The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope by Rhonda Riley Page A

knew why, I would tell you. I would give you that. I am sorry. I don’t know.”
    Her hands were warm. Her breath, as she turned to me, a thin vapor. We were inches apart. I saw nothing but her face and those familiar eyes, green flecked with gold. I felt nausea of fear and confusion, then a wave of calm. Under her gaze, the panic in me dwindled down to quiet the way a child’s cries fall away under the rhythm and melody of a lullaby.
    Suddenly we were both cold, and I remembered the animals unfed and unmilked in the barn. We dressed quickly, laughing when we stumbled in our rush.
    We did chores, made coffee, and ate breakfast. I did the things I had done on countless ordinary days. Habit carried me through the job of slopping the hog, feeding the chickens, and milking the cows. But my skin was on fire, my nerves ping-ponging from “it cannot be” to “it is.”
    While we ate breakfast, I told her the story of my father’s sister. I explained that she would be the daughter of my long-lost aunt, come to Clarion looking for her mother’s relations. We had met at the train stop. As the train pulled up to the station, she’d seen me across the street at the feed store, and was so taken by our resemblance that, in her haste to get off the train, she forgot her suitcase. That’s why she had nothing. As I finished my story, she took the dirty dishes from me, carried them to the sink, and began washing up as if she had been doing it for a lifetime.
    “We have to say those things?” she asked.
    I nodded.
    “You think people will not like me if we don’t tell them your story?”
    I winced to hear it put so bluntly. “Mostly I think they wouldn’t believe me if I told them the truth. But I have to tell them something. There has to be a reason for you to look like me.”
    She peered down at her body and her dripping hands. “Okay.” She smiled. “But you are not afraid of me? And you like me?”
    “Yes,” I said. “I do like you and I’m not afraid.”
    She laughed. “You don’t scare me either, and I like you, too.” She turned that gaze on me while she dried her hands. “A train stop? Tell me about the train stop.” She put her arm through mine and led me out of the kitchen, and I realized, with a shock, that she was comforting me.
    The sun shone for the first time in days when we stepped outside late that afternoon. Everything glistened, new and distinct. For a moment I saw everything—the pump, the house, the barn, the apple tree, the fields—through her eyes, through the eyes of someone new. Every run-down, beautiful, waterlogged bit of my world. I was happy.
    That night the lights came back on down the hill and the trains ran again. I took Addie outside when I heard the 8:10 coming. We stood in the thin light of the moon, our breath fogged around us and the train gleaming as it cleared the curve. It was deafening, but I could feel her beside me, the low, vibrant hum of her expanding under the sound of the train. When the conductor blew the horn, she laughed and, letting go of my hand, she held her arms out as she had earlier for the mare.
    O n the first night after Cole broke his leg, I dreamed that she and I were Siamese twins, joined belly to belly, and I woke in the middle of the night to find that we, in a sense, had merged. Only years later would I have the words “lover” or “sex” to describe what we began that night.
    The next evening, we began to touch each other as soon as we got into bed. In the darkness, she seemed to make of her body a room that we entered. And there was nothing but that room and her presence. She left no part of me untouched.
    The moment I touched the warm, moist folds of her, she ceased moving. She sighed deeply then; an audible chime tingled up my arm and chest and into my head. Her strange, unnatural voice expanded, rising, then soaring past hearing as she shuddered and convulsed.
    For a second, she was silent. “Are you okay?” I touched her face.
    “Yes.”