The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

Nine

Surrender





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Come with you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, I’ve never had me an old man.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Evelyn! Are you okay?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam paused at the bottom step.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My own deflated hope was a suffocating weight on my chest. All I could do was take his hand. “Let’s go home.”

A few moments later, we passed a battered old station wagon as we turned out onto the main road. The elderly woman at the wheel did a double-take. The bald man beside her turned in his seat, his eyes locked on Adam.

Adam appeared not to notice. He sighed deeply again and gripped the steering wheel. “It never occurred to me . . .”

I touched his leg, and he pressed his lips together. There was nothing more to say. The air in the cab of the truck seemed clotted, unbreathable. I rolled my window down. We drove on in silence. Adam, staring ahead, vibrated beside me. Under the noise of the engine and the open window, I thought I heard something darker, a deep, low drone.

Soon he drove off the highway and took us higher into the hills, up progressively narrower tree-lined roads until there were no more homes. When he stopped, the road was a single-lane, weedy rock path.

His face was closed, private. “I’m going to stretch my legs a little.” He got out of the truck and walked away.

Quickly, the back of his blue plaid shirt disappeared into the underbrush. I stepped out of the truck cab into the cooler air. Everything was suddenly unnaturally quiet. The birds had stopped singing. Two deer bolted out of the woods from Adam’s direction, galloped across the road in front of the truck, then lunged uphill.

A roar billowed behind them: Adam’s voice, sharp as his cry at Jennie’s coffin. A rumbling boulder of rage. The skin on my arms and face tingled, my pulse kicked. I covered my ears and fought my own urge to run.

In the silence that followed, I slumped against the side of the truck not sure what would happen next. Soon, the birds resumed their chatter, and I climbed back into the truck. I nodded off, and when I woke from my nap, the shadows of late afternoon stretched across the road. My neck and shoulders ached from being scrunched up against the passenger door. My disappointment returned in a surge and I looked around for Adam. I tried to remember exactly where he had walked into the woods, but the trees all looked alike. It would be dark soon. His thunderous, jagged cry echoed in me. I shivered. He’d once said the mountains answered his call. What could the response to such a call be? What if he was hurt, trapped under some boulder dislodged by his voice?

I flung my door open, ready to dash into the forest to look for him when I saw the rhythmic swing of his sleeve.

Seconds later, Adam emerged, his face lighter, his gait looser. He circled the truck and stopped at the open door on my side. “For your patience.” He held up a few inches of ginseng root. His eyes were as resolute and calm as when, years before, he’d stood in the bedroom bare-chested, offering the gift of himself as Addie.

I smiled at the man and the body I’d now loved for so many years.

“Evelyn, I can still do this. It doesn’t have to be Roy. I could find someone else. You could help me. You could choose the man. We’d have to figure out some way for me to get close to him.”

My pulse pounded in my ears. I had to strain to hear him. I tried to imagine him with a completely new face, not Roy’s. A strange older man, someone else’s face looking at me every morning. The fresh stories, new lies. A sudden dense fatigue overcame me. I felt my age.

“No!” I said. “No, Adam.” My words shocked me.

A question registered on his face.

I’d always assumed that I would accept anything to have him with me. I took his hand, aware of its weight and strength. “Our grandchildren should know the father their mothers had. The man I married.”

He shook his head violently.

I persisted. “What would we do? Fake your death? Then you come back as some new old guy and we take up where we left off? And we try to explain everything to the girls? To everybody? More lies and made-up stories? I want us to live as who we are.”

He stared at me, still shaking his head.

I gripped his shoulder. “Once I asked you what the difference was between being a man and being a woman. You told me that the greatest difference between me and you was not our sex but the fact that you were not fixed, you could change while I had to remain as I was—a woman—for my entire life.”

He squinted at me and I felt him tense as if to pull away.

I held tighter. “You were right in that respect, but I’m not without my own changes. I’m not like I was when you looked like me. I am the one changing now. My hands ache after a day in the garden. I lift a fifty-pound bag of feed and my back hurts for days. My eyes aren’t as good as they used to be. And this is just the beginning. There will be more and more changes for me. I want you to be with me. I want you down to my marrow. But I can’t bear the thought of you giving up what you have to feel like I do. And I don’t want to tell any more lies or make up any more stories.” I touched his face. “You have a gift. You can’t turn your back on it. We must bear this the best we can.”

He pressed his face into my hand. “Stay, Evelyn. Don’t change,” he whispered.

I held his wet face and made him look at me. “I can’t help but change. As long as I can be, I will be with you. But I will become an old woman and then . . .” I choked. “Will you stay—”

He stopped my words with a hard, fierce kiss. We made love on the seat of the truck. Frenzied. Quick. We devoured each other.

The sky was thick with stars by the time we drove out of the mountains, heading south toward the place we’d lived for so many years without lies. I had no idea how we would navigate those waters before us. What if I lived to the age of eighty-five and he still looked twenty-five? I could not keep the inevitable at bay. A helpless, irrational shame saturated me.

As we drove past homes lit against the falling dusk and returned to the highway, I thought of our daughters. I’d always focused on Adam’s most obvious gifts, his voice and his physical transitions, when I considered what he may have passed on to our children. But he’d also given them robust health and, it would now seem, a long life. They had matured at a normal rate, but would they age like me or like him? The older they got, the more they seemed like him. I’d never expected to outlive my children, but they might live far longer than I’d ever imagined. How much of their lives would I miss?

As we left the mountains behind us, I sensed a continuing undercurrent of resistance in his silence. He drove all night, staring straight ahead at the road while I dozed beside him. We held hands, but said only what was necessary for the drive. By the time we pulled into the ranch early the next morning, I understood that, though he had wept at my request, he had not yet agreed to it. I knew, too, that his single howl in the mountains had done little to abate his grief.

I touched his arm, stopping him before he got out of the truck. “I left the land I loved to come here, to safety. And when the girls and their friends were experimenting with drugs, I let you handle it your way.”

“Evelyn, no.”

But I held on to his hand. “I once asked you to hide your voice, to make that power private, so as not to disturb others or our daughters. You honored my request and found your way through. It seems our daughters have, too. They don’t seem to be able to transform themselves as you have. I think they will always be women, like me. But in this other way, they may be like you. If they are, they will need you. You should stay as you are, the man they have known as their father, and I’m not saying this just to avoid spinning new lies or to spare you the physical pain of aging. Our daughters will need you here with them. When their husbands are old men, if they still look like thirty-year-olds, they’ll need someone who has been through this to guide them. And when their husbands are old men, I won’t be here.” My jaw clenched on my last words.

His eyes widened. A dark, horrible grief flashed across his face and something in him seemed to collapse. He nodded his agreement as he opened his arms.

We wept, holding each other as all around us dawn broke.

In the months that followed, we made love more frequently, Adam embracing me as if touch could alter what words were powerless to change. At times, I had the impression that he was trying to absorb from me the aging process itself or to literally press his youthfulness into me.

For me, the sorrow came in waves. My heart, at times, awash in loss.

I’d always known there would be an eventual, inevitable parting, but now I understood its approach and the difficulties it would, in time, bring. However extraordinary he was, we were, in this respect, very ordinary.

Soon after we returned from Kentucky, one of Adam’s favorite thoroughbred mares, Rose of Jericho, was ready to breed. Over the years, our business had settled on breeding and boarding, mostly thoroughbreds and quarter horses. Adam still had a special talent for handling disturbed horses and rehabilitating misguided riders, but he’d also developed a strong reputation for matching sire to dam for a good foal. By then, we had two stable hands: Manny, our full-time groomer and trainer, and Bruce, a pre-vet student at the university, who helped us part-time when Adam was out of town.

Jericho’s owner, a Jacksonville investment banker and one of our best boarding clients, wanted his most recent purchase, Hurricane, to sire. The stallion, tall and powerful, was broad-hoofed, but a light, swift racer. Jet-black with a startlingly white blaze, he was also temperamental and willful. We did not use artificial insemination. All our horses bred live-cover—a standard practice with some breeds and for some owners who wanted their sire’s line guaranteed, but risky if a stallion became aggressive.

One afternoon, I watched from the kitchen window as Adam led Jericho down the stable to the breeding shed. Within minutes, I heard a horse’s scream. That alone was not unusual, but more screams followed. I recognized the kick of hooves on wood and men’s voices, harsh and alarmed. I started from my chair. Adam appeared at the back door, his shirt bloody. “Call Ray! Now!” he shouted, then dashed back to the stable.

Unnerved by the sight, I dialed Ray Bentley, our veterinarian.

When I hung up, I grabbed gauze, a sheet, scissors, and the extra first-aid kit we kept in the house, then ran to the stable. Bloody footprints led to the first stall, where Jericho lay on her side. Adam and Manny had stripped to the waist. A broad smear of red darkened Adam’s chest. Kneeling at Jericho’s shoulder, he held bloody, wadded-up shirts, one pressed at the base of her neck, the other at her chest. His cheek was abraded, and a long, shallow cut oozed at his bicep.

The mare lay still. Only her eyes moved, wildly. She breathed in staccato snorts.

I heard nothing else, but when I touched Adam’s back, his voice vibrated under my hand. “The vet’s on his way,” I said.

Manny muttered a soothing stream of Spanish as he grabbed the sheet and began tearing it into strips.

“Never seen anything like it!” Adam winced as I handed him two thick gauze pads. “He bit the crap out of her, then all hell broke loose. Rearing. Over and over. His hooves slashing.” He tossed the shirts aside and pressed the gauze firmly to the wounds. “He wanted to kill her. We barely got her out.” Blood blossomed through the compress immediately, oozing around his fingers.

“Loco, loco,” Manny muttered.

Jericho nickered weakly when the vet arrived. Ray shook his head as he knelt to examine the mare. I gasped when he removed the compress. A fist-sized chunk of flesh slid sideways from her withers, barely attached.

Jericho erupted, kicked, then lifted her head and shoulders as if to heave herself upright. Everyone but Adam backed away. He moved closer, his hand in her mane, soothing her. At his touch, she laid her head down again.

Ray laid a large, dark case on the ground a few feet away and began to unpack syringes and a large vial. “It looks bad. A local, first. She’s not going to like it.”

“You don’t have to stay for this,” Adam whispered to me.

Grateful, I walked away from the agonized cries of the horse. For want of anything more constructive to do, I went in the house and prepared sandwiches and coffee. As I loaded the food onto a tray, another sharp neigh rang. I added a flask of whiskey on my way out.

Manny stood at a respectful distance, watching intently. The other horses in the stable were quiet, their ears perked. The odors of blood and the men’s sweat dulled the air.

A big utility light clamped to the stall rails shone down on Adam and Ray. Jericho, her legs tied, lay facing away from my view. I was grateful not to see her wounded chest or her terrified eyes.

Adam knelt at her back, stroking her neck. Her foreleg trembled spasmodically. Her hide rippled.

Ray paused, leaning back on his heels. “I didn’t expect anything this extensive. I’m out.” He held up an empty vial and shook it. “I can’t give her a local on these last two wounds. But I’ve got to close her up before there’s any more swelling. Twenty-five, maybe thirty more sutures. It’s going to be rough.” He glanced at Adam, who nodded.

“Evelyn,” Adam said without looking up.

Ray hesitated, the threaded needle poised over Jericho, and shot a questioning glance in my direction.

The cups rattled as I set the tray down. The only other sound was the mare’s shallow and rapid breath.

Not certain what Adam wanted, I stepped into the stall and stood next to him. Ray’s needle touched near a gapping slash of exposed muscle. Jericho flexed her forelegs and jerked her head sideways in a scream of protest. The two remaining gashes bled anew.

Adam touched my foot. I realized what he was going to do and moved to stand closer to him, giving tacit permission. Then I braced myself. His other hand slid up the taut muscles of Jericho’s neck. His lips parted in exhalation. A single, radiant chime rang out, pure and singular. A test, not his full range. Jericho nickered a soft response. Adam and Ray locked eyes for a second. As Adam’s voice increased in volume, Ray’s face opened in shock. Adam bent to press his chest to the mare’s shoulder.

Ray’s eyes followed Adam, then darted down the flanks of the horse who now lay completely still.

Adam’s monotone rose and flexed through the stable. His hand encircled my ankle. The air pressed into pure sound. But I heard an undercurrent of uncertainty, a falter in the swell of it. I realized with a shock that his goal was not only to soothe but to anesthetize. My head and chest hummed. I opened my mouth to breathe. His grasp on my ankle tightened. A chill ran up my arms as his hesitant tremolo blasted into full harmonic command. Soothing and hypnotic. To the bone. Ray blinked rapidly and shuddered before guiding the needle in. His hand dipped, then rose for the next stitch.

I closed my eyes. I reached out to steady myself. My hand landed on Adam’s head, and the resonance changed instantly as if some circuit completed.

His voice filled my skin. My arm and ribs vibrated. It pulsed down into my hips and feet.

I do not know how long Adam’s voice rang through me—through the mare and the stable. Slowly, evenly, he drew down to shallow waves. I opened my eyes. Jericho lay softly beside us, breathing regularly, her eyes closed.

Ray’s hands shook slightly as he smoothed the last bandage on. “I couldn’t completely close her up, but it will granulate in,” he whispered, his words slow and thick. His eyes glistened. “There was ligament damage on her chest that will affect her right leg. But it’s the best I can do.” His dazed face slack, he rubbed his arms as if they were cold, and stared at Adam, who still leaned over Jericho’s neck.

An expanse of white bandage covered her chest, her withers, and her upper foreleg. A small bandage glowed on her cheek.

Adam took a deep breath and released my ankle. I dropped to my knees beside him. I must have looked like I was praying.

Manny stepped forward to pull a blanket over the mare and help Ray collect his tools. Then I heard one of them pour coffee. A spoon clinked on a cup. Footsteps. Then Manny’s hands appeared in front of me, holding half a sandwich and a cup of coffee.

A small dread bloomed in my chest. I steeled myself against that familiar pang of anger and shame, against what I’d seen in the faces of Clarion.

Manny set the sandwich and coffee down on the floor in front of me.

I looked up.

He regarded me only with somber concern and a brief nod. “Eat,” he said.

I picked up the sandwich and pushed myself up off the floor.

Adam didn’t move.

The men turned their gaze expectantly from Adam’s back to me. I saw with a start of relief: their dazed faces were respectful, almost reverent. No judgment, no fear. “Please help yourselves to the food.”

Adam sat, slumped, one hand still resting on Jericho. I held the sandwich out to him.

“I’m okay.” He waved it away.

I followed Ray out of the stall. “Let’s let them rest,” I said and pushed the stall door shut behind us.

The three of us ate quietly, standing up. I was grateful for their silence as the whiskey flask passed from hand to hand.

After we finished the food, Ray squatted beside Adam and, including me with a glance, gave us instructions for Jericho’s care and the dates and times he’d be returning to check up on her. He spoke quietly and to the point, his hand resting on Adam’s shoulder.

Adam, bleary-eyed, simply nodded; then, when Ray was done, asked me if I was okay. “Good,” he muttered when I told him I was fine. Then he returned his attention to Jericho.

I walked Ray outside. I was suddenly reluctant to have him leave and felt I owed him something. He paused at the door of his truck and turned to me as if to speak. But he said nothing, simply opened the door and got into his truck.

I touched his arm propped in the window. “Thank you” was all I could manage.

“I don’t know what to say. I’m glad to have—” He blinked away tears, then sighed.

“You don’t have to say anything, Ray.”

He nodded and drove away.

I returned to the stable to find Manny standing outside the stall as if guarding Jericho and Adam. He startled briefly, then waved his hand indicating the whole stable. “Is so quiet now.”

It was unusually quiet in the stable. I heard only the gentle swish of a horse’s tail, then, from one of the far stalls, the faint rhythm of chewing. Adam slept beside the mare.

“They’ll be okay. You can go now. Go on home. It’s been a long day.”

He studied Adam’s back for a moment. “Gracias,” he whispered with a nod. As he walked to his truck, I saw him cross himself.

My chest still hummed and my ankle felt hot. I went outside and took my first deep breath since Adam had touched me. Overhead, the sky was brilliantly clear, the horizon low and softened by the distant tree line. Florida lay gentle and flat in all directions. Miles away, the sea kept rhythm. Under my feet were the tributaries of springs. This land was different. The men in the stable were not a bunch of stoned hippies, not a congregation in pain. They’d heard a soothing, powerful command, not the rage of loss.

I returned to the house for a sleeping bag and pillows to make him a pallet. Adam slept the rest of the afternoon by Jericho’s side. All day, I could feel the imprint of his hand on my ankle.

Breath, Adam’s and the horses’, purled through the stable when I visited late that night. He lay beautiful in his sleep, his face placid and firm, one hand on the mare’s shoulder. She slept on her opposite side. He must have awakened and gotten her to stand and turn, a good sign. The bandage on her chest was bloody at the center, but the edges were white.

The next day, Manny stopped me on the back porch. He spent his days in the stables and rarely came up to the house. His normal serious, calm demeanor was unchanged. Still, I braced myself.

But there was only kindness and curiosity on his face. “What happened in the stable?” A quiet, almost formal man, he seldom asked me direct questions.

“I don’t know. I really don’t know how he does it or what it is. He doesn’t know either. But it works on the horses.”

“Yes, it works.” Manny nodded. “It is his talent.”

“Thank you, Manny. I appreciate you seeing it that way.”

He returned my smile, puzzled as if wondering what other way he might see it, but said nothing more before returning to the stable.

I went inside and wept with gratitude.

Initially, Jericho made swift progress, but on the third day she burned with a fever. It took days for the new antibiotic to kick in. Adam stayed with her around the clock, sleeping in the stable. Ray was not optimistic about her chances of a full recovery from the damage to her ligaments. Her owner wanted to put her down, but Adam insisted that she could recuperate. He bought her from the owner to ensure that she had a chance.

At Ray’s instruction, he cleaned and dressed the wounds three times a day for the first few weeks, then twice daily for months, and finally only once a day. Adam eventually coaxed the mare into a confident, nearly normal gait, but the stallion, still boarding with us even after the attack, became progressively more aggressive, kicking when anyone walked through the stable, often striking and rearing when Adam approached him. Manny, a very capable, calm groom, refused to handle him.

“I don’t understand it,” Adam complained repeatedly. “One moment, he’s a normal horse. The next, it’s like there’s no horse in there, just rage and fear. Nothing I do reaches him then. Something’s not right. I don’t know what to do. This has never happened before. I don’t know how to fix this.” He rubbed his face as if to wake himself.

One afternoon, I heard the stallion’s angry neighs and kicks repeatedly interrupt the soothing ring of Adam’s voice. That evening, when I took Adam’s supper out to him in the stable office, I found him drowsing at his desk. He looked tired, unfocused.

“I feel like a snake ready to shed,” he muttered, ignoring the plate I set on his desk. “Things seem veiled, as if there’s a caul over my head.” He waved his hand in front of his eyes.

I rubbed his arm and felt the firm muscle and his smooth skin. Our trip to Kentucky had taken something out of both of us. A dull, helpless dread nagged me. I could feel it in my bones, and was uncertain if it was a fordable obstacle or the foreshadowing of my body’s eventual surrender. In Adam, I sensed resistance, his energies deferred. He’d been willing to become old for me. Instead, he would, in the youthful skin of Roy Hope, escort me into my old age. He would watch my vigor and remaining beauty slip away. Then I would leave him here to grow old at his own unique rate. The bitter bile of sorrow threatened. I pressed it down, pushed it away, and turned my attention to the comforts I could offer him now. “You need more sleep. Come to bed. I’ll give you a back rub.”

As we settled into bed that evening, he said, “There’s a waterfall in the mountains that I always go to. Near the top of the falls there is a place you can walk behind the water. The ledge is deep, the water falls clear as glass. One night, I saw the full moon through it. And if you stick your head through the curtain of water on a clear day, you can see for miles.”

“Yes?” I whispered.

“I think of that place when I’m tired or discouraged. The water never stops. No matter what happens to any of us, to anyone, anywhere, water keeps coming off the mountain. It moves. It was. Is. Will be.”

I reached back and rubbed his thigh. “Go. As soon as you can, go.”

A few days later, the stallion’s owner, unhappy with Adam’s lack of progress, arranged to move the horse to another stable—another first for Adam. When the new stable came to pick up the stallion, the horse was having one of his better days, his neck and back supple. Adam pressed his face against the horse’s shoulder before leading him out of our stable. At the trailer ramp, he stepped back and held his arms open as he released the horse. I remembered him standing in the rain so many years ago, his arms open to Darling the day Cole broke his leg.

The winter sun bounced off the side of the trailer as it turned onto the highway. The earth seemed to exhale mist as the day warmed and the brown-tipped grass of the pastures returned the morning’s rain to its source.

Adam radiated thwarted energy.

Later that day, I found him in the hall, standing next to the phone. He stared into space and rubbed his chest. “The waterfall that I told you about. It has stopped,” he said. “I called the ranger station there. It’s frozen. How could I not have thought of that?”

In bed that night, I switched off the light and I pulled him toward me. Wordlessly, as we had countless times, we touched. His hands were certain, his voice strong. But I woke in the middle of the night to find him naked, silhouetted at the bedroom window looking toward the stables.

“You loved the springs when we first got here. What was it you once told me about them? Millions of gallons a day, every day. Endless. You don’t have to wait for your waterfall to thaw. Go to the springs. Think of it as the reverse of the mountain. It’s moving water. You just go down instead of up.”

“Being underwater feels very different. But you’re right. I’ll go. Tomorrow.” He nodded and continued watching the stables.

Soon, I felt his warm, bruised energy spooning up behind me.

In the morning, Adam packed his scuba-diving gear in the back of the truck. Devil’s Springs had been developed as a private park by then, but they still allowed diving in the caves. He hadn’t dived that cave in years.

We kissed, a slow, soft kiss, then he was off. I noticed again how he smelled different lately, more tart. I waved good-bye, happy to think of him in the spring where we had taken our one cave dive together. Dust rose behind his truck as he waved and passed Manny’s little red dented car on the driveway.

Usually, he was gone four or five hours when he went diving. But he still was not back when the little girl with the leg brace came for her riding lesson in the afternoon.

The girl and her mother sat in the stable office waiting for Adam. I took some iced tea out to them.

“When do you expect him back?” the mother asked, wiping the arm of her chair. An impatient beauty, she seemed to think the world owed her something to compensate for the crippled daughter fate had given her.

“He should have been back by now,” I said.

She gave me a look that said she knew that kind of husband. I didn’t want to wait there with her. Usually, Adam called if he was running late. I assumed a flat tire, a last-minute errand.

After a few minutes, I heard the soft hiss of her car tires as she drove away.

Still Adam did not come home. In the slant of late-afternoon light, Manny closed the stables for the evening.

As I prepared our dinner, I imagined Adam stopping at the tack shop. I set the table. Spaghetti, the sauce made with my own canned tomatoes. A salad with the first lettuce of winter. I would give him until nine o’clock, I told myself, then I would eat.

My dinner tasted like cardboard. After a few bites, I put it in the refrigerator. I left his plate on the table, a fork and spoon beside it.

Midnight was too late for a stray errand or a broken fan belt. I tried to think who Adam might have stopped to visit. Sometimes, Ray came by for a beer at the end of the week. Adam played poker with Randy Warren and some Ocala horse ranchers every few weeks. A tattered list of typed names hung on the bulletin board next to the kitchen phone—people he played music with. I recognized most of the names. Adam had penciled in a few new names. One had been crossed out.

The flutter of anxiety in my chest became a stone. All night, I waited. First, I watched TV, then I turned the TV off and resorted to the silence of reading, so I would be certain to hear him arrive.

At the first blush of light in the windows, I put his unused dishes away and made a pot of coffee. I poured two cups and went out to the stables. My hand shook slightly as I set Adam’s steaming cup of coffee on his desk. I shivered in the dawn cold and drew my robe closer.

The horses eyed me politely, sniffing. Stretching their necks over the stall railing, they poked their velvet noses into my pockets, searching for treats.

I went into Jericho’s stall and pressed my palms to her flanks to receive her warmth. The bite scar blazed pale on her shoulder. For a moment, it seemed that Adam must be there in the stable, his footsteps lost in the contented sounds of the waking horses.

The rattle of Manny’s approaching car outside signaled the beginning of the workday.

Adam would have been home by now if he’d spent the night with a woman. The police would have called if there had been an accident. I went back into the house. I surveyed each room, the front yard, and then backyard, with the irrational hope that I had somehow overlooked Adam. The faint slope of the land I had come to love, the familiar geometry of the white rail fencing, the pasture dotted with scattered shade oaks, and the far green horizon of forest, all seemed to wait with a complacency that comforted and unnerved me.

Three times I picked up the phone, then returned it to its cradle.

When I finally dialed the springs, a man with a nasal voice told me he didn’t have time to mess with the whereabouts of a husband who had failed to come home. They had camping sites now. Plenty of people parked there overnight.

“My husband isn’t camping. He went there to scuba-dive in your caves. You need to find out if he’s there.” That got his attention. I gave him a description of Adam’s truck.

Minutes later, he called me back. “I found his truck. The hood’s cold. Hasn’t been driven anywhere this morning. No ma’am. No sign of him. He went diving by himself? We always tell people to take a partner.”

I sped to the springs, cursing the morning traffic. I bumped along the dirt road leading to the new Devil’s Springs Park, catching a glimpse of tents in the woods, sleepy campers emerging from them.

Adam’s truck was the only one in the parking lot near the southern spring mouth. His clothes lay draped across the passenger seat over a folded towel. I unlocked the passenger door and flipped the glove compartment open. His wallet fell out. I scooped it up, quickly scanning it. I searched the corner of the truck bed behind the driver’s seat. The keys were there, where he usually put them, hidden under his spare tank and a short coil of nylon rope. Adam was the only thing missing.

I marched to the new stone building nearby, wielding his driver’s license as if all I had to do was offer proof of his identity and he would appear. I passed a rack of postcards, and a stack of inner tubes for rental, then slapped the license on the glass-top counter next to the cash register. “This is my husband. Have you seen him here this morning?”

Immediately, the young man at the counter looked up from his book. “I’ll get my boss.”

He returned quickly, a round, middle-aged man smelling of cigars followed.

The older fellow took one quick look at me, frowned at the license in his hand. “A diver,” he muttered as if it were a mild curse, then added, “I’ve met him. Nice guy.” He turned to the kid. “Call for a search.”

I nodded.

Then time seemed to stop. Or rather I stopped. Someone guided me outside to a covered picnic pavilion. All around me young men began to bustle in various stages of diving preparations. Masks, tanks, bare chests. The squeak of the rubbery wet suits. Ropes, flippers, and lamps piled on the ground.

Two men in full gear strode off toward the spring. One stepped off the limestone lip of the spring and dropped into the water. Then I looked away.

Twice the older fellow approached me and asked if I would like to call anyone. Each time I shook my head. I sat on the picnic bench, staring down at the rough surface of the table. The day began to warm. Curious campers and other divers appeared drawn by the commotion.

For a long time, I sat at the picnic table. If I remained there, everything else would remain as it was. Then I realized I faced the woods where Adam and I had once made love after he took me for my first and only cave dive. Suddenly, it seemed necessary to find the exact spot where we had lain. I walked into the woods along the river bank. There was a trail now where there had been only underbrush. A soda can. A kid’s flip-flop. Just ahead was a familiar juxtaposition of cypress knees. I looked back to get my bearings and gauge how far I was from Adam’s truck now as I tried to remember where we’d parked that day. A small crowd had gathered by the spring.

I returned my attention to the ground around me, certain I could find the place. Like me, Adam could have wandered off to find this spot. I listened, sure for a moment I would hear his beautiful, sweet voice. In the hush of the woods, a single birdcall erupted, then a shout pierced the quiet. “They’ve found something!”

“Something” turned out to be a literal dead-end. A newly sealed chamber deep in the cave. A collapse.

When they brought me over to the bank, I looked down at the two young divers treading water above the sky-blue hole and told them, “He’s not there. He must have taken a walk.” I shook my head. They stared back at me blankly. “He liked to take walks in the woods, to . . .”

I do not recall completing my sentence. I do not recall who drove me home.

The girls began to arrive, first Sarah from her apartment in town, then Rosie, who drove from Tallahassee. The next day, Gracie and Lil flew in from DC with Baby Adam in tow. The four of them filled the house with anxious energy. Their questions ricocheting around me: When did Daddy leave? How long has he been gone? What did they find at the springs?

All, save the baby, had the same stunned look on their faces that flared back and forth from puzzled urgency to vacant surprise. I couldn’t help but think of the day Jennie died.

I kept telling them everything would be okay. “He must have gotten confused and wandered off somewhere. He probably never even went into the springs.” Each time I said that, I thought about his recent restlessness, and the possibility seemed more likely.

Within hours of Lil and Gracie arriving, they piled into the car, headed for the springs, their faces filled with hope and purpose.

I didn’t want to see that gaping mouth of blue again. I stayed behind with Baby Adam. His babbling filled my afternoon. His manic, toddling dashes toward every open cabinet door and every coffee-table corner required constant vigilance.

At sunset, the girls returned—Sarah, Lil, and Gracie in the car, Rosie close behind at the wheel of Adam’s truck. Before they got out, I saw that they had news, but it was not good news.

We gathered around the empty truck. Crossing her arms over her chest, Rosie stared at the ground and blinked away tears. “The collapsed vein is in one of the deepest parts of the caves, one that doesn’t get many divers. An offshoot. They loaned me a tank and gear so I could go down and see for myself. They’ve already put up a grate to block it off. It’s not safe to get close. They gave me a good, strong light, but all I could see was a jumble of limestone far away. They’ve even filtered the nearby silt for evidence . . . Some sign that he was . . .” Her voice cracked, then she added, “Nothing. I’m sorry, Momma.” She covered her mouth.

Gracie bounced Baby Adam on her hip and searched my face for a reaction. “The ground over that branch of the cave has sunk quite a bit. The building where they rent the tubes is very close by. They’re afraid that if they try any kind of excavation, the building will collapse onto . . . It would be too dangerous . . .” Her voice trailed off as she leaned against me and put her arm around my waist. Little Adam patted my chest and drooled on my shoulder.

Sarah took my hand and looked around at her sisters for confirmation. “Momma, there was no sign of him on the banks. No sign in the woods. They’ve looked. We combed the woods again. They’ve extended the search to include more of the river. Just in case. They’ll call if they find anything.”

Lil bit her lips and, without a word, went inside.

A wave of books, papers, notebooks, and textbooks arrived with the girls, covering every surface. Even Lil, the only one not officially a student, was researching to find the best graduate programs. Guitars and fiddles migrated room to room. Picks, capos, and baby rattles littered the kitchen counter. The girls’ distinctive chlorophyll odor of new-mown grass was overlaid with the scents of patchouli and baby powder.

Visibly, each of them was a variation on Addie and myself as young women. Gracie was now broader in the hips. Rosie had sheared her auburn mane to short spikes. Lil, who resembled us the most, had grown pale since she’d joined Gracie in DC. Sarah, her lithe frame topped by a mass of curls, looked younger than her twenty years.

Little blond Adam dashed up and down the hall, fiddle bow or yellow highlighter marker in hand, chased by one aunt or another. Hearing his name over and over—in the girls’ casual references to feeding or bedtime ritual and their attempts to soothe his fussiness—was strangely disorienting. The name “Adam” leapt out of their sentences. It was particularly jolting when Gracie, who wanted to raise her son bilingually, spoke to him, embedding those beloved syllables in Dutch.

Outwardly, everything appeared to be a normal family gathering. Lil resorted to her standard distractions—housekeeping and cooking. Rosie directed all her attention to helping Manny in the stables. Gracie and I took turns fussing with the baby while Sarah sketched us all. Adam might have been in the next room.

But the girls were fragile with anxiety, their bodies taut and somehow quieter, concentrated as if they, too, were listening for their father’s footsteps on the back porch. We all jumped in unison each time the phone rang. Sarah abandoned her little apartment “for the duration” and commuted to campus. Her latest paintings, wide, abstract swatches of reds and blues, leaned on the hall table. I thought of blood and water every time I saw one.

Those first days passed in a grainy, surreal numbness, punctuated by flashes of helplessness that left me exhausted. The thin hope I’d seen on the girls’ faces soon devolved into sadness or denial. Everything seemed to hinge on small details that might have been, but ultimately were not, revelations—an abandoned snorkel on the other side of the spring, some broken branches in the woods. Continuously, the girls circled the same questions. How could this happen? Why had he gone diving? Why would he go without a guide line?

I knew why he had gone to the springs: he went because I had sent him. Go down into the water, I’d told him. Go find your solace in Florida. But the lack of a guide line made no sense. Therefore, I reasoned, he wasn’t in the cave. He’d walked off into the woods as he had on our way home from Kentucky. He’d gone off to find release, to unleash his voice. The locals might already be telling stories of a strange new haint near the springs. Or he’d met some older man in the woods and was undergoing a new metamorphosis. He’d be back. I remained optimistic.

To distract ourselves, we turned to music. Only in those moments when they played—Gracie and Rosie on guitars, Lil on the fiddle, or when the five of us sang—did their faces relax. Though I strained to hear Adam’s tenor in the braid of their harmony, I heard only their voices and the chair next to me remained empty.

Their friends began to visit, wandering in at odd hours to offer condolences in low, serious conversations that paused if I walked into the room. If I woke in the middle of the night, the soft mutterings of grief and comfort drifted down the hall. In the mornings, when I sat at the kitchen table nursing my first cup of coffee and surrendering to my insomnia, the house seemed to buzz with their loss.

But I sensed that my placid demeanor frustrated and puzzled the girls. I’d noticed a disconcerted ripple move through them as I continued to refer to their father in the present tense. Once, Gracie moved Adam’s coffee mug from the end table in the corner of the living room where he’d left it the morning he disappeared. When I moved it back immediately and found a new spot for her beer, I caught her glance of surprise. I also saw a spark of pity and resistance.

Early on the morning of the fifth day, I got a call that the search was officially called off. When I gathered the girls in the dining room, and I told them, a wordless, leaden grief enveloped the breakfast table. Rosie pushed her coffee cup away, then left to help Manny in the stables. The rest of us sat as if waiting to be released.

Moments later, we all startled when the door opened and Rosie walked back in. She came and stood beside my chair. “Mom, you’ve been saying he can’t be in the cave because no guide line was ever found and he always used one. This is the line we used the last time we went diving. I found it on the top of the office file cabinet.” Carefully, she laid a neatly tied bundle of white nylon rope in the middle of the table.

I recognized Adam’s method of looping and knotting ropes. A strand of blue ran through the supple cord. A clip dangled heavily from each end.

“He never kept his diving gear in the stable. Never. He must have stopped to check some file before he left for the spring. Then he forgot and left the line.” Rosie’s chin quivered. “He went in anyway.”

Lil stroked the rope tenderly. “He once told me he knew that spring like the back of his hand. He’d explored every ‘vein and artery.’ ”

Sarah rubbed her chest and whispered, “He believed he’d be able to find his way out, by touch or by listening, if anything went wrong.”

I shivered. They were eulogizing.

“What do you know about what he might have done?” I snapped. In the sliver of silence that followed, I picked up the rope and moved it to the kitchen counter behind me, out of sight.

“Momma,” Rosie cried, “Daddy’s not lost in the woods!”

Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw Sarah’s quick shake of her head and her warning glance at Rosie.

I took Rosie’s hand, and the gesture seemed to calm her. She drew closer and stood next to my chair with her arm around my shoulder. But I could not bring myself to agree with them.

Gracie wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Shit. Shit. I miss him.”

Baby Adam beat the table with his tiny fists. “Shit! Shit!” he chirped. Then he stopped, his hands in the air, and stared, his happy gaze taking in their stricken faces. “Shit?” His grin broke into a wail of alarm, and they all burst into sobs.

Lil laid her head on the table. “I can’t believe he’s gone.” Her arms muffled her voice.

I smoothed her hair over her head, feeling her heat and youth. I longed to reassure them, to offer some hope. I wanted company in my optimism. I yearned to have them understand everything about their father—who he was, how he came to me, and how he might once again return to me—to us. But the story seemed so large then, impossible for one person to unfurl. I’d always imagined the two of us telling them. I could not bring myself to speak of him in the past tense. Such a recitation, however much I owed it to them, seemed delicate, precarious, even dangerous without him there. My heart veered.

While my daughters wept around me, I literally choked on my words. My energies drained out of me. I was helpless against the momentum of their story and their assumption that he was there in the springs, entombed.

I had no intention of becoming my mother. I didn’t want to keep them from the truth about their father for decades. But I also had no idea how rare such opportunities to confide in them would become, how infrequently all four of my daughters would be able to visit at the same time as they spread out across their various careers and, later, the globe. Rarer still would be times the five of us would have without husbands, boyfriends, or children.

The next day, they wanted to return to the springs. They spent the morning efficiently and solemnly preparing for what I realized was an informal, impromptu funeral. Pauline and some of their friends would be joining them. They insisted I come, too. But I was equally insistent on staying home, again, with the baby.

That evening, the table was crowded with Adam’s favorite dishes: gumbo, collards, corn bread, Key Lime pie, and my canned peaches.

“We need to do something more. Something official. Daddy had lots of friends,” they began to say. I understood their need, but each time, I shook my head. “Not yet.” A hopeful denial hardened in me. I was quiet any time they discussed their father.

A restlessness trailed their sorrow. They were young. They had the distractions and the promise of new life to contend with.

Lil’s boyfriend, Alphonso, had been calling every evening, missing her and hoping to be invited to join us. Sarah confided that Gracie was in danger of losing her first Foreign Service assignment if she missed much more of her intensive Spanish studies. Rosie took the phone out onto the porch when she pleaded with her professors for extensions on her lab assignments.

“There’s nothing more you girls can do,” I told them one night at supper. “I’ll be okay. You can come back when you need to. If there is news.” Their exchange of glances told me that they were certain there would be no more news. They regarded me with varying degrees of indulgence and concern.

“You sure, Momma?” Gracie asked.

“Yes, I have to be alone eventually.” I looked away from their upturned faces and imagined Adam walking up to our door in new form, ready to once again be my husband.

After the girls left, stripping our home of their books, clothes, and guitars, Adam’s things emerged as the land does out of a melting snow. His handkerchief, still wadded on the little shelf by the back door, where he always dropped his keys on the way in. His copy of Bartram’s Travels on the coffee table. His bedroom slippers by the recliner.

I was in limbo. My husband was gone and I was alone, but I did not consider myself a widow. I kept everything as it was before he disappeared. All his clothes hung in the closet. His razor and shaving cream sat beside the sink. Like me, they seemed to be waiting for what would come next.

Two images haunted me: Adam’s back as he disappeared into the woods on our way home from finding Roy Hope’s grave, and the look of wonder on his face when he was underwater with me and his voice shimmered between us just before the rain of silt sent us scurrying out of the cave. Parallel, twin questions always followed. Why had I sent him to the springs, down into the earth? When and how would he return to me? Over and over, I relived the morning he disappeared, tracing it back through the days and weeks and months before. I combed through every gesture, every word, for significance.

Without acknowledging to myself any contradiction, I vacillated between the conviction that he was in the earth, deep in a watery grave, and my certainty that he walked the earth, seeking a viable path back to me as an old man, as he once wanted to. He would return to me once again and he would be similar to me. Not in the obvious ways Addie had been, but like me in that one, crucial way. He would be enough like me to, once again, be with me. And that single similarity would allow him to return to me all that I craved of him—his wondrous, inexplicable strangeness.

A few days after the girls left, I got a call from the stallion’s owner. The crazy horse had started having seizures and they’d put him down. An autopsy had revealed a brain tumor the size of a ping-pong ball. The banker complained about the cost of the autopsy but wanted to let me know that the problem had been the horse, not my husband. I thanked him for letting me know. Adam would have cherished the comfort of knowing it was not his failure.

Our business phone calls soon fell down to a couple per week. But I did not disconnect the phone in the stable office. Its occasional eruptions, evidence that someone else also expected Adam to be there, soothed me.

The horses comforted me, too. One cool night, I took off my shirt and put on the flannel shirt Adam had left draped over the footboard of our bed. The shirt was well-worn and soft against my bare skin. I smelled his sweat on his hatband as I slipped his hat on my head. Then I turned the horses out under a full moon. Curious, they gathered around me. One by one, they sniffed under Adam’s hat, questioning. Their breath steamed my face. I closed my eyes. Their warm flanks slid by me, under my outstretched hands. I cried then. Not for Adam, not for my loss. But for the horses’ wordless generosity.

Over the days that followed, their owners moved them to other stables. From the kitchen or the back porch, I watched while Manny led those fine, proud animals into trailers that took them away. I studied their gleaming coats and smooth gaits, the angle and tension of their ears and tails, and I asked myself: What kind of horse is this? What kind of man is my husband? Where is my husband?

Would he appear at my door as he had when he returned as Adam? Would I hear his voice again, feel his touch?

At night, I tossed in my bed, craving him, wanting to enter the room of his body and feel his hands on my face. To taste his mouth and press my chest against his. There were no buffers between the need, the absence, and myself. When I wept, I wept for need, not grief.

If I kept everything ready for him, Adam would return. Years before, my readiness, my ripeness and solitude as a young woman had called him out of the Carolina clay. Surely, my loneliness could now do the same. I waited and waited and waited. I, along with all his clothes, and his horses, and his tools, waited.

The pasture greened up in the first rains of spring, but otherwise, everything remained the same. Weeks, then months crept by.

The girls and Pauline visited as often as they were able, and the emptiness of the house always seemed fresher, stronger, in the wake of their departures. I deflected their requests for a memorial. Some days, I did not answer the phone.

I kept up the house and the garden. The tomatoes came in by the bushel. White acre peas, cucumbers, and corn followed. I made Adam’s favorite relish, an old recipe of Momma’s. I lined the jars up on the pantry shelf. Gleaming, ready.

By midsummer, the tension of waiting for his arrival had stripped away my passivity. Methodically, I pulled out all of Adam’s Florida maps. I worked my way through his bookshelves, reading his books on Florida history, geography, flora, and fauna. I studied his notes in the margins, then visited all the circled destinations on his maps. What I initially told myself would be a tribute to Adam quickly turned into a desperate search. I began to see older men who looked like him everywhere.

His individual physical features that I had savored for so long now seemed common. I raced down a crowded Cedar Key pier to touch the arm of a gray-haired man whose wide back reminded me of Adam’s. At the farmer’s market, my heart startled and I gawked at a man who laughed like Adam. I drove across the parking lot of a state park to pull up beside an old man who walked like Adam. Each time left me with a dissonant sense of failure, as if my mistaken leaps of recognition were somehow dispersing the very qualities I sought.

Still, I scrutinized every stranger who paid me the slightest attention or kindness. Everywhere I went, I watched and waited, on alert. I was looking for a single straw in a haystack.

Listening for his return seemed to be the only thing that held my muscles to my bones, that kept the supper dishes from sliding off the table, and brought the sun up in the morning. My clothes hung loosely on me. I dug through boxes and closets to pull out smaller clothes the girls had left behind.

I struggled to hold myself open, to remain vigilant for his return to me.

One day, I went to a local nursery for some flowers to plant by the back door. I reached over the flats of four-inch pots, searching for the most robust among the dark orange marigolds, Adam’s favorite shade. From behind me a man’s voice asked, “Can these take full sun?”

I turned.

He was exactly my height. He appeared to be in his sixties, gray hair, warm hazel eyes, and a thick white mustache. He laughed at my surprise and repeated his question, his broad hand grazing the flower tops. He absently scratched his breastbone and told me how much he liked the color I’d chosen.

As we strolled by the vine section on our way to the checkout counter, he cupped a passion vine blossom and asked, “What kind of flower is this?”

His words whipped through me. Our question game! I searched his face, his pale, intelligent eyes for signs of recognition. All my nerves were poised, ready for Addie’s beaming smile or Adam’s deep laugh. I touched his arm, squeezing to stop my hand’s trembling.

As I opened my mouth to say Adam’s name, the man glanced over his shoulder awkwardly and shifted the potted flower he held so that his arm slipped from my touch. “Excuse me, I need to help my mother.”

“You have a mother?”

“Um, yes. She’s waiting for me over there. Thank you.” He nodded toward the cash register and left to join a thin, ancient woman in the checkout line. They had the same forehead, the same square chin.

Suddenly, I realized how I looked to them—a gawking, haggard woman.

I wandered around the back of the nursery near the potted fruit trees until the man and his mother drove away. I left without buying any flowers.

Shame tightened like a crust on my skin.

I gripped the steering wheel at the first light. The world slipped, angling off away from me. The light was green. The driver behind me honked. I went on to the next red light. Stopping at the intersection, I made myself take deep breaths. I looked around at the people. Boys with their loud stereo in the next car. A young woman pushed a stroller across the street. In the noon light, everyone seemed outlined, purposeful, and new. The world overflowed with people. All of them were going to or from the people or places they loved. Just as A. had come to me. I remembered lifting my Aunt Eva’s quilt to see his strange face for the first time, before he was Addie, before he was anyone.

Something broke in me. I could feel it, the precise moment of surrender, like a bone snapping. A sudden, terrible miracle. Any one of them could be Adam. Old, young, male, female, black, white.

He was gone. Not forever, not from everything. But from my life. All my questions about him would remain unanswered. Forever.

The car behind me honked. I drove on. I wept, for the first time as a widow.

The next day, I pulled out an old WWI army-issue metal box that one of my uncles had given me when I was a girl. Inside, I placed a lock of A.’s hair, a perfect, glossy, brown C-curve from the seventies, when he let it grow a little longer. Five other locks of differing shades of auburn and red hair nestled in the box. I added copies of my favorite photos of Adam: a snapshot Momma had taken of the seven of us, the girls in their Easter dresses squinted at the spring sun; a black-and-white of Momma and Adam at our wedding, their shoulders touching as they leaned toward each other, smiling; the photo of me and Addie that Momma gave me the day she told me about my father; a shot Sarah took of Adam on horseback, crouched forward gracefully over the horse’s withers, mid-jump; and, last, the photo of the burned Japanese woman Frank had left at the farm years before. On top of them, I placed Adam’s copy of Song of Myself that the girls had given him a few years before. The last thing to go in the box: a jar of Florida’s sandy soil.

Then I drove north, straight to the farm.

Bud, Wanda, and their kids weren’t home. A privacy hedge now separated the yard from the field, but the decayed stump of the apple tree was still there and I could easily locate the spot where I’d found A. I sank down onto my knees. I kissed the earth that had given him to me and tasted the clay grit on my lips, bringing him into my body one last time.

He was gone.

I dug, and the opened earth exhaled a feral musk. I wrapped the box in plastic, then in an old oilcloth. A gentle rain began to fall as I shoveled, burying the box.

The land, level and empty, seemed to stretch out endlessly in the twilight. Gradually, I realized that the pale lumps in the distance were earth-moving machinery. Then I remembered hearing that the fields had been resold and were being cleared for a new mall. The oaks still buffered the land where it dropped down to the railroad tracks. The Starneses’ land was split; the half near the highway was now a subdivision. Cole and his brothers had held on to the house and southern pasture. I took a perverse pleasure in thinking of all those future shoppers coming and going for years near the spot where A. had last come into this world, ignorant as we are in Florida of the rivers that vein the land below us. I imagined Adam watching. The sky seemed to hang directly above me, low and mobile.

The rain began to fall in earnest as I dropped the final handful of red clay.

Car wheels whispered on the driveway behind me. I heard Bud and Wanda get out of their car. I walked around the hedge to greet them.

“Good Lord, Evelyn!” Wanda gasped. She and Bud hurried me out of the rain toward the house.

On the porch, I stared back at them stupidly, then realized how I looked, shovel in hand and dirt on my mouth. My clothes rumpled from the long drive and now muddy, my hair wet.

For the first time in months, I laughed out loud.

Everything in the recently remodeled kitchen shone new and modern. In the brightly tiled bathroom, I washed my hands and face. The iron-red clay swirled away from my dirty hands in the white porcelain sink.

After they fed me a hearty supper, I walked through the stable. The barn had been taken down the year before. Old furniture cluttered one of the far stalls. Dismembered motorcycles, Bud’s hobby, filled the stalls closest to the house. The air smelled of engine oil and dust.

When I pushed open the broad door at the far end of the stable, the air moved behind me. Something fluttered at the corner of my eye, and I turned just in time to see an owl, pale against the darkness of the trees, bank off to the left and disappear into the large oak that had been the base of the twins’ playhouse. I followed him and listened for a long time. In the last of the light, I heard only the traffic of the highway, distant and oceanic.

Something seemed to release in me, not a wild widow’s grief but a sharper, more specific need. All the things I’d never said about A., all my silent months since he’d been gone, everything I might have said at a funeral, beat inside me. I wanted to speak. I lusted for the truth. I wanted to, as Adam had always urged his riders, “true myself.”

I went inside to call Cole, the first person I had lied to.

We hadn’t seen each other in years, but he readily agreed to meet me the next day at the little pizzeria that had replaced Bun’s Café.

I arrived early and kept my eyes on the door. I let myself relish how right it felt to be telling Cole. Like me, he had known both of them. Many times he had sat across the supper table from Addie and then Adam. Now, finally, he would know who they were. He would also understand why I had left him so many years ago.

When I’d finished telling him, I would go straight back to Florida, round up my girls, and tell them. They would understand, I knew, and that rift I’d felt between us since their father went into the cave would be healed.

I felt light-headed, filled with a giddy anticipation. What I wanted to tell Cole felt enormous, but like a great weight poised on the summit of a hill, I had only to give it a gentle push and everything I knew about Adam would roll away from me, no longer mine alone. I squirmed restlessly on the bench seat while I waited. Was this how Adam had felt on the way to his mountain trips, the release of his feral howl waiting in his chest?

As Cole climbed out of his truck and strolled to the restaurant, the slight limp from the bad break so many years ago was barely noticeable. The lines around his mouth and across his forehead had deepened, but something of the boy remained in his smile. His brown hair had thinned. His sixty-plus years of life showed. In his thirties, he’d quit horse-breeding and gone to the mill. One of his sons had died of a drug overdose, and his wife, Eloise, of cancer.

While we ate our pizza, I told him what had happened to Adam, knowing he’d surely already heard. He told me about his wife and son as if I might not have heard. Then he spotted the bouquet of flowers I’d brought lying on the seat next to me. I held the bundled blossoms up for his inspection. “They’re for Jennie and Momma. Come with me to visit their graves. Please?” For a second, I was afraid he might refuse and I would have to tell him about A. in a crowded restaurant.

He smiled. A good, ordinary man. I wondered, as I had many times before, what my life would have been like with him. He saw how I studied his face; he touched my hand. “Of course, I’d be honored.”

I drove us to the cemetery. Cole chatted about his family’s land and the changes at the mill. The cadences of my birthplace ran through his voice. He stretched out his legs beside me and lapsed into a respectful quiet as we pulled into the graveyard. He waved his assent as I motioned that I would be back in a moment.

At their graves, I steeled myself against the weight of sorrow and all I had not said to them. Thankful that they had both heard Adam’s voice, I hoped they forgave me my silence. “Listen now if you can to my voice and help me find the right words,” I whispered over their graves.

Then I turned my attention to Cole. A relaxed concern filled his face as I returned to the car.

“I have something I need to tell you.” My heart pounded as I began to speak. He patted my hand. I started at the beginning, with Aunt Eva’s death and my move to the farm.

When I spoke of his first visit and our inexperienced sex, he smiled shyly, as he had then. “I imagine we’ve both learned a bit since, over the decades.”

I understood again my original attraction to him. When I mentioned finding Addie, his face brightened with interest. He listened intently to my brief recitation of her transformation, his head tilted to one side, his gaze resting on the tombstones in front of us, an odd quizzical expression on his face. I wondered for a second if he had a hearing problem. Then he said, “Buried, covered in mud in that storm.” His tone was level, a simple summary of what I’d said.

I nodded, encouraged, then stumbled on, uncertain that I could explain the depths of her change. He said nothing, but sat very still, listening, and did not interrupt.

He gave me a wry, sideways smile when I mentioned his broken leg. He adjusted his feet under the dashboard. “I still regret that.”

What could he have to regret, I wondered.

“That horse in that storm. I still feel it every winter.” He rubbed his leg. “But that’s nothing compared to what poor Addie must have been through before you found her.”

I couldn’t read his head shake—indulgence or dismissal? The inside of the car seemed too dark, too close. I wished we were outside in the full light, where I could see his face better.

I took a deep breath and plunged on. “She’s the reason I couldn’t be with you. She and I were very close . . . we were . . .” I tripped before the word “lovers.”

“Well, that does explain things.” For the first time since I’d mentioned Addie, he looked directly at me. “I’m not that surprised. But that was a long time ago. You went on to have a good marriage and all those pretty girls. You did fine. Me, too.”

“Cole, Addie wasn’t like us. She had an unusual voice. That’s why she was so good with the horses.”

He pointed his finger in agreement. “You’re right about that, she did have an amazing way with them. And a good singing voice, too.”

“No. No, I’m not talking about her singing voice.” Despite my prayer, I had no words to explain. “She had another way of . . . At night, with me . . .” I felt my face redden. “When she—”

He reached out and took one of my hands, lowering it to the console between us. “This is getting interesting—very interesting. But, Evelyn, you don’t owe me any explanations.”

“Cole, I want you to know. You have to know. You have to understand.” I wiped my face, sat up straighter, and began again.

He leaned back in his seat and listened to me through my description of Roy Hope. He nodded when I told him about finding the note from Addie and waiting for her to reappear. “Some people just take off and don’t look back.” He shook his head.

“But she did come back. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

He was still smiling, as I began to explain Addie’s transformation into Adam. His face registered greater surprise. His smile vanished. A muscle flinched in his jaw. “Look, I know Adam did something crazy at Jennie’s funeral. God knows, people talked about that for years. But this is even crazier. You’re trying to tell me they were the same person?”

I floundered and my heart pounded. I realized I’d been unconsciously counting on that one time everyone had heard Adam. He had been exposed then; everyone who’d heard him would know in their bones how extraordinary he was, and would be able to understand everything else about him. But I’d forgotten Cole had left the funeral early.

For one second, I hoped he might still be with me. I began to sweat. “Yes, that’s what I am telling you, Cole.” The timbre of a plea clung to my words.

A grimace flickered across his face, followed by a small, uncomfortable smile.

“Evelyn, honey, I know Addie had a gift with horses, a special way of talking to them that was . . . was . . .” he waved his hands as if trying to scoop the words out of the air. “Unusual. Lord knows it was amazing that Adam had the same gift and showed up when he did. But he came to Clarion because he’d heard of how good she was with the horses. You said so yourself then. He may have replaced her in your heart, but . . .”

He looked down at my hands pressed together as if in prayer and shook his head rapidly. “That doesn’t make Addie and Adam the same person. A woman can’t turn herself into a man.” He wrapped his hands around mine and I felt myself shrivel. “Listen to me, Evelyn. You’re still in shock. You can’t let the grief get to you. I know when Eloise passed, I thought I would go crazy.”

We stared at each other for a long moment.

Shame flooded me. The impotence of not being believed crushed me. I had no recourse. No proof.

He leaned closer, trying to catch my eye. “Evelyn, do your girls know you’re here? Do they know you drove up here by yourself?”

I withdrew my hands from his and drove him back to the pizzeria. Then I returned to Florida, my shoulders and neck aching from hours of driving, stunned by the dual loss, by the final glance of pity on Cole’s face. My throat closed.

He was the only person I ever tried to tell this story to.

By the time I was in Florida, I had decided that, if cowardice once again prevented me from attempting the truth, I could, at least, offer my daughters closure. A memorial for their father required no validation beyond what they already believed.

I called Sarah first. “I want you to make something for me, for your father.” I described the simple fired-clay plaque I wanted.

“Good. I’ve been waiting for you to ask,” she said gently.

Then I had to go swimming. I needed to cleanse myself of the memory of doubt and pity I’d seen in Cole’s eyes. I wanted to wash away my mother’s shame and the weakness and fear that made me like her. In the water, I would be with Adam and I would be like him—no past, free of explanations.

Families and small children filled the park surrounding Devil’s Spring. The smells of grilling meat and sunscreen hung heavy in the air. In the cold water, families shouted and splashed around me. Bright, inflated toys bounced against me as I waded into the shallows. I put on my mask, snorkel, and fins, glad to have children nearby as counterbalance to the blue void below the surface.

I swam past them and circled the mouth of the spring, peering down on the place where he had taken me. The place that had taken him. Bubbles of air escaped from the azure hole and a guide rope disappeared into it. As I dove lower, underwater silence overcame the sounds of playing children. The spring mouth loomed, a vivid, continuously deepening blue. I understood Adam’s attraction. The spring seemed placid, not the menace I had imagined there for months.

Then I surfaced.

Months later, I stood near the same spot surrounded by my daughters, our hearts on the same shore again. Holding hands, we waded knee-deep into the water. The girls’ long skirts floated around them, except for Rosie, who was in full dive gear. Lil carried her father’s fiddle. Little Adam bounced and burbled on his mother’s hip as we passed the memorial plaque hand-to-hand, admiring the terra cotta, the color of the Carolina clay, and the pale, crackled blue glaze. Clearly carved into the surface in Sarah’s square, neat calligraphy were the words from Lil’s and Adam’s favorite Whitman poem: “Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, I and this mystery . . . In memory of A. Hope.”

Gracie, Lil, Sarah, and I watched Rosie and one of the springs dive crew disappear down into the spring, to place the plaque in the cave, just outside the grate that now barred divers from the vein that led to the collapsed chamber. Lil raised the fiddle and began to play “Amazing Grace.”

I remembered the silt glittering around me and Adam when we had been in the cave together, the water vibrant between us as his hand marked a rhythm I could not hear. For the first time, I allowed myself to imagine him there alone underwater, his feral howl radiating, restless and joyful, through the land he loved. And, for the first time, I considered that the land had once again answered him, not with rhythm but with a terrible embrace, their duet now airless and unending.

I kept my eyes on the guide rope, not completely at ease with the thought of Rosie so deep in the earth. I studied the serious, expectant faces of my daughters. For a moment, I had the notion that he was calling to them from underground and they were listening, able to hear him as I never had.

After what seemed far too long, Rosie broke through the water, her thumb up and her short hair clinging to her head. “It is done.”

We returned to the ranch for the official memorial. A small stage was set up in the backyard. Beside it stood Sarah’s latest painting. Adam filled the large canvas. Pictured from the waist up and nude, his arms stretched out, his fingers spread. He looked directly at all of us. A familiar expression filled his face, relaxed and curious, as if he waited for a reply from someone he knew well. A plate-size asterisk radiated from his chest, white at its edge, cobalt in the center. The likeness was strikingly realistic in all respects but his hair. She had given him auburn hair.

When the girls sang, I found I could no longer pull their individual voices loose from the braid of their harmonies. Only when one of them took the lead could I tell who or how many were singing. There might have been five voices, there could have been six.

One by one, neighbors, cowboys, musicians, divers, hippies, and horsemen stepped up to the microphone with some story or song for Adam. People whom Adam had touched surrounded me. Their voices buoyed me. Neither Ray the veterinarian, nor Manny had ever again mentioned what they’d heard from Adam the day the stallion attacked the mare, but Ray paused during his praise of Adam’s horsemanship and his eyes sought mine in the crowd. Then, with a nod, he seemed to find the word he was seeking: uncanny.

I did not speak. The single, unique story I could have told was a weight in my chest. A star of dark matter, a thing that held its own gravity, enthralling my heart.

Things were not good after that, but they were better. Grief’s gutting blade was preferable to obsession. The questions of what I might have done to prevent or foresee what had happened still seduced me at times, but they never dominated me as they once had.

From that point on, to be reminded of my husband, I could look at any stranger’s face. To honor him, I had only to treat every stranger as if he or she might have been my lover and the parent of my children. I hung Sarah’s portrait of him in the living room. I gave his clothes away. I sold all our horses except for Rosie’s favorite and Jericho.

Not long after the memorial, I sold the ranch and moved into town. I became, at last, a herd animal, at home in the casual company of a neighborhood, pleased by the crowds at the markets and art fairs downtown. My home is now a short walk to a creek, a park, the public library, a supermarket, a funeral home, a birthing center, a theater, and the courthouse. You can do anything here. And there are plenty of folks to do it among—lots of families, a few oldies like me, a drunk guy, and one friendly transvestite laundress who strolls by every day after the local dry cleaner closes. There are also possum, armadillo, raccoons, a few snakes, and some ducks. A curious otter, a wild turkey, and a black bear have wandered into the neighborhood—not all at the same time. The only thing missing is the sky. Aged water oaks tower over the houses, shading the yards.

It seems I will not be wandering off into the woods, as I did as a girl, but will take my leave here among my own kind.

I lived alone until a couple of years ago. Then Lil discovered that Alphonso, her college sweetheart and husband for almost twenty years, was not what she thought him to be. After the divorce, she came home to Florida and decided to live with me. I’m old enough now that all the girls thought it was a good idea that one of them be around to keep an eye on me.

They are not so young themselves. Gracie will turn fifty within days. But, like their father, they all seem to be aging at their own special rates. The curve of their earlobes, how they lift their faces when their own children speak to them, how their hips and breasts have filled and shrunk with the changes of maturity and childbirth, continue to fascinate me—not as frequently, but no less intensely than their perfect bodies did when they were new and fresh. I still feel flashes of tenderness toward them, amazed that they are here in the world and are mine. They are profoundly, cellularly familiar to me, and they are, in the distances and privacies of their adult lives, a series of mysteries.

Adam may be responsible for the youthfulness of their faces, but I claim responsibility for the gene that sent them to the edge of their tribes for a mate. The same gene that sang in me as I dragged A. in out of the cold rain. Our daughters are now scattered across four continents. Mayan, Chinese, Dutch, and African blood runs through the veins of my grandchildren. In their careers and their choice of husbands, they’ve covered the globe. Gracie lives in the Netherlands. Still married to Hans, she now has a diplomatic appointment at The Hague. Their sons are mild, witty Dutchmen like their father. Vet school led Rosie to research in genetics and species-hopping viruses. She married Mussa, a fellow geneticist, and they commute between California and Africa on a seasonal basis. Her boys all have their daddy’s beautiful tropical skin and big hands. Sarah lives and paints in China with her husband, Jian, and their son. She has just been authorized to return to the United States. Lil lives down the hall. The mother of two grown sons, she left the Library of Congress last year and took a position at the UF library as a digital preservation specialist. Eventually, she ceased being the twin left behind, one half of a whole, and became her singular self. Seeing her become a mother separated her, at last, in my heart, from Jennie, who remains nine years old.

About a month ago, I woke from a deep sleep to a sound I had not heard in twenty years: the reverberations of Adam’s sexual climax. Instinctively, I reached across my empty bed for him. Still half-asleep, I got out of bed and followed the rising voice, then realized I was outside Lil’s bedroom door. Gently, I pressed my palm flat on the door as the cry peaked then vanished.

A man’s voice boomed, “Wow!” Lil’s new lover.

Lil’s laughter followed—surprised, joyful laughter.

Only then did I realize who I’d been listening to. I stepped back into my bedroom and quietly shut the door. I wanted Adam. I wanted the beautiful harmonic of him, wanted to pour myself over him.

Down the hall, their voices continued, indistinct, muffled.

Eventually, the house became quiet again. Then I heard Lil’s footsteps in the hall. I found her sitting at the kitchen table, just outside the pool of light from the stove hood, her features relaxed and soft. She shook her head when I sat down at the table across from her. “Momma, just when I think I’m on an even keel and I understand how things are and what I’m capable of . . .” She sighed.

“I know. I heard.”

“Yes, I guess you would’ve.” The corner of her mouth lifted in an apologetic half-smile. “We always knew with you and Daddy. There would be the click of your bedroom door closing, then after a while . . .” She paused and glanced at me a little sheepishly.

“Yes?”

“Then you’d make that sound you always made. The walls hummed, then Daddy laughed.”

“The sound I made?”

Her face reflected my surprise.

I touched her hand. “Lil, that was your daddy you heard, not me. It was never me.”

“Daddy? Really?” Her mouth hung open and she stared at me.

I nodded.

She snapped her mouth shut. “Wow . . . I thought it was something only women did. Sarah does it when she’s with Jian. Remember, I stayed about a week with them when they lived in Chicago. The walls were so thin. And I’ve heard Rosie . . . So that was Daddy?” She rubbed her chest. “And that time after Jennie’s funeral when you stopped Daddy, I thought it was because he was doing something only women did. I thought you were upset because he was acting like a woman.”

I wiped my eyes and tried to smile at her. “Do you remember the time in the mountains with all of us?”

She squinted in the effort to remember, then her expression changed. “Oh, when the rocks sang? That was amazing. You were right there when I opened my eyes. Are you saying that was Daddy, too?”

I nodded.

After a moment, her face slowly broke into a wide smile. “Momma, a while ago in bed, when I . . . it was like my chest opened up in a new way. Wonderful and scary.” She paused and sighed. “So, you are telling me that, at forty-four, my body has learned a new trick and it’s unique to us?”

Not to “us,” I thought—to you, the daughters of Adam. But I just nodded.

Lil’s revelation stunned me. It had never crossed my mind that the girls would attribute his voice to me or their unique voice as a gift from me.

But I know how secrets and assumptions grow larger over the years, fed by the tensions and yearnings of their keepers. They also diffuse as they settle, like a strange pollen, spreading invisibly over the fields of our daily lives. Simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. What we do not say never ceases being. It waits. Robust. Elemental.

The day after my conversation with Lil, I received a brief letter from Sarah:

Momma, I’m including this picture to prepare you—all of you. It’s the latest picture of me. I haven’t done anything to myself or the photograph, I swear. I probably should be alarmed, but I’m not. It feels natural. I’m okay. I’m happy. And I am pregnant again! Three months by the time I see you! A daughter is coming, I’m sure. Oh, and there’s a canyon here that reminds me so much of Daddy. Looking forward to seeing all of you soon.

Love, S.

In the photograph, Sarah squats beside her young son, Michael. He grins up at the camera, a happy little Chinese boy sporting the cheekbones of the McMurrough clan and a purple shirt. Sarah looks directly at the camera, her face is serious, her chin thrust out as if offering her features to the world. She is still quite distinctly Sarah. Same chin, same forehead. But her once-curly auburn hair is black and straight, her pale irises are now dark brown. Her eyelids are Asian. She has become a Chinese woman. The daughter of A.

I stared at the photo until my eyes burned, then teared. I had it finally: proof.

I began to write.

Recently, I found out that the “magical sea monkeys” we purchased for the girls when we first moved to Florida are a species of tiny shrimp-like animals, triops, which survive in the hidden pools that are the carved afterthoughts of desert flash-floods. When the pool dries completely, the dehydrated creatures, lifeless by all human measures, can wait decades for the next flood, when they will once again spring into life and swim.

I find a humbling, comic comfort in triops. In their company, Adam seems normal, or at least natural. In the last decade, I have gotten tired of questions and of questioning.

What is simply is.

My hope is that my daughters will forgive me my innocence, my ignorance, and my fears. All I know is this: A. was and is. He walks this earth, whole and unrecognizable. He is here among us, somewhere. Beside you, perhaps. And on this December day in the year 2000, I know that the Florida air is warm, the windows are open. My grandsons run down the hall. Gracie’s plane is touching down. Sarah and her family are flying over the Pacific. The odors of baking bread fill my home. In the kitchen, Lil and Rosie sling Christmas carols around like cabaret songs. “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” indeed.

Within hours, my youngest daughter will come through the door bearing in her body her second child and undeniable proof of A.

I will hand my daughters all that I have written here.

I will, at last, be true.

I have often found myself thinking of that day long ago at the springs when I lay on my back under A., looking past his shoulder into that one-bird-filled sky, lying like a girl, naked under my husband in the woods. I felt the shadow of his disappearance then. Faint in that spring brightness, but not undetectable. I chose not to look at it then, not to pull the thread of that individual loss and sorrow out of the tapestry, but I knew it was there. I’ve wondered if he intentionally brought me to the place where he would take his leave, the deep blue mouth of the earth that would be his door out of this life. Probably not. I don’t think he knew any more than I did at the time. He was simply and eventually true to his own nature. He left my life as he entered it, through elegant and elemental forces. He left me to listen after him to this new land.

Now he is of this land and this water. The water here, like him, is of no discernible origin. Pulled by the sun’s endless energy, it rises from far-off shores to fall on Florida soil. It makes its way through the dense, fragrant darkness of mulch, tannin-drenched sand, and the limestone. In dark, underground silence, droplets form trickles then brooks. Brooks join to become small rivers beneath this thin skin of earth. Small rivers join to make larger rivers, increasing exponentially in force, power, and volume until millions of gallons spring from the earth into the lazy flow of the Suwannee, the Withlacoochee, the Itchetucknee, the Santa Fe. From there, the water flows to the sea, or it makes its way into the bellies of alligators and snakes, or inches up through dense cellulose of cypress. Or it rises as singular molecules again toward the sun to fall once more on other faraway forests.

Countless times, I have imagined A. rising through the rivers of this land, to the surface of Florida to be found again, pulled into the air by new hands. The possibilities are endless, but most often I imagine him found by children. Above him, the sky shimmers and undulates blue through transparent springwater. Then four small brown hands break the surface and pull him into the air and into their excited and frightened vocabularies. The delicate bones of their arms and ribs absorb his voice, shattering their knowledge of what is possible.





Acknowledgments



Three women were crucial in this novel’s journey to your hands. Though my dear friend Peg Libertus did not live to see its publication, her early and highly enthusiastic support for the idea of A. Hope kept me going as I slogged through the earliest versions. I am very grateful to my agent, Mollie Glick, for saying yes to me and the story of Adam Hope. Her professionalism and warmth made the process of finding publication astoundingly smooth. Lee Boudreaux’s reassuring cheer, lucid edits, and trust in my creativity invigorated the final revisions, opening up solutions I wouldn’t have thought of on my own. I am very fortunate to have these three on my team.

I am thankful for the many friends and fellow writers who patiently read this book in manuscript form and gave me the impetus and the tools to push on. Special acknowledgment must be given to those who read the awful first drafts in part or full, without laughing or trying to smack some sense into me: Susan Mickelberry, Susan Gildersleeve, Julie Robitaille, David O’Gorman, Manuel Martinez, Margaret Luongo, Richard Nuñez, Naana Horne, Kathy DeWitt, Sidney Bertisch, Peggy Payne, and Flo Turcotte. Pat Rowe and June Edelstein read earlier drafts and offered unbridled encouragement throughout the process. My fellow Writers’ Alliance of Gainesville members Frank Fiordalisi, Robin Ecker, Shari King, Persis Granger, and Art Crummer spent many a Thursday afternoon poring over The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope. Their supportive critiques were invaluable to me.

Robin Ecker and Deb Jennings generously gave me the benefit of their years of experience with horses. Other friends and family have provided research, support, ideas, or observations: Roxanne Colwell, Dot and Kit Martin, and the Gainesville group of Like-Minded Women.

I am personally grateful to my children, Daniel and Rachel, who suffered, with very little complaint, the deprivations of a tiny rental house so I could afford a sabbatical to write. I thank Doran for years of friendship that have nourished my imagination and my heart.

The final revisions were written with the support of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the State of Florida Division of Cultural Affairs.

My appreciation for the writing of Michael Ondaatje, Terry Tempest Williams, and Craig Childs has informed this novel. My humble thanks to them for how well they have done their jobs.

I would also like to acknowledge the efforts of all who seek to protect and conserve Nature, particularly those who work to preserve the purity and plenty of Florida’s amazing and endangered waterways. If this novel has sparked your interest in the springs of Florida, please visit http://floridaconservationcoalition.org/ or http://www.floridastateparks.org/





About the Author


RHONDA RILEY is a graduate of the creative writing program at the University of Florida. This is her first novel. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.