a start and cried out. Gracie held up Adam’s fiddle and leaned over the mic. “We’d like to call our dad up to help us on this one.” They started on a song I’d never heard before. The audience began to sing along on the refrain. Hans slipped the baby into my arms, then he dashed off to crouch near the girls and take pictures.

  They danced and hugged each other onstage. Their friends in the front of the audience rose to their feet and joined them. Baby Adam wiggled, threatening to fuss. So I stood up and swayed, rocking him back and forth. Despite the volume of music, the baby had calmed again. Gracie spotted us and pressed her arm across her chest to keep her milk from letting down. For a moment, I felt a stillness and quiet amid the music as I sniffed the sweet baby odor and warmth of him, my first grandchild. I thought of the sadness I’d just glimpsed in my husband’s eyes, and Time, that cruel, raucous queen of sorrow, passed a hand over my heart.

  Nine

  Surrender

  After Gracie, Hans, and the baby left, there were only the two of us in the house. Sarah had her first apartment near campus. Lil and her new Guatemalan sweetheart, Alphonso, also lived in Gainesville, but would soon join Gracie in DC. Rosie had begun graduate veterinary studies at Tallahassee.

  Adam’s restlessness soon became more obvious in the unfamiliar quiet. He continued waking in the middle of the night as if he still heard our grandson’s cries. The horses snuffled noisily, and turned in their stalls, pawing impatiently as he passed. He rode off more on his own, often for hours at a time.

  The question of his age remained. Perhaps it was my lack of distraction in such a childless home, or some loss of mental flexibility on my part, but I could not make the current of my daily life flow smoothly past this question as I had so many other questions about Adam. This was not a matter of concocting a new story. It could not be fixed by moving to another state. A new kind of dexterity and resilience was being required of me just as I felt both qualities ebbing.

  Adam and I had not discussed his age again, but I felt a new tension in his touch at night, poignant and infectious.

  For the first time in years, I began to have difficulty sleeping. In the mornings, I often stationed myself at the kitchen window, where I could watch Adam take the horses through their routines, his body lithe, undaunted by its own history.

  When the certainty of the spring thaw hit the Appalachians, Adam began preparations for his first mountain trip in well over a year. We also had a wedding anniversary coming up—a big one, our thirtieth. We normally celebrated with a simple dinner out, but this year he seemed to have something more in mind. His mood had lifted in the last few weeks, his trip preparations were more elaborate than normal and his usual, already-on-the road, distraction was absent. He really piqued my interest when he asked if I had any plans for amusing myself while he was gone. He seemed happy when I told him I had none.

  He whistled softly to himself as he trod back and forth from the house to the truck. Then he stopped at the office door. “Come with me?”

  “Come with you?”

  He beamed. “Yes. I’ll make it worth your while. I want to give you an early anniversary present.”

  Within the hour, we were on the road, heading north.

  All day Adam refused to say where we were going. I had joined him a few times for his horse auction trips to Lexington and Louisville, and we seemed to be taking that familiar route. But when we reached Kentucky, we headed east instead of west. By evening, my suspicion of a second, impromptu, honeymoon was confirmed. Adam pulled over at a motel, a row of cabins nestled against a hill several miles outside a little town called Jensen. “Look good to you?” He beamed at me.

  The motel was rustic and on its way to being run-down. But the air, as I rolled down my window, smelled of mountain evergreen, sweet and fresh. “Perfect,” I said.

  The rotund man in the office peered up at us from his low chair when we asked for a single room. His eyes ping-ponged back and forth between our faces, and he snorted at the “Mr. and Mrs.” Adam signed in the registry.

  My good mood vanished. A current of anger flashed through me. I snatched the key off the desk and strode back to the car for our luggage.

  We dropped our bags in the small, dark room that smelled of mountain damp, of wood and stone. “What are we really doing here?” I asked.

  Adam went immediately to the thin, yellowed phone book on the nightstand by the bed. He opened it, flipped a few pages triumphantly, then held it up for me to see. By his f
inger on the page: four listings for Hope. One R. Hope. “My gift to you, first a middle-aged Roy Hope then a middle-aged Adam Hope.”

  That literally knocked me off my feet. I dropped down on the lumpy bed, my mouth gaping. “He’s here! You found him!”

  “No, not yet. But I remembered him saying he came from a mining town in west Kentucky. So I went to the library and did some research. Hold your horses.” He dug through the duffel bag of his clothes, then unfolded a small Kentucky map with several towns circled. I counted three more north of us.

  Adam swept his finger along the zigzag of red circles. “Jensen sounded familiar, so I brought us here first. If we don’t find him here, we’ll just keep going until we find him or somebody who can tell us where he is.”

  Such a simple and elegant solution! All my efforts had centered on explanations and understanding while he had sought a direct, practical resolution. “Happy anniversary!” I laughed.

  We went to a little café for dinner. The place seemed ebullient and shiny. We held hands at the little Formica booth and ignored the few odd glances from nearby tables. Adam detailed his plans for remodeling the stables. We speculated on how soon our grandson would be walking and how our family would be expanding with more grandchildren.

  We returned to the motel and showered. He sat cross-legged on the bed, waiting for me when I came out of the bathroom; I sat behind him and put my arms around him. “Are you afraid?” I asked.

  “No, not of changing. But I’m not sure how this works. I don’t want to let you down.”

  I squeezed him tighter in my arms. “Do you think this will change? Will it be different?”

  “I don’t know. This is as new to me as it is to you.” He shifted his position to face me.

  “Yes, I’ve never had me an old man.”

  Then Adam lay down with me, and his hands poured over me, as they had so many times before, toes to crown, unhurried, silent until his voice washed over us and he filled the room. Time was mute, irrelevant.