The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,177
was overlaid with the scents of patchouli and baby powder.
Visibly, each of them was a variation on Addie and myself as young women. Gracie was now broader in the hips. Rosie had sheared her auburn mane to short spikes. Lil, who resembled us the most, had grown pale since she’d joined Gracie in DC. Sarah, her lithe frame topped by a mass of curls, looked younger than her twenty years.
Little blond Adam dashed up and down the hall, fiddle bow or yellow highlighter marker in hand, chased by one aunt or another. Hearing his name over and over—in the girls’ casual references to feeding or bedtime ritual and their attempts to soothe his fussiness—was strangely disorienting. The name “Adam” leapt out of their sentences. It was particularly jolting when Gracie, who wanted to raise her son bilingually, spoke to him, embedding those beloved syllables in Dutch.
Outwardly, everything appeared to be a normal family gathering. Lil resorted to her standard distractions—housekeeping and cooking. Rosie directed all her attention to helping Manny in the stables. Gracie and I took turns fussing with the baby while Sarah sketched us all. Adam might have been in the next room.
But the girls were fragile with anxiety, their bodies taut and somehow quieter, concentrated as if they, too, were listening for their father’s footsteps on the back porch. We all jumped in unison each time the phone rang. Sarah abandoned her little apartment “for the duration” and commuted to campus. Her latest paintings, wide, abstract swatches of reds and blues, leaned on the hall table. I thought of blood and water every time I saw one.
Those first days passed in a grainy, surreal numbness, punctuated by flashes of helplessness that left me exhausted. The thin hope I’d seen on the girls’ faces soon devolved into sadness or denial. Everything seemed to hinge on small details that might have been, but ultimately were not, revelations—an abandoned snorkel on the other side of the spring, some broken branches in the woods. Continuously, the girls circled the same questions. How could this happen? Why had he gone diving? Why would he go without a guide line?
I knew why he had gone to the springs: he went because I had sent him. Go down into the water, I’d told him. Go find your solace in Florida. But the lack of a guide line made no sense. Therefore, I reasoned, he wasn’t in the cave. He’d walked off into the woods as he had on our way home from Kentucky. He’d gone off to find release, to unleash his voice. The locals might already be telling stories of a strange new haint near the springs. Or he’d met some older man in the woods and was undergoing a new metamorphosis. He’d be back. I remained optimistic.
To distract ourselves, we turned to music. Only in those moments when they played—Gracie and Rosie on guitars, Lil on the fiddle, or when the five of us sang—did their faces relax. Though I strained to hear Adam’s tenor in the braid of their harmony, I heard only their voices and the chair next to me remained empty.
Their friends began to visit, wandering in at odd hours to offer condolences in low, serious conversations that paused if I walked into the room. If I woke in the middle of the night, the soft mutterings of grief and comfort drifted down the hall. In the mornings, when I sat at the kitchen table nursing my first cup of coffee and surrendering to my insomnia, the house seemed to buzz with their loss.
But I sensed that my placid demeanor frustrated and puzzled the girls. I’d noticed a disconcerted ripple move through them as I continued to refer to their father in the present tense. Once, Gracie moved Adam’s coffee mug from the end table in the corner of the living room where he’d left it the morning he disappeared. When I moved it back immediately and found a new spot for her beer, I caught her glance of surprise. I also saw a spark of pity and resistance.
Early on the morning of the fifth day, I got a call that the search was officially called off. When I gathered the girls in the dining room, and I told them, a wordless, leaden grief enveloped the breakfast table. Rosie pushed her coffee cup away, then left to help Manny in the stables. The rest of us sat as if waiting to be released.