The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

by Rhonda Riley

  He fell asleep before me, while I tried to focus on my novel. Rain pattered down steadily on the roof, persistent, laudatory, a sound that reminded me of the farm. I put my book down and watched Adam sleep beside me, smooth-faced. I tried to imagine him as an old man, but could not. His transition from woman to man had been so overwhelming a feat. I’d seen no change in his character then, none of Roy in him. Would this time be different? Would he be different if he became older, like me? After he became a man, there had been times when I missed Addie. What would I miss after this transition?

  I held my hand up, flexing it. In the angled light of the bedside lamp, all the fine lines on my hands and forearms were visible. These signs of age in me had made no difference to Adam. His touch at night was the same. Under his hands’ long stroke from my shoulder to my hip, I felt as ripe and beautiful as I had ever been.

  I made a fist and the lines across the back of my hand disappeared. I remembered staring at my body when I was high on the LSD. I tried to retrieve that same calm acceptance now. My hand seemed to be melting before me, then I realized I was only crying.

  Adam’s hand slid out from under the covers. Without opening his eyes, he clasped his hand over my fist. “I can’t promise you anything. I have no idea what I’m doing. But I am willing to try.” He rolled over on his side to face me. Eyes the color of burnished mahogany. Leaning across me, he switched the light off. “Sleep now. It’ll be okay.” He drew me closer.

  In the morning, we decided we would go first to the R. Hope address, then move down the list if we had no luck there.

  “Do you think he remembers being with you?” I asked as we dressed.

  “Oh, I’m sure he remembers. He had days alone in that grimy little motel with Addie! I kept him very drunk toward the end. Drunk and, I’m sure, confused.”

  I realized that what we were planning was a minor reenactment of that transformation, carrying it forth to some logical conclusion in which Adam would at last share a characteristic with both Roy and me. The thought of their strange history overwhelmed my optimism for a moment. I remembered my amazement when A. had returned as Adam. For the first time, I saw us from Roy’s point of view. In the mirror above the dresser we looked like mother and son. “He’ll think I’m Addie and you’re his son.”

  Adam shrugged his shirt onto his shoulders and considered his reflection. “Yes, I guess you’re right. We could say—”

  The strangeness of our situation washed through me. The room darkened and tilted.

  “Evelyn! Are you okay?”

  I took a deep breath and my dizziness passed. “It was so strange when you returned then. I thought my heart would break from sheer strangeness.” I righted myself and covered my mouth. “I was so young. Sometimes I could barely make it all fit together. And I couldn’t tell anyone, not even Momma.”

  Adam took my hand. “This is different. I don’t want to change in any other way, just look more my age.”

  Silently, I wondered: what was his age? Out loud, I asked, “What will we do when we find him?”

  “We’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it. Let’s find him first. A lot will depend on him.”

  Outside, the morning was mountain-fresh, crisp, and cool. A faint tang of wood smoke and coffee sweetened the air. A bright stream of birdsong overlay the mutter of the TV from the hotel office.

  With the directions from the desk clerk, we found the R. Hope residence, a small, green clapboard house at the end of a short, well-shaded drive off the main road. There was no car in the drive, but we knocked anyway. Woods surrounded the house and the land rose steeply behind it. Water dripped from the eaves onto a tub of blossoming red geraniums. An old hound loped up, barking, then sniffed us without much interest. Adam knocked again, but no one answered.

  Farther down the same winding road, we found the second house on our list. An older version of the first. H. HOPE was hand-painted on the mailbox. A tall, old man on the porch pushed himself up from his chair as we pulled off the road. He was stooped and rail-thin, in faded overalls. A halo of wispy, gray hair wafted around his head. Raising one hand to shade his eyes against the morning sun, he glared at us as we walked up the gravel path. Nothing about the old man’s narrow, hollow-cheeked face resembled Roy Hope.

  Adam paused at the bottom step.

  The old man cackled and slapped his leg. “I’ll be goddamn. Look who the cat dragged in!”

  Adam and I exchanged grins. The old man obviously recognized him. Adam stepped up onto the porch and took the hand the old man offered.

  As soon as Adam was within arm’s reach, the old man’s eyes narrowed and his hand fell away from Adam’s. His puzzled glance bounced from Adam to me and back. “Roy?” he whispered.

  “No, sir.” Adam shook his head and motioned me forward. “I’m Adam and this is Evelyn. We’re looking for Roy. Are you related to him?”

  The old man’s eyes darted back to me, with surprise. “Well, you don’t look like yer from around here.” Then he pointed at Adam’s chest. “But this one sure is. Can tell that just by looking. Dead ringer for Roy. Are you his boy? Don’t recall him having a boy.” The old man shuffled sideways, tottering so badly that I dashed up behind him to steady him, and Adam grabbed his elbow. The old man folded himself into a rocker and offered me the porch swing.

  Adam sat down in the remaining chair across from me. “I’m not his son, but I’d like to find him. Say hello. It’s been a long time.”

  The old man stared past us and offered nothing. He blinked his rheumy eyes rapidly and I noticed one of his hands shook.

  I touched his arm. “The ‘H’ on the mailbox—what’s that for?”

  “Hoyle. Hoyle Hope. But everybody calls me Toot.” He laughed, then slowly bent over, picked up the cup sitting next to Adam’s chair, and spat tobacco juice into it. “Not allowed to spit off the porch anymore. Took a tumble last year.” He straightened up and looked Adam over. “Roy coulda used a son. Those two daughters don’t have a grateful bone between them. Hardly ever visited him in the hospital.”

  Adam leaned in closer. “Roy’s in the hospital?”

  Toot’s head wobbled on his thin neck. “No. He’s past that. Resting down yonder. The cemetery behind the post office. ’Bout two years now. Car accident. So drunk he forgot that mountain roads curve. His brother, Everett, was with him, died on the spot. Roy hung on for weeks. What’d you say your name was?”

  Adam and I locked eyes for a moment. An odd expression swept across his face, reminding me of the time the nurse mistook him for Gracie’s husband. His hand moved up toward his chest then fell limply at his side. His head bowed. My heart skittered.

  We listened politely to the old man’s stories about Roy. Twice he looked quizzically at Adam and asked his name again. “Who was your momma?” he asked once. Adam was uncharacteristically unresponsive. The old man seemed to lose interest in his own questions. His gaze drifted back to his spit cup.

  After a few moments, we returned to the truck. Adam picked up our list of addresses, slid it into the folds of the Kentucky map, and stuffed both into the glove compartment.

  Silently, we drove into town. It didn’t take long to find the grave. But the old man was wrong about the date. Roy had been dead ten years.

  A decade. I’d been imagining him aging like me, gauging Adam against that image, and all the while, he was gone.

  Beside me, Adam exhaled a long, shuddering sigh and leaned against Roy’s tombstone. I remembered the X-ray of his chest, the pale spread of the organ that gave him his voice. He blinked up at the surrounding hills. “This is a strange place.”

  I looked around me at the nondescript little town and recalled what Sarah had said about never knowing what colors others actually saw. What, I wondered, did he hear, what did he see that I missed? Did Roy’s death sever some physical tie for him? Did it matter that the mold for his present state was gone, returned to the earth?

  “Evelyn, I’ve been thinking about this for months.
I wanted to give you . . .” His voice cracked. He took a deep, gulping breath. “Give you myself. Again. I hoped I could just hang out with him. Couple of long fishing trips. And each time I’d grow a little older-looking. A natural process. Nothing to explain.” He ignored the tears running down his face. “It never, ever occurred to me that he might be dead. I just want everything to go on as it is. With us. For you and for the girls. That’s all I want.”

  My own deflated hope was a suffocating weight on my chest. All I could do was take his hand. “Let’s go home.”

  A few moments later, we passed a battered old station wagon as we turned out onto the main road. The elderly woman at the wheel did a double-take. The bald man beside her turned in his seat, his eyes locked on Adam.

  Adam appeared not to notice. He sighed deeply again and gripped the steering wheel. “It never occurred to me . . .”

  I touched his leg, and he pressed his lips together. There was nothing more to say. The air in the cab of the truck seemed clotted, unbreathable. I rolled my window down. We drove on in silence. Adam, staring ahead, vibrated beside me. Under the noise of the engine and the open window, I thought I heard something darker, a deep, low drone.

  Soon he drove off the highway and took us higher into the hills, up progressively narrower tree-lined roads until there were no more homes. When he stopped, the road was a single-lane, weedy rock path.

  His face was closed, private. “I’m going to stretch my legs a little.” He got out of the truck and walked away.

  Quickly, the back of his blue plaid shirt disappeared into the underbrush. I stepped out of the truck cab into the cooler air. Everything was suddenly unnaturally quiet. The birds had stopped singing. Two deer bolted out of the woods from Adam’s direction, galloped across the road in front of the truck, then lunged uphill.

  A roar billowed behind them: Adam’s voice, sharp as his cry at Jennie’s coffin. A rumbling boulder of rage. The skin on my arms and face tingled, my pulse kicked. I covered my ears and fought my own urge to run.

  In the silence that followed, I slumped against the side of the truck not sure what would happen next. Soon, the birds resumed their chatter, and I climbed back into the truck. I nodded off, and when I woke from my nap, the shadows of late afternoon stretched across the road. My neck and shoulders ached from being scrunched up against the passenger door. My disappointment returned in a surge and I looked around for Adam. I tried to remember exactly where he had walked into the woods, but the trees all looked alike. It would be dark soon. His thunderous, jagged cry echoed in me. I shivered. He’d once said the mountains answered his call. What could the response to such a call be? What if he was hurt, trapped under some boulder dislodged by his voice?

  I flung my door open, ready to dash into the forest to look for him when I saw the rhythmic swing of his sleeve.

  Seconds later, Adam emerged, his face lighter, his gait looser. He circled the truck and stopped at the open door on my side. “For your patience.” He held up a few inches of ginseng root. His eyes were as resolute and calm as when, years before, he’d stood in the bedroom bare-chested, offering the gift of himself as Addie.

  I smiled at the man and the body I’d now loved for so many years.

  “Evelyn, I can still do this. It doesn’t have to be Roy. I could find someone else. You could help me. You could choose the man. We’d have to figure out some way for me to get close to him.”

  My pulse pounded in my ears. I had to strain to hear him. I tried to imagine him with a completely new face, not Roy’s. A strange older man, someone else’s face looking at me every morning. The fresh stories, new lies. A sudden dense fatigue overcame me. I felt my age.

  “No!” I said. “No, Adam.” My words shocked me.

  A question registered on his face.

  I’d always assumed that I would accept anything to have him with me. I took his hand, aware of its weight and strength. “Our grandchildren should know the father their mothers had. The man I married.”

  He shook his head violently.

  I persisted. “What would we do? Fake your death? Then you come back as some new old guy and we take up where we left off? And we try to explain everything to the girls? To everybody? More lies and made-up stories? I want us to live as who we are.”

  He stared at me, still shaking his head.

  I gripped his shoulder. “Once I asked you what the difference was between being a man and being a woman. You told me that the greatest difference between me and you was not our sex but the fact that you were not fixed, you could change while I had to remain as I was—a woman—for my entire life.”

  He squinted at me and I felt him tense as if to pull away.

  I held tighter. “You were right in that respect, but I’m not without my own changes. I’m not like I was when you looked like me. I am the one changing now. My hands ache after a day in the garden. I lift a fifty-pound bag of feed and my back hurts for days. My eyes aren’t as good as they used to be. And this is just the beginning. There will be more and more changes for me. I want you to be with me. I want you down to my marrow. But I can’t bear the thought of you giving up what you have to feel like I do. And I don’t want to tell any more lies or make up any more stories.” I touched his face. “You have a gift. You can’t turn your back on it. We must bear this the best we can.”

  He pressed his face into my hand. “Stay, Evelyn. Don’t change,” he whispered.

  I held his wet face and made him look at me. “I can’t help but change. As long as I can be, I will be with you. But I will become an old woman and then . . .” I choked. “Will you stay—”

  He stopped my words with a hard, fierce kiss. We made love on the seat of the truck. Frenzied. Quick. We devoured each other.

  The sky was thick with stars by the time we drove out of the mountains, heading south toward the place we’d lived for so many years without lies. I had no idea how we would navigate those waters before us. What if I lived to the age of eighty-five and he still looked twenty-five? I could not keep the inevitable at bay. A helpless, irrational shame saturated me.

  As we drove past homes lit against the falling dusk and returned to the highway, I thought of our daughters. I’d always focused on Adam’s most obvious gifts, his voice and his physical transitions, when I considered what he may have passed on to our children. But he’d also given them robust health and, it would now seem, a long life. They had matured at a normal rate, but would they age like me or like him? The older they got, the more they seemed like him. I’d never expected to outlive my children, but they might live far longer than I’d ever imagined. How much of their lives would I miss?

  As we left the mountains behind us, I sensed a continuing undercurrent of resistance in his silence. He drove all night, staring straight ahead at the road while I dozed beside him. We held hands, but said only what was necessary for the drive. By the time we pulled into the ranch early the next morning, I understood that, though he had wept at my request, he had not yet agreed to it. I knew, too, that his single howl in the mountains had done little to abate his grief.

  I touched his arm, stopping him before he got out of the truck. “I left the land I loved to come here, to safety. And when the girls and their friends were experimenting with drugs, I let you handle it your way.”

  “Evelyn, no.”

  But I held on to his hand. “I once asked you to hide your voice, to make that power private, so as not to disturb others or our daughters. You honored my request and found your way through. It seems our daughters have, too. They don’t seem to be able to transform themselves as you have. I think they will always be women, like me. But in this other way, they may be like you. If they are, they will need you. You should stay as you are, the man they have known as their father, and I’m not saying this just to avoid spinning new lies or to spare you the physical pain of aging. Our daughters will need you here with them. When their husbands are old men, if they still look like thirty-year-olds, they’ll need someone who has b
een through this to guide them. And when their husbands are old men, I won’t be here.” My jaw clenched on my last words.

  His eyes widened. A dark, horrible grief flashed across his face and something in him seemed to collapse. He nodded his agreement as he opened his arms.

  We wept, holding each other as all around us dawn broke.

  In the months that followed, we made love more frequently, Adam embracing me as if touch could alter what words were powerless to change. At times, I had the impression that he was trying to absorb from me the aging process itself or to literally press his youthfulness into me.

  For me, the sorrow came in waves. My heart, at times, awash in loss.

  I’d always known there would be an eventual, inevitable parting, but now I understood its approach and the difficulties it would, in time, bring. However extraordinary he was, we were, in this respect, very ordinary.

  Soon after we returned from Kentucky, one of Adam’s favorite thoroughbred mares, Rose of Jericho, was ready to breed. Over the years, our business had settled on breeding and boarding, mostly thoroughbreds and quarter horses. Adam still had a special talent for handling disturbed horses and rehabilitating misguided riders, but he’d also developed a strong reputation for matching sire to dam for a good foal. By then, we had two stable hands: Manny, our full-time groomer and trainer, and Bruce, a pre-vet student at the university, who helped us part-time when Adam was out of town.

  Jericho’s owner, a Jacksonville investment banker and one of our best boarding clients, wanted his most recent purchase, Hurricane, to sire. The stallion, tall and powerful, was broad-hoofed, but a light, swift racer. Jet-black with a startlingly white blaze, he was also temperamental and willful. We did not use artificial insemination. All our horses bred live-cover—a standard practice with some breeds and for some owners who wanted their sire’s line guaranteed, but risky if a stallion became aggressive.

  One afternoon, I watched from the kitchen window as Adam led Jericho down the stable to the breeding shed. Within minutes, I heard a horse’s scream. That alone was not unusual, but more screams followed. I recognized the kick of hooves on wood and men’s voices, harsh and alarmed. I started from my chair. Adam appeared at the back door, his shirt bloody. “Call Ray! Now!” he shouted, then dashed back to the stable.