by Rhonda Riley
Adam turned right abruptly and reached back to me with one hand to pull me up beside him. We were weightless, outside the press of the current, released. Adam took the light from my hand. Above us, the cavern wall exploded in light, a wide band of yellow cutting through the silver-gray of limestone. He touched my leg, reminding me to soften the movement of my fins, then, taking my hand, swam us up close to the top of the cave. He held his arms out as if to say, “See, it’s beautiful.” And it was. More mysterious than beautiful in its mobile shadows, golden light, and silver-flecked silt.
To our right, the cave opened farther into a black hole. We swam once around the cave, our movements liquid and slow. The only sound was my breath, ragged, uneven. I was still frightened and stiff against Adam. I could not tell which way was up or down. But the beauty seeped around my fear.
Holding me tighter with one arm, Adam did something to my tank that I could not see, and unbuckled my weight belt, then he loosed his hold on me, opening his arms a little, and I began to float away from him up, up toward the ceiling of the room, or what I thought of as the ceiling. I pulled at him and shook my head. He took my arm and held his other hand up for patience. I held tight to him, digging my fingers into his sides.
Still weighted, he bent over me to keep me from moving and adjusted the light on the floor of the cave. Then he unbuckled his own belt and it slid awkwardly down in a smoky puff of silt as we began to rise. Adam twisted, turning so that he was perpendicular to me and held me across his chest as if I were his bride. He adjusted the guide rope still tied to his waist. Nearly blind with panic, I clawed at him. He grabbed my hands with his and clutched them firmly to calm me. His feet hit the cave surface in a small jolt and a sprinkle of sparkling flint. He stood on the roof of the cave, upside down, balanced between gravity, the water’s pressure, and our own natural buoyancy. From his arms, I looked up into his face side-lit by the light beaming from below us. At his feet, beyond the roof of the cave, was the surface of the earth. Had the earth’s skin been transparent, I would have been able to see past his feet to tree roots and, beyond them, the sky.
He spat his air hose out and smiled at me, a smile that cut through my fear. He opened his mouth and I reached out and put his mouthpiece back for him. He walked us, holding me in his arms around the ceiling of the cave, our shadows changing as we moved. Flecks dislodged by his feet drifted between us, tiny silvery flashes. We were, for a few moments, lovers in some alien airless underground world. All I could see were his eyes, almost black in the shadows, and the changing background of the cave, otherworldly umbers, golds, grays, and whites. I forgot my breath, my panic.
Then he knelt and loosened his arms as if to let go of me. I shook my head and he pulled his arm away to point to our belts on the cave floor. Slowly, he lowered me to the roof and I tilted there, propped against my tank, my legs sticking out awkwardly. The moment he let go of me, my breath lurched in my chest again. I sucked deeply on the oxygen, trying to breathe evenly, but the fear in my diaphragm hardened as I watched him return to the floor and put his belt on then, swim, light in hand, to bring me mine.
He pointed toward the dark end of the cave to another vein that led farther, deeper into the earth’s body. I pointed to the surface.
He nodded his head in agreement, but held his hand up asking me to wait. Then he cupped his right ear and cocked his head sideways as if listening. His forehead wrinkled above his mask as his eyebrows shot up in an exaggerated question.
I shook my head. I didn’t hear a thing except the jagged rhythm of my own breathing.
Patiently, he repeated the same gesture. Except this time, as he held his ear with one hand, he held his other hand out like a choir director, sweeping it in a slow, steady rhythm up and down. Clearly, what he wanted me to hear rose and fell in a slow, steady rhythm.
I concentrated on softening my breath and listening while I kept myself upright with as little motion as possible.
Still, nothing. I shook my head again.
Adam took my hand and flattened my palm against his chest. I felt his voice reverberate gently through my fingers and up my arm. His other hand rose and fell again. Gradually, I realized that the modulation of his voice matched the up-and-down movements of his hand. His eyes brightened with a question once more as his hand circled to include the whole cave. Then he tapped me on my breastbone.
I felt his voice, but nothing beyond that. I shook my head so emphatically that I suddenly had to use both arms to balance myself in the water. My heart pounded with frustration.
Then I saw the water move between us. From his chest outward, the water seemed to ripple in tiny bubbles. We stared down at his chest. The size of the ripples varied. The variation, I realized, matched the rhythm of the thing Adam wanted me to hear.
Then he opened his arms as if to say “See?” His eyes crinkled into a smile. Before his chest, the water seemed to change again, shimmering. For a moment, I thought he had changed the color of the water, and then I realized what was happening. His voice had loosened little sparkles of sand from the roof of the cave and they were raining down on us.
He beamed. The silt thickened. Too thick. My panic returned. I grabbed his arm.
Adam startled, his face suddenly changed. He swiveled, glancing around the cave in alarm. He jabbed his finger, pointing to the surface as he guided my hand to his belt.
Yes! I nodded. The beam of light danced crazily as we swam through the thick glitter of silt. Adam followed the guide rope, pulling us into the swift exiting current.
The spring spat us out. We shot through the rough tunnel to the undulant blue surface. Then we burst through into air, into sound.
We dropped our mouthpieces, pushed back our masks, and whooped. Adam slapped the water’s surface and howled like a dog. I gulped deep breaths.
“Amazing!” He laughed. “Did you hear it? Did you feel it?” He held my shoulders as we tread the water.
I shook my head.
He beamed, undaunted. “I’ve felt it before here—in Florida—but never this strong. Maybe the water makes it stronger.” He held his hand out, sweeping it up and down again in a slow rhythm. “It’s like a breath, a vibration. I felt it on the farm, too, Evelyn, if I was very, very still. And in the mountains, always in the mountains. But here!” He pivoted in the water, his head back and his arms spread. “In Florida! It’s music! This place is a different note. It is to the farm like a B is to a G. That’s the difference. That’s it. That’s what I’ve been feeling.” His eyes widened as we paddled toward the bank. His hair stuck up in spikes around the mask pushed up to his forehead.
I laughed in spite of my disappointment at not being able to hear what he heard. I flattened my palm on his chest and then let my hand trail down to his waist. “I don’t know about that, but I felt you.” I licked the smiling scar on his sternum.
“You did feel me, didn’t you?” He gathered me in, hugging me close against his chest. “Hurry! Let’s get out.”
We stripped off our gear and clambered out of the water. Adam ran to the truck with the tanks. I gathered the rest of our stuff and followed. He met me, grabbed everything out of my hands, threw it in the truck, and snatched a blanket. The lone family of picnickers had left.
He cupped my face in his hands, kissed me quickly, deeply, and took my hand. We ran out of the clearing, laughing, like kids. His tented shorts wagged in front of him. In the woods, we slowed to a breathless walk.
Several dozen feet into the woods, we found a few square feet free of cypress knees and threw the blanket down. We peeled our wet swimsuits off in a frenzy and made love under the green canopy and blue sky. The sheer sweetness almost broke me, waves washing over me in a rhythmic baptism over and over until I was undone. Adam’s sweet voice rising through and above us like a prayer.
He fell down against my chest. Turning my head to kiss his neck, I saw high in the boughs of cypress a single snowy egret break through and spread herself against the blue sky. I was humbled, gratef
ul for the language of underground rivers, for lovemaking, for the single white uplift of a bird. Grief, for that moment, was only a watcher, a mute child who asks nothing from us and takes nothing, not even pleasure or joy. A presence among us, rather than our essence.
Later, as we drove home under the mid-afternoon sun, we were quiet, soft and liquid in our joints. Adam grinned into the air that rushed through the truck windows.
“I feel different here,” he said.
“I know. I see it.”
As we pulled into the driveway, the sky shifted into the darker shades of an approaching thunderstorm.
Adam did not open his door when he shut the truck off. He swept his gaze across the pastures of the Warren ranch, our house, and the small fresh patch beside the house, which I had turned over recently for a fall garden.
“Both places have their own music, but Florida seems less dramatic. No hills. No fall colors. But it has its ways. If the farm and the mountains laughed, Florida’s land grins a long, sly grin.”
Then he laughed and grinned, long and sly.
So I came to live in Florida, to begin to call it home. For the first time since Jennie died, I felt a true hope. He was right to take me there, to baptize me into the new with the familiarity of his touch and his voice.
I hope he felt the same gratitude and knew that when, in his grief, I took his hand and forced my body on him I was trying to do the same thing, to keep him with me—with us—to keep him from floating away.
I never went back inside the caves. I snorkeled a lot, scuba-dived in shallow waters off the coasts with Adam, and teased myself by diving outside the soft, mossy mouths of other springs, but I never went into one again. It was mostly fear that kept me away from the caves. But also, I didn’t want to lose the purity of that day, did not want the memory diminished by anything that followed.
Our lovemaking from that point on was as strong and as sharp as when we first met, but it also encompassed a bitter sweetness. A largeness. Early on, we’d been young and bare, our souls and hearts slender with innocence, but now we came to each other robust, fat with grief and joy. When we first were lovers, we did not know we could drift from each other. Our earlier lovemaking had been just us in the bedroom or under the sky. Now we brought with us old scars, a cacophony of experience, and the knowledge that we could part. It made our passion deeper and sweeter.
The winter after Adam took me diving in the springs, I turned forty. In those first months in Florida, with plenty of time on my hands, I’d scrutinized my face in mirrors, noting the first signs of age. Since Momma and Jennie died, my skin had begun to recall all those days working in the fields. Lines appeared around my eyes and mouth. My hair paled at my temples, the red fading in strands to sandy-gray and white.
One evening, I stood on the back steps, surveying my garden of lettuce, broccoli, and sugar peas. For me, it was an act of faith to put seeds in the ground at that time of year. The garden seemed puny by my standards, but I was growing food again and determined to do better in the spring.
Behind me, Adam straddled his workbench on the porch as he repaired a saddle. His grace of movement and his beauty were still arresting. For a moment, I saw Addie in the look of concentration on his face as he forced the needle through the leather. The sun shone in his eyes when he glanced up at me. The fine lines of his squint disappeared when he returned to his work.
I’d always admired his good skin. Unlike me, he and the girls tanned a golden brown in the sun. Yet his skin had none of the leathery quality I saw on men who spent a lot of time outdoors. I’d noticed many men seemed to age more slowly than their wives. But as I studied him, I saw that he really did not look a day older than when he set foot on my porch with the face of Roy Hope.
He’d arrived with no past, and had lived in an endless present before Jennie died. That innocence had left his life and his face, but its absence did not show as age. His skin reflected only the subtle changes of maturity. He’d settled into his features, but he still appeared to be a man in his late twenties.
How could I not have seen it before? His clock ticked more slowly. I sat down in the chair on the opposite side of the porch. From that angle, the smoothness of his hands and arms was more obvious. My own hands were freckled, the skin on the backs of them not yet lined but loosened.
He stopped at his work and looked up. His eyes were their most golden-brown in the direct afternoon sun. “What?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“You’re lying.” He laughed.
I went over to him, straddled the bench behind him, and pulled up close, my arms around his waist. “Yes, I am.”
He began humming, a song I’d heard on the radio.
“Later,” I said. “We can talk later. Finish your work now.”
He held up the saddle for me to see his repair.
“I think I need reading glasses,” I said as I admired his work.
After that, I studied men my age for their differences and compared them to Adam. Some looked thoroughly middle-aged, worn and beginning to gray. Others had held on to a kind of youthful bearing, their faces lived-in and beginning to slacken with age but not yet showing actual lines or wrinkles. A few had remarkably good skin, like Adam’s.
By mid-spring, our country drives focused on a single new purpose: buying our own land and business. Bud and Wanda were still on the farm and expecting their first child, but not farming. The fields were fallow. When we got a second, even more impressive offer on all the farm acreage along the highway, we sold a few more acres farthest from the house, where the highways intersected, and went to take a closer look at the Mahoney ranch we’d visited several times. The land was perfect: good pasture, a good well, a small pond, a line of deep, wide oaks shading the house, an eight-stall stable in good repair, and a sprinkling of early phlox along State Road 441. The house had four bedrooms, modern walk-in closets, and more than one bathroom. Still, I felt it wasn’t wise to take the first thing we saw. We had more money than I’d ever dreamed of having and it was hard for me to let go of it on the basis of what seemed more like luck than serious research. We considered other places but we kept going back to the Mahoney ranch.
Old Mr. Mahoney wanted to sell us the ranch, but he had begun losing patience. One day Adam walked in from work, sat down at the kitchen table, and frowned. “Evelyn, it’s okay if we buy the first thing we saw. You were what I saw when I opened my eyes for the first time on the floor of the farmhouse. I didn’t look for better when there was no need. There’s no need now. We’ve scoured three counties.”
I got the truck keys and we drove to the Mahoneys’ to make an offer. That summer, we moved to our own ranch.
The first thing I did by way of decorating the new house was hang the photo of me and Addie that Momma had shown me when she told me about my father, the only photo I had of the two of us together. In Florida, it was the sole proof that Addie had ever existed. No one there had ever met her, not even Pauline. For the girls, Addie was just a relation who had disappeared before they were born, someone who looked a lot like their momma. The picture revealed nothing of the link between Addie and Adam. I bought it a beautiful wood frame and hung it in the hall.
As I adjusted it on the hook, I could almost smell the innocence, the wide-open simplicity of that time. Grief shot through me, then a spasm of regret. I veered away from the sudden memory of the funeral and the girls’ faces afterward, when I silenced their father and pled with them to sing only in their normal voices.
They showed no sign of his vocal abilities. No sign of changing as Addie had. But recently I’d noticed how much the girls were becoming like him in other ways. It wasn’t just the enthusiasm for Florida that they shared with Adam. They’d begun to smell like him, first Gracie, now Rosie. Lately, when Gracie finished her shower, the bathroom smelled of fresh, newly mown grass, strong as the first time I’d bathed A., that cold winter morning so long ago. Once or twice recently, Rosie had smelled the same after a long day in the st
ables, the tart greenness underlying the odors of the horses and leather.
The girls had never seen the photo of me and Addie. They gathered around it when they came home from school.
Gracie peered over Sarah’s head. “How could the two of you look so much alike?”
Lil turned to me for an explanation, but I had none to give.
At that moment, Addie seemed so far removed from their world of school and the ranch, so unbelievable. I wanted suddenly, desperately, to have them understand everything. I wanted the riddle of their father’s origin to unfold like an exotic flower bearing its own explanation, a flower I could hold out in my palm. A mother’s offering: I know who your father is. I know what your father is.
I shrugged. “Cousins. We were cousins.”
“More like twins,” Lil said, not taking her eyes from the picture.
I herded them away from the photo. I couldn’t fit the story of their father into their world. Yet Adam’s identity was as close to them as their own skin. They carried him in their bones and their blood cells, too.
But not in their faces. They looked like me, not Adam or Roy Hope.
“Look what else I put up today while you were in school.” I showed them the measuring board from the farmhouse, now mounted in the doorway between the dining room and hall. “Who’s first? Sarah? Lil?” I pulled a pencil stub out of my pocket.
The girls knelt on either side of the doorway, reciting dates and names. Lil tapped the highest mark that indicated her and Jennie’s height. We froze for a moment as her finger inched up the empty space above that line. No measurements had been added since Jennie’s death.
Gracie recovered first, leaping up to grab a ruler from the desk. She balanced it on her head as she pressed her back against the door frame. “Measure us, Mom.”
She squared her shoulders and stood very straight and still as I held the ruler level and measured her. Rose was next, smirking with satisfaction to see that she had gained on Gracie, who was now only a fraction of an inch below the line marked “Momma—June 1953.”