by Emily France
“You’re serious? You found this?”
“Yeah, by the campsite. In the woods.” Essa ran a finger over the Pure Buds label. “She left clues, Mom. She wants to be found. Maybe there’s still time.”
“Ayden,” Essa’s mom whispered. “Ayden.”
“You recognize it?”
“She said something.”
Essa stood up and sat on the edge of the bed. “What did she say? Was he a boyfriend? A crush?”
“I can’t remember . . .” Essa’s mom reached over to her bedside table, fumbling for her multicolored glass pipe. “Hand me the lighter, will you?”
“No.”
Her mother rolled her eyes and reached for her pipe and lighter herself. She pulled them into her lap. “Essa, I need to—”
“When?” Essa said. “When did Puck mention Ayden?”
Her mom shook her head. “I was with Ronnie. It was late. We were in the kitchen making bread with some seeds he brought.”
Essa sat there, eyes wide, waiting for her to go on.
She didn’t.
“Mom, think.” Essa’s voice was climbing. “What did she say?”
“Puck came in the kitchen. Said she couldn’t sleep and that she wanted to wait up for a piece of bread.” She stopped, leaned over again, and pulled open her bedside table drawer. She took out a small bag of green buds and loaded her pipe. “This will help me remember.” She held the lighter over the bowl, circling the flame, wrapping her lips around the end of the pipe, drawing in a breath, drawing the heat over the dried green knot, sending a thin line of smoke snaking into the air. She rocked back and forth as it hit her. Her face softened, relaxed. Her shoulders eased down a little. She softly closed her eyes. “I don’t know. I can’t . . .”
“Think. Think hard. What was Ronnie saying? What were you saying? Did Puck say why she couldn’t sleep? Had she been drinking too much Kool-Aid or—”
Essa’s mom opened her eyes. “She said she’d heard a sad story. At school, I think.”
“A sad story? About what?”
Her mother kept rocking back and forth. Back and forth.
You don’t remember.
Essa glanced back at Puck’s picture in her mother’s locket. “Were you high? When Puck came in?”
Her mother’s answer was a whisper. And a nod. “Yes.”
Essa stared at her mother’s bowl. The blackened bud against the bright colors of the glass. The smell of burning. The smell of forgetting. The smell of escape.
“You say it will help you remember,” Essa said slowly. She twisted the Edi-Sweets bag in her hands. “But it’s what helps you forget.”
“I’m sorry, I—” Her mother stopped and reached into the drawer again.
“Just stop, Mom. Don’t smoke anymore. You’re already . . .”
“I’m not getting more,” she said. She ran her hands through the junk in the drawer. She brushed aside pens and old rubber bands. ChapStick and bookmarks. Crystals and pennies. “Here.” She held up a photograph.
Essa leaned in. It was a photo of a young woman in high-waisted pants. She had cropped hair and was wearing pearls. She was holding a small child. A little girl. Essa recognized the look in the child’s eyes. “That’s you,” Essa said. “And is that . . . my grandmother? Holding you?”
Her mother’s eyes were turning redder by the second. Glassy. She nodded. “You never got to meet her. But growing up, she was so strict with me, Essa. So strict.” Her mother looked up at the ceiling like her memories were plastered there, a collage over her head, a lifetime to watch as she fell asleep each night. “She wouldn’t let me do anything. Talk to boys. Go out with friends. Nothing. It was awful. So awful.” Her mom looked back at the pipe in her lap.
Her mom was high. Her voice had that familiar faraway sound to it.
It made Essa sick.
She stood to go.
I don’t want to listen. I want to find Puck.
“I just never wanted to be like that, you know?” her mother asked. “So strict. So cold. I told myself if I ever had kids, I’d be fun. Chill. The cool mom.”
Essa looked at her mother, so pitiful there in a heap of purple velvet. With a bowl in her lap. With a faded picture of the past. “That isn’t what kids want, Mom. Not really.”
“Yeah? Well, what is it that they want?”
“They just want your attention. Your complete and undivided attention. For you to be with them when you’re with them. To be here when you’re here. You don’t have to be rich. You don’t have to have a fancy Boulder house. Or a villa in Aspen. But wherever you live, you have to be there. Just . . . there.”
“I’m always here. I—”
“You aren’t. You forget everything. You never pay attention. When Puck talked. When she told you things.”
Her mother hung her head, stared again into her pipe.
“And now this clue,” Essa said, holding up the Edi-Sweets bag and the note about Ayden. “This could lead us to Puck. It could save her life. And it’s up to you. And you don’t remember. She left this for you.” Essa stopped. She heard Puck’s voice in her head.
What Puck said about why she liked Oliver when she first met him.
“He took me seriously. About my dragon. He was paying attention.”
What Puck said during the fight with their mother on Pearl Street about the mala. How Puck had explained to their mom three times what the beads were.
“See, Essa? She never listens.”
What Puck said, standing in Above the Clouds with tears in her eyes when Essa busted her on the computer. When Essa said their mother would be so mad if she found out Puck was ordering stuff online again.
“She won’t even notice. She’s too busy making out with half of Boulder.”
What Puck said when she was sitting on her bed working on the Puzzle Kite, hoping it had the horse kite inside.
“I told her five times I wanted the horse kite. And she kept saying she’d buy it. But I could tell she wasn’t even listening.”
“Oh my god,” Essa said slowly. Her mother looked up from her pipe. Her glassy eyes red-rimmed with tears.
“What now?”
“They’re all for you,” Essa said. She locked her clear eyes on her mother’s foggy ones. “All the clues. She left them for you. They’re all about things you weren’t paying attention to. She wanted you to find her. To teach you a lesson about . . .”
Essa stopped and dug in her bag. She fumbled for the Puzzle Kite Puck had left under her mother’s bed. She popped open the top and took out the drawing of the wheel of the Dharma with the darkened spoke. In front of Old Tibet, Puck had said that each spoke stood for a step on Buddha’s Eightfold Path. Essa ran into Puck’s room, turned on a light, and looked up at her sister’s poster. The Dharma wheel on it wasn’t labeled. Essa crouched in front of Puck’s bookshelves, searching for a book on Buddhism. She found one and flipped to the index in the back.
“The Eightfold Path,” she whispered, running her finger down the page. “There.” She turned to the section. There was a drawing of the wheel of the Dharma. With eight spokes. The first spoke pointing directly north was Right View, the first step. Moving clockwise, the next spokes were Right Thinking, Right Speech, Right Action. The spoke pointing directly south was Right Livelihood. Then Right Effort.
Essa stared at the next spoke. The spoke pointing directly west. The spoke that Puck had darkened on the wheel she left under her mother’s bed. The spoke that was the very first clue, that pointed west to her mother’s bedroom, to the mala and the clue about the sticks and stones:
Right Mindfulness.
The step on Buddha’s Eightfold Path that was about paying attention. Being aware. The teaching that suffering—dhukha—could be eased by bringing our minds and our bodies to the present moment. Out of the storm of our thoughts of th
e past and the future and what we have or don’t have and into the present. Into the cup of smoky lapsang tea. Into the breath. Into the awe of something as simple as a paper towel. The tree it was made of, the water that fed the tree, the sun that turned its leaves green. Awe. Awareness. Presence. Peace.
Right Mindfulness.
“Essa.”
Her mother was standing in Puck’s doorway, pipe in hand. She held it out. “I’ll stop. I will.” She looked at Essa, begging. “Just find her.”
July 1
38
ESSA
Mrs. Connelly was picking up a pile of scripts that had fallen on the auditorium floor. They were for the school’s first production of the next school year: Peter Pan.
“Essa,” Mrs. Connelly said, nearly dropping the scripts in her arms. Her short gray hair was in tightly permed coils, and she was a wearing a T-shirt that read, keep the drama on the stage. university hill elementary school drama camp.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” she said, tears welling in her eyes. “I could barely finish the drama camp without Puck. We are all so sad. They brought counselors in to help the kids understand.”
Essa smiled weakly. “Thank you. And I never got to thank you for letting her do the camp for free.”
“Of course,” Mrs. Connelly said. She held up a script. “I had already pegged her for the roll of Tinker Bell next year.”
Essa imagined Puck in a fairy costume, her blonde hair in a high ponytail, her feet in little green shoes. She’d be perfect. And she’d love it. Essa looked up on the stage and imagined her sister there, flying back and forth. The dusty red stage curtain was partly open. A few kids dashed back and forth behind it.
“Um, I was wondering,” Essa began. “About your students. If you had one named Ayden in the camp this year? With a weird spelling. It’s A-Y-D-E-N.”
Mrs. Connelly put the scripts down in one of the auditorium seats. “Ayden,” she said slowly. “No. We had a Cayden? And a Jade. But no Ayden.”
“What about in the rest of the school? Is there an Ayden at all?”
“Oh gosh, I wouldn’t know . . .” Mrs. Connelly looked puzzled. “Why do you ask?”
“It’s just that Puck told my mom a story about someone named Ayden. A sad story. But my mom can’t remember it.” Essa stopped. “We think it may have been Puck’s boyfriend. She wrote ‘Puck + Ayden’ on a note. We’d just like to know, that’s all. None of us knew she had a crush.”
“Puck? A crush?” Mrs. Connelly flashed a sad smile. “Well, that little stinker. I never saw her with a boy, if that’s what you mean. And she certainly wasn’t a flirt. I think she intimidated all the boys in drama camp anyway.”
Essa smiled. “She was smart.” She reached in her bag and ran her hand over the Puzzle Kite box. “Smarter than any of us even knew.”
“I’m so sorry—”
“Thanks,” Essa cut her off. She suspected Mrs. Connelly was going to say she was sorry for Essa’s loss again. Essa couldn’t stand to hear it one more time. “I hope Peter Pan is a hit.”
“Thank you,” Mrs. Connelly said, her face still filled with pity.
Essa took one last look at the stage. The one her sister loved to be on. The one she might never be on again. Essa turned and made her way slowly toward the auditorium exit.
“Wait,” Mrs. Connelly called. She hurried down the aisle, waving for Essa to stop. “Ayden. I just remembered. We did a unit on safety in the city. And one on wilderness safety, too. We’re a downtown school in the mountains after all.” Students on the stage behind her started giggling. Mrs. Connelly glanced over her shoulder at them. “Anyway, I’ve got to run. But Ayden. You asked about him?”
“You know him?”
“Not personally. But he was a student here in the nineties. He went hiking with his family and family friends, and . . .” Mrs. Connelly paused, like she didn’t want to say the rest.
“And?”
“And he disappeared. They finally ruled that he was taken by a mountain lion. They only found his shoes.”
At the mention of a mountain lion, memories flooded Essa’s mind. The sound of something dragging along the ground outside their shelter the night Puck disappeared. The thought of Puck’s clothes being ripped to shreds by sharp claws and teeth.
But a mountain lion didn’t shred her clothes. She did.
“It hit Puck really hard, that story,” Mrs. Connelly said. “She talked about it. How sad it was. That no one was paying close enough attention to Ayden.”
“Do you know anything else about it?”
Mrs. Connelly shook her head. “I’m afraid not. Sorry I can’t be of more help.”
“Thank you,” Essa said. “You’ve helped more than you know.”
Essa hopped in the backseat of Micah’s idling Jeep. Micah, Anish, and Oliver had been waiting outside the school. “Can one of you rich kids with the unlimited data plans hand me a phone? I need to search the Net for Ayden.”
“Here.” Oliver handed Essa his cell. “So she knew something?”
“Yep. There was a kid who was a student here in the nineties named Ayden. He went missing in the woods. Mrs. Connelly heard Puck talk about it.”
Essa searched for “Ayden” and “Colorado.” The hits were all over the place. There were sites about men named Ayden who were long dead and gone. Burial records from the early 1900s, funeral announcements in the Boulder Daily Camera. She scrolled down.
“Here it is,” she said slowly. “Ayden Beech. He was six. Ran ahead of his family while they were hiking and disappeared.” She stopped. Looked at Oliver. “In the Comanche Peak Wilderness.” She handed Oliver the phone. “Read the rest; I don’t think I can.”
Oliver read the article out loud. “‘There was confusion in the hiking party. The group split into two. The group at the front thought Ayden was back with the others. And the group in the back thought he’d run ahead to the front.’”
Essa pictured a little kid racing along the trail, alone between the two groups. Everyone thinking they knew where he was, but no one really did.
They weren’t paying close enough attention.
“No one was paying attention,” she said slowly. “That’s what gave Puck the idea to run away in Comanche. To make her point about mindfulness.”
“Ayden,” Oliver said. “He wasn’t her boyfriend . . . he was her inspiration.”
Essa couldn’t get the image of Ayden out of her mind. No one realized he was gone. Until it was too late.
Maybe it’s too late for Puck, too.
“Come here,” Oliver said, next to her in the backseat. He pulled her close, and she rested her head on his shoulder.
“Show me where you saw the Ayden note. In the shop,” Essa said. “It’s all we’ve got.”
39
OLIVER
“It was right here,” Oliver said. They all stood in the storage room of Above the Clouds. Anish was searching the room for anything else Puck could have left behind and Micah was searching the front of the store. Oliver pointed to the spot on the computer table where he saw the Ayden note. “I’d just started working here. It was my first day. And I saw all these lollipop wrappers on the table, and this little white note in the middle of them. ‘Puck + Ayden.’ And circles. It makes sense now. The circles must be—”
“Dharma wheels,” Essa said.
Oliver sat down at the computer. He looked at the tabletop. Under it. On the sides. Looking for another note. Another clue. He didn’t find one. He looked back at the darkened computer screen and moved the mouse, waiting for the screen to light up. He typed in the password.
“Here,” Anish said, holding out a handful of lollipops. “Eat one of these. Keep your strength up.”
Essa smiled. “Thank you.”
“Ugh,” Oliver said.
“What? You don’t like these flavors?�
�� Anish stared at the candy. “There’s bubble gum, apple, cherry. The only one I’m missing is grape.”
“No, no. The password isn’t working. Is Jan around?”
“I’ll go see.” Essa pushed open the swinging storage room door. She was back through it in minutes with Jan in tow.
Oliver hadn’t seen Jan in a while. She was still wearing a flowing white top, a long necklace. He got a kick out of remembering the first time he met her. How he thought she might be some sort of Yoda figure. Always saying something wise. He remembered how foreign Boulder seemed. How sleepy. How small.
Now it felt bigger than any place he’d ever been. Full of koans. And Zen priests. And Essa.
“Password trouble?” Jan asked, swooping onto the stool.
“Goflyakite isn’t working,” Oliver said. “I tried it three times.”
“I changed it. Too many people knew it.” Jan smiled. “You’re gonna love the new one.”
They all peered at the screen as Jan typed in the new code: BadasstheDragon.
“I love it,” Essa said.
Oliver smiled, thinking of Badass with her flaming blue scales and giant open wings. Jan hit enter and the screen lit up just as the storage room door swung open and whacked against the wall.
“Kite club’s here.” It was Micah. “They need fifteen winders. And ten pieces of line laundry. Preferably the giant squid. I don’t even think we have three.” Micah pulled a cardboard box down from the shelf and started rummaging through it. He cast a glance at Jan. “And please notice I’m working off the clock, out of the abundant kindness in my heart.”
“Noted,” Jan said. “I will hang your employee of the year plaque as soon as possible.”
Micah looked at the computer screen. “You find Puck’s kite app?” he asked.
“No, I want to look up the news stories on Ayden,” Oliver said. “That kid who went missing in the nineties.”