Season of the Dragonflies

by Sarah Creech

  Willow placed a finger in the air. “I haven’t agreed to any changes. Just to hear you out, that’s all.”

  “Same thing,” Mya said.

  Their mother sighed. Willow finally said, “It’s not Lucia.”

  “It’s not?” Mya said.

  “I meant to read it over.”

  “Thank you for finally saying that,” Mya said, and slapped the arms of her chair before jumping up. “Let’s go to my workshop, no time to waste.” Mya ushered Lucia up from her chair and waved for Willow to stand also. Mya led the way out of the office, through the reading room, and to the back of the cabin. The workshop had always been Mya’s sacred space, one she allowed Lucia to enter on select occasions, perhaps as a present for her birthday or for Valentine’s Day. Lucia stepped down into the room and the smell of deep earth, like a freshly dug grave, overpowered her.

  “Is that musk?” Willow said as she glanced around the room, her face lifted upward to catch the scent on the air. “Musk. That’s what it is, but that’s not synthetic.”

  “Nope,” Mya said as she uncovered her wall of dried flowers, “but it’s the solution.”

  This wall was where Mya had always come to gather supplies for the love spells they’d cast. When Mya unveiled the dried herbs Lucia felt nine years old again. Mya had promised it would take many, many years for those spells to come true, and Lucia had believed Mya because she could tame deer and see the future in the clouds. For a while Lucia had believed Jonah had come from those love spells. How very wrong she’d been. Many, many years had passed and Lucia and Mya were both still alone. Their mother too. Maybe something about Lenore women couldn’t be sustained with a partner. Lucia wanted a healthy relationship—she didn’t want to end up alone like her mother, with her career as her only companion.

  Willow said, “Is that it?” and walked to the wall of flowers.

  Lucia stood behind them. A tiny ball hung there: Was it a rock covered with dried moss, or a fig?

  Mya removed it and said, “Watch this,” and she took it to the butcher’s block in the middle of the room. She sliced slowly down the middle and removed a dark and ruddy substance from the inside. It looked like dark sand from a faraway coast. Mya gently placed it into a small glass bowl. She took out a pastry brush and painstakingly wiped out the cavity to make sure nothing was left behind. Lucia wanted to know what she was looking at, but both her mother and Mya were concentrating so hard that Lucia couldn’t step in with a question. She sensed she’d already have known the answer if she’d studied the business as well as they had.

  Willow picked up the sliced-open pod and said, “The last time I held one of these I was in Paris with Mother.”

  Mya took it back from her and cradled it in her palm. “My musk deer died.”

  Mya finished working and put down her tools. “I’ll wash the grains in water I got from the natural spring and let it sit overnight.”

  She pulled up a handle of Cold Creek Appalachian moonshine, made by men who probably still sat at the barbershop in Quartz Hollow all day long waiting for a local to place an order. The Lenore family had always been the largest buyer, as it was the best way to dilute the flower’s essence. The boys kept a cold creek and a storage cave devoted to just their family’s supply. Mya continued, “Tomorrow I’ll dilute it with this. Then I’ll have a musk base unlike anything you can get on the market. Zoe wants to focus on her sensuality, so I’ll add the essence of Gardenia potentiae, orange blossom, patchouli, and Bulgarian rose.”

  “That’s all?” Willow said.

  Mya lifted a small amber bottle and said, “And a few drops of this.”

  Willow took the bottle from her.

  “Don’t smell it,” Mya said, and reached out, but Willow deflected her pass.

  “And why not?” Willow said, and began to remove the top.

  “It’s my hair.”

  Willow stopped and placed the glass bottle on the table. “Excuse me?”

  Mya picked it up as if to guard it. “Well, not anymore. I used the enfleurage method we learned in Paris. Got beef fat from two farms over and spread it on those glass plates and pressed my hair. Took forever to capture, but I got it.”

  Lucia vaguely recalled the technique Mya had used, but those summer days in Paris were very long ago. Willow’s head continued to shake from side to side, and Lucia wanted to command her to speak. Any time Mya involved hair she was up to no good; Lucia knew that all too well.

  When Lucia was in the second grade and Mya was in the fifth, they’d begun a potion with the leftover rainwater from a spring storm that morning, and they’d spent almost all of recess perfecting it. With one more handful of honeysuckle blossoms, the healing potion for a dying robin would have been complete. Marta Mitchell and her group of friends from the fifth grade asked to play, and when Mya said, “Not right now,” Marta pushed Lucia out of the way and took the stick Lucia was using to stir the potion.

  Mya said, “Give it back, Marta, or I’ll tell,” and Marta said, “No,” and drove the stick into the water and splashed it around until none of the potion remained. “Next time let us play,” Marta said, and threw the stick back to Lucia, hitting her directly in the eye. It stung and she cried. Lucia held one hand over that left eye, but with her good eye she watched Mya ball her fists. She said, “Tell my little sister you’re sorry.”

  Marta said, “Stupid little voodoo girls. Nobody even likes you.” Mya’s face and neck turned red like a tomato. It was the first time Lucia had seen Mya’s anger so visible on her body, and that was frightening enough, but then she walked straight up to Marta and a crowd of kids gathered around them and shouted for a fight.

  Lucia was sure Mya would gift Marta two black eyes and a bloody lip. Instead she remained calm, slowly reached out to Marta’s face, and plucked out a few of her hairs. Mya tucked the hair in her pocket and said, “Just you wait.” Marta laughed all the way back to the swings. Mya never told Lucia what she did with those coarse brown hairs from Marta’s head, but three days later Marta’s beloved Jack Russell terrier jumped in a well and drowned, her parents lost their jobs at the factory, and the family moved out of town immediately.

  As far as anyone on the playground was concerned, Mya had made Marta Mitchell disappear forever. Lucia and Mya were never again called voodoo girls, to their faces anyway. Lucia felt protected by Mya but afraid of her too. What would keep Mya from turning on Lucia? The bond of love? Lucia spent years thereafter offering to do Mya’s chores just to stay in her good graces. Mya probably assumed Lucia liked to clean. Lucia didn’t want to feel this nervous again, but she couldn’t help it, not with returning to this place and seeing Mya’s hair captured in that bottle, soon to be added to a perfume for a client who threatened the business.

  Willow picked up Mya’s bottle again, but timidly, like it might be hot. She said, “And your hair is necessary because . . . ?”

  “Zoe lied to us,” Mya said, “and now she wants to ruin us.”

  “But technically she wasn’t contracted,” Lucia said to add some reason to the conversation, since their mother wasn’t objecting as much as Lucia had expected.

  Both Willow and Mya turned around and shot her a terrible look, one that made Lucia glance to the door, looking for an escape route. Willow said, “Just so you know, Lucia, I was in those interviews with Mya and we made it clear to Zoe.”

  “But not in the contract,” Lucia said.

  Willow turned back around and ignored Lucia’s statement. “What will it do?”

  “I told you,” Mya said. “Fix our problems.”

  “But how?” Willow persisted.

  Mya said, “Zoe wanted more sensuality, right? So it’s sexual, but to the point of madness. There’ll be a huge backlash, one she won’t be able to anticipate.”

  “Is that even remotely safe?” Lucia asked.

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  Willow continued to stare at Mya like she didn’t believe her. Mya said, “It is, I promise. She’ll need
a new career, that’s all. Bartending or something.”

  “Could it be linked to us?” Willow asked.

  Lucia turned away from them, walked to the wall of flowers, and covered them with the curtain. She couldn’t believe where this conversation was headed.

  Mya said, “She’ll self-destruct. There’ll be no one to blame but herself. And her PR person, I guess.”

  Willow made a long humming noise.

  “As in yes?” Mya said, and Lucia turned around, just as shocked as Mya to see their mother nodding. Just like that. Lucia had never thought her mother would actually agree. She just figured that if Willow listened to Mya, at least Mya couldn’t complain about being marginalized.

  “I see no other option,” Willow said. “She can’t expose us.”

  “Exactly,” Mya said.

  “But swear to me that as soon as it’s done you’ll destroy this and stick to the original formula,” Willow said, and touched the bottle of Mya’s dissolved hair. “I think if we make this small adjustment just once, for the sake of the business’s longevity, then the curse won’t have a reason to come down on us.”

  Mya jumped up and down and then hugged Willow and said, “Thank you for letting me fix this. I’ll never let it happen again, I swear.”

  She opened the jar of spring water and used the dropper to add the ingredient to the musk pod grains. Hunched over the glass bowl, Mya watched each drop fall, and then she began to swirl the mixture together. Directly above Mya’s head, a dark, watery substance formed like a gathering tornado. Lucia closed and opened her eyes just to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating. But it was still there. The dark substance lengthened and expanded, and Lucia caught her breath as she watched what no one else in the room seemed to notice. Mya hugged their mother tightly again, and the darkness moved with her and hovered over them both for a moment. Then Mya let go and moved back to her table, and the darkness followed her. As she handled her materials, the ethereal substance grew larger and took the shape of a single stormy cloud floating just a foot above the crown of Mya’s head. In a flash within the cloud, Lucia saw her sister’s bloody face. Lucia felt her own face go pale.

  She shook her head. The earthy, animalistic smell that invaded the room during the musk wash had to be the reason Lucia was going crazy. She felt certain she might faint if she stayed any longer. She said, “I need to go to the bathroom.”

  “Are you okay?” Mya’s brow furrowed.

  “Fine,” Lucia said, continuing to stare at the bruised cloud bobbing above Mya’s head. It looked like thunder and lightning would issue forth at any moment. Lucia’s entire body went cold, like she’d learned a damning family secret kept thirty-three years too long.

  “You sure?” Willow said. “You look a little peaked.” Lucia’s face must’ve looked as drained as it felt. She stared at Mya, certain that if she walked toward her and reached out her hand she could insert it inside the cloud.

  “I—I think I need to go outside,” Lucia stammered, bracing herself on the doorframe of the workshop. “Just out for a bit, to get some stuff.”

  “Can you pick up sour cherries? Lots of them,” Mya said, and smiled, the cloud bobbing up and down. “I have a craving for cherry pie and I used all the ripe ones from our trees.”

  Lucia nodded and tripped on the top step of the workshop stairs. She turned from the room and hurried out the back door of the cabin to their white truck, the keys already in the ignition, the engine running like it expected her. “What the hell?” Lucia leaned over the seat and took many deep breaths. She knew this feeling—it had happened on the Acorn Theater stage, and now she was experiencing the exact same panic attack for a very different reason. Lucia wanted that cloud to disappear; it made her feel so terrible, almost like she had the flu. She’d have to tell her sister about it and convince her, even though she had no proof and no history of visions. All she had was this burning, awful feeling.

  Like spotting a cracked tree limb right before it fell.

  Lucia hoped that by the time she came home, whatever hung over Mya’s head would have vanished, and that the truck’s being on was just a fluke. Maybe one of the land-maintenance workers had used it and forgot to shut it off. People did forgetful things like that sometimes, right? Her world couldn’t shift so completely in an instant, could it?

  CHAPTER 9

  Choosing a Successor

  WILLOW ADJUSTED THE wide-brimmed hat on her head, and the scent of her family’s flower on the wind drew her closer to the blooming fields. She so rarely took walks now that her knees ached, but she couldn’t stay another moment longer in the cabin. The smell of Mya’s unadulterated musk had brought back so many memories of her days of training in Paris alongside her sister, Iris, and their mother. She missed them more today than she had in a long time. She could practically hear her mother’s disappointed voice, southern accent and all: No direction? No husbands? No babies? What are those daughters of yours doing? Willow wasn’t the least bit sure anymore. She’d done her part for the family business; she’d given birth to daughters and raised them by herself (minus the help she received from local women she’d loaned money to), and she couldn’t keep thinking about the future of the business if neither of her daughters did the same.

  Though Lucia had been away for so many years, Willow had at least hoped Lucia and Jonah would eventually send a granddaughter for Willow to train. The family business wasn’t of interest to Lucia, but that didn’t guarantee her daughter would feel the same way. Now both of Willow’s daughters were single and in their thirties and no closer to a long-term relationship than Willow. Lucia reminded Willow of Iris—disconnected from the family business, working nine to five as a bank teller in Toledo, looking for a life she never found with a man she hardly loved, dying alone from a massive stroke without anyone finding her for days—all because she wanted nothing to do with the business. Willow worried Lucia would turn out the same way long after Willow left the world and had no power to help her.

  She arrived at the top of the hill, where acres of Gardenia potentiae hedges stretched until the flowers at the farthest reaches looked like white dots of snow. She stopped and took an invigorating breath of the flower’s scent, present only during these few weeks of the summer. A deep breath at this place always made Willow feel better.

  But the scent was not as strong as she expected, and she lifted her hands into the air to feel for an east wind. The leaves on the surrounding trees did not move. She walked to the edge and the thick green foliage looked healthy, as did the blooms. Bending down to better smell the flowers, Willow touched a green bud, and it moved up and down as if it were nodding. Willow caressed it. The plants were blooming late this year. Perhaps that was all. She’d go in and call Robert over at the factory and make sure he knew.

  Willow knelt down before the flowers and bowed her head, as if she needed to apologize to them for all that had happened. On the eve of retirement, Willow Lenore might have run the business into the ground. She’d be forever judged by this instead of by her strong history as president for thirty years without a glitch. Well, maybe one or two glitches. Too few ladybugs one year, if she remembered correctly. Or was it a white fungus? No need trying to recall what no longer mattered, a tenet she hadn’t adhered to as a younger woman, but now she had no choice.

  Willow decided to go to the pond down in the holler for a summer swim. She owned the pond, yet she rarely used it since the girls had grown up. Her bare feet crushed dandelions and wild onions as she descended the hill, and the air cooled as she came closer to the pond. In the pocket of her linen dress, her cell phone began to vibrate, and she stopped and debated whether she should check it. If only she could have ten minutes to herself. Was that so much to ask? But it could be Mya or Lucia or Jennifer Katz or, God forbid, Zoe Bennett. She lifted the device out of her pocket and James Stein’s name scrolled across the bottom of the screen.

  She smiled and let it ring for a minute, and by the time she was ready to answer she had missed t
he call. Willow didn’t want to seem too available, so she placed her feet in the cool pond water and watched the minnows dance around in the algae murkiness she kicked up. Little nibbles on her toes and ankles tickled like a pedicure. Knee-deep in the water now and with her dress lifted, Willow tapped James’s name on the screen.

  After three rings he picked up, and his voice was smokier than she remembered. “I hoped you’d call back,” he said. It sounded like he was smiling.

  Willow eased herself out of the water and stretched her bare legs on the grassy edge of the pond. “How are you?”

  “Between meetings. You?”

  “About to go for a swim in our pond.” Willow switched the phone to her other ear.

  “It’s hot here,” James said, and then he told someone in the background to wait. “Willow, you there?”

  “I am. Is everything okay?”

  “Just an assistant,” he said quickly. “So I’m calling because I’ll be in DC next week and I was hoping I could come down and visit that pond of yours.”

  Willow’s heart began to pound. Was that an innuendo? He flustered her, but she didn’t want him to notice. She covered the speaker, took a deep breath, and then said, “I think that should be fine. It’s harvest time, just so you know.”

  “I’ll stay out of the way, I promise.”

  Willow laughed aloud and let a granddaddy longlegs spider walk across her palm. She said, “About Zoe.”

  “Bad transition,” James said.

  Willow laughed again. He had a knack for making her happy. “I just thought you’d want to know that I approved a new formula for her. She’ll land sexier kinds of roles.”

  “She’s okay with that?”

  “It’s what she desires.”

  “Good news then, right?”

  “I think so.”

  “I can’t wait to see you again.”

  “Me too.”

  “I’ll send you my flight information soon. All I need is your address.”