The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope (52 page)

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 hopeful 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.

A
fter 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.

Without acknowledging to myself any contradiction, I vacillated between the conviction that he was in the earth, deep in a watery grave, and my certainty that he walked the earth, seeking a viable path back to me as an old man, as he once wanted to. He would return to me once again and he would be similar to me. Not in the obvious ways Addie had been, but like me in that one, crucial way. He would be enough like me to, once again, be
with
me. And that single similarity would allow him to return to me all that I craved of him—his wondrous, inexplicable strangeness.

A
few days after the girls left, I got a call from the stallion’s owner. The crazy horse had started having seizures and they’d put him down. An autopsy had revealed a brain tumor the size of a ping-pong ball. The banker complained about the cost of the autopsy but wanted to let me know that the problem had been the horse, not my husband. I thanked him for letting me know. Adam would have cherished the comfort of knowing it was not his failure.

Our business phone calls soon fell down to a couple per week. But I did not disconnect the phone in the stable office. Its occasional eruptions, evidence that someone else also expected Adam to be there, soothed me.

The horses comforted me, too. One cool night, I took off my shirt and put on the flannel shirt Adam had left draped over the footboard of our bed. The shirt was well-worn and soft against my bare skin. I smelled his sweat on his hatband as I slipped his hat on my head. Then I turned the horses out under a full moon. Curious, they gathered around me. One by one, they sniffed under Adam’s hat, questioning. Their breath steamed my face. I closed my eyes. Their warm flanks slid by me, under my outstretched hands. I cried then. Not for Adam, not for my loss. But for the horses’ wordless generosity.

Over the days that followed, their owners moved them to other stables. From the kitchen or the back porch, I watched while Manny led those fine, proud animals into trailers that took them away. I studied their gleaming coats and smooth gaits, the angle and tension of their ears and tails, and I asked myself: What kind of horse is this? What kind of man is my husband? Where is my husband?

Would he appear at my door as he had when he returned as Adam? Would I hear his voice again, feel his touch?

At night, I tossed in my bed, craving him, wanting to enter the room of his body and feel his hands on my face. To taste his mouth and press my chest against his. There were no buffers between the need, the absence, and myself. When I wept, I wept for need, not grief.

If I kept everything ready for him, Adam would return. Years before, my readiness, my ripeness and solitude as a young woman had called him out of the Carolina clay. Surely, my loneliness could now do the same. I waited and waited and waited. I, along with all his clothes, and his horses, and his tools, waited.

The pasture greened up in the first rains of spring, but otherwise, everything remained the same. Weeks, then months crept by.

The girls and Pauline visited as often as they were able, and the emptiness of the house always seemed fresher, stronger, in the wake of their departures. I deflected their requests for a memorial. Some days, I did not answer the phone.

I kept up the house and the garden. The tomatoes came in by the bushel. White acre peas, cucumbers, and corn followed. I made Adam’s favorite relish, an old recipe of Momma’s. I lined the jars up on the pantry shelf. Gleaming, ready.

By midsummer, the tension of waiting for his arrival had stripped away my passivity. Methodically, I pulled out all of Adam’s Florida maps. I worked my way through his bookshelves, reading his books on Florida history, geography, flora, and fauna. I studied his notes in the margins, then visited all the circled destinations on his maps. What I initially told myself would be a tribute to Adam quickly turned into a desperate search. I began to see older men who looked like him everywhere.

His individual physical features that I had savored for so long now seemed common. I raced down a crowded Cedar Key pier to touch the arm of a gray-haired man whose wide back reminded me of Adam’s. At the farmer’s market, my heart startled and I gawked at a man who laughed like Adam. I drove across the parking lot of a state park to pull up beside an old man who walked like Adam. Each time left me with a dissonant sense of failure, as if my mistaken leaps of recognition were somehow dispersing the very qualities I sought.

Still, I scrutinized every stranger who paid me the slightest attention or kindness. Everywhere I went, I watched and waited, on alert. I was looking for a single straw in a haystack.

Listening for his return seemed to be the only thing that held my muscles to my bones, that kept the supper dishes from sliding off the table, and brought the sun up in the morning. My clothes hung loosely on me. I dug through boxes and closets to pull out smaller clothes the girls had left behind.

I struggled to hold myself open, to remain vigilant for his return to me.

One day, I went to a local nursery for some flowers to plant by the back door. I reached over the flats of four-inch pots, searching for the most robust among the dark orange marigolds, Adam’s favorite shade. From behind me a man’s voice asked, “Can these take full sun?”

I turned.

He was exactly my height. He appeared to be in his sixties, gray hair, warm hazel eyes, and a thick white mustache. He laughed at my surprise and repeated his question, his broad hand grazing the flower tops. He absently scratched his breastbone and told me how much he liked the color I’d chosen.

As we strolled by the vine section on our way to the checkout counter, he cupped a passion vine blossom and asked, “What kind of flower is this?”

His words whipped through me. Our question game! I searched his face, his pale, intelligent eyes for signs of recognition. All my nerves were poised, ready for Addie’s beaming smile or Adam’s deep laugh. I touched his arm, squeezing to stop my hand’s trembling.

As I opened my mouth to say Adam’s name, the man glanced over his shoulder awkwardly and shifted the potted flower he held so that his arm slipped from my touch. “Excuse me, I need to help my mother.”

“You have a mother?”

“Um, yes. She’s waiting for me over there. Thank you.” He nodded toward the cash register and left to join a thin, ancient woman in the checkout line. They had the same forehead, the same square chin.

Suddenly, I realized how I looked to them—a gawking, haggard woman.

I wandered around the back of the nursery near the potted fruit trees until the man and his mother drove away. I left without buying any flowers.

Shame tightened like a crust on my skin.

I gripped the steering wheel at the first light. The world slipped, angling off away from me. The light was green. The driver behind me honked. I went on to the next red light. Stopping at the intersection, I made myself take deep breaths. I looked around at the people. Boys with their loud stereo in the next car. A young woman pushed a stroller across the street. In the noon light, everyone seemed outlined, purposeful, and new. The world overflowed with people. All of them were going to or from the people or places they loved. Just as A. had come to me. I remembered lifting my Aunt Eva’s quilt to see his strange face for the first time, before he was Addie, before he was anyone.

Something broke in me. I could feel it, the precise moment of surrender, like a bone snapping. A sudden, terrible miracle. Any one of them could be Adam. Old, young, male, female, black, white.

He was gone. Not forever, not from everything. But from my life. All my questions about him would remain unanswered. Forever.

The car behind me honked. I drove on. I wept, for the first time as a widow.

T
he next day, I pulled out an old WWI army-issue metal box that one of my uncles had given me when I was a girl. Inside, I placed a lock of A.’s hair, a perfect, glossy, brown C-curve from the seventies, when he let it grow a little longer. Five other locks of differing shades of auburn and red hair nestled in the box. I added copies of my favorite photos of Adam: a snapshot Momma had taken of the seven of us, the girls in their Easter dresses squinted at the spring sun; a black-and-white of Momma and Adam at our wedding, their shoulders touching as they leaned toward each other, smiling; the photo of me and Addie that Momma gave me the day she told me about my father; a shot Sarah took of Adam on horseback, crouched forward gracefully over the horse’s withers, mid-jump; and, last, the photo of the burned Japanese woman Frank had left at the farm years before. On top of them, I placed Adam’s copy of
Song of Myself
that the girls had given him a few years before. The last thing to go in the box: a jar of Florida’s sandy soil.

Then I drove north, straight to the farm.

Bud, Wanda, and their kids weren’t home. A privacy hedge now separated the yard from the field, but the decayed stump of the apple tree was still there and I could easily locate the spot where I’d found A. I sank down onto my knees. I kissed the earth that had given him to me and tasted the clay grit on my lips, bringing him into my body one last time.

He was gone.

I dug, and the opened earth exhaled a feral musk. I wrapped the box in plastic, then in an old oilcloth. A gentle rain began to fall as I shoveled, burying the box.

The land, level and empty, seemed to stretch out endlessly in the twilight. Gradually, I realized that the pale lumps in the distance were earth-moving machinery. Then I remembered hearing that the fields had been resold and were being cleared for a new mall. The oaks still buffered the land where it dropped down to the railroad tracks. The Starneses’ land was split; the half near the highway was now a subdivision. Cole and his brothers had held on to the house and southern pasture. I took a perverse pleasure in thinking of all those future shoppers coming and going for years near the spot where A. had last come into this world, ignorant as we are in Florida of the rivers that vein the land below us. I imagined Adam watching. The sky seemed to hang directly above me, low and mobile.

The rain began to fall in earnest as I dropped the final handful of red clay.

Car wheels whispered on the driveway behind me. I heard Bud and Wanda get out of their car. I walked around the hedge to greet them.

“Good Lord, Evelyn!” Wanda gasped. She and Bud hurried me out of the rain toward the house.

On the porch, I stared back at them stupidly, then realized how I looked, shovel in hand and dirt on my mouth. My clothes rumpled from the long drive and now muddy, my hair wet.