The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,38

being alone at night since her momma died.” I talked too fast, made new lies without thinking.

He sighed. “Okay, okay.” Then he glanced toward the barn. “If you want to, you can sneak out when she’s sleeping. We could meet in the barn.”

I imagined disentangling myself from her arms to go to him. I didn’t want to leave her at night. “I’ll see . . .” I couldn’t think. I knew he could see the answer on my face.

“You blush too much,” he said, his grin gone. He hobbled off, following Addie into the barn. A few minutes later, he rode away. I tried to read his back as he disappeared, but his posture told me nothing of what he knew or sensed between me and Addie.

My silence about the joy Addie gave me pulled me away from the people I loved, particularly my mother. All the things I couldn’t explain about Addie created a void that wanted filling.

The Depression and the war were right behind us, thick in everyone’s past. But Addie was a clean slate. When anyone asked about her past, she was vague. An outright lie seemed an impossible act for her. But she was deft with a turn of phrase.

I took on the task of storytelling and lying, volunteering when I was alone with the curious questioner that Addie was shy about things, embarrassed by her momma’s past. I felt oddly compelled to make her imaginary life as extraordinary as she herself was. By the time she’d been with me a few months, I’d told quite a bit about her. Not much to one person, but everything together would have amounted to a life—a life that to my small-town eyes was exotic. Addie had one brother, a blessedly small family. They lived in an apartment in Chicago. They went to live plays on Saturday nights, a Lutheran Church on Sunday.

For the first time in my life, I had the pleasure of telling a complete anecdote. No one tried to finish sentences for me, correcting or adding to what I said. No one knew her story but me.

One night, before we fell asleep, I asked her if it bothered her not having a past, a family, or a place she came from. “I come from here,” she whispered close. “Just like you.” She spoke again in a slow, deliberate voice. “I don’t like lying. I can’t do it without laughing.”

“I know, and you laugh when you hear someone else lying, too. But nobody gets upset with you. They just laugh along.”

She rolled over on her back. In the dimness, she stared up at the ceiling. “It’s funny when people lie. They know they’re lying and they think they’re getting away with it. But they’re like a naked man trying to straighten his tie.” She paused and sighed. “Other times, it is not a lie, but something else. I’ve heard others tell about something that happened when I was there, but they tell it differently than I would.”

My eyes had adjusted to the faint moonlight through the windows. I studied her profile, conscious of how others must see me.

“They do it without thinking,” she added. “To keep other stories going. Their own stories, or the things their mothers or cousins or the preacher have told them. They’re also telling about themselves. You hear two things at once—the facts and the storyteller’s heart.” She rolled onto her side, facing me, and laid her hand on my chest. “I know you’re helping me fit into your family’s story. They need the stories. And so do you. But I don’t.”

“So what do you tell yourself?”

“That I am here. That I am. And I am.”

I suddenly felt naked. Naked and so unlike her.

She turned toward me again and touched my face. “So go ahead. Tell any stories you need to.”

How could they not have known about Addie then? Not sensed on her skin or seen in her eyes the deep, strange difference of her? I kept expecting someone to pull me aside and say they knew she wasn’t one of us. Once I dreamed that Momma, Daddy, and Joe buried her—put her back in the dirt where she came from—her eyes, open, calm, and beseeching as they shoveled dirt on top of her.

But no one ever accused her. No one stopped us. No one tried to take her away.

Gradually, I saw that everyone would treat Addie as people have always treated their relatives and neighbors with embarrassing but essentially harmless traits. They