The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope (11 page)

“At night, here with me, you always sigh ‘Aaahh’ first, then you start to . . . to resonate.”

“I resonate?” She laughed. “It doesn’t matter that you can’t give me the same kind of ‘voice’ I can give you. You gave me all this.” She skimmed her hand lightly over my face and down my body.

I did not know what to say. I had given nothing. She had taken her identity from me, yet left it with me and given me every reason to see how vastly different we were from one another. She pulled me closer and, pressing her mouth to mine, gently exhaled into me.

No name for what she was or what she did. No name for the place she had come from.

But each night there was her sweet voice.

On my moonlit, sleepless nights, she lay beside me, sleeping. Everyone, everything else slumbered, and the world was quiet. In the surreal silence of midnight, I watched her, studying a face more like my own than a mirror. I lay close enough that I breathed her exhalations and she mine, the air going in and out of us in matched rhythm. Watching her eyes move over the dream world under her closed lids, I could not imagine what she saw. A world peopled with others like her? I saw the face my mother must have seen when she watched me sleeping, the face I would see later when my own daughters, so like me, slept. I was inside and outside my own skin, both the mother and the daughter, the other and myself.

Other nights, I would have to rise from our bed and walk the house, touching the walls and the furniture until the ordinary proportions and places of things returned.

Once, while pacing the bedroom, I saw a fox cross the bright, night-gray yard, trotting purposefully, confidently on small, delicate paws. I wanted to touch those paws, to feel the press of them on the ground and know the texture of her coat. To be outside in the cool darkness, my nose in the air.

Sometimes, without moving, Addie would open her eyes and look at me from a seemingly deep sleep. I would see, then, who I was not. The distinctness of myself lurched within me, the tender presentness coming over me as she opened her arms and pulled me into them again.

F
reddie and Marge Rumford were a young couple, just married. I had known Freddie all my life, but Marge, whom he married shortly after coming back from the war, was from Cramerton. Freddie, a thin man with a dry sense of humor, had returned from the war almost mute until he met Marge, a big, friendly girl, her body seeming to move in loose, relaxed circles. After they married, local musicians gathered every Sunday evening for picking parties at their home.

One Sunday, Addie and I passed Freddie and Marge’s on our walk back to the farm from dinner at Momma’s. The early spring air was warm enough that they had left the door open. Music tumbled out onto the street—banjo, guitar, fiddle, and mandolin. Addie stopped dead in the street, her head cocked to one side. She followed the music into their house. Just opened the screen door and strode in. I was right behind her.

Freddie sat on a tall stool in the kitchen. One of the Wilkes girls and a few of the old fellows who used to play with my uncle Lester crowded the room, not skipping a beat of their waltz as Addie barged in.

I couldn’t see Addie’s face, but I saw Marge’s when she turned from cleaning up at the sink and realized we were in her kitchen. There was the little flash of surprise that crossed people’s faces when they met Addie. I waved so Marge would know which one of us was me.

Addie stood motionless, transfixed by the music, then cackled with delight as the tune ended. Amid the noise of everyone shifting around to pull in some more chairs, I introduced her. No one blinked or asked a question as we settled in our seats.

“I’ve heard about you,” Marge said. “Glad to meet you, Addie.”

The musicians picked up their instruments again and started playing “Haste to the Wedding.” Marge pulled me to my feet. We turned in the middle of the kitchen and danced out to the porch and back. Addie stood up with her hands held out expectantly. Marge took her for a spin, the two of them laughing. Addie followed surprisingly well.

When they danced back into the kitchen and Marge released her, Addie sat and stared at the musicians, enthralled. During their next break, Freddie leaned across the kitchen and said to Addie, “Here, you look like you want this in your hands. Try it.”

Addie took the banjo and ran her hands over its strings, “ahhing” like a child, and everyone laughed at what they took to be comic exaggeration. She bent over it in precise imitation of Freddie’s shoulder-hunched way of playing and grinned up at me as she plucked.

After Addie returned the banjo, the musicians resumed playing. She closed her eyes as she listened, tilting her head as if zeroing in on one instrument then another. We stayed until milking time.

Days later, she found Uncle Lester’s old fiddle at the bottom of the wardrobe. It made an awful squawk when she first touched bow to string. She winced and echoed with her own surprised cry. Holding the fiddle out away from her shoulder, she glared at it.

I’d been around enough fiddle players to show her some basics—the tuning pegs, the bow, the rosin. The next time we went into town, we bought strings. She worked on her fiddle-playing every spare moment, her face screwed up in concentration. She paced the house, the yard, and the barn, fiddle to her chin. Soon she had notes and had taught herself a simple song. In the next few days, she pulled me from my chores and asked me to sing for her. I’d sing a song and then she’d work at it and work at it until she got it right.

Once, after I sang “The Old Rugged Cross” for her, she spent every spare moment of her day working on it. She showed up at the barn while I finished the evening milking, fiddle and bow in hand, her brow furrowed. “Once again? I almost have it,” she said. I sang it again, leaning my head on old Lilac’s warm side. She listened intently, staring up into the rafters of the barn, the way I’d seen Daddy stare as he listened to the radio. Then she played it again, swaying in the lantern light, her eyes closed.

Not long afterward, she carried the fiddle down to Momma’s for Sunday supper and we stopped by Freddie and Marge’s. They recognized Lester’s fiddle in her hands and playfully asked her what she planned on doing with it. Without a word, she stepped into the center of them, put it under her chin, and started on a slow version of “The Old Rugged Cross,” a little rough but all there. Rusty, an old man well known in the area for his fiddling, picked up on the chorus with her. When they were done, he put his old, mottled hand on her shoulder and said, “That was real sweet, darling.”

After that, we spent our Sunday evenings at Freddie and Marge’s. She preferred to play standing. Among the mostly middle-aged, meaty men who met at Freddie’s, she was a bright contrast, swaying pale and slender. Sometimes she set the fiddle aside and we sang, harmonizing like sisters. Her skin seemed to shine then, and when she turned that gaze on me, she was brilliant. Absorbing. She filled the room.

C
ole was confined while his leg mended. The thought of the two of them meeting again made me nervous. Addie had told me that, while I’d gone for help, Cole had mostly been unconscious, moaning and cursing some. Still, I wasn’t certain what he might think about me and her. When I visited him during his recovery, I went alone. I brought him magazines and a pie. He spent his days in his family’s parlor, his broken leg encased in a thick white cast, stretched out the length of the couch, the rest of him covered with blankets. I told him about Addie, reminding him of how she favored me.

He nodded. “I don’t remember much but the pain and cold. She held my hand and hummed to me. That helped. She reminded me of you.” He rubbed his chest thoughtfully.

I distracted him with a question about my plans to get his daddy to loan us the tractor in the spring.

He would have to come with the tractor, he told me. His daddy wouldn’t want a girl driving it by herself. Beyond that, we spoke of nothing important. We had no privacy sitting there in the parlor, awkward with his family around, coming and going. I stayed only a few minutes each time.

By late March, Cole’s leg had healed well enough for him to get up on a horse. I was sweeping the back porch when he trotted up on his old chestnut. He dismounted slowly, easing his bad leg down, then walked up to the house with a limp that made me wince. He had a bouquet of dried mistletoe tied with a red ribbon. “This is the best I can do this time of year.” He grinned. “I was hoping to remind you of my Christmas present.”

He meant my Christmas promise to him. I had expected he would want to be back in my bed. But too much had changed. He and I had not so much as kissed since early December. I could not be with him like that, not while I was with Addie. For the first time, I had to admit to myself that what I did with her was what I had done with him. That admission stunned me speechless. He laughed, misunderstanding my stammering blush. Waving the mistletoe over my head, he leaned forward for a kiss.

Just then Addie and Hobo came around the corner of the house. She stopped, smiled at him, and held out her hand. His mouth hung open. He looked from me to her and then whistled. “Geez, I’d heard you looked alike, but I really didn’t remember. I didn’t see that well when my leg . . . Geez.” He shook her hand. “Thank you, Miss . . . Addie, for . . .” He pointed toward the road. “. . . When I . . . umm.” It was his turn to go red-faced.

“Just Addie. Where’s the horse you rode before—the gray one? I liked her.” She walked over to his horse and stroked her neck. The mare sidestepped closer to Addie, nudging her shoulder.

“She’s too lively for me now with my leg. Too spooky to begin with. That’s why we got her so cheap. Though I reckon I have paid a price for her. She’s worse now. Daddy’s thinking of selling her. She’s still trouble.” He rubbed his leg and moved to sit on the edge of the porch.

“I’ve seen her out in your pasture and talked to her. I’ll take this one to the barn for you,” she said and turned. The horse followed, its reins dangling. Cole watched them walk away.

“God, she looks like you.” Then he turned to face me. “Can I come see you some evening?”

“Just me?”

“Well, yes, just you. Like before.” He moved closer but I continued to sweep the steps. A subtle move, but it registered in his face.

“I can’t. Cole, I can’t, not with her here.”

“We can be quiet.”

“No, we sleep in the same bed. She’s scared of the dark. She doesn’t like being alone at night since her momma died.” I talked too fast, made new lies without thinking.

He sighed. “Okay, okay.” Then he glanced toward the barn. “If you want to, you can sneak out when she’s sleeping. We could meet in the barn.”

I imagined disentangling myself from her arms to go to him. I didn’t want to leave her at night. “I’ll see . . .” I couldn’t think. I knew he could see the answer on my face.

“You blush too much,” he said, his grin gone. He hobbled off, following Addie into the barn. A few minutes later, he rode away. I tried to read his back as he disappeared, but his posture told me nothing of what he knew or sensed between me and Addie.

M
y silence about the joy Addie gave me pulled me away from the people I loved, particularly my mother. All the things I couldn’t explain about Addie created a void that wanted filling.

The Depression and the war were right behind us, thick in everyone’s past. But Addie was a clean slate. When anyone asked about her past, she was vague. An outright lie seemed an impossible act for her. But she was deft with a turn of phrase.

I took on the task of storytelling and lying, volunteering when I was alone with the curious questioner that Addie was shy about things, embarrassed by her momma’s past. I felt oddly compelled to make her imaginary life as extraordinary as she herself was. By the time she’d been with me a few months, I’d told quite a bit about her. Not much to one person, but everything together would have amounted to a life—a life that to my small-town eyes was exotic. Addie had one brother, a blessedly small family. They lived in an apartment in Chicago. They went to live plays on Saturday nights, a Lutheran Church on Sunday.

For the first time in my life, I had the pleasure of telling a complete anecdote. No one tried to finish sentences for me, correcting or adding to what I said. No one knew her story but me.

One night, before we fell asleep, I asked her if it bothered her not having a past, a family, or a place she came from. “I come from here,” she whispered close. “Just like you.” She spoke again in a slow, deliberate voice. “I don’t like lying. I can’t do it without laughing.”

“I know, and you laugh when you hear someone else lying, too. But nobody gets upset with you. They just laugh along.”

She rolled over on her back. In the dimness, she stared up at the ceiling. “It’s funny when people lie. They know they’re lying and they think they’re getting away with it. But they’re like a naked man trying to straighten his tie.” She paused and sighed. “Other times, it is not a lie, but something else. I’ve heard others tell about something that happened when I was there, but they tell it differently than I would.”

My eyes had adjusted to the faint moonlight through the windows. I studied her profile, conscious of how others must see me.

“They do it without thinking,” she added. “To keep other stories going. Their own stories, or the things their mothers or cousins or the preacher have told them. They’re also telling about themselves. You hear two things at once—the facts and the storyteller’s heart.” She rolled onto her side, facing me, and laid her hand on my chest. “I know you’re helping me fit into your family’s story. They need the stories. And so do you. But I don’t.”

“So what do you tell yourself?”

“That I am here. That I am. And I am.”

I suddenly felt naked. Naked and so unlike her.

She turned toward me again and touched my face. “So go ahead. Tell any stories you need to.”

H
ow could they not have known about Addie then? Not sensed on her skin or seen in her eyes the deep, strange difference of her? I kept expecting someone to pull me aside and say they knew she wasn’t one of us. Once I dreamed that Momma, Daddy, and Joe buried her—put her back in the dirt where she came from—her eyes, open, calm, and beseeching as they shoveled dirt on top of her.