The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope (48 page)

Nine

Surrender

A
fter Gracie, Hans, and the baby left, there were only the two of us in the house. Sarah had her first apartment near campus. Lil and her new Guatemalan sweetheart, Alphonso, also lived in Gainesville, but would soon join Gracie in DC. Rosie had begun graduate veterinary studies at Tallahassee.

Adam’s restlessness soon became more obvious in the unfamiliar quiet. He continued waking in the middle of the night as if he still heard our grandson’s cries. The horses snuffled noisily, and turned in their stalls, pawing impatiently as he passed. He rode off more on his own, often for hours at a time.

The question of his age remained. Perhaps it was my lack of distraction in such a childless home, or some loss of mental flexibility on my part, but I could not make the current of my daily life flow smoothly past this question as I had so many other questions about Adam. This was not a matter of concocting a new story. It could not be fixed by moving to another state. A new kind of dexterity and resilience was being required of me just as I felt both qualities ebbing.

Adam and I had not discussed his age again, but I felt a new tension in his touch at night, poignant and infectious.

For the first time in years, I began to have difficulty sleeping. In the mornings, I often stationed myself at the kitchen window, where I could watch Adam take the horses through their routines, his body lithe, undaunted by its own history.

When the certainty of the spring thaw hit the Appalachians, Adam began preparations for his first mountain trip in well over a year. We also had a wedding anniversary coming up—a big one, our thirtieth. We normally celebrated with a simple dinner out, but this year he seemed to have something more in mind. His mood had lifted in the last few weeks, his trip preparations were more elaborate than normal and his usual, already-on-the road, distraction was absent. He really piqued my interest when he asked if I had any plans for amusing myself while he was gone. He seemed happy when I told him I had none.

He whistled softly to himself as he trod back and forth from the house to the truck. Then he stopped at the office door. “Come with me?”

“Come with you?”

He beamed. “Yes. I’ll make it worth your while. I want to give you an early anniversary present.”

Within the hour, we were on the road, heading north.

All day Adam refused to say where we were going. I had joined him a few times for his horse auction trips to Lexington and Louisville, and we seemed to be taking that familiar route. But when we reached Kentucky, we headed east instead of west. By evening, my suspicion of a second, impromptu, honeymoon was confirmed. Adam pulled over at a motel, a row of cabins nestled against a hill several miles outside a little town called Jensen. “Look good to you?” He beamed at me.

The motel was rustic and on its way to being run-down. But the air, as I rolled down my window, smelled of mountain evergreen, sweet and fresh. “Perfect,” I said.

The rotund man in the office peered up at us from his low chair when we asked for a single room. His eyes ping-ponged back and forth between our faces, and he snorted at the “Mr. and Mrs.” Adam signed in the registry.

My good mood vanished. A current of anger flashed through me. I snatched the key off the desk and strode back to the car for our luggage.

We dropped our bags in the small, dark room that smelled of mountain damp, of wood and stone. “What are we really doing here?” I asked.

Adam went immediately to the thin, yellowed phone book on the nightstand by the bed. He opened it, flipped a few pages triumphantly, then held it up for me to see. By his finger on the page: four listings for Hope. One R. Hope. “My gift to you, first a middle-aged Roy Hope then a middle-aged Adam Hope.”

That literally knocked me off my feet. I dropped down on the lumpy bed, my mouth gaping. “He’s here! You found him!”

“No, not yet. But I remembered him saying he came from a mining town in west Kentucky. So I went to the library and did some research. Hold your horses.” He dug through the duffel bag of his clothes, then unfolded a small Kentucky map with several towns circled. I counted three more north of us.

Adam swept his finger along the zigzag of red circles. “Jensen sounded familiar, so I brought us here first. If we don’t find him here, we’ll just keep going until we find him or somebody who can tell us where he is.”

Such a simple and elegant solution! All my efforts had centered on explanations and understanding while he had sought a direct, practical resolution. “Happy anniversary!” I laughed.

We went to a little café for dinner. The place seemed ebullient and shiny. We held hands at the little Formica booth and ignored the few odd glances from nearby tables. Adam detailed his plans for remodeling the stables. We speculated on how soon our grandson would be walking and how our family would be expanding with more grandchildren.

We returned to the motel and showered. He sat cross-legged on the bed, waiting for me when I came out of the bathroom; I sat behind him and put my arms around him. “Are you afraid?” I asked.

“No, not of changing. But I’m not sure how this works. I don’t want to let you down.”

I squeezed him tighter in my arms. “Do you think this will change? Will it be different?”

“I don’t know. This is as new to me as it is to you.” He shifted his position to face me.

“Yes, I’ve never had me an old man.”

Then Adam lay down with me, and his hands poured over me, as they had so many times before, toes to crown, unhurried, silent until his voice washed over us and he filled the room. Time was mute, irrelevant.

He fell asleep before me, while I tried to focus on my novel. Rain pattered down steadily on the roof, persistent, laudatory, a sound that reminded me of the farm. I put my book down and watched Adam sleep beside me, smooth-faced. I tried to imagine him as an old man, but could not. His transition from woman to man had been so overwhelming a feat. I’d seen no change in his character then, none of Roy in him. Would this time be different? Would he
be
different if he became older, like me? After he became a man, there had been times when I missed Addie. What would I miss after this transition?

I held my hand up, flexing it. In the angled light of the bedside lamp, all the fine lines on my hands and forearms were visible. These signs of age in me had made no difference to Adam. His touch at night was the same. Under his hands’ long stroke from my shoulder to my hip, I felt as ripe and beautiful as I had ever been.

I made a fist and the lines across the back of my hand disappeared. I remembered staring at my body when I was high on the LSD. I tried to retrieve that same calm acceptance now. My hand seemed to be melting before me, then I realized I was only crying.

Adam’s hand slid out from under the covers. Without opening his eyes, he clasped his hand over my fist. “I can’t promise you anything. I have no idea what I’m doing. But I am willing to try.” He rolled over on his side to face me. Eyes the color of burnished mahogany. Leaning across me, he switched the light off. “Sleep now. It’ll be okay.” He drew me closer.

I
n the morning, we decided we would go first to the R. Hope address, then move down the list if we had no luck there.

“Do you think he remembers being with you?” I asked as we dressed.

“Oh, I’m sure he remembers. He had days alone in that grimy little motel with Addie! I kept him very drunk toward the end. Drunk and, I’m sure, confused.”

I realized that what we were planning was a minor reenactment of that transformation, carrying it forth to some logical conclusion in which Adam would at last share a characteristic with both Roy and me. The thought of their strange history overwhelmed my optimism for a moment. I remembered my amazement when A. had returned as Adam. For the first time, I saw us from Roy’s point of view. In the mirror above the dresser we looked like mother and son. “He’ll think I’m Addie and you’re his son.”

Adam shrugged his shirt onto his shoulders and considered his reflection. “Yes, I guess you’re right. We could say—”

The strangeness of our situation washed through me. The room darkened and tilted.

“Evelyn! Are you okay?”

I took a deep breath and my dizziness passed. “It was so strange when you returned then. I thought my heart would break from sheer strangeness.” I righted myself and covered my mouth. “I was so young. Sometimes I could barely make it all fit together. And I couldn’t tell anyone, not even Momma.”

Adam took my hand. “This is different. I don’t want to change in any other way, just look more my age.”

Silently, I wondered: what was his age? Out loud, I asked, “What will we do when we find him?”

“We’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it. Let’s find him first. A lot will depend on him.”

O
utside, the morning was mountain-fresh, crisp, and cool. A faint tang of wood smoke and coffee sweetened the air. A bright stream of birdsong overlay the mutter of the TV from the hotel office.

With the directions from the desk clerk, we found the R. Hope residence, a small, green clapboard house at the end of a short, well-shaded drive off the main road. There was no car in the drive, but we knocked anyway. Woods surrounded the house and the land rose steeply behind it. Water dripped from the eaves onto a tub of blossoming red geraniums. An old hound loped up, barking, then sniffed us without much interest. Adam knocked again, but no one answered.

Farther down the same winding road, we found the second house on our list. An older version of the first.
H. HOPE
was hand-painted on the mailbox. A tall, old man on the porch pushed himself up from his chair as we pulled off the road. He was stooped and rail-thin, in faded overalls. A halo of wispy, gray hair wafted around his head. Raising one hand to shade his eyes against the morning sun, he glared at us as we walked up the gravel path. Nothing about the old man’s narrow, hollow-cheeked face resembled Roy Hope.

Adam paused at the bottom step.

The old man cackled and slapped his leg. “I’ll be goddamn. Look who the cat dragged in!”

Adam and I exchanged grins. The old man obviously recognized him. Adam stepped up onto the porch and took the hand the old man offered.

As soon as Adam was within arm’s reach, the old man’s eyes narrowed and his hand fell away from Adam’s. His puzzled glance bounced from Adam to me and back. “Roy?” he whispered.

“No, sir.” Adam shook his head and motioned me forward. “I’m Adam and this is Evelyn. We’re looking for Roy. Are you related to him?”

The old man’s eyes darted back to me, with surprise. “Well, you don’t look like yer from around here.” Then he pointed at Adam’s chest. “But this one sure is. Can tell that just by looking. Dead ringer for Roy. Are you his boy? Don’t recall him having a boy.” The old man shuffled sideways, tottering so badly that I dashed up behind him to steady him, and Adam grabbed his elbow. The old man folded himself into a rocker and offered me the porch swing.

Adam sat down in the remaining chair across from me. “I’m not his son, but I’d like to find him. Say hello. It’s been a long time.”

The old man stared past us and offered nothing. He blinked his rheumy eyes rapidly and I noticed one of his hands shook.

I touched his arm. “The ‘H’ on the mailbox—what’s that for?”

“Hoyle. Hoyle Hope. But everybody calls me Toot.” He laughed, then slowly bent over, picked up the cup sitting next to Adam’s chair, and spat tobacco juice into it. “Not allowed to spit off the porch anymore. Took a tumble last year.” He straightened up and looked Adam over. “Roy coulda used a son. Those two daughters don’t have a grateful bone between them. Hardly ever visited him in the hospital.”

Adam leaned in closer. “Roy’s in the hospital?”

Toot’s head wobbled on his thin neck. “No. He’s past that. Resting down yonder. The cemetery behind the post office. ’Bout two years now. Car accident. So drunk he forgot that mountain roads curve. His brother, Everett, was with him, died on the spot. Roy hung on for weeks. What’d you say your name was?”

Adam and I locked eyes for a moment. An odd expression swept across his face, reminding me of the time the nurse mistook him for Gracie’s husband. His hand moved up toward his chest then fell limply at his side. His head bowed. My heart skittered.

We listened politely to the old man’s stories about Roy. Twice he looked quizzically at Adam and asked his name again. “Who was your momma?” he asked once. Adam was uncharacteristically unresponsive. The old man seemed to lose interest in his own questions. His gaze drifted back to his spit cup.

After a few moments, we returned to the truck. Adam picked up our list of addresses, slid it into the folds of the Kentucky map, and stuffed both into the glove compartment.

Silently, we drove into town. It didn’t take long to find the grave. But the old man was wrong about the date. Roy had been dead ten years.

A decade. I’d been imagining him aging like me, gauging Adam against that image, and all the while, he was gone.

Beside me, Adam exhaled a long, shuddering sigh and leaned against Roy’s tombstone. I remembered the X-ray of his chest, the pale spread of the organ that gave him his voice. He blinked up at the surrounding hills. “This is a strange place.”

I looked around me at the nondescript little town and recalled what Sarah had said about never knowing what colors others actually saw. What, I wondered, did he hear, what did he see that I missed? Did Roy’s death sever some physical tie for him? Did it matter that the mold for his present state was gone, returned to the earth?

“Evelyn, I’ve been thinking about this for months. I wanted to give you . . .” His voice cracked. He took a deep, gulping breath. “Give you myself. Again. I hoped I could just hang out with him. Couple of long fishing trips. And each time I’d grow a little older-looking. A natural process. Nothing to explain.” He ignored the tears running down his face. “It never, ever occurred to me that he might be dead. I just want everything to go on as it is. With us. For you and for the girls. That’s all I want.”