Now, when a desert wind blew up his mountain, it sometimes reeked of what he’d thought happiness was, of burning sweetness and optimism and wanting. But whenever he swallowed, it went down bitter. It left a bad aftertaste that lasted for weeks.
He unloaded the rest of the wood, then gathered his dogs into the bed of the pickup. Sasha was still mooning over the woman, and Jake touched her head.
“She put a spell on you, girl?” She turned away, as if she didn’t want him to see her eyes.
He got in the truck and turned over the engine. He had backed halfway out of the drive when Doug and his daughter knocked on his window. He stopped and rolled it down.
“You can come in if you want,” Doug said. “I’m going to see my granddaughter for the first time in years. And you haven’t met my daughter, Savannah.”
Jake looked at the woman. She was nervous, that’s what he picked out first off. She stood the way he’d stood for fifteen years, legs set apart, one foot in front of the other, one fist clenched—the stance of someone who was thinking about running. But when she looked at him, she was all smiles.
“It’s nice to meet you,” she said.
He nodded. He’d run out of conversation three hours ago and, besides, the only thing he could think to say was that a girl had shimmied up one of the Juneberry trees and was sitting precariously on a skinny limb. Jake watched her in his rearview mirror. He didn’t give away anything, not even when she began tearing leaves from the branches and mashing flower petals in the palm of her hand.
“Let the poor man go,” Maggie said, coming down the drive.
“Can we start on the bench tomorrow?” Doug asked.
Jake turned away from the yearning in his eyes. “This weekend. I’ll call you.”
He hit the gas and skidded out of the driveway. In his mirror, he saw the girl jump from the tree, scaring the daylights out of her grandparents. The woman looked after his truck, as if she regretted not hitching a ride. He nearly slammed on the brakes and went back for her, then wondered what he was thinking, assuming she’d have any desire to be with him.
He turned the corner and took a deep breath. When a group of girls playing hopscotch saw his truck and bolted for the porch, he felt a little better. Long ago, he had decided he was only good for scaring people, and he’d spent the last fifteen years proving it. He’d befriended Cal Bentley, the country sheriff, for one simple reason: It was only a matter of time before the man found him out.
* * *
Emma jumped out of the Juneberry tree onto the concrete. The bandage was loose on her grandfather’s forehead, but that was not what made her start crying. It was the color around him, black as dried blood. For as long as she could remember, she’d seen colors around people—a deep blue shimmering around Ramona, an orange so magnificent clinging to her friend Diana she could hardly bear to look at it. Her grandfather’s, however, was the first one that reeked. It stunk like the deepest part of the compost pile, like something being eaten away.
“Oh, honey,” Doug said. “Don’t you cry.”
He held her and that was worse. Emma didn’t even know him. She wasn’t about to start caring for someone who was only going to die. But whether she knew him or not, his arms felt familiar. He had the same awkward hooked grasp her mother had. He made the same clucking noise between his teeth. And though her mother had sworn Ramona and her friends from school were their family, that they weren’t missing anything, Emma knew now that Savannah had lied. A real family made her cry when she’d thought she’d been perfectly happy. Pretty soon, they’d get her shouting for no good reason and missing what she’d never even known.
Emma pulled back. She couldn’t look him in the eyes. He had two blond tufts of hair that stood up straight from his scalp; the rest was just pink, mottled skin, like the flesh of a baby whale. She looked straight at the sun, until she saw red. That didn’t stop her from noticing that her grandmother’s aura was even redder—red as blood, red as rage. It sizzled and sparked around her head; one streak flew straight to the top of the Juneberry tree and spooked the crows into flying. That stopped Emma’s tears. That was wonderful. Maggie’s meanness was like an alien creature, a monster she wanted to hide her eyes from, but couldn’t, it was so marvelously awful. Emma had been set on running away tonight, as soon as the moon dipped behind Kemper Mountain, but she decided right then to stay awhile, because it was obvious something was going to happen.
Her mother’s aura was the same as always, lavender, the color of a dreamer. Wisps swirled out from her to curl around Doug’s shoulders.
“This is so wonderful,” Doug said. “And all because of this little thing.” He gestured to his forehead as if it were nothing, as if they all couldn’t see the blood slipping out around the bandage.
Emma pressed her arms to her sides. She had expected a lot of things to happen when she turned fifteen. She figured she’d finally start filling out her bras and maybe get a chance to French kiss. What she had not been prepared for was the way she would slowly stop believing in everything. First in luck, because every boy she showed the slightest interest in fell in love with her best friend, Diana; and second in God, after her classmate Benjy Martinez was kidnapped from his own front yard, taken to the top of Mt. Tamalpais, and beaten senseless. And, just lately, Emma had stopped believing in her mother.
Savannah had raised her on laughter and stories; every cloud had been a guardian angel, every sudden rain had meant good fortune. Now all that seemed ridiculous. Life couldn’t possibly have so much luck.
Her mother reached for Doug’s hand. “It’s going to be fine now. I can feel it. Let me read your fortune. I’ll prove it to you.”
“Oh no,” Maggie said. “Don’t even think about it.”
“Mom, it wouldn’t kill you to open your mind a little.”
“It’s open all right. Open enough to know it’s all a bunch of garbage.”
Another thing that happened to Emma when she turned fifteen was that she started wanting her mother to be like everyone else. She wanted her to get a little mean when she was tired. She wanted her to stop getting that look in her eyes when Emma cried, like it was killing her. She really hadn’t expected to get what she wanted, but now it looked like she just might. This wasn’t Savannah’s world. She stood so still not a single bracelet jingled, and took shallow, short breaths, as if she was close to choking on something.
Emma realized everything wrong with her life was her mother’s fault. Savannah was the reason food had suddenly lost its flavor; she hated health food and still fried everything, even though Emma had told her a thousand times she was on a diet. Her mother was the reason Emma cried every time she saw a rainbow or found a four-leaf clover, because she’d wished for a thousand things, for true love and a million dollars and for her dad to come back, and not a single one of them had come true—contrary to her mother’s promises.
“You know what the tarots are?” her mother asked Maggie. “They are an act of trust in the universe. Selecting cards at random and trusting in their judgment is an acknowledgment that we’re not always in control here. There is a power greater than anything we can imagine.”
“My God,” Maggie said. “You’re worse than I thought.”
Doug laughed. “I wouldn’t mind a reading. I could use some good news.”
“And what if it all comes up death?” Maggie asked. “What if you’re going to die tomorrow?”
Doug took his wife’s hand and massaged the knots out of each of her fingers. “Then I won’t believe it.”
“You’ll believe the good things but not the bad?” Maggie said, tears in her eyes. “You can’t do that. That’s not how life works.”
“That’s how my life works.”
“Then you’re not being fair to the rest of us.”
Emma turned away. Three clouds were gathering in the western sky, and below them a worked-over sports car came screaming down the road. The driver skidded to a stop in front of the house, then hopped out through the car window.
“Hey,” he said. “Jake here?”
“You just missed him, Eli,” Doug answered. The young man nodded. He started to get back in the car, then stopped. He had long brown hair that completely covered his face, and he reached up to part it. Emma could make out two things: a flash of green, and the fact that he was staring at her.
She wrapped her arms around her waist and looked at the sky. Diana Truff had been the beauty of Mission High School—all blond hair and blue eyes and a C cup by the time she was twelve. No boy had ever shown the slightest interest in Emma, so now she hugged herself and made believe that life could swing on a stare. When those three clouds merged and suddenly thickened with rain, it seemed entirely possible that desire could sweep up out of a clear blue sky, that everything could change in an instant.
FOUR
THE MOON UNKNOWN ENEMIES
Savannah had four weeks of accumulated vacation and sick time, and she had every intention of going back to San Francisco before they were over. She spent her first few nights in prescott dreaming her father well, but in the mornings found lumps of his hair on his pillow. For days, she felt nauseated at the thought of what would happen if he died, but he felt worse; he spent his mornings in the bathroom, vomiting up everything but cream of mushroom soup. She unpacked her bags and hung her hats on the walls.
When she drew a card for herself and came up with Strength, she decided this was the perfect opportunity to try her fortune-telling full-time, and to stop being afraid of Harry’s attorneys. She placed an ad in Prescott’s Daily Courier. AMAZING FORTUNE-TELLER—KNOW YOUR FUTURE. CALL SAVANNAH. 645-1297.
The ad appeared Monday morning and by Monday afternoon, she got her first call. Unfortunately, Maggie answered the phone and told the young pilot out at Embry-Riddle University he was out of his mind. “What if she tells you a train’s headed right for you? Do you want to live your whole life in fear? And why would you believe her anyway? Who made her an expert on your life?”
“I just thought—”
“No, you didn’t think. That’s the trouble with you young people. You’re not thinking at all.”
Savannah was standing in the back of the kitchen, and she headed for the door.
“You will not put up any signs!” Maggie called after her.
Savannah went to the converted garage, where she and Emma had moved in. Her father had apologized for the rakes on the walls and the exposed plumbing; he had never seen their house in the city when the housekeeper failed to show. Savannah would rather invite Ramona over for margaritas than dust her furniture. In her opinion, people who stenciled their hardwood floors needed some time in Tahiti.
She put on her Panama hat and grabbed her checkbook. She went to the phone company in person, to get a second line put in the garage.
When she returned, her father and mother were just pulling up in the driveway, after Doug’s radiation treatment. This was his second round of treatments, scheduled five days a week for six weeks, and it was doing nothing but killing him. His hair was all gone and even when they left the windows open in his room, there was a yeasty smell there that could make a woman as tough as Maggie Dawson curl up in a ball and cry.
Savannah started across the yard, but Maggie stopped her halfway. “You go on,” she said.
“I just want to help him in.” Savannah looked past her mother to the car, where her father sat frighteningly still. The only sign of life was his trembling bottom lip.
“You think he wants you to see him this way?” Maggie whispered. “You think this isn’t killing him?”
Maggie’s voice quivered, and Savannah looked up. It was obvious who this was killing, and that shocked her. She had thought her mother would be just fine.
“I’m sorry,” Savannah said, and walked back to the garage. She was trembling, but she made herself walk normally. She quieted the throb in her throat with a stick of Juicy Fruit gum. She took a deep breath and climbed the ladder above the garage door. While Maggie slipped a strong arm around Doug’s waist and half carried him into the house, Savannah nailed her fortune-teller sign to the wall. She glanced up occasionally at her father’s window, but it was half an hour before she saw any movement, and then it was just her mother pulling down the shade.
At dusk, when the sidewalks filled with strolling widowers in pressed sweat suits, timing their heart rates, Savannah waited in the garden for one to come for a closer look at her sign. When the streetlamps snapped on at eight, a good hour before dark, a man did. Maggie watched from the kitchen window, smiling, because the man was Ben Hiller, head of the MesaLand Homeowners Association.
“There are covenants against this sort of thing.” Hiller gestured at her sign with the sharp white point of his elbow. He was tall, silver-haired, and thin as a pear sapling. He wore all white, which only highlighted the fact that his skin was the color of macaroni and cheese. From the smell of his breath, she was sure that was all he’d been eating for weeks.
“Come on in,” she said. “Let me give you a reading.”
He had to bend his head down to look at her. She could smell sadness a mile away, and it reeked to high heaven on him. She put a hand on his arm, right over a liver spot shaped like a bird. He studied her bracelets a moment, then pulled away.
“We will not have any businesses run on our properties. We’re here to live out our days in peace and quiet.”
Savannah adjusted her hat. “I don’t read to rock music. You won’t even know I’m here, unless you come for a reading. I could tell your fortune right now. I’ll do it for free, just to get the word out.”
“Young lady,” Ben said, “I’ve lived on that corner for twenty years. I think I know a thing or two about my neighbors. They’re already scared enough, for one thing. They’re not going to be lining up here so you can tell them they’ve got only two more years to live.”
Savannah drew back as if he’d insulted her. “I’d never say that. The tarots are not fortune cookies, you know. They’re not so much a prediction of the future as a way to get in touch with your own intuition. A way to see things clearer. Did you know the tarots go back to Egyptian times? The cards are based on mythical archetypes. The major arcana correspond to the twenty-two letters of the kabbalah. I’m telling you, I am not messing around here.”
Ben Hiller stepped back and grasped the black string around his neck. It held two silver wedding rings, a woman’s and a man’s, which he tucked beneath his faded white shirt, against his heart.
“That is not the issue,” he said.
“I’m not going to tell anyone they’ll get in a car crash or have a heart attack,” Savannah went on. “There’s nothing in the cards for that. But four Fours often means a journey is near at hand. And there is no doubt about it, the Two of Cups means you’re going to fall in love.”
“No one on this block wants to fall in love again. I guarantee you.”
Ben looked through the lemon stamp of lamplight at his house on the corner, the one with an overwhelming expanse of blue fescue, like an ocean he’d have to cross just to get to his front door. He stepped back, right into the path of a blueberry climber Doug had planted along the walls of the garage.
“Young lady, you take down that sign and don’t even think about practicing your witchcraft here.”
Savannah put a hand over her heart. “I swear I will not practice witchcraft.”
Ben Hiller squinted at her. He was trembling, and they both heard the wedding rings slapping against his chest. He stepped back, until he crushed a blood-red tulip, which had just opened up. It was a well-known fact that crimson tulips from Canada to Texas bloomed on the same day, as if by magic. On that night, mothers put their toddlers to bed early and asked their stunned husbands to dance, girls pricked their fingers and said a boy’s name one hundred times, and hard men cried. But Ben Hiller just scraped the blossoms off the bottom of his heel.
Savannah touched his shirt, above the rings. “What was her name?”
Ben Hiller stepped back and
put a hand over his chest, as if she’d burned him. The wind curled around their shoulders and arms, but went no higher; it never rocked the top branches of the trees, it did nothing to deter the flight paths of crows. It was a wind for landlocked humans, and tonight it swirled around a widower’s shirt collar, then collapsed into his pocket, where it trembled against his chest.
“Helen,” he said. “She died sixteen years ago this summer.”
Savannah suddenly felt unsteady, and reached for the wall of the garage. Husbands and wives ought to grow old together, not leave one another hanging. Life ought to reward true love, and if it didn’t, then she didn’t want to know about it. She looked at the blueberry climber and the darkening sky, everywhere except at the pain in one old man’s eyes.
“Well,” she said. “Thanks for the warning.”
She left Ben Hiller standing in the garden and went back inside. She didn’t even think about taking down the sign. But a few days later, she knew Ben had warned the neighbors, because no one in the MesaLand retirement community would come near her. Even after the ad appeared with her new phone number, she got only three calls, all high-school girls wanting to know how to win back their ex-boyfriends. Her neighbors hung up on her whenever she phoned with offers of a free introductory reading. They crossed the street when they saw her coming. Ninety-year-old Mark Ridley went so far as to ask his grandson to move in, just in case something funny should happen.
Savannah ignored this entirely. She read for the high-school girls and tried to stop dreaming of her old life—her corner office overlooking the Bay Bridge, and the dodgeball games her writers would be playing in the conference room. She tried to stop thinking Arizona was making her another person. Outside her father’s garden, there was not enough color, so she wore nothing but crimson dresses and sapphire rings. She still woke up humming, but sometimes it took her awhile to figure out a tune. Sometimes, in the middle of frying up bacon, she couldn’t think of one more note.
After two weeks, when her father had turned a paler shade of chalk, she began to get a little nervous. When she was down to five days of sick leave, she ignored Emma’s lethal stare and called her boss.
The Wishing Garden Page 6