Season of the Dragonflies Read online

  Dedication

  FOR MY MOTHER, CHAREATHA

  Epigraph

  I do not wish [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.

  —MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

  A woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future.

  —COCO CHANEL

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  THE BEGINNING OF LENORE INCORPORATED: Serena’s Story

  PART ONE DISTILLATION

  CHAPTER 1 Three Generations Later

  CHAPTER 2 Sex and Vision

  CHAPTER 3 Business in L.A.

  CHAPTER 4 The Musk Pod

  CHAPTER 5 Memory of an Attraction

  CHAPTER 6 To Rue Her Return

  CHAPTER 7 To the Fields

  CHAPTER 8 A Black Cloud

  CHAPTER 9 Choosing a Successor

  CHAPTER 10 The First Date

  CHAPTER 11 The First Love

  CHAPTER 12 Detailed Plotting

  CHAPTER 13 News at the Factory

  PART TWO A FIXATIVE

  CHAPTER 14 The Curse Manifests

  CHAPTER 15 Business Matters

  CHAPTER 16 Prepping

  CHAPTER 17 The Scent of Sex

  CHAPTER 18 Dinner with Ben

  CHAPTER 19 Shredding the Numbers

  CHAPTER 20 Snakebite

  CHAPTER 21 Curse and Vengeance

  CHAPTER 22 Acceleration

  CHAPTER 23 Naming the President

  CHAPTER 24 The Infection

  CHAPTER 25 False Calls

  CHAPTER 26 Burned Brick

  CHAPTER 27 A Visitor

  CHAPTER 28 When One Bedroom Closes

  CHAPTER 29 Anywhere but Here

  CHAPTER 30 Experiments

  CHAPTER 31 Onset and Past

  CHAPTER 32 Paranoia

  CHAPTER 33 Intertwined

  PART THREE THE DRY DOWN

  CHAPTER 34 Glass

  CHAPTER 35 An Irrational Leap

  CHAPTER 36 Memory of a Rose

  CHAPTER 37 Newborn

  CHAPTER 38 Oil Drops

  CHAPTER 39 Anointment

  CHAPTER 40 Sealed

  CHAPTER 41 Success Reigns

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  THE BEGINNING OF LENORE INCORPORATED:

  Serena’s Story

  THE HEAVY WOODEN doors to the office opened, and there stood the shortest man Serena Lenore could’ve imagined. “Come along,” her father said, one hand on Mr. Chase’s shoulder. “It’s time for dinner.”

  Mr. Chase smiled at Serena, his thin lips spread so wide they nearly disappeared. The sight of him made her thighs lock together. Those lips, and only those lips, would eventually find their way beneath all these layers of petticoat. His head was so long, like a horse’s, and his eyes too small, like a doll’s. How could her father do this to her? Did he have no feelings at all? Did he not remember what it meant to be in love? Mr. Chase was a banking heir. His family owned stock in rail, steel, and now oil and even grocery chains. They invested in small men with big dreams and made fortunes. Anyone who wanted to develop real estate in the city needed the Chase family, and her father needed Serena to sacrifice herself for his business expansion. “For your future and fortune, my darling,” her father had reasoned.

  “But what about love?” And to this her father had no answer. Could she say no? Serena dreamed about saying no; every night the same settee and the same tumbler of scotch in her father’s hand appeared. But when she told him, he dissolved on the spot, her only living parent lost to her forever. The same dream every single night, just like the same dull days in the dull marriage she’d succumb to soon enough.

  Undoubtedly, Mr. Chase would work as hard as her father and be home just as little, and this brought Serena her only comfort. Her bitterness bubbled like percolating coffee as she walked behind the two men down the mahogany hallway, which was as narrow as a coffin. She smelled vegetable broth boiling in the kitchen. She sat down at the dining room table set for sixteen, thankfully many seats away from her father and Mr. Chase. Serena recognized only a few faces at the table, like the decrepit Mrs. Barts, whose breath smelled like rotten meat. Serena’s trust manager, Mr. Hart, arrived without a date, as usual, and he was seated next to Mrs. Barts. At least it wouldn’t be Serena’s charge to conduct close conversation with the old woman tonight. Otherwise, Serena’s father had invited potential business partners to witness this momentous day in her life. She hardly knew any of them, though Mr. Chase seemed familiar with all of them. He shook their hands and they patted his shoulders, one by one, before taking their seats. Mr. Chase’s mother was the only other woman in attendance.

  A young man sat directly across from Serena, a man she hadn’t seen before at her father’s table. He’d slicked his dark blond hair into place with pomade, like waves in the ocean, and his eyes were so blue she had to look away for fear of being indecent. But he didn’t look away from her. Indeed, he stared. His lips were not too thin, his skin not prematurely wrinkled.

  Her father stood with a champagne flute in hand (none for Serena, of course) and said, “Tonight’s very special. My daughter, Serena, is now engaged to Mr. Chase. Such a delightful match; I couldn’t have asked for a better son-in-law.” Everyone turned and smiled at Serena and raised their glasses. The man sitting across from her looked at Mr. Chase and back to Serena. He mimed a small gag, and for a moment Serena really thought he was choking, until he smiled and his leather shoe rubbed against her ankle. She immediately sat up straight.

  The man leaned over and spoke to the mayor as if nothing had happened at all, but no one spoke to Serena, and she stirred her vegetable soup until it went cold. Occasionally she glanced to the end of the table where Mr. Chase and her father leaned close together and gaily conversed, like lovers. “You must do it for the family,” her father had told her again and again to counter her very reasonable objections: I don’t know him. I’m not ready. I’m only eighteen. “It’s what your mother would’ve expected,” her father had said, and this always silenced her.

  Serena knew very little about her mother, except that she had been quite the beauty, a daughter of one of the wealthiest textile merchants in the city, and Serena’s father had loved her very, very much. Her nanny insisted on this point. True love. However, her mother didn’t return to the woman she’d been before her marriage—witty, charming, free. Only the birth of Serena had offered her temporary happiness. Throughout the years Serena had overheard the staff telling new hires the rumors about her mother, how her sadness brewed storms in the Atlantic, and the more she was confined to the home, the more her once-gleaming blue eyes turned the color of ashes, the more hair she shed, and the more weight she lost. Until a doctor promised Serena’s heartbroken father that the only cure was temporary bed rest in Connecticut, and “temporary” became ten years. She died in her sleep when Serena was fourteen. Serena had never been allowed to visit. Her father had promised it would hurt her too much.

  Wicked hurricanes would brew just for Serena. Her unhappiness would make lightning strike. Though her father had fallen madly in love with her mother, Serena wasn’t convinced her mother would have wanted this kind of marriage for her, not if it felt like this.

  During a main course of lamb medallions in a red wine and rosemary reduction, Serena’s foot found its way into the pant cuff of the blond man. Their feet caressed for a brief moment before her father called upon him. “Dr. Alex Danner,” her father said in his booming baritone voice, “please tell us of those wild adventures of yours.”

  Dr. Alex Danner cleared his throat, smoothed his tie with one hand, and th
en said, “In Southeast Asia there are remote islands with the world’s oldest rain forests and an amazing range of biodiversity. Much like the Amazon, which most of you are familiar with, I assume.” He had captured the full table’s attention, especially Serena’s.

  “There’s an English-speaking community in Borneo and Sumatra now, as those islands are referred to, and my company’s offered to send me there to study the flora,” he said. His cheeks reddened and his voice grew louder. “And to discover—at least we hope—cures for the maladies of our times. Tuberculosis and malaria, chiefly.”

  “Is it a dangerous place?” Mrs. Barts said.

  “Yes, ma’am, I suppose it is.” Alex smiled and added, “Tigers frighten me most.”

  “I should say so.” Mrs. Barts fanned herself with a linen napkin.

  “What do you most want to see there?” Mr. Chase said, and Serena cringed. He was the kind of man to ask others about the unknown world without any desire to experience it for himself.

  Alex said, “Orangutans in their nests. They build them so high in the forest’s canopy, they can be rather hard to spot. Dragonflies too. More species there than anywhere on earth. But I assure you, gentlemen, I will not go for sightseeing. I’m convinced those islands hold cures for human diseases, and that mystery is the only one I care about.”

  “Of course, of course,” her father said. “Five years, is it?”

  “I will make a return visit for an update then, sir,” he said.

  “Very well,” her father said.

  Five years. Five years? Serena glanced at Mr. Chase at the far end of the table, who dabbed at his mouth with his handkerchief like a woman might, and she swallowed hard. Five years from now she’d have two ankle-biters with that man and she’d be used and gray, just like her poor dead mother. She wrapped both of her ankles around Alex’s leg and squeezed, and he pretended not to notice. With one elbow propped on the table Alex carried on about his research to the mayor, and with his free hand he lifted one of Serena’s ankles and caressed her foot in the shadows of the tablecloth.

  After dinner the men planned to sequester themselves in the library for scotch and cigars and to discuss investment in Alex’s project. The women gathered for a game of bridge. Alex asked to be excused and the crowd of men moved ahead without him. As he neared the bathroom Serena took his hand from behind and led him to a room beneath the staircase, glancing over her shoulder just in case her father or Mr. Chase might inquire.

  In the darkness of the closet she lit a candlestick, and here he discovered her romance novels and blankets and candies, this place she saved just for herself, a place where her father assumed the staff kept dry goods or utensils. And this is where she took Dr. Alex Danner into her arms, kissed him, and said, “Take me with you. Please, you must.” He backed her against a wall and kissed her with such force she thought her corset might tear. She loved him immediately, and she knew he loved her just the same when he said, “Your eyes flicker with jungle fire.” She wanted out of that corset, that closet, that brownstone, out of New York City. She was made for much more than she knew existed. Borneo. Sumatra. Plants unseen and unnamed. Exotic smells floating on warm night air. “Take me,” she begged. “I can’t stay here another moment longer.”

  SERENA PLANNED THEIR SECRET DEPARTURE as her father slumbered. She and Alex escaped from New York Harbor on the Princess Anne liner to the south. She’d left her father a brief note about her desire to travel without disclosing an exact location, and she prayed he might forgive her, though she doubted he ever would; there was much she couldn’t forgive him for, and thus, they were even. They sailed beyond the Caribbean, South America, Cape Horn, places Serena had only read about in travel books. The ship stopped at seventeen ports, but she spent much of the time ill in their windowless berth, only partially from seasickness. Almost nine months later they docked on the north coast of Borneo, an area governed by British rule. Here she found medical assistance for the birth of her daughter, a girl whose first toys were palm fronds, rocks, and dirt sculptures of her making, not dolls. No one would force her daughter to wear a corset.

  Serena and Alex grew more deeply in love and more infatuated with each other’s company in the isolation of the jungle. Alex did not let a day pass without reminding Serena how happy she made him. Their conversation was restricted to each other and the children they raised together. They lived happily with their two daughters, the second one born in their mud-and-bark hut far inland from the coast of the South China Sea. Serena and Alex were more in love seven years later than either had imagined possible.

  Serena’s hips widened from childbirth, her breasts softened from feeding, and her back grew stronger from carrying her babies slung across it like the local Dayak women did. Serena had transformed in those seven years from a girl of eighteen to a woman of twenty-five with more firsthand knowledge of the world than any of the girls she had tutored with in New York. Serena missed many things about New York, like her bathroom and its running water; her father, whom she loved more now that she lived far away; and her brownstone, because her mother had decorated it. But the pristine rain forest, the uncultivated privacy of the world she’d grown to understand, had become her chosen reality. Her daughters wore loose-fitting clothes to ward off mosquitoes, but inside their dwelling they were as naked as the orangutans that loomed in their stick-and-leaf nests in the trees. Stinking peels of durian fruit signaled a nearby ape, and Serena’s children found playmates in the young ones and tasted those huge, spiked fruits that smelled of burned milk custard and onion. Serena loved her life. Most of all she cherished Alex, the only scientist daring enough to bring a woman to a place like Borneo.

  Some families lived in more Western villages, but Alex and Serena did not often go to visit them, as it took a day’s boat ride. With two young children it was only worth it if they needed supplies. They battled together as a team—fevers, bouts of malaria, strange carnivorous insects, bites so unusual only the local tinctures could heal them—and they survived together. Even prospered together. Only during the comparatively quiet nights in the jungle did Serena question whether she had a purpose other than raising her girls and supporting Alex’s research, both of which she loved doing. Her daughters gave her laughter, and she enjoyed tagging plants and helping Alex organize his notes. Alex had discovered so many different species of plants with such promising possibilities that he believed they would be wealthier than Serena’s father when he developed them in America.

  News of America’s financial collapse reached Borneo almost a year after the market crashed. Alex had been the one to share the news with Serena. She thought of her father and wondered how he had fared. Alex and Serena debated the severity of these events after sunset when the girls had fallen asleep and only the forest and its wild symphony were still hotly awake. He held her in the hammock they shared and said, “Investments are down; the company doesn’t know how much longer they can support us.” The company had postponed his return twice already.

  “Maybe it’s time,” Serena said. She almost added “to go home,” but the hut was home, and she had no idea what they’d find when they returned to the States. A few weeks later, the company requested Alex’s return. His years of work had not been in vain. He had treated multiple local children for malaria in the past year with a formula based on an oil extraction from a small purple flower shaped like a honeysuckle that the Dayaks ritually rubbed on themselves for good health. He needed more advanced laboratories to develop his TB cure.

  During their final days, Alex and Serena and the little girls sang sad songs about their hut and jungle and made jokes about a return to civilization. Serena told them, “It’ll feel like a jungle of buildings.” She knew it would feel as foreign as Borneo had the first moment she stepped from that godforsaken ship and stared at a wall of untamed trees so unlike any she’d seen in Central Park. Her girls would feel the same deep sense of fear at their first sight of a Model T.

  On their last afternoon in Borneo,
they cleaned up their hut for the next scientist and placed their few belongings by the curtained door in preparation for their boat the next day. But the girls worked slowly, and Alex continued to wrap a splintered bamboo shaft fifty different ways. Serena said, “Let’s take a walk and do this later.”

  Serena led her family outside but stopped when she heard chanting. The voices lowered and heightened in waves. Alex pulled on her hand. “Shouldn’t we go a different way? They’re worshipping.”

  And even though their children trailed her and normally she would’ve avoided interrupting a local custom, she couldn’t resist the sound of those voices. She felt compelled into the depths of the forest. The sounds grew louder until she saw a group of bare-breasted Dayak women hovering together over a single spot on the forest floor.

  Serena advanced until she stood directly behind the circle of women and tried to peer inside, kneeling just as they did, as it was the only way to glimpse the small white flower barely visible amid the brush. One woman’s dark hands gently pushed the woody leaves away from the plant, and each time her skin brushed the petals it looked as if the plant wilted on the spot. Each time the woman moved away, the plant grew healthy again and the group made noises of astonishment. The women had never seen this particular gardenia flower before, that much was clear.

  Serena needed to touch that plant. She pushed through the crowd. A velvety red dragonfly fluttered nearby, a much larger species than the ones she and the girls had chased during their stay. Without warning it dropped down near the plant and then disappeared into the surrounding trees. Serena closed in. The plant’s white petals grew larger, and a woody branch appeared beneath it and reached in her direction. The Dayak women pulled away with small shouts of horror, and one woman tried to hold Serena’s arm back. Alex and her daughters stood far away. Serena pulled herself forward and reached her small hands down to the plant as an invitation. The moment her finger touched its stem, the plant began to shake itself free from the ground, exposing its long white roots, and nearly leaped into her palms. A scent more heavenly than any she’d encountered in the forest invaded Serena’s nostrils and filled her entire body with more glory than motherhood or love or sunlight could.