Emma snorted again, and went back inside for more coffee. She drank it on the front porch, too far away for conversation.
Savannah sat on the stoop and didn’t turn around. She took what she could get now, even if it was only a twenty-foot intimacy. Half an hour later, the mailman walked up the hill. He handed her a stack of catalogs, and a single letter on top. “Not a bill in sight,” he said, and smiled as he walked away.
Savannah looked at the Prescott, Arizona, postmark and dropped the letter into her lap. Her mother had scrawled the address in nearly indecipherable purple ink, and something in Savannah’s stomach curled up, rising high and tight against her lungs. A sane person would have just burned the letter, but Emma was behind her, staring so hard the back of Savannah’s neck burned, so she blew on the envelope once for good luck, then slit it open.
Savannah,
Your father’s dying, but before he does it, he’s decided to go insane. He’s gotten it into his head that he has to have another bench for his garden, as if he hasn’t spent half his life building worthless things already. He wants it to be some kind of testament to his life, and there’s no telling him how pathetic that sounds, a man fitting his whole, tiny existence onto a single slab of wood. He’s hired a psycho to do just that, for a price that would make your skin crawl, let me tell you. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the man takes a chainsaw to us the second he gets his money.
Nevertheless, your dad says he needs your help with the bench, and what that really means is he would like to see you one more time before he dies.
Mom
Savannah squeezed her eyes shut. She’d gone home only a few times in fifteen years, to show off Emma as a baby and young girl, before—she hoped—any damage could be done. She hadn’t been back in six years, hadn’t even seen this house in Prescott her parents had retired to. In the last two years, they had stopped asking her to come.
Yet her father had planted a fig tree the day she was born and held it upright for three hours during a ravenous spring flood. He’d been the one she hadn’t wanted to leave. Her fortune had just come true—the Eight of Swords had issued its warning, and if the Three of Swords was her father dying, then of course she had no choice.
All of a sudden, Emma was beside her. “What is it?”
Savannah opened her eyes and handed her daughter the letter. Emma read it over, then crumpled it in her hands. “So what does this mean?”
“I guess it means we’re going to Arizona,” Savannah said.
“For a few days?”
“For as long as we’re needed.”
“Oh no. No way. I’m going to the dance next Friday. Diana is having her sixteenth-birthday party in two weeks.”
“Emma, he’s dying.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but you’re the one who never cries at funerals, who’s got the guts to smile at sobbing widows. You can’t just yank me out of school. There’s only a month left.”
Savannah stood up, but Emma backed away. “You can finish up the semester in Prescott. It’s a pretty town. I heard it’s a big retirement community now.” She saw the look on Emma’s face and touched her arm. “Emma, he’s my father. He worked as a buyer for an electronics firm all his life, but I always thought he must have doubled as a spy. Whenever I slept beneath his roof, I never felt the slightest threat. I thought he was made of lead.”
Emma jerked her hand off. “Well, goody for you. You had a dad around.”
“Emma—”
Emma folded her arms across her chest. “Let me stay at Diana’s. I’m fifteen. You know I can handle it. Trust me.”
“I do trust you,” Savannah said quietly, then turned away before her daughter could see her eyes. Obviously, she’d taken up lying without warning. She’d given Emma unqualified devotion and as much freedom as she thought safe, and she’d still ended up with a daughter she could not predict. Emma had taken up smoking just when Savannah thought she’d sign up for track. She’d picked friends Savannah would never have chosen in a million years.
But that wasn’t what frightened Savannah most. No, what scared her was how much energy Emma put into being miserable—reading only suicidal poets and watching the movies where everyone dies at the end.
Savannah had never monitored the foods Emma ate or what she wore out in public, but she’d made sure her daughter knew luck was everywhere. Heads meant a wish would come true and tails gave you three more wishes. Sudden rain always brought good fortune, a penny in your pocket was a sign of a visitor, and three clouds in the western sky meant you were about to fall in love.
Now it turned out it had all been wasted effort. Emma hadn’t believed a word she’d said.
“Then let me stay,” Emma said.
“I need you with me. This is important, Emma. It’s family.”
“Great. Fine. Let’s uproot our lives for the sake of some family you can’t even stand to visit. I’m calling my dad.”
She walked into the house. Savannah heard the beep of the phone, then a long pause, then Emma crying.
Savannah hung her head, but not before she saw the shadow of that wolf again, first rearing up, then lying down at her feet. She stood up and walked into the house.
“I can’t believe this,” Emma was sobbing into the phone. “I thought you, of all people, would be on my side.”
Savannah walked past her and started packing. Every day, she thanked God for something, and today she decided it would be for Harry, for the fact that he had never given in to spite.
By the time Emma got off the phone, Savannah had stuffed most of her dresses and a few hats in a suitcase. Emma walked into her room and threw herself on the bed.
Savannah snapped shut the suitcase, then walked into Emma’s room. She looked at her sobbing daughter, then out the window. “We’ve got a life here,” she said. “We’ll come back.” Emma only cried harder, as if she’d seen what Savannah had just seen—Savannah’s shadow getting up after that wolf, then following him west, as far as he would go.
Savannah called the office and arranged a leave of absence. Emma did not say a word for the two-day drive to Arizona. Her only pleasure came from the Holiday Inn in Barstow, which had free HBO and conditioner. Somewhere in the Mojave Desert, the sky got so wide and light, bees could not spot land. Crows sat on the tops of telephone poles and plucked the frustrated insects, one by one, out of the air. Outside Needles, the temperature hit one hundred degrees and kept climbing. Savannah licked her lips and tasted salt.
Once in Arizona, she stopped the car to point out the first saguaro. Emma just shrugged. She would not get out of the car.
“There’s a story about these trees,” Savannah said, stepping out of her light blue Honda.
“Here we go,” Emma said.
The sun took up half the sky and was the color a child might use, Lemon Yellow or Tangerine Dream. It was scorching and added a tang to the air. Even if a woman broke her heart, it would be too hot to cry.
“A long time ago,” Savannah said, “the saguaro lived on the edge of the forest. Believe it or not, he had skin as smooth as silk and, at night, the moon spirit took him in her arms and they waltzed together over the mesa.”
She walked along the car, drawing her name in the dust on the hood. “But the desert kept creeping in on him,” she went on, “cracking the earth around his roots. He began to yearn for rain and the smell of grass and the chance to live higher up, where the pines grew and the air had a chill to it. He even envied the fact that when there was a fire, the pines all went down together, while he survived alone.”
The stories came like breath to her now. Inhale, a tale of moon spirits, exhale, the love story of the mermaid and the sea. She believed every one of them, because not to believe would have made the world too magicless to contemplate, it would have reduced true love to chemicals.
“The saguaro grew so bitter and angry,” she said, “he hardened his own soul, turned his bones brittle. He covered himself in thorns so when the moon spirit came down to
swing him in her arms, she pricked herself instead. Betrayed, the moon spirit cast the saguaro far out into the desert, to live alone forever.”
She looked back at Emma, who was staring at the largest saguaro, one of its stumps sheared off by pranksters. There were Pepsi cans on the desert floor, and Burger King wrappers twisted in cacti.
Savannah got back in the car and started the engine.
“And the moral is?” Emma asked.
“Learn to love what you’ve got.”
“Ah. Right. I should love leaving everything I know for a dying stranger.”
Savannah drove the last two hundred miles to Prescott with the radio on loud. The temperature dropped to the eighties after they entered Flagstaff, and when they dipped down into the thick stands of ponderosa pines near Prescott, Arizona, the air smelled surprisingly of vanilla. She stopped at the first Mobil station in town to ask directions to her parents’ house.
She knew the place halfway down the block, because of the garden. Her father would never settle for a lawn and junipers. He had planted a pair of June berry trees along the curb, and their branches sagged beneath clusters of pink flowers. Honeysuckle vines and akebias wound up the porch columns; the front garden was a sweet curl of chamomile and lily-of-the-valley and bitterroot, names she had rolled across her tongue as a child.
Savannah pulled into the driveway and cut the engine. She had hoped her first sight would be of her father, working in his garden. But the yard was empty, so she just sat there.
“Aren’t we going in?” Emma asked.
Savannah tucked her hair beneath a baseball cap and got out of the car. Her emerald green dress was light as tracing paper, but wherever it brushed her, she felt little pinpricks of pain. When they reached the porch, she ran her hand down one of the columns and came away with a clump of honeysuckle blossoms. They smelled like the summer mornings of her childhood, when she’d left open her window so that the first thing that touched her would be something borne by her father.
She was reaching out to knock on the front door when a huge gray and white Husky bounded around the corner of the house, barking furiously. Savannah went still, except for an arm she swung out around Emma. The dog charged them, teeth bared, and Savannah used the only weapon she had—the white blossoms in her hand. She threw them at the dog and they fell in a flutter in front of the beast’s eyes, so much like rain the dog stopped suddenly to shake herself dry. By then, Savannah had crouched down menacingly; by then the dog only rumbled.
“Just give it up,” Savannah said. “You don’t scare me.”
The Husky still came on, and when she got within biting distance, Savannah reached out and slapped her nose. The dog was so shocked, all she could do was lie down and whimper. She curled into a pitiful ball at Savannah’s feet.
The door opened and Maggie Dawson stood there. She had one hand on her hip, the other clutching a meat mallet. She looked down at the dog, then up at Savannah.
“One of the psycho’s dogs,” she said. “She’ll eat anything human if you give her half a chance.”
Savannah reached down and stroked the dog’s fur. It was soft as angel hair. The dog’s heart thundered in her chest. “She’s just scared.”
“Scared, shmared. She’s a psycho too.”
Savannah stood up. “Well, we made it.”
Her mother tilted up her chin. Maggie Dawson was five feet four, with dark brown hair cut in a bob. She lived in the MesaLand retirement community and no doubt played bridge every Tuesday, but she still had the meanest gray eyes Savannah had ever seen.
“I can see that,” Maggie said. “You should have gotten here before he started dying.”
“Mom—”
“Don’t talk to me. I’m not interested.” She rubbed her hands over her arms, which were covered in goose bumps. A frigid blast of Lysol-scented, air-conditioned air streamed out of the house behind her. Maggie looked at Emma, still hiding behind Savannah’s arm. “The last time I saw you you were nine years old, and your mother kept you in a motel. I couldn’t even hug you, that’s how afraid she was I’d contaminate you.”
“Mom, don’t,” Savannah said.
Maggie squared her shoulders, then picked up the meat mallet. “Your father’s out with the psycho, cutting trees for the goddamn bench. You can wait for him in the garden.” Then she went back in the house and slammed the door.
Emma stepped forward, then jumped back again when the dog growled. Savannah tapped the dog’s mouth until she quieted.
“Shit,” Emma said. “Welcome home, Mom.”
Savannah turned, ready to apologize, then realized there was no point, because Emma was smiling.
TWO
THE EMPEROR WAR-MAKING TENDENCIES
Maggie Dawson was shaking as she closed the door on her daughter. Nevertheless, she walked across her blue slate entry and turned the thermostat down another two degrees. The foot-thick stuccoed walls of her house vibrated with the pulse of air-conditioning that would run until October. Prescott was a mile high, and in summer it rarely got above eighty-five degrees, but the day Maggie had turned fifty, she’d vowed to get her hair done once a week and never be hot again. Let the students over at Prescott College smolder in their stifling dormitories, worrying about energy conservation and how to pay the summer electricity bill; they were young and slim and headed for six-figure incomes in business and computer science. Maggie was fifty-five years old, prone to hot flashes, and she’d paid her dues in Phoenix. She’d spent fifty summers there, wolfing down Wheaties so the milk wouldn’t curdle halfway through, and crushing scorpions who got into her laundry basket and pantry and once, amazingly, a carton of milk, looking for a cool place to sleep.
Prescott was a dream compared to that, but Maggie still kept the thermostat at sixty-two or under, day and night. Her husband wore red wool sweaters and slept beneath a down comforter, but that was because now that Doug had gotten sick, he was cold everywhere, even in steaming hot baths. He would no longer drink Coca-Cola, his favorite, because he complained it chilled him going down. He had joked that all his hair falling out was a blessing, since it saved on haircuts and hers cost fifty bucks a pop. “You’re wiping me out,” he’d said, after she came home one afternoon with a new auburn tint.
She walked into the living room she’d redecorated in blue six months ago, right after Doug’s biopsy. She’d chosen an indigo leather sofa, plush turquoise carpeting, and two seascapes for the walls. You couldn’t walk into the room without shivering, and that was just how Maggie liked it. She’d bought the thickest drapes she could find, a quarter-inch of royal blue velour, and rarely opened them. This might be a mountain town, but twenty miles outside the city limits, forest turned to scrub. One more El Niño year and Lynx Lake would dry up, the pines would go down in a horrific forest fire and never reseed themselves. She’d be living in desert all over again. As it stood now, Arizona was little more than sand and crows, hot tempers and white-slacked widows staring pleadingly at an alarming expanse of sky.
At five thousand feet, there might be trees, but the sun was devastating. It sucked the burgundy right out of the gazanias; plants and animals blanched to the color of concrete. Heat-loving pomegranate trees wilted, pet iguanas left on the patio were fried crisp as barbecued potato chips, then devoured by crows. Doug’s garden was the only thing that had flourished in the MesaLand retirement community, because he’d put in drip irrigation and knew how to Xeriscape; all the others were brown fescue lawns and junipers. Everybody else had just given up.
Maggie Dawson parted the drapes just enough to peek through. Her long-lost daughter was walking through the garden. Savannah had on an emerald green dress and black velvet sandals. Maggie would never have added that ugly baseball cap, but on her daughter it looked surprisingly chic. Of course no one, least of all Savannah, would ever give Maggie credit for her daughter’s fashion sense. Maggie was responsible for every tear and heartache—no doubt for war and famine, too—but never for Savannah’s successes, for he
r creativity and flair and the fact that she was happy.
Maggie gripped the curtains. Savannah was pointing out plants to Emma. Incense cedar, akebia quinata, ginkgo biloba, beard tongue, names Maggie knew but intentionally mispronounced, should anyone ask. Thirty-six years ago, Doug had taken his first gardening class at the community college. One morning he was hers, and that afternoon, poof, he was in love with begonias. He came home loaded down with sunflower seed packets, sorry-looking hibiscus cuttings, and a brand-new set of trowels, and she never saw him again. He knelt down in what passed for soil in their Phoenix yard and first replaced the burnt fescue with fairy duster and African daisies, then put in lemon and grapefruit trees for shade, dwarf pomegranate and cape weed for color. He bought mushroom compost by the truckload, then started making his own fertilizer out of coffee grinds and rotted onion skins. He planted fig trees and lantanas; he even went so far as to carve out a lily garden, which came back stronger every year, the flowers white as moonlight. His garden became the prize of east Phoenix; every evening, their neighbors gathered beneath Doug’s bougainvillea-covered trellis and dreamed themselves right out of their hot, rotten lives into the green forests of Canada, or at least anywhere north of there.
When Doug announced he was accepting his company’s early-retirement package and moving to Prescott, the women in the neighborhood knelt in his garden, sobbing. The men tried to bribe him to stay, offering to order him those twenty-two rare species of orchids he’d been eyeing, vowing to pay his water bill for life. Doug might have wavered, but Maggie was determined to get them out of that desert hellhole. She had chosen a house in Prescott with a dull but passable garden, hoping that Doug wouldn’t have the energy to start all over again. But while the movers were still unloading their furniture, he had dug down three feet in the front yard to see what kind of soil he was dealing with. That evening, he pored over tree catalogs and ordered the rare pink-blossomed Juneberry trees, both of which had grown four feet a year.
Just like in Phoenix, everyone in the MesaLand retirement community loved the garden. Widows crept into the perennial bed and clipped bunches of sweet rock jasmine; old men got a little bit shaky, claiming they hadn’t seen such shades of lavender in years. The neighbors loved Doug, too, because he was as bright and peppy as his garden. He said the same thing to every person he met: “Hello. Wonderful to see you. Beautiful day.” Even if it was raining. Even if he was dying.
The Wishing Garden Page 3