The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

by Rhonda Riley

  The men filled the room awkwardly, watching Addie get up and then glancing at me for an explanation. “This is my cousin, Addie Hardin.”

  Without question, they nodded politely at her, then turned their attention to Cole, who had begun to moan as soon as they touched him. Only Reese looked back, his eyes going from her back to me, as they began to lift Cole.

  His face blanched again and he twisted his neck to see me. “I just wanted to know if you were all right. You have wood and food?” The men stopped.

  “I’m okay. We’ve got plenty of both.”

  “She’s got better sense than you, Cole, going out in this weather,” Mr. Starnes said, then they continued maneuvering him toward the back door.

  “Bye,” I told him and pulled the oilcloth over his face to keep the rain off. “I’ll come see you as soon as I can.”

  Addie and I went to the front of the house, returning to the bedroom window to watch them ease down toward the road with Cole, and then reappear at the truck. Covered like that with his brother crouched beside him in the rusted truck bed, Cole resembled a dead man.

  Alone again, Addie and I turned to each other. She was flesh and blood. Undeniable, impossible flesh and blood. I felt the startle of her presence in my chest, deep in my gut, but made myself look at her and breathe normally. She still had Uncle Lester’s hat on. She’d had it on the whole time. Maybe the men hadn’t seen her face very well. I felt the pressure of her unformed questions, but I held my hand up before she could speak and pulled her back over to the mirror.

  “Take your clothes off,” I told her. And she did, just like that. The hat, too.

  “You?” She pointed to my clothes. And I took them off, everything. The air was cold, but the cold stayed outside us. I turned to her, staring. We were exactly alike. The only difference I could see was her straight left collarbone. Mine had a lump in it where I’d broken it as a baby. Her hair, much shorter than mine, was the same copper color and just as coarse and curly. We were the same height. Her toes were long, like mine. The veins branching across the backs of our hands were not identical. I turned her and saw, for the first time, my own back. “Is my behind that broad?” I asked. I didn’t expect an answer, but she backed up against me and ran her hands from her hipbones back to mine.

  “We’re the same,” she announced.

  “How did you do this? What did you do?”

  She stared down at her own hands, then her breasts. “I don’t know. You were next to me.” She shrugged.

  “Why do you look like me? How?”

  “I am like you. I don’t know why. I opened my eyes and you were there. If I knew why, I would tell you. I would give you that. I am sorry. I don’t know.”

  Her hands were warm. Her breath, as she turned to me, a thin vapor. We were inches apart. I saw nothing but her face and those familiar eyes, green flecked with gold. I felt nausea of fear and confusion, then a wave of calm. Under her gaze, the panic in me dwindled down to quiet the way a child’s cries fall away under the rhythm and melody of a lullaby.

  Suddenly we were both cold, and I remembered the animals unfed and unmilked in the barn. We dressed quickly, laughing when we stumbled in our rush.

  We did chores, made coffee, and ate breakfast. I did the things I had done on countless ordinary days. Habit carried me through the job of slopping the hog, feeding the chickens, and milking the cows. But my skin was on fire, my nerves ping-ponging from “it cannot be” to “it is.”

  While we ate breakfast, I told her the story of my father’s sister. I explained that she would be the daughter of my long-lost aunt, come to Clarion looking for her mother’s relations. We had met at the train stop. As the train pulled up to the station, she’d seen me across the street at the feed store, and was so taken by our resemblance that, in her haste to get off the train, she forgot her suitcase. That’s why she had nothing. As I finished my story, she took the dirty dishes from me, carried them to the sink, and began washing up as if she had been doing it for a lifetime.

  “We have to say those things?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “You think people will not like me if we don’t tell them your story?”

  I winced to hear it put so bluntly. “Mostly I think they wouldn’t believe me if I told them the truth. But I have to tell them something. There has to be a reason for you to look like me.”

  She peered down at her body and her dripping hands. “Okay.” She smiled. “But you are not afraid of me? And you like me?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do like you and I’m not afraid.”

  She laughed. “You don’t scare me either, and I like you, too.” She turned that gaze on me while she dried her hands. “A train stop? Tell me about the train stop.” She put her arm through mine and led me out of the kitchen, and I realized, with a shock, that she was comforting me.

  The sun shone for the first time in days when we stepped outside late that afternoon. Everything glistened, new and distinct. For a moment I saw everything—the pump, the house, the barn, the apple tree, the fields—through her eyes, through the eyes of someone new. Every run-down, beautiful, waterlogged bit of my world. I was happy.

  That night the lights came back on down the hill and the trains ran again. I took Addie outside when I heard the 8:10 coming. We stood in the thin light of the moon, our breath fogged around us and the train gleaming as it cleared the curve. It was deafening, but I could feel her beside me, the low, vibrant hum of her expanding under the sound of the train. When the conductor blew the horn, she laughed and, letting go of my hand, she held her arms out as she had earlier for the mare.

  On the first night after Cole broke his leg, I dreamed that she and I were Siamese twins, joined belly to belly, and I woke in the middle of the night to find that we, in a sense, had merged. Only years later would I have the words “lover” or “sex” to describe what we began that night.

  The next evening, we began to touch each other as soon as we got into bed. In the darkness, she seemed to make of her body a room that we entered. And there was nothing but that room and her presence. She left no part of me untouched.

  The moment I touched the warm, moist folds of her, she ceased moving. She sighed deeply then; an audible chime tingled up my arm and chest and into my head. Her strange, unnatural voice expanded, rising, then soaring past hearing as she shuddered and convulsed.

  For a second, she was silent. “Are you okay?” I touched her face.

  “Yes.” Then she laughed, deep and sweet, as she would each night.

  I did not know then that there was a vocabulary for what we did, or that other women had done the same before us. So, for me, there were no words for what we did, just as there was no word for how she had changed, emerging from the dirt and transforming into someone so like me. How we touched each other at night in bed seemed a small thing next to that. But I knew, without doubt, that it was good, as good and pure as the eyes she turned to me each morning. Good, but one more thing I could not speak of.

  Three

  Addie

  I’ve never been able to say with any precision why I responded to finding Addie as I did. I was very young, often alone, and without self-consciousness on the farm, a girl raised among people who did their jobs, seldom questioning what fate, commonly called the Lord, gave them. Then she arrived, inexplicable as the Lord. Undeniable, intelligent, and strange. To have her come up literally from the land I loved seemed natural, a fit to my heart’s logic. The land’s response to my love. So when fate gave me Addie, I let her be given.

  How others would accept her remained a question that January as the sky finally began to clear, the mud dried, and the place I’d found her became only a slight depression in the soil. My thoughts were on my family and Addie’s first meeting with them. But there were others closer at hand.

  The Lay family—Mildred, Ralph, and their son, Crandall, who was a few years younger than me—lived west of the farm. Their house was downhill from us and there was a narrow field w
here they kept a couple hogs and a small garden.

  Crandall was peculiar. “Not quite right in the head” was the way most people put it. He never learned to read and, by fourth grade, had been allowed to drop out of school. He did not like to be touched, and I’d heard that he once had some kind of fit in church. He rarely spoke and spent most of his time outside, rocking side to side and playing scales on his harmonica. Never a melody, always scales. Tow-headed and scarecrow-thin, he’d stand in the sun, out by his momma’s vegetable garden, and play like there was nothing else in the world but a harmonica. Certainly, people were not in his world. He looked right through everybody.

  The day before the roads cleared up and anyone else could make it up to the farm, something brought Crandall Lay close to our land. He stood down by the creek, next to the barbed-wire fence that separated our farm from the Lays’. I watched him from the back porch, listening to the monotonous drone he made of note after note when Addie appeared at the barn door, bucket in hand. She put the bucket down and strolled toward Crandall, who swayed side to side with the precision of a metronome.

  It was a relief and a pleasure to see her from a distance, to take her likeness to me in a smaller dose. Her back and shoulders seemed straighter, more graceful than I felt myself to be when I walked. She stopped at the fence and held her hand out as I had instructed her to when meeting someone for the first time. From where I stood on the porch, I saw her in profile. Her mouth moved, but I was too far away to hear what she said.

  He didn’t break rhythm of his scale or acknowledge her. Her hand remained in the air, innocent. Suddenly, I realized that I needed to explain his odd behavior to her. I jumped off the porch and jogged toward them, focused on her hand, motionless above the fence. As I came near, she tilted her head and, bending over, peered up at his face. For that second, they seemed similar, twin oddities. I had my hand out to touch her shoulder. As Crandall paused to inhale, a crisp, loud tone pealed through the air one perfect octave above his last note, like nothing I had heard from her so far. A short, clear pop of a question like a single sharp rap on a triangle.

  Crandall froze. Addie’s hand shot out and caught the falling harmonica. His eyes focused, shifted rapidly from her to me then back to her, his expression dead calm, open, as her nonverbal question fell into silence. I could not see her face, but as his gaze returned to it, she held the harmonica out to him, touching his hand. For a second, he looked at her. Then his features contorted and he exploded in a guttural scream. He spun, snatching the harmonica from her and ran, stumbling back toward his home.

  Suddenly, I could not breathe. I was sure he recognized her unnatural nature. My next thought was that we were safe: whatever he’d seen or heard, he would not be able to report, no one would believe him.

  She whirled around to face me, wide-eyed. “What happened? I was asking him to say hello.”

  I opened my mouth, mirroring her.

  Then she answered her own question. “He is not like us,” she announced.

  “Like ‘us’?” I thought. Like us? I giggled.

  She frowned and glanced toward the Lay home. “Why is he afraid of me?”

  The question sobered me. “No one can do what you just did. None of us make those sounds.” I touched my own throat and asked, “Can all your people do that?”

  She waved the question away. “I don’t know who or where my people are or what any other people can do.” She spread her fingers on her chest. And I heard a drone, the timbre of a large bell, a pure tone without question or inflection, a simple demonstration that blossomed through my head and chest then vanished into the air between us. “No one can do that?” she asked.

  I hesitated. Perhaps others could. Maybe I was the innocent one, the ignorant one. But I shook my head and took her arm to lead her back toward the house. “No. No one here can.” Suddenly, it seemed best if we were out of sight. “He’s in his own world, Addie. He usually doesn’t notice anyone. I’ve never seen him look anyone in the eye, not even his own momma. He’s not hurt. He’s just different. It was a kind of compliment that he reacted to you at all.”

  She tapped herself on her breastbone and then waved her hand in a graceful arc. “If no one else can do that, then I won’t do it out here. But I won’t be able to stop it at night with you. Then I forget everything. Everything. For a moment.”

  “Then is okay.” I remembered the night before, the moan of her into my mouth, flushing through me. For a second, I could barely walk. Then I ran ahead of her up the steps of the house and held the door open for her. She entered, grinning like an ordinary woman.

  When it comes to personal things, affairs of the family or the heart, there seem to be two kinds of men. There are men who ask questions and may even pry. These men may be tender in their solicitations or simply authoritarian, but they are present to their families. The second kind of man never asks questions and certainly never pries, particularly about emotional situations or conflicts. These men give an angry or sad woman a wide berth, and they will leave a hapless child to wander into trouble. At times these unquestioning men may seem wise and patient. Other times, they don’t seem to be there at all. They can have an air of absence about them that leaves their women and children lonely.

  Daddy was the second kind of man. He rarely asked me about anything except money, food, and the farm. The only subjects of conversation for him were the concrete, daily arrangements of things. He did not seem to want to know what was in our hearts. Whether it was shyness, lack of curiosity, or indifference, I never knew. Once, when he had come to the farm to bring me some flour and feed, Cole’s cap lay on the sofa where he had left it the night before. Daddy glanced at it without a word.

  Perhaps Daddy was like that because he had too much of his own burden to keep hidden and quiet. It made sense that he would not want to speak of his half-sister who, without benefit of marriage, ran off with a strange man, but he seldom mentioned anyone else in his family either. They were all poor farmers. Most of them drunks, I heard, his father the worst of them. His mother had died when he was a boy and his father married again. With his new wife, he had had Doris, Addie’s “mother.” When other men told their stories, Daddy would laugh with them, but he told none of his own.

  He was not a bad father, not much of a disciplinarian, and never cruel. Yet his love was like light to me. I could see it and I knew intellectually that it touched me, but I could not touch it back. And like the sun’s light on an overcast winter day, it did not warm me, just reminded me of warmth and made me hunger for it.

  With Daddy, Addie and I were safe from scrutiny. But Momma was a curious woman, one who liked to know the end of stories. Out of respect, she would leave Addie alone, for a while, at least. But over time, I was sure, she would give voice to her curiosity.

  They would, I knew, be coming to check on me as soon as they could, and so I did my best to make Addie look less like me. I curled her hair on Eva’s bobby pins. That made one small difference—she had short, very curly hair. Mine was long and hung in waves. Aside from her hair, there wasn’t much I could do. I went over her story several times. But my knowledge was limited. All I could tell her was the names of her momma and daddy and where she was from. I hoped no one else knew more than I did and that my father’s half-sister had truly vanished.

  I coached her to shake hands with my parents when she first met them and to call them ma’am and sir till they told her not to. They would, I assured her, be like Cole’s family and nothing like Crandall Lay.

  So when we heard the truck shut off down the road, we were ready. They came walking up the driveway, just Momma and Daddy. They had left my brother and sisters at home. Daddy had on a good shirt, and Momma had on one of her shopping dresses. Not Sunday stuff, just better than their everyday clothes. Clearly, they had heard about Addie.

  She emerged from the chicken coop with the eggs. They hollered a hello to her, and she raised a hand hesitantly. Momma started over to her, reaching out to touch what she thoug
ht was my newly shorn hair. She turned to me when I called.

  “Good Lord,” she said and shut her mouth on whatever else she had been about to say. We all stood there a minute—Momma and Daddy looking back and forth at me and Addie.

  Momma glanced back over her shoulder to Daddy. “No doubt about it, she’s kin.” Then she took the hand Addie offered. By the time we all got inside, I had told them most of Addie’s story, being careful to meet Momma’s gaze once or twice. The discomfort of lying to my parents fluttered through my chest. Then I felt the very faint, now familiar humming of Addie next to me. Momma and Daddy did not seem to notice anything at first, but their faces softened. In the kitchen, Daddy cocked his head, a look of concentration on his face, and Momma rubbed her breastbone. I touched Addie’s hand and in that split second of contact the humming sensation vanished, lifting from the room. Momma’s hand dropped to her side.

  Addie left us to put the eggs away in the pantry. While Daddy stopped at the stove to pour himself a cup of coffee, Momma pulled me down the hall and into Ricky’s old bedroom, squeezing my arm. “It sure is strange how much she looks like you. She ought to look like that Hardin boy and your daddy’s side of the family. But she sure resembles you and my side of the family. Looks like her momma ran into one of my brothers on her way out of town. What will everybody think?”

  What could Momma’s brothers have to do with Addie? Then I realized how utterly stupid I’d been. I looked like my mother’s side of the family. I had big hands like Daddy and thought my chin looked like his as much as Momma’s. But the McMurrough red hair, height, and freckles from Momma’s family trumped everything. How could Addie have gotten those through my daddy’s side of the family? My mind went blank.

  She gave me a glance I couldn’t read, then turned her attention to the kitchen where Daddy and Addie were.