passed and the subtle shifts I sensed in the landscape around us. What, I wondered, did our daughters have of him? What had I silenced and what lay nestled under their breastbones? I reached over and patted Gracie’s arm.
Her face looked older, somber in the light of the dashboard. “Is Daddy going to be okay?”
Anxiety thickened in my throat. I was less certain than I wanted to be. I nodded, unable to lie out loud. I wanted to, needed to offer her something true. “Our honeymoon was the first trip we ever took with just the two of us. Our only trip to Florida. It’ll be good for him to go back. The change will help him.”
“That’s the pretty lake you said you’re taking us to?”
“Yes.”
She gave me a sly sideways glance. “Your honeymoon? And the place you swam when you were pregnant with me?”
“Oh, shit! Another thing you need to keep under your hat!”
She smiled at me, her first since we’d been on the road, and opened her mouth to speak.
I interrupted, “We didn’t have to get married. Once we were engaged . . . We loved each other so much we couldn’t wait.”
Gracie laughed. “Oh, Momma!”
“Our secret?”
“Of course.”
That accidental, inadvertent truth delighted me, lightening the hours of driving.
Gracie was still awake at about midnight when I pulled over at a motel. I checked in as Addie Nell Hardin and dished out more than we normally spent on a week’s groceries for a room with two double beds and an extra roll-away bed.
Adam slept beside me, having awakened enough to put his arms around me. Sarah slept in the little bed at our feet. The three other girls were safe in the next bed. My back ached from the hours of sitting cramped behind the wheel. Exhausted, I fell asleep listening to the five of them breathing. We were in Georgia, just outside of Jessup. I slept fitfully, dreaming of men in white coats armed with blue pens, who came to take Adam.
Eight
Renewal
Our first morning after leaving Clarion, I woke and dressed in the unfamiliar shadows of the motel room while my family snored around me. Adam slept on his side, one arm across Sarah, who had joined us in the middle of the night. In the dim light, the bandages on his chest and head shone against his skin.
Outside, the freshness of oncoming spring and the familiarity of moist red clay mingled with the unfamiliar odors of highway fumes. Trucks hissed by on Highway 301 in the predawn darkness. We could have been anywhere. I imagined the doctor’s pink hands removing someone else’s internal organs in a hospital far away from us. I unlocked the car and took out the clothes we would need for that day, then went inside to wake my family.
We ate breakfast in a small local restaurant. Adam wolfed down an enormous omelet and grazed off my plate.
“What kind of eggs are these?” he asked the girls, starting the game.
“Fried eggs!” Sarah volunteered.
Gracie shrugged, but grinned. “Good eggs?”
Rosie said, “Good fried eggs from a Geooorgia hen!”
Lil rolled her eyes at the blandness of her sisters’ answers. They finally won Adam’s approval with good fried eggs from a Georgia hen for a hungry, horse-whacked, napping Daddy. Rosie beat the rhythm on her plate with her fork. Lil and Sarah lapsed into a church-worthy giggling fit. Adam finished the toast and sopped up the last morsel on every plate. The waitress appeared very happy to bring the check.
It was eight thirty in the morning.
The girls raced to the car, laughing and arguing about who would get which seat. I watched Adam as we strolled across the narrow parking lot. My eyes went obsessively to his bald head and the bright bandage. I thought I could still see some trace of blue lines.
He stopped and pressed his finger to my chin, lowering my gaze to his eyes. “I’m going to be okay,” he said and squeezed my hand.
Rosie leaned out of the front-seat window. “Momma, Daddy, it’s getting hot in here!”
As I drove away from the restaurant, my fears nattered at me. I was sure I’d done the right thing for Adam. But everything else was uncertain. What had seemed like a reasonable, inevitable decision the day before, now, in the morning light, seemed crazy. I turned my mind to the task at hand: keeping Adam safe, the girls distracted, and all of us moving until we could decide what to do next.
We’d driven through northern Georgia