“Like who?”
“Like my daughter.”
Esme Faulkner sits across from me, her teacup rattling against the saucer as she sips from it. Her eyes skitter toward Granny. “I didn’t know if I should come. Didn’t know if she’d still be living in Tin Mountain or living at all. You never know when you get to be our age.”
“How do you know Granny?”
“Deirdre and I were friends. In Charleston.”
I’m wary. It’s possible this woman could be telling the truth, but I’ve never heard Granny mention an Esme. “Charleston? I didn’t know Granny lived there.”
At this, Esme’s lip trembles. “I figured she wouldn’t tell anyone about me. We went to the same school there. A finishing school. We became close.” She takes a quick sip of her tea.
“I tried writing to her, over the years, but I mustn’t have had the right address, because all my letters were returned unopened. After I left school, I married the boy that had been courting me. Lionel. He was good to me. We tried, but we couldn’t have children of our own. One spring, we visited my parents in Hannibal. While we were there, we went to an orphanage in St. Louis. There was a little girl there. She was three years old. When I held her little hand, I knew she was Deirdre’s.”
I raise an eyebrow in disbelief. “You knew?”
“Yes. Deirdre and I . . . we have some of the same gifts. Clairvoyance and such.” Esme clears her throat and looks away. “I know, it sounds silly, doesn’t it? In any case, Lionel and I signed the papers that very day and brought Ophelia home.”
“So, you claim you adopted my mother?”
“Yes.”
It occurs to me just how much about her life Granny’s kept hidden. If she really had a secret daughter, and that daughter had somehow been my mother, it’d mean we’re blood kin. Not that it matters much. Granny’s my family. Always has been. Always will be.
But knowing this about my mama gets me to thinking about how Bellflower called me “granddaughter” before I sent him hurtling back to hell, what he told me at the lighthouse about Granny, and their strange conversation on the square. Maybe there’s some truth in his lies, after all. Had he seduced Granny and fathered a child with her? My mother? I shudder to think I could have any part of him running through me.
Esme clears her throat, and I drag myself away from my troublesome thoughts.
“Lionel died the next year of an awful bout of cholera. I auctioned off our low country plantation and went back to Missouri to raise Ophelia near my family. She was a quiet child, but willful. As she grew older, she never saw much sense in social affairs and courting like most girls her age did. She preferred her books. But when she got to be in her twenties, she started running with a rough crowd. Met a girl named Valerie at a dance, who was dating a boy with an older brother. She took off with him. After I threatened to get the law involved, she wouldn’t speak to me anymore.” Esme rubs her forehead. “He was a drunkard, I think.”
“Shep Doherty.”
“Yes.”
“That bastard’s long dead,” I say. Esme looks up in surprise, probably at my language. “Sorry. Shep was my daddy, but he wasn’t any good. After he died, Valerie took me in. She’s Granny’s daughter, too. That’s how I came to be here.”
“Oh my. How strange. But I always knew things would turn full circle, somehow.” Esme reaches out and squeezes my hand. “I’m so glad I came.”
From across the porch comes a rustling. Granny throws off her covers and sits up, blinking. She rubs at her eyes and squints. “Gracie, who’s there? Who are you visitin’ with?”
“This lady’s from Hannibal. Says she’s my grandma, too, and she knew you at school?”
Esme swivels in her chair. “Hello, Deirdre.”
All the color drains from Granny’s face, and a whimper drifts from her lips. “Esme. After all this time.”
I help Granny out to her bench under the peach tree and cover her shoulders with one of her crocheted afghans. The weather has cooled, and we’ve had enough rain lately that the grass is up to our ankles again and full of chiggers. Esme sits next to Granny, and after I’ve brought them a few slices of buttered corn bread and more tea, I leave them be. I figure they’ve got a lot to catch up on, and I’ll have a chance to ask all my questions later. Lord knows I have plenty.
Instead, I walk up the hill and knock on the door to the lighthouse cottage. Abby answers. I don’t even wait for her to say a word. I just pull her to me and kiss her like there’s no tomorrow, like someone that’s almost lost everything and everyone she loves.
I figure this is the start of everything good in my life, after so much bad, and I’m not afraid of anything anymore.
Not even high places.
EPILOGUE
GRACELYNN
WALPURGIS NIGHT, 1981
Caro just left, with all her grandbabies in tow, and I’m tuckered out from braiding daisy chains and chasing them around the maypole all afternoon. Somehow, even without a blood tie to Anneliese, one of them has our gift—the youngest—Jessica. It crackles off her like summer lightning. I’ll pass this grimoire on to her when it’s time, just like Granny did with me, and then she’ll add her own knowledge for her granddaughter someday, because that’s what we do in this family. We carry things through, and then we pass them on.
It’s been a curseless fifty years so far, filled with nothing but happiness and love. I have no reason to think the next fifty years will be any different.
Sometime after midnight, I take Abby’s hand and lead her to our bedroom up in the loft, where the sweet scent of lilacs comes through the open window. In the distance, an owl hoots mournfully against the trickle of the spring. Underneath it all, a train chugs along with its promise of far-off places. But just like the curse that used to plague this land, the girl who couldn’t wait to leave Tin Mountain is long gone.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize that home is less about the place you live, and more about the people who love you. The memories you make. The laughter and tears and all the moments in between.
Home is Esme and Granny, their ashes spread under the peach tree where they used to feed the chickens and steal kisses. They had a whole twenty years of loving before they passed within a month of each other. Peaceful, in their sleep. Home is Morris and Seth, almost two thousand miles away in San Francisco, growing old together in their tiny apartment—and still looking at the same stars I look at, every night.
Home is Caro and her brood of kids and grandkids, and the way she no longer calls me Gracie, but “Mama.” I reckon I’ve earned that honor.
And even though it has its flaws, Tin Mountain is home, too. It always has been. It’s the women lining up outside our apothecary, still occasionally paying me with ham hocks and zucchini in exchange for herbal tonics to soothe their babies so they might get some sleep themselves. It’s Calvina’s tearoom and boardinghouse at the old Bledsoe place, and the memory of Ebba’s silly, girlish laughter. It’s the monument to Anneliese in the town square that the townsfolk put up as a penance, the year after the storm. It’s the way the sun lingers long in summer and the first frost of autumn turns the maple leaves from scarlet to silver.