The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,179

danger of losing her first Foreign Service assignment if she missed much more of her intensive Spanish studies. Rosie took the phone out onto the porch when she pleaded with her professors for extensions on her lab assignments.

“There’s nothing more you girls can do,” I told them one night at supper. “I’ll be okay. You can come back when you need to. If there is news.” Their exchange of glances told me that they were certain there would be no more news. They regarded me with varying degrees of indulgence and concern.

“You sure, Momma?” Gracie asked.

“Yes, I have to be alone eventually.” I looked away from their upturned faces and imagined Adam walking up to our door in new form, ready to once again be my husband.

After the girls left, stripping our home of their books, clothes, and guitars, Adam’s things emerged as the land does out of a melting snow. His handkerchief, still wadded on the little shelf by the back door, where he always dropped his keys on the way in. His copy of Bartram’s Travels on the coffee table. His bedroom slippers by the recliner.

I was in limbo. My husband was gone and I was alone, but I did not consider myself a widow. I kept everything as it was before he disappeared. All his clothes hung in the closet. His razor and shaving cream sat beside the sink. Like me, they seemed to be waiting for what would come next.

Two images haunted me: Adam’s back as he disappeared into the woods on our way home from finding Roy Hope’s grave, and the look of wonder on his face when he was underwater with me and his voice shimmered between us just before the rain of silt sent us scurrying out of the cave. Parallel, twin questions always followed. Why had I sent him to the springs, down into the earth? When and how would he return to me? Over and over, I relived the morning he disappeared, tracing it back through the days and weeks and months before. I combed through every gesture, every word, for significance.

Without acknowledging to myself any contradiction, I vacillated between the conviction that he was in the earth, deep in a watery grave, and my certainty that he walked the earth, seeking a viable path back to me as an old man, as he once wanted to. He would return to me once again and he would be similar to me. Not in the obvious ways Addie had been, but like me in that one, crucial way. He would be enough like me to, once again, be with me. And that single similarity would allow him to return to me all that I craved of him—his wondrous, inexplicable strangeness.

A few days after the girls left, I got a call from the stallion’s owner. The crazy horse had started having seizures and they’d put him down. An autopsy had revealed a brain tumor the size of a ping-pong ball. The banker complained about the cost of the autopsy but wanted to let me know that the problem had been the horse, not my husband. I thanked him for letting me know. Adam would have cherished the comfort of knowing it was not his failure.

Our business phone calls soon fell down to a couple per week. But I did not disconnect the phone in the stable office. Its occasional eruptions, evidence that someone else also expected Adam to be there, soothed me.

The horses comforted me, too. One cool night, I took off my shirt and put on the flannel shirt Adam had left draped over the footboard of our bed. The shirt was well-worn and soft against my bare skin. I smelled his sweat on his hatband as I slipped his hat on my head. Then I turned the horses out under a full moon. Curious, they gathered around me. One by one, they sniffed under Adam’s hat, questioning. Their breath steamed my face. I closed my eyes. Their warm flanks slid by me, under my outstretched hands. I cried then. Not for Adam, not for my loss. But for the horses’ wordless generosity.

Over the days that followed, their owners moved them to other stables. From the kitchen or the back porch, I watched while Manny led those fine, proud animals into trailers that took them away. I studied their gleaming coats and smooth gaits, the angle and tension of their ears and tails, and I asked myself: What kind of horse is