LUCIA’S HOPE OF having a child had died during her marriage. Jonah had made it clear he was more concerned with art than creating a family. And she’d accepted his answer as her own: she too was trying to be an artist and had no time for motherhood. Plus, babies were thieves. They stole dinners out and hours of sleep. Lucia had no time for it, just like Jonah. She pushed those feelings away and down so deep that the idea of a celebration had never occurred to her. But now she wanted a party. Yellow balloons and flower-printed paper cups. Cake. Presents. Congratulations, at the very least. So far, none of that had happened.
Just four days after Lucia made love to Ben, she and Willow stood at the edge of a healthy mid-June crop of Gardenia potentiae flowers, their lovely white petals reaching upward to the exposed sun, their scent ready for harvest.
Willow said, “You’re certain?”
Lucia nodded. Of course she was certain: Wasn’t the field evidence? Lucia wouldn’t need a pregnancy test to know it was true. It had been sealed with her intent.
Willow bent over, placed her palms on the ground, and said, “Best news in months.”
A party wasn’t necessary, but why did it feel so much like a transaction? Fertilize an egg, business as usual.
James approached them from farther down the field. Willow stood to watch him come near and said, “He’s handsome, isn’t he?”
Lucia always preferred men her own age. Also, she didn’t know how to comment on her mother’s boyfriend’s good looks, so she opted to say nothing.
Willow said, “Will you two get married?”
“Me and Ben?”
“Who else?” Willow said, and wrapped one arm around Lucia’s shoulders. She patted Lucia’s belly with her other hand.
With Mya’s accident and Zoe’s death, no one, not even Lucia, was prepared for this kind of news. She wanted to feel happy about it, but marriage hadn’t occurred to her, not once. “I don’t think so,” Lucia said.
“How come?” Willow held her hand out to the flowers. One section of the hedge moved to her without hesitation, and she plucked one flower from the bush and inserted it behind her ear.
Lucia had a million reasons, but the most obvious one was Ben hadn’t suggested it and neither had Lucia. “I’ve done married before. Didn’t turn out so well.”
Willow pulled her close. “Don’t judge your future by your past.”
“That’s wise and all,” Lucia agreed. “But the flowers are thriving. What more is necessary? Maybe you never needed to get married, maybe Grandmother Lily didn’t need to either, if love was the only requirement.”
“That wasn’t an option for me, I guess.” Willow dropped her arm from around Lucia’s waist and walked forward to the edge of the flowers. She bent down once more and the flowers lifted to meet her delicate nose. In that moment Lucia found the little girl her mother once was, a girl Lucia would never meet, except, perhaps, in her own daughter. Willow said, “They smell like they always have. Maybe better.” She snapped off another flower at the top of the stem and turned to face Lucia. Willow fastened the flower in her silver bun, but her smile faded, and right then Lucia understood how lonely she must’ve been all these years. Working hard and without a lover, yet never talking about it, never complaining, never having time to share her burden.
James came to them and said, “That’s lovely,” and leaned over to smell the flower in Willow’s hair.
“Thanks.”
“Ben’s coming by later to sample the flowers once more,” Lucia said. “Just so you know.”
James smiled. “I like that kid.”
Lucia smiled back at James. “Me too.” She continued to stare at him, wondering who he would become in her mother’s life. A husband? It was so hard to imagine her mother married after all this time. Lucia appreciated his calm, steady presence. More than anything, he seemed to love her mother and make her happy, and it was about time. She’d always hoped for a James for Willow.
Lucia looked out to the fields once more; the rolling hedges of white were stable and unmoving. “Should we go?”
“The sooner, the better,” Willow answered.
MYA’S WORKSHOP FELT SO DESERTED, as if the vials of oil and the spiders suspended in the corners knew it was not Mya who entered this space. Very little sunlight filtered through the slats of the bamboo blinds. Lucia walked to the windows. Willow and James followed.
Willow sealed the door behind her and then lit the candles. She gathered droppers and cloths and large glass bottles of essential oils from Mya’s cabinets. Lucia and James watched as Willow fluttered around Mya’s room, so frantic that she knocked over a bottle of geranium oil. It shattered on the ground and filled the room with the scent of a second-rate rose. She quickly grabbed the broom and began sweeping the oily glass into the dust pan. James tried to go to her, but Lucia grabbed the back of his shirt and he stood still. Willow stood and braced herself on Mya’s table.
“Mom?” Lucia said softly.
“What’s wrong with your sister?” Finally Willow looked up and over at Lucia like she might have an answer.
“Calm down.” Lucia wasn’t sure why her mother was acting so strange. She’d seemed fine when they were in the fields.
Willow said, “There’s always something more with Mya. She knew what she was doing when she made that scent for Zoe. Let’s just admit that it was no accident. How could my own daughter be capable of a thing like that?”
“You have to believe her. She didn’t mean to.”
“The outcome doesn’t change based on intent,” James said, and both Willow and Lucia looked at him.
Willow stopped staring at James. “Yes, that’s true.”
“She didn’t mean to,” Lucia pressed. “She’s just reckless.”
“Doesn’t make it right.” Willow’s voice was flat.
No one answered.
“But she’s family,” Willow said. “For God’s sake, I made her.”
Lucia placed her hands on her stomach and a sudden terror overtook her body—she had no way to control who she would birth into the world or what would happen to her, for good or for ill.
“She’s family,” Willow repeated. “I just don’t know if I should protect her like this. I’m not even sure she deserves it.”
Lucia had never thought her mother would talk this way about either of them. Mya didn’t have malicious intent. She’d never been good at dealing with her problems. She always went for the easiest way and she didn’t learn from her mistakes, even when she was the one who ended up being hurt. But her sister wasn’t a murderer. Lucia said, “I don’t think you should.”
“I can’t do it.” Willow began gathering the supplies to return them to the cabinet.
Lucia laid one hand on her mother’s. “Mya asked me, not you, and I want to try.”
Willow continued to stack the bottles where she first found them. “I can’t let you.”
“I think she wants to be forgiven,” Lucia said.
Willow paused.
“Please just let me try. I’m going for something longer lasting. Something committed.”
“We’ll step out then.” Willow and James walked out of the workshop, and Lucia commandeered Mya’s stool.
How many times she’d wanted to be the one front and center. But Mya defended her space. Lucia had hated her for it—white, jealous hatred. But it was Mya’s one thing, this space. It was what she loved. Protecting that was all she had. Lucia didn’t agree with her sister all the time, but Mya was family, and Lucia wanted her to be alive and well. Motherhood might be the last grace available to Mya, to sacrifice and put another person’s needs before her own. This was the pinnacle experience that Mya needed in order to change, and Lucia had to bottle it somehow.
Lucia glanced at the vials her mother had first arranged on the table: orange blossom, clove, civet, Gardenia potentiae, bergamot, vanilla, and ambergris. Too complicated, Lucia thought as she stared at the line of bottles, and she returned all but her family’s essence to the shelves. Stored high up, perhaps as a way to restrict its use, Mya kept a bottle of attar of roses and oud oil, two of the most expensive essential oils in the world, scents that she’d first encountered in Paris on their very first summer trip to the Dubois shop. The richest of experiences needed the richest of scents. Lucia found a stool and used it to reach the bottles. She eased each one off the shelf.
Willow walked into the workshop holding a small wooden box and placed it on the table.
Lucia climbed down and said, “What’s that?”
“Something you left behind.” Willow smiled and then pointed to the bottles. “Interesting choices.”
Inside the box were old handwritten letters from high school. Some from her classmates, but most of the letters were from Ben. “Where were these?” Lucia asked in surprise.
“Kept them in the office,” Willow told her. “I had a hunch you might want them someday.”
The house had always been cluttered from her mother’s little intuitions, just like this one. “Thanks.”
“We’re heading back to the hospital now.”
“Ben’s coming over and we’ll be there soon.”
“You can do this,” Willow assured her.
Lucia hoped for that to be true. She’d had one vision, the first one in her entire life, but that didn’t guarantee she could blend a protection spell.
James appeared in the doorway. “Can I drive again?” He jingled the keys.
Willow said, “I suppose,” as if she were put out, but Lucia could tell her mother loved his playfulness.
Once they left, Lucia opened the box and unfolded a stack of notebook paper filled with Ben’s handwriting. Skinny letters leaning up and to the right. She scanned through pages and pages of letters detailing his days with intermittent declarations of his love. Lucia stopped when she came across a passage about the parkway on her eighteenth birthday—it was the first thunderstorm of the spring season and the first time she knew for sure she was leaving him for New York City, and she didn’t know how to tell him.
I was thinking about your birthday, how the roads were winding through a foggy mist and flashes of lightning filled the valley below us for seconds, illuminating the vastness before turning black again, and when the rain finally stopped we pulled over on the side of the road. You got out first and began to walk ahead of me and I was worried something was wrong that you weren’t sharing, but then you stopped and we stood in the middle of a cloud, and I asked you to dance with me and told you I wished it could always be this way between us, but you didn’t say anything. I’ll never forget that day for as long as I live. I’ve never loved anyone or anything like I love you and I always will. I promise you that, no matter what happens.
Lucia remembered that foggy night, and she remembered thinking how many other places and other people she needed to meet. So much to do and accomplish. What a scared and immature girl she’d been not to tell him what she was thinking. He knew anyway. He knew she’d leave him, but he kept writing anyway. Ben had loved her all these years, just like this letter promised he would, and he had a compelling love to offer, a kind that can only be sustained by the faithful. It was her turn to learn this kind of love. And Mya’s turn too.
She smoothed his letter on the table like a place mat and put the glass vial on top. She released thirty-six drops of the attar of roses for Mya, thirty-three drops of oud oil for herself, and then four drops of their family’s oil for the mother-and-child unions to come. She closed her eyes and recalled her acting classes in small studios in Union Square and how she learned to access sadness to call forth genuine tears. Lucia took this letter, her absent father, her divorce from Jonah, and all her handicaps along the way, and she shoved them aside and wrapped her arms around her belly, soon to swell with a love unlike any before, and from that place she brought forth tears and caught one in the vial. She capped the bottle and shook it to blend the oils together, then placed it back on Ben’s letter. Flanking the vial with both of her hands and with all the love she could possibly imagine, Lucia activated the energy in her palms. The vial shook in the center, and Lucia kept her love pouring forth from her hands. Lucia wrapped it in a purple cloth, swirled the liquid together once more, and said, “For Mya and Luke and a child, to protect them in love forevermore.”