The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,150
bring her face before me. Just darkness. The dark immenseness. Hated, hated darkness. In me, on me.
Then I was inside on the bathroom floor, tearing my shirt off. Sorrow sparking through my clothes as I threw them down. My face was like wax in the heat, my bones too close to the surface. I had to turn from my own reflection in the mirror. I sat with my knees pulled up to my chest, afraid of the sorrow and darkness that breathed through me, faster and faster, until a large hand reached around from behind me. The hand told me that I was alone, that it was my own breath I heard. Those words spread a calm through me. I uncoiled in the thick, warm air and listened. I heard that everything was okay. Good. There was just is. Is-ness.
Is filled the bathroom. In all directions it continued. Endless.
After a while, I ran a bath, filling the tub with water. And the water was like water all over the earth. Iridescent. Alive.
Naked, I saw that everything about me was good. In the moonlight through the window, the slackness of my lower belly and my breasts, the silvery stain of old pregnancy stretch marks, the little veins on my legs and ankles, the darker freckling on the backs of my hands and my arms, the colors of my hair dulling toward gray were no longer signs of age but beauty, simple and present as the joints in my wrist, as the crickets outside and the sparkle of the bath water through my hands. All was right and wondrous, sweet, infinite.
I eased down into the cool bath. My body loosened into the water and I knew again without any doubt that the world was well and beautiful. Not all the time and not for everyone, but for the All which the individual and the singular is a part of. I had first known this, beyond any reason, when I was a child alone in the woods, and I knew it again. I breathed deeply and calmly. Stunned.
The pale, half-drawn shower curtain, the bathroom walls, and the small square of the bathroom window seemed to breathe with me. I was in a room in a house on a ranch in a state in a nation in a world that turned.
Then a young man appeared at the toilet. It seemed right that he should be there, peeing with his back to me, but I also sensed there was something unusual about the two of us being in the bathroom together. He sang a few bars of a jumpy little tune. He jigged his shoulders like a gnome. Then he turned and let out a yelp as he zipped up. “Mrs. Hope!” He rubbed his face and eyes. There was still something I couldn’t understand. I didn’t bother to cover myself as we stared at each other. My inability to comprehend what was going on struck me as hysterically funny and I burst out laughing. He bumbled out the door, calling, “Everything’s cool! I’ll get help! Rosie’s right on the front porch!”
Moments later, Gracie and Rosie exploded into the bathroom, upset over something, turning on blinding lights. They spouted a chorus. “It’s two in the morning. What are you doing in the bathtub in the dark? What happened? Are you okay?” To appease them, I let them dry me and dress me. They kept asking if I was okay. They moved too much, they talked too much, and there was too much I did not understand. Funny, sweet girls. They glowed like daughters, but finally I told them to shut up.
They led me to the bed. I propped myself up on the pillows. The sheets glittered white around me. Then Gracie and Rosie sat in the dark on either side of me like sentinels. A good way to go to bed.
I sighed. My body relaxed against the headboard. When I closed my eyes, I could see all my nerves swept clean. Sweet and new as the moment after sexual climax.
“What are we waiting for?” I asked. “Adam?”
“Where is Daddy?” Rosie started to rise from the bed. “I’ll go—”
I touched her warm shoulder. “No, wait here with me. He’s coming back.”
She leaned closer again. “Okay, Momma. We’re both here with you. Now, how much of it did you drink?”
“I drank this much.” I laughed and spread my arms. But the sentinels did not laugh. Gradually, I stopped giggling, cowed by their solemnity.