by Rhonda Riley
Beside me, Lil fiddled with the radio dial, unable to find what she wanted. Sarah and Gracie unfolded the Florida map and entertained us with a recitation of Florida towns. “Apopka, Frostproof, Panasoffkee, Plant City, Kissimmee,” Sarah giggled, stumbling over the Indian names.
I tried to ignore my watch.
Gracie navigated us straight toward the beach. Adam and the girls hung out the windows, gawking at the marshy landscape. Thick, briny air filled the car.
Claiming a sudden, irrepressible whimsy, I insisted that we stop at the first little souvenir shop for sunglasses and hats. Adam’s bare head needed protection and I wanted us to fit in at the beach, not draw any attention to ourselves. Next to the cash register was a rack of Magic Sea Monkeys, stiff little packets accompanied by a jar. Colorful, vaguely crustacean-looking cartoon characters grinned from the illustration. Normally, both Adam and I were immune to the girls’ pleas for impulse purchases, especially at the cash register. But after Sarah read the package—“Just add water and your Magic Monkeys spring to life!”—Adam set two of them on the counter. Sarah and Lil beamed with surprise.
“We really are on vacation!” Gracie exclaimed.
Those simple purchases seemed to release something in the girls and Adam. Outside, Lil twirled in the shop parking lot, admiring her new, flamingo-studded sunglasses. Her hair, fluffed by wind and humidity, sprang out in bright corkscrews. “Neat-o, neat-o, neat-o!” she chanted her new favorite word.
Rosie mugged at me, her cat-eye sunglasses low on her nose. “Not neat-o. We are incognito, right, Momma?”
Adam lifted his new hat off his head, laughing. “Five pale, freckled, redheaded gals, a bald guy with a bandaged head, in a loaded car with out-of-state plates? Noncognito is as close as we get.”
I cracked up. By the time we got to the beach, I wasn’t sure if I was laughing or crying, but I got us to the water safely. Adam and the girls tumbled out of the car, whooping, and bolted for the waves as soon as I shifted into park. I dried my eyes and blinked at the bright expanse of the Atlantic.
I followed them across the blazing powder-white sand to the wet hard pack and managed to get my feet wet before allowing myself to look at my watch. Twelve fifteen. A quarter-hour past the time I said I’d return Adam to the hospital. Whatever was going to happen had begun. The tightness in my chest returned. I could see the doctor and the sheriff knocking on our front door.
That evening, using Addie’s name again, I checked us into a moldy little dive of a hotel on A1A just north of St. Augustine. After showering the crispy saltiness from our skin and hair, we all collapsed, exhausted. When everyone else was asleep, I left the room and pulled the car around, to the side of the motel, and backed into the shadows so the North Carolina tag wasn’t visible from the road.
I’d registered the girls and Adam’s excitement earlier in the evening when they watered the little granules of sea-monkey magic. As I’d rinsed out our wet bathing suits and reorganized the food in the cooler, my mind had been on the next day’s route, busy with the strange calculus of our situation. I’d only smiled at the jar Lil, her face livid with amazement, held up for me to examine. But when I returned to the bed, I saw the jars lined up on the desk by the window. A sliver of street light illuminated one of them. Pale, tiny ghosts of creatures fluttered busily back and forth in the water. For a long time, I watched them, unable to decide if they resembled shrimp or tiny spiders. I understood my family’s reaction. I fell asleep watching those inexplicable little creatures, my own mental monkeys calmed.
The next day we toured St. Augustine. The dissonance of those old, sleepy Spanish streets and my constant, tensed vigilance nauseated me. But no police officers questioned us, no doctors appeared.
Adam and the girls indulged in ice cream and fried shrimp. They dawdled endlessly over the offering of tourist trinkets in the shops and the placards of history trivia.
That night, when we pulled into a motel in Daytona, Adam held up two fingers and grinned. “Two rooms.”
After we were sure the girls were asleep, Adam and I went to our room.
Slowly, tenderly, we made love. As his lips parted and I heard the familiar “ahh,” I pulled his face to mine and kissed him. His voice poured into me, muted and absorbed by my mouth and chest. An almost unbearable tenderness.
He was back.
The next morning, while the girls and Adam had breakfast, I fed quarters into the pay phone outside and made my first call home. I would have preferred to speak to Joe, but no one picked up at his house, so I called Bertie.
“Evelyn, where the hell are y’all? The sheriff came to Daddy’s looking for Adam! What did he do?” she yelled so loud I had to hold the receiver out away from my ear. Panic constricted my throat.
When I tried to explain, she interrupted, “The sheriff doesn’t come after people just for leaving a hospital. Adam must’ve done something. Did he hurt somebody?”
“He didn’t hurt anybody. They just thought he was sick and didn’t want me to take him home.”
“You weren’t with him all the time. Who knows what he could have done.”
Silence filled the line for a moment.
Then Bertie sighed. “I think you’re nuts, but I won’t tell them where you are.” Suspicion of official inquiries was native to her character; she would be good on her word. “Well, where are you? When are y’all coming back?”
“We’re traveling—on vacation. I don’t know when we’ll be back. I just wanted to let everybody know we’re okay,” I said.
She snorted. “Traveling? You should have let the doctors do what they needed to do to Adam. He needs something. I hope you’re right and getting him out of town for a while is the answer. One of us will go by and check on your place. Give the girls my love,” she said before she hung up.
We continued south, to Titusville and Cape Kennedy, then Melbourne Beach. Each day was a different beach. Every night a different motel. We’d only been to the beach a few times before and now the ocean fascinated the girls and Adam. While they swam, scoured the sand for interesting shells, or scanned the water for dolphin pods, I huddled under a big umbrella, avoiding more sunburn. My gaze kept drifting toward the road and north. We’d made no more calls home. The postcards the girls collected were not mailed.
I knew Adam was relieved to be away from the doctors, and he agreed that it was best not to let anyone know where we were and to keep contact to a minimum for a while, but I sensed in him a calm I could not share. He was absorbed rather than anxious. His only concern was the welfare of the horses. At night in our hotel room, when he laid his hand on my belly, just below my ribs, where my tension knotted, I was grateful for his comparative serenity.
We’d been gone a week by the time we made it to Fort Pierce. I was tired of motels, tired of the salty grit that coated everything I touched, and desperate to know if the sheriff was still looking for us.
I fed a pile of quarters into a pay phone and called Bertie. “Somebody in Atlanta and a doctor at some college” had called again but, she assured me, hadn’t gotten anything out of anyone. Then Adam called Wallace for his first update on the farm. The horses were fine and Joe was picking up mail and depositing boarding fees. The phone in the house rang constantly, Wallace reported. The sheriff and doctors had sent Harley Brown around looking for us a couple of times, but that was in the first two days. He hadn’t seen or heard a thing from them since then. I celebrated by calling my cousin Pauline in Micanopy to tell her we were on our way.
The following morning, we rolled through the mid-state citrus groves with the windows down. The distinct, exquisite odor of orange blossom blasted through the car. My eyes were still drawn continuously to the rearview mirror. In the backseat behind me, Lil closed her eyes and tilted her face to the fragrant breeze. I was certain that she was thinking of Jennie at that moment. Her lips curved into a small, firm smile. For the first time since we left, I considered that we were going to something new as much as we were fleeing the
past. For the first time, I realized that the girls, in their own way, might have needed rescuing as much as Adam.
For our last stop before Pauline’s, we visited Weeki Wachee Springs. The silly-sounding name and promise of live mermaids was irresistible. In the underground theater that looked out onto the depths of the spring, Adam and our four girls sat beside me. As the sparkling mermaids floated before us on the other side of the thick plate glass, I gazed down the row of my family’s rapt faces and felt something akin to hope. The open smile on Adam’s face reminded me of Addie in her first days. The sunlight through the blue undulation of water stained our faces an unnatural hue.
Sarah took my hand, her face suddenly sober. “We have to stay here, Momma. It’s so beautiful. I don’t want to be a mountain girl anymore. I want to be a mermaid.”
Later that afternoon, we pulled into Pauline’s dusty, pale driveway. She emerged from her house with her poofy hair, cigarette, and coffee cup. “Curiosity got me, I just had to leave work and be here when y’all got in.” She hugged all the girls except Sarah, who didn’t remember her and held back. She turned to Adam, whose hair was now a thick stubble, the bandages completely gone. “Good Lord, Adam, look at you. You look fine! Let me see those awful wounds the doctors got so excited about,” Pauline said.
Adam bent deeply in front of her, showing the scar on the back of his head.
“I love it when men bow to me like that,” she cackled. “Lord, this looks like nothing. This doesn’t deserve surgery!”
Adam grinned at me sideways and upside down from his bow. I laughed but repressed a shiver as I ran my hand over his prickly scalp and the little pink scar. Those blue lines and the X-ray star still haunted me.
Later that day, after we settled the girls down for the night in the spare bedroom, I leaned against the hall door and listened to Adam singing to them. He hadn’t sung their bedtime songs to them since Jennie died. “A tisket, a tasket, a brown and yellow basket . . .”
Since Jennie’s death, I’d seen something new in his face. Some freshness or innocence had left him then and that departure had resonated in his features in a subtle way. Now a familiar kind of lightness was returning to him. I heard it in his voice, too. The simple songs he sang to our daughters flooded me with relief.
In the kitchen, Pauline poured herself a beer. She lit a cigarette and patted the table. “Sit down.” She studied me.
I caught the beer she slid toward me.
“Now,” she said, lifting her penciled eyebrows, “what’s really going on? You’re jumpy. Vacation, my ass.”
The happy mask I’d tried to wear collapsed. I told her more or less what I had told Gracie and Rosie about the accident and hospital. “I just couldn’t take it anymore. Too much has happened. I couldn’t let them operate on him. He just needs to rest.”
She took my hand. “You look like you could use some rest, too, Evelyn. Y’all have been through so much. You can all stay as long as you like and for whatever reason, you know that.” She reached back to the counter, picked up a box of Kleenex, and handed it to me. “The girls look great. Adam, too! Hell, maybe he’s better off. A good kick can do wonders for some men. Though he’s always struck me as one who didn’t need it.”
“I wish the horse knew that.” I laughed and blew my nose.
The next morning, Adam rose early and made breakfast for everyone. Perfect scrambled eggs from a Florida hen. In a single meal, we exhausted Pauline’s supply of milk, eggs, and bread. As she headed out for work, Adam and I left the girls, still in their pajamas, to lollygag in front of Pauline’s TV and went to buy groceries.
I was grateful for the time alone with him and assumed we’d use the opportunity to discuss what we should do next. Instead, we were quiet. We passed a school. We didn’t know any of the children in the school or the people driving to work.
I motioned for Adam to pull over at a little park. “I don’t like how people were treating you in Clarion. They won’t forget it. They won’t say anything to your face, but they’re thinking about it just the same. It’s been so hard to be there since Jennie . . .”
Adam took a deep breath and shifted into park. “I lost control. I didn’t know that could happen.”
“I know you didn’t mean to hurt anyone. But things are different for us in Clarion now.” I touched his face and he relaxed into my touch. “I missed hearing you laugh. I missed hearing the girls laugh with you. So much has changed—too much.”
He opened his mouth to protest, but I held out my hand to hush him.
“There’s something I haven’t told you about.” Choking on the first sentences, I began my recitation of everything Momma had told me.
He listened.
The words tumbling out, I began to cry. But with each detail of Momma’s story, his face grew lighter, more amazed. As soon as I got to the part about Momma sneaking into the hotel to meet Ben Mullins, Adam smiled. “Your daddy’s a carpenter from Raleigh? Lilly Mae McMurrough fell in love and couldn’t wait?”
I nodded.
He laughed, throwing his head back in that deep belly laugh.
“Oh, I love Momma,” he said. “As Addie, I must’ve been a constant reminder. She was so certain my momma had lied to me, too.” He pounded the steering wheel and said, “I knew there was some other reason Momma was always so sweet to me!” Then he laughed again.
“She fell in love and couldn’t wait,” I repeated.
“Fell in love and couldn’t wait,” he echoed. His simple direct statement of Momma’s youthful, impatient love seemed happy and I laughed, too. Then we laughed more, each time we looked at each other, hysterical, face-aching laughter. I couldn’t see for the tears. Finally, I caught my breath and focused.
“Oh, I miss Momma.” Adam blew out his breath. “I guess that makes you and me more alike than we ever knew. All the unanswerable questions about where and who we came from.”
Now I was amazed. I shook my head. That had not occurred to me.
He put his hand over mine. “We are both here now, Evelyn. And that is all I need to know.” He paused before he reached for the ignition, his face earnest and grave. “She loved you, Evelyn. However she got you, she wanted you.”
The warmth of his hand and those simple words felt like a gift. An absolution I hadn’t known I wanted. Or needed.
We drove on to the supermarket.
When we called home a couple of days later, both Wallace and Bertie told us the calls and sheriff’s visits had stopped. By the end of the first week at Pauline’s, we had not yet discussed returning to North Carolina. I could sense the girls’ energies turning from celebratory distraction to restlessness. Vague answers satisfied Sarah and Lil, but Gracie and Rosie were another story. I told them firmly that their father and I would decide soon.
On the next Saturday, Pauline took us for a long walk in the woods. Huge, inert alligators draped the opposite bank of the river near our path. For dinner, we ate fried gator tail at a little restaurant near a dark, cypress-shaded creek. That evening, after the girls were in bed, Adam and I sat in the kitchen, talking. Pauline puttered at the kitchen counter. The three of us had just finished discussing the places we had visited that day when Adam said, “This seems like a good place—the springs, the little hills, the lakes, and good pasture land. What brought you here, Pauline?”
“I followed a man down here and then got my heart broke. He left. I stayed. I had a good job by then and I liked it here. No snow, no Momma calling me up wanting to know what I’m doing. Somebody has to die or be born before she’ll make a long-distance call.” She shrugged. “So here I am. Happy as a clam and not, thank God, married and working in the cotton mill.”
Adam turned to me. “We have to decide what we’re doing. Soon. The girls should be in school. Financially, we’re fine for a while, but we’re spending money and not making it. Wallace needs help or fewer horses. The feed crops should go in soon if they’re going.”
I nodded.
The phone rang.
Pauline picked it up and, stretching the cord out to its full length, winked at me as she disappeared into her bedroom. We were cramping her style. We couldn’t stay much longer.
We strolled out to her screened porch. She lived on one of the hills near Micanopy. I turned off the light so its glare would not obscure the view. I looked out at the trunks of tall oaks and the hollow of a dry creek bed. “This neighborhood reminds me of North Carolina a little. I feel more at home here than any part of Florida we’ve seen so far,” I said.
Adam studied the trees and yard a moment. “I can see that. But it feels very different to me. Very different.” He bounced up and down on his heels. “The ground is lighter. More—buoyant?” He glanced at me for confirmation, then leaned against the frame of the door and stared out into Pauline’s moonlit backyard. “Every time I looked out our back door at the farm, I saw where Jennie lay by the tractor.” He paused at her name, his voice sliding down. “And if Frank ever showed up again, I don’t know.” He took my hands, his voice was unsteady, but then he pulled himself together and went on. “I don’t know if I could trust myself around him again.”
We both turned toward a noise from the living room. Rosie stood at the kitchen door, tears in her eyes. “Daddy,” she cried. “What about the horses? What about Beau?” Beau was her favorite, a big, sweet gelding.
Adam returned to the table and pulled Rosie into his lap as he sat down. “Wallace is doing a good job, Rosie. I talk to him every day. Tomorrow, you can talk to him yourself and ask him about Beau. Do you know anyone who’d be good to help Wallace? It’s a lot for one man to handle. Think about it and see if you can come up with some names.”
Rosie let me lead her back to the bedroom and her pallet on the floor. “We’re not going back home, are we, Momma?”
“We’re figuring that out, Rosie. Good night, now. You go to sleep.” I kissed her and returned to Adam.
He stood at the back door again. “The crickets are already out down here,” he said. And we stood listening for a while. “When we stopped on the side of the road to look at that farm near Micanopy and I saw those horses grazing on beautiful green slopes in March, I thought to myself, ‘This is not a bad place. I could live here.’ ” He put his arm around me and drew me closer. “And then I saw the springs, so blue and pretty they looked like the source of sky. You know there might be a river underground, right below us, now, where we’re standing? A river that bubbles up into a spring miles from here. Isn’t that something?”