Season of the Dragonflies by Sarah Creech

Author:Sarah Creech
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780062307576
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 21

Curse and Vengeance

LUCIA 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.

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