The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,35
crown of my head to my heels and toes. Again and again her hands would roam over me, as if she were a blind woman trying to memorize my contours. She was always silent when she did this and, if there was moonlight enough, I could see that her eyes were half-open, her face calm and slack, as if all of her being had gone into her hands. Her touch buoyed me. When she was done, she leaned over and pressed her chest against mine, her hands on my face. Her body became a room we entered. Everything else fell away and I forgot myself. Her strange voice rose around us, the harmonics of it on my skin, then ringing like light in my breastbone up to my skull and down through my hips. She found the core and pressed in.
I was nearly undone, as if the literal fibers of my being were unwinding themselves—dissipating. Her touch and her laughter would carry through into the day, sticking like fine powder on my skin.
One night I lay stunned, limp, and humbled next to her. “Does it bother you that I can’t do everything you can do? That I can’t do with my voice what you do with yours?”
“It doesn’t come from here.” She touched me lightly on my throat. “But here.” She tapped between my breasts. “Would it still be called a voice?”
“It’s like a voice. But it is not a voice. How do you do it?”
She pressed her lips together and closed her eyes. A short, declarative tremolo radiated from her. She opened her eyes. “I don’t know how I do it. Most of the time, it just happens. I’m not trying to do anything.”
“At night, here with me, you always sigh ‘Aaahh’ first, then you start to . . . to resonate.”
“I resonate?” She laughed. “It doesn’t matter that you can’t give me the same kind of ‘voice’ I can give you. You gave me all this.” She skimmed her hand lightly over my face and down my body.
I did not know what to say. I had given nothing. She had taken her identity from me, yet left it with me and given me every reason to see how vastly different we were from one another. She pulled me closer and, pressing her mouth to mine, gently exhaled into me.
No name for what she was or what she did. No name for the place she had come from.
But each night there was her sweet voice.
On my moonlit, sleepless nights, she lay beside me, sleeping. Everyone, everything else slumbered, and the world was quiet. In the surreal silence of midnight, I watched her, studying a face more like my own than a mirror. I lay close enough that I breathed her exhalations and she mine, the air going in and out of us in matched rhythm. Watching her eyes move over the dream world under her closed lids, I could not imagine what she saw. A world peopled with others like her? I saw the face my mother must have seen when she watched me sleeping, the face I would see later when my own daughters, so like me, slept. I was inside and outside my own skin, both the mother and the daughter, the other and myself.
Other nights, I would have to rise from our bed and walk the house, touching the walls and the furniture until the ordinary proportions and places of things returned.
Once, while pacing the bedroom, I saw a fox cross the bright, night-gray yard, trotting purposefully, confidently on small, delicate paws. I wanted to touch those paws, to feel the press of them on the ground and know the texture of her coat. To be outside in the cool darkness, my nose in the air.
Sometimes, without moving, Addie would open her eyes and look at me from a seemingly deep sleep. I would see, then, who I was not. The distinctness of myself lurched within me, the tender presentness coming over me as she opened her arms and pulled me into them again.
Freddie and Marge Rumford were a young couple, just married. I had known Freddie all my life, but Marge, whom he married shortly after coming back from the war, was from Cramerton. Freddie, a thin man with a dry sense of humor, had returned from the war almost mute until he met Marge, a big, friendly girl, her body seeming to move in loose, relaxed circles. After they married, local musicians gathered every