Season of the Dragonflies (21 page)

“Stay put,” Luke said, and then he ran to the stream to rinse out his mouth, then disappeared into her lean-to and brought back the flask. He rinsed his lips and mouth with the liquor and spat it out, and then he doused her bites. She reached out for the flask and took a deep gulp.

“Come on.” He hoisted her up onto his back again, and she held him tight around the neck.

“Thank you for not leaving,” she said.

Luke rubbed her clasped hands and then brought his arms underneath her thighs to support her. He hiked Mya out of the wilderness while the moonshine washed over her pain. Warmth overtook her body like a down blanket sliding up from her feet and over her thighs, and all she could think about was Lucia's cloud. Baby copperheads. Seven, maybe ten, and all at once. She'd played on this property all her life and never come close to being snakebit. That was a punishment from Great-Grandmother Serena. The cloud hadn't come just to warn her about Spots, and just because Lucia couldn't see it anymore didn't mean the curse had disappeared. The cloud would rain down on her, she was sure of it, but how much more?

L
UCIA FINISHED HER
run on the hiking trails just as the sun rose to its noon position. The air had been so clear this morning and the mountains so blue that she'd lost her sense of time and exercised for much longer than she had in months. Her thighs would make her pay for it tomorrow. Lunchtime neared, and Lucia was beginning to worry about her sister; she had hoped to come across her on the trail. That cloud. She couldn't let go of the feeling that the cloud would reappear at any moment. She could almost guarantee it. This was the kind of feeling that her mother and Mya had often referred to during her childhood, feelings Lucia had never known; they had spoken of them as truth and it drove Lucia crazy. She couldn't experience a disappointment or a hope without one of them mentioning it before she did. Sometimes she just wanted the space to feel what she could and the choice to share or not.

But now Lucia understood how urgent those moments must've been for her mother and Mya. These feelings were pushy and didn't want to be kept silent. Thirty-three years. That's all the time it took for them to manifest. Lucia wondered what her life would've been like if it had been as effortless for her as it had been for Mya. Would she have left Quartz Hollow in the first place? Might she be married to Ben? Might her mother have retired already and sought treatment for her memory loss? Might Lucia be president at this point? She'd always believed the gifts had passed her over, a genetic glitch for the Lenore family. In a legacy of talented women, she'd been skipped, only to grow up and be left wondering how it could've been or if it still could be. Suddenly all the choices she'd made prior to this moment felt like a poor investment. Her only consolation was that at least she finally understood her family.

She
had
to tell someone. It was a compulsion without explanation. Technically, the cloud itself had disappeared, but she couldn't shake this sense of distrust. She couldn't tell Mya, not after the fawn and that look of utter relief when Lucia had told her the cloud no longer stalked her.

A dented blue pickup truck that hadn't been there when Lucia left was parked out front. The dragonflies continued to swarm the front porch, so Lucia took off her muddy running shoes by the side door of the cabin and went inside to find her mother. She said “Hello?” as she walked through the empty cabin. Only the noise of cicadas outside responded. Lucia changed into a yellow summer dress she found in her closet, amazed it still fit. A little tight around the hips but doable. Her mother's room was empty, the quilt on the bed perfectly tucked. Lucia peeked behind the curtain of her mother's office, where Willow sat at the desk reading her tablet.

“I can come back later,” Lucia said.

“No, no,” Willow said, and took off her reading glasses.

Lucia collapsed on the Victorian couch, and it was as hard and uncomfortable as she remembered. Next to her mother's desk, the shredder had the remnants of paper poking from the top. “Were you working?” Lucia said.

Her mother stood, picked up the black can, and put it on top of her desk. “Old files,” she said.

“Isn't that Brenda's job?” Lucia said. Brenda came three times a week, sometimes more, to tidy the office.

“Yep,” Willow said, and she walked out of the office and returned with a trash bag, into which she dumped the shredded paper. Willow tied the black bag and tossed it by the doorframe. She sat back down and asked, “What's that called again?”

“What?” Lucia said. “The shredder?”

“That's it,” her mother said.

“Did Mya come in?”

“Not that I saw.” Lucia couldn't stop looking at the bag like some stranger's body was stuffed inside. Not once could Lucia remember her mother actively doing the tasks of an office manager. Maybe she wasn't feeling well today.

“Her boyfriend came over,” Willow said. “I sent him to get her, figured they'd be back by now.”

“Maybe they're busy.”

Willow laughed. “That's all they ever do. Like rabbits.”

“God, Mom,” Lucia said, but couldn't stop herself from smiling. “How can you stand that?”

“I ignore it. Or I leave. I usually have work to do. You haven't met Luke. He's younger than she is.”

This didn't surprise Lucia. “How much younger?”

“Younger than you. Midtwenties I think.”

Lucia whistled. “I wouldn't know what to do with one of those.”

“He's a nice boy. Hard worker, handsome. I'm sure Ben knows him. Luke's daddy owns a cattle ranch not too far from the Whites,” Willow said. “I just worry, he's so young and all. I'd like Mya to find somebody.”

“Don't count on it.”

Willow shrugged her shoulders, as if to say “You never know.” She joined Lucia on the couch and said, “Last night sounded fun.”

“You listened?”

Willow crossed her legs and smoothed her linen dress at the knee. “Not on purpose.”

She wondered how often Willow and Mya had had talks just like this during all the years Lucia was away. She had chosen to leave home, but she couldn't help feeling so excluded all the time: excluded from any interest in the business, from the family gifts, from a relationship with her mother and this town. She'd left, yes. At the time she'd felt like she had to. Thinking about all she'd missed made her sad now.

“What about you?” Lucia asked.

“What about me?” Willow straightened her shoulders for the offensive.

“I want you to find somebody too.”

“That's sweet. When I retire I can think about all that.”

Lucia planted her feet on the floor and rubbed her palms on her thighs. Willow wasn't being subtle anymore about her desire to stop working, but Lucia wasn't ready to make a decision. To stay here for the rest of her life was a lot to ask. It had always been too much to expect but was especially so now, with so much instability in the business. If only her mother could wait until times were better. Unless she wasn't sure times would get better, and in that case, why would she keep the business running?

“Will we see Ben today?” Willow said.

“He said he'd call.” Lucia took a deep breath.

“Are you worried?”

“Just in general. Aren't you?” Lucia said.

“Yes.” Neither of them spoke for a while. Just a mother and a daughter on the couch. Cue the cello music.

Lucia decided to break the silence: “I know I said the cloud's gone, but it doesn't
feel
gone to me.”

“But if it's gone, it's gone,” Willow said. “Probably just your nerves. I remember the first time I had a daydream so vivid I thought I was another person. I saw my father's car crushed beneath a rockslide in the mountains, and I was so scared, and I told my mother. She told me he wasn't near the mountains, he'd taken the train for business. Never had I felt such relief before. But he ended up catching a ride and coming back that way, and I never saw him again. I hated those visions so much. Never good things, you know? And it took me years to accept it. I remember too when Mya saw her first clouds form, and she told me the parents of one of her new school friends—they'd just moved to town—would be coming over to talk about Mya's devil storytelling, things about Grandmother Serena and such, which Mya shouldn't have been doing. She was outside and ran inside because she saw her friend and her friend's mother in a cloud. And sure enough, just as she told me, their car crested the driveway. Mya looked so scared, and it took her a long time to appreciate that she sees the world just a little differently. And maybe you just never wanted to be afraid. But I don't doubt how scary it is now, even when you're all grown up.”

“You're done?” Lucia said.

“Yes, smarty-pants, I am,” Willow said.

“Good,” Lucia said. “Because that's not what this is. It does freak me out, I admit that, but that doesn't explain my feeling completely.”

The front door opened and Lucia heard a stranger's voice yell, “Anyone home?”

“That's Luke,” Willow said. “In the office,” she shouted back.

“I need you.” Lucia didn't know Luke, but she knew the sound of panic in a person's voice. Willow shot off the couch, and Lucia followed her mother into the kitchen, where a tall, lean, and super-sexy guy with no shirt on stood by the sink pounding glass after glass of water, his body slicked down with sweat. Maybe what her mother had said about Mya and Luke going at it like rabbits was true, and that made Lucia extremely jealous. He could at least not flaunt his body in front of her. Such a young one too—he had to have been in elementary school still when Lucia attended high school, not that it mattered much once everybody in the room was all grown up.

What if, what if, what if, what if?

What a tiny question, and she hated herself for even thinking it. Mya had thought it once before and she had followed her impulse. It would serve her right all these years later, except Luke didn't even notice Lucia, not even a compulsory glance at her breasts, and that simple connection was a necessary one for attraction. Ben and Mya must've had a connection, no matter how small, or she would've never attempted to convince him that he was in love with the wrong Lenore girl, a girl who wouldn't stick around Quartz Hollow, a girl who wouldn't ensure his place as the resident botanist for Lenore Incorporated. A searing-hot hatred for both Ben and her sister traveled the length of Lucia's body like an electromagnetic pulse.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction
—she'd been finishing her project on Newton in her senior physics class when it all happened, a mere week before graduation. Newton's third law of motion remained seared in her memory. And what choice did Lucia have but to leave like Mya swore she would? She'd doubted whether her move to the city to pursue acting was the right decision and she hadn't wanted to leave Ben behind. But after what happened, she no longer questioned. She was over this, she told herself, so very, very over this, fifteen years past this.

Luke wiped his brow with a dirty dishrag on the stove and said, “Mya got snakebit.”

Willow said, “Where is she?”

Luke chugged one more glass of water and put the glass down in the sink, and then he was the first to go back outside. Mya sat on the front porch steps. Her right ankle was as swollen as an eggplant. Lucia hung back. The black cloud did not appear over her sister's head, but the panic in the depths of Lucia's abdomen was stronger than before.

Willow knelt down next to Mya. “How'd this happen?”

“Copperheads, like a bed of them,” Mya said, her voice breathy and quick. “Stepped right on them.”

“Barefoot,” Luke added.

Her mother's eyes grew large, and Mya nodded. “Half-naked too, so stupid of me.”

“You slashed them open?” Willow said, still looking at Luke. “Are you crazy?”

“I told him to,” she said. “He got all of it, I think.”

“Are you sure?”

His chest rose and fell quickly. “No,” he said. Luke stared down at Mya, and the way he looked at her made the tightness inside Lucia's body relax for a moment. She hadn't seen a guy look at her sister like that ever before. Lust, sure, but that wasn't all.

Luke knelt down in front of Mya, put his hand on the back of her neck, and said, “I'll take her to Dr. Kent.”

“You sure?” Willow said. “I should go.”

Why her mother was worried about Luke, Lucia couldn't understand. He might be younger than Mya, but he loved her; it was as obvious as the blue sky. If anything, her sister would sabotage it because she was too afraid to accept what he had to offer. A small part of Lucia wanted her to, only so she'd know how it felt to lose.

“Mya?” Willow said.

She nodded, sweat dripping from the tip of her nose. She said, “I need water.” Luke hustled inside the house and brought her a Mason jar. Her sister only drank a few sips before handing it back.

Mya said, “It's there, isn't it?”

Lucia shook her head.

“It's there, I know it is,” Mya insisted. “It's that fucking curse. And it's come just for me. It wants to kill me, I swear it does. It wants me dead.”

For all his chiseled muscles and 3 percent body fat, Luke's eyes were sensitive, the kind of eyes an actor needs. Bedroom eyes, Lucia thought. He looked very worried when he said, “She's been talking like that, all the hike back.”

Willow looked over at Lucia and then back to Luke. “That's the venom. You just need to get her to town. Call me and let me know if I need to come down there.”

“You know I'm right.” Mya stared up at them both like a child, her face pale and the circles underneath her eyes swollen and dark. “Lucia, you know I am. Tell her.”