The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,69

woman to the father of her child. I wanted to give him a child. I wanted to have a part of him inside me in every sense. But my pregnancy also put us firmly on opposite sides of an experience. Addie and I had been the same. While I could commiserate with Joe’s wife, Mary, and with any other woman who had had a baby, for the first time what was happening to me could not be shared with A. in the same way

That Adam could exist the way he did was, for him, as it is for all of us, the first given, the absolute. He took his own existence for granted. But the impossibility of his existence, the guilt and isolation I felt in choosing him over my own kind and bearing his children, these were things I wanted to share with him but did not. What good could come from telling him I had these conflicts?

But in my sleep, I gave myself away.

During the fourth month of my pregnancy, the nightmares began. In each dream, I was with the baby in public. Happily, I showed off my new child and everyone admired her. But then I looked down and I saw that she was shapeless and faceless. In some dreams, I tried to hide her face from everyone and get away. Other nights, her shapelessness seemed to be my own craziness and no one else saw it. I tried to keep the nightmares to myself. But I would wake from them with Adam holding me, rocking and humming.

Once when Momma and I were alone in her kitchen, cleaning up after Sunday supper, I asked, “Did you have bad dreams when you were pregnant?”

“Most women do. Don’t let it worry you.”

“But these are real bad—really bad. They wake me up.” Then I told her one of the dreams.

“Everybody’s scared when a baby’s coming, Evelyn. That’s normal. But all you can do is take it easy and let Nature do the rest.”

Suddenly, her ignorance irritated me. I shook my head. “You can’t understand. You can’t!”

I saw the hurt in her face as she paused before starting to speak. I held up my hand to interrupt her, but my own words backed up in my throat. Nothing came out of my open mouth. The puzzled expression on her face as I left the room reminded me of the faces in my dreams.

The week after I told Momma my bad dreams, she insisted on taking me to Dr. Hanks, who delivered most of the babies in Clarion then. I knew she was trying to reassure me, but it didn’t help. He talked about what I should eat, what work I should do. Everybody assumed that I’d be having the baby at the hospital, of course. Only backwoods or desperately poor women still had their babies at home. To have sought any alternative then would have been seen as a kind of insanity. But in a hospital, I would be asleep and alone when the baby came out, as helpless as I was in my dreams. I didn’t want others to be the first to see her. I was afraid of what they might do if she looked like her daddy had when I first saw him.

By the time I neared my seventh month, I was irrational with worry. Women then referred to the deep anesthesia of hospital labor as the “twilight sleep.” The phrase seemed ominous to me and I became convinced they would kill my baby or spirit her away before I woke, then tell me she had been born dead in order to spare me having to see her or raise a deformed child.

I woke in a sweat one night with Adam holding me. “Tell me about it,” he whispered. And, finally, I told him about the dreams and my fears.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

“I chose. I chose to do this.”

Then I realized he might not remember much of those first few days. I turned on the light and got out the picture that Frank had left, the one of the Japanese girl burned in the bombing. I had put it away, deep in the small drawers of the wardrobe.

“Do you remember this?” I asked. “Do you remember your skin being a different color and looking like this?” I traced my finger along the burnt shoulder of the woman.

Adam moaned, low and awful. “I remember this picture. I know I was different from you, but I don’t