The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

by Rhonda Riley

  The horses eyed me politely, sniffing. Stretching their necks over the stall railing, they poked their velvet noses into my pockets, searching for treats.

  I went into Jericho’s stall and pressed my palms to her flanks to receive her warmth. The bite scar blazed pale on her shoulder. For a moment, it seemed that Adam must be there in the stable, his footsteps lost in the contented sounds of the waking horses.

  The rattle of Manny’s approaching car outside signaled the beginning of the workday.

  Adam would have been home by now if he’d spent the night with a woman. The police would have called if there had been an accident. I went back into the house. I surveyed each room, the front yard, and then backyard, with the irrational hope that I had somehow overlooked Adam. The faint slope of the land I had come to love, the familiar geometry of the white rail fencing, the pasture dotted with scattered shade oaks, and the far green horizon of forest, all seemed to wait with a complacency that comforted and unnerved me.

  Three times I picked up the phone, then returned it to its cradle.

  When I finally dialed the springs, a man with a nasal voice told me he didn’t have time to mess with the whereabouts of a husband who had failed to come home. They had camping sites now. Plenty of people parked there overnight.

  “My husband isn’t camping. He went there to scuba-dive in your caves. You need to find out if he’s there.” That got his attention. I gave him a description of Adam’s truck.

  Minutes later, he called me back. “I found his truck. The hood’s cold. Hasn’t been driven anywhere this morning. No ma’am. No sign of him. He went diving by himself? We always tell people to take a partner.”

  I sped to the springs, cursing the morning traffic. I bumped along the dirt road leading to the new Devil’s Springs Park, catching a glimpse of tents in the woods, sleepy campers emerging from them.

  Adam’s truck was the only one in the parking lot near the southern spring mouth. His clothes lay draped across the passenger seat over a folded towel. I unlocked the passenger door and flipped the glove compartment open. His wallet fell out. I scooped it up, quickly scanning it. I searched the corner of the truck bed behind the driver’s seat. The keys were there, where he usually put them, hidden under his spare tank and a short coil of nylon rope. Adam was the only thing missing.

  I marched to the new stone building nearby, wielding his driver’s license as if all I had to do was offer proof of his identity and he would appear. I passed a rack of postcards, and a stack of inner tubes for rental, then slapped the license on the glass-top counter next to the cash register. “This is my husband. Have you seen him here this morning?”

  Immediately, the young man at the counter looked up from his book. “I’ll get my boss.”

  He returned quickly, a round, middle-aged man smelling of cigars followed.

  The older fellow took one quick look at me, frowned at the license in his hand. “A diver,” he muttered as if it were a mild curse, then added, “I’ve met him. Nice guy.” He turned to the kid. “Call for a search.”

  I nodded.

  Then time seemed to stop. Or rather I stopped. Someone guided me outside to a covered picnic pavilion. All around me young men began to bustle in various stages of diving preparations. Masks, tanks, bare chests. The squeak of the rubbery wet suits. Ropes, flippers, and lamps piled on the ground.

  Two men in full gear strode off toward the spring. One stepped off the limestone lip of the spring and dropped into the water. Then I looked away.

  Twice the older fellow approached me and asked if I would like to call anyone. Each time I shook my head. I sat on the picnic bench, staring down at the rough surface of the table. The day began to warm. Curious campers and other divers appeared drawn by the commotion.

  For a long time, I sat at the picnic table. If I remained there, everything else would remain as it was. Then I realized I faced the woods where Adam and I had once made love after he took me for my first and only cave dive. Suddenly, it seemed necessary to find the exact spot where we had lain. I walked into the woods along the river bank. There was a trail now where there had been only underbrush. A soda can. A kid’s flip-flop. Just ahead was a familiar juxtaposition of cypress knees. I looked back to get my bearings and gauge how far I was from Adam’s truck now as I tried to remember where we’d parked that day. A small crowd had gathered by the spring.

  I returned my attention to the ground around me, certain I could find the place. Like me, Adam could have wandered off to find this spot. I listened, sure for a moment I would hear his beautiful, sweet voice. In the hush of the woods, a single birdcall erupted, then a shout pierced the quiet. “They’ve found something!”

  “Something” turned out to be a literal dead-end. A newly sealed chamber deep in the cave. A collapse.

  When they brought me over to the bank, I looked down at the two young divers treading water above the sky-blue hole and told them, “He’s not there. He must have taken a walk.” I shook my head. They stared back at me blankly. “He liked to take walks in the woods, to . . .”

  I do not recall completing my sentence. I do not recall who drove me home.

  The girls began to arrive, first Sarah from her apartment in town, then Rosie, who drove from Tallahassee. The next day, Gracie and Lil flew in from DC with Baby Adam in tow. The four of them filled the house with anxious energy. Their questions ricocheting around me: When did Daddy leave? How long has he been gone? What did they find at the springs?

  All, save the baby, had the same stunned look on their faces that flared back and forth from puzzled urgency to vacant surprise. I couldn’t help but think of the day Jennie died.

  I kept telling them everything would be okay. “He must have gotten confused and wandered off somewhere. He probably never even went into the springs.” Each time I said that, I thought about his recent restlessness, and the possibility seemed more likely.

  Within hours of Lil and Gracie arriving, they piled into the car, headed for the springs, their faces filled with hope and purpose.

  I didn’t want to see that gaping mouth of blue again. I stayed behind with Baby Adam. His babbling filled my afternoon. His manic, toddling dashes toward every open cabinet door and every coffee-table corner required constant vigilance.

  At sunset, the girls returned—Sarah, Lil, and Gracie in the car, Rosie close behind at the wheel of Adam’s truck. Before they got out, I saw that they had news, but it was not good news.

  We gathered around the empty truck. Crossing her arms over her chest, Rosie stared at the ground and blinked away tears. “The collapsed vein is in one of the deepest parts of the caves, one that doesn’t get many divers. An offshoot. They loaned me a tank and gear so I could go down and see for myself. They’ve already put up a grate to block it off. It’s not safe to get close. They gave me a good, strong light, but all I could see was a jumble of limestone far away. They’ve even filtered the nearby silt for evidence . . . Some sign that he was . . .” Her voice cracked, then she added, “Nothing. I’m sorry, Momma.” She covered her mouth.

  Gracie bounced Baby Adam on her hip and searched my face for a reaction. “The ground over that branch of the cave has sunk quite a bit. The building where they rent the tubes is very close by. They’re afraid that if they try any kind of excavation, the building will collapse onto . . . It would be too dangerous . . .” Her voice trailed off as she leaned against me and put her arm around my waist. Little Adam patted my chest and drooled on my shoulder.

  Sarah took my hand and looked around at her sisters for confirmation. “Momma, there was no sign of him on the banks. No sign in the woods. They’ve looked. We combed the woods again. They’ve extended the search to include more of the river. Just in case. They’ll call if they find anything.”

  Lil bit her lips and, without a word, went inside.

  A wave of books, papers, notebooks, and textbooks arrived with the girls, covering every surface. Even Lil, the only one not officially a student, was researching to
find the best graduate programs. Guitars and fiddles migrated room to room. Picks, capos, and baby rattles littered the kitchen counter. The girls’ distinctive chlorophyll odor of new-mown grass was overlaid with the scents of patchouli and baby powder.

  Visibly, each of them was a variation on Addie and myself as young women. Gracie was now broader in the hips. Rosie had sheared her auburn mane to short spikes. Lil, who resembled us the most, had grown pale since she’d joined Gracie in DC. Sarah, her lithe frame topped by a mass of curls, looked younger than her twenty years.

  Little blond Adam dashed up and down the hall, fiddle bow or yellow highlighter marker in hand, chased by one aunt or another. Hearing his name over and over—in the girls’ casual references to feeding or bedtime ritual and their attempts to soothe his fussiness—was strangely disorienting. The name “Adam” leapt out of their sentences. It was particularly jolting when Gracie, who wanted to raise her son bilingually, spoke to him, embedding those beloved syllables in Dutch.

  Outwardly, everything appeared to be a normal family gathering. Lil resorted to her standard distractions—housekeeping and cooking. Rosie directed all her attention to helping Manny in the stables. Gracie and I took turns fussing with the baby while Sarah sketched us all. Adam might have been in the next room.

  But the girls were fragile with anxiety, their bodies taut and somehow quieter, concentrated as if they, too, were listening for their father’s footsteps on the back porch. We all jumped in unison each time the phone rang. Sarah abandoned her little apartment “for the duration” and commuted to campus. Her latest paintings, wide, abstract swatches of reds and blues, leaned on the hall table. I thought of blood and water every time I saw one.

  Those first days passed in a grainy, surreal numbness, punctuated by flashes of helplessness that left me exhausted. The thin hope I’d seen on the girls’ faces soon devolved into sadness or denial. Everything seemed to hinge on small details that might have been, but ultimately were not, revelations—an abandoned snorkel on the other side of the spring, some broken branches in the woods. Continuously, the girls circled the same questions. How could this happen? Why had he gone diving? Why would he go without a guide line?

  I knew why he had gone to the springs: he went because I had sent him. Go down into the water, I’d told him. Go find your solace in Florida. But the lack of a guide line made no sense. Therefore, I reasoned, he wasn’t in the cave. He’d walked off into the woods as he had on our way home from Kentucky. He’d gone off to find release, to unleash his voice. The locals might already be telling stories of a strange new haint near the springs. Or he’d met some older man in the woods and was undergoing a new metamorphosis. He’d be back. I remained optimistic.

  To distract ourselves, we turned to music. Only in those moments when they played—Gracie and Rosie on guitars, Lil on the fiddle, or when the five of us sang—did their faces relax. Though I strained to hear Adam’s tenor in the braid of their harmony, I heard only their voices and the chair next to me remained empty.

  Their friends began to visit, wandering in at odd hours to offer condolences in low, serious conversations that paused if I walked into the room. If I woke in the middle of the night, the soft mutterings of grief and comfort drifted down the hall. In the mornings, when I sat at the kitchen table nursing my first cup of coffee and surrendering to my insomnia, the house seemed to buzz with their loss.

  But I sensed that my placid demeanor frustrated and puzzled the girls. I’d noticed a disconcerted ripple move through them as I continued to refer to their father in the present tense. Once, Gracie moved Adam’s coffee mug from the end table in the corner of the living room where he’d left it the morning he disappeared. When I moved it back immediately and found a new spot for her beer, I caught her glance of surprise. I also saw a spark of pity and resistance.

  Early on the morning of the fifth day, I got a call that the search was officially called off. When I gathered the girls in the dining room, and I told them, a wordless, leaden grief enveloped the breakfast table. Rosie pushed her coffee cup away, then left to help Manny in the stables. The rest of us sat as if waiting to be released.

  Moments later, we all startled when the door opened and Rosie walked back in. She came and stood beside my chair. “Mom, you’ve been saying he can’t be in the cave because no guide line was ever found and he always used one. This is the line we used the last time we went diving. I found it on the top of the office file cabinet.” Carefully, she laid a neatly tied bundle of white nylon rope in the middle of the table.

  I recognized Adam’s method of looping and knotting ropes. A strand of blue ran through the supple cord. A clip dangled heavily from each end.

  “He never kept his diving gear in the stable. Never. He must have stopped to check some file before he left for the spring. Then he forgot and left the line.” Rosie’s chin quivered. “He went in anyway.”

  Lil stroked the rope tenderly. “He once told me he knew that spring like the back of his hand. He’d explored every ‘vein and artery.’ ”

  Sarah rubbed her chest and whispered, “He believed he’d be able to find his way out, by touch or by listening, if anything went wrong.”

  I shivered. They were eulogizing.

  “What do you know about what he might have done?” I snapped. In the sliver of silence that followed, I picked up the rope and moved it to the kitchen counter behind me, out of sight.

  “Momma,” Rosie cried, “Daddy’s not lost in the woods!”

  Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw Sarah’s quick shake of her head and her warning glance at Rosie.

  I took Rosie’s hand, and the gesture seemed to calm her. She drew closer and stood next to my chair with her arm around my shoulder. But I could not bring myself to agree with them.

  Gracie wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Shit. Shit. I miss him.”

  Baby Adam beat the table with his tiny fists. “Shit! Shit!” he chirped. Then he stopped, his hands in the air, and stared, his happy gaze taking in their stricken faces. “Shit?” His grin broke into a wail of alarm, and they all burst into sobs.

  Lil laid her head on the table. “I can’t believe he’s gone.” Her arms muffled her voice.

  I smoothed her hair over her head, feeling her heat and youth. I longed to reassure them, to offer some hope. I wanted company in my optimism. I yearned to have them understand everything about their father—who he was, how he came to me, and how he might once again return to me—to us. But the story seemed so large then, impossible for one person to unfurl. I’d always imagined the two of us telling them. I could not bring myself to speak of him in the past tense. Such a recitation, however much I owed it to them, seemed delicate, precarious, even dangerous without him there. My heart veered.

  While my daughters wept around me, I literally choked on my words. My energies drained out of me. I was helpless against the momentum of their story and their assumption that he was there in the springs, entombed.

  I had no intention of becoming my mother. I didn’t want to keep them from the truth about their father for decades. But I also had no idea how rare such opportunities to confide in them would become, how infrequently all four of my daughters would be able to visit at the same time as they spread out across their various careers and, later, the globe. Rarer still would be times the five of us would have without husbands, boyfriends, or children.

  The next day, they wanted to return to the springs. They spent the morning efficiently and solemnly preparing for what I realized was an informal, impromptu funeral. Pauline and some of their friends would be joining them. They insisted I come, too. But I was equally insistent on staying home, again, with the baby.

  That evening, the table was crowded with Adam’s favorite dishes: gumbo, collards, corn bread, Key Lime pie, and my canned peaches.

  “We need to do something more. Something official. Daddy had lots of friends,” they began to say. I understood their need, but each time, I shook my head. “Not yet.” A hop
eful denial hardened in me. I was quiet any time they discussed their father.

  A restlessness trailed their sorrow. They were young. They had the distractions and the promise of new life to contend with.

  Lil’s boyfriend, Alphonso, had been calling every evening, missing her and hoping to be invited to join us. Sarah confided that Gracie was in danger of losing her first Foreign Service assignment if she missed much more of her intensive Spanish studies. Rosie took the phone out onto the porch when she pleaded with her professors for extensions on her lab assignments.

  “There’s nothing more you girls can do,” I told them one night at supper. “I’ll be okay. You can come back when you need to. If there is news.” Their exchange of glances told me that they were certain there would be no more news. They regarded me with varying degrees of indulgence and concern.

  “You sure, Momma?” Gracie asked.

  “Yes, I have to be alone eventually.” I looked away from their upturned faces and imagined Adam walking up to our door in new form, ready to once again be my husband.

  After the girls left, stripping our home of their books, clothes, and guitars, Adam’s things emerged as the land does out of a melting snow. His handkerchief, still wadded on the little shelf by the back door, where he always dropped his keys on the way in. His copy of Bartram’s Travels on the coffee table. His bedroom slippers by the recliner.

  I was in limbo. My husband was gone and I was alone, but I did not consider myself a widow. I kept everything as it was before he disappeared. All his clothes hung in the closet. His razor and shaving cream sat beside the sink. Like me, they seemed to be waiting for what would come next.

  Two images haunted me: Adam’s back as he disappeared into the woods on our way home from finding Roy Hope’s grave, and the look of wonder on his face when he was underwater with me and his voice shimmered between us just before the rain of silt sent us scurrying out of the cave. Parallel, twin questions always followed. Why had I sent him to the springs, down into the earth? When and how would he return to me? Over and over, I relived the morning he disappeared, tracing it back through the days and weeks and months before. I combed through every gesture, every word, for significance.