The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,28

flesh and blood. I felt the startle of her presence in my chest, deep in my gut, but made myself look at her and breathe normally. She still had Uncle Lester’s hat on. She’d had it on the whole time. Maybe the men hadn’t seen her face very well. I felt the pressure of her unformed questions, but I held my hand up before she could speak and pulled her back over to the mirror.

“Take your clothes off,” I told her. And she did, just like that. The hat, too.

“You?” She pointed to my clothes. And I took them off, everything. The air was cold, but the cold stayed outside us. I turned to her, staring. We were exactly alike. The only difference I could see was her straight left collarbone. Mine had a lump in it where I’d broken it as a baby. Her hair, much shorter than mine, was the same copper color and just as coarse and curly. We were the same height. Her toes were long, like mine. The veins branching across the backs of our hands were not identical. I turned her and saw, for the first time, my own back. “Is my behind that broad?” I asked. I didn’t expect an answer, but she backed up against me and ran her hands from her hipbones back to mine.

“We’re the same,” she announced.

“How did you do this? What did you do?”

She stared down at her own hands, then her breasts. “I don’t know. You were next to me.” She shrugged.

“Why do you look like me? How?”

“I am like you. I don’t know why. I opened my eyes and you were there. If I knew why, I would tell you. I would give you that. I am sorry. I don’t know.”

Her hands were warm. Her breath, as she turned to me, a thin vapor. We were inches apart. I saw nothing but her face and those familiar eyes, green flecked with gold. I felt nausea of fear and confusion, then a wave of calm. Under her gaze, the panic in me dwindled down to quiet the way a child’s cries fall away under the rhythm and melody of a lullaby.

Suddenly we were both cold, and I remembered the animals unfed and unmilked in the barn. We dressed quickly, laughing when we stumbled in our rush.

We did chores, made coffee, and ate breakfast. I did the things I had done on countless ordinary days. Habit carried me through the job of slopping the hog, feeding the chickens, and milking the cows. But my skin was on fire, my nerves ping-ponging from “it cannot be” to “it is.”

While we ate breakfast, I told her the story of my father’s sister. I explained that she would be the daughter of my long-lost aunt, come to Clarion looking for her mother’s relations. We had met at the train stop. As the train pulled up to the station, she’d seen me across the street at the feed store, and was so taken by our resemblance that, in her haste to get off the train, she forgot her suitcase. That’s why she had nothing. As I finished my story, she took the dirty dishes from me, carried them to the sink, and began washing up as if she had been doing it for a lifetime.

“We have to say those things?” she asked.

I nodded.

“You think people will not like me if we don’t tell them your story?”

I winced to hear it put so bluntly. “Mostly I think they wouldn’t believe me if I told them the truth. But I have to tell them something. There has to be a reason for you to look like me.”

She peered down at her body and her dripping hands. “Okay.” She smiled. “But you are not afraid of me? And you like me?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do like you and I’m not afraid.”

She laughed. “You don’t scare me either, and I like you, too.” She turned that gaze on me while she dried her hands. “A train stop? Tell me about the train stop.” She put her arm through mine and led me out of the kitchen, and I realized, with a shock, that she was comforting me.

The sun shone for the first time in days when we stepped outside late that afternoon. Everything glistened, new and distinct. For a moment I saw everything—the pump, the house, the barn, the apple tree, the fields—through her eyes, through the eyes of someone new. Every run-down, beautiful, waterlogged bit