The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

by Rhonda Riley

  Without acknowledging to myself any contradiction, I vacillated between the conviction that he was in the earth, deep in a watery grave, and my certainty that he walked the earth, seeking a viable path back to me as an old man, as he once wanted to. He would return to me once again and he would be similar to me. Not in the obvious ways Addie had been, but like me in that one, crucial way. He would be enough like me to, once again, be with me. And that single similarity would allow him to return to me all that I craved of him—his wondrous, inexplicable strangeness.

  A few days after the girls left, I got a call from the stallion’s owner. The crazy horse had started having seizures and they’d put him down. An autopsy had revealed a brain tumor the size of a ping-pong ball. The banker complained about the cost of the autopsy but wanted to let me know that the problem had been the horse, not my husband. I thanked him for letting me know. Adam would have cherished the comfort of knowing it was not his failure.

  Our business phone calls soon fell down to a couple per week. But I did not disconnect the phone in the stable office. Its occasional eruptions, evidence that someone else also expected Adam to be there, soothed me.

  The horses comforted me, too. One cool night, I took off my shirt and put on the flannel shirt Adam had left draped over the footboard of our bed. The shirt was well-worn and soft against my bare skin. I smelled his sweat on his hatband as I slipped his hat on my head. Then I turned the horses out under a full moon. Curious, they gathered around me. One by one, they sniffed under Adam’s hat, questioning. Their breath steamed my face. I closed my eyes. Their warm flanks slid by me, under my outstretched hands. I cried then. Not for Adam, not for my loss. But for the horses’ wordless generosity.

  Over the days that followed, their owners moved them to other stables. From the kitchen or the back porch, I watched while Manny led those fine, proud animals into trailers that took them away. I studied their gleaming coats and smooth gaits, the angle and tension of their ears and tails, and I asked myself: What kind of horse is this? What kind of man is my husband? Where is my husband?

  Would he appear at my door as he had when he returned as Adam? Would I hear his voice again, feel his touch?

  At night, I tossed in my bed, craving him, wanting to enter the room of his body and feel his hands on my face. To taste his mouth and press my chest against his. There were no buffers between the need, the absence, and myself. When I wept, I wept for need, not grief.

  If I kept everything ready for him, Adam would return. Years before, my readiness, my ripeness and solitude as a young woman had called him out of the Carolina clay. Surely, my loneliness could now do the same. I waited and waited and waited. I, along with all his clothes, and his horses, and his tools, waited.

  The pasture greened up in the first rains of spring, but otherwise, everything remained the same. Weeks, then months crept by.

  The girls and Pauline visited as often as they were able, and the emptiness of the house always seemed fresher, stronger, in the wake of their departures. I deflected their requests for a memorial. Some days, I did not answer the phone.

  I kept up the house and the garden. The tomatoes came in by the bushel. White acre peas, cucumbers, and corn followed. I made Adam’s favorite relish, an old recipe of Momma’s. I lined the jars up on the pantry shelf. Gleaming, ready.

  By midsummer, the tension of waiting for his arrival had stripped away my passivity. Methodically, I pulled out all of Adam’s Florida maps. I worked my way through his bookshelves, reading his books on Florida history, geography, flora, and fauna. I studied his notes in the margins, then visited all the circled destinations on his maps. What I initially told myself would be a tribute to Adam quickly turned into a desperate search. I began to see older men who looked like him everywhere.

  His individual physical features that I had savored for so long now seemed common. I raced down a crowded Cedar Key pier to touch the arm of a gray-haired man whose wide back reminded me of Adam’s. At the farmer’s market, my heart startled and I gawked at a man who laughed like Adam. I drove across the parking lot of a state park to pull up beside an old man who walked like Adam. Each time left me with a dissonant sense of failure, as if my mistaken leaps of recognition were somehow dispersing the very qualities I sought.

  Still, I scrutinized every stranger who paid me the slightest attention or kindness. Everywhere I went, I watched and waited, on alert. I was looking for a single straw in a haystack.

  Listening for his return seemed to be the only thing that held my muscles to my bones, that kept the supper dishes from sliding off the table, and brought the sun up in the morning. My clothes hung loosely on me. I dug through boxes and closets to pull out smaller clothes the girls had left behind.

  I struggled to hold myself open, to remain vigilant for his return to me.

  One day, I went to a local nursery for some flowers to plant by the back door. I reached over the flats of four-inch pots, searching for the most robust among the dark orange marigolds, Adam’s favorite shade. From behind me a man’s voice asked, “Can these take full sun?”

  I turned.

  He was exactly my height. He appeared to be in his sixties, gray hair, warm hazel eyes, and a thick white mustache. He laughed at my surprise and repeated his question, his broad hand grazing the flower tops. He absently scratched his breastbone and told me how much he liked the color I’d chosen.

  As we strolled by the vine section on our way to the checkout counter, he cupped a passion vine blossom and asked, “What kind of flower is this?”

  His words whipped through me. Our question game! I searched his face, his pale, intelligent eyes for signs of recognition. All my nerves were poised, ready for Addie’s beaming smile or Adam’s deep laugh. I touched his arm, squeezing to stop my hand’s trembling.

  As I opened my mouth to say Adam’s name, the man glanced over his shoulder awkwardly and shifted the potted flower he held so that his arm slipped from my touch. “Excuse me, I need to help my mother.”

  “You have a mother?”

  “Um, yes. She’s waiting for me over there. Thank you.” He nodded toward the cash register and left to join a thin, ancient woman in the checkout line. They had the same forehead, the same square chin.

  Suddenly, I realized how I looked to them—a gawking, haggard woman.

  I wandered around the back of the nursery near the potted fruit trees until the man and his mother drove away. I left without buying any flowers.

  Shame tightened like a crust on my skin.

  I gripped the steering wheel at the first light. The world slipped, angling off away from me. The light was green. The driver behind me honked. I went on to the next red light. Stopping at the intersection, I made myself take deep breaths. I looked around at the people. Boys with their loud stereo in the next car. A young woman pushed a stroller across the street. In the noon light, everyone seemed outlined, purposeful, and new. The world overflowed with people. All of them were going to or from the people or places they loved. Just as A. had come to me. I remembered lifting my Aunt Eva’s quilt to see his strange face for the first time, before he was Addie, before he was anyone.

  Something broke in me. I could feel it, the precise moment of surrender, like a bone snapping. A sudden, terrible miracle. Any one of them could be Adam. Old, young, male, female, black, white.

  He was gone. Not forever, not from everything. But from my life. All my questions about him would remain unanswered. Forever.

  The car behind me honked. I drove on. I wept, for the first time as a widow.

  The next day, I pulled out an old WWI army-issue metal box that one of my uncles had given me when I was a girl. Inside, I placed a lock of A.’s hair, a perfect, glossy, brown C-curve from the seventies, when he let it grow a little longer. Five other locks of differing shades of auburn and red hair nestled in the box. I added copies of my favorite photos of Adam: a snapshot Momma had taken of the seven of us, the girls in their Easter dresses squinted at the spring sun; a blac
k-and-white of Momma and Adam at our wedding, their shoulders touching as they leaned toward each other, smiling; the photo of me and Addie that Momma gave me the day she told me about my father; a shot Sarah took of Adam on horseback, crouched forward gracefully over the horse’s withers, mid-jump; and, last, the photo of the burned Japanese woman Frank had left at the farm years before. On top of them, I placed Adam’s copy of Song of Myself that the girls had given him a few years before. The last thing to go in the box: a jar of Florida’s sandy soil.

  Then I drove north, straight to the farm.

  Bud, Wanda, and their kids weren’t home. A privacy hedge now separated the yard from the field, but the decayed stump of the apple tree was still there and I could easily locate the spot where I’d found A. I sank down onto my knees. I kissed the earth that had given him to me and tasted the clay grit on my lips, bringing him into my body one last time.

  He was gone.

  I dug, and the opened earth exhaled a feral musk. I wrapped the box in plastic, then in an old oilcloth. A gentle rain began to fall as I shoveled, burying the box.

  The land, level and empty, seemed to stretch out endlessly in the twilight. Gradually, I realized that the pale lumps in the distance were earth-moving machinery. Then I remembered hearing that the fields had been resold and were being cleared for a new mall. The oaks still buffered the land where it dropped down to the railroad tracks. The Starneses’ land was split; the half near the highway was now a subdivision. Cole and his brothers had held on to the house and southern pasture. I took a perverse pleasure in thinking of all those future shoppers coming and going for years near the spot where A. had last come into this world, ignorant as we are in Florida of the rivers that vein the land below us. I imagined Adam watching. The sky seemed to hang directly above me, low and mobile.

  The rain began to fall in earnest as I dropped the final handful of red clay.

  Car wheels whispered on the driveway behind me. I heard Bud and Wanda get out of their car. I walked around the hedge to greet them.

  “Good Lord, Evelyn!” Wanda gasped. She and Bud hurried me out of the rain toward the house.

  On the porch, I stared back at them stupidly, then realized how I looked, shovel in hand and dirt on my mouth. My clothes rumpled from the long drive and now muddy, my hair wet.

  For the first time in months, I laughed out loud.

  Everything in the recently remodeled kitchen shone new and modern. In the brightly tiled bathroom, I washed my hands and face. The iron-red clay swirled away from my dirty hands in the white porcelain sink.

  After they fed me a hearty supper, I walked through the stable. The barn had been taken down the year before. Old furniture cluttered one of the far stalls. Dismembered motorcycles, Bud’s hobby, filled the stalls closest to the house. The air smelled of engine oil and dust.

  When I pushed open the broad door at the far end of the stable, the air moved behind me. Something fluttered at the corner of my eye, and I turned just in time to see an owl, pale against the darkness of the trees, bank off to the left and disappear into the large oak that had been the base of the twins’ playhouse. I followed him and listened for a long time. In the last of the light, I heard only the traffic of the highway, distant and oceanic.

  Something seemed to release in me, not a wild widow’s grief but a sharper, more specific need. All the things I’d never said about A., all my silent months since he’d been gone, everything I might have said at a funeral, beat inside me. I wanted to speak. I lusted for the truth. I wanted to, as Adam had always urged his riders, “true myself.”

  I went inside to call Cole, the first person I had lied to.

  We hadn’t seen each other in years, but he readily agreed to meet me the next day at the little pizzeria that had replaced Bun’s Café.

  I arrived early and kept my eyes on the door. I let myself relish how right it felt to be telling Cole. Like me, he had known both of them. Many times he had sat across the supper table from Addie and then Adam. Now, finally, he would know who they were. He would also understand why I had left him so many years ago.

  When I’d finished telling him, I would go straight back to Florida, round up my girls, and tell them. They would understand, I knew, and that rift I’d felt between us since their father went into the cave would be healed.

  I felt light-headed, filled with a giddy anticipation. What I wanted to tell Cole felt enormous, but like a great weight poised on the summit of a hill, I had only to give it a gentle push and everything I knew about Adam would roll away from me, no longer mine alone. I squirmed restlessly on the bench seat while I waited. Was this how Adam had felt on the way to his mountain trips, the release of his feral howl waiting in his chest?

  As Cole climbed out of his truck and strolled to the restaurant, the slight limp from the bad break so many years ago was barely noticeable. The lines around his mouth and across his forehead had deepened, but something of the boy remained in his smile. His brown hair had thinned. His sixty-plus years of life showed. In his thirties, he’d quit horse-breeding and gone to the mill. One of his sons had died of a drug overdose, and his wife, Eloise, of cancer.

  While we ate our pizza, I told him what had happened to Adam, knowing he’d surely already heard. He told me about his wife and son as if I might not have heard. Then he spotted the bouquet of flowers I’d brought lying on the seat next to me. I held the bundled blossoms up for his inspection. “They’re for Jennie and Momma. Come with me to visit their graves. Please?” For a second, I was afraid he might refuse and I would have to tell him about A. in a crowded restaurant.

  He smiled. A good, ordinary man. I wondered, as I had many times before, what my life would have been like with him. He saw how I studied his face; he touched my hand. “Of course, I’d be honored.”

  I drove us to the cemetery. Cole chatted about his family’s land and the changes at the mill. The cadences of my birthplace ran through his voice. He stretched out his legs beside me and lapsed into a respectful quiet as we pulled into the graveyard. He waved his assent as I motioned that I would be back in a moment.

  At their graves, I steeled myself against the weight of sorrow and all I had not said to them. Thankful that they had both heard Adam’s voice, I hoped they forgave me my silence. “Listen now if you can to my voice and help me find the right words,” I whispered over their graves.

  Then I turned my attention to Cole. A relaxed concern filled his face as I returned to the car.

  “I have something I need to tell you.” My heart pounded as I began to speak. He patted my hand. I started at the beginning, with Aunt Eva’s death and my move to the farm.

  When I spoke of his first visit and our inexperienced sex, he smiled shyly, as he had then. “I imagine we’ve both learned a bit since, over the decades.”

  I understood again my original attraction to him. When I mentioned finding Addie, his face brightened with interest. He listened intently to my brief recitation of her transformation, his head tilted to one side, his gaze resting on the tombstones in front of us, an odd quizzical expression on his face. I wondered for a second if he had a hearing problem. Then he said, “Buried, covered in mud in that storm.” His tone was level, a simple summary of what I’d said.

  I nodded, encouraged, then stumbled on, uncertain that I could explain the depths of her change. He said nothing, but sat very still, listening, and did not interrupt.

  He gave me a wry, sideways smile when I mentioned his broken leg. He adjusted his feet under the dashboard. “I still regret that.”

  What could he have to regret, I wondered.

  “That horse in that storm. I still feel it every winter.” He rubbed his leg. “But that’s nothing compared to what poor Addie must have been through before you found her.”

  I couldn’t read his head shake—indulgence or dismissal? The inside of the car seemed too dark, too close. I wished we were outside in the full light, where I could see his face better.

  I took a deep breath and pl
unged on. “She’s the reason I couldn’t be with you. She and I were very close . . . we were . . .” I tripped before the word “lovers.”

  “Well, that does explain things.” For the first time since I’d mentioned Addie, he looked directly at me. “I’m not that surprised. But that was a long time ago. You went on to have a good marriage and all those pretty girls. You did fine. Me, too.”

  “Cole, Addie wasn’t like us. She had an unusual voice. That’s why she was so good with the horses.”

  He pointed his finger in agreement. “You’re right about that, she did have an amazing way with them. And a good singing voice, too.”

  “No. No, I’m not talking about her singing voice.” Despite my prayer, I had no words to explain. “She had another way of . . . At night, with me . . .” I felt my face redden. “When she—”

  He reached out and took one of my hands, lowering it to the console between us. “This is getting interesting—very interesting. But, Evelyn, you don’t owe me any explanations.”

  “Cole, I want you to know. You have to know. You have to understand.” I wiped my face, sat up straighter, and began again.

  He leaned back in his seat and listened to me through my description of Roy Hope. He nodded when I told him about finding the note from Addie and waiting for her to reappear. “Some people just take off and don’t look back.” He shook his head.

  “But she did come back. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

  He was still smiling, as I began to explain Addie’s transformation into Adam. His face registered greater surprise. His smile vanished. A muscle flinched in his jaw. “Look, I know Adam did something crazy at Jennie’s funeral. God knows, people talked about that for years. But this is even crazier. You’re trying to tell me they were the same person?”

  I floundered and my heart pounded. I realized I’d been unconsciously counting on that one time everyone had heard Adam. He had been exposed then; everyone who’d heard him would know in their bones how extraordinary he was, and would be able to understand everything else about him. But I’d forgotten Cole had left the funeral early.