The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,158

me.”

Sarah joined us at the table. “When I was a little girl, I worried about that.”

Lil sat down next to her sister. “Worried about what?”

“That I perceived—saw—things differently from everyone else,” Sarah said. “What if, when I look at a pumpkin, I see the color orange. But when you look at it, Momma, you see the color purple and when Lil looks at it she sees yellow. But if we all call the color we see ‘orange,’ then we would never know that we were actually each seeing different colors, would we?”

Lil nodded. “I thought the same thing, but I had backup when I was a kid. I always knew Jennie saw the same thing I did. I was sure of it.” She pressed her lips together the way she always did after uttering her sister’s name.

I thought of Adam, solitary, the only one of his kind. “There are things we’ll never know. But you’re not alone. None of you will ever be alone.” My words fell heavier than I intended.

A short silence followed. Then Rosie volunteered: “I have the same problem with sounds. I’m pretty sure there are times I hear things that other people don’t.” She held up the pot lid she had been drying and tapped it on the edge with a big spoon. Ting! The sound reverberated. Rosie swept the spoon through the air as if following the sound. The arc of the spoon continued long after I heard only silence punctuated by Adam’s snores from Lil’s bedroom. Rosie banged the pot again softly and whispered in mock drama, “And sometimes, ladies, I hear that sound when there is no pot or spoon around!”

Beside me, Lil pinched her thumb and forefinger together and sucked air between them. Sarah snickered.

“No. No,” Rosie protested. “Nothing to do with smoking. It started when I was a little girl. Weird droning sounds. Stuff like those bowls.”

I wondered what else Rosie might hear that I did not. I shooed Lil away and stood up.

“Well, I have heard enough. I want to hear the dishes getting finished. Go! All of you.”

They raced for the kitchen door. Once again, I felt myself to be the solitary one. They heard things I could not hear. They had potential out of my range, possibilities that would ferry them into a future blind to me. They were so young. All of them. Even Adam.

Not long after she returned the borrowed singing bowls, Sarah began the first of her “anatomy” drawings, strange distortions of the human body morphing into animals. She turned Gracie and Rosie’s old bedroom into an ever-changing gallery. My favorite was a portrait of Adam as a centaur. She had followed him around the stables for days, stopping him at his work, asking him to take his shirt off.

I caught her sketching me one day as I bent over in the garden. “I’m not taking any of my clothes off,” I told her and waved her away.

“Oh, I really wouldn’t want you to for this one.” She grinned as her hand swept over the paper.

The next day she had a new sketch up, a horse shown from the rear, turning to look back in surprise over its shoulder. The face peering over the broad, heart-shaped rump was an elongated, horsy version of my own.

“She got you!” Adam laughed when he saw it.

“Really?” I asked. “Is my butt that big?”

Adam wisely just grinned and scooted out the door.

Since their births, I’d wondered how different my girls were. As they matured, I couldn’t help but ask how it was that they didn’t seem to recognize the difference between themselves and others, even as they gave voice—literal and metaphoric voice—to that difference. How could they not know what was in their own blood? In their genes? But, I told myself, we are all stuck in our own skin. Limited to the singular certainty of our individual selves. Each of us knows the world only from a single perspective.

Then the thought jolted me: not Adam. He was not limited to his own perspective, he had not always been stuck in one skin. He’d had mine and Roy Hope’s.

I laughed.

Again, he surpassed my understanding.

How would they, his daughters, follow his lead?

The year that Sarah had started her periods, I’d begun skipping mine. By the time she was in high school, I had gone through menopause. I had a relatively easy time of it, but I did notice I no longer had the single-minded drive toward sex, and desired it