by Sarah Creech
Willow nodded. “Months ago. It’s early-onset Alzheimer’s.” She covered her mouth. “That’s the first time I’ve said it.”
James leaned over to look Willow in the eyes. “Is it recommended you stay here where you can see your doctor regularly?”
“I haven’t broached that topic yet,” she said. “But I want some freedom to enjoy my life without concern, even if it’s just for six months. I know that’s irresponsible, but I can’t help it.”
James remained silent and Willow said, “You’re having second thoughts; I understand that completely.”
Willow used to believe consciousness and the spirit existed after the body, but now, piece by piece, who she was died with every word forgotten, every malfunction of her brain. She’d changed her mind about all this in this last stretch to the finish of her life. The account doesn’t function if there’s no manager watching over it, and without awareness of a self, no self existed. She wanted to enjoy her body and be aware of her mind for as long as she had left.
James took her chin in his hand. “I support what you think’s best. You want to go, that’s your choice. A personal doctor can travel with us—whatever it takes. I fell in love with you the first time I met you and I never forgot it, so you won’t either. What I want now is time with you, as soon as I can have it.” He kissed her gently, stroked her hair, and held her for a long time.
Willow had almost fallen asleep when he said, “Excuse me.” He rolled out of bed, his bare ass strong and high, his calf muscles defined. He entered her bathroom, and it was an odd sight, a man in there. He called, “Anywhere good to dine in Quartz Knot?”
“Quartz Hollow,” she said, and heard him say, “Oh yeah,” to himself. He likes to talk while he’s in the bathroom. Can you deal with that? the single woman inside Willow asked, and the single woman decided she could, but that she also needed to keep a tally of his strange behaviors and check in with herself regularly to make sure she could accept them. No point in going it alone this long just to sacrifice her peace at the end. They would not marry, she was convinced of that, but still, cohabitation required commitment, and commitment required practice, and she’d been out of practice in that area too. She’d have to compromise.
Willow waited for the door to open and for him to reappear before she said, “There’s a farm-to-table place I think you’ll like.”
He climbed on top of her and put his full weight on her body before he kissed her, then rolled back to his side and buried himself under the covers.
“What about your girls?” he said.
“What about them?” Willow covered her breasts with the cotton sheet.
“Will they come?”
“Are you joking?”
“I wasn’t, no.”
“That’s about the last thing I think they’d want to do, especially Mya. She’s not happy that I’ve asked Lucia to be president. And now Zoe,” Willow said. “I think we can plan on just the two of us.”
“And Mya?” James asked. “What will she do now?”
“That I don’t know. Once Lucia left home I always expected Mya to take over. But you can’t force what’s not right—I learned that with their father, in fact.”
“You haven’t mentioned him before.” James readjusted his back so he was sitting up against the leather headboard.
“Such a long time ago, really, it feels like an unrelated life.” Willow snuggled closer against James. His skin radiated so much heat that a blanket wasn’t necessary. “Mya had the most time with him and looks the most like him, but Lucia never met him. He did have charm like her though. He was a jazz musician. I met him a few years after I’d graduated from high school, on a trip to San Francisco. I was supposed to take over the business for my mother soon after my trip. I went out there for fun and shopped for vintage couture. I stopped at a bar one night in the Haight and he was playing. I danced and he bought me a drink after, at least I think that’s how it happened. Either way, that’s where I met him. My sister had already moved away from home and I was the only one to be chosen. I liked the work, but I was scared and wasn’t ready for that life of responsibility. A lot like Lucia and Mya, I guess, though I was much younger. I met a mysterious guy, and he was a sure way out. I stayed out there with him and spent my early twenties going to bars and watching him play, until I got pregnant with Mya. We lived together north of San Francisco, in a cabin in the redwoods. He skipped out when I was pregnant with Lucia.”
“What was his name?” James said.
“Michael.” Willow laughed. “I haven’t said his name aloud in a very long time.”
“Do the girls ever see him?”
“No,” Willow said. “They never saw him again. And you can imagine how mad my mother was when I finally returned to take over and I was saddled with two small children.”
James held Willow’s hand and she had nothing left to say. She rested her head on his bare stomach and he continued to stroke her hair. The perfume can’t prevent a family death; that’s what Willow had thought as her mother lay ill with pneumonia in this exact room. With her white curly hair spread across the pillow in the room with a window looking out on the hills, she had taken Willow’s smooth hand (the wrinkles she had now were so distant then) and said, “Pass it on when you no longer love it.” A young and grieving twenty-nine-year-old Willow thought that could never happen. How could she ever fall out of love with the family business? For years now she’d imagined herself working until the day she dropped dead of a stroke, just like her own sister, but now she knew she’d likely die of something less immediate. She could live a very long life but die without a clue of her whereabouts or her own history.
If she didn’t pass the business on to a Lenore woman, no one else could make the flowers grow. And God help her, she had two healthy daughters who seemed far less capable of what Willow’s mother had asked of her when she was seven years younger than Mya and a mother of two young children. Willow often thought it had something to do with their father’s genetic material. She didn’t allow herself to think of Michael very often, though one glance at Mya and she couldn’t help but remember him. She had his sly mouth and sandy blond hair. No one falls in love with a musician and doesn’t know on some level that he might go. But love never guaranteed longevity. Neither did vows, which Lucia had now discovered.
Michael had left without leaving a note to tell her where he went or why. She suspected the stress of never securing steady work broke him, but she didn’t know for certain. Had she been more mature, she might not have cursed him by taking their courthouse wedding photo and poking out his eyes with a rabbit’s rib bone. She sealed the mouth, hands, and feet of his image with red wax, then placed the photo before a black candle that burned to the bottom of its wick, banishing him from their lives. She was protecting her girls from a man like that, someone so undependable.
She had loved Michael, the way his hands curved around the guitar, and she hated him for leaving, and that kind of passionate anger fills the body and invades everyone nearby until no one knows what’s normal anymore. She couldn’t deny, however, that Mya and Lucia were a part of him, and certainly some of their behavior could be attributed to Michael. Like Mya’s not telling Willow that she planned to leave the house with Luke, despite her mother’s warning. Though she had always been quick to dismiss it, Willow had wondered from time to time if their father’s being absent might’ve hurt the girls more than she’d like to admit. Neither girl had managed to have a successful relationship, and Willow felt guilty about it all.
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.
CHAPTER 32
Paranoia
MYA 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.
CHAPTER 33
Intertwined
THE 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.