Season of the Dragonflies (37 page)

“The outcome doesn't change based on intent,” James said, and both Willow and Lucia looked at him.

Willow stopped staring at James. “Yes, that's true.”

“She didn't mean to,” Lucia pressed. “She's just reckless.”

“Doesn't make it right.” Willow's voice was flat.

No one answered.

“But she's family,” Willow said. “For God's sake, I made her.”

Lucia placed her hands on her stomach and a sudden terror overtook her body—she had no way to control who she would birth into the world or what would happen to her, for good or for ill.

“She's family,” Willow repeated. “I just don't know if I should protect her like this. I'm not even sure she deserves it.”

Lucia had never thought her mother would talk this way about either of them. Mya didn't have malicious intent. She'd never been good at dealing with her problems. She always went for the easiest way and she didn't learn from her mistakes, even when she was the one who ended up being hurt. But her sister wasn't a murderer. Lucia said, “I don't think you should.”

“I can't do it.” Willow began gathering the supplies to return them to the cabinet.

Lucia laid one hand on her mother's. “Mya asked me, not you, and I want to try.”

Willow continued to stack the bottles where she first found them. “I can't let you.”

“I think she wants to be forgiven,” Lucia said.

Willow paused.

“Please just let me try. I'm going for something longer lasting. Something committed.”

“We'll step out then.” Willow and James walked out of the workshop, and Lucia commandeered Mya's stool.

How many times she'd wanted to be the one front and center. But Mya defended her space. Lucia had hated her for it—white, jealous hatred. But it was Mya's one thing, this space. It was what she loved. Protecting that was all she had. Lucia didn't agree with her sister all the time, but Mya was family, and Lucia wanted her to be alive and well. Motherhood might be the last grace available to Mya, to sacrifice and put another person's needs before her own. This was the pinnacle experience that Mya needed in order to change, and Lucia had to bottle it somehow.

Lucia glanced at the vials her mother had first arranged on the table: orange blossom, clove, civet,
Gardenia potentiae,
bergamot, vanilla, and ambergris.
Too complicated,
Lucia thought as she stared at the line of bottles, and she returned all but her family's essence to the shelves. Stored high up, perhaps as a way to restrict its use, Mya kept a bottle of attar of roses and oud oil, two of the most expensive essential oils in the world, scents that she'd first encountered in Paris on their very first summer trip to the Dubois shop. The richest of experiences needed the richest of scents. Lucia found a stool and used it to reach the bottles. She eased each one off the shelf.

Willow walked into the workshop holding a small wooden box and placed it on the table.

Lucia climbed down and said, “What's that?”

“Something you left behind.” Willow smiled and then pointed to the bottles. “Interesting choices.”

Inside the box were old handwritten letters from high school. Some from her classmates, but most of the letters were from Ben. “Where were these?” Lucia asked in surprise.

“Kept them in the office,” Willow told her. “I had a hunch you might want them someday.”

The house had always been cluttered from her mother's little intuitions, just like this one. “Thanks.”

“We're heading back to the hospital now.”

“Ben's coming over and we'll be there soon.”

“You can do this,” Willow assured her.

Lucia hoped for that to be true. She'd had one vision, the first one in her entire life, but that didn't guarantee she could blend a protection spell.

James appeared in the doorway. “Can I drive again?” He jingled the keys.

Willow said, “I suppose,” as if she were put out, but Lucia could tell her mother loved his playfulness.

Once they left, Lucia opened the box and unfolded a stack of notebook paper filled with Ben's handwriting. Skinny letters leaning up and to the right. She scanned through pages and pages of letters detailing his days with intermittent declarations of his love. Lucia stopped when she came across a passage about the parkway on her eighteenth birthday—it was the first thunderstorm of the spring season and the first time she knew for sure she was leaving him for New York City, and she didn't know how to tell him.

I was thinking about your birthday, how the roads were winding through a foggy mist and flashes of lightning filled the valley below us for seconds, illuminating the vastness before turning black again, and when the rain finally stopped we pulled over on the side of the road. You got out first and began to walk ahead of me and I was worried something was wrong that you weren't sharing, but then you stopped and we stood in the middle of a cloud, and I asked you to dance with me and told you I wished it could always be this way between us, but you didn't say anything. I'll never forget that day for as long as I live. I've never loved anyone or anything like I love you and I always will. I promise you that, no matter what happens.

Lucia remembered that foggy night, and she remembered thinking how many other places and other people she needed to meet. So much to do and accomplish. What a scared and immature girl she'd been not to tell him what she was thinking. He knew anyway. He knew she'd leave him, but he kept writing anyway. Ben had loved her all these years, just like this letter promised he would, and he had a compelling love to offer, a kind that can only be sustained by the faithful. It was her turn to learn this kind of love. And Mya's turn too.

She smoothed his letter on the table like a place mat and put the glass vial on top. She released thirty-six drops of the attar of roses for Mya, thirty-three drops of oud oil for herself, and then four drops of their family's oil for the mother-and-child unions to come. She closed her eyes and recalled her acting classes in small studios in Union Square and how she learned to access sadness to call forth genuine tears. Lucia took this letter, her absent father, her divorce from Jonah, and all her handicaps along the way, and she shoved them aside and wrapped her arms around her belly, soon to swell with a love unlike any before, and from that place she brought forth tears and caught one in the vial. She capped the bottle and shook it to blend the oils together, then placed it back on Ben's letter. Flanking the vial with both of her hands and with all the love she could possibly imagine, Lucia activated the energy in her palms. The vial shook in the center, and Lucia kept her love pouring forth from her hands. Lucia wrapped it in a purple cloth, swirled the liquid together once more, and said, “For Mya and Luke and a child, to protect them in love forevermore.”

W
E SHOULD GRAB
some lunch and a drink maybe,” James said as they stood in Mya's room, watching her sleep. His phone rang and he said, “Hang on,” and walked out of the room and back to the lobby.

The swelling in Mya's face had gone down, but she still had the puffiness of a newborn in her cheeks and neck. Willow's grown daughter looked like her baby. They'd lived together for so long that Willow no longer noticed Mya's upturned nose, her pouty lips, and the exquisite jawline so many boys had fallen for, the same features as her father. Willow had been proud of her daughter's arresting beauty, which never failed to make strangers stop and say, “Oh, she's stunning.” The longer they'd lived together, the less Mya had seemed a daughter and the more she'd become a roommate and difficult friend. For all their intimacy, Willow didn't feel close to Mya like she should have. Lucia's long absence had stunted her as a teenager in Willow's memory, the intervening years unable to shape what Willow's imagination had sealed. She didn't have the same experience with Mya. For the sake of their relationship, Mya should've left home, and Lucia and Willow should've pushed her to do so.

That's it, then.
Willow stroked the light hairs on Mya's arm and pushed down the loose tape holding in her IV. So that's why James had finally come to Willow, to help Mya feel like she didn't have to stay in Quartz Hollow to act as her guardian any longer. She'd always been the protective one. For so long Willow had focused on Mya's anger and her mistakes, but not this part of her daughter, the part that was good. “I'm sorry, sweetie,” Willow said softly. So many times she'd felt like such an awful, humbled human being because of motherhood.

Willow turned because she could feel James approaching. He opened the glass door. “Work.” He waved his phone in the air like evidence.

“You need to go?” She hadn't let herself think about his pending departure. The idea that the two of them might retire right here in Quartz Hollow and have the cabin all to themselves was just fine by Willow.

“Zoe's funeral, lots of press,” James said, “and the director postponed shooting but wants Jennifer back in the film. My assistants are overwhelmed. And the LAPD left a message. Want to know if I know anything about a missing perfume. They say Zoe's manager won't stop yammering about it. I called the chief back and it appears they aren't putting much stock in Peter's claims. The final cause of death is the hanging, but they say they needed to follow up, for procedure.”

Willow looked around Mya's room to make sure no one was near. “Do you know anything?”

“I have no idea about any perfume,” James said.

“You told him that?” As much as Willow wanted to sound playful, she couldn't. She had never asked him to cover for her or her daughter, nor had she asked him to stay here while Mya recovered. But he had chosen to, and that was out of Willow's control.

James said, “How about that drink?”

Willow nodded and patted Mya's arm once more. A nurse in teddy-bear-print scrubs passing by Willow in the long white hall said, “She's doing good, Ms. Lenore,” and flashed a big smile. Willow thanked her and right then remembered the woman's mother, who had the same wide smile. Lenore Incorporated had financed her business, Joanne's Salon on Main Street. “How's your mom?” Willow asked, and the nurse stopped, her white shoes squeaking on the waxed floor.

“She's good,” she said. “Business is good. I'll tell her you say hello.”

“Please. And tell her I'm due for a trim.”

“Will do.”

They stepped into the elevator and James said, “Everyone's so nice.”

“It's the mountains,” Willow told him, pushing the “G” button.

“I always thought it was the South.” James adjusted his collar in his reflection in the metal doors.

“That too.” The elevator began to descend. “Do you think I see my daughters too much?” She looked over at him.

“Distance makes the heart grow fonder.” He took her hand.

“You believe that?”

“I have to,” James answered. “I'm leaving tomorrow.”

“Oh yes,” Willow said, but she'd forgotten, perhaps by choice. The doors opened on the ground floor. A piano in the lobby played Chopin by itself next to a large planting of fake bamboo. The nurse at the front desk looked like she might take a nap. Dark clouds filled the windows.

James asked, “Should we drive?”

“Storm's coming,” Willow said, and James seemed very pleased with himself, like he had wished for a storm just so they couldn't walk. Driving a stick shift in the mountains was his new favorite activity. She handed him the keys.

“Right this way.” James took her by the arm, and just as they pushed through the revolving door, Willow saw Ben and Lucia coming toward the main entrance.

Willow waved; Ben saw her first and they trotted over. “You're leaving?” Lucia said. “In this?”

“Mya's asleep. James is leaving tomorrow.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.” Ben shook James's hand. “It was good to meet you. Your studio produces the best stuff.”

“Thanks,” James said. “I like to think so, but it's good to hear.”

“Big fan of
The Memory Makers
. Easton's best,” Ben said.

“I agree,” Lucia added.

“You two should come out to L.A. soon, before I retire,” James said. “I'll show you around.”

“Can I come?” Willow asked.

James stepped away from her. “Truth?”

She wasn't ready for this. And in front of the children? He was breaking up with her? “No,” she started to say, but he began at the same time: “I want you to go back with me tomorrow.”

Lucia smiled and then realized James was serious. “She can't,” Lucia answered for her.

“I know,” James said. “But I want her to.”

Willow's face flushed; Ben noticed and smiled. She gave Ben a hug. “Congratulations. It was meant to be this way.” Willow wanted those two married. She wanted Ben as an official son.

“That's a lovely necklace, Lucia,” James said. Lucia immediately clasped the pendant resting on her breastbone. Willow hadn't even noticed.

“Ben gave it to me,” Lucia said.

“May I see?” Willow said, and Lucia offered up the sterling silver chain. The sparkling blue dragonfly with silver-outlined wings and two ruby eyes landed squarely in Willow's palm. “Gorgeous. From Sarah's shop, I imagine. Is that right?”

“You're right,” Ben said.

Willow did like his taste: Sarah's glass jewelry business was one venture Willow had been especially eager to support. She knew it would be a big hit with the hikers seeking a talisman for the trail. “This will do,” Willow said, “until you find a proper ring.”

At this Lucia's eyes flared, just like Willow knew they would. “Can I talk to you?” Lucia said. “Over there.” She pointed to a bench.