The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

Eight

Renewal





Our first morning after leaving Clarion, I woke and dressed in the unfamiliar shadows of the motel room while my family snored around me. Adam slept on his side, one arm across Sarah, who had joined us in the middle of the night. In the dim light, the bandages on his chest and head shone against his skin.

Outside, the freshness of oncoming spring and the familiarity of moist red clay mingled with the unfamiliar odors of highway fumes. Trucks hissed by on Highway 301 in the predawn darkness. We could have been anywhere. I imagined the doctor’s pink hands removing someone else’s internal organs in a hospital far away from us. I unlocked the car and took out the clothes we would need for that day, then went inside to wake my family.

We ate breakfast in a small local restaurant. Adam wolfed down an enormous omelet and grazed off my plate.

“What kind of eggs are these?” he asked the girls, starting the game.

“Fried eggs!” Sarah volunteered.

Gracie shrugged, but grinned. “Good eggs?”

Rosie said, “Good fried eggs from a Geooorgia hen!”

Lil rolled her eyes at the blandness of her sisters’ answers. They finally won Adam’s approval with good fried eggs from a Georgia hen for a hungry, horse-whacked, napping Daddy. Rosie beat the rhythm on her plate with her fork. Lil and Sarah lapsed into a church-worthy giggling fit. Adam finished the toast and sopped up the last morsel on every plate. The waitress appeared very happy to bring the check.

It was eight thirty in the morning.

The girls raced to the car, laughing and arguing about who would get which seat. I watched Adam as we strolled across the narrow parking lot. My eyes went obsessively to his bald head and the bright bandage. I thought I could still see some trace of blue lines.

He stopped and pressed his finger to my chin, lowering my gaze to his eyes. “I’m going to be okay,” he said and squeezed my hand.

Rosie leaned out of the front-seat window. “Momma, Daddy, it’s getting hot in here!”

As I drove away from the restaurant, my fears nattered at me. I was sure I’d done the right thing for Adam. But everything else was uncertain. What had seemed like a reasonable, inevitable decision the day before, now, in the morning light, seemed crazy. I turned my mind to the task at hand: keeping Adam safe, the girls distracted, and all of us moving until we could decide what to do next.

We’d driven through northern Georgia at night. Now, as the morning sun glared off the cars of people on their way to work and shopping, I realized how flat the land had become. The soil changed from familiar iron-red to alien shades of gray and black. The road relaxed into distant, straight horizons. Palm trees dotted the landscape. Small towns interrupted stretches of dense forests that crowded the highway and open fields. I had made the same journey with Adam sixteen years before, but nothing looked familiar.

When we crossed the state line, the girls exploded into cheers. “We’re in Florida! We’re in Florida!”

Adam startled from his post-breakfast doze, rubbed his head, and squinted at the brilliant sunlight. “This was a good idea, Ev.” He winked at me.

Beside me, Lil fiddled with the radio dial, unable to find what she wanted. Sarah and Gracie unfolded the Florida map and entertained us with a recitation of Florida towns. “Apopka, Frostproof, Panasoffkee, Plant City, Kissimmee,” Sarah giggled, stumbling over the Indian names.

I tried to ignore my watch.

Gracie navigated us straight toward the beach. Adam and the girls hung out the windows, gawking at the marshy landscape. Thick, briny air filled the car.

Claiming a sudden, irrepressible whimsy, I insisted that we stop at the first little souvenir shop for sunglasses and hats. Adam’s bare head needed protection and I wanted us to fit in at the beach, not draw any attention to ourselves. Next to the cash register was a rack of Magic Sea Monkeys, stiff little packets accompanied by a jar. Colorful, vaguely crustacean-looking cartoon characters grinned from the illustration. Normally, both Adam and I were immune to the girls’ pleas for impulse purchases, especially at the cash register. But after Sarah read the package—“Just add water and your Magic Monkeys spring to life!”—Adam set two of them on the counter. Sarah and Lil beamed with surprise.

“We really are on vacation!” Gracie exclaimed.

Those simple purchases seemed to release something in the girls and Adam. Outside, Lil twirled in the shop parking lot, admiring her new, flamingo-studded sunglasses. Her hair, fluffed by wind and humidity, sprang out in bright corkscrews. “Neat-o, neat-o, neat-o!” she chanted her new favorite word.

Rosie mugged at me, her cat-eye sunglasses low on her nose. “Not neat-o. We are incognito, right, Momma?”

Adam lifted his new hat off his head, laughing. “Five pale, freckled, redheaded gals, a bald guy with a bandaged head, in a loaded car with out-of-state plates? Noncognito is as close as we get.”

I cracked up. By the time we got to the beach, I wasn’t sure if I was laughing or crying, but I got us to the water safely. Adam and the girls tumbled out of the car, whooping, and bolted for the waves as soon as I shifted into park. I dried my eyes and blinked at the bright expanse of the Atlantic.

I followed them across the blazing powder-white sand to the wet hard pack and managed to get my feet wet before allowing myself to look at my watch. Twelve fifteen. A quarter-hour past the time I said I’d return Adam to the hospital. Whatever was going to happen had begun. The tightness in my chest returned. I could see the doctor and the sheriff knocking on our front door.

That evening, using Addie’s name again, I checked us into a moldy little dive of a hotel on A1A just north of St. Augustine. After showering the crispy saltiness from our skin and hair, we all collapsed, exhausted. When everyone else was asleep, I left the room and pulled the car around, to the side of the motel, and backed into the shadows so the North Carolina tag wasn’t visible from the road.

I’d registered the girls and Adam’s excitement earlier in the evening when they watered the little granules of sea-monkey magic. As I’d rinsed out our wet bathing suits and reorganized the food in the cooler, my mind had been on the next day’s route, busy with the strange calculus of our situation. I’d only smiled at the jar Lil, her face livid with amazement, held up for me to examine. But when I returned to the bed, I saw the jars lined up on the desk by the window. A sliver of street light illuminated one of them. Pale, tiny ghosts of creatures fluttered busily back and forth in the water. For a long time, I watched them, unable to decide if they resembled shrimp or tiny spiders. I understood my family’s reaction. I fell asleep watching those inexplicable little creatures, my own mental monkeys calmed.

The next day we toured St. Augustine. The dissonance of those old, sleepy Spanish streets and my constant, tensed vigilance nauseated me. But no police officers questioned us, no doctors appeared.

Adam and the girls indulged in ice cream and fried shrimp. They dawdled endlessly over the offering of tourist trinkets in the shops and the placards of history trivia.

That night, when we pulled into a motel in Daytona, Adam held up two fingers and grinned. “Two rooms.”

After we were sure the girls were asleep, Adam and I went to our room.

Slowly, tenderly, we made love. As his lips parted and I heard the familiar “ahh,” I pulled his face to mine and kissed him. His voice poured into me, muted and absorbed by my mouth and chest. An almost unbearable tenderness.

He was back.

The next morning, while the girls and Adam had breakfast, I fed quarters into the pay phone outside and made my first call home. I would have preferred to speak to Joe, but no one picked up at his house, so I called Bertie.

“Evelyn, where the hell are y’all? The sheriff came to Daddy’s looking for Adam! What did he do?” she yelled so loud I had to hold the receiver out away from my ear. Panic constricted my throat.

When I tried to explain, she interrupted, “The sheriff doesn’t come after people just for leaving a hospital. Adam must’ve done something. Did he hurt somebody?”

“He didn’t hurt anybody. They just thought he was sick and didn’t want me to take him home.”

“You weren’t with him all the time. Who knows what he could have done.”

Silence filled the line for a moment.

Then Bertie sighed. “I think you’re nuts, but I won’t tell them where you are.” Suspicion of official inquiries was native to her character; she would be good on her word. “Well, where are you? When are y’all coming back?”

“We’re traveling—on vacation. I don’t know when we’ll be back. I just wanted to let everybody know we’re okay,” I said.

She snorted. “Traveling? You should have let the doctors do what they needed to do to Adam. He needs something. I hope you’re right and getting him out of town for a while is the answer. One of us will go by and check on your place. Give the girls my love,” she said before she hung up.

We continued south, to Titusville and Cape Kennedy, then Melbourne Beach. Each day was a different beach. Every night a different motel. We’d only been to the beach a few times before and now the ocean fascinated the girls and Adam. While they swam, scoured the sand for interesting shells, or scanned the water for dolphin pods, I huddled under a big umbrella, avoiding more sunburn. My gaze kept drifting toward the road and north. We’d made no more calls home. The postcards the girls collected were not mailed.

I knew Adam was relieved to be away from the doctors, and he agreed that it was best not to let anyone know where we were and to keep contact to a minimum for a while, but I sensed in him a calm I could not share. He was absorbed rather than anxious. His only concern was the welfare of the horses. At night in our hotel room, when he laid his hand on my belly, just below my ribs, where my tension knotted, I was grateful for his comparative serenity.

We’d been gone a week by the time we made it to Fort Pierce. I was tired of motels, tired of the salty grit that coated everything I touched, and desperate to know if the sheriff was still looking for us.

I fed a pile of quarters into a pay phone and called Bertie. “Somebody in Atlanta and a doctor at some college” had called again but, she assured me, hadn’t gotten anything out of anyone. Then Adam called Wallace for his first update on the farm. The horses were fine and Joe was picking up mail and depositing boarding fees. The phone in the house rang constantly, Wallace reported. The sheriff and doctors had sent Harley Brown around looking for us a couple of times, but that was in the first two days. He hadn’t seen or heard a thing from them since then. I celebrated by calling my cousin Pauline in Micanopy to tell her we were on our way.

The following morning, we rolled through the mid-state citrus groves with the windows down. The distinct, exquisite odor of orange blossom blasted through the car. My eyes were still drawn continuously to the rearview mirror. In the backseat behind me, Lil closed her eyes and tilted her face to the fragrant breeze. I was certain that she was thinking of Jennie at that moment. Her lips curved into a small, firm smile. For the first time since we left, I considered that we were going to something new as much as we were fleeing the past. For the first time, I realized that the girls, in their own way, might have needed rescuing as much as Adam.

For our last stop before Pauline’s, we visited Weeki Wachee Springs. The silly-sounding name and promise of live mermaids was irresistible. In the underground theater that looked out onto the depths of the spring, Adam and our four girls sat beside me. As the sparkling mermaids floated before us on the other side of the thick plate glass, I gazed down the row of my family’s rapt faces and felt something akin to hope. The open smile on Adam’s face reminded me of Addie in her first days. The sunlight through the blue undulation of water stained our faces an unnatural hue.

Sarah took my hand, her face suddenly sober. “We have to stay here, Momma. It’s so beautiful. I don’t want to be a mountain girl anymore. I want to be a mermaid.”

Later that afternoon, we pulled into Pauline’s dusty, pale driveway. She emerged from her house with her poofy hair, cigarette, and coffee cup. “Curiosity got me, I just had to leave work and be here when y’all got in.” She hugged all the girls except Sarah, who didn’t remember her and held back. She turned to Adam, whose hair was now a thick stubble, the bandages completely gone. “Good Lord, Adam, look at you. You look fine! Let me see those awful wounds the doctors got so excited about,” Pauline said.

Adam bent deeply in front of her, showing the scar on the back of his head.

“I love it when men bow to me like that,” she cackled. “Lord, this looks like nothing. This doesn’t deserve surgery!”

Adam grinned at me sideways and upside down from his bow. I laughed but repressed a shiver as I ran my hand over his prickly scalp and the little pink scar. Those blue lines and the X-ray star still haunted me.

Later that day, after we settled the girls down for the night in the spare bedroom, I leaned against the hall door and listened to Adam singing to them. He hadn’t sung their bedtime songs to them since Jennie died. “A tisket, a tasket, a brown and yellow basket . . .”

Since Jennie’s death, I’d seen something new in his face. Some freshness or innocence had left him then and that departure had resonated in his features in a subtle way. Now a familiar kind of lightness was returning to him. I heard it in his voice, too. The simple songs he sang to our daughters flooded me with relief.

In the kitchen, Pauline poured herself a beer. She lit a cigarette and patted the table. “Sit down.” She studied me.

I caught the beer she slid toward me.

“Now,” she said, lifting her penciled eyebrows, “what’s really going on? You’re jumpy. Vacation, my ass.”

The happy mask I’d tried to wear collapsed. I told her more or less what I had told Gracie and Rosie about the accident and hospital. “I just couldn’t take it anymore. Too much has happened. I couldn’t let them operate on him. He just needs to rest.”

She took my hand. “You look like you could use some rest, too, Evelyn. Y’all have been through so much. You can all stay as long as you like and for whatever reason, you know that.” She reached back to the counter, picked up a box of Kleenex, and handed it to me. “The girls look great. Adam, too! Hell, maybe he’s better off. A good kick can do wonders for some men. Though he’s always struck me as one who didn’t need it.”

“I wish the horse knew that.” I laughed and blew my nose.

The next morning, Adam rose early and made breakfast for everyone. Perfect scrambled eggs from a Florida hen. In a single meal, we exhausted Pauline’s supply of milk, eggs, and bread. As she headed out for work, Adam and I left the girls, still in their pajamas, to lollygag in front of Pauline’s TV and went to buy groceries.

I was grateful for the time alone with him and assumed we’d use the opportunity to discuss what we should do next. Instead, we were quiet. We passed a school. We didn’t know any of the children in the school or the people driving to work.

I motioned for Adam to pull over at a little park. “I don’t like how people were treating you in Clarion. They won’t forget it. They won’t say anything to your face, but they’re thinking about it just the same. It’s been so hard to be there since Jennie . . .”

Adam took a deep breath and shifted into park. “I lost control. I didn’t know that could happen.”

“I know you didn’t mean to hurt anyone. But things are different for us in Clarion now.” I touched his face and he relaxed into my touch. “I missed hearing you laugh. I missed hearing the girls laugh with you. So much has changed—too much.”

He opened his mouth to protest, but I held out my hand to hush him.

“There’s something I haven’t told you about.” Choking on the first sentences, I began my recitation of everything Momma had told me.

He listened.

The words tumbling out, I began to cry. But with each detail of Momma’s story, his face grew lighter, more amazed. As soon as I got to the part about Momma sneaking into the hotel to meet Ben Mullins, Adam smiled. “Your daddy’s a carpenter from Raleigh? Lilly Mae McMurrough fell in love and couldn’t wait?”

I nodded.

He laughed, throwing his head back in that deep belly laugh.

“Oh, I love Momma,” he said. “As Addie, I must’ve been a constant reminder. She was so certain my momma had lied to me, too.” He pounded the steering wheel and said, “I knew there was some other reason Momma was always so sweet to me!” Then he laughed again.

“She fell in love and couldn’t wait,” I repeated.

“Fell in love and couldn’t wait,” he echoed. His simple direct statement of Momma’s youthful, impatient love seemed happy and I laughed, too. Then we laughed more, each time we looked at each other, hysterical, face-aching laughter. I couldn’t see for the tears. Finally, I caught my breath and focused.

“Oh, I miss Momma.” Adam blew out his breath. “I guess that makes you and me more alike than we ever knew. All the unanswerable questions about where and who we came from.”

Now I was amazed. I shook my head. That had not occurred to me.

He put his hand over mine. “We are both here now, Evelyn. And that is all I need to know.” He paused before he reached for the ignition, his face earnest and grave. “She loved you, Evelyn. However she got you, she wanted you.”

The warmth of his hand and those simple words felt like a gift. An absolution I hadn’t known I wanted. Or needed.

We drove on to the supermarket.

When we called home a couple of days later, both Wallace and Bertie told us the calls and sheriff’s visits had stopped. By the end of the first week at Pauline’s, we had not yet discussed returning to North Carolina. I could sense the girls’ energies turning from celebratory distraction to restlessness. Vague answers satisfied Sarah and Lil, but Gracie and Rosie were another story. I told them firmly that their father and I would decide soon.

On the next Saturday, Pauline took us for a long walk in the woods. Huge, inert alligators draped the opposite bank of the river near our path. For dinner, we ate fried gator tail at a little restaurant near a dark, cypress-shaded creek. That evening, after the girls were in bed, Adam and I sat in the kitchen, talking. Pauline puttered at the kitchen counter. The three of us had just finished discussing the places we had visited that day when Adam said, “This seems like a good place—the springs, the little hills, the lakes, and good pasture land. What brought you here, Pauline?”

“I followed a man down here and then got my heart broke. He left. I stayed. I had a good job by then and I liked it here. No snow, no Momma calling me up wanting to know what I’m doing. Somebody has to die or be born before she’ll make a long-distance call.” She shrugged. “So here I am. Happy as a clam and not, thank God, married and working in the cotton mill.”

Adam turned to me. “We have to decide what we’re doing. Soon. The girls should be in school. Financially, we’re fine for a while, but we’re spending money and not making it. Wallace needs help or fewer horses. The feed crops should go in soon if they’re going.”

I nodded.

The phone rang. Pauline picked it up and, stretching the cord out to its full length, winked at me as she disappeared into her bedroom. We were cramping her style. We couldn’t stay much longer.

We strolled out to her screened porch. She lived on one of the hills near Micanopy. I turned off the light so its glare would not obscure the view. I looked out at the trunks of tall oaks and the hollow of a dry creek bed. “This neighborhood reminds me of North Carolina a little. I feel more at home here than any part of Florida we’ve seen so far,” I said.

Adam studied the trees and yard a moment. “I can see that. But it feels very different to me. Very different.” He bounced up and down on his heels. “The ground is lighter. More—buoyant?” He glanced at me for confirmation, then leaned against the frame of the door and stared out into Pauline’s moonlit backyard. “Every time I looked out our back door at the farm, I saw where Jennie lay by the tractor.” He paused at her name, his voice sliding down. “And if Frank ever showed up again, I don’t know.” He took my hands, his voice was unsteady, but then he pulled himself together and went on. “I don’t know if I could trust myself around him again.”

We both turned toward a noise from the living room. Rosie stood at the kitchen door, tears in her eyes. “Daddy,” she cried. “What about the horses? What about Beau?” Beau was her favorite, a big, sweet gelding.

Adam returned to the table and pulled Rosie into his lap as he sat down. “Wallace is doing a good job, Rosie. I talk to him every day. Tomorrow, you can talk to him yourself and ask him about Beau. Do you know anyone who’d be good to help Wallace? It’s a lot for one man to handle. Think about it and see if you can come up with some names.”

Rosie let me lead her back to the bedroom and her pallet on the floor. “We’re not going back home, are we, Momma?”

“We’re figuring that out, Rosie. Good night, now. You go to sleep.” I kissed her and returned to Adam.

He stood at the back door again. “The crickets are already out down here,” he said. And we stood listening for a while. “When we stopped on the side of the road to look at that farm near Micanopy and I saw those horses grazing on beautiful green slopes in March, I thought to myself, ‘This is not a bad place. I could live here.’ ” He put his arm around me and drew me closer. “And then I saw the springs, so blue and pretty they looked like the source of sky. You know there might be a river underground, right below us, now, where we’re standing? A river that bubbles up into a spring miles from here. Isn’t that something?”

The interest I heard in his voice then, the precursor of love, was all I needed to convince me, but he continued. “I feel different. I like the smell of the air here and the ground feels good under my feet.”

I felt the evidence of his words as I leaned against his chest. The tightness that had thrummed through him for months had quieted.

“We will miss the farm,” I said.

“Just thinking about it feels a little like being unfaithful to the farm, doesn’t it?” Adam whispered. “That land has been like a good woman to me.”

We listened to the night sounds. An owl bellowed in the distance. “I think maybe Florida could want me—all of me,” Adam said.

“She’s calling your name, huh?”

He waved his hand. “What kind of place is this?”

“A warm place?” I offered. He raised his eyebrows. “Hot place?” He sighed and rolled his eyes. “A place with horses and rolling green hills?” He gave me his broad smile. Finally, I got it: “A good woman calling your name?”

He nodded. “Call my name.” He kissed me, my reward, and I said his name.

“Tomorrow, I’ll go look,” he said, his voice sober again. “See what work there is. And whether this is the kind of place where my wife can grow beans, tomatoes, and flowers.”

“Have you looked at the dirt here? I don’t know. We’ll have to see if Florida calls my name, too.”

“Been a while since you had a good woman, huh?” He pressed his hips against me.

“Yes, it has been, but the last one sent me a wonderful substitute.” I kissed him. “Take Rosie with you tomorrow. She needs it. She misses the horses.”

Dew fell and the odor of the earth rose up, different from the smell of North Carolina red clay—musky and less metallic. I remembered Addie, misshapen and lying on her side like a bear in the mud. “Let’s not sell any more land. Not just yet, okay?” I couldn’t sever that tie.

“No, we shouldn’t have to. If I get work, we’ll be okay. We need to find someone willing to take care of the farm and the horses.”

I immediately thought of Joe’s son, Bud. He was grown now and recently married. His wife, Wanda, had been a farm girl until she married him.

With that we decided to try living in Florida. We went to bed and I did not stay awake listening to crickets, mockingbirds, and my husband’s breathing. I slept deep and hard and woke to Adam bending over me to kiss me good-bye as he left to look for work.

Adam found a job quickly—a job with a house. Randy and Edith Warren needed a groom and trainer. They hired him on the spot. The job came with a small house if we wanted to live on the property.

The wood-frame house needed paint, and had three small bedrooms instead of four, but its windows looked out on those rolling hills and grazing horses that Adam found so appealing. The Warrens’ ranch was pretty, especially in that early part of the year before the summer sun dulled the green of the pastures.

As we dusted, bleached, and cleaned our new home, wolf spiders skittered out of sight. What furniture there was in the house smelled of unfamiliar molds. We quickly discovered how far Florida roaches can fly and which shade of red hair they prefer for a landing. But Pauline helped us, and her presence defused the girls’ whining. She and the Warrens loaned us furniture, so each of us had a place to sit during the day and a place to lie down at night. We enrolled the girls in school as soon as possible.

At the end of their first week in school, I made a trip back to North Carolina, alone. A lightning raid to check on the farm and pick up essentials.

The Florida flatlands receded and the sun rose to my right as I drove north. The solitary drive took all day. Through the monotony of southern Georgia back roads, I waffled between anxiety and anticipation. I reminded myself that the authorities wanted Adam—not me, not our land. I imagined all my familiar things in our Florida kitchen. No more paper plates or cheap, new coffee cups.

By late afternoon, the first of the familiar red clay hills rose around me, a bittersweet, almost sexual pleasure. An hour after sunset, I was on the farm. My motherland. The place my children were born.

In the moonlight, I could see little had changed in the weeks we’d been gone. Wallace had even kept up the parts of the garden already planted. The tea roses needed pruning.

I unlocked the back door, swung it open, and stepped into my kitchen as if into a lover’s arms. But before my hand reached the light switch, I felt the emptiness of the house as a tangible, shocking thing. My hand faltered. Then light burst through the kitchen. Everything looked the same. Exactly as we’d left it. The only difference was a neat pile of mail in the middle of the table, right where I’d asked Joe to leave it. Numbly, I fanned the envelopes, searching them as if the key to our changed lives resided there. Bills. Letters from the girls’ schools. A letter from the Centers for Disease Control. I dumped them all, unopened, in a paper bag, and ran out to the car, away from the oppressive quiet of the house.

Outside, the air seemed brittle and strange, deeply familiar and distant, unattainable as the dead. I wanted to call the names into the air: Jennie. Momma. I wanted to go down on my knees and scream their names into the dirt. But I held my tongue on those fruitless syllables. I walked the perimeter of the hay field. In the garden, I dug my hand into the soil and felt the residue of the day’s warmth. The ground rendered nothing of the sweat we’d put into the farm, nothing of the generous bowls of beans, corn, and squash we had passed, hand to hand, at the supper table.

In the empty barn, I methodically scanned every surface with the flashlight beam. The chickens, hog, and remaining cow had gone to Wallace’s and Cole’s families. The walls and rafters seemed skeletal, oddly intimate in their solitary exposed planes.

I opened the stable door and listened to the breath of the remaining horses in the close darkness, then went back into the house. At last, I packed. Kitchen, first, then bedrooms. I tried not to look at things, not to think. Just get the job done.

By four in the morning, the car bulged. Luggage and more boxes were tied on top. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I left more money for Wallace and a glowing letter of recommendation Adam had written. Then I fled, again.

As I made my final turn out of Clarion before dawn, I thought I saw a row of police lights atop an approaching car. I pressed the brakes suddenly. Boxes groaned and shifted in the backseat. My heart hammered. I turned in the opposite direction and took the longer route out of Clarion, heading back to Florida as quickly as I could, fleeing what I had, just the day before, looked forward to embracing.

The sun began to rise.

I drove south and turned my heart toward my girls, to consoling and protecting them, as much as possible, from the sorrow of leaving the only home they’d ever known. I wanted to make them understand, to tell them: it will work out. No one will look at your father as people in Clarion had. No one will take him from us. He can return to himself in our new home.

When I pulled into the yard that evening, they eagerly surrounded the car, immediately unpacking and exclaiming over all our old familiar stuff as if I’d returned long-lost treasures to them. My solicitous tenderness found no purchase. They dashed into their bedrooms, unloading clothes and books. Their decorating and organizing decisions seemed endless. The only hesitation I saw was in Rosie. She sat in the dining room, staring pensively at her collection of horse figurines lined up on the table. “I miss Beau.” She sighed.

“Soon,” I said, relieved that I would be able to provide what she was missing. “Your horse will be here.”

The next night at the dinner table I asked my normal questions about school. Lil, who usually just said “Okay,” announced, “No one here knows I’m missing anything.”

“Yeah,” Sarah added. “Here, we’re just an ordinary family.”

“Cool.” Gracie’s new favorite word.

Rosie rolled her eyes, her favored reaction to her little sisters.

“You girls will have to set them straight. You are not ordinary.” Adam leaned back in his chair and grinned at us. The girls regarded their father with surprise.

“I want to be ordinary.” Lil scowled. “I don’t want everybody to know.”

“Ordinary’s good,” Sarah echoed.

Rosie nodded.

Adam reached across the table and touched Lil’s hand as he touched Sarah’s back with his other hand. “You’re right. Here we can be as ordinary as we want to be. And we get to decide how we are ordinary, no one else decides.”

Lil smiled back at her father.

They managed their mutual goal of being ordinary and fitting in very well. All their conversations now were sprinkled with the names of classmates I didn’t know, teachers I’d met only once, if that. With four girls, the phone was ringing constantly. Even Sarah’s second-grade pals called. I didn’t recognize any of the voices, and the deep, unfamiliar voices of boys asking for Gracie or Rosie always surprised me. The freedom of driving, a necessity since we lived so far out of town, also widened Gracie’s social circle. Rosie still came straight home from school each day, changed into dungarees, and joined her father in the stables.

Three months later, I returned to the farm once more, via Greyhound bus, for the truck and some of the furniture. The horses we’d boarded and cared for had all been sent to other stables. Only our two remained. Darling, now docile with age, and Beau, Rosie’s favorite, waited for me to bring them to their new home. I braced myself against the shrill vacancy of the farm.

We’d arranged for Joe’s son, Bud, and his wife, Wanda, to rent the house. Despite the scattered cardboard boxes of their things, neatly labeled and sealed in anticipation of moving in, the house felt even more abandoned. I walked from room to room, touching boxes and the doors of empty closets. The violent shock of my earlier visit devolved into forlorn sorrow. I tried to imagine the clear spaciousness of when I’d lived there alone before Addie. But I couldn’t see past the deserted rooms.

The top shelf of the bureau I’d shared with Adam still bulged with old single gloves, the odd scarf, and a few stray photographs that I kept separate from the photo albums and the shoe box of family snapshots. A wide, white envelope held the photo of the burned Japanese woman that Frank had left years before. With it was the photo of me and Addie that Momma had been looking at when she told me about my father. I recalled A.’s face in those few short days after I found her when she was not yet Addie. The mixture of horror and empathy that had bloomed across her face as she held the picture of the Japanese woman that day was one of the things that led me to trust her so. That quality was still there in Adam; I still trusted him deeply, intuitively. He had changed so much, yet remained the same. But I knew no more about him after almost twenty years. I had no idea what changes twenty more years would bring, but I sensed in him something new since we’d moved to Florida. Good, but slightly different, as if his voice held new frequencies just over the edge of my ability to hear.

I put the two photographs back in the envelope and packed them.

The next day warmed unseasonably. I would have preferred to do all of the moving alone, but knew I couldn’t manage the furniture on my own and so had asked Joe to help. I hadn’t told anyone else about my trip back to the farm. I didn’t want to take any chances, even though Joe assured me there had been no more phone calls or visits from the sheriff.

It wasn’t that difficult to withhold information, even about where, exactly, we were living, and Joe didn’t press. Without Momma, our family had no center. Except for the day we cleaned Momma’s closets, I’d hardly seen Bertie or Rita. As Joe and I sweated, cramming headboard, tables, and chairs into the back of the truck, he told me about Rita’s move to Hickory, where her new boyfriend lived. She worked at a store there and rented a little apartment.

Like Daddy, Joe had somehow become middle-aged while still in his thirties. Since Momma’s death, he’d even taken up pipe-smoking and now smelled of the same sweet tobacco Daddy smoked. When we’d finished with the furniture and hitched the horse trailer to the truck, Joe hugged me, a rare thing for him. “Come back when you can.” His voice thickened. Of all of them, I felt he was the most likely to forgive Adam, the most likely to find a way to treat him like an ordinary man.

“Thank you, Joe. I will,” I whispered as he released me. I felt I should say more, but I didn’t trust myself. As I watched his car pull away and his hand sweep out the window in a final wave, I knew that I—we—would not be coming back.

As night fell, I leaned against the porch, surveying the pastures and star-filled sky above the stables. A stone of sorrow grew in my stomach. The cooling night air smelled of spring.

Only one task remained. For years, Adam and I had measured the height of our daughters each year in the dining-room doorway. Dozens of horizontal pencil marks, dates, and initials marked the door frame. The lowest mark was Jennie and Lil in early 1959, when they were toddlers. The highest was marked “Dad.” I was about three inches below him.

The nails that held the board to the door frame, hammered home long before I had been born, groaned as I pried them loose with a crowbar. I worked up one side and then down the other. By fractions of an inch, the nails released. Finally, the board clattered to the floor, its dual row of nails jutting up. By the back-porch light, I banged all the nails out except a center stubborn one, then wedged the board into the tight press of the furniture strapped into the truck bed.

After I made a final sweep of each room, I stood in the hall and sang, as steady as I could, for those empty, echoing rooms and all that had happened in them: “Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me.” Then the last stanzas of “Amazing Grace,” and my own voice disappeared into the house.

I made myself a pallet on the bare floor of the bedroom where our bed had once been. I waited for peace, but I felt only the weight of sorrow. Finally, I fell asleep. In the ballet of my dreams, Bud and Wanda’s furniture settled into the corners.

The next morning, after I loaded the horses in the trailer, I took a fresh jelly jar from the cellar shelf and filled it with clay from the spot where I had found Addie. I hesitated before screwing the lid on, then I went to the spot where Jennie had bled into the ground and added another fistful.

For the last time, I locked the door to a house that I owned but that was no longer mine. The footstool I had sat on as a girl when I pumped the butter churn for Aunt Eva was pressed against the back window of the truck, filling the rearview mirror as I drove away. A few moments later, I parked at the edge of the graveyard. The graves were neat, recently mown. The remains of water-stained, wilted pictures of flowers Sarah and Lil had torn out of magazines drooped against Jennie’s tombstone. I left a little yellow cup with a lamb embossed on the side, Jennie’s favorite when she’d been a baby.

Then I drove away to my husband and daughters.

Months passed before I stopped expecting a knock at the door. The escape from the hospital and those first days in Florida had burned a new kind of anxiety into my nerve cells. Gradually, the sense of constant vigilance slipped away. While I had no illusions that Clarion would ever be a safe or happy place for Adam again, I began to feel that we were safe where we were.

It was 1966 and the sorrow and loss of our family seemed to be reflected all around us. Kennedy had been assassinated, blacks marched for civil rights, and Vietnam splattered across the TV and newspapers every day. The world smoldered and soon would catch fire, fire of a very different sort than in my youth—the fire of protest and rebellion.

But we had found our refuge.

The change of place began the thaw of grief for all of us. If death had chilled our hearts, the heat of that first summer quickened our pulses. Much of what I felt was the exhilaration of relief at being away from all the problems of Clarion. The rest was sheer physical newness. I perceived the same new lightness in the girls and Adam. But I felt a new grief that was not reflected in their faces.

The first few months in the house on the Warren ranch, everything seemed an affront to my expectations, to everything I knew. Our dirty clothes stained in grays and blacks instead of red Carolina clay. The strange view out the windows. The damp, odd odors of the house. I kept expecting the low, gentle slopes, the house, even the horses to be taken down and carried away like cardboard props so we could all stop the pretense. So we could go home. Then I would remember the empty rooms of the farm, Jennie bleeding in the truck, the faces of everyone I knew as we left her funeral, and it would hit me: this strange, surreal place was my home. My heart stumbled from the blow.

While Adam and the girls fell quickly into their daily routines of school and job, I now had nothing to do but housework, and that was finished by noon each day. There was no bookkeeping to be done. There were no hogs, chickens, or cows, no garden to tend.

On the farm, the stable had been within shouting distance. Now Adam spent his days in stables that were rectangles on the horizon, far past the sound of my voice. Gracie and Rosie, both in high school, had begun gathering up their small privacies for the life they would have when they left home. Boys collected around them, calling and dropping by the house, practicing nonchalance in their new men’s bodies, their voices as deep as Adam’s. Lil and Sarah studied their sisters for clues of what was to come.

What should have been a time of leisure and solitude for me lay heavy, solid as a blanket over my face, and I had no energy to throw it off. Nights, I lay awake next to Adam in the un-air-conditioned house, the mid-spring air already thick with moisture. As spring turned to the full heat of summer, it seemed we slept in the mouth of God, the air already breathed by some huge being. I tossed in the heat, listened for the relief of rain. I thought of everyone in North Carolina: Joe and the rest of my family, Marge and Freddie, and Wallace. I longed to see their faces, but my longing for the land surpassed all other desires. I ached for the sunrise view down the hill. In the swelling heat of Florida, I lusted for the crunch of fall leaves underfoot, the hard grip of the cold under my nightgown as I went out to milk in the morning. I hungered to take that curve where the road dipped to the mill-village houses and Momma’s. I would have given almost anything then to press myself into the farm’s embrace, to match my contours to hers.

I tried to turn my heart to the living, to the place I was, but putting seed in land not owned by me or my family seemed alien. The sandy, gray-white soil looked like dirty beach sand, not fit for growing anything. It smelled like dust. Yet weeds and trees and wildflowers grew along the roads. When we drove into town, we passed dense, impenetrable woods and fields of corn, peas, and peppers. Such new combinations of seemingly poor soil and happy flora puzzled me. Everywhere I went, I picked up the dirt, examining it for clues. Bringing anything out of such soil would require a whole new language on my part. I imagined that there must be something richer and darker under the gray sand, or some trick the farmers all knew. Trick or no trick, what I had always been able to do well now seemed inaccessible. Still, I searched the yard around our house for the best spot to plant my fall garden.

Meanwhile, with my hands and a good part of my days literally empty, I found myself turning again to Momma’s revelation. I circled the question of how could she have kept such a secret from me for so long. Often a second, unbidden, question followed: How could I? My daughters did not know their father’s origin. A dark, tender anxiety filled me.

One Saturday morning, I found Sarah sleeping next to a family portrait she’d drawn, a stair-step line of bright dresses and toothy smiles. Her nightmares were rare now and she could go to sleep without a light on, but she still slept with her art supplies and drew each night. In this newest drawing, I counted six of us girls and assumed she’d included Jennie. Since our move, the bloodiness had disappeared from her drawings, but so had Jennie, though Lil sometimes appeared outlined in ways that suggested a shadowy figure behind her. I was relieved to see Jennie whole and smiling among us. But I wondered why Sarah had left her father out. Then I saw penciled in below the two largest figures “Momma” and “Daddy.”

My gasp must have awakened her, for she stretched, then sat up to peer over at the portrait. Pointing to the tallest figure, she said, “This one is Daddy when he used to be a girl.” She regarded my startled face, then made a face at her drawing. “Should he have brown hair?”

I hadn’t heard Adam in the hall, but there he was, listening. He came over, searched her blankets, and held up the orange crayon. “This is what I remember having, Sarah. Orange hair, like yours and Momma’s, when I was a girl.”

“I remember, too, Daddy.” She nodded solemnly at him. “I like your hair now. I like you being a boy.” She took his hand. “Can I have oatmeal this morning with syrup?”

They both looked at me.

“Sure, oatmeal.” I felt dizzy as she rushed past me down the hall.

All children, when they are very young, confuse the male and female. Joe’s son had once asked me if I’d liked fishing when I was a boy. But Sarah was seven years old now, past the age for such confusions. She was correct, not confused.

In ways I could not pinpoint, she’d always seemed the one most like Adam, or rather Addie. She often seemed to know things she had no discernible way of knowing.

One evening, not long after we saw Sarah’s drawing, I asked Adam if he had ever told the girls—particularly Sarah—anything about himself and Addie. Adam had just returned from his shower. “No, I haven’t tried to explain anything to them.” He shrugged. “I can’t answer your questions. How would I answer theirs?”

He stepped into his boxers and climbed into bed with me.

“What should we tell them?” I asked.

“You could tell them about finding me, since you remember it better than me. And I guess I could tell them something about becoming who I am now. But not everything.”

“What did you do with Roy Hope in that hotel for two weeks?”

“Everything a body can do to know another body.” We both thought about that a moment.

“No.” I laughed. “You wouldn’t want to tell them about that. But what should we tell them and when?”

“Not now. They’re all too young. And they should all be told at the same time so they have company. You would be the best judge of when. When do you think Momma should have told you about your father?”

I had no answer.

Adam’s hair had grown out quickly, covering the scar on his head. The wound on his chest provided the smile for the happy face Sarah drew on him with a permanent marker. Each night, as he undressed, I saw that the circle and two dots had grown fainter, nearly vanishing, until she redrew them and the process began again.

While I puzzled over the soil and flat pastures, Adam was buoyant. He threw himself at Florida as if it was the Second Coming and redemption was at hand. For him, it was a kind of redemption, and his contagious enthusiasm pulled us all in. Even Gracie, who had begun dating, willingly joined in on her father’s explorations of Florida.

Adam studied Florida as he had my body when we first met. His interest quickly shifted from tourist attractions to geography and state parks. He familiarized himself with the local bookstores and libraries. On Saturday nights, he scattered the dining room and bedroom with books, maps, and pamphlets, covering every surface as he planned the next day’s outing. Somewhere, he found a huge geographical map of Florida and taped it to the dining-room wall. A changing constellation of bright red destination tacks dotted it. “Karst,” he said to me one night as he read at the dining-room table. He repeated the new word happily, savoring it. “Karst. That’s the name for this place. Limestone and water. That’s why the land feels so different here.”

With luck, he could be finished at the Warrens’ by ten on Sunday mornings and we would take off for a day’s excursion as soon as he walked in the door.

“Beats church,” Rosie said one Sunday morning as she helped me pack our picnic lunch.

“But won’t we go to hell for missing church and going off to do other stuff?” Sarah asked as she poured more cereal into her bowl. She was very interested in rules and the consequences of their violation.

“Not if we sing hymns while we’re on our way to the parks. That makes it the Church of Florida,” Rosie retorted.

“The Church of Florida” sounded good to all of us. So, on the way to beaches, caves, springs, parks, swamps, rivers—anywhere we could get to and back home in one day—we sang our way through every hymn we knew and saved our souls. We collected Steinhatchee scallops, canoed the Sewanee, and fished at Cedar Key. All the girls learned to snorkel. Adam and Rosie even learned to scuba-dive. Late Sunday nights, we drove home, the girls asleep around us, Adam and I alone in the lights of the dashboard.

Cool water obsessed us those first long, hot months. There were the dark, tannin-stained rivers and cold, crystal-clear rivers, their waters originating in swamps or from deep underground. Unlike the rivers of the Appalachian Mountains, these brooked no boulders, few rocks, no white-water rapids, no muddied rust-colored rise of spring thaw. Florida’s rivers were at peace with gravity, sliding along its belly instead of tumbling down into its embrace.

One river in particular excited Adam, the Santa Fe. The first Sunday after school let out for the summer, we drove out to O’Leno State Park and cooled ourselves in orange-brown water near the swimming dock. Then Adam announced that he had a surprise for all of us and led us down the trail that paralleled the bank.

When we reached an observation deck, he laughed and, holding his arms out, proudly announced, “A trickster river.”

Below us, the now-black river disappeared into the ground. Heat-stunned, the six of us watched a log crowded with three large turtles pivot in a slow, broad circle on the river surface. The river turned unnaturally and vanished, swallowed by the earth. Above the vortex, the air hung still and peculiarly leaden, almost reverent.

“It’s like a big toilet!” Sarah said in a hushed voice.

“Not quite. It resurfaces about two miles from here.” Adam pointed to our right.

“Must be some surprised fish and gators popping up there,” Rosie observed.

We continued on the path and circled the river’s end. Returning to our car, we crossed a swampy area of black soil almost impassable for the clusters of cypress knees. The ground rustled with tiny dark toads that hopped away from our feet, clearing a path for us.

The disappearing river unnerved me. Rivers are supposed to lead us to the sea, not underground. I preferred the spring-fed rivers and pools to the blind waters of the dark rivers. We visited all of the area springs—Blue, Poe, Ichetucknee, Ginnie, Devil’s, Fanning—their cold waters so clear we could see the white sandy bottom. At Poe Springs, I stood, chin-deep in the chilling water, and edged along the spring’s lip, knowing from the intensity and purity of the blue generally where the drop-off would be but unable to be certain because of the glare of the sun and the water’s distortion. Then, suddenly, there was no toehold, and I trod, suspended, almost breathless, above the bottomless place where the water comes out, thousands of gallons per second. That first glance down past my own feet into the dark turquoise mouth of the earth echoed the moment I saw the pulse in Jennie’s neck stop, and the first time I saw death on my mother’s face. I had stepped off the edge of the earth, over an abyss that could have drowned me, yet I continued to breathe.

Adam wanted me to learn to snorkel. But every time I put my face in the water, I fought an instinctive panic. Unable to convince my body that I could breathe with my face underwater, I heaved and sucked air until I hyperventilated. Though I was a good enough swimmer and eventually learned to relax and enjoy snorkeling, the fear of having my face underwater never left me completely. Adam saw my panic, but he persisted, asking me to learn to scuba-dive and go cave-exploring with him. I could use Rosie’s equipment and everything would be fine, he kept telling me, but I refused each time. Going underground seemed too much for him to ask of me. When Adam and Rosie disappeared into the blue, the river and earth gulping them, I turned down the other girls’ invitations to play or swim. I sat on the shore, within sight of the guide rope tied to the roots on the bank, checking to see if it had been pulled taut, a sign that they were lost, blinded by kicked-up silt, or hurt and using the rope to find their way back.

At times, I felt left out, unable to share Adam’s love of this new place. I would have been jealous, but his enthusiasm for Florida was paralleled by his renewed desire for me at night. The jarring, fierce quality of grief lost its grip on our intimacy. The returning tenderness made it easier for me to forgive Florida its flat unfamiliarity, its alien, sandy soil, its odd weeds and grasses, and its endless wet heat.

The days thickened into full summer heat, and the rain came daily. Suddenly the girls were home all day and we were trapped inside by the oppressive heat and rain. The rain began in July and did not stop. Thunder rattled our little wood-frame house that stood like a lightning rod in the flat pasture. North Carolina had its summer storms, but they were a whisper to the shout and sudden fury of the Florida storms. Thick, heavy drops spat down from the sky onto hot sand. Everything sizzled, then steamed. We draped damp laundry over doors and chairs, anywhere we could fit it. The floors and beds were gritty with sand tracked in on wet shoes and boots.

The newspaper featured pictures of sandbagged houses and the top of a child’s swing set half-visible in a flooded backyard. I found little consolation in knowing the weather that summer was not the norm and I was not alone in my amazement under such a relentless sky.

In early September, soon after the girls had started school, Adam had a rare weekday afternoon off and asked me to join him on a trip to the springs. We left a note for the girls, in case they got home from school before we returned.

We drove out near High Springs and down a sandy road. Then we parked beside another car in a clearing. A mother and two small children picnicking on a blanket nodded their hellos. The children’s wet hair clung to their heads. Otherwise, we were alone. There were no paved roads near the Devil’s Springs then, no concession stands or bathrooms, just a path, woods, and the water.

I followed Adam to the back of the truck to help unload his diving gear. I didn’t see a snorkel, but there were two scuba tanks.

“Where is my snorkel?” I asked, my hands on my hips.

He picked up the tanks. “It’s not much different from snorkeling. And I know you listened to everything I taught Rosie. Come on.” He strode off toward the water, tanks and belts in hand.

“Only in the shallow parts,” I warned, as I followed him with the masks and fins.

Adam shot me one quick glance, but no response, as he plunged into the chest-deep water.

“Only in the places where I would snorkel. Nothing deep,” I added.

He stopped rinsing the tanks and stepped over to the bank where I sat. He touched my cheek very softly, his cool, wet fingers sliding up to my temple. “Only the shallow? But you like it deep.” He grinned.

I rolled my eyes at him but returned his smile. “Not in the water.”

I slipped into the cold water next to him and let him hoist the tank onto my back. He showed me how to breathe, how to check the air, and how to share one mouthpiece if one of us ran out of air or got into trouble, repeating the lessons he’d given Rosie. The gear felt awkward, and heavier than I would have thought.

Scuba-diving in the chest-high river was pleasant. I had to admit Adam was right. Except for the change in buoyancy with the tank, it wasn’t all that different from snorkeling. Sunlight still warmed my back and shimmered silver-blue through the water. As I gazed down at the grasses, I knew I could surface in seconds. I was happy diving a few feet under to get a closer look at a rock or log, pleased with myself for having made my compromise with Adam’s enthusiasm for the river. Adam dived lower, glided along the bottom, and circled the small lagoon that surrounded the cobalt mouth of the spring.

When he surfaced and removed his tank and flippers, I assumed he was ready to go home, and began to take mine off, too. He held up his hand. “No, don’t. Not yet. I’m just going to the car.”

He came back with a light and a thick coil of rope. He had bought a new underwater flashlight recently. Seeing the expensive, shiny new light in his hand reminded me of how comparatively well off we’d been since selling that little corner of the farm before we left Clarion. But I was glad he had the new light. The old one had been secondhand and rusty. I hated to think of him suddenly without light, deep underground.

I leaned on the bank, watching him work his feet back into the flippers. I’d taken my tank off. It lay sleeping on the bank. I was done, I could relax. Adam smiled his happiest, most seductive smile as he adjusted his tank and checked the light. Sunshine streamed down through the trees, speckling the water.

He tied the rope to a tall, thick cypress knee, picked up my tank, and walked out into the water—I thought to rinse it. Instead he turned, holding it up toward me. “You just hold on to me. I’ll do the work.”

“Oh, no.” Panic tightened my chest. “You go on. I’ll wait here.” I was ashamed of my fear, even with him, and tried to keep my voice casual. But I had shrunk back, certain that he heard the unsteady jerk of my diaphragm in my words.

“It is no different from doing it right here. All you have to do is hold on to me and breathe.”

Tree roots and limestone dug into my back. I pressed my hands into the gritty, slick sand on either side of me.

“It is so beautiful, Evelyn. I just want to show you what I see when I’m down there.” He looked straight at me, not smiling anymore but waiting, holding one hand out.

I shook my head again. I wanted to say yes, yes for him, but my fear held like iron.

Adam spoke softly, his face resolved and patient. “I want to show you what I see. I want you to feel what I feel. Come on. For me.”

I curled my hands, digging my fingertips into the bank behind me. Suddenly I remembered how he had done the same, the nights after Jennie and Momma, when he lay under me, arms outstretched, shaking his head but letting me take him all the same. Letting me have him. I had felt the dense coil of pain in him then. But in the end he came with me.

I owed him the same.

I let go of the bank and took his hand. Without a word, he helped me into my tank and fastened the weight belt around my waist. We moved carefully and slowly. He adjusted my mask, smoothed my hair, and pulled me close. “Just relax. I have you. Hold on. Keep a good grip on my belt and swim behind me. Keep your head down behind my tank while we’re in the current. Once we’re in the first room and get out of the current, move your fins as little as possible.”

I nodded, but my heart pounded, and my skin felt numb and hard. Then we went under, into the silence of water and my staccato breathing.

Over the brilliant mouth of the spring, he handed me the light. He gave a few powerful kicks and we entered the current of the spring. Like a strong, silent wind, it pressed at the top of my head. I kicked hard and could feel Adam using his hands to pull us into the mouth of the cave. The rough rope coiling out from his belt slid against my hip. Beyond our feet was the silver surface of the air. I tightened my grip on his belt. Then there was darkness, and I closed my eyes.

The walls of the spring mouth scraped my arm and the top of my tank. In jerks, Adam pulled us in, gripping the walls of the opening and pulling us down. Down, down, down. I tried to make myself as light and small as I could, forced myself to think of nothing but my breath, my hands on his belt, and my kicking legs.

Adam turned right abruptly and reached back to me with one hand to pull me up beside him. We were weightless, outside the press of the current, released. Adam took the light from my hand. Above us, the cavern wall exploded in light, a wide band of yellow cutting through the silver-gray of limestone. He touched my leg, reminding me to soften the movement of my fins, then, taking my hand, swam us up close to the top of the cave. He held his arms out as if to say, “See, it’s beautiful.” And it was. More mysterious than beautiful in its mobile shadows, golden light, and silver-flecked silt.

To our right, the cave opened farther into a black hole. We swam once around the cave, our movements liquid and slow. The only sound was my breath, ragged, uneven. I was still frightened and stiff against Adam. I could not tell which way was up or down. But the beauty seeped around my fear.

Holding me tighter with one arm, Adam did something to my tank that I could not see, and unbuckled my weight belt, then he loosed his hold on me, opening his arms a little, and I began to float away from him up, up toward the ceiling of the room, or what I thought of as the ceiling. I pulled at him and shook my head. He took my arm and held his other hand up for patience. I held tight to him, digging my fingers into his sides.

Still weighted, he bent over me to keep me from moving and adjusted the light on the floor of the cave. Then he unbuckled his own belt and it slid awkwardly down in a smoky puff of silt as we began to rise. Adam twisted, turning so that he was perpendicular to me and held me across his chest as if I were his bride. He adjusted the guide rope still tied to his waist. Nearly blind with panic, I clawed at him. He grabbed my hands with his and clutched them firmly to calm me. His feet hit the cave surface in a small jolt and a sprinkle of sparkling flint. He stood on the roof of the cave, upside down, balanced between gravity, the water’s pressure, and our own natural buoyancy. From his arms, I looked up into his face side-lit by the light beaming from below us. At his feet, beyond the roof of the cave, was the surface of the earth. Had the earth’s skin been transparent, I would have been able to see past his feet to tree roots and, beyond them, the sky.

He spat his air hose out and smiled at me, a smile that cut through my fear. He opened his mouth and I reached out and put his mouthpiece back for him. He walked us, holding me in his arms around the ceiling of the cave, our shadows changing as we moved. Flecks dislodged by his feet drifted between us, tiny silvery flashes. We were, for a few moments, lovers in some alien airless underground world. All I could see were his eyes, almost black in the shadows, and the changing background of the cave, otherworldly umbers, golds, grays, and whites. I forgot my breath, my panic.

Then he knelt and loosened his arms as if to let go of me. I shook my head and he pulled his arm away to point to our belts on the cave floor. Slowly, he lowered me to the roof and I tilted there, propped against my tank, my legs sticking out awkwardly. The moment he let go of me, my breath lurched in my chest again. I sucked deeply on the oxygen, trying to breathe evenly, but the fear in my diaphragm hardened as I watched him return to the floor and put his belt on then, swim, light in hand, to bring me mine.

He pointed toward the dark end of the cave to another vein that led farther, deeper into the earth’s body. I pointed to the surface.

He nodded his head in agreement, but held his hand up asking me to wait. Then he cupped his right ear and cocked his head sideways as if listening. His forehead wrinkled above his mask as his eyebrows shot up in an exaggerated question.

I shook my head. I didn’t hear a thing except the jagged rhythm of my own breathing.

Patiently, he repeated the same gesture. Except this time, as he held his ear with one hand, he held his other hand out like a choir director, sweeping it in a slow, steady rhythm up and down. Clearly, what he wanted me to hear rose and fell in a slow, steady rhythm.

I concentrated on softening my breath and listening while I kept myself upright with as little motion as possible.

Still, nothing. I shook my head again.

Adam took my hand and flattened my palm against his chest. I felt his voice reverberate gently through my fingers and up my arm. His other hand rose and fell again. Gradually, I realized that the modulation of his voice matched the up-and-down movements of his hand. His eyes brightened with a question once more as his hand circled to include the whole cave. Then he tapped me on my breastbone.

I felt his voice, but nothing beyond that. I shook my head so emphatically that I suddenly had to use both arms to balance myself in the water. My heart pounded with frustration.

Then I saw the water move between us. From his chest outward, the water seemed to ripple in tiny bubbles. We stared down at his chest. The size of the ripples varied. The variation, I realized, matched the rhythm of the thing Adam wanted me to hear.

Then he opened his arms as if to say “See?” His eyes crinkled into a smile. Before his chest, the water seemed to change again, shimmering. For a moment, I thought he had changed the color of the water, and then I realized what was happening. His voice had loosened little sparkles of sand from the roof of the cave and they were raining down on us.

He beamed. The silt thickened. Too thick. My panic returned. I grabbed his arm.

Adam startled, his face suddenly changed. He swiveled, glancing around the cave in alarm. He jabbed his finger, pointing to the surface as he guided my hand to his belt.

Yes! I nodded. The beam of light danced crazily as we swam through the thick glitter of silt. Adam followed the guide rope, pulling us into the swift exiting current.

The spring spat us out. We shot through the rough tunnel to the undulant blue surface. Then we burst through into air, into sound.

We dropped our mouthpieces, pushed back our masks, and whooped. Adam slapped the water’s surface and howled like a dog. I gulped deep breaths.

“Amazing!” He laughed. “Did you hear it? Did you feel it?” He held my shoulders as we tread the water.

I shook my head.

He beamed, undaunted. “I’ve felt it before here—in Florida—but never this strong. Maybe the water makes it stronger.” He held his hand out, sweeping it up and down again in a slow rhythm. “It’s like a breath, a vibration. I felt it on the farm, too, Evelyn, if I was very, very still. And in the mountains, always in the mountains. But here!” He pivoted in the water, his head back and his arms spread. “In Florida! It’s music! This place is a different note. It is to the farm like a B is to a G. That’s the difference. That’s it. That’s what I’ve been feeling.” His eyes widened as we paddled toward the bank. His hair stuck up in spikes around the mask pushed up to his forehead.

I laughed in spite of my disappointment at not being able to hear what he heard. I flattened my palm on his chest and then let my hand trail down to his waist. “I don’t know about that, but I felt you.” I licked the smiling scar on his sternum.

“You did feel me, didn’t you?” He gathered me in, hugging me close against his chest. “Hurry! Let’s get out.”

We stripped off our gear and clambered out of the water. Adam ran to the truck with the tanks. I gathered the rest of our stuff and followed. He met me, grabbed everything out of my hands, threw it in the truck, and snatched a blanket. The lone family of picnickers had left.

He cupped my face in his hands, kissed me quickly, deeply, and took my hand. We ran out of the clearing, laughing, like kids. His tented shorts wagged in front of him. In the woods, we slowed to a breathless walk.

Several dozen feet into the woods, we found a few square feet free of cypress knees and threw the blanket down. We peeled our wet swimsuits off in a frenzy and made love under the green canopy and blue sky. The sheer sweetness almost broke me, waves washing over me in a rhythmic baptism over and over until I was undone. Adam’s sweet voice rising through and above us like a prayer.

He fell down against my chest. Turning my head to kiss his neck, I saw high in the boughs of cypress a single snowy egret break through and spread herself against the blue sky. I was humbled, grateful for the language of underground rivers, for lovemaking, for the single white uplift of a bird. Grief, for that moment, was only a watcher, a mute child who asks nothing from us and takes nothing, not even pleasure or joy. A presence among us, rather than our essence.

Later, as we drove home under the mid-afternoon sun, we were quiet, soft and liquid in our joints. Adam grinned into the air that rushed through the truck windows.

“I feel different here,” he said.

“I know. I see it.”

As we pulled into the driveway, the sky shifted into the darker shades of an approaching thunderstorm.

Adam did not open his door when he shut the truck off. He swept his gaze across the pastures of the Warren ranch, our house, and the small fresh patch beside the house, which I had turned over recently for a fall garden.

“Both places have their own music, but Florida seems less dramatic. No hills. No fall colors. But it has its ways. If the farm and the mountains laughed, Florida’s land grins a long, sly grin.”

Then he laughed and grinned, long and sly.

So I came to live in Florida, to begin to call it home. For the first time since Jennie died, I felt a true hope. He was right to take me there, to baptize me into the new with the familiarity of his touch and his voice.

I hope he felt the same gratitude and knew that when, in his grief, I took his hand and forced my body on him I was trying to do the same thing, to keep him with me—with us—to keep him from floating away.

I never went back inside the caves. I snorkeled a lot, scuba-dived in shallow waters off the coasts with Adam, and teased myself by diving outside the soft, mossy mouths of other springs, but I never went into one again. It was mostly fear that kept me away from the caves. But also, I didn’t want to lose the purity of that day, did not want the memory diminished by anything that followed.

Our lovemaking from that point on was as strong and as sharp as when we first met, but it also encompassed a bitter sweetness. A largeness. Early on, we’d been young and bare, our souls and hearts slender with innocence, but now we came to each other robust, fat with grief and joy. When we first were lovers, we did not know we could drift from each other. Our earlier lovemaking had been just us in the bedroom or under the sky. Now we brought with us old scars, a cacophony of experience, and the knowledge that we could part. It made our passion deeper and sweeter.

The winter after Adam took me diving in the springs, I turned forty. In those first months in Florida, with plenty of time on my hands, I’d scrutinized my face in mirrors, noting the first signs of age. Since Momma and Jennie died, my skin had begun to recall all those days working in the fields. Lines appeared around my eyes and mouth. My hair paled at my temples, the red fading in strands to sandy-gray and white.

One evening, I stood on the back steps, surveying my garden of lettuce, broccoli, and sugar peas. For me, it was an act of faith to put seeds in the ground at that time of year. The garden seemed puny by my standards, but I was growing food again and determined to do better in the spring.

Behind me, Adam straddled his workbench on the porch as he repaired a saddle. His grace of movement and his beauty were still arresting. For a moment, I saw Addie in the look of concentration on his face as he forced the needle through the leather. The sun shone in his eyes when he glanced up at me. The fine lines of his squint disappeared when he returned to his work.

I’d always admired his good skin. Unlike me, he and the girls tanned a golden brown in the sun. Yet his skin had none of the leathery quality I saw on men who spent a lot of time outdoors. I’d noticed many men seemed to age more slowly than their wives. But as I studied him, I saw that he really did not look a day older than when he set foot on my porch with the face of Roy Hope.

He’d arrived with no past, and had lived in an endless present before Jennie died. That innocence had left his life and his face, but its absence did not show as age. His skin reflected only the subtle changes of maturity. He’d settled into his features, but he still appeared to be a man in his late twenties.

How could I not have seen it before? His clock ticked more slowly. I sat down in the chair on the opposite side of the porch. From that angle, the smoothness of his hands and arms was more obvious. My own hands were freckled, the skin on the backs of them not yet lined but loosened.

He stopped at his work and looked up. His eyes were their most golden-brown in the direct afternoon sun. “What?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“You’re lying.” He laughed.

I went over to him, straddled the bench behind him, and pulled up close, my arms around his waist. “Yes, I am.”

He began humming, a song I’d heard on the radio.

“Later,” I said. “We can talk later. Finish your work now.”

He held up the saddle for me to see his repair.

“I think I need reading glasses,” I said as I admired his work.

After that, I studied men my age for their differences and compared them to Adam. Some looked thoroughly middle-aged, worn and beginning to gray. Others had held on to a kind of youthful bearing, their faces lived-in and beginning to slacken with age but not yet showing actual lines or wrinkles. A few had remarkably good skin, like Adam’s.

By mid-spring, our country drives focused on a single new purpose: buying our own land and business. Bud and Wanda were still on the farm and expecting their first child, but not farming. The fields were fallow. When we got a second, even more impressive offer on all the farm acreage along the highway, we sold a few more acres farthest from the house, where the highways intersected, and went to take a closer look at the Mahoney ranch we’d visited several times. The land was perfect: good pasture, a good well, a small pond, a line of deep, wide oaks shading the house, an eight-stall stable in good repair, and a sprinkling of early phlox along State Road 441. The house had four bedrooms, modern walk-in closets, and more than one bathroom. Still, I felt it wasn’t wise to take the first thing we saw. We had more money than I’d ever dreamed of having and it was hard for me to let go of it on the basis of what seemed more like luck than serious research. We considered other places but we kept going back to the Mahoney ranch.

Old Mr. Mahoney wanted to sell us the ranch, but he had begun losing patience. One day Adam walked in from work, sat down at the kitchen table, and frowned. “Evelyn, it’s okay if we buy the first thing we saw. You were what I saw when I opened my eyes for the first time on the floor of the farmhouse. I didn’t look for better when there was no need. There’s no need now. We’ve scoured three counties.”

I got the truck keys and we drove to the Mahoneys’ to make an offer. That summer, we moved to our own ranch.

The first thing I did by way of decorating the new house was hang the photo of me and Addie that Momma had shown me when she told me about my father, the only photo I had of the two of us together. In Florida, it was the sole proof that Addie had ever existed. No one there had ever met her, not even Pauline. For the girls, Addie was just a relation who had disappeared before they were born, someone who looked a lot like their momma. The picture revealed nothing of the link between Addie and Adam. I bought it a beautiful wood frame and hung it in the hall.

As I adjusted it on the hook, I could almost smell the innocence, the wide-open simplicity of that time. Grief shot through me, then a spasm of regret. I veered away from the sudden memory of the funeral and the girls’ faces afterward, when I silenced their father and pled with them to sing only in their normal voices.

They showed no sign of his vocal abilities. No sign of changing as Addie had. But recently I’d noticed how much the girls were becoming like him in other ways. It wasn’t just the enthusiasm for Florida that they shared with Adam. They’d begun to smell like him, first Gracie, now Rosie. Lately, when Gracie finished her shower, the bathroom smelled of fresh, newly mown grass, strong as the first time I’d bathed A., that cold winter morning so long ago. Once or twice recently, Rosie had smelled the same after a long day in the stables, the tart greenness underlying the odors of the horses and leather.

The girls had never seen the photo of me and Addie. They gathered around it when they came home from school.

Gracie peered over Sarah’s head. “How could the two of you look so much alike?”

Lil turned to me for an explanation, but I had none to give.

At that moment, Addie seemed so far removed from their world of school and the ranch, so unbelievable. I wanted suddenly, desperately, to have them understand everything. I wanted the riddle of their father’s origin to unfold like an exotic flower bearing its own explanation, a flower I could hold out in my palm. A mother’s offering: I know who your father is. I know what your father is.

I shrugged. “Cousins. We were cousins.”

“More like twins,” Lil said, not taking her eyes from the picture.

I herded them away from the photo. I couldn’t fit the story of their father into their world. Yet Adam’s identity was as close to them as their own skin. They carried him in their bones and their blood cells, too.

But not in their faces. They looked like me, not Adam or Roy Hope.

“Look what else I put up today while you were in school.” I showed them the measuring board from the farmhouse, now mounted in the doorway between the dining room and hall. “Who’s first? Sarah? Lil?” I pulled a pencil stub out of my pocket.

The girls knelt on either side of the doorway, reciting dates and names. Lil tapped the highest mark that indicated her and Jennie’s height. We froze for a moment as her finger inched up the empty space above that line. No measurements had been added since Jennie’s death.

Gracie recovered first, leaping up to grab a ruler from the desk. She balanced it on her head as she pressed her back against the door frame. “Measure us, Mom.”

She squared her shoulders and stood very straight and still as I held the ruler level and measured her. Rose was next, smirking with satisfaction to see that she had gained on Gracie, who was now only a fraction of an inch below the line marked “Momma—June 1953.”

Adam walked in, wiping his face on a handkerchief as the back door swung shut behind him.

“You’re next!” Gracie called to him.

“Stop cheating, Lil.” Rosie perched the ruler on Lil’s head.

Lil lowered her heels to the floor, then turned to look at the mark Gracie made.

Adam joined us and ran his finger from Jennie’s name up to the line of Lil’s new height. “Look how much you’ve grown.”

Lil bit her lip. Her eyes went back and forth between the two marks. “She would be this tall now, too,” she whispered.

“Yes, she would be,” Adam replied. He massaged her shoulders. “Your turn.” He touched Sara’s back.

Sarah stepped up. She’d grown the most, almost three inches.

Gracie waved the ruler impatiently. “Mom and Dad, you two haven’t been measured in years. Come on!”

“We won’t have grown, we’re already grown up,” I protested.

But Adam stepped up and Gracie reached, leveling the ruler over his head.

“Wow! You’ve grown,” Rosie boomed. “Look!”

I pointed to his feet. “Your boots.”

Sarah helped him pull them off while he balanced on one foot.

In his stocking feet, he still stood taller than his original height. His feet were flat on the floor. I measured him again. Six foot three and a half. A little more than an inch between the first and second measurement.

He stepped away from the door frame, unimpressed with his growth. I took his place.

Gracie squinted at the line of her father’s height above my head. “That is weird. He has grown!”

I was slightly shorter than my first measurement. Adam marked my height right over the new line for Gracie.

Within minutes, all of them had dispersed, intent on phone calls, TV, homework, or chores. My eyes kept returning to the new, darker mark above all the others. He had grown. Only an inch or so in the fourteen years we’d been recording the girls’ heights there. We were literally going in opposite directions. But what did it mean about him? About us? Every time I walked through that doorway, I felt I passed through those questions.

We put up a simple sign—THE HOPE RANCH, A. & E. HOPE—and built a second, larger stable. Adam began boarding, training, buying, and selling horses as he had in North Carolina. He quickly filled the stables. They were farther from the house than they had been on the farm. But I could hear Adam as he worked, his whistle and calls to the horses, and on the days he gave his horsemanship lessons, his admonitions to the riders to “balance. True yourself.”

My garden lay between the house and the stables, and I kept some chickens. Having my own land felt like a wondrous, luxurious relief, endearing me to the place I’d recently found so strange. I still missed the farm. I missed the Clarion hills. I missed Joe, Cole, the Sunday picking parties at Marge and Freddie’s, quiet Rita, and even cranky Bertie, but I no longer ached for them.

Lil and Sarah helped me plant persimmon, fig, and pecan trees in the afternoons, when they came home from school. Rosie nearly lived in the stables when she and Gracie were not picking at their guitars or listening to Joan Baez or Beatles albums. In fact, all four girls took up some kind of instrument. Lil joined the marching band at her school and played the flute. Sarah began lessons on violin Tuesdays after school and impromptu fiddle lessons from Adam in the evenings. He found some local picking parties and often took all the girls. I was the only nonmusical one in the family.

The next year, Gracie turned eighteen and was on a date almost every Friday and Saturday night. Sometimes, Rosie would go out with her—a double date. Ranch life started early in the morning and we were all usually in bed by ten. They complained of their early curfew, but when we stood firm, they relented without much protest.

One Friday night, Adam shook me awake soon after I’d gone to sleep. He pressed his finger to his lips. His other hand covered my mouth. “Gracie and Rosie have just left. Let’s surprise them and go with them.”

“What?”

He led me out of bed to the front porch. “See, we’ll have to hurry.” He pointed down the driveway. In the light of a full moon, I could make out Gracie and Rosie hurrying toward the highway. The clock glowed eleven o’clock. I started for the front door, pissed.

“Not yet. Go get dressed first. I’ll get Lil and Sarah ready,” Adam said. “We need to see where they are going—all of us.”

As I changed clothes, I heard Lil’s and Sarah’s voices.

“Don’t,” Adam whispered to them. “It’ll spoil the surprise if you turn on the lights.”

Moments later, as the four of us walked silently down the driveway, we could see Gracie and Rosie clearly in silhouette under the big oak by the highway, their guitar cases propped beside them. They were sneaking out to play music? My anger began to slip. Adam grinned next to me. It had been a long time since we had all been outside at night together. Sarah squeezed my hand and tried not to giggle. A cool wind lifted my skirt. We marched side by side, holding hands.

“Shit!” Rosie hissed when she looked over her shoulder and spotted us.

Gracie, who’d picked up her guitar and stepped closer to the road to peer north toward town, whirled around, her mouth a dark O of surprise.

“We’re going out with you!” Sarah ran ahead to hug Rosie.

“We’re not going anywhere. We were just out for a walk.” Rosie swatted Sarah away.

“Walking your guitars, that’s a good one!” Adam laughed.

Lil joined Sarah in a little jig and chorus of “We’re going out! We’re going out!”

An old, battered station wagon with wooden panels pulled up slowly, its lights out. The driver, a blond boy in a white shirt, got out and stared wordlessly at the six of us. “Daddy, please!” Gracie whispered as Adam stepped up to the boy and held out his hand.

“Thank you, it’s so nice that you’re letting us come along. We don’t get out much,” Adam said.

The boy stared at Adam’s outstretched hand, baffled. Adam had the advantage of about five inches and at least fifty pounds on him.

“It’s okay, Keith.” Rosie’s voice was flat with resignation.

Keith looked at all of us. The moon shone so bright I could see every hair on his head. He gave us a determined grimace of a smile and then shook Adam’s hand.

We piled in. Rosie and Gracie slipped their guitars in the back of the station wagon, then climbed into the front seat with Keith. Adam and I got in, pulling the younger ones onto our laps. The young man next to us in the backseat reached quickly behind the seat and put something away. “This is Andy. Be nice,” Rosie said to me and Adam.

“I will,” Andy croaked and pressed himself closer to the window.

“Lights, son.”

“Thank you, sir.” Keith turned on his lights and we were off.

I dared not look at Adam. I bit my lip all the way into town to keep from laughing.

Skinny Andy beside me cleared his throat and adjusted his glasses every mile or so. Rosie turned several times to mutter and slap at Lil, who squirmed and kicked her seat. Otherwise, we were silent until we reached the first streetlights of Gainesville.

“We were going to this place in town where people get together and play music. We’re playing there tonight,” Gracie said with flat, offended dignity. “If we don’t sign up early enough, all we can get is the later time slot.”

We pulled up outside what looked like an ordinary house. A few dozen cars lined the street. Gracie led us down a short, dark hall with random squiggled psychedelic colors painted on the black walls, and into a large, dimly lit room. The place smelled of smoke and beer and another, unfamiliar sweetness. Small tables crowded the room of about forty people. No one there looked over the age of thirty. This was nothing like a Clarion picking party.

We were obviously Ma and Pa Yoakum with our gang of young’uns, but after a few quick glances of interest, everyone returned to their drinks and cigarettes. Keith and Andy scooted off to get extra chairs. We sat crowded around a single little table near the back.

A man with a goatee played banjo on a small stage, a familiar but jazzed-up tune. Adam leaned over toward me. “Not bad.” Sarah wiggled off my lap and returned to the hall to trace the colored swirls. Keith, obviously deciding that servility would be the best approach to the situation, brought us each a cup of coffee. I thanked him with pointed warmth. Lil, who had recently learned to wink, gave him one. He stood uncertainly for a moment, then sat down beside us. Rosie and Gracie ignored everything but the banjo onstage.

Then the girls were on.

Gracie leaned over the mic. “We’re the Hope Sisters.” After the pale banjo player, they were exotic flowers. A few people waved and nodded from the audience. I realized, with a shock, they had been there before. They knew these people, this place. Adam took my hand. To my ears, they did Bob Dylan better than Bob Dylan. A woman in a long skirt brought cookies for Lil and Sarah, who stopped fidgeting long enough to thank her.

After the next song, Gracie covered her mic and said something to Rosie, who first shook her head then nodded. Gracie peered past the lights into the audience and pointed, “Those are our parents in the back.”

“Obviously!” someone shouted from near the stage. Gracie smiled, pulled her hair out to her shoulders, and dipped her head in a little curtsey.

“They hitched a ride with us tonight. They don’t get out much,” Rosie dead-panned.

Adam pulled me to my feet for the quick splatter of applause. Everyone turned to look. It was my turn to be mortified. I blushed.

“And our two little sisters.” Gracie motioned them to the stage.

Sarah bolted from behind us. Lil hung back. “Go on, Lil, go to your sisters.” Adam pushed her gently. Sarah and Lil blinked at the lights as they stepped up to the stage. Their sisters, who whispered away from the mics, positioned them. Then the four of them sang “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

I stood behind Adam’s chair to get a better view. He leaned his head back against me. The last time I’d heard them all sing together in public had been at Momma’s funeral. I recalled how, when they held some notes, there seemed to be an extra voice, five rather than four daughters. I listened now, sure that I heard a fifth voice entwined. I closed my eyes and slid my hand down Adam’s chest to feel the barely perceptible hum of his breastbone under my palm. When I opened my eyes, Adam gazed up at me. We were submerged in our daughters’ voices. Then their harmony seemed to expand, then unravel and move closer, rising from behind me and on each side. With a small jolt, I realized there were, in fact, many extra voices. At the table near us, several women sang along with the girls. Scanning the crowd, I saw others singing. A song I did not know, sung by a room full of people who did not look or think like the people of Clarion, people my daughters might know for many years to come. This place—the house and the town we were in—were not what I had expected for our future. But here the girls would have more options. If there was ever a knock on the door, if anyone came for their father again or for them, they would have options and multiple paths. My world may have contracted, but our daughters’ had expanded.

They finished the song. Warm applause erupted. A few people whistled and called for more. Our daughters bowed. Beautiful, innocent, harmonious daughters.

We’d never grounded them before, but we did the next weekend. They also had to muck the stable every day and do the dishes each night for the next two weeks. But we moved their curfew to one A.M. on the nights they played at the Bent Card. Adam stayed up reading until he heard them return.

That fall, Gracie started college at the University of Florida but continued to live at home. On the weekends, the house filled up with young people. They were polite and respectful but they did not call us ma’am and sir, as the Clarion kids would have. They dressed differently, too, and they smelled sweet, like flowers or incense, and, eventually I realized, like marijuana. The boys, at first, wore Beatles haircuts, but soon it seemed they all had shoulder-length hair. All of them, boys and girls alike, wore beads and bell-bottom jeans with patches. Often, I had to take a few discreet glances at their chests or wait until one spoke before I could tell if I was speaking to a boy or a girl. A few of them were black, their full afros bobbing softly. They all carried large macramé bags, backpacks, or guitars.

Their ideas about life were very different from when I had been a teenager. Whatever we thought of our leaders in the forties, we knew the enemy and he wasn’t us. But in the sixties, the enemy was closer at hand—white adults spitting on little black girls going to school, assassins, and the advocates of the Vietnam War. The world seemed to be on fire. More than once, the girls sat rapt in front of the TV news, tears of outrage on their faces.

Unlike me, the girls were ready to step into the world they saw on TV. They were young and could not ignore the fire. Flyers announcing protests and rallies, album covers, books, and newspapers littered the house. For hours at a time, Gracie’s friends gathered, talking about music, the Vietnam War, or the latest protest on campus.

But for Adam and me, the ranch was an oasis. We were happy to share it, to have all the girls’ friends visit. I remembered what a refuge the farm had been for me during the last war and hoped we were providing similar solace.

Today, we’d be arrested for contributing to the delinquency of minors for what went on at the ranch then. Adam and I were uneasy at times. We were also naive. In small-town North Carolina in the forties, there had been only booze and sex, no drugs, no protests. No curfews, because there were no places to go after nine or ten o’clock at night.

Once I saw a friend of Gracie’s step out of the back of a van parked in the driveway. As the girl bent to tie her fringed boots, I saw, through the open van door, a boy buttoning his shirt. I knew the girl was only seventeen, a high school senior. A sweet, bright kid. I felt I should do something. But I wasn’t sure what I should or could do. At their age, I had the responsibility of a farm. I had first Cole, then Addie, in my bed. Most of the girls, Gracie told me, could get birth control pills at the local clinics. Many of the boys who crowded our porches faced the bane of chastity: the draft. So, after I’d gone over the facts of life once again with Gracie, I could think of nothing more to say than “be careful and don’t get pregnant.”

One evening, Adam found a hand-rolled cigarette on the stable floor and a lighter nearby. “It sure doesn’t smell like tobacco.” He sniffed the twisted end.

We’d both read about marijuana, and the Woodstock festival of muddy, stoned hippies had been all over the news the weeks before. Neither of us was easy with the idea of the girls or their friends doing drugs. But the lighter concerned us as much, maybe more, than the pot. We knew what a burned-down stable would cost.

“I want to know what it’s like before we talk to the girls about it,” Adam said. “Let’s try it.”

I held back, reluctant. But Pauline had tried it and proclaimed it “no big deal.” She preferred Jack Daniel’s, she said.

So we strolled out past the stables and lit up the cigarette, passing it back and forth between coughing fits. A cool puff of wind wafted the smoke farther into the pasture.

Not much happened. Adam seemed a little more talkative. I felt relaxed and a little weird, but not elated or particularly high. It seemed as if the world, not me, had gotten oddly and thoughtfully drunk. An experience far short of the dire warnings I’d read in magazines and newspapers. I scorched the spaghetti sauce for dinner that night, but we both ate a lot and thought it particularly good. Then we went to bed without ill effect.

But we did have some new rules after Adam found the marijuana. No visitors in the stables unless Adam or Rosie was with them. No matches or lighters anywhere near the stables. No one could offer or give Lil and Sarah anything stronger than chocolate milk. And because the number of visitors on the weekends had increased, and a few parents of Rosie’s high school friends had called looking for their sons and daughters, everyone had to come through the house and introduce themselves to us.

As the boys would troop by on their way to gather in the fields, Adam would shake their hands firmly and look them in the eye. Then, with uncharacteristic paternal sternness, he’d announce his rules: “Stay away from the stable and horses. Take care of the girls. And have a good time, boys.”

“Sure, Mr. Hope, it’s cool.” The boys always nodded. Rosie and Gracie would roll their eyes at Adam and pull the boys through the house and out the back door.

On a May Saturday in 1970, Gracie and Rosie prepared for a big party they’d be having out in the pasture. Sarah and Lil left earlier that morning with Pauline for the beach. All afternoon, the older girls bustled around in the kitchen and house, driving firewood, tables, and baskets of food out to the spot where they usually gathered, under one of the large live oaks. Adam cleared an area in the pasture we never used for riding. They would be allowed to have a bonfire there. They’d be far enough away to dim their music and debates, but close enough to run back to the house for the bathroom or any emergency.

I spent the day in the garden, mulching, trying to keep the water in and the weeds out. Adam mended the far corral and worked with a young mare, a pretty, gold thing whose love bite had left a bruise on my behind the week before. By sunset, we were beat. We sat inside at the kitchen table, drinking iced tea and watching each other sweat.

After dinner, Adam and I relaxed on the front porch, greeting a steady stream of arriving kids. The yard filled with cars and vans. It looked like it was going be one of their bigger parties.

Finally, the mosquitoes chased us inside. There was no more iced tea in the refrigerator, so we each poured ourselves a glass from a pitcher of bright red Kool-Aid. Adam finished his quickly and poured himself a second glass. I settled down on the couch with a novel while he gave the stables a final check for the evening.

It was well past ten o’clock, my normal bedtime. I didn’t feel sleepy but the words on the page blurred toward the margins. I set my book aside. I was back in the kitchen, trying to decide if the Kool-Aid tasted like strawberry or cherry—maybe raspberry—when Adam joined me and a batch of kids shuffled through. We rose to greet them. They were a brightly dressed group, all so sweet and beautiful. I felt a great tenderness toward them.

When they left, the salt shaker on the table undulated slowly to some music I couldn’t quite hear. One of the boys had been carrying a mandolin. “That boy must be a very good musician,” I said and pointed to the dancing salt shaker.

Adam gave the table a long, quizzical look. We both sat down again.

“The flowers are beautiful,” he said. I’d cut some zinnias and lantana and put them in a bottle. They danced, too. The bright pink, gold, and orange petals trembled delicately, keeping time with the salt shaker. They were the most beautiful flowers I’d ever seen. Their hairy emerald leaves curled gently, waving in a breeze. I bent and inhaled the simplicity of tart chlorophyll and sunshine. When I opened my eyes, the room glowed.

Adam, fluctuating between the definite and indefinite, watched me. I held my arms out to him in an invitation. He was surprised, but game. I tapped time on his shoulder as we waltzed around the table. He was the most beautiful and exquisite man. So right and so good.

The whole world was right and good and sweet and we danced. The breeze swirled around us, cooling our skin. I smelled horse, marigold, leather, dirt, and sweat on us. I heard the birds outside, an infinity of calls. The stabled horses breathed and shuffled. Farther out in the pasture, more animals and the voices of the kids, a faint echo of chirps. A car rattled down the road. Our home hummed around us. The room spun slowly and glowed as we danced. We kissed and got lost in the dark forest of kissing; I slowly sank to the floor, pulling Adam with me.

A wave of sound washed down the tube of the hall and curled itself into and out of footsteps, then giggles. There seemed to be a million of them in the hall, thousands of young people, staring down at us. Their faces looked more beautiful and funnier than any I’d ever seen.

“Excuse us, Mr., Mrs. Hope,” someone said in a high, tinny voice. It was the funniest thing I’d ever heard. I was gone, rolling on the floor and giggling. The joke was contagious. Every time Adam looked at me, he laughed, too. Wires of hilarity coursed through my face and stomach until I ached.

Then, gradually, we quieted, the wires of laughter loosened. Limp, we watched the undulant ceiling form and reform itself, the skin of the room. We breathed and held hands, lying on the floor, and listened as the house breathed around us. The birdsong brimmed on and on.

The ceiling and the birds were too active, and I turned to Adam.

He grinned. “Why are we still on the floor?”

“Because we can be.” I held his face in my hands and got closer. He hummed his sweet bell tone, a lilting spring-green sound. His face began to come apart, disintegrating into its individual features, but the change did not disturb me. I moved into his changing face, closer, until I could see nothing but the dark, bright black of his pupils, the endlessness of him. His features dissembled then reassembled into another complete face. A man, his mouth open in rage and pain. Then he was an Asian woman, large-eyed, expectant. Then a calm, fair child. On and on. Face after face. Each face distinct and whole, historied. Faster and faster, the changes came. Face after face. Like a current sucking me out of myself.

I cried out, jerked away, and shut my eyes.

Then there was just light and breath, the music of him, his essential beautiful alienness. He rose and rose and rose all around. He touched my face. The whisper of his fingertips on my cheek surged down my body and out my feet. A cry jolted me and I realized that the cry had come from me, my own voice of pleasure. I sank back onto my kitchen floor and lay beside my ordinary husband, the father of my children.

Children. Daughters. There was a knife, dark and solid in that thought, but I could not identify it.

I told Adam about the knife. He told me that the Kool-Aid must have something in it. He felt a little funny.

“I’ll say,” I agreed.

In a single fluid move, he got off the floor and took a sip.

I angled myself up and drained my glass. To me, it tasted like too many things I could not name. “What kind of Kool-Aid is this?”

“Exactly.” Adam peered at the glass in his hand. “This is the kind of Kool-Aid we need to ask questions about. I’ve read about kids putting LSD in Kool-Aid as a kind of test to see how ‘cool’ someone is.” I followed him to the sink and watched him rinse his glass. The swirl of pink water laughed down the drain.

Adam picked up the pitcher and sniffed the Kool-Aid. “There must have been eight or ten gallons of this in the coolers I saw some kids lug into the kitchen earlier.” He scowled, somehow both comic and paternal. “How do you feel?”

I rubbed his shoulder, my warmth for him erupting in my chest, radiating down my arm.

“Wonderful.” I giggled. “Go! Go find out what it is. I want to know.” I pulled him toward the back door and pushed the screen open. “I should go lie down again. I’ll wait for you in bed.”

He kissed me softly, then obediently set off into the darkness, an inch of brilliant candy-red sloshing in the pitcher he still held. He weaved his graceful way between the cars and vans parked behind the house. His mobility amazed me.

I was no longer sure I had feet, but I stepped outside and looked up. The night sky shimmered with points and streaks of pinks, lavenders, and oranges. Birdcalls slid through. The dark knife remained unnamed, solemn and quiet in the press of sound and color. Odors of hay and horses and wood and young people wafted by. Days or minutes may have passed since I’d sat on the couch reading. Time had turned to rubber. I was happy, very happy until the ground went red—first the rust-red of Carolina clay then blood-red. Then, the dark knife ripped the world in two and everything came in. An animal howl filled me. Jennie! Jennie! Jennie! But I could not bring her face before me. Just darkness. The dark immenseness. Hated, hated darkness. In me, on me.

Then I was inside on the bathroom floor, tearing my shirt off. Sorrow sparking through my clothes as I threw them down. My face was like wax in the heat, my bones too close to the surface. I had to turn from my own reflection in the mirror. I sat with my knees pulled up to my chest, afraid of the sorrow and darkness that breathed through me, faster and faster, until a large hand reached around from behind me. The hand told me that I was alone, that it was my own breath I heard. Those words spread a calm through me. I uncoiled in the thick, warm air and listened. I heard that everything was okay. Good. There was just is. Is-ness.

Is filled the bathroom. In all directions it continued. Endless.

After a while, I ran a bath, filling the tub with water. And the water was like water all over the earth. Iridescent. Alive.

Naked, I saw that everything about me was good. In the moonlight through the window, the slackness of my lower belly and my breasts, the silvery stain of old pregnancy stretch marks, the little veins on my legs and ankles, the darker freckling on the backs of my hands and my arms, the colors of my hair dulling toward gray were no longer signs of age but beauty, simple and present as the joints in my wrist, as the crickets outside and the sparkle of the bath water through my hands. All was right and wondrous, sweet, infinite.

I eased down into the cool bath. My body loosened into the water and I knew again without any doubt that the world was well and beautiful. Not all the time and not for everyone, but for the All which the individual and the singular is a part of. I had first known this, beyond any reason, when I was a child alone in the woods, and I knew it again. I breathed deeply and calmly. Stunned.

The pale, half-drawn shower curtain, the bathroom walls, and the small square of the bathroom window seemed to breathe with me. I was in a room in a house on a ranch in a state in a nation in a world that turned.

Then a young man appeared at the toilet. It seemed right that he should be there, peeing with his back to me, but I also sensed there was something unusual about the two of us being in the bathroom together. He sang a few bars of a jumpy little tune. He jigged his shoulders like a gnome. Then he turned and let out a yelp as he zipped up. “Mrs. Hope!” He rubbed his face and eyes. There was still something I couldn’t understand. I didn’t bother to cover myself as we stared at each other. My inability to comprehend what was going on struck me as hysterically funny and I burst out laughing. He bumbled out the door, calling, “Everything’s cool! I’ll get help! Rosie’s right on the front porch!”

Moments later, Gracie and Rosie exploded into the bathroom, upset over something, turning on blinding lights. They spouted a chorus. “It’s two in the morning. What are you doing in the bathtub in the dark? What happened? Are you okay?” To appease them, I let them dry me and dress me. They kept asking if I was okay. They moved too much, they talked too much, and there was too much I did not understand. Funny, sweet girls. They glowed like daughters, but finally I told them to shut up.

They led me to the bed. I propped myself up on the pillows. The sheets glittered white around me. Then Gracie and Rosie sat in the dark on either side of me like sentinels. A good way to go to bed.

I sighed. My body relaxed against the headboard. When I closed my eyes, I could see all my nerves swept clean. Sweet and new as the moment after sexual climax.

“What are we waiting for?” I asked. “Adam?”

“Where is Daddy?” Rosie started to rise from the bed. “I’ll go—”

I touched her warm shoulder. “No, wait here with me. He’s coming back.”

She leaned closer again. “Okay, Momma. We’re both here with you. Now, how much of it did you drink?”

“I drank this much.” I laughed and spread my arms. But the sentinels did not laugh. Gradually, I stopped giggling, cowed by their solemnity.

“Jennie,” I said. “She was a knife.”

“Oh, Momma!” Gracie choked.

“She’s okay now, Momma. We’re all okay,” Rosie took my hand.

Gracie began to cry, softly. I reached over and rubbed her back until she stopped. Then she slept, slumped against my shoulder. Rosie fell asleep, too.

Gradually, something like sleep moved through me. I dozed in waves of bright, dense dreams, surfacing long enough to awaken the girls and send them to their rooms. Several times, I had to assure them that I was okay. They murmured apologetically as they stumbled in the darkness toward the door.

Then I slept, a true, deep sleep.

When I next awoke, the brilliance of noon light washed through the bedroom and Adam lay next to me, propped up on his elbow. “Are you okay?”

I nodded, though I had no idea how okay I was. “And you?”

“Oh, I’m fine. But I’m sorry I didn’t get back before you fell asleep.”

I shook my head. “It’s all right. I sent you out to . . .” I had a sudden vivid recollection of his face changing. I rubbed my eyes and pulled my head back a little to focus. His features held. In fact, his face seemed a little sharper, more distinct than normal. His eyes glowed. His skin was clear and ageless. I caught my breath.

He placed his hand gently on my diaphragm. “It was LSD.” He studied my face. “You look a little rough.”

“Adam, it felt a thousand times stronger than the marijuana we smoked.” Slowly, in lumpy, halting sentences, I told him what it had been like for me. He listened intently, not once interrupting with questions. His eyebrows shot up at my recitation of his strange metamorphoses.

When I got to the part about Jennie, he closed his eyes, turned his head away, and moaned. “I’m glad the girls were with you after that. I should have come right back after I found out what was in the Kool-Aid instead of trying to find them. I searched everywhere. All those cars and vans. Even the stables. Then I came back here and found all three of you sleeping peacefully. Are you sure you’re all right?” He slipped his hand around mine.

I managed to nod convincingly.

He kissed my forehead. “I wanted to find the girls so badly because I heard something.”

I felt myself smile, my face involuntarily reflecting his. “What? Why are you so happy? What did you hear?”

“I heard one of the girls, Evelyn.”

“What do you mean? Heard?”

“My voice from one of them.” He pressed my hand to his breastbone. “I was on my way out to the fire circle with the Kool-Aid when suddenly I felt it.” He opened his arm and his hand swept a graceful curve above me. “So beautiful!” He laughed.

I sat up. “What?”

“Evelyn, I’ve never heard that except when the sound was coming out of me!” His face shone.

I blinked.

“It had to be one of the girls. I know what I heard. I felt it here.” He beat his chest softly.

“Gracie? Rosie?”

“I don’t know, but I wanted to find out. I dropped the pitcher and ran. There must have been a hundred kids around the fire. Faces, light, music. I couldn’t find Gracie or Rosie. But it had to be one of them.” He slipped off the bed. “I couldn’t sleep. I’ve been up all night. We need to talk to them about all of this, now. I called Pauline and asked her to keep Lil and Sarah at her place for the rest of the afternoon. But first let me make you some breakfast. You’ll feel better when you’ve eaten.”

I pulled on my robe and followed him into the kitchen.

I distinctly remembered him drinking his first glass of Kool-Aid, then at least one other after that. How could he be so normal?

He pulled out a chair for me and set a cup of coffee on the table.

I sat down and rubbed my eyes. The sun glared through the windows. My brain felt like the transparent, crispy edges of the fried eggs he sat before me a few minutes later. I pushed the plate away and asked for dry toast and water.

“I’ll wake up Gracie and Rosie,” Adam said as soon as I’d finished eating.

While he went to wake the girls, I watched the salt and pepper shakers on the table and stroked the scratchy leaves of the now well-behaved zinnias. I tried to muster some idea of how we should deal with Gracie and Rosie. Adam had drunk as much of the Kool-Aid as me, maybe more. Had he been hallucinating, hearing what he wanted to hear? Suddenly, the effect of the LSD seemed to return. For a moment, I saw Adam not as a man but as a raw bundle of intentions that could shimmer off into any direction at any moment.

“Momma? You okay?” Rosie and Gracie stood in the doorway, their faces and pajamas rumpled.

I nodded and pointed at the chairs across the table from me.

“Sit.” Adam glared sternly at them. “We need to talk.”

They wilted under his gaze. Gracie hunched at the table. Rosie poked at some crumbs left on a saucer.

Adam paced behind them, shaking his head. “Leaving that Kool-Aid in the fridge was a stupid, stupid thing to do. Do you know what you put your mother through? Were we the only ones who didn’t know what was in the Kool-Aid?” With each pass back and forth behind them, Adam seemed larger. For a few crazed seconds, I thought he might actually be growing.

Gracie twisted around in her chair to look up at Adam, a bare apology on her face. “It was a mistake, Daddy. Everybody else knew! A friend brought all the Kool-Aid. Someone was supposed to bring the last pitchers out to the pasture.”

Gracie turned to me. “I’m so sorry, Momma. We didn’t mean to . . .”

“Your face, Momma.” Rosie held her hands up to her face and then swept them back from her cheekbones. “You didn’t look like yourself.” She reached across the table for my hand. “Are you okay, now?”

Adam paused for my reply.

“I’ll be okay. But it was really rough at one point.”

Adam leaned down between the two of them. “If you ever think your mother is in trouble, come get me.” His voice was low and dark. “After we realized there was something in the Kool-Aid, I left your mother alone while I went out to the fire to find out what we’d drunk. Then I stayed out there trying to track down the two of you.”

Both their heads jerked up.

“You had some, too?” Rosie said.

“Yes, we both had a couple glasses. Not much happened to me, but it was very different for your mother.”

They exchanged quick glances then stared up at Adam.

“Your mother and I will discuss this and decide what to do.” He began to pace again. The only sound in the room was the rhythm of his footsteps.

Speechless, I just shook my head. I was still stuck at his claim that “not much” had happened to him.

For a long, withering moment, the girls sat, frozen, staring at the table.

He came to a stop and exhaled loudly. “I have one more question.” His voice was brighter, his face softer.

The girls’ posture relaxed a fraction.

He tapped them each high on their breastbones. “Now tell me which of you did I hear last night at the fire?” He turned an expectant, almost tender smile from one to the other. I understood how badly he wanted them to be like him.

They glanced quickly at each other.

Rosie swallowed. “What are you talking about? We weren’t out there at the fire when you and Momma . . . I was on the front porch. That’s where I was when I heard Momma laughing and Jerrod came running out.”

Adam turned a confident face to Gracie and touched her back. She looked over her shoulder, her eyes darting up toward him. Her gaze held his for a second, then she returned her attention to the table, scanning its surface. “I wasn’t at the fire then, either.”

“She was with me,” Rosie said.

Adam stood motionless, squinting at the top of Gracie’s head. He rubbed his chest. A quick smile crossed his lips and I thought he might laugh as he usually did when he caught one of them in a lie. Instead, his eyes narrowed. He slapped his hand on the table. “The Kool-Aid was a stupid thing to do. You didn’t tell us what was in it. Now one of you is not telling us where you were and what you did last night. I was not hallucinating. One of you is lying!”

Gracie opened her mouth. Before she could speak, Rosie touched her arm. She flushed and pressed her lips together. I tried to recall when I’d seen that odd spasm of confusion and guilt that crossed her face.

“Go!” I waved them away. “Now. Go get dressed.”

I could almost smell their relief as they scrambled out of the chairs and down the hall.

Adam came around the table and knelt beside my chair. “I know I heard her.” The certainty in his words belied his puzzled frown.

I held his face in my hands. “It’s not like Gracie to lie, especially to you. You drank the Kool-Aid, too. Maybe you imagined it.”

He shook his head. “Time sped up. Things were a little brighter and funnier, the volume turned up. But I didn’t see or hear anything that wasn’t there. I know what I heard, Evelyn! I don’t understand why she won’t admit it.” He pulled me closer. His face looked no older than it had when we’d married.

“Don’t cry, Evelyn. Everything will be okay.”

“I’m not crying,” I muttered into his collar.

He laughed at my lie.

We kissed. He tasted different. Like water. But what resonated softly from his mouth and chest, pouring into me, felt ancient. Older than Addie.

Overwhelmed, I spent the rest of the day in a stupor, napping while the girls moved softly up and down the hall, taking care of the day’s chores. Adam brought me soup and crackers for supper.

After I’d eaten a second time, I finally felt coherent enough to discuss what we should do about the girls and the drugs. The power of the LSD awed me, and our daughters were so young and so delicate. I wanted to ban everything like it from the property.

But Adam disagreed. “If it is happening, we should know what’s going on. For me it wasn’t any stronger than marijuana, Evelyn.”

That shocked me into a momentary silence. The drug had hit me like a sledgehammer.

“No. No, Adam, we have to do something! We can’t just let them take these drugs. And they did something careless and stupid.” I felt my panic rise higher each time I said no.

“Evelyn, did you see their faces when I said the drug had little effect on me? I think it’s the same for them. I don’t think we can assume that any drug will affect them like it does their friends. Or you.”

I remembered what the doctor had said about the uniqueness of Adam’s brain and hoped they were like him in this. “Yes, Adam, they may be like you but their friends are not. And even if you think it’s fine for all of them to experiment, they should not have disguised drugs lying around. Plus, it’s against the law!”

He nodded his concession and sighed. “We need some rules. Still, we can’t control what our daughters do every minute of every day. And we’ve never tried to. We’ve always trusted them. Gracie is twenty and Rosie is seventeen. If we jerk the reins, especially now, Gracie will pull away and Rosie will run in the opposite direction. And Lil and Sarah will see them do it.”

“They are not horses, Adam.”

“They are horses. You’re a horse and I am a horse. We need to lead them, not take the responsibility from them.” Then, with a tender exasperation, he added, “Evelyn, trust me. I once trusted you with what the girls should do. Trust me now.”

A nauseating wave swept through me. I suddenly understood what I’d seen on Gracie’s face earlier that day—the same dissonance of shame and confusion I’d seen there after Jennie’s funeral, when I’d stilled her father’s voice.

My resistance collapsed. “Okay,” I whispered. “We won’t jerk the reins.”

The next night at dinner, Adam rapped his knife on his glass of iced tea. All four girls were immediately silent. Adam looked around the table at each of them, his gaze stopping at Gracie. “Girls, your mother and I trust you. We know you trust us to take care of you. We all have to take the responsibility for ourselves and for others. This is what your mother and I want from you.” He glanced at me and his voice grew firmer. “You will never have anything in this house again that does not look like what it is. No disguises. No more Kool-Aid and no funny brownies. Hallucinogens can be very powerful. If you are going to take them, you must do it at home and only rarely. Nowhere else. You must tell us if you or one of your friends is tripping. And if you get caught with anything illegal, we will not mortgage our home and livelihood to bail you out and pay a lawyer’s fees. Is that clear?”

There was a round of nods and “Yes, sir.”

“Gracie and Rosie, we have more to say to you after dinner.” Then Adam raised his glass as if for a toast. “Daughters, you have to know what a thing is and respect its power. You don’t fly the Apollo spacecraft to the corner store. That is waste, ignorance, disrespect. Respect the vessel you are in. And we will respect you. Evelyn?”

The tension in the girls’ faces had already softened to gratitude as they turned to me for my response. I had nothing more to add, but I vowed to myself that I would keep a much closer eye on all of the girls.

After dinner, Gracie and Rosie were contrite. Without complaint, they accepted our list of extra chores and restrictions.

A couple of days later, while Adam was out on horseback, I approached Gracie as she folded clothes in the laundry room. All the girls had been more attentive to the housework since my accidental trip.

“Almost everybody else had some of the Kool-Aid that night,” she confirmed. “But I didn’t. Rosie either. We didn’t bother.” She shrugged. “I’ve tripped before. But I just felt good. The world was very pretty. And louder. That was all. It’s overrated if you ask me. I agree with Daddy.”

“Obviously it doesn’t affect everyone the same way. Your father wasn’t hallucinating. So what did he hear the night of the party?”

Gracie slowly picked up a big towel and folded it. For a long moment, she did not reply. Since the LSD, she and Rosie had treated me with an unnerving self-consciousness, as if they thought I might burst into flame at any moment. She squatted to retrieve more clothes from the dryer. “Momma, you remember when you told us the facts of life?”

“Yes, of course.” I frowned at her obvious attempt to change the subject.

“Well, you told us we could ask you anything about sex. I want you to know that I’ve always appreciated that. I know girls whose mothers never told them anything.” She paused to fold another towel. “But you also said that we all have a right to privacy and some things should remain private. We could ask you anything about sex as long as it wasn’t about what you had done, personally. And you promised not to ask us the same sort of questions, right?”

I nodded, curious.

She continued only after she saw me agree. “You said it was your duty to make sure we were using protection and you had a right to ask us about that, but the rest was our private lives. You also said you wanted us to tell you if any man ever hurt us.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I said. You called it ‘limited disclosure.’ ”

She smiled when I quoted her. “That was the deal.” She studied my face as she closed the dryer. “So the night you and Daddy drank the Kool-Aid, I was well protected and nobody was hurting me. But, like you with Daddy, I probably wasn’t as quiet as I should have been.” She glanced away and I heard the slight challenge in her tone.

“Oh.” I recalled the perfect, long-resonating sound of her father’s climax with me the night before and understood why she’d blushed when Adam confronted her. I also realized, with relief, that I had been wrong. Her denial had nothing to do with me or what happened after Jennie’s funeral.

Gracie ignored my red face and squeezed past me with her basket of folded laundry. “Mom, I’m going to be a junior next year. I really need my own apartment. I think I’ve found a good place, cheap. Close to campus.”

That night, Adam came in late from the stables. He’d been checking on a mare who would foal soon. He undressed in the dark, and spooned up close behind me.

I repeated everything Gracie had said earlier.

He laughed, flipped on the bedside lamp, and sat up. “Of course, that’s why she lied! Sex is the one time it’s so difficult not to . . . Evelyn, I heard a burst of pure joy from her. As if something enormous swam past me in a flash. Something powerful and beautiful whipping by. Then a long bubbling wake of warmth. I could almost see it.” He shivered and wiped his eyes. “What’s his name?”

“You really think I’d ask for details at the end of that conversation?”

“Well, no, but that’s okay. We’ll hear more about him, I’m sure. He made her very happy.”

I’d expected at least a little paternal bluster about his daughter having sex. He was, after all, a man. Instead, he placed my hand on his chest and drew me into his arms.

“You’re not surprised, are you?” I asked.

“Oh, she surprised the hell out of me that night.” He turned his face sideways to look down into my face, smiling at the memory of her voice. “But I’ve always felt it was a possibility.”

I nodded against his chest.

“I’ve heard other things,” he said. “Once in the middle of the night when she was dreaming, Sarah muttered something—funny, almost like a warble of surprise, but she wasn’t speaking, her mouth was shut. And Rosie with the horses—there’s something going on with her since we moved to Florida. She uses a voice with them. But I’ve never heard anything close to what I heard the other night.”

All these years, I’d been listening and heard nothing. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

He didn’t answer, but I saw the response on his face, the memory of Jennie’s funeral. Again, I felt the crushing weight of that day and what I had asked of him.

Regret choked me.

“Evelyn, it’s okay. You were right. It is a powerful thing. For a long time I thought they were not vocal like me. But I decided to let them discover it in their own way if they were—I have to respect the vessel they are in. I’m happy to let them come to it in their own way. And they will. We don’t have to push anything. We can leave Gracie with her privacy.” He searched my face. “You’ve never heard anything from Rosie?”

I shook my head dumbly.

“Hers may be too high-pitched for you to hear. It’s like a whistle. But if you watch closely, you’ll know. The dogs and horses turn to her a split second before she speaks and sometimes they respond when she’s given no obvious signal.”

“This has been going on and I didn’t know?”

“No one’s been keeping anything from you, Evelyn. I think there are times Rosie’s not even aware of what she’s doing.”

All this time I’d spent with him and I still did not know him. One thing I was certain of: he was without guile and incapable of deception.

It saddened me to think of how he must long for company in his unique gifts. I understood that desire and its insidious burdens, for I had so often craved company in my longing to share what I knew of him. I wondered how much a similar desire had motivated him to take on my form so many years ago.

The world of my daughters seemed so different. Or rather, I had begun to feel my difference from them more keenly. All mothers feel that way to some degree as their children become adults, but I harbored those other questions about who they were and what they were capable of. But I began to realize Adam was right. The answers to those questions would be theirs, not mine, and they might carry the gifts of their father privately.

For the rest of that summer, all the girls spent more time at home. They sang together in the evenings. Their voices, carrying through the house or across the back porch to the garden, always filled me with a calm tenderness.

In the fall, Gracie moved into her own apartment, a large wood-frame house near downtown that she shared with a menagerie of hippies. Within months, Rosie was accepted at the University of Florida, in pre-vet studies. She followed Gracie, the center of her world shifting away from the ranch.

Sarah painted and Lil read her fantasy novels. Soon enough, they also had parties with their friends in the pasture. They both decided not to wear bras or shave their legs. But they were there for supper every weeknight. Their grades were good, their eyes clear, and their friends respectful.

Lil turned fifteen the following spring. Her birthday seemed to incite a restlessness in her. A new name began to pop out any time she discussed school: Bryce. I recognized the cadences of infatuation in her voice, but there was something else, something not said. I asked Sarah about the boy, but she’d never met him. He was a new kid at school.

Sarah and I were in the living room when Lil and the boy pulled into the driveway. She peered out the side of the window. “Incest,” she hissed just as the front door opened and they strolled in.

Not exactly identical, Lil and the boy were certainly strikingly similar. The same shade of red curly hair, Lil’s shorter by only an inch or two. The same green eyes, the same tall lankness. His nose was larger, his eyes closer together. Adam, who had joined us, recovered first and offered his hand. The boy’s gaze darted past our surprised faces, and then swept the room as Lil introduced him.

Moments later, Adam and I stood in the kitchen and watched the two of them saunter to the stable to meet Rosie and the horses. Adam leaned against the sink, hunched forward for a better view. “I don’t like him,” he said. “He looked away every time I spoke to him.”

Lil laughed and leaned toward the boy, letting her hair sweep toward him.

“There’s nothing we can do,” I said.

“Sarah’s right. It looks incestuous.”

“She lost her twin. She likes him because he looks like Jennie and a lot of the people on my momma’s side of the family. Every red-headed, freckled one of us,” I said.

“He reminds me of Roy Hope. He wants her, but he doesn’t see who she is.”

“You got your skin and face off of Roy Hope. And other parts.” I patted his crotch.

“Your point?”

“She’s getting something off of this boy that she needs now. That’s all she sees—what she needs. I’ll bet she’s not seeing him any more than he sees her,” I said.

Adam glanced quickly at me, as if to speak, but said nothing, then turned his attention back to Lil and the boy.

I continued. “I know she’s vulnerable, but I trust her heart—her eventual heart. If we take the offense now, she’ll take the defense.” I realized that this was exactly the argument he had made after we drank the LSD Kool-Aid. “She’s infatuated and working through something. Let’s just keep our eye on it—on her. We can do that. She still lives here.”

“Okay. But I don’t want him hurting her.”

Before they reached the stable door, Lil took the boy by the shoulders, turned him to face her, and kissed him. I recognized that certainty and directness.

“Shit,” I said. “She’s in love.”

Adam nodded and turned away from the window.

Within a few months, Bryce took up with another girl and avoided all contact with Lil. She sequestered herself in her room to write poetry, refusing to come out even for meals. With only two daughters at home, her withdrawal shifted the balance of the house.

“Let her be,” Adam told me when I insisted she come to the supper table.

But he stopped by her room each night on his way to the table.

“I’m not hungry, Daddy,” she told him.

After days of this, Sarah arrived home from visiting one of her middle-school pals and announced, “I have had enough of Lil’s broken-hearted moping. Time for a cure.” Ceremoniously, she set a large, obviously heavy box on the floor. Gleaming gold satin with geometric designs covered the box and lid. “A surprise for later. Don’t ask.”

Gracie and Rosie showed up for dinner that night. Still, with all five of us at the table, Lil declined to come out of her room.

With a nod to Sarah, Adam said, “Let’s go.” He scooped up the pot of chili and tilted his head in the direction of Lil’s bedroom. Rosie, Gracie, and I loaded up, taking the rest of dinner with us. Sarah followed with the mysterious box.

Lil remained sullen and quiet as we set up the meal on the floor of her bedroom. No protest, no acknowledgment. But she couldn’t resist all three sisters. By the end of the meal, she joined in the conversation, asking Rosie about vet school, telling us about her new math teacher.

After we’d eaten, we pushed the dishes out of the way and Sarah sat the box in the middle of our circle. She took out three objects, each nestled inside a larger one, and carefully unwrapped them.

“Singing bowls!” she announced with a flourish of her hand. But they were not like bowls for serving food. They were cylindrical, their sides straight and high, the largest about eighteen inches in diameter. They were made from opaque glass, each one a slightly different creamy shade. Light from the hall shone through them, leaving one side shadowed. Carefully, she arranged them in a triangle on the floor.

Gracie smiled up at Lil. “You have to be near them.” She patted the floor next to her. Lil shrugged and obliged.

Sarah took out two mallets. She held on against the rim of the largest bowl and moved it slowly around the inside edge. A tone reverberated, vibrant and soothing, through the room. I almost jumped from the shock; I’d never heard anything so similar to Adam’s voice. I glanced quickly at Adam, who sat across from me, between Rosie and Sarah. But his eyes were closed, his head rolled back. The girls leaned in closer as Sarah picked up a second mallet and swirled it gently in the smallest bowl. The timbre and volume changed. Adam’s hand moved up his chest. Lil smiled, open-mouthed in surprise. The first interest I’d seen on her face in days.

Adam sighed and shivered, his eyes still closed. The girls inched closer to the bowls. Sarah concentrated. Her breathing was deep and measured as she pressed the mallets slowly, around and around, deeper then higher in the bowl, varying the tone and resonance. Without looking up, she motioned to a third mallet sitting next to her and said, “Gracie, yours.”

When the third mallet touched the middle bowl, I heard the sharp intake of breath around me. I felt the harmony in my solar plexus, a sweetness that made me smile. The tone of the three bowls seemed to mingle into a peak, then separate in a broad pattern. As it changed, rising and falling, my family moaned around me. Lil had slumped back against the footboard of her bed. Rosie stared, unfocused, at the bowls, her hand on her belly. Lil blinked, and her eyes rolled back in her head as her back arched slightly, then dropped again. Her face softened. Adam exhaled sharply. Gracie lurched forward in a small spasm and clutched her chest with her free hand. Something I could not see or feel moved through them like a wave, orgasmic.

Sarah moved the mallets lower in the bowl, Gracie followed, and the sound sobered, changed rhythm. She looked around at us. “More?”

“Yes,” Adam whispered.

I nodded.

Sarah looked at Lil, who mumbled, “Please. Yes, more.”

Sarah picked up the tempo again. “Stay there and a little faster,” she said to Gracie. And the sound moved from somber to ticklishly pleasing. Then the room exploded. Adam, Lil, and then Rosie burst into guffaws and rolled on the floor. Sarah bit her lip in concentration. I went limp and happy, leaning back against Lil’s closet door, my head warm. But Adam and each of the girls suddenly sucked in their breath, then exhaled explosively, wiggling as if being violently tickled. Tears streaked their faces. Lil pounded the floor and clutched her father’s arm. Rosie tried to stand to do God knows what, but couldn’t make it up off the floor. Gracie kept her mallet moving, but held one hand over her mouth as if to stifle her laughter. A tear slid down her face and into her bowl. Sarah stared down, mouth open, eyes big, and her pupils dilated.

The sound filled the room, and the strange St. Vitus dance of giggles, guffaws, and snorts continued around me. My head and chest hummed with a tender, amazing joy. But what I felt was clearly not the fantastic joke they all seemed to hear.

Then, abruptly, part of it cut out. I opened my eyes. Gracie, a wide, foolish grin on her face, held both hands up in the air.

The sound dropped and stopped. Sarah put the mallets down gently and rubbed her arms. Their laughter bubbled down to whimpers, then exhausted sighs.

“Wow,” one of them moaned thickly.

Gradually, the girls begin to move around me.

“Oh, and to think I used to spend money on drugs,” Rosie said.

Adam snored. Gracie stretched beside him and closed her eyes.

Sarah, Rosie, Lil, and I slowly gathered up the dirty dishes and leftovers and wandered back into the kitchen. They washed the dishes while I sat at the table. I watched them jostling shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen. Bright-haired, slim young women. Lil now as tall as Rosie. So like me when I had been a girl. And so like their father when they rolled on the floor laughing earlier.

I thought of Momma. For a moment, I saw her face drawn with illness, the appeal for forgiveness in her voice when she told me about my father. How could I explain to them what I did not understand? Adam was, and always had been, vast and strange, beyond my vocabulary. I glanced down the hall at the photograph of Addie and me hanging there. How could I explain that to our daughters?

Lil put her dish towel down, came over to me, and laid her hand on my back. “Thanks for the sisters, Mom,” she said.

“You’re welcome.”

She looked down at me. “You didn’t like the bowls as much as we did, did you?”

“Oh, I like them. But it was different for me.”

Sarah joined us at the table. “When I was a little girl, I worried about that.”

Lil sat down next to her sister. “Worried about what?”

“That I perceived—saw—things differently from everyone else,” Sarah said. “What if, when I look at a pumpkin, I see the color orange. But when you look at it, Momma, you see the color purple and when Lil looks at it she sees yellow. But if we all call the color we see ‘orange,’ then we would never know that we were actually each seeing different colors, would we?”

Lil nodded. “I thought the same thing, but I had backup when I was a kid. I always knew Jennie saw the same thing I did. I was sure of it.” She pressed her lips together the way she always did after uttering her sister’s name.

I thought of Adam, solitary, the only one of his kind. “There are things we’ll never know. But you’re not alone. None of you will ever be alone.” My words fell heavier than I intended.

A short silence followed. Then Rosie volunteered: “I have the same problem with sounds. I’m pretty sure there are times I hear things that other people don’t.” She held up the pot lid she had been drying and tapped it on the edge with a big spoon. Ting! The sound reverberated. Rosie swept the spoon through the air as if following the sound. The arc of the spoon continued long after I heard only silence punctuated by Adam’s snores from Lil’s bedroom. Rosie banged the pot again softly and whispered in mock drama, “And sometimes, ladies, I hear that sound when there is no pot or spoon around!”

Beside me, Lil pinched her thumb and forefinger together and sucked air between them. Sarah snickered.

“No. No,” Rosie protested. “Nothing to do with smoking. It started when I was a little girl. Weird droning sounds. Stuff like those bowls.”

I wondered what else Rosie might hear that I did not. I shooed Lil away and stood up.

“Well, I have heard enough. I want to hear the dishes getting finished. Go! All of you.”

They raced for the kitchen door. Once again, I felt myself to be the solitary one. They heard things I could not hear. They had potential out of my range, possibilities that would ferry them into a future blind to me. They were so young. All of them. Even Adam.

Not long after she returned the borrowed singing bowls, Sarah began the first of her “anatomy” drawings, strange distortions of the human body morphing into animals. She turned Gracie and Rosie’s old bedroom into an ever-changing gallery. My favorite was a portrait of Adam as a centaur. She had followed him around the stables for days, stopping him at his work, asking him to take his shirt off.

I caught her sketching me one day as I bent over in the garden. “I’m not taking any of my clothes off,” I told her and waved her away.

“Oh, I really wouldn’t want you to for this one.” She grinned as her hand swept over the paper.

The next day she had a new sketch up, a horse shown from the rear, turning to look back in surprise over its shoulder. The face peering over the broad, heart-shaped rump was an elongated, horsy version of my own.

“She got you!” Adam laughed when he saw it.

“Really?” I asked. “Is my butt that big?”

Adam wisely just grinned and scooted out the door.

Since their births, I’d wondered how different my girls were. As they matured, I couldn’t help but ask how it was that they didn’t seem to recognize the difference between themselves and others, even as they gave voice—literal and metaphoric voice—to that difference. How could they not know what was in their own blood? In their genes? But, I told myself, we are all stuck in our own skin. Limited to the singular certainty of our individual selves. Each of us knows the world only from a single perspective.

Then the thought jolted me: not Adam. He was not limited to his own perspective, he had not always been stuck in one skin. He’d had mine and Roy Hope’s.

I laughed.

Again, he surpassed my understanding.

How would they, his daughters, follow his lead?

The year that Sarah had started her periods, I’d begun skipping mine. By the time she was in high school, I had gone through menopause. I had a relatively easy time of it, but I did notice I no longer had the single-minded drive toward sex, and desired it less frequently. Sexual desire had been a part of me since I had become a woman; I was uncertain of how to be a woman without it. Who would I be if it fell away completely?

And even though I had not wanted a child for years, the final impossibility of it made the act less consequential in some way. But its meaning had changed rather than diminished. Lovemaking became a distillation of the bond between Adam and me. Now it was pure touch, pure connection without the tincture of other possibilities.

When I entered the room of Adam’s body, everything else fell away. There was only him, his body, his mouth, his hands. Then the moment of sweet, bright harmonics bound us. That remained unchanged.

During the days, Adam seemed a normal man. A normal, young man. I could feel, almost smell, the stallion on him.

One day, as I weeded the garden, the tall, blond girl who had come home from school with Sarah wandered out our back door and toward the stables. She had wide hips and a full figure, what people would have once called voluptuous, and a kind of brightness surrounded her. Her youth was heavy on her, like sweat. She walked into the open stable door. I heard the swish of Adam’s rasp stop. Then his voice, followed by hers.

I walked past the stable a few minutes later, with a bushel basket of spent basil stems and roots for the compost pile, when Sarah rushed the girl out of the stable and toward the house, hissing, “Jesus, he’s my father!” She shook her head at the girl, whose voice rose defensively as the back door shut behind them.

Adam stood inside the stable, wiping his hands and watching their retreat. I tried to read his face. We looked at each other. I walked up to him, pushed his hair up out of his eyes, and studied his face. Not a day over thirty he looked. I was fifty-two. He could easily have passed for my son. I thought of how other women must see him. For a moment, I imagined him in the world without me, outliving me.

He touched my hair, ran his hand down my cheek. He took my hand and pressed it to his breastbone. “Don’t leave,” he said.

Keeping my fingertips on his chest, I bent to put down my basket and pretended that he wanted me to stay with him in the stable. I did not want to think of what he saw—my graying hair and the lines on my face that told him I was far closer to my end than he to his.

I unbuttoned and opened his shirt. The skin on his bare chest did not have the slight crepe-like quality of age. There was no sinking of the pectorals that I saw on other men my age, no gray hair. But the horse-kick scar remained. I traced it, wanting to press my tongue to it and feel its smoothness. I closed my eyes for a second and saw the pale star in the X-ray of his chest as the doctor had held it up for me to see.

I licked my finger and added the dots and circle that would make a smiling face. “Remember those first months in Florida when Sarah drew that? It took days to wear off. You came to bed each night with it fainter and fainter. Then she would redraw it and the vanishing process would start again. She did that for months.”

He nodded and looked down at himself, tapping his sternum with his fingertips, a gesture as old as Addie. “I think of it as a U.”

“U for unknown.”

We kissed and the odor of his sweat blended with the basil resin on me. He smelled different lately.

“U for what I don’t know,” he said.

I heard something new in his voice, a lack of ease.

“Will you age at all? Will you change that way?” Then the question I did not say out loud, because I knew the answer: “Will I have to grow old alone while you remain young?”

He looked down at his chest again, then past me, his eyes scanning the house and the land behind me. “I don’t know, Evelyn. I changed myself to be this.” He ran his hand over his youthful face. “But I don’t know how to become a middle-aged Roy Hope.”

Anxiety rippled up my chest. I pulled him closer and lay my head against his neck.

“Don’t go away,” he whispered.

“No one is going away.” I looked over my shoulder out the door of the stable. My eyes followed the path of the girl. “Have you ever been with another woman?”

“Evelyn. Evelyn.” He took my hand and led me out into the yard. Gripping my shoulders, he turned me suddenly to face away from him. “Look at the sky, Evelyn. Look at the pastures. And the trees. I love that sky, those trees and fields and every horse there. I love all the faces I see in town. I love the way the roads curve or go straight. All these things give something to me. I love all this. It is so beautiful. So beautiful.” His voice broke and fell lower.

I did look at those green pastures, at the soft undulation of the distant, tree-dotted fields. The depths of cumulus towered in the distance. Through my tears, I saw the beauty he saw.

He tightened his hold on my arms. He whispered again, hard and fast against my ear. “All those things and everyone else is outside of me. But you, Evelyn. You pulled me out of the ground. And I know how your tongue rests against the roof of your mouth, how the sweat gathers under your breasts in summer, how your narrow wrists ache after hours of hoeing, how you take your pleasure from a man. And I know all this not through empathy or imagination. Not even love. But because I have been you.”

His last sentence was an unexpected turn. He had found the perfect pitch. As soon as he said those words, I knew them to be true. He belonged to me as no other had. And I to him. And he would, in some ways, never belong to me. I did not know his parameters. That was the source of my anxieties. It wasn’t the threat of infidelity. It was him.

For months afterward, I thought of Dorian Gray. Every time I saw Adam shaving and my eyes tracked the skim of the razor over his ageless skin, I imagined a middle-aged Roy Hope. Like me, he would have reading glasses on the nightstand by his bed, a tube of Ben-Gay lotion on hand for his aching joints. Several times, when Adam thought he was alone, I saw him scrutinize his reflection, frowning as he leaned in close, turning his head side to side or pushing his hair up to expose a perfect hairline.

Like all other questions about him, the question of his age dogged me, patient and loyal. But unlike other questions about him, time would inevitably make this question public, progressively more public.

Before the year was out, Gracie announced her engagement to Hans, the Dutch student she had been dating, the man she had been with the night Adam and I drank the Kool-Aid. They wanted to get married soon, they explained. Then Hans would be able to legally work in the United States while he completed his doctoral degree. Their engagement was no surprise, as Adam had predicted; we’d seen a lot of Hans since that night. But their shy addendum to the engagement announcement was completely unexpected: Gracie was pregnant—a happy accident, they explained.

I should have been disappointed that she had not been more careful with birth control, but all I felt was relief in knowing she could have children. Her pregnancy was the final proof that the girls, despite their sexually ambiguous beginnings, were normal. Not mules but fertile women!

Gracie insisted on a wedding at the ranch. She and I strolled out of the kitchen so she could show me where she wanted to stand with Hans as they made their vows. As she pivoted, surveying the land around her, her long red braid swung out behind her and she shielded her eyes from the afternoon sun. “Yep, this is the spot. And in about a month, the sun will be setting right over there.” She pointed.

I realized that we were standing where all the vans and cars had parked the night Adam heard her voice ring out sweet, joyful. I understood why she was choosing to commemorate the spot, and I smiled. She reminded me so much of my younger self at that moment.

The guest list was effusive and rambling, a menagerie of our past and present. Gracie wanted an informal wedding not much different from their parties, except that it included North Carolina relations and friends, as well as Florida horsemen, Hans’s family, and, of course, a varied pool of the girls’ friends—hippies, academics, campus activists, and a few Florida cracker cowboys.

As we all gathered just before the ceremony, I watched my sister, Bertie, who’d recently found the Lord, bless the non-Baptist masses with a fixed scowl of restrained piety. My brother, Joe, and his wife, Mary, struggled politely through a conversation with a local philosophy professor. Freddie and Marge showed up with banjo, guitar, and regrets from Cole—his wife, Eloise, was ill. The two of them were the most at ease, settling in among the long-haired musicians.

After a few years living in Florida, we’d resumed contact with our Clarion relations, a few of whom had even come to visit. But now I could see the shock that registered in their eyes when they saw Adam’s face, so much younger than theirs and mine. Those sideways, assessing gazes reminded me of what we had endured in our last year in North Carolina. I appreciated how much the move had spared us and opened up the girls’ lives. But I could see our Florida neighbors and friends making the same comparison now. If they had assumed I was simply aging prematurely, meeting my middle-aged siblings corrected that notion. I did not want to lie again. I did not want to be shunned again. When their eyes lingered a moment longer than normal on Adam’s face, I looked away, ignored the smolder of anxiety under my ribs, and turned my attention to other guests.

The wedding ceremony was flawless. The girls were all beautiful, especially Gracie in a long, white, cotton lace dress. Rosie set aside her overalls and donned a long dress to be the maid of honor. Lil and Sarah sang. In his dark suit, Hans looked a fetching combination of shocked and proud. He was clearly a good and reliable man. Adam and I had no qualms about him, and Hans’s family seemed to adore Gracie, but we cried at the wedding all the same.

After the short outdoor ceremony, we all ate dinner on long tables set up in the pasture. Hans, normally a rather reserved person, got drunk enough to serenade us in Dutch, then hug and kiss us all, proclaiming his love for everyone. Sarah, the official wedding photographer, captured all our goofy, happy grins. But there were no other surprises. No tainted Kool-Aid. Though I did detect the smoke of marijuana on a few of the guests.

The music went on until early in the morning. We made strong coffee and breakfast for the motley gang of stragglers who had camped all night. Then the honeymooners left for a month in Utrecht.

When they returned, Gracie was almost four months along and beginning to show. They continued living in Gracie’s small apartment, where they would stay until the lease ran out or the baby was born, whichever came first, then live with us for a few months after the birth while Hans completed his degree. We counted down the weeks.

Several times I had bouts of anxiety about the baby, though no nightmares as I’d had when I was pregnant with Gracie. Once I asked Adam, “What should we tell her? Should we warn her that he might not look right at first?” I was asking only about the baby, but as the words came out of my mouth, I thought of all her questions that would naturally follow.

My question seemed to surprise Adam. “I don’t think there’s really anything to warn her about. What good would it do? It would just upset her, like you were before she was born. The girls were all fine and our grandchildren will be, too. And that’s all that matters.”

I recalled my anxious examinations of the girls when they were little. My question suddenly seemed disloyal and overly fearful. But Adam’s face, as he answered, was devoid of anxiety, open and free of judgment. Something in his eyes then reminded me of Addie’s response, years before, when I’d asked her if it bothered her to have no past, no explanations or stories for herself. “I am,” she’d simply asserted. Unlike me, A. had never needed explanations or stories. It also occurred to me then, as it had in those first moments of Gracie’s life, that whatever Adam saw in his children or grandchildren, however unusual to anyone else, might seem natural and familiar to him.

I soothed myself with lighthearted warnings to Gracie and Hans about the particularly intense “newborn” look of Hope babies, but did not share my anxieties. In those last months, when Gracie grabbed our hands and pressed them to her swollen belly and asked, “Did you feel that? You feel it?” the thrill of that firm thump against my palm vanquished any residual worry. The ripple of our first grandchild turning in his mother’s womb was mortality and continuity. Adam was right. Nothing else mattered.

We loved Baby Adam at first sight. I had expected to love my grandchild, but couldn’t imagine it possible to love any other child with the intensity that I felt for the children who came from my own body. Yet, from the first touch, my love for Gracie’s son was immediate, so visceral it startled me, and equal to my love for her.

His features lacked the flat, slightly unformed quality our daughters had when they were born, but his skin looked uneven as theirs had. Exhausted from labor, Gracie cried when she first saw him. Hans tilted his new son in his arms so we could take our first good look. Adam lifted the blanket. Swollen testicles propped up a little stiff pod. Definitely a boy.

“At last, another doolywhacker in the family,” Adam laughed. Within hours, Baby Adam’s features smoothed. There was no discussion of tests or problems.

Baby Adam was only twenty-four hours old when Adam and I returned to the hospital. The two of us sat on the bed, flanking Gracie, while Hans took a much-needed coffee break in the cafeteria. Adam cradled the baby, and the three of us watched in fascination, cooing each time he sucked his fist or blinked or wiggled in his blankets. Round face, blond fuzz. Eyes blue as the waters of a Florida spring. Perfect, beautiful.

Then a nurse walked in. All bustle and efficiency, she whisked Gracie’s food tray aside and checked something on the chart. She glanced at Adam, smiled, and said, “You should give the baby back to your wife.”

Adam slid off the bed and came around it toward me, holding our grandson. I opened my hands to take the child.

“No.” The nurse laughed. “Your wife. It’s feeding time and your wife is down for breast-feeding. Grandma can’t do that.”

Adam flushed, then wordlessly turned and handed the baby to Gracie, who took him hungrily. He gave me one quick, confused glance, muttered something about coffee, and left.

“Some daddies don’t like to watch, but he’ll get used to it, honey.” The nurse fluffed a pillow and slid it under Gracie’s arm.

“It’s his first grandchild,” Gracie volunteered.

This registered on the nurse’s face. “Well,” she said.

As the nurse left, Lil and Sarah popped their heads in the door of the room. “We saw Daddy in the hall,” Sarah said. “Everything okay?”

I nodded and motioned for them to join us.

They sat enraptured on the edge of the bed, watching little Adam grunt as he audibly sucked his mother’s breast, his eyes shut tight. Gracie leaned back against the pillows and closed her eyes. I walked over and looked out the hospital window. I kept seeing the look on Adam’s face, its rapid change from reverent pride to an expression I could not define. Embarrassment? Surprise? Shame?

“Are you okay, Momma?” Sarah asked.

I nodded and joined them again at the bedside.

“Why have you two always lied about Daddy’s age?” Gracie asked, her eyes still shut, her face serene and tired.

Lil looked to me for an answer. Sarah leaned across the bed, cupped the baby’s head, and smoothed his hair down.

“He doesn’t know how old he is,” I said. “We had to make up something for the courthouse when we got married.”

“How can he not know?” Lil asked.

“There were no records of his birth, and he didn’t really know his mother,” I replied.

“Still, how can he not know how old he is? He should at least know what year he was born? Didn’t his mother . . . ?” Lil continued.

Sarah put her hand on Lil’s. “Daddy’s special.” She glanced from her sister to me with that expression on her face that always made me wonder how much she knew and how she knew it.

Gracie raised her head and looked at me. “However special Daddy may be you must have come pretty close to actually robbing the cradle. He was weaned when you met him, right?”

“Yes, young lady, but he could barely feed himself.” It was true. For a second, I pictured Addie’s hand wavering as she reached for her first biscuit and blackberry jam.

Gracie laughed and gazed down at Baby Adam, who made a loud puppy-grunt of satisfaction at her breast. “Momma,” she said and patted the bed beside her where she wanted me to sit. She shifted the baby from one breast to the other, and the newly exposed nipple continued to spurt, the stream of milk landing on her knee.

Sarah and Lil leapt back, squealing and giggling.

The baby startled, lost suction, and then sneezed at the second breast now spraying milk into his face.

“I didn’t know they could squirt like that!” Gracie laughed.

Gracie, Hans, and the baby moved out to the ranch. Their apartment lease had expired, but Hans still needed to finish up his doctoral work. Soon, they would leave for the Netherlands to introduce the baby to his Dutch relations. Then they would live in Washington, DC, for Gracie’s Foreign Service training. After that, she would receive her first international assignment.

That summer and through the fall, Adam and I spent as much time with our daughter and grandson as we could. Adam postponed his usual trip to the mountains.

He did not say so, but he missed his time of solitude. I sensed a restlessness in him that went beyond the normal energy and distraction that comes with having a newborn and a new mother in the house. His tautness relaxed only when he held his grandson.

Late one night, I found Adam asleep in the recliner. Baby Adam, exquisitely new and tender, slept slack-mouthed, drooling on his grandfather’s chest. I knelt next to them and studied Adam’s face. I didn’t want to wake him then, but longed to touch him, to assure myself of his substance.

He opened his eyes, in that abrupt way he sometimes woke, without movement or speech.

I pressed my palm to his jaw, and then cupped the baby’s head with my other hand. “You two remind me so much of all those long nights when Rosie had colic,” I whispered. “You look exactly like you did then. You haven’t changed at all.” I felt an intense longing for the past. He and I would never again be a young couple with children. Yet, I could see on his face, on the very surface of his skin, that he could have all those things again.

He stroked my cheek. “The first time I opened my eyes, I fell in love with you. Before I knew what love was or who you were. Then, at night, I lay beside you absorbing you as a child does the world. I fell into you. And you met me in everything I wanted or did. It was a sweet, complete immersion to take your form. I didn’t expect it, or try to make it happen.”

I nuzzled his hand as he continued.

“With Roy Hope, I had to literally push myself into him. I stole from him. And it took two weeks.” Adam took a deep, slow breath and gazed toward the dark rectangle of windows. Past the reflection of the three of us, moonlight shone on the yard. Beyond our yard and the faint line of the road lay the darker area of gentle slopes and the sky. I could make out one star. I wondered if he saw the same one.

“Evelyn, it’s been years since you had to explain anything about me. But that will change soon. I look at men in their fifties and sixties. Older men, men who . . .” He glanced at me and, mentally, I finished his sentence: “Are your age.”

“Adam, I can’t keep the inevitable from happening.” I felt impotent.

“I know. I don’t expect you to. But we need a solution.” He looked down at our grandson on his chest. “Before he knows me like this. Before more people here mistake me for his—” He hesitated and then recovered. “I’m not sure what to do or what I can do, but give me time.”

I pressed my finger to his lips. “He has a perfectly wonderful Grandpa. And you have all the time I can give.”

Baby Adam moaned and rocked his head. Adam rubbed the baby’s back and his tiny body relaxed immediately. Then he pulled me toward him for a kiss. A tender, sweet kiss. I closed my eyes. His mouth was the world. Hope was a hard, dark seed in my chest.

I reached up, turned off the lamp, and then wedged myself into the recliner next to him. With our arms around each other and our grandson nestled between us, we fell asleep.

During the night, Gracie retrieved the baby and covered us with a blanket. As I woke, dawn light pinked the sky outside the window. My hips ached from being cramped in the recliner.

“Good morning.” Adam planted a kiss on my cheek and, in a single fluid motion, pushed down the footrest and stood up.

For the last time before Gracie’s departure, the girls performed together in a coffeehouse near campus. They all sang. Gracie and Rosie on guitar, Lil played the fiddle.

When Adam and I, the official baby-sitters, arrived, the café tables were already crowded with the familiar faces. Many, whom I could barely see in the low lights, greeted me and Adam by name. They cleared a center table for us as the women cooed over the baby, who slept in my arms.

The lights above the small, open stage brightened and the room quieted. Hans joined us at our table. Carefully, I slipped Baby Adam into his father’s arms. The girls, far more poised than during their first performances years before, began with a pretty song about bringing a baby home.

Through the whole set, the baby slept against his father’s chest, oblivious to the music.

For their last song, they put their instruments down and stepped to the edge of the stage, in front of the mics. An expectant hush swept across the tables and through the bar in the back of the room. Sarah, in her sweet, full soprano, sang a short song that ended with the line: “Mother Earth will swallow you. Lay your body down.” She was the smallest, only eighteen, and still bone-slender. She started the two-line song again, and, one by one, her sisters joined her. They sang in rounds until Gracie’s single voice finished. The girls stepped down off the stage and sang the two lines once more in unison. Their voices mingled and swelled. Again, I had that strange sensation of hearing not four but five voices as they sang. I thought of Jennie as I watched Lil close her mouth on the final syllable of that strange, short song.

In the second of silence that followed their voices, Adam took my hand and squeezed it, a strange blend of sorrow and pride on his face. He brought my hand up to his lips and I felt a tear.

I opened my mouth to speak, but the audience burst into applause and shouts for an encore. Little Adam woke with a start and cried out. Gracie held up Adam’s fiddle and leaned over the mic. “We’d like to call our dad up to help us on this one.” They started on a song I’d never heard before. The audience began to sing along on the refrain. Hans slipped the baby into my arms, then he dashed off to crouch near the girls and take pictures.

They danced and hugged each other onstage. Their friends in the front of the audience rose to their feet and joined them. Baby Adam wiggled, threatening to fuss. So I stood up and swayed, rocking him back and forth. Despite the volume of music, the baby had calmed again. Gracie spotted us and pressed her arm across her chest to keep her milk from letting down. For a moment, I felt a stillness and quiet amid the music as I sniffed the sweet baby odor and warmth of him, my first grandchild. I thought of the sadness I’d just glimpsed in my husband’s eyes, and Time, that cruel, raucous queen of sorrow, passed a hand over my heart.