Season of the Dragonflies (10 page)

The room pulsed with personal hurt, and Lucia felt embarrassed for inserting herself into this meeting. She glanced at Mya, who rubbed her cheeks with both palms and then covered her mouth with her hands.

“Nothing?” Willow said. “You've got nothing to say to me?” Lucia couldn't remember hearing her mother be so cross with Mya. With Lucia, yes, but not Mya, who had always planned to follow their mother's career path. Clearly their roommate situation had strained their relationship. Willow turned the chair away from Mya and did the absolutely unthinkable. How many times had she put hot-pepper lacquer on Lucia's nails to make her stop biting them? And there was Willow's pointer fingernail resting on her lips, her lower jaw working back and forth.

Without facing Mya again, Willow said, “She's contacting our other clients. How the hell she knows who they are and how to get in touch with them is beyond me at this point, but Jennifer said it's true. Zoe's blackmailing her too, so I believe her.” Willow took a sip of her coffee and cradled the mug in her hands. “Jennifer seems so lost.”

Mya raised her arm as if she sat in an elementary school classroom, but Willow put her hand up as if to shush her. “I've been informed of your little plan and you know we can't; it goes against everything I've ever told you about the business, not that you seem to give a damn about what I say anymore. But we don't change the formula. We haven't for a hundred years. My mother adhered to that, and I promised her I would as well. You
know
this. Why would I need to remind you?”

“You don't,” Mya said, “but—”

Willow said, “There are no exceptions.”

“There
must
be exceptions,” Mya said. “Life doesn't operate without them.”

“Maybe,” Willow said, “but our business does. Don't you want the company? Don't you both want something to pass on?” And then Willow waved her hand in the air as if to brush away dust. “Well, not you, Lucia, I know, but, Mya, doesn't that matter to you? The decisions we make here matter for the future. Deciding to alter the formula without consulting me and then telling clients that was the decision we'd made—just irresponsible. I never thought you'd do something so low.”

Mya shook her head and no one spoke.

“What about murder?” Lucia asked, and then smiled.

Her mother's mouth dropped open.

“Seems like the surest solution,” Lucia said.

Willow pointed at Lucia and said, “Just stop. Or get out if you can't be helpful,” and then she muttered something. All these years later and Lucia still knew how to fluster Willow. She couldn't help herself.

Mya narrowed her eyes at Lucia, then turned to their mother and said, “How do you know, and I mean with a hundred percent certainty, that they wouldn't have changed it if they
had
to, if they might lose the business altogether?”

Willow took a deep breath, her chest rising slowly. “No,” she said.

“It's your fault you didn't read the damn contract! Now you won't compromise,” Mya blurted, her voice raised high suddenly, as though she needed a witness in the room to have the courage to utter it. Lucia placed her hand on Mya's arm without realizing until Mya pulled away.

Willow turned her face away and placed her chin in her hand. This sign of contrition admitted all they needed to know. Mya settled back in her chair. In a soft voice Willow said, “You sent me out there alone so I'd have no other choice. Didn't you?”

Lucia felt like she'd arrived to a new family where the past didn't dictate who they were anymore.

“If it's both your faults, can't you just hear her out?” Lucia said to Willow, and braced herself by squeezing the armchair on both sides.

Mya's eyebrows lifted in anticipation, and she looked over at Lucia as if to say “thank you.” Willow tucked flyaway hairs behind her ears and said, “Fine.”

Mya said, “What do you mean ‘fine'?”

Willow looked to the ceiling like she could make it collapse. “I mean fine, Mya, please don't test my patience.”

“It's just that—”

“It's what?” Willow said.

Mya turned out her palms. “She comes home for a few hours and you agree to her suggestion even though I've been asking you to consider the possibility of a different formula for weeks?”

“Don't be childish.”

“Agreed,” Lucia added. Only Mya would quarrel when Lucia was pretty sure she'd just helped her out.

“Butt out,” Mya said to Lucia. To Willow she said, “I'm glad you agree, I just don't know why it took her to get you to do it.”

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.”