The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,88
Besides, the mountains do echo my voice in ways that the open land here doesn’t. The mountains do sing.”
“What was their reaction at first, before I got there?”
“Same as when you were there: they listened. I don’t know what they can do. How much like me they are.”
“Sarah reminds me of you as Addie in some way. She knows things.”
He sighed and pulled me toward him. “Don’t worry,” he whispered. “The girls will be okay.”
Until then, I was the only person who had heard his other voice. I remembered the power of his voice the day he came back in the skin of Roy Hope. Anxiety thickened in my diaphragm and I took a deep breath. Adam spooned up against me, then rolled over me, as his voice had earlier.
The girls never mentioned what he did that day. Perhaps they saw Adam’s explanation of singing rocks as just another adult charade, like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Or maybe the relative isolation of the farm made it easier for them to assume that we were the norm, that all fathers in the privacy of their families could make the rocks sing.
Either way, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. For them to question or to change.
As Gracie reached puberty, my fears about how normal the girls were returned. How would they cope with their changing bodies, would Adam’s genes mitigate or amplify the normal or somehow pull it offtrack?
That year, Gracie had grown almost five inches. We marked the girls’ growth on the door frame of Gracie’s and Rosie’s bedroom. Gracie’s height marks were always at the top. The other girls followed in stair-step clusters of names and dates. Recently, Gracie had passed five and a half feet and was now within inches of the mark indicating my height. Her chest also popped out, first in pink, puffed buds, then small, round breasts. She began to lock the bathroom door when she bathed.
Months before her thirteenth birthday, she called me into the bathroom one afternoon to show me the bloody stain on her underwear. We were prepared. I’d shown her the sanitary pads and how to attach them to the elastic belt I bought for her. I felt the buoyancy of relief as I sent her off to her room to change while I washed her first pair of bloody panties in the bathroom sink. She was a normal woman.
A few weeks later, she passed through the kitchen as Adam helped me unpack a load of groceries. He handed Gracie the toilet paper. “Take this to the bathroom on your way.” Then he held up a box of pads. “These, too.” He stacked the box on top of the toilet paper in Gracie’s arms. “So much better than those rags, aren’t they?” he commented with the certainty of experience.
Gracie nodded enthusiastically at her father. Then frowned, puzzled, and turned abruptly, striding off to the bathroom.
Six
The Storm
By the spring of 1965, we were in a state of equilibrium. We were finished having babies. The girls were all healthy, all in school, and doing well—normal, sweet, and ornery as any children. No longer the main reason we needed help, they now worked in the garden and stables. Business was good. A new corral extended out from the stable and we were thinking of adding a second stable. With the new highways complete on two sides of our land, the farm was worth more than we’d ever dreamed possible.
On the morning of Saturday, April 10, 1965, I woke and sat up on the edge of the bed. Everything shifted sideways. But nothing in the dim bedroom had moved. Silently, I checked myself and stood up. The world seemed normal again. Just some odd quirk of the body, an unexplained dizziness that passes over and is gone. Momma would have said a possum had walked over my grave.
The girls woke and we all began our morning routines. Gracie brought in the milk while I started breakfast. Rosie fed the chickens and collected the eggs. Sarah disappeared into the barn to play with the latest stray cat. Jennie and Lil revved up for their normal morning debate. They were arguing about Mister Ed, the TV show with the talking horse.
“I know how they get Mr. Ed to do that!” Jennie shouted. Then she appeared at my side. “Lil’s not listening again,” she fished for my support. She was still in her nightgown. Her bright hair tangled around her shoulders.