The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,91

tangle, as if in the crowding we would not miss the one who was gone.

I woke more than once in the middle of that night, rising to the surface of consciousness and then falling back into oblivion. Near dawn, I surfaced a final time, forgetting for a moment and basking in the familiarity of the touch and smell of my family. Legs, elbows, breath, and hair. I reached down and touched someone’s leg. Warm, youthfully smooth skin. One of the girls sighed and shifted. One by one we all moved, each reacting and adjusting to the others in a ripple across the bed.

Then I woke fully and remembered why we were all there. The questions crushed into my chest: Why hadn’t I called her away from the tractor? Why had I turned back to the sheets? To the meaningless push of cloth over a wire line?

Everything broke up into pieces. The days after Jennie died were a series of faces; among them, Adam’s face always dead-still and faraway or completely naked and mobile in his cries. I’d never, and have never since, seen a man weep so. It wrenched me, and all who saw him. Most men looked away or offered him whiskey. A few bear-hugged him as if to squeeze out his grief. The women touched him, offering him food and handkerchiefs. To me, his skin was hot, searing.

And the girls, their faces wide-eyed, were stricken with sorrow one minute, then lapsing into their ordinary expressions the next. Lil, particularly, seemed lost. I could not protect them, could not soften or mitigate anything. I could only hold them close.

Every time I sat down, Sarah, who was only six years old and otherwise seemed to be enjoying the attention and commotion, crawled into my lap and silently sucked her thumb, something she had not done since she was a toddler. Momma seemed to be everywhere. She answered the phone. She laid out the bowls of food brought in by neighbors.

I pressed my jaw firmly shut and did not scream or vomit. I touched my daughters and my husband when they were near.

The field waited for the alfalfa seed. The horses leaned out the open stable windows and watched with curiosity as the yard filled with cars and the house filled with the faces of Clarion.

For two days before the funeral, everyone we knew passed through our home. The faces of mothers and fathers who had lost children were the hardest and the easiest to look into.

When people gather after a death, they usually discuss the dead—youthful adventures, funny stories, the arc of an illness or a life. They may recall similar deaths. It is a macabre yet humane thing to do. We keep ourselves from drowning by offering each other small cups of water.

None of the regular condolences applied. No one could say that it was a blessing, that her pain or suffering had ended. No one could say she’d had a long, good life and it was just her time. Many did credit the Lord’s will. Adam flinched every time he heard that.

The second night, I stood in front of the open refrigerator, mindless before the gleaming bowls of food wrapped in shiny aluminum foil, the butter dish in my hand. Momma took it out of my hands and wedged it into a bottom shelf.

“Momma, why do we do the things we do? Why? I could have called her when I saw her near the field. I know Frank drinks.”

“It’s not your fault, Evelyn. Everyone has Frank fixing their cars and everyone knows he drinks. He’s dented up cars, but never anything like this. No one could have foreseen this.”

“But I did see, Momma. I saw her go over and speak to Frank. I was right there. I thought she was safe. What was he thinking trying to give her a ride on the tractor? I went back to the laundry. If I had just . . .”

Momma shook me by the shoulders and made me look at her. “Evelyn, you cannot think that again. Your girls have been near the tractor, the disk, and Frank before and nothing ever happened. But sometimes terrible things occur. The Lord has mysterious ways we can’t understand.”

I looked away and, shaking my head, wept.

The night before the funeral, Momma stayed at the house after everyone left. She’d tucked the girls in and had, I thought, turned in for the night. But when I returned from my bath, I found her in our