inexplicable little creatures, my own mental monkeys calmed.
The next day we toured St. Augustine. The dissonance of those old, sleepy Spanish streets and my constant, tensed vigilance nauseated me. But no police officers questioned us, no doctors appeared.
Adam and the girls indulged in ice cream and fried shrimp. They dawdled endlessly over the offering of tourist trinkets in the shops and the placards of history trivia.
That night, when we pulled into a motel in Daytona, Adam held up two fingers and grinned. “Two rooms.”
After we were sure the girls were asleep, Adam and I went to our room.
Slowly, tenderly, we made love. As his lips parted and I heard the familiar “ahh,” I pulled his face to mine and kissed him. His voice poured into me, muted and absorbed by my mouth and chest. An almost unbearable tenderness.
He was back.
The next morning, while the girls and Adam had breakfast, I fed quarters into the pay phone outside and made my first call home. I would have preferred to speak to Joe, but no one picked up at his house, so I called Bertie.
“Evelyn, where the hell are y’all? The sheriff came to Daddy’s looking for Adam! What did he do?” she yelled so loud I had to hold the receiver out away from my ear. Panic constricted my throat.
When I tried to explain, she interrupted, “The sheriff doesn’t come after people just for leaving a hospital. Adam must’ve done something. Did he hurt somebody?”
“He didn’t hurt anybody. They just thought he was sick and didn’t want me to take him home.”
“You weren’t with him all the time. Who knows what he could have done.”
Silence filled the line for a moment.
Then Bertie sighed. “I think you’re nuts, but I won’t tell them where you are.” Suspicion of official inquiries was native to her character; she would be good on her word. “Well, where are you? When are y’all coming back?”
“We’re traveling—on vacation. I don’t know when we’ll be back. I just wanted to let everybody know we’re okay,” I said.
She snorted. “Traveling? You should have let the doctors do what they needed to do to Adam. He needs something. I hope you’re right and getting him out of town for a while is the answer. One of us will go by and check on your place. Give the girls my love,” she said before she hung up.
We continued south, to Titusville and Cape Kennedy, then Melbourne Beach. Each day was a different beach. Every night a different motel. We’d only been to the beach a few times before and now the ocean fascinated the girls and Adam. While they swam, scoured the sand for interesting shells, or scanned the water for dolphin pods, I huddled under a big umbrella, avoiding more sunburn. My gaze kept drifting toward the road and north. We’d made no more calls home. The postcards the girls collected were not mailed.
I knew Adam was relieved to be away from the doctors, and he agreed that it was best not to let anyone know where we were and to keep contact to a minimum for a while, but I sensed in him a calm I could not share. He was absorbed rather than anxious. His only concern was the welfare of the horses. At night in our hotel room, when he laid his hand on my belly, just below my ribs, where my tension knotted, I was grateful for his comparative serenity.
We’d been gone a week by the time we made it to Fort Pierce. I was tired of motels, tired of the salty grit that coated everything I touched, and desperate to know if the sheriff was still looking for us.
I fed a pile of quarters into a pay phone and called Bertie. “Somebody in Atlanta and a doctor at some college” had called again but, she assured me, hadn’t gotten anything out of anyone. Then Adam called Wallace for his first update on the farm. The horses were fine and Joe was picking up mail and depositing boarding fees. The phone in the house rang constantly, Wallace reported. The sheriff and doctors had sent Harley Brown around looking for us a couple of times, but that was in the first two days. He hadn’t seen or heard a thing from them since then. I celebrated by calling my cousin Pauline in Micanopy to tell her we were on our way.
The following morning, we rolled through the mid-state citrus groves with the windows down. The distinct, exquisite