Finding Esme Read online

  Dedication

  FOR ACREE CARLISLE, MY DADDY,

  WHO TAUGHT ME THE POWER OF STORY

  AND FOUND WONDER IN ALL THINGS

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Peach Hollow Farm

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Peach Hollow Farm

  Chapter 1

  If it hadn’t been for my little brother Bo and me chasing fireflies, I would’ve never discovered the bones up on Solace Hill. It was my granddad Paps’s tractor that first churned the bones up to the surface. My grandmother Bee says if not for their son (my no-good daddy) Harlan disappearing, Paps wouldn’t have been on Solace Hill in the first place, digging for redemption. Bee was making peach pie in the kitchen when she noticed she could no longer hear the sweet hum of the tractor. She says our sorrows are linked together like our honeycombs, deep and cavernous, full of lonely hollows.

  Paps’s heart had simply stopped. Bee didn’t have the gumption to move the tractor after he passed. That was three months ago. Now that tractor sat there like a giant rusty grasshopper. Sometimes I’d lie under it trying to feel his spirit—my gentle quiet Paps. Bee would yell from the kitchen door, “Esme McCauley, you know he’s not there. GET OFF THAT HILL!”

  Bee claimed Paps was in heaven, where God was tending to his hurts. But I don’t know if I believed in heaven anymore, so every day after my chores, I’d lay under that tractor eyeballing the old grumpy horned toad who made his home there. I called him Bump. I’d like to think that somehow, some way, that’s where Paps was, behind the ancient eyes of that horned toad. Paps’s face was starting to slip away from me. I could hardly remember his voice, although it came to me every night in my dreams, like an echo, as though he were hollering from the bottom of a well, trying to tell me something. What, Paps? What is it? What am I supposed to know?

  I’d never had much luck, even from the beginning. June Rain, my mama, had a terrible time with me in her tummy, could barely keep a bite down. Seems even back then she didn’t want me. I came out eight weeks early, about as big as the big end of nothing, Bee says. Had to be kept in a warming incubator wrapped in a cotton cocoon over in Paradise. I was hardly bigger than a shoe. Then one night a few weeks after I was born, Bee snatched me back, said I needed the good warm beating hearts of kin. Every night she and Paps bundled me up tight and rocked me on their chests, my head as little as a butter bean, Paps told me.

  I would never grow as big as all the other kids, the doctor said; only my feet and ears seemed to grow as the years went by. My face was pale white, my skin thin and translucent. One time Bee showed me my footprints and handprints on a sheet of paper from the hospital and it looked like a bug had crawled across it. I had giant eyes (Saucer Eyes), and a little mouth with hardly any lips (Butthole Mouth), and skinny legs (Skinny Sticks), and was just plain tiny (Thumby for Thumbelina). Bee said God would take care of it in the end. All my funny pieces would meld together perfectly and someday my special gift, my gift that was waiting for me, would work itself to the surface for all to see.

  I stood at the screen door, my nose pressed against the mesh, praying, praying the rain would stop. I wouldn’t be able to go up Solace Hill; Bee’d set up a howl if I laid in that mud under the tractor in the rain.

  Bee was making peach pies again, just like the day Paps died, for the Holy Mercy Church of Abiding Faith’s potluck dinner for the poor. Even though we’re poor, there’s always those that are worse off in Hollis, the town nearby, she says. I glanced back at her as she pressed her thumb along the edge of the pie making perfect half-moons in the dough. There were kettles on the stove bubbling with wonderful-smelling spices, and gingerbread in the oven.

  And then . . . that’s when, that’s when it all began. A flicker of a shadow, a wisp of something outside. But I hadn’t even turned my head from Bee. Had I? You know when someone is staring at you from behind and you just know it? Bee and I locked eyes for a moment, and she tilted her head, like Bump does sometimes, as though asking, What? What, Esme? Since Paps died, I’d felt those steely eyes of hers watching me as though I was a pot waiting to boil. I turned to the screen, but nothing was there, just the endless tppp, tppp, tppp of the rain as it splattered on the screen door.

  June Rain? Had it been her? No, she’d been on the front porch a few minutes ago when I’d run in from collecting eggs. She’d been sitting in her rocker like she always does, cutting out photos of movie stars from magazines and putting them in the thick scrapbook she’s had forever. Some days when she’s up to it, she helps out at my Aunt Sweetmaw’s Just Teasin’ Beauty Parlor, but she doesn’t leave our house much anymore. Since my daddy Harlan left for good, June Rain’s been in a bad spell as long as a Texas drought. She hadn’t even looked up at me when I’d walked past her with my shirt billowed out like a sail, cradling several dozen eggs.

  Suddenly my toes started to tingle; you know that numbly feeling you get when you’ve sat cross-legged too long watching Saturday cartoons or listening to your teacher drone on and on during storytime? I didn’t like it one bit.

  I started lifting my feet up and down in sort of a march, to see if I could make it go away. Bee looked over at me as she put another pie in the oven. “What in the good damnation are you doing?”

  “I have a charley horse in my feet,” I answered her. That’s what it felt like, a little bit.

  “In both of them?” She frowned, and then a soft look of worry crossed her face. “I don’t want you going outside today,” she said. “Especially not up there.”

  Despite my best efforts, my feet continued to hum and tingle. “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was playing on the radio from somewhere in the house, the gentle melody rising and falling with the tingles in my toes. Suddenly Old Jack, Paps’s dog, jumped up on the other side of the screen door, then another jump, and another, whining to get a good whiff of all the smells—sweet peaches and sugared gingerbread and doughy flour and melted butter—and Bee clapped her hands at him. Had it been the shadow of Old Jack I’d seen a few moments before? The shadow that’d started my toes burning?

  And then behind Old Jack, a flitting blur, a streak in the rain. I watched as it moved toward Solace Hill, the bee-buzz in my feet rising up my legs before disappearing. I let Old Jack in, then pressed my nose against the screen. “Shhhhh,” I whispered down to him, petting his head. He licked at the screen, strangely trying to get right back out.

  “Esme McCauley, you know he’s not there,” Bee said, her voice startling me. I turned to her. “You let go of that hill, honey,” she said in a soft-as-cotton way, so unlike her. She put the peach pie in the oven and gave the oven a horse kick, for it was always on the fritz like most things around here. Then she braced her arms on the stove and stood still as a statue. I leaned forward, wondering what she was going to say.

  “Why?” she whispered. “Why?”

  Was she talking about my no-good daddy Harlan? I had an image of him, the day before he disappeared, sticking his whole hand in one of Bee’s peach pies and just grabbing a big ole handful. Bee had swatted him away and told him to go fix the back-pasture
fence, ’cause Miss Lilah’s geese were getting in and eating all our peaches. And then he was gone. “It’s for good this time,” June Rain had said, somehow knowing it was more than a trip to Paradise for cigarettes.

  Bee went back to work on the peaches. She never, ever smiles, and her name is fittin’ ’cause she is cuddly as a hornet. I curled my toes up and down to make sure they were back to normal as I looked at Bee, hoping she couldn’t see what I was doing. Bee is tall, taller than any other women in Hollis, and slim as one of her witching sticks. She wears her gray hair long, on the side, gathered at the end in a clip like a tiny fish tail. Sweetmaw was always begging Bee to come to the Just Teasin’ so she could give her a modern hairdo, but Bee said she wouldn’t let Sweetmaw Hennessy and her scissors near her if it was the last day on earth. There’s bad blood between the two that’s older than Egypt.

  “Are there ghosts, Bee?” I asked her, closing my eyes, thinking of what I’d just seen out in the rain.

  Her head shot up; her glasses slid down her nose. “What kind of question is that?”

  I focused on a dusting of flour on her cheek. She always had something on her that was not supposed to be there, like peach fuzz, or a smudge of oil from fixing the Bee Wagon. One time she had a cicada shell riding around all day in her hair and she didn’t even know it till my little brother Bo pulled it off and stepped on it, sending a loud crunching noise across the kitchen. Bee didn’t have time to worry about such things, or to smile or frown, or to tell us she loved us. She was too busy taking care of the peaches, the bees, and all of us.

  Just then June Rain drifted by the door, Bo trailing behind her like a shadow, plastic army men clutched in his hands. I don’t think June Rain even knew he was there.

  A while after Bee’d left to go deliver the food, and June Rain had gone to take her long daily nap, Bo disappeared, which was a good indication he was up to no good. Old Jack clawed at the screen door frantically. The rain had slowed down, not enough for me to go up to Solace Hill, but enough to go find Bo.

  My brother Bo has always been wild as the hills, but as sweet as cherry plums. Bee says he’s a bona fide ring-tailed tooter, always in mischief and always on the move, and that’s just how little boys are. She’s not worried about him; those sorts always grow up to be something ’cause they use all that energy in a good way and become go-getters and doctors and stuff. His teacher at preschool, though, after dealing with him just one day, called Bee and June Rain in and told them he has some scientific “full of crock” whatchamacallit problem. All I could decipher from the hushed conversation was the word “hyper.”

  Old Jack ran ahead of me like a rocket, zigzagging through the peach trees in and out of the patches of rain-darkened sunlight. I chased him to the henhouse where we kept Bee’s prized Buckeye hens. I’d already picked the day’s eggs, but more than once I’d found Bo sitting in the hay and sucking the innards straight out of a pale brown egg. “Bo?” I called before going in. The hens inside were having a conniption fit. I leaned down in front of the small shack and poked my head in. It was strangely dark. “Bo?” I called again into the ruckus. Old Jack stayed behind me as he knew he’d be in big trouble if he ever went in the henhouse, but he was whining and yelping like all get out. “Shhhhh! Shhhhh!” I soothed the squawking hens. Dozens of feathers floated around in the dark like there’d been a pillow fight.

  There was a tiny space with a tiny door next to the henhouse that was often one of Bo’s hiding spots. I carefully opened the door and crawled in. My toes had started to buzz again. It was dark as night. “Bo?” I knew there was a box of matches that I wasn’t supposed to touch on one of the ledges. I pulled a match out and struck the edge, and the small storage room lit up in the soft glow of the tiny flame. Suddenly there was a sound, like someone drawing in all their breath and letting it all out. Like when you blow out your birthday candles. Whoosh! The match blew out.

  I quickly lit another one. Whoosh! Darkness. Someone, or something, had blown out the match again. I reached back to find the knob and shot out of there, barely feeling my feet because of the tingles.

  And there was Bo, holding three prized Buckeye hen feathers, laughing. But I knew he hadn’t been in that little room with me. Something else had.

  “What’s wrong, Esme?” he said. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

  I tried to smile and yelled, “I’m gonna catch you!”

  He turned, laughing, and ran off toward Solace Hill.

  A cold wind, the kind that tells you the rain is leaving, started to blow as Bo and I ran through the orchard, chasing fireflies. Bee said the fireflies were disappearing more and more every summer, and it made me sad.

  At the base of Solace Hill, the buzzing started in my feet again. I ignored it as I peered at the gentle pinpricks of rain on the sweet clover. The clover grew in clumps up the hill, surrounded by butter-colored stumps of jutting stone. Bo ran ahead of me, laughing as he reached for the elusive fireflies, who would dance just out of his grasp. I ran after him, but Old Jack stayed behind, stiff as a sentinel, a low growl emitting every now and then from his throat.

  It was just a moment later that I tripped over something hard, a rock that hadn’t been there before ’cause I knew every inch of that hill like I knew the back of my hand, like I knew every foot of Peach Hollow Farm. Paps’s tractor must have churned it up, and the rain must have unveiled it. I blinked, the wind knocked out of me from the fall and my nose throbbing from landing face-first on rocky earth. Something dripped on my hand. Blood. I’d given myself a bloody nose. I started to stand up just as I saw a shape. I stood back in awe.

  It wasn’t a rock. I leaned down and peered at it closer, holding my hand up to my bleeding nose. A bone. Not a stone or a rock. It was a bone! I stood up quickly, my heart dropping to my feet. Paps? Oh, God! Harlan? Could it be my daddy? I stood stock-still, shivers going up and down my spine, staring at that bone. Then I turned and chased Bo back down the hill after the fireflies. Like ghost embers in the dark they were.

  Bo ran into the house, letting the screen door slam right in my face. He opened his hand and a firefly flew wildly around the kitchen. Bee was at the kitchen sink washing up the dishes. I slowly walked in after him.

  “Where was the tooter this time?” she asked over her shoulder as she scrubbed a pie pan. Bo reached for one of the gingerbread squares, thick buttered pieces she’d saved for us on a crisp kitchen towel.

  I froze: feeling the room spin as images of bones and blood swirled around my head. I couldn’t even lift my hand to my nose to stop the bleeding. It dripped, dripped, dripped on the wooden floor. Old Jack, still on the other side of the screen door, whined and swished his tail.

  “Esme’s bleeding, Bee!” Bo yelled between mouthfuls of gingerbread.

  Bee dropped a skillet in the sink with a loud clank. She walked over to me and lifted up my chin, squeezing my nose. “Get me a leaf from one of the peach trees, Bo,” she said. Bo was swatting at the firefly he had trapped high on the screen. “Get it now, Bo!” Bee yelled. He ran out the screen door a minute later and ran in with one. She carefully folded it up into a rectangle. “Here,” she said to me. “Open your mouth.” I opened my mouth and she gently tucked it under my upper lip, then put her two fingers on top, with pressure.

  “Stop shivering, honey,” she told me. “It will stop in a minute.”

  But I couldn’t. Not after what I’d seen.

  “Now tell me, what happened out there?”

  I knew she wasn’t just asking me about the fall, about my nose. She knew there was more. I wanted to tell, I did, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t even if I wanted to. I closed my eyes, everything swirling around in my head. Bo let Old Jack in and he laid down at my feet and licked my toes.

  “Stop shivering, honey, or the bleeding won’t stop,” Bee said.

  “I can’t, Bee, I can’t.” Something’s got ahold of me. Something’s got ahold of me. “Why he’d have to leave us, Bee?” I whispered, feeling like I was gonn
a faint. I was talking about both Paps and Harlan. Both of them had left me.

  Bee, still holding her fingers gently on my lip, looked me in the eyes. “Paps was an old, old man, Esme. He had a full life.”

  I knew now this wasn’t the whole truth and Bee knew it, too. My grandma’s specialty is knowing things, knowing and finding things that no one else can. She was keeping half of it to herself, like she always did. I’d known my whole life that something was missing from Paps’s story, all of our stories, like a great big puzzle piece. The one that made all of the other pieces make sense.

  “There,” she said, lifting her fingers. “All better.”

  But when I looked into her eyes, she looked away. I ran upstairs then, my heart beating fast. I jumped in my old rickety bed, threw the covers over my head, and tossed and turned it seemed forever before finally dozing off. I dreamed of white feathers raining down and bones churning up through the dirt, a tiny light in the darkness. Whoosh!

  Chapter 2

  I woke with a start. There was a slow, throbbing pain in my nose. Then I remembered. I’d found bones. I’d found bones up on Solace Hill. I lay in bed awhile, watching raindrops catch on the window, my white chenille bedspread tucked up under my chin. It was pouring again. I nibbled on the knots in the chenille, like I did when I was worried about something, those gnawed-down knots over half the bedspread representing my life. After Paps died, I’d stayed in the quicksand cocoon of my bed nibbling on those knots for a week, till Bee finally yanked me out. Bee says I carry too many worries in my heart and it’s gonna explode if I don’t learn to let them fly away.

  I rolled over and pulled the bedspread over my head. I couldn’t do anything about those bones just yet. Not in the rain, and not with Bee’s antennae up. I’d have to sneak back tonight. I clenched my eyes shut thinking about it all. Had I dreamed it? My numbly-tingly feet, the flash of shadows in the rain, the henhouse whoosh!, the fireflies leading us up and up and finally—that bone! My heart sank, wondering what it could be.