The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope (49 page)

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.

T
he 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 been 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.

S
oon 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.

Unnerved by the sight, I dialed Ray Bentley, our veterinarian.

When I hung up, I grabbed gauze, a sheet, scissors, and the extra first-aid kit we kept in the house, then ran to the stable. Bloody footprints led to the first stall, where Jericho lay on her side. Adam and Manny had stripped to the waist. A broad smear of red darkened Adam’s chest. Kneeling at Jericho’s shoulder, he held bloody, wadded-up shirts, one pressed at the base of her neck, the other at her chest. His cheek was abraded, and a long, shallow cut oozed at his bicep.

The mare lay still. Only her eyes moved, wildly. She breathed in staccato snorts.

I heard nothing else, but when I touched Adam’s back, his voice vibrated under my hand. “The vet’s on his way,” I said.

Manny muttered a soothing stream of Spanish as he grabbed the sheet and began tearing it into strips.

“Never seen anything like it!” Adam winced as I handed him two thick gauze pads. “He bit the crap out of her, then all hell broke loose. Rearing. Over and over. His hooves slashing.” He tossed the shirts aside and pressed the gauze firmly to the wounds. “He wanted to kill her. We barely got her out.” Blood blossomed through the compress immediately, oozing around his fingers.

“Loco, loco,”
Manny muttered.

Jericho nickered weakly when the vet arrived. Ray shook his head as he knelt to examine the mare. I gasped when he removed the compress. A fist-sized chunk of flesh slid sideways from her withers, barely attached.

Jericho erupted, kicked, then lifted her head and shoulders as if to heave herself upright. Everyone but Adam backed away. He moved closer, his hand in her mane, soothing her. At his touch, she laid her head down again.

Ray laid a large, dark case on the ground a few feet away and began to unpack syringes and a large vial. “It looks bad. A local, first. She’s not going to like it.”

“You don’t have to stay for this,” Adam whispered to me.

Grateful, I walked away from the agonized cries of the horse. For want of anything more constructive to do, I went in the house and prepared sandwiches and coffee. As I loaded the food onto a tray, another sharp neigh rang. I added a flask of whiskey on my way out.

Manny stood at a respectful distance, watching intently. The other horses in the stable were quiet, their ears perked. The odors of blood and the men’s sweat dulled the air.

A big utility light clamped to the stall rails shone down on Adam and Ray. Jericho, her legs tied, lay facing away from my view. I was grateful not to see her wounded chest or her terrified eyes.

Adam knelt at her back, stroking her neck. Her foreleg trembled spasmodically. Her hide rippled.

Ray paused, leaning back on his heels. “I didn’t expect anything this extensive. I’m out.” He held up an empty vial and shook it. “I can’t give her a local on these last two wounds. But I’ve got to close her up before there’s any more swelling. Twenty-five, maybe thirty more sutures. It’s going to be rough.” He glanced at Adam, who nodded.

“Evelyn,” Adam said without looking up.

Ray hesitated, the threaded needle poised over Jericho, and shot a questioning glance in my direction.

The cups rattled as I set the tray down. The only other sound was the mare’s shallow and rapid breath.

Not certain what Adam wanted, I stepped into the stall and stood next to him. Ray’s needle touched near a gapping slash of exposed muscle. Jericho flexed her forelegs and jerked her head sideways in a scream of protest. The two remaining gashes bled anew.

Adam touched my foot. I realized what he was going to do and moved to stand closer to him, giving tacit permission. Then I braced myself. His other hand slid up the taut muscles of Jericho’s neck. His lips parted in exhalation. A single, radiant chime rang out, pure and singular. A test, not his full range. Jericho nickered a soft response. Adam and Ray locked eyes for a second. As Adam’s voice increased in volume, Ray’s face opened in shock. Adam bent to press his chest to the mare’s shoulder.

Ray’s eyes followed Adam, then darted down the flanks of the horse who now lay completely still.