“Are you concentrating, Dad?” Savannah asked, because he had stopped swirling the cards. He started again and thought about the only question he really wanted answered: How much more time would he have with Maggie?
Savannah took back the cards and laid them out. They looked all right to him. No Death card, no Devil.
“Look at this, Dad. Your future is the Knight of Wands. I’ve always loved that card. It’s the card of journeys. Advancement into the unknown without fear. It’s a card of risk.”
Doug looked over at his wife. She turned suddenly and stared at him. “What’s there to risk if you’re already dying?”
He leaned back. Maggie was absolutely right. What did he have to risk except those few things that cancer could not devour and the bittersweet poetry of his soul?
If he was already dying, then the least he could do was go about it flying through thin air. He found himself thinking everything depended on whether or not Maggie thought him capable of poetry. All of a sudden, he had a million ways to say he loved her, and he had to get them all down on paper.
Also by Christy Yorke
MAGIC SPELLS
THE WISHING GARDEN
A Bantam Book/August 2000
All rights reserved.
Illustrations from the Rider-Waite Tarot Deck®, known also as the Rider Tarot and the Waite Tarot, reproduced by permission of U.S. Games Systems, Inc., Stamford, CT 06902 USA. Copyright © 1971 by U.S. Games Systems, Inc. Further reproduction prohibited. The Rider-Waite Tarot Deck® is a registered trademark of U.S. Games Systems, Inc.
Copyright © 2000 by Christy Cohen
Cover art copyright © 2000 by Robert Hunt No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76813-1
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.
v3.1
Dear Reader:
I’m thrilled to share The Wishing Garden with you. Its main character, Savannah Dawson, was inspired by my husband, Rob, who is nicknamed Mr. Positive. Like Savannah, Rob sees the good in everyone and finds the bright side to every disaster. Obviously he drives me crazy, but mostly because I wish I could be more like him.
While Rob breathed life into Savannah, my young children are the driving force behind all my novels. I began writing stories about the power of wishes and love’s ability to transform us for one reason: I wanted my daughter and son to believe in a world of possibilities.
Like them, may you believe in magic. May you wish daily on stars.
Sincerely,
For Dean,
who makes me laugh
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One: The Eight of Swords Warning
Chapter Two: The Emperor War-Making Tendencies
Chapter Three: Ace of Wands, Reversed False Start
Chapter Four: The Moon Unknown Enemies
Chapter Five: Knight of Wands Risk
Chapter Six: Nine of Cups, Reversed False Freedom
Chapter Seven: The Five of Wands Cruel Boys
Chapter Eight: Four of Pentacles Yearning
Chapter Nine: The Page of Wands Heart-Breaker
Chapter Ten: The Devil Self-Destruction
Chapter Eleven: The Knight of Cups Attraction
Chapter Twelve: The Seven of Wands Courage
Chapter Thirteen: The Five of Cups, Reversed Return of an Old Friend
Chapter Fourteen: The Lovers Sacrifice of The Soul
Chapter Fifteen: The Five of Swords, Reversed Misfortune of a Friend:
Chapter Sixteen: The Hierophant Forgiveness
Chapter Seventeen: The Star Hope
Chapter Eighteen: Justice Just Reward
About the Author
ONE
THE EIGHT OF SWORDS WARNING
When people first moved to San Francisco, they often cried through the whole month of June. They’d had no idea the rain would come in daily and sideways, that fog would accumulate to the consistency of puréed potato soup. Old-timers, however, knew the secret to living happily in the city. They didn’t ask for too much. No more than a few days of sunshine in autumn, a decent parking space, a fifteen-hundred-a-month studio apartment. They certainly didn’t ask for their hearts’ desires, unless they were masochists to begin with and wanted to be hurt.
That was probably the reason Savannah Dawson had never made her living telling fortunes. No one trusted her ability to turn out one good fortune after another. Not only was she cheap—twenty dollars for half an hour and a ten-card tarot spread—she had never dealt the sorrow-filled Three of Swords. She promised anyone who walked through her door true love, yet only teenagers, the drunk, and the desperate took her up on it. They believed in little but destiny and grand passion, and Savannah assured them of both.
When the Devil came up, no one panicked. Savannah shrugged it off with a wave of ruby-red fingernails and told them they were going to lose something all right, but probably just those ten extra pounds or a tradition of lonely Saturday nights. By the time they put their twenty dollars in her tin, they were expecting greatness and no longer scared of a thing.
Savannah made her living working at San Francisco’s Taylor Baines advertising agency. She headed up a creative team that had linked milk consumption with true love, but when it came to fortunes, she wasn’t making things up. Take the case of the fifty-year-old spinster she’d told to look north for true love. The woman had gotten out a lawn chair, turned her back to the ineffective San Francisco sun, and refused to move. When the mailman she’d known forever came around the corner, carrying mace to ward off dogs, she wondered why she hadn’t noticed before that his thinning hair turned gold in the sunlight. She started ordering from L. L. Bean, so he’d have to spend a few extra minutes lugging snowshoes and parkas she’d never use to her door, and every time he accepted her offer of fresh-squeezed lemonade, she got a little sick thinking of all the wasted time.
Even for a nonbeliever, like the gin-drinking man who only went to Savannah’s house on a dare, there was no denying that when Savannah turned over the possibility-filled World card, his hair stood on end. He told everyone the fortune-teller was crazy. His wife had left him, his teenagers smoked pot and didn’t listen to a word he said, and if some bejeweled psychic in a velvet-paneled room thought he was going to be happy, she was sadly mistaken. Still, the next night he didn’t fix the gin and tonic the second he walked in the door. He stepped out on the back porch for a minute and was stunned by what he’d been missing during cocktail hour—an astonishing primary-colored sunset, shades of reds and yellows he had forgotten even existed. The wind scratched up clippings from his neighbor’s freshly cut lawn, and his throat swelled. By the time he walked back in the house, he was a little bit taller, and that extra inch was pure hope.
Savannah had that kind of effect on people, so when she read her own fortune and the Three of Swords came up smack-dab in her own future, she could only sit back and stare at it.
Ramona Wendall, her best friend and a two-hundred-pound palm reader for fancy San Francisco parties, sat beside her on the leather couch in Savannah’s house. Between them, they’d polished off a bottle and a half of Chianti, which
hadn’t made either of them the slightest bit drunk. Earlier, Savannah had let her fifteen-year-old daughter, Emma, have half a glass, and now Emma slept like the dead behind the bedroom door she had recently taken to locking.
“Lookie there,” Ramona said.
“I was bound to draw it eventually.”
“Well, sure.”
“It could mean anything,” Savannah went on.
“Absolutely. Probably just a bad case of indigestion.”
Savannah nodded, but she couldn’t steady her silver bracelets after she laid out the rest of the cards. Her crossing card was the Eight of Swords, the bearer of bad news, her final result the Nine of Pentacles, reversed, a card of storms. Her destiny was the Chariot, which always meant radical movement or change. One man had gotten it in his destiny and, the next morning, withdrew two hundred thousand dollars from his wife’s savings account and disappeared off the face of the earth. Ramona had gotten it the night before her husband, Stan, proposed, and she’d driven four hundred miles before she turned around and decided to say yes. The Chariot meant to run, but where to was up for debate.
“Let’s see,” Savannah said, trying to find the thread of hope in the cards, the way she found it for everyone else. Even when a man came up with the Tower and the Five of Wands side by side, she didn’t worry. The Tower might suggest ruin, and the Fives hard lessons to be learned, but often a good old-fashioned disaster was exactly what was needed to get a heart pumping right. Sometimes it took a hurricane to blow a woman out of a house she’d always hated anyway, or getting fired in the morning for a man to find his dream job by nightfall.
“So what does it say?” Ramona asked.
“Bad news leading to sorrow.”
“And then?” Ramona laughed and poured more wine. “Don’t tell me there’s no good part. Savannah Dawson, you’ve always got a good part.”
Savannah looked at her best friend and smiled. “And when I don’t, I fake it.”
It had been obvious, when she was growing up, that Savannah took after her father, Doug, a man who could not find a fault in anyone—much to the disgust of his wife, Maggie. “The two of you have no taste,” Maggie had always told them. “It’s absolutely essential to hate a few people. Otherwise, how will you know when you fall in love?”
But Savannah had not given in. All the girls on her block in Phoenix had considered her their best friend, because Savannah could do French braids and was absolutely certain they would all find their hearts’ desires. At nine, when she had her first premonition—Dorsey Levins would meet a soap opera star and end up in a beach house in Malibu—no one could get the girls out of her house, they loved her so much.
“Idiots,” Maggie Dawson had called them.
On Savannah’s eighteenth birthday, her mother hadn’t let a single one of them into the house. “They only want you to promise them a happy life,” Maggie had said, “and believe me, they’ll sue when they don’t get it.” Then she leaned over Savannah’s double-chocolate cake and blew out all eighteen candles.
“That’s not fair,” Savannah said. “You stole my wish.”
“I did you a favor. Unfair things happen every day. Just get used to it.”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t wish when you were eighteen.”
Her mother began slicing the cake that no one was going to eat. “I wished for a life of my own, and I didn’t get it.”
Savannah stood up slowly. She had imagined herself anywhere but there thousands of times, but now she thought she saw her shadow leaving. It picked up a suitcase and disappeared into deep fog. It would take another six months for her to actually pack that suitcase, but as far as she was concerned, from that moment on she was gone.
“I wish for true love,” she said. “I wish for good health and constant happiness and a daughter I can teach about wishes. I’m going to wish until I’m sore.”
Later that night, Savannah walked into the garden her father had escaped to every day for as long as she could remember. While he bent over his beloved flannel bush, she told him she had decided what she was going to be when she grew up. “I’m going to be not her,” she declared.
Now, Savannah fingered the sorrow card. “I don’t like the looks of this.”
“Oh, honey,” Ramona said. “You’re taking this way too seriously. What’s a little sorrow, after all?”
Savannah stared out the window at the smear of the Milky Way. May nights in the Bay area were so saturated, stars got blurry, dew dripped from the tip of the crescent moon. On such nights, when most people cursed the dampness and scrubbed ineffectually at mold devouring their windowsills, Savannah looked for watery red stars, which Ramona had always insisted were a sign of good fortune.
She picked at a thread on her silk blouse. She hadn’t had any customers tonight, so she was still wearing her work clothes—white blouse, ankle-length taupe skirt, and a white beret. She’d bought the hat at Macy’s after her ad agency won a Clio for her jeans commercials. She’d bought a bowler after she was promoted to assistant creative director, and a marvelous tricorn after receiving an Effie for most effective advertising—an award the other creatives loathed, but which she treasured. She loved hats, and she wasn’t afraid to wear them, because a number of her colleagues wore dreadlocks, and her boss had been known to shave his head. The only people who got anywhere at Taylor Baines were the ones with style and a flair for the dramatic.
Some people were good at numbers; Savannah could make a vegetarian suddenly crave a steak dinner, and she had stopped apologizing for it. Some people just didn’t know what happiness was until she pointed it out to them. To a stressed-out single mother, or a man who worked two jobs and never saw his kids, pleasure might seem like something they didn’t have time for or deserve. Savannah’s job was to talk them out of misery, to prove that sometimes they had to buy things simply for pleasure or go on a luxury vacation. They had to give themselves a break.
In advertising, there were no repercussions or side effects, and no one who worked at Taylor Baines wanted to hear otherwise. Savannah’s coworkers bought funky clothes, smoked unfiltered cigarettes, and took trips to southeast Asia in duct-taped planes. They were generally young and out of control; they bowled in the hallways and couldn’t believe they were getting paid for making things up. In the last year, when her daughter had grown more silent and huffy, and eventually lived almost exclusively in her room, Savannah had sometimes hated coming home.
But when she did, usually late, she turned on jazz music and cooked up fatty foods. She changed into ankle-length, loose-fitting dresses in shades of topaz, crimson, and royal blue, and wore silver bracelets all up one arm. She opened her door to whoever had the guts to knock.
“It’s probably just a sign of an off night or two,” Ramona said. “That card doesn’t mean squat.”
Savannah fingered the Three of Swords, its heart in the clouds, stabbed by three swords. Its sorrow was obvious. She had never had to pretty it up, and now she didn’t know how.
“Then again,” Savannah said, “it could be Harry. You think it’s Harry? You think he’s going to start in about Emma going to live with him again?”
“So what if he does? You know how Emma feels about that pretty suburb of his. That girl would either do some damage there or run away in two seconds flat. Harry can huff and puff all he wants. He knows Emma’s a city girl.”
Savannah nodded, but what she was thinking was that Harry had selective memory. He remembered the times she had let Emma roll off the couch as an infant, or slip into the deep end of the pool for a split second before she yanked her back to the surface. He remembered those years he’d worked such long hours at the auto dealership; he’d turned himself into a rare, precious celebrity, the one Emma couldn’t help but love best.
Savannah had met her ex-husband sixteen years earlier, in Phoenix. She had been nearing the end of her sophomore year in college and discovered the tarots. Every time she read her fortune, she came up with the same thing—a lack of
sound judgment in her future, which she immediately shrugged off. She was more interested in German beer and grand passion than common sense. She was drawn to the creative fields, majoring first in drama, then in writing, and finally in fine arts. “You’re breaking my heart,” her mother had told her. “You’re killing me.”
Savannah had ignored her. She was doing exactly what she’d set out to do—prove her mother wrong. She could enjoy every second. Every field of study held a certain appeal, every man she dated was worthy of loving. Joy was no more elusive than sorrow; she didn’t see how her mother missed it.
Out of school, she read miraculous fortunes for her friends and the occasional daring customer who came into the small grocery store where she worked as a checker. Then Harry Shaw came into her line with the strangest assortment of items she’d ever seen. Brussels sprouts, buttermilk, canned red beets, Malt-O-Meal and amaretto coffee.
“You don’t want to know,” he said, when he caught Savannah ogling his cart.
“But I do. Whatever it is, it’s wonderful.”
He came back after her shift and took her to his tiny apartment, where he never ate the same thing twice. His refrigerator was stuffed with exotic mushrooms, smoked and whipped cheeses, and seven varieties of tofu. Fifty different boxes of cereal and a wall of plain, pickled and puréed vegetables lined the pantry.
“I don’t cook,” he said. “I sample. See, what I think is life’s too short to eat bologna every day. I mean, bologna’s good. I’ve got nothing against cured meats, but what if I died tomorrow and hadn’t eaten egg salad? I mean, wouldn’t that be a shame?”
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