Adam & Eve (22 page)

That was what my grandmother used to say when bedtime in Memphis came during a rainstorm. “Listen to the rain,” as though that were a sound to be let in through your ears and into your mind, like a friend.

“Adam,” I said, “what do you want to do with your life?”

“I used to want to draw. And paint.”

“That would be easier to do, if you went back with me.”

After the apple skins began to wrinkle and glisten, we mutually pronounced them done enough. With a stick, Adam rolled them over the stones close to where we sat. To avoid burning our fingers, we waited again, and Adam mentioned he had brought some cherries and also some walnuts and pecans to crack.

“Plenty of rocks for cracking,” I remarked, in return.

Finally he said for me to cup the apple in both hands and just take a bite.

A patch of peel slid right off with a touch of my teeth, and the hot juice and warm fruit delighted me. When I finished, I even lapped up the little brown seeds from the palm of my hand and chomped on the stem. Only after licking my sticky fingers like ten lollipops did I go to the water curtain to wash them. The water was shockingly cold to the touch, and it stripped my skin of the mellow warmth and lingering aroma of the apple. The sharp rain fell like little spears against my spread hands, punitive as sleet, and my whole body felt vulnerable. I wished for clothing.

When I turned from the blackness, I saw that Adam was already lying down on his pallet, his back turned toward me with his knees drawn up. The whiteness of his flesh looked miserable and chilled. My gaze followed the rift of his backbone to his buttocks, rough with goose bumps. The cave looked dismally primitive and dirty, unbearably confining.
Lucky Lucy,
I reminded myself. Lucky I had not been killed when the plane went down. Lucky there was somebody willing and able to take care of me. I remembered how he had looked from the plane, lying on the bank of the river—glorious, like ivory, in the sunlight. Like a piece of art, not a miserable human being. Even in the extremity of my situation, he had seemed a marvel.

After I lay down, I found it difficult to get comfortable on the moss. The stone floor was much harder than the grassy earth that usually padded my fern pallet. I focused on the pile of throwing stones—yes, that was what they must be, a primitive arsenal. To distract myself from discomfort, I began counting the stones in his arsenal and noticing their shapes and textures, speckled, like granite eggs. Especially against my head, the hardness of the floor came right through the moss.

I felt excluded by his delusions, but I had made myself behave as neutrally as I could. That was how I had trained myself; if I had no warmth to give my patients, at least I could find a blankness to offer, not my own uncertainty or pain.

I decided I should give myself some definite time limit for finding the texts Pierre Saad had entrusted to me. After such a period had elapsed, then it would be reasonable to leave, empty-handed. I was strong enough now. I tried resting on one side of my face, then the other. Why had I jettisoned the case? I had thought that even if I died, perhaps it could be salvaged. I had wanted to do that for a person who had trusted me. I still had Thom’s flash drive. At least I could return that to the scientists.

Most uncomfortable was the obdurate pain where the convex of the back of my skull encountered the flat of stone.

“Lucy,” Adam said—how strange to hear a voice; I had felt utterly alone. There was his kind, strong voice. “If you like, you can pillow your head on my stomach.”

“I’d like that,” I answered.

“Stand up,” he went on, a certain neutrality in his voice. “I’ll move your bed over here, at a right angle to mine.”

He had already nimbly risen.

“I’ll fix everything,” he said. He sounded like a willing child, an eager Scout.

When I stood up, he quickly began to move my pallet. The fire was very low now, and he interrupted his work to put on a large limb. “Our night log,” he said. Then he lay down on his pallet and patted his stomach. It did not look soft but ridged with muscles—a six-pack, the bodybuilders called it. Still, I lay down and placed my head there. Yes, this was much better. His body was my cushion. It relieved my shoulders of the weight of my head and neck to lie this way, perpendicular to his side. Very slightly, my head rose and fell with his shallow breathing.

“I won’t touch you,” he said. “Not in any way.”

Even his voice seemed disembodied; it hovered in the air, pretended to be words formed by the tongue of flame in the cavern, rather than in a human mouth.

Only as I drifted into sleep did I realize he had called me by my name. I hadn’t even noticed. “Lucy,” he had said. “Lucy, you can pillow your head …”

I opened my eyes in surprise, then closed them and listened to the licking of the small flames and the falling of the rain. It made no difference what we called each other, I told myself. We were who we were, I thought, regardless of label.

Yet when he called me by my name, the core of me had responded.

From that night when I pillowed my head on his body and he first called me Lucy, the name he used for me became an index to his state of mind.

N
O NIGHTMARES VISITED
Adam’s sleep that night, and when I awoke, I found my head had moved to his shoulder, and I had thrown my arm across his chest. That was how I had loved to sleep with Thom, with my head on his shoulder. Adam lay on his back, as though he had not stirred at all in his sleep. Very carefully, I sat up; then I studied his body in repose. Not entirely in repose; there was a clenched quality about his muscles. The features of his face seemed more chiseled, set, and beautiful than ever. I glanced at his penis. It lay to one side, not hard but rounded and somewhat tumescent. Rosy, his egglike testicles, ruddy and tender, lolled against his paler skin.

I stood up carefully and walked to the lip of the rock shelter. The curtain of rain had vanished, the sun bathed the nearby trees, and the world was a peaceable kingdom. I could see and see yet farther and yet beyond, over the meadows of the great plains divided into zones by stands of acacias. The flowers and colors of our garden were too small to carry to this distance, but I recognized the clear geometric shape of their plot. On one side was the river; tall grasses tucked here and there against its curves, and in the far distance the glittering ocean. Was it the Persian Gulf? A mirage? On the other side, a
band of lavender clouds gathered again on the horizon with their hint of
could.
Could it rain again tonight?

Without warning I heard a rumble and then the sound of tearing sky. Not in the distance but nearby and coming nearer, something was ripping the great blue sheet of cloudless sky, booming and coming closer. I felt the warmth of Adam’s body standing just at my side when two jets sped into view, turning and twisting their contrails together like DNA. They flew much higher than the lone jet that had passed over our luncheon on the grassy plain, but still the double power and speed of the twining two was terrifying—the sound of their unbridled engines, the shriek of their silver massiveness.

Suddenly something orange, packagelike, shot out from one of them, lengthened, and began unfurling, while the two planes narrowed with astonishing rapidity the blue division of sky between them. As we gasped, the planes collided and exploded in a single fireball that continued the momentum of their motion, then plummeted, exploding again in a shatter of fire.

“Wait here,” Adam said, and began to run down the path.

Before the question could leave my throat to ask, What is it? he answered over his shoulder. “Parachute!”

Mesmerized, I stared at the almost vacant sky while he hurried down the path. Yes, an orange parachute hung in the blue, and a blob of human almost too tiny to see dangled below the carapace. Halfway across the sky where the planes had converged, only a cloud of smoke smudged the air. I looked closely at the terrain where the parachute was descending, and I recognized a familiar landmark. When my own Piper Cub had lost power, while it was still gliding, I had noticed a grove of redwood trees. They had risen above the greenery of all the other trees to an amazing height, like many spires of a super cathedral, like Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia. And there they were again, with the billow of orange fabric hovering above their tall green points.

I wondered if Adam had noted the redwoods as a marker.

Of course he had. This was his hideaway, his stronghold, his private place. He was keenly observant. He would have seen the redwoods. He would have admired them as I had.

Had he instructed me to wait? Of course I would not wait. He would need
help. Perhaps
they
would need help. But I would not run. I knew I was not yet strong enough for running. Quickly I looked for the store of fruit and nuts we had transported to the shelter. I draped my ears with bunches of the long-stemmed cherries the way Adam had done when he first brought me fruit to eat. In each hand, I held an apple. Then, following Adam, I started as rapidly as I could down the rocky path.

I
’
M HERE
, P
APA
,” she said.

Pierre Saad shivered and then sprang from his chair to embrace his daughter. He shivered because, ever since her puberty, his daughter’s voice had assumed exactly the same timbre as his wife’s.

More than a decade had passed since that day when the similarity had taken him utterly by surprise. Arielle had been thirteen. She had come back to Jean-de-Luc from boarding school in Paris. Electrified by surprise and joy—“I’m here,” her voice had rung out—he had thought his wife, Violette, had returned from the dead. His body believed. His ears rang with the miracle. When his eyes fell upon his little girl—taller, her hair caught up in a more sophisticated way—he had had to press his breastbone. The pain of false recognition exploded in his heart, as though he had been shot.

Thoroughly alarmed at his expression of pain, the sudden movement of his hand to his breast, she had run to him.

“I’m all right,” he had stammered in French. “It’s all right. You’ve grown. In just these months you’ve changed so much.”

“I have a secret,” she said, the dimple in one cheek showing. Now she looked like a little girl again.

“You’ve become very beautiful,” he said. “Is that your secret? You scared me.”

“Poor Papa,” she said. “It’s just me. I’m not Princess Charming.”

He kissed her on both cheeks and, still feeling weak, invited her to sit down with him in the library.

“Next time,” he said, “you must say, ‘I’m here,
Papa.’
Then I’ll know it’s you.”

“All right,” she replied happily. “I’m here, Papa, and I want to tell you my secret.”

“What is it?”

“My periods have started. I look the same, but really I’m a woman.”

He wanted to say, You do not look the same, you do not sound the same; it seemed my wife was alive again and returned, but instead he had assured, “You are growing up, sans doute, but always you are my beloved daughter.”

From within the circle of his fatherly embrace, his independent, now truly grown-up daughter, a successful artist, teased, “I knew you’d be in here. Always working in the library.”

“My favorite room,” he answered, still unsteady with joy. Daughter or wife, it was almost the same joy.

“Our favorite room,” she said. She glanced around, taking it all in (he did not need to look; he saw it in his imagination through her beloved eyes): the oak bookshelves and the matching oak library table, the walls painted a rich red, the vase of white midsummer daisies he kept there on the golden oak table whenever daisies were in bloom. He knew she was making sure nothing had been changed, except the flowers. Naturally, they were allowed to change according to the season, even within the eternal compass of home.

“But Lucy Bergmann has not arrived, I take it,” Arielle said to him. Her face was very serious.

“How do you know?” he asked, teasing.

“Because she would have left her mark. Here in the library, there would have been … a slight mutation.”