by Sarah Creech
Mya snatched it from his hand. “How’d you get this?”
Willow examined the bottle and saw that her daughter must have been right about Zoe using too much: it was half-empty.
He closed his bag and said, “May I come in first?”
“Yes, of course,” Willow said. As she passed by Mya she whispered, “Destroy it.”
CHAPTER 28
When One Bedroom Closes
LUCIA RETURNED TO her bedroom after a scorching-hot shower, so hot her shoulders were still bright red, hot enough to wash away any responsibility she might’ve had for the death of Zoe Bennett. She had told Mya not to do it. Lucia had protested the decision. But she’d also encouraged her mother to hear Mya’s plan, and how could she have known Willow would actually agree to it? Lucia stopped a moment to look at the stickers on her dresser, remnants of who she was in her middle and high school years: J/K, BESTIES, RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS, OASIS, HERBAL ESSENCES. A collection of the trivial things she’d collected and cared about. She pushed her earrings aside to look at a Beatles song lyric she’d written in permanent marker, but she accidentally knocked the jewelry behind the dresser. She pulled out the dresser and found her earrings caught in cobwebs and dirt. She also found a grimy framed photograph of herself and Ben at their junior prom.
She wiped it off with her bath towel. Ben was so much lankier then; his time working in the fields and hiking had filled out his upper body. But his big smile hadn’t changed, and the cowlick at the top of his head was still there. He held Lucia like a wind might blow her away, and she looked happy. A big smile to match Ben’s. A ridiculous poufy yellow-and-white empire dress she’d never wear again. A single red rose corsage he’d bought for her and placed on her wrist. On this night he’d tell her he loved her for the first time, and she’d say it back without hesitation. Days after this they gave each other their virginities—prom night would’ve been too clichéd for a love like theirs—and then they couldn’t be stopped. They missed school sometimes because they were too impatient. Jonah had been a good partner when their marriage was happy, very giving, very eager to please her, much more experienced than Ben, of course. But now Lucia was experienced too, and she wondered just how different sex would be with Ben all grown up. She positioned the framed picture on top of her dresser, and then she put on a purple broomstick skirt and black tank top and braided her wet hair in one thick rope down her back.
Her cell phone vibrated on the bed. She knew who it was before she even saw his name. She couldn’t avoid him any longer.
“Hey,” Jonah said, his voice shaky, like he’d just woken up.
“Hi.”
“Thanks for finally answering.”
“I’ve been busy.” That’s all she owed him. She wanted him to wonder. She might not have art openings and meetings with corporate dealers, but she did have stuff to do.
“I saw Nina and she said you never came by, but your stuff was gone. Were you ever planning on calling me?”
“I’m home,” Lucia said.
“I know. I talked to Mya.”
“She told me. So what do I need to do?”
“What do you mean?”
Jonah always blamed this kind of flightiness on his artistic bent, but it still annoyed Lucia. “The issue. Mya said something about an issue. Do I need to sign something or pay something?”
He remained silent. She listened to his raspy breathing and wondered if he’d started smoking again in her absence.
“You did rent the place, right?” Lucia sat down on her daybed.
“Are you considering coming back?” he asked.
This wasn’t his business. Why couldn’t she say that to him? “I don’t think so.” It was the first time she’d affirmed this aloud.
“You’re just giving up?” he said. “Shame.”
“Excuse me?” She couldn’t believe he had the nerve to talk to her like they were still married.
“Don’t get mad,” he said. “I was just asking.”
“You know just like I do that my acting career wasn’t working out,” she said. And just to spite him she added, “A single girl’s gotta eat, Jonah, except, I suppose, the anorexic ones.” She pinched her leg for this one; she had promised herself she wouldn’t be childish and bitter about their divorce.
“I guess your family’s feeding you now,” he said, his tone flat.
Now she wanted to hang up on him. She wished she hadn’t answered the phone to begin with. “I’m working here,” Lucia said.
“In Quartz Hollow?”
“Yes, in Quartz Hollow.”
“They’ve got a good community theater?”
“Don’t be an asshole.” It officially sounded like they were still married, and that needed to end here. “Just tell me about the apartment.”
“A banker and his boyfriend might move in next week.”
“Might?” She needed more than this: she needed to know they’d no longer have a reason to communicate. Officially.
“If you don’t come back, then yes.”
“I’m not coming back,” Lucia told him.
“Martin called me,” Jonah said, “and I think you should consider taking that role. I know it’s television, but it sounds steady.”
Lucia laughed out loud. Yesterday had been an absurd day, but now this? “I haven’t spoken to Martin in months.”
“He mentioned that. You should check your messages. That lead for the kids’ show you auditioned for back in November opened up.”
Eco 1-2-3. An education show for preschoolers about the environment and climate change: nothing she was super passionate about at the time, but she would’ve taken it on the spot and called her mother to brag about the role she’d landed. It had potential to be long running and had a high pay rate per episode. It would’ve offered some security and validation. “Are you serious?”
“I won’t rent out the place unless you tell me you don’t want it.”
This wasn’t a temptation she needed right now, not with the business in such turmoil. How easy it would be to walk away. Zoe had still had a heartbeat when Lucia agreed to become president. Why should she take over her sister’s mess now? But if she left and returned to New York, what her mother and sister said about her always running away would be absolutely true, and she didn’t want to be that girl anymore, that same girl Jonah had met and asked to marry, the same girl Mya obviously still hoped Lucia would be.
“Just tell me this: Did Mya call you?”
A long pause gave him away. Was Mya really this desperate to get rid of Lucia?
She wasn’t the kind of person to make him suffer, so she said, “I don’t think I could live in that apartment anymore. Too many bad memories.”
He coughed once. “Have you met someone?”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“But I don’t know why you’d ask that,” Lucia said. “Mya told you that?”
“You just sound like you’ve met someone. You sound like you’ve moved on.”
“I moved on before I left New York,” she replied, though she was lying and they both knew it, and just like that they’d swerved toward another fight. They had always operated this way, and now it was so easy to see how unhealthy they were together. “Plus, if you recall, you moved on first. That’s what matters.”
“I fucked up, but that doesn’t mean I moved on,” Jonah said, and Lucia stopped breathing for a moment.
“You asked for a divorce.” Lucia could hear the confusion in her voice.
“You wouldn’t look at me,” he said hurriedly. “Let alone talk to me. I thought that’s what you wanted.”
Lucia could see him this minute in his studio on Eighth Avenue, the floor strewn with half-used tubes of oil paint and blank or semi-complete canvases lining the bottom of all four walls. The one window letting in a piercing ray of sunlight, and Jonah in the center, staring at it all, the light illuminating him.
“Lucia?”
“What?” she finally said.
�
��We weren’t good married,” he said. “You know I know that. But we don’t have to be married. We don’t have to do it that way again.”
Lucia leaned her weight against the dresser and wiped away one more cobweb on her prom picture with Ben. She said, “I want great things for you, Jonah. I always have.”
He sniffed and didn’t speak.
“My mom’s retiring and I’m taking over.”
“Wow.”
“Wow what?”
“I don’t know. Manufacturing?”
“I know, but it’s my family.”
“But business? Punching numbers? That’s not you.”
“No?” Lucia said. “Maybe it is; maybe it always was.”
“At least call Martin. At least do that. And take care of yourself,” he said.
“Same to you.” In the past he’d always said he loved her—that was one great thing he’d never failed to do—and she could tell his pause meant the same as hers: How to end it?
“Good luck.”
“Bye.” She hung up. Lucia gripped the side of the dresser and a deep, rolling feeling like molasses in her veins traveled straight from her feet to her heart. She let out a long breath. She had needed that conversation. She’d underestimated how badly she needed some closure. Why, when everything seemed to be going so wrong for her sister, did so much start going right for Lucia? What had happened to her desire? Shouldn’t she be jumping up and down about a leading part, even in a children’s show? Days ago she would’ve. She felt like that life in New York had never happened, as if she had spent all those years in this cabin instead, being prepped by her mother to take over the business, never wanting anything else. Just like Mya.
With her cell phone in hand, Lucia walked out of the bedroom and toward the voices in the kitchen. When she turned right, she first saw a very tall and distinguished older man standing at the island with a cup of coffee. Lucia stopped dead. Was he with the FBI?
Willow glanced over her shoulder and then squared herself to look at Lucia.
“This is James Stein, head of AGM Studios,” Willow said, “and, James, this is my younger daughter, Lucia.”
A young dragonfly had ridden in on his lapel, and Lucia reached up and gently shooed it away. She said, “Back outside.” James widened his eyes for a moment and turned to Willow. “Not you,” Lucia explained.
“What a relief.” He extended his hand.
Lucia accepted it. “Nice to meet you.” This had to be about Zoe, but she’d wait for Willow’s cue before she asked questions.
The front door opened, and Mya limped into the room holding a vial of perfume in both hands. The cloud flew in above her like her parole officer escorting her inside. It had grown larger and darker, and Lucia couldn’t help gasping.
“I can feel it now. It’s heavy, almost like a crown.”
Willow looked to Lucia to confirm.
Lucia nodded. She pointed at the bottle. “How’d you get that?”
Mya looked at James and he said, “I paid Zoe a visit.”
Willow’s hand landed on top of his, and the way he immediately laced his fingers in hers, it was like they were in a relationship. But her mother had never mentioned a man before. She couldn’t have forgotten a boyfriend. Her memory wasn’t that far gone, was it? Lucia glanced over at Mya, who was also staring at their interlaced fingers. From the way she frowned, clearly she’d never heard of him either.
“Before she, you know . . .” James took a sip of his coffee. “Before she did that, she quit my studio’s biggest movie, so I went to see her and I found that vial in her bedroom.”
“So you stole it?” Lucia asked.
“Essentially.”
“Why’d you do a thing like that?” Mya said.
“What were you doing in her bedroom?” Lucia asked. Willow narrowed her eyes at her, but she hadn’t meant to say that. It just came out.
“To the other room,” Willow said. “Now.”
“Everybody?” James said.
“Oh yes.” Willow nodded. “We’re all in this together now.”
CHAPTER 29
Anywhere but Here
THEY WERE SEATED in the round room surrounded by the curving floor-to-ceiling bookcases and the overhanging loft where she and Lucia had played as girls, filled now with clutter of all kinds—old expense reports and clothes in transparent tubs labeled with black faded marker that had once clearly said Donate. Mya wondered who the hell James Stein was. Who was he to come all the way here unannounced with that bottle? Willow had never mentioned him before, not a single slip about a man on her mind, yet they seemed so familiar, and he knew about the family’s business. He knew too much.
Lucia sat on the chaise lounge and stretched out her legs like she was on vacation. In a way she was—free room and board, offered a great job, sister falling apart like on a reality television show. All Lucia needed now was a margarita. Willow moved books off the orange wing-back chair for James, and Mya sat on the cream loveseat, waiting for them to get settled. Willow would not stop shifting items on the coffee table, as if she were making room for the drinks none of them had.
“Mom?” Mya said. “Will you sit?”
“No.” She continued stacking the coasters.
James grabbed Willow’s hand and said, “It might be better,” and just like that, she stopped and eased herself down on the orange ottoman. Zoe’s death had shocked Mya, but a man who could penetrate her mother’s stubbornness shocked her more at the moment. All three women stared at James. He didn’t look surprised, just unprepared. Perhaps he thought Willow’s daughters didn’t live at home. Perhaps he’d planned only to see Willow and never to meet Lucia and Mya in person.
James propped one ankle on his knee and smoothed his pant leg, then said, “If you need answers, I don’t have any.”
“Why are you here?” Lucia said.
“To deliver the perfume,” he said.
“And?” Lucia prodded.
“And to see your mother,” he admitted. “That wasn’t clear?”
Willow smiled. How could she be falling in love now, at a time like this? She’d taken away the company from Mya, and the flowers were dying. Zoe was dead. This was no time for love. Yet Willow looked like she couldn’t help herself.
“Did the perfume do it?” Lucia said. Everyone became quiet and then slowly turned their attention to Mya, whose face felt hot. Lucia, Willow, and James secretly believed, and always would, that Mya had intentionally killed Zoe Bennett. How would she ever convince them otherwise? Yes, she had ill intent. But not intent to murder.
“Zoe killed herself,” James said. “Hanged herself in her home theater. Why she did that is up for debate.”
“That’s not what Peter’s assistant told me. Said she overdosed,” Willow said.
James coughed, rubbed his chest, and then cleared his throat again. With a scratchy voice he said, “She was in bad shape when I saw her. No shower, seemed very drunk. I didn’t think she’d kill herself, but she did make a lot of strange comments about hating herself and being a hack and begged me to forgive her for being such a failure, things Zoe never would’ve said. She always had the confidence of a redwood.”
Lucia sat cross-legged on the chaise lounge. “She was depressed. A broken heart can do that sort of thing.”
“But to hate herself was not Zoe’s style,” James said. “Even if she was sad, she could always manage to love something about herself. When I visited her she despised everything and everyone that had made her so famous. Except the perfume. The only positive thing she talked about was the new perfume, how she’d never stop wearing it.”
Willow smoothed her white hair with both hands. “That’s not reason enough for you to take the perfume, I wouldn’t think.”
“You would,” he said, “if you had smelled it on her.”
At this Mya stood from her chair, but by the way James leveled his stare at her, she saw that he knew exactly what her perfume had been intended to do. Mya couldn’t move.
“Mya does,” James said, not once taking his eyes off her.
“Mya?” Willow said.
“I told you already,” Mya said, and she began to make her exit from the room.
Willow looked back to James, and he said, “I wanted to eat her because she seemed so delicious, but I also wanted to puke her back up and flush her down the toilet. For thirty minutes I’d never felt anything so strange in my entire life. And she was living in it. I told her to return to the studio in the next few weeks or however much time she needed, but she locked herself in her home theater and didn’t see me out. I went to her bedroom just to find that smell, and the bottle was open on her vanity. Half-empty, as you can see.”
Willow closed her eyes like she’d just been told of women and children dying in some mass genocide in a faraway country.
“She used too much,” Mya told him. “It’s not like the usage rules had changed. But you’re right about everything else, about the smell.”
“But why?” James asked, like he couldn’t believe her.
Sometimes that question had no place in a conversation.
Lucia said, “Look, Zoe’s dead, and it was nice that you brought it back, but it could make us look guilty, right? I mean, if she was bragging about the perfume to you, who else heard about it? Her manager knows.”
“That occurred to me,” James said, “and I still took it.”
“So you think we’re guilty?” Willow said.
He rested his hands in his lap. “Do you think you’re guilty?”
Willow shook her head and then looked at Mya. Mya said, “Someone else might’ve made a different decision, given the same perfume. She didn’t have to kill herself.”
“That’s true,” James said, “but did you consider what kind of personality you were dealing with before you made it?”
Mya shifted in her chair. Attention-obsessed Hollywood narcissist. Of course she’d thought about it. James Stein didn’t think Mya was innocent; there wasn’t even a sliver of hope. He’d turn her in. That’s the kind of man her mother was attracted to, apparently, and it was sickening. He had no loyalty to the business or to her family. Mya said defiantly, “She made a choice and I won’t be made to feel guilty about it.”