The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,126

at night. Now, as the morning sun glared off the cars of people on their way to work and shopping, I realized how flat the land had become. The soil changed from familiar iron-red to alien shades of gray and black. The road relaxed into distant, straight horizons. Palm trees dotted the landscape. Small towns interrupted stretches of dense forests that crowded the highway and open fields. I had made the same journey with Adam sixteen years before, but nothing looked familiar.

When we crossed the state line, the girls exploded into cheers. “We’re in Florida! We’re in Florida!”

Adam startled from his post-breakfast doze, rubbed his head, and squinted at the brilliant sunlight. “This was a good idea, Ev.” He winked at me.

Beside me, Lil fiddled with the radio dial, unable to find what she wanted. Sarah and Gracie unfolded the Florida map and entertained us with a recitation of Florida towns. “Apopka, Frostproof, Panasoffkee, Plant City, Kissimmee,” Sarah giggled, stumbling over the Indian names.

I tried to ignore my watch.

Gracie navigated us straight toward the beach. Adam and the girls hung out the windows, gawking at the marshy landscape. Thick, briny air filled the car.

Claiming a sudden, irrepressible whimsy, I insisted that we stop at the first little souvenir shop for sunglasses and hats. Adam’s bare head needed protection and I wanted us to fit in at the beach, not draw any attention to ourselves. Next to the cash register was a rack of Magic Sea Monkeys, stiff little packets accompanied by a jar. Colorful, vaguely crustacean-looking cartoon characters grinned from the illustration. Normally, both Adam and I were immune to the girls’ pleas for impulse purchases, especially at the cash register. But after Sarah read the package—“Just add water and your Magic Monkeys spring to life!”—Adam set two of them on the counter. Sarah and Lil beamed with surprise.

“We really are on vacation!” Gracie exclaimed.

Those simple purchases seemed to release something in the girls and Adam. Outside, Lil twirled in the shop parking lot, admiring her new, flamingo-studded sunglasses. Her hair, fluffed by wind and humidity, sprang out in bright corkscrews. “Neat-o, neat-o, neat-o!” she chanted her new favorite word.

Rosie mugged at me, her cat-eye sunglasses low on her nose. “Not neat-o. We are incognito, right, Momma?”

Adam lifted his new hat off his head, laughing. “Five pale, freckled, redheaded gals, a bald guy with a bandaged head, in a loaded car with out-of-state plates? Noncognito is as close as we get.”

I cracked up. By the time we got to the beach, I wasn’t sure if I was laughing or crying, but I got us to the water safely. Adam and the girls tumbled out of the car, whooping, and bolted for the waves as soon as I shifted into park. I dried my eyes and blinked at the bright expanse of the Atlantic.

I followed them across the blazing powder-white sand to the wet hard pack and managed to get my feet wet before allowing myself to look at my watch. Twelve fifteen. A quarter-hour past the time I said I’d return Adam to the hospital. Whatever was going to happen had begun. The tightness in my chest returned. I could see the doctor and the sheriff knocking on our front door.

That evening, using Addie’s name again, I checked us into a moldy little dive of a hotel on A1A just north of St. Augustine. After showering the crispy saltiness from our skin and hair, we all collapsed, exhausted. When everyone else was asleep, I left the room and pulled the car around, to the side of the motel, and backed into the shadows so the North Carolina tag wasn’t visible from the road.

I’d registered the girls and Adam’s excitement earlier in the evening when they watered the little granules of sea-monkey magic. As I’d rinsed out our wet bathing suits and reorganized the food in the cooler, my mind had been on the next day’s route, busy with the strange calculus of our situation. I’d only smiled at the jar Lil, her face livid with amazement, held up for me to examine. But when I returned to the bed, I saw the jars lined up on the desk by the window. A sliver of street light illuminated one of them. Pale, tiny ghosts of creatures fluttered busily back and forth in the water. For a long time, I watched them, unable to decide if they resembled shrimp or tiny spiders. I understood my family’s reaction. I fell asleep watching those