by Sarah Creech
At one point in the movie Zoe, who notoriously shot all her own action sequences, stood on a tightrope between two Colorado mountains with her enemy approaching from one side. A bullet zoomed toward her chest just as the rope, which she’d set on fire, burned through and sent them both falling. Mya wanted so badly for Zoe to plunge into the river below and perish. Even if it was a fictional moment, it would’ve made Mya feel better. Alas, her sidekick and soon-to-be lover sailed through the air and caught her before releasing his parachute at the last minute.
The movie dragged on for another hour and a half after that, and it was almost midnight before Mya checked for her phone, only to discover she’d left it at the cabin. Once she arrived home she discovered her voice mail and text message inboxes filled with commands from her mother to come home immediately. It didn’t matter. By the time she found her phone, her mother and Lucia had already informed her about the plants. She never did get laid, which seemed like the only possible perk of a date. Not even a make-out session. Just a boyfriend, that’s what she got, without the sex. Somehow that seemed exactly right for how her life was going.
Mya sat with her legs crossed on a tree stump the next morning and stared out at the field of flowers. Seven dragonflies sailed overhead, but the deer hadn’t come all morning. Nothing seemed particularly wrong with the flowers. They were a little smaller but not drastically so. Maybe it was just a fluke, some misstep with the heat. They’d hired new people last month. From what she could see, she had no idea what else might’ve happened.
She looked to the pink morning clouds above, and they formed the shape of a giant hand reaching down with an open palm, fingers outstretched; she heard a rustle in the tall grass behind her and turned around. Lucia’s black hair whipped in the wind, and she carried two white mugs of coffee. Mya took the mug from her hand and said, “Thanks.” The sun had just begun to peek over the edge of the forest, a lilac hue from the sunrise beaming from behind the clouds.
“See anything?” Lucia said, staring at some point above Mya’s head.
She glanced up but nothing was there. “No.”
“But Robert’s sure.” Lucia approached a flower and touched a petal.
How could her mother not have an emergency plan for this kind of problem, one that could wipe out the entire business in one season? How many clients would they lose altogether? Would anything remain for Mya? She bit her lower lip. The one and only time she’d agreed to go on a date with Luke, this happened, and Willow had taken Lucia to an emergency meeting in her place.
Lucia stared at her, but just slightly above her head, as if static electricity had caused her hair to stand up straight. Mya looked up and still saw nothing. This tic of Lucia’s annoyed her. Mya said, “What’s your issue?” Instinctively she patted the top of her head, and then Lucia did the strangest thing: she placed her hand above Mya’s head, waving it all around as if trying to catch a firefly. Mya jerked her head back and said, “What’s wrong? Is it a dragonfly or something?”
“No,” Lucia said with a tone that made Mya very uneasy, like she was mourning a dead kitten. “It’s just . . .”
“What?” Mya looked up again.
Lucia scratched behind one ear and said, “Ever since we were in the workroom with that deer musk . . . ,” and then Lucia took a deep breath and sped up. “Ever since then I see the darkest cloud just above your head, like a deep bruise, and it’s freaking me out. I hoped it would be gone by the time I saw you this morning but it’s still there.”
“Right now?”
Lucia nodded and tucked her hair behind her tiny ears.
“Did you tell Mom?”
“No,” Lucia said. “I thought maybe I was hallucinating. I hoped so anyway.”
“But you’ve never had visions.”
“Why would I make it up?” Lucia said. “I have a horrible feeling in my body every time I see it, like I could puke.” She reached out again like she was trying to grip it, but she brought back her hand as empty as before.
Mya bit her fingernail. She wasn’t a habitual nail biter, just a nervous chewer. She said, “You have to tell Mom.”
“But she’s asleep.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I’ll tell her when she wakes up.”
“No, you’ll tell her now,” Mya said, and took Lucia by the hand.
She jerked away. “Stop telling me what to do.”
Lucia wanted to fight at a time like this? What was wrong with her? If some scary image only Mya could see hung above Lucia’s head, she would’ve told her at first sight. Lucia had waited an entire day before mentioning it, and now Lucia wanted to complain about Mya’s bossing her. Lucia had always had the most ridiculous expectations: acting, New York City, Jonah. Just look at how far those had gotten her. Mya wanted so badly to shout all of this at her, but it would only make matters worse. Instead, Mya took Lucia by the hand again and said, “Please.”
“Please?” Lucia echoed as if she couldn’t believe it.
Mya nodded.
“Fine,” Lucia said. “Let’s go.”
It really was a magic word. If only Mya had employed it more when they were younger.
WILLOW’S HAIR WAS WRAPPED IN the white knitted cap she always wore at night, some relic of their grandmother’s. Willow didn’t need to wear it, but Mya believed she did it to be close to her mother. The morning sunlight filtering in through the curtains cut a triangle on Willow’s cheek and she looked rather peaceful. Mya wondered how often Willow had gazed at them this very same way when they were babies. A few times Mya remembered waking up and seeing her mother standing in the doorframe gazing at her. Neither Mya nor Lucia wanted to be the first to disturb her. Mya poked her mother’s shoulder and then looked for Lucia to do the same. Lucia blew her breath on Willow’s face, and their mother grimaced and opened one eye like a cat. Mya looked over to Lucia and said, “Brush your teeth.”
“Please,” Willow said, and then the other eye opened in quick surprise. “What’s this about?” She shot up in the bed. “Did Robert call?”
Mya shook her head, hoping her mother might see the cloud like Lucia did, but Willow gave no sign that she did. She propped herself up on her elbows and closed her eyes again like she’d fallen back to sleep.
Mya pointed at Lucia and said, “Tell her.”
“I, um,” Lucia began, and her mother stared at Lucia. “It’s just that I see something.”
“Not just something,” Mya said, and she could hear the panic in her own voice.
Lucia continued. “I see a black cloud over Mya and it makes me nervous.”
Willow sat all the way up in bed and massaged her eyebrows with one hand. She removed the cap, shook out her silver hair like a horse’s mane, and stared above Mya’s head. Mya decided then and there that she really hated people looking just past her all the time. Willow said, “I don’t see anything.”
Urgently, Lucia said, “Well, I do, it’s right there.” She pointed at nothingness. “It follows her around, and I know it’s bad.”
“Has anyone in the family seen things like this before?” Mya asked.
Willow took a sip of Mya’s coffee and sat quietly for a moment. When she did begin to speak, she seemed to be talking to herself: “Grandmother Serena didn’t, but her younger daughter saw visions in the clouds like Mya, and my sister did as well, but they drove Iris crazy. My dream visions have always directed my client selections, up until now anyway. But there’s no history of anything stormy, and the visions never stuck around.” She sipped the coffee again and finally looked up at Lucia. “You see it all the time?”
“I do.”
“Just great.” Mya gripped the foot of their mother’s bed.
“Something’s wrong,” Lucia said.
“No shit.”
Willow took a deep breath. “Between this, the flowers, and Zoe, I don’t know what the hell’s going on anymore. But they must be connected. When did it first appear?”
“In the workshop.
When she told us about that new perfume. Right when she mixed that musk with water.” Willow stared at Lucia for a long moment, and something intimate passed between them. Mya couldn’t place it exactly but they seemed closer somehow, like partners.
“Have you finished?” Willow asked Mya.
“It’ll be done today.”
“What if the cloud and the flowers don’t want Mya to do this? We weren’t allowed to stray from the original formula,” Lucia said.
“Look at you,” Mya said sarcastically. “So invested in the family business all of a sudden.”
“I just—”
“I’m making that perfume for her, Mom,” Mya said. “You already agreed.”
“But what if Lucia’s right?”
Her mother deferred to Lucia now? The one who hadn’t had a family gift for thirty-three years and now, poof, she swayed Willow’s decisions? Zoe, the flowers, the cloud—all of these troubles would pass, but Lucia might stay. Above all else, this couldn’t happen. Mya said, “You know we have no other choice. If anything, I need to get this out the door so we have one less problem today.”
“We do have bigger problems,” Willow said to Lucia, as though she felt obligated to convince her or receive her approval.
What had happened yesterday? I should’ve never gone out with Luke, Mya told herself. Stupid, stupid girl.
“Look, the cloud’s only over me. And let’s say it is Great-Grandmother’s warning; why wouldn’t it be over you and Lucia too? We were all in that room together. You agreed to it, Mother, so wouldn’t you be cursed? And Lucia witnessed it, so why not her? It has to be the bad deal with Zoe; the new perfume will fix it.”
“And if that’s not it?” Lucia said.
“Then I’m willing to deal with whatever comes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Stop talking to me like I’m a child,” Mya said. “Yes, I’m very sure.” She was sure she didn’t believe in that stupid curse or in her younger sister’s right to act like this. One vision, so what?
“When will you ship it?” Willow asked.
“You’re kidding,” Lucia said.
“I can have it to her by this evening.”
“Fix it,” Willow said, and then stood up from the bed and exited to the bathroom. Her mother didn’t seem too concerned about that cloud, and Mya should’ve been glad. So why did she still feel so uneasy? As silly as it sounded, her mother seemed mad at her, like a hurt friend, more so than she had yesterday. But what more had she done since then? Mya could feel Lucia staring at the cloud. Mya couldn’t stand another minute of that concerned look on Lucia’s face, so she walked past her sister without another word and went straight to the workshop, where she could lock herself away.
CHAPTER 15
Business Matters
WILLOW WAITED UNTIL Mya closed herself in the workshop before she sequestered herself in the office. Willow was doing everything she could to control herself for Mya’s sake, but that stormy cloud scared her to death. Grandmother Serena had promised bad things would come if the formula was changed. Willow’s mother had never strayed and insisted Willow agree to this one rule when the business changed hands. She’d promised her mother on her deathbed.
Neither her mother nor Serena could’ve foreseen a situation like this one. Only her daughter would be flighty enough to forget to add the most important clause in a contract. Why Mya hadn’t simply copied the language from any number of contracts Willow had offered her, she’d never know, and that way Willow wouldn’t have needed to check it over before she sent it out. Mya was strong-willed to a fault and had been that way since she was a toddler who refused to wear anything but tights and tutus, even to go swimming in the pond. How she missed those trivial conflicts. Willow was as angry with Mya now as she was scared for her, scared of what that cloud could mean. Love for her daughter wrapped around all this frustration. Willow had long since experienced these conflicting emotions. Once the girls had matured and learned to talk back to her, the stress of young, single motherhood and ceaseless work created a withering exhaustion and resentment. She had done her best to quell these feelings.
And of all times for Lucia to finally have a vision, one unlike those of anyone else in the family . . . Willow believed her. One thing Lucia had never been was a liar. Her two daughters couldn’t have been more different. With one exception: as babies they both loved to stroke Willow’s long hair as they breast-fed, and those quiet moments still buoyed Willow during the troubling times with her girls. But beyond that quality during infancy, Mya and Lucia had little in common. Lucia believed she didn’t have a place in the family because her skills with the flower and perfumery had failed to manifest; she might not admit it, but Willow knew this had been a compelling reason for her to follow a career in acting. Sometimes it had felt like she had one healthy daughter, born with all the Lenore family gifts, and one perfectly intelligent and lovely but mute daughter. Still, Willow didn’t love Lucia any less. Early on Willow had sensed her daughter had the power to make people worship her, because the dragonflies congregated around her and rode into the cabin on her shoulders, and Willow had to promptly turn Lucia around and get her back out to the porch so she could send the dragonflies outside. Willow desired for Lucia to be successful, and the older she became, the more her talent with people appeared to be her magic—a perfect skill for the business. But Lucia didn’t believe in it. Acting called her instead. At least today proved to Lucia that she wasn’t a defective Lenore after all. So many years spent worrying about Lucia, and now Willow could finally relax, only to switch her concern to Mya. Such was the way of motherhood.
She didn’t have the nerve to dial James Stein’s number. She couldn’t explain that she had to cancel because her younger daughter had a vision of a dark cloud hovering over her older daughter’s head. To anyone outside the family, that would sound ludicrous. Willow would tell James some business issue had come up. It wasn’t a total lie. Right now wasn’t a good time, not with the flowers and the cloud. Would she ever live a life without interruptions?
Her girlhood had been the only time that flowed as one long, straight river, a time when she craved a bend to enliven her world. Any interruption had been welcome. She had most looked forward to her trips abroad. She remembered when her mother took Iris and Willow to France for the first time and they studied flower cultivation in Grasse in June and July, just when the jasmine had bloomed. Then they spent six months in Paris in the Eighth Arrondissement learning Parisian French from a college student attending the Sorbonne. During the day Willow and Iris were tutored while their mother visited the Louvre or the Musée d’Orsay or shopped on the rue de Rivoli, and in the afternoons she came back for them and they stopped at a boulangerie for a buttery baguette sandwich before taking the metro to 38 avenue Pierre 1er de Serbie. They walked to the House of Dubois storefront to study the art of perfumery under Henri Dubois.
Willow’s mother respected the Dubois dynasty, which had been passed down from father to son for more than two hundred years, and avidly collected the variety of rare scents they produced. But it was Grandmother Serena whom Henri Dubois first contacted. Rumor had it that the finest, richest American actresses, who should’ve been the Dubois family’s clientele, had a scent they adored but kept fiercely secret. The Dubois family was passionate about scent and traveled to Bulgaria and Turkey and Italy in search of the most luxurious rose, jasmine, and iris essences. The idea that a flower as powerful as Gardenia potentiae existed in secret nearly drove Henri Dubois mad. He was a wise businessman and a charming fellow, and Grandmother Serena relented and told him he could experience the flower if he allowed her dynasty of daughters to apprentice at the House of Dubois during the summer and study the time-honored techniques of infusion, maceration, and filtration for which his house was so famous. Serena’s girls could study alongside the male heirs of that company, and perhaps a marriage or two would evolve from her deal. That hadn’t happened, though. Lenore women seemed to prefer American
men. To this day, the Dubois family master perfumers were the only perfumers in Paris to know of the existence of the Gardenia potentiae flower. Forever Willow would connect Paris with the smells of freshly baked bread and urine in the metro, and the absolute intensity of the rose and jasmine and tuberose and violet in the Dubois family perfumes. These scent memories, so easy to recall today but perhaps not tomorrow. Her entire life reduced to nothing but the present.
The phone rang in its cradle, making Willow jump like the smoke alarm had been triggered. When she answered the phone and said, “Willow Lenore speaking,” the sound on the other line made her smile immediately.
James said, “I like when your voice sounds so professional.”
“I was just thinking about you.”
“All good things, I hope.”
She sat back down. Nothing mattered now in the space between his phone connection and her own. “Absolutely.” Willow couldn’t keep the sadness out of her voice.
“Something’s wrong.” But before Willow could respond he said, “I’ve set up a meeting with Jennifer Katz and her manager and agent to find out what’s going on. I hope that doesn’t bother you, but I figure it’s easier for me to do it from here than you flying out again. And it’s a personal matter for me too.”
She should know exactly what he was talking about. “About the perfume?” she asked.
He paused. “Jennifer’s manager didn’t call you?”
“I haven’t seen my assistant today.”
“Jennifer’s convinced the perfume stopped working for her because of Zoe. She’s refusing to present at the Oscars now and her people are panicking. She won’t leave her house for appointments. Her PR girl told the press she’s vacationing in the South Pacific. I’m set to meet with them tomorrow but I doubt she’ll show. You should call her,” James said.