The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

by Rhonda Riley

  I heard him ask how the patch on the porch roof had held up through the storms. Would she know what a patch was? She replied softly, barely audible.

  Momma pulled me close. “She even sounds like you,” she hissed. Panic rippled through my belly and I thought I would be sick. I opened my mouth to respond but Daddy called out for Momma then, and her face returned to its normal expression. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go see what your daddy wants. She’s family. We can figure the rest out later.”

  They were cordial but they did not sit down, and stayed only long enough to make a list of the things I needed from town. Addie was quiet, big-eyed, and shy. They were leaving when Daddy stopped at the door and turned to Addie. He held his hat in his hands, turning the brim slowly. “Your family, how are they?”

  Momma raised her eyebrows at me in surprise. Daddy inclined his head listening for her answer, his gaze drifting to the floor.

  Addie glanced at me. “Her momma died not long ago,” I told them.

  Momma touched Addie’s arm, muttering, “Oh. I’m so sorry.”

  Daddy just nodded, his eyes still on the floor. He put his hat on and looked directly at Addie. “It’s Uncle, Uncle Robert. Welcome to North Carolina, Addie.” That was the last and only time he ever asked Addie anything about her family.

  Momma and Daddy came back soon, of course, and they brought the rest of the family with them. Joe, Bertie, and Rita piled out of the back of the truck and stood in a line, their eyes darting from Addie to me and then back again in that ping-pong of glances that would become so familiar in the next weeks and months. Surprise showed on their faces, but they were meeting Addie with an explanation in hand, and I’m sure Momma and Daddy had prepared them.

  For a long moment, we all just stared at each other, and then Addie laughed, sweet and pure.

  Joe held out his hand. “Welcome, Addie Hardin. You are definitely among family.” I thought he might be making a veiled reference to her questionable paternity. But the wide grin on his face was a guileless match to Addie’s. He winked at me. “Next long-lost relation you bring home has to be a boy like me, okay?”

  Bertie crossed her arms on her chest. Her mouth turned down at the corners and the tendons in her neck twitched. She didn’t like change or things that took her by surprise. “You came all the way from Chicago to work on this farm?”

  Addie shrugged. “I like it here.”

  Rita erupted in a shy giggle and touched my arm briefly as if checking the reality of what she saw, then she dashed past us into the house.

  That was it: they accepted her. My story about her origins may have had its flaws, but she was clearly one of us.

  I braced myself for Addie’s introduction to the rest of Clarion, certain someone would see her as an imposter or find a hole in my story. Someone who would claim they had not seen me on Clear Lake Road just before the storm. Or someone who had been on the train and knew she had not. Suddenly, my home and community did not seem so transparent. My heart pounded every time she held out her hand to a new person and announced herself: “Addie Hardin.” I followed with the announcement that she was the daughter of my daddy’s half-sister, Doris. There was the moment of hesitation while everyone took in the similarity between us. I am sure that there must have been some speculation about our situation and who Addie’s father might be, but I heard none of it. In fact, the only person, besides Momma, to bring up Addie’s mother was Miss Biddy.

  Addie’s first time off the farm was the Sunday after she met Momma and Daddy. She and I finished the morning chores, dressed in our Sunday clothes, and walked down to the mill-village church. It was a cold, bright morning, the ground still soggy from the days of rain. Addie beamed—at the trees and the houses, at each person we passed on the way to church, then, at church, the whole congregation. Every set of eyes we met bounced swiftly back and forth between us. But I’m sure the differences were apparent immediately that day. She was the quiet one with the smile and the ready handshake. I was the anxious, chatty one. I was sweating under my coat by the time we sat down on our pew in the sanctuary. I kept thinking of the day she met Crandall Lay and wondering what sound might burst out of her, but she produced only words, handshakes, and her infectious smile.

  For the sermon, she sat between me and Rita. She gave the preacher her full attention, looking at me occasionally, her eyes wide with questions. When we opened the hymnal and began to sing, she did not join us until the repeat of the chorus. Her voice was strong and, to my ears, richer than my own. She glanced at me between verses, a question on her face. I did not understand, at first. I ran my finger along the hymnal words, but she shook her head. That’s when I realized she couldn’t read. She had picked up some of the books on the farm. I had assumed she could read them. But my assumption suddenly seemed foolish. She had arrived knowing nothing, why should she know how to read?

  Outside, after the sermon, Rita gazed up and asked her, “How come you didn’t sing all the songs, Addie?”

  Addie took her hand and gave her that smile. “I couldn’t. I don’t know all the words yet.”

  “Why not, you ain’t been to church?” Rita smiled back. “Or they didn’t sing in your church?” Normally very reserved, Rita swung Addie’s hand now, and peered up at her almost flirtatiously.

  I didn’t wait for Addie’s truthful answer. Instead, I took Rita’s other arm and turned her toward Momma. “Scoot,” I told her and turned my attention to the gauntlet of introductions as everyone filed out of the church. There was a ripple of attention from the older women. The younger men eyed us from across the churchyard. Addie took the attention well.

  She and I lingered longer than usual outside the church. My family had gone on ahead. I was trying to explain the sermon to Addie as we walked toward Momma’s house when Miss Biddy stopped us.

  Miss Biddy wasn’t her real name, but that’s what half the town called her. She had a long, unpronounceable Polish name that started with a B. She was a tiny woman and had a birdlike way of tilting her head side-to-side. Something of the Pole remained in her speech and made a peculiar blend with her Southern accent. She and her husband had a laundry and, later, a dry-cleaning service downtown.

  She plucked at my elbow, and, squinting up at us, waited for her introduction to Addie. “I just wanted to tell you girls how happy I am to see you in church. Especially you.” She tilted her chin at Addie. “I knew your mother. She was a sweet girl, quiet and a little sad sometimes. But good. A good girl regardless of what anyone says. She ironed for me. She was always neat, a good worker. I was sorry when she left.”

  “Thank you,” Addie replied and held out her hand. “Thank you for telling me that about her.”

  Miss Biddy opened her mouth, as if to say more, but Addie clasped Miss Biddy’s slender, freckled hand and smiled. “We have to go now. Aunt Lily is expecting us for dinner.” She tilted her head, mirroring Miss Biddy, and they beamed at each other.

  I was calmer by the time we got to Momma’s. At the dinner table, she was just another family member, passing a plate of ham down the table. Momma was the only one who treated her like company, offering then reoffering second helpings.

  That night, when we were alone, Addie began the practice of repeating the names of people she had met, asking me about them and mapping out the social relations of the town. I found an old reading primer in the parlor bookcase, dated, worn, and childish. She sniffed its pages as she spread it open on the dining table.

  “We start here.” I flipped to the first page. I felt my tension release as I recited the alphabet to her and pointed to each letter. She had made it through her initial introduction to Clarion without incident. No one knew our secret. No one but me.

  Addie ran her finger over the faded illustrations and short sentences, her voice rising and falling as she read aloud, sounding out the simple nouns and verbs. I stood behind her and brushed her short hair, as Eva had done countless times for me. In that moment, I had no questions for her: it did not matte
r where she came from or what strange things she could do.

  She learned quickly, finishing the primer before we went to bed.

  What I saw at church that day was repeated over the weeks of introductions everywhere we went—the mill-village, Rhyne’s store, downtown, the feed store—people stopping to fuss over us and exclaim about our similarity. Addie was attentive and calmly gracious, speaking very little and volunteering nothing of herself in terms of facts. Smoothly deflecting questions with her warm smile and gentle touch.

  From the moment I found Addie in the mud, my fears calmed by her unique voice, I felt myself bent to a new form. Part lullaby, part plea, and part question, the sound she made was a peculiar combination of elements. It had the metallic droning vibrato of a bell and the hummed warmth of the human voice. I felt its sweet harmonics in my bones as I heard them with my ears. Deep in me, something cracked open and unfurled, a giving way that would neither need, nor brook repair.

  For months after I found her, I was in a heightened state, my nerves on a slow, white-hot burn. I could not sleep for more than five or six hours at a stretch, often getting only four hours in a night. I could not eat much at a sitting. Food, even plain biscuits with syrup or jam, turned heavy and too rich after a few bites. I lost weight and clothes hung on me, yet I was not tired.

  For all of this, I did not feel upset. An odd calm lay over me, like the calm that comes in the middle of some great disaster, when things must be done quickly, yet the world seems to move slowly and with more light and precision. Everything was sharper and more defined, brighter, as if my pupils were open more than normal. The sky’s light, the patterns in cloth, the minute convolutions of a tree’s bark, the speckling of rust on a car fender—all these I looked not at but into. When I spoke to people, I looked directly into their faces, and there was more there in each of them than I’d previously seen. Not different things—just more of who they were—as if their souls were coming to the surface of their skin, giving themselves to me.

  Addie’s arrival was a baptism by adrenaline, yet my body’s fight-or-flee response left me, and I could do neither. All I could do was surrender. Allow the seemingly inevitable, the fantastic, to come in and eat at my table like a long-known neighbor.

  But I did not surrender passively. I wanted the slight metallic taste of her, the grassy odor of her sweat. Her sweet, strange voice at night. I wanted all that she contained that was not like me. Each time I touched her, I bonded my longing for her otherness to the nerves and fibers of my body.

  Sometimes she would sit on the bed in the dark next to me with her legs crossed and lightly touch me everywhere—from the crown of my head to my heels and toes. Again and again her hands would roam over me, as if she were a blind woman trying to memorize my contours. She was always silent when she did this and, if there was moonlight enough, I could see that her eyes were half-open, her face calm and slack, as if all of her being had gone into her hands. Her touch buoyed me. When she was done, she leaned over and pressed her chest against mine, her hands on my face. Her body became a room we entered. Everything else fell away and I forgot myself. Her strange voice rose around us, the harmonics of it on my skin, then ringing like light in my breastbone up to my skull and down through my hips. She found the core and pressed in.

  I was nearly undone, as if the literal fibers of my being were unwinding themselves—dissipating. Her touch and her laughter would carry through into the day, sticking like fine powder on my skin.

  One night I lay stunned, limp, and humbled next to her. “Does it bother you that I can’t do everything you can do? That I can’t do with my voice what you do with yours?”

  “It doesn’t come from here.” She touched me lightly on my throat. “But here.” She tapped between my breasts. “Would it still be called a voice?”

  “It’s like a voice. But it is not a voice. How do you do it?”

  She pressed her lips together and closed her eyes. A short, declarative tremolo radiated from her. She opened her eyes. “I don’t know how I do it. Most of the time, it just happens. I’m not trying to do anything.”

  “At night, here with me, you always sigh ‘Aaahh’ first, then you start to . . . to resonate.”

  “I resonate?” She laughed. “It doesn’t matter that you can’t give me the same kind of ‘voice’ I can give you. You gave me all this.” She skimmed her hand lightly over my face and down my body.

  I did not know what to say. I had given nothing. She had taken her identity from me, yet left it with me and given me every reason to see how vastly different we were from one another. She pulled me closer and, pressing her mouth to mine, gently exhaled into me.

  No name for what she was or what she did. No name for the place she had come from.

  But each night there was her sweet voice.

  On my moonlit, sleepless nights, she lay beside me, sleeping. Everyone, everything else slumbered, and the world was quiet. In the surreal silence of midnight, I watched her, studying a face more like my own than a mirror. I lay close enough that I breathed her exhalations and she mine, the air going in and out of us in matched rhythm. Watching her eyes move over the dream world under her closed lids, I could not imagine what she saw. A world peopled with others like her? I saw the face my mother must have seen when she watched me sleeping, the face I would see later when my own daughters, so like me, slept. I was inside and outside my own skin, both the mother and the daughter, the other and myself.

  Other nights, I would have to rise from our bed and walk the house, touching the walls and the furniture until the ordinary proportions and places of things returned.

  Once, while pacing the bedroom, I saw a fox cross the bright, night-gray yard, trotting purposefully, confidently on small, delicate paws. I wanted to touch those paws, to feel the press of them on the ground and know the texture of her coat. To be outside in the cool darkness, my nose in the air.

  Sometimes, without moving, Addie would open her eyes and look at me from a seemingly deep sleep. I would see, then, who I was not. The distinctness of myself lurched within me, the tender presentness coming over me as she opened her arms and pulled me into them again.

  Freddie and Marge Rumford were a young couple, just married. I had known Freddie all my life, but Marge, whom he married shortly after coming back from the war, was from Cramerton. Freddie, a thin man with a dry sense of humor, had returned from the war almost mute until he met Marge, a big, friendly girl, her body seeming to move in loose, relaxed circles. After they married, local musicians gathered every Sunday evening for picking parties at their home.

  One Sunday, Addie and I passed Freddie and Marge’s on our walk back to the farm from dinner at Momma’s. The early spring air was warm enough that they had left the door open. Music tumbled out onto the street—banjo, guitar, fiddle, and mandolin. Addie stopped dead in the street, her head cocked to one side. She followed the music into their house. Just opened the screen door and strode in. I was right behind her.

  Freddie sat on a tall stool in the kitchen. One of the Wilkes girls and a few of the old fellows who used to play with my uncle Lester crowded the room, not skipping a beat of their waltz as Addie barged in.

  I couldn’t see Addie’s face, but I saw Marge’s when she turned from cleaning up at the sink and realized we were in her kitchen. There was the little flash of surprise that crossed people’s faces when they met Addie. I waved so Marge would know which one of us was me.

  Addie stood motionless, transfixed by the music, then cackled with delight as the tune ended. Amid the noise of everyone shifting around to pull in some more chairs, I introduced her. No one blinked or asked a question as we settled in our seats.

  “I’ve heard about you,” Marge said. “Glad to meet you, Addie.”

  The musicians picked up their instruments again and started playing “Haste to the Wedding.” Marge pulled me to my feet. We turned in the middle of the kitchen and danced out to the porch and back. Addie stood up with her hands held out expectant
ly. Marge took her for a spin, the two of them laughing. Addie followed surprisingly well.

  When they danced back into the kitchen and Marge released her, Addie sat and stared at the musicians, enthralled. During their next break, Freddie leaned across the kitchen and said to Addie, “Here, you look like you want this in your hands. Try it.”

  Addie took the banjo and ran her hands over its strings, “ahhing” like a child, and everyone laughed at what they took to be comic exaggeration. She bent over it in precise imitation of Freddie’s shoulder-hunched way of playing and grinned up at me as she plucked.

  After Addie returned the banjo, the musicians resumed playing. She closed her eyes as she listened, tilting her head as if zeroing in on one instrument then another. We stayed until milking time.

  Days later, she found Uncle Lester’s old fiddle at the bottom of the wardrobe. It made an awful squawk when she first touched bow to string. She winced and echoed with her own surprised cry. Holding the fiddle out away from her shoulder, she glared at it.

  I’d been around enough fiddle players to show her some basics—the tuning pegs, the bow, the rosin. The next time we went into town, we bought strings. She worked on her fiddle-playing every spare moment, her face screwed up in concentration. She paced the house, the yard, and the barn, fiddle to her chin. Soon she had notes and had taught herself a simple song. In the next few days, she pulled me from my chores and asked me to sing for her. I’d sing a song and then she’d work at it and work at it until she got it right.

  Once, after I sang “The Old Rugged Cross” for her, she spent every spare moment of her day working on it. She showed up at the barn while I finished the evening milking, fiddle and bow in hand, her brow furrowed. “Once again? I almost have it,” she said. I sang it again, leaning my head on old Lilac’s warm side. She listened intently, staring up into the rafters of the barn, the way I’d seen Daddy stare as he listened to the radio. Then she played it again, swaying in the lantern light, her eyes closed.