Season of the Dragonflies (33 page)

She glanced up at James, who was staring out the window. She wanted an excuse to stop thinking about the past. She narrowed her eyes in what she hoped was a sultry manner and said, “Again?”

He rubbed his lips together and nodded, and she opened her arms to invite him, grateful for her bed being so fully occupied after all these years, grateful for a chance to shut out the world and forget everyone but James and herself.

M
YA DIDN'T HAVE
the energy to ask Luke about the girl who'd answered his phone, but she had to or she wouldn't be able to concentrate. She went ahead and assumed he was fucking her on the side and told herself that was okay. He said he loved Mya. So what, right? She didn't say it back and never intended to, so she couldn't expect him to stick around as her recreational entertainment. She thought he was satisfied in that area of their arrangement, but if he wasn't, she couldn't hold it against him. He was young. She was not. He wanted commitment. She did not. Why, then, did it piss her off to the tenth degree?

She needed to drive, to feel in control, despite her swollen leg. Mya loved Luke's burly truck. The deeper she drove into the Blue Ridge Parkway, the more the roads curved, the larger the overlooks became, and the more altitude they gained, the closer Mya came to asking him, mostly because he wasn't asking her much of anything, not even why she was being so quiet. Soon they had passed Crooked Overlook, the blue mountain peaks stacked against one another like folding triangles and the clouds motionless in the valley like a blanket of floating snow. Mya couldn't handle the stillness anymore.

“So who was she?” she asked. And never before had Mya felt so old.

“She?” Luke said.

Mya gripped the tattered steering wheel cover.

“You know what I'm talking about,” Mya said, and the mountain walls blurred as they accelerated by. “Don't act like you don't know.”

“Just one of Jena's friends.” Luke tried to hold Mya's free hand but she slid it beneath her thigh.

“She didn't sound sixteen.”

“Maybe she's fifteen, I don't know, all my sister's friends look fifteen.” Luke looked genuinely mystified. “Why?”

Why? That was a really good question.
Why
did this matter to Mya?

Luke nudged her thigh. “Seriously, why'd you ask?”

“No reason.”

“Jealous.” He smiled like a little boy, his one dimple exposed.

“Don't get a hard-on.” And then Mya looked over at him, taking her eyes off the winding mountain roads that she knew by heart. He wouldn't stop staring until she relented and smiled. “Maybe a little jealous,” she confessed.

“Good,” he said. “Mya Lenore is a normal girl.”

“Normal” was not how you described a woman who made suicide spells by accident. “Normal” had never been a word Mya used to describe herself. She was not normal. Dangerous, careless, foolish, but certainly not normal. And why, of all feelings, would jealousy seem normal to anyone?

“So then you do love me?” Luke asked.

Mya turned her face away like he'd splattered grease on her. A buck stood at the edge of the road ahead of them. “Watch that,” he said, and she said, “I see him.”

“Don't avoid the subject,” he pressed.

“I'm not.” They passed the buck and he stared at their truck, then they passed a soapstone wall with a sign that read,
BEWARE
OF
FALLING
ROCKS
. She'd passed the sign many times and never paid attention to it, but today it felt ominous.

“How much farther?” she said. She hadn't visited the Cascades in a few years, preferred the pond on her land to the small, cold pool at the bottom of the waterfall, but it was a nice secluded place with few visitors. A protected place. When Luke suggested it, she'd accepted like no other idea would do, but she didn't tell him about Peter Sable. Mya'd never been threatened before, and she wasn't quite sure what to do. Peter was raging, and probably she was nervous for nothing—it was absurd to think he'd come after her physically; he wasn't the Hells Angels of movie star managers—but still, the mountains and Luke were the only things that made her feel secure.

“Not far,” he said. At the upcoming bend in the road, Mya spotted another herd of deer, five of them and a fawn, but Luke didn't say anything this time.

Luke changed the radio station to Rock 95.3 and the eerie sounds of Pink Floyd's “The Wall” grew louder in the cab. “You love me,” Luke said. “I know you do. Mya Lenore, you love me.”

She wished he'd stop talking. Perhaps he thought that if he tortured her she'd finally acquiesce. When you'd hurt and driven away as many people as Mya had, you never wanted to reveal anything again, not even the most essential of feelings. Not even love. Not even to yourself.

“You love me like your deer,” Luke told her. “Admit it.”

“I do not.”

“But you
do
. Why's that so hard?”

“Because I don't know how, that's why,” Mya said. Her body felt like it was filled with buzzing bees, and she kept her vision fixated on the deer, their bodies frozen but at any moment prepared to leap.

He reached over and squeezed her arm. “Promise me you'll try.” But before she could respond, Luke said, “Watch them,” and pointed to the deer just ten feet ahead of them.

Mya peered into her rearview mirror and said, “This guy.”

“What?” Luke said, and looked into his side mirror.

The driver had come out of nowhere since she last looked behind her, but that was normal on the parkway. Locals sped, the roads were windy, tourists drove slowly. Luke said, “Make him tail you, he'll get it.”

“He's on my ass,” Mya said, and instead of slowing down, she sped up. “He wants to pass, that fucking asshole.”

“Just let him go.”

Mya eased her foot off the gas and they decelerated, the herd of deer now visible in Mya's mirror. As the SUV came up on the left, Mya glimpsed a bald man in a white collared shirt and black sunglasses looking directly into their truck just as Luke said in a bewildered voice, “What the fuck's he looking at?” The SUV slowed down just ahead of them in the passing lane and didn't move over, and Mya's heart began to beat three times too fast. Luke said, “What's he doing?”

Luke reached over and blasted the car horn, which made Mya even more alarmed. This was some kind of hit man sent from L.A. because she'd killed Zoe, she knew it. The end had come for her, and she'd take Luke with her. Her arms shook and she began to make a noise like a cross between a hum and a shout, and Luke said, “Calm down,” but he sounded unsure too. A sign for their turnoff to the Cascades was on the right side of the road, along with the sign for the Cascades Overlook. Just as she approached the opening on the right for the overlook parking, the SUV swerved in front of Luke's truck, cutting them off and nearly clipping the headlights. The SUV hit its brakes to handle the curve and Luke shouted, “Oh shit,” as Mya tried to gain control of the wheel, and all she could see was the deep vertical drop from the overlook into the mountains below, and she wanted to close her eyes but she absolutely couldn't. Mya overcorrected to the left but slowed down to avoid rear-ending the guy, and she felt the truck trying to fishtail, but she held on to the wheel. The SUV pulled into the semicircle turnoff for the overlook, its reflection growing farther away in her side mirror. Peter Sable's hit man was not chasing her to avenge Zoe Bennett's death—and for the first time all day Mya felt relieved and happy and absolutely ridiculous for almost wrecking Luke's truck and possibly their lives because of her paranoia.

T
HE CLOUD COVER
broke and freed the sunlight, but it wasn't the brightness that woke her. The scent of the flowers enveloped them like a blanket. Lucia opened her eyes and squinted until she no longer saw black spots. Her arm had intertwined with Ben's as they slept, their naked bodies attached at the hip, their clothes tossed all around them. Lucia squeezed Ben's arm and he woke to the same image: the hedge nearest them had stretched and constructed a canopy over Lucia and Ben. The hedges were taller than Lucia had ever seen them before, and the flowers were a healthy white again. Except when she propped herself up on her elbows and detached herself from Ben, the plants pulled away and the flowers began to turn green. Ben sat next to Lucia, hip to hip, and the blossoms that had been in the process of hardening and turning green were once again softening, succulent, and white as an angel.

Ben gripped her hand hard before he whispered, “It's like they healed because we . . .” But he wouldn't finish his thought.

“We what?” Lucia said, and looked over at his naked torso, the defined muscles in his abdomen, and the strength in his arms. He was better than she remembered. Much better. Enthusiastic but in control. Lucia had never had an orgasm with him all those years ago, and if it took different lovers for her to come back to Ben and be in sync with him, then she'd made the right choice. Emotionally it was like they'd never parted.

“It's too insane.” He pulled his clothes over and covered his exposed lap.

“Say it.”

Ben put on his shirt and stood to put on his boxers, and the flowers straightened, just like him. He stepped away from them and hurried his tasks. “Like they grew because we, you know, because.”

“Had sex?” Lucia laughed, still seated in the grass.

“Exactly.”

Lucia hugged her knees to her bare chest. Being naked in this field with this man—she could do this all day long. “It's not crazy.”

“But it's impossible,” Ben said.

“Suppose it isn't.” Lucia stood up before him, and he darted his eyes away from her body but then immediately looked back.

Ben threw his hands in the air. “So they want you to have sex, that's what you think?”

“They're not perverted.” Lucia put her hands on his chest. “It's not like that.”

“They won't procreate unless you do?” His face turned from tight disapproval to a state of shock.

Lucia hugged him, let her ear fall against his chest, and listened to his breath. She laughed once and then again, and more, until she couldn't control herself. “That's exactly it, I think.”

“No way,” Ben said softly, as if he'd just found out he was having twins. “They're not flowers. They look like flowers and smell like flowers, but they're not flowers at all.”

Lucia held him for fear that he might start running.

“Like they're your biological clock or something.”

“People still use that phrase?”

“I don't know.” Ben finally let his arms relax around her.

Lucia said, “Mom needs to retire, and soon, and Mya and I, well, we're just not in that part of our lives. I thought I was, but it didn't happen with Jonah and I never thought I'd come back anyway, even if I had kids. Figured Mya would have the babies my mother wanted. My mother and her mother and her mother's mother, they all had daughters before they were thirty. Why didn't I think about this? I don't know.”

Ben was listening carefully, she could tell, but he wouldn't look at Lucia. He stared at his bare feet buried in the grass. Finally he crossed his arms and went into professor mode: “Let me, just for a moment, let me straighten this out, okay? You're telling me that I have to go see your mother, who's expecting a reason and a solution for these acres of dying plants, the very bedrock of your family's money, and I have to tell her the only way I can save the flower is to fuck her daughter?”

“ ‘Fuck' might not be the best word.” Lucia put her clothes back on. “I can tell her, don't worry. I'll just say I have to find someone and fall in love and have a baby. Or Mya does. But maybe just me, who knows?” She took a deep breath and felt a flash of heat in her body from all the responsibility that thought entailed. “Just those small things. No need for you to confirm it.”

Ben didn't respond at first, and then he said, “You think it takes love to make the flowers move like that?”

“Did I say that?”

“You did,” he said.

A baby alone could save the flowers. Maybe. But the past usually held the answers, and if the past was anything to go by, then Lucia knew she had to be inexplicably, vulnerably in love to fulfill the expectation. She had to love like Great-Grandmother Serena had loved her husband. Love the way Grandmother Lily had loved her husband. The way Willow must've loved Lucia's father at some point, but definitely the way she loved Mya and Lucia. To risk for love. And to sacrifice. Serena couldn't have foreseen this loveless, childless generation of Lenore women; she probably never considered that rotting fruit can hang on a healthy vine.

Lucia reached out her hand for Ben to hold. “I think I did say that.”

“I can't see your mother now,” Ben said, gesturing to his rumpled, grass-stained clothes.

“I understand.”

“Can we go to my house? And talk about this over dinner?”

“Are you upset?” Lucia dropped his hand to give him space, but then he took it back and pulled her close.

“Terrified,” Ben said, and he kissed her like fear was a necessary evil.

M
YA AWOKE TO
sunlight. Her pupils adjusted, and she looked to the right side. Luke's head and neck were caught in a hole in the windshield, his ratty seat belt unwound like the unfurled tape in a cassette. Mya tried to say his name, but she couldn't open her mouth and couldn't find her voice, and instead she moaned. Her seat belt was tight, her side of the windshield smashed open, and she saw her blood on the door and steering wheel and looked down to find it on her pant leg as well. The inside of the cab smelled like iron. She tried to say, “Oh, God, what happened?” but it sounded like she was gargling mouthwash, and the warm blood spilled down her chin and the front of her T-shirt. Her tongue found the space where her back teeth had been, and Mya jerked her torso back and forth in her seat but couldn't break free.