The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,169

me.

A question registered on his face.

I’d always assumed that I would accept anything to have him with me. I took his hand, aware of its weight and strength. “Our grandchildren should know the father their mothers had. The man I married.”

He shook his head violently.

I persisted. “What would we do? Fake your death? Then you come back as some new old guy and we take up where we left off? And we try to explain everything to the girls? To everybody? More lies and made-up stories? I want us to live as who we are.”

He stared at me, still shaking his head.

I gripped his shoulder. “Once I asked you what the difference was between being a man and being a woman. You told me that the greatest difference between me and you was not our sex but the fact that you were not fixed, you could change while I had to remain as I was—a woman—for my entire life.”

He squinted at me and I felt him tense as if to pull away.

I held tighter. “You were right in that respect, but I’m not without my own changes. I’m not like I was when you looked like me. I am the one changing now. My hands ache after a day in the garden. I lift a fifty-pound bag of feed and my back hurts for days. My eyes aren’t as good as they used to be. And this is just the beginning. There will be more and more changes for me. I want you to be with me. I want you down to my marrow. But I can’t bear the thought of you giving up what you have to feel like I do. And I don’t want to tell any more lies or make up any more stories.” I touched his face. “You have a gift. You can’t turn your back on it. We must bear this the best we can.”

He pressed his face into my hand. “Stay, Evelyn. Don’t change,” he whispered.

I held his wet face and made him look at me. “I can’t help but change. As long as I can be, I will be with you. But I will become an old woman and then . . .” I choked. “Will you stay—”

He stopped my words with a hard, fierce kiss. We made love on the seat of the truck. Frenzied. Quick. We devoured each other.

The sky was thick with stars by the time we drove out of the mountains, heading south toward the place we’d lived for so many years without lies. I had no idea how we would navigate those waters before us. What if I lived to the age of eighty-five and he still looked twenty-five? I could not keep the inevitable at bay. A helpless, irrational shame saturated me.

As we drove past homes lit against the falling dusk and returned to the highway, I thought of our daughters. I’d always focused on Adam’s most obvious gifts, his voice and his physical transitions, when I considered what he may have passed on to our children. But he’d also given them robust health and, it would now seem, a long life. They had matured at a normal rate, but would they age like me or like him? The older they got, the more they seemed like him. I’d never expected to outlive my children, but they might live far longer than I’d ever imagined. How much of their lives would I miss?

As we left the mountains behind us, I sensed a continuing undercurrent of resistance in his silence. He drove all night, staring straight ahead at the road while I dozed beside him. We held hands, but said only what was necessary for the drive. By the time we pulled into the ranch early the next morning, I understood that, though he had wept at my request, he had not yet agreed to it. I knew, too, that his single howl in the mountains had done little to abate his grief.

I touched his arm, stopping him before he got out of the truck. “I left the land I loved to come here, to safety. And when the girls and their friends were experimenting with drugs, I let you handle it your way.”

“Evelyn, no.”

But I held on to his hand. “I once asked you to hide your voice, to make that power private, so as not to disturb others or our daughters. You honored my request and found your way through. It seems our daughters have, too.