The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,34

mouth, as if to say more, but Addie clasped Miss Biddy’s slender, freckled hand and smiled. “We have to go now. Aunt Lily is expecting us for dinner.” She tilted her head, mirroring Miss Biddy, and they beamed at each other.

I was calmer by the time we got to Momma’s. At the dinner table, she was just another family member, passing a plate of ham down the table. Momma was the only one who treated her like company, offering then reoffering second helpings.

That night, when we were alone, Addie began the practice of repeating the names of people she had met, asking me about them and mapping out the social relations of the town. I found an old reading primer in the parlor bookcase, dated, worn, and childish. She sniffed its pages as she spread it open on the dining table.

“We start here.” I flipped to the first page. I felt my tension release as I recited the alphabet to her and pointed to each letter. She had made it through her initial introduction to Clarion without incident. No one knew our secret. No one but me.

Addie ran her finger over the faded illustrations and short sentences, her voice rising and falling as she read aloud, sounding out the simple nouns and verbs. I stood behind her and brushed her short hair, as Eva had done countless times for me. In that moment, I had no questions for her: it did not matter where she came from or what strange things she could do.

She learned quickly, finishing the primer before we went to bed.

What I saw at church that day was repeated over the weeks of introductions everywhere we went—the mill-village, Rhyne’s store, downtown, the feed store—people stopping to fuss over us and exclaim about our similarity. Addie was attentive and calmly gracious, speaking very little and volunteering nothing of herself in terms of facts. Smoothly deflecting questions with her warm smile and gentle touch.

From the moment I found Addie in the mud, my fears calmed by her unique voice, I felt myself bent to a new form. Part lullaby, part plea, and part question, the sound she made was a peculiar combination of elements. It had the metallic droning vibrato of a bell and the hummed warmth of the human voice. I felt its sweet harmonics in my bones as I heard them with my ears. Deep in me, something cracked open and unfurled, a giving way that would neither need, nor brook repair.

For months after I found her, I was in a heightened state, my nerves on a slow, white-hot burn. I could not sleep for more than five or six hours at a stretch, often getting only four hours in a night. I could not eat much at a sitting. Food, even plain biscuits with syrup or jam, turned heavy and too rich after a few bites. I lost weight and clothes hung on me, yet I was not tired.

For all of this, I did not feel upset. An odd calm lay over me, like the calm that comes in the middle of some great disaster, when things must be done quickly, yet the world seems to move slowly and with more light and precision. Everything was sharper and more defined, brighter, as if my pupils were open more than normal. The sky’s light, the patterns in cloth, the minute convolutions of a tree’s bark, the speckling of rust on a car fender—all these I looked not at but into. When I spoke to people, I looked directly into their faces, and there was more there in each of them than I’d previously seen. Not different things—just more of who they were—as if their souls were coming to the surface of their skin, giving themselves to me.

Addie’s arrival was a baptism by adrenaline, yet my body’s fight-or-flee response left me, and I could do neither. All I could do was surrender. Allow the seemingly inevitable, the fantastic, to come in and eat at my table like a long-known neighbor.

But I did not surrender passively. I wanted the slight metallic taste of her, the grassy odor of her sweat. Her sweet, strange voice at night. I wanted all that she contained that was not like me. Each time I touched her, I bonded my longing for her otherness to the nerves and fibers of my body.

Sometimes she would sit on the bed in the dark next to me with her legs crossed and lightly touch me everywhere—from the