The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,99

or how we would return to each other.

During the day, I was stunned into numbness. Lying in bed at night, I thought of how I could have prevented Jennie’s death, imagining what might have been if I had called her to me instead of returning to that last sheet, stretching it out on the line, smoothing those inconsequential wrinkles while she climbed up on the tractor to join her drunken cousin. Helplessly, I replayed that day. Did she smell the whiskey and his sweat in that last breath she took before she fell and the disk swept across her body? Or did she smell the spring air, the sweet, clean odors of fresh-turned earth?

I allowed myself to consider the infinity of details that might have left Jennie alive. A change of weather the day she died, rain keeping the girls inside. One of us taking longer in the bathroom that morning and delaying Jennie’s walk to the field. A broken washing machine and all the girls pitching in to help do laundry by hand. Sometimes my tracing of consequence and connection went back as far as the war. If Frank had not survived, Jennie would have. The possibilities were endless. I let myself comb through them in small increments. Such thoughts were madness and futility, but they vaulted me into anger and provided a respite from the daily numbness. Sometimes, those were the only thoughts that could engage me.

I did not share these musings with Adam. To speak would have unleashed an endless wail in me as well as him, I was sure. So I shut my mouth on what my heart needed to say. Adam and I learned a new vocabulary of silence.

The girls, in their raw youth, sustained me. They carried the absence of their sister, but they glowed, vibrating with life and health, even as they grieved. I had only to touch them or look at them to be given that. They did not cease being themselves.

Lil, of course, missed Jennie the most directly and actively. Her face often had the same emptied-out look that Adam had. Frequently, I found myself, out of habit, looking past her for Jennie. At times, I could hardly bear to look at her. She was a constant reminder then, as she would be for the rest of her life, of what Jennie would have been.

The twins’ names had always been a single unit: Jennie-and-Lil; Lil-and-Jennie. Now we all stumbled on the lone syllable of Lil’s name. It seemed too abrupt, a fresh wound each time we called her. And every time we stuttered there or paused before her name, Lil flinched.

Soon, the other girls and I began, spontaneously, to call her Lillian, a mouthful that had always seemed too much for a small child. Sarah, particularly, seemed to savor drawing out the full three syllables. Only Adam continued, without any change of inflection or timing, to call her Lil.

I found her once looking at herself in the bedroom mirror, chirping in the secret language she and Jennie had shared. She spoke back and forth in conspiratorial whispers as herself and then as Jennie. After several exchanges, her tone changed to tearful exasperation. When I moved, she caught sight of me in the mirror, froze in embarrassment, then collapsed in tears. “Momma, Momma!” I held her for a long time.

For a while, Lil adopted Sarah as her new twin. They frequently wore identical clothes, something she and Jennie had done only for special occasions. The matched clothes hung loosely on Sarah and stretched tight on Lil, who had grown since Jennie’s death. She even let Sarah into the twins’ “house.”

But then one day at the breakfast table Sarah answered Lil in the twins’ patois and Lil flew into a rage, screaming, “Don’t say that, don’t say that.” It took me and Rosie both to pull her off her sister. That was the end of Sarah as a twin.

During the day, Sarah seemed the least affected by her sister’s death, but she soon began to have nightmares, so frightened of the dark that she stood in the middle of her bed paralyzed, crying and refusing to leave her room. Often her cries woke me and Adam, and we brought her into our room. She crawled into the middle of our bed and clung to us. After a few minutes, her small, bony grip would loosen in sleep.

After Lil beat her away, Sarah began to spend more time with Gracie. They talked about what