“I can’t go back now,” she said.
Taylor Baines was one of the most successful ad agencies in the city, second only to the Goodby Silverstein agency. There were a hundred people standing in line to take her job, but she couldn’t consider that. Not while her father needed help getting from his bed to the bathroom, not while she heard her steely mother crying in the middle of the night.
“You could take family leave,” her boss said. “Your position will be waiting for you when you come back.”
He suggested freelance copywriting just to keep her finger in the business, and she found such work writing newspaper ads for Fulsom Foods, an independent supermarket chain in decline. Though the work was minimal, some days she found it harder than her job at Taylor Baines.
“Shop with experience,” she said out loud. She was stirring up another batch of homemade cream of mushroom soup in her mother’s kitchen. “Freshness and experience. No one can beat our quality and service.”
“I got food poisoning from one of their tomatoes,” Maggie said, coming into the kitchen.
“You did not.”
Maggie went to the cupboard. “I most certainly did. Besides that, I prefer the new Smitty’s. Have you seen the size of their deli? They’ve got a sushi chef on staff, if you can believe that.”
Savannah stirred the soup, while her mother found a wineglass. Beyond the glasses, there was an inordinate amount of frying pans and utensils, and a cutting board to die for, none of which appeared to have ever been used.
“I’ll get going with the fortune-telling anyway,” she said. “This could all be fate, you know.”
“You’re a successful woman. Don’t ruin it.”
“I’m not ruining anything. I’m trying to follow my heart.”
“Do you know what I would have given for a life like yours?”
Savannah looked at her mother’s hands clenched tightly around the stem of her wineglass. She turned away. “We are two different people, Mom.”
“So you’d like to think.” Maggie unpeeled the tag from the wineglass, then filled it with chilled Chardonnay. She took a good, long sip, then finally turned to Savannah. “You won’t do any fortune-telling business here. My neighbors already know their future. It’s cream of mushroom soup.”
Savannah’s hand shook as she poured the bone-colored soup, but she wasn’t about to start falling for doomsday thinking now. She took the soup on a tray to her father, but he had already fallen asleep. She put the tray down on the side table and pulled the blankets up under his chin.
She pressed her face into the crook of his neck, and breathed in deeply. She ignored the stench of illness entirely—the bitter breath and moldy sweat—because beneath that he still smelled of himself, of citrus and fishy soil and rose petals. Of the only cherry tree in all of Phoenix. He still smelled of the living, and she swept that up into her heart.
She pressed her cheek firmly against him. She adored him, but his dying was not bringing out the best in her. In fact, it had made her selfishness crystal clear. She didn’t care what else he did, he just couldn’t leave her. She could walk away and never come back, she could break his heart in two, but a father was meant to be there. He didn’t have to say a word; he just had to last.
This didn’t speak well for her, but she knew what she had to do—read her father’s fortune and, if it came up badly, stack the cards. A child had to have some power, after all, and hers would be to make him live.
She sang a song she’d made up years ago, when she’d spent her nights on that back lawn in Danville, Emma tucked against her, her palms unfurled.
My lover went to sea,
to sea.
His heart he gave to me,
to me.
I stored it in a treasure chest,
the key tucked near my breast,
my breast.
But still the sea swept it out to rest
at the bottom of the sea,
the sea.
She stroked her cheek against her father’s arm. The hair had fallen out there, too, so he now had skin like a baby’s, so smooth and pink it brought tears to her eyes. She cried the way she laughed, from the pit of her stomach, from way down deep. And while she cried, she realized she had married Harry Shaw not only to escape her irascible mother, but also to get away from the goodness of her father, from loving someone so much, losing him would make her another person. She might suddenly forget the things he’d taught her—how to ride a bicycle and do long division. Worst of all, with her champion gone, she might start looking at the world differently, as if it were a predator and had been after her all along.
She felt a hand on her hair and looked up to find her father awake, staring at her. He stroked her hair and tried to smile, but his bottom lip split with the effort. She reached for the washcloth by the side of the bed and wiped off the blood.
“It’s always darkest before the dawn,” he said.
He had said the same thing every time she lost a boyfriend, or Maggie yelled, or a friend moved away. She had clung to those words, she had believed them, but now she was not so sure. She thought it might very well be darkest right before midnight, when there was still a whole night of darkness to get through.
The second Emma stepped onto the grounds of Prescott High, she knew she had made a mistake sticking around. Mission High in San Francisco was a small charter school devoted to the arts, and the students were even more bohemian than the artists south of Market and the witches who gathered on misty Tank Hill. The boys wore ponytails and backpacked all summer, the girls read Keats and hardly ever fell in love. Popularity was based not on athletics or looks, but on which part you got in Othello, on whether or not people cried while you sang a Tracy Chapman song.
Emma had been Desdemona in Othello, she had had friends hanging on her every word. Now, though, she was frozen solid; she was hideously out of place. Prescott High was double the size of Mission High, sprawling, nondescript, a vague brown. People had way too much land to play with out here, they had entirely too much access to concrete and computer-aided design. The school was a fortress of cement, with every window locked tight—a security measure since a boy in neighboring Flagstaff went crazy with an Uzi during homeroom. She was supposed to find room 203 for History, but she wasn’t going anywhere, not any farther than the flagpole near the front gate.
A clique of girls in tight blouses and short skirts walked past her and snorted at her clothes—she’d worn her favorite ankle-length gray skirt, oversized gray blouse, and sandals. One of them said something about foreigners and the others laughed.
Emma picked up a handful of dirt and flung it at them. The girls yelped and turned around, but Emma was already picking up another handful. Ramona had taught her how to throw a hex. Emma spit on the dirt for luck, then hurled it at the tallest girl’s eyes, all the while cussing like there was no tomorrow.
“Fuckshitgoddamnyoumotherfucker.”
She must have done it right, because long before the dirt wad hit them, the girls were running. They flung themselves inside the Science building, where they hugged one another and sobbed. Emma slapped her hands clean, satisfied.
“Good aim,” someone said.
Emma turned around to find a band of punks behind her. They were too old for high school, nineteen or early twenties, with cigarettes in their pockets and mean, ugly haircuts. The boy she’d seen drive up in front of her grandparents’ house had already taken a step toward her.
“They had it coming,” she said.
“No doubt.”
He lit a cigarette and squinted when the smoke flew past his eyes. He was hard and audaciously thin, a lean coyote who has the guts to nudge open a kitchen door, looking for food. Long brown hair fell over his eyes and a nasty scar ran down his left cheek. He sucked on his cigarette but, as far as she could tell, never exhaled.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Emma Shaw.”
“Emma Shaw. Emma Shaw.”
She di
d not know if he was singing her name or mocking her. The others passed around a joint and didn’t bother to put it out when a woman in a blue linen suit slammed out of the administration building. Emma recognized her as Principal Harris, whom she’d met when she enrolled.
“Eli Malone,” the woman said, “I told you if I caught you here one more time, I was going to call Cal Bentley. You’d better get moving, because he’s already on his way.”
“I’m shaking. I’m shitting my pants.”
The boys all laughed. They passed the joint to Eli right in front of her.
“Haven’t you got anything else to do?” the principal asked.
“We’re just friendly, that’s all,” Eli said. “When Cal comes, what’s he gonna pick us up for? Loitering? We’ll be out in an hour. We’ll pick up Rick and Pippen and come back even stronger.”
Eli walked up to the principal and rested his head on her shoulder. “Principal Harris? You hear about that shooting during homeroom up in Flagstaff? You hear how that boy just snapped?”
The woman was at least thirty years older than Eli, with crusty brown lines fanning out from her eyes, but she leaned back, out of his reach. Behind her back, she crossed and uncrossed her fingers.
Eli laughed, then looked at Emma. He stared at her so hard, Emma had the feeling he was working some kind of magic, taking something from her even though she wasn’t quite sure what it was. Principal Harris must have felt the force of that gaze, too, because she put a hand on her shoulder.
One of the boys held the joint out to the principal, then laughed when she glared at him. Emma snorted. Big deal. In San Francisco, these guys would have to do a lot worse to get noticed. In a city where almost everything and everyone was accepted, it was frustratingly hard to be bad.
But here, where high-school girls either got scholarships or knocked up, and their brothers went to bed at eight o’clock or not at all, Emma could see right off she definitely had to choose her corner. Raise her standards or raise havoc, but either way decide early, so people would know how to treat her.
Emma squeezed her hands into fists. Though her skin was burning hot, she nevertheless turned toward the principal. She didn’t dare look into Eli Malone’s eyes. She wasn’t the type of girl who suddenly started screwing up her life.
“Remember me?” she said to the principal. “I’m Emma Shaw. It’s my first day.”
“Well, don’t start it with these boys. They were kicked out four years ago, and we haven’t been able to get rid of them since.”
The sheriff drove up then, but instead of scattering, the boys planted their feet. They weren’t total fools, though; when the cop got out of his car, they threw the joint into the ivy.
The sheriff was built like a slab of concrete. He was taller than Eli, and had to weigh twice as much. His hair was cut short and going silver, but it was the lines around his eyes that held Emma’s attention. That was where his color seeped out, a strangely luminous yellow, a surprising color for a man with hands the size of T-bone steaks.
“This is what I’m gonna do,” the sheriff said, putting a hand on his gun. “I’m gonna push this up a notch and call it trespassing. See? Then the school gets a chance to sue. Then we’re talking civil suit, in addition to criminal. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll get a warrant. I’ll bet I can get each of you for possession right now. That’s a felony, boys. That’s the big house.”
The others all looked at Eli, but he just leaned back on his shiny black boots and smiled. “Jake will never let you book me.”
“Jake’s got no say in this.”
Eli shrugged. “I’ll call your bluff.”
Cal Bentley nodded and slipped a pair of handcuffs out of his back pocket. Eli turned around and held out his hands behind him. He smiled at Emma, and she took a step toward him before she wondered what she was doing.
By the time Cal had the handcuffs fastened, the other boys had scattered. “Looks like you’re on your own,” Cal said.
“What else is new?”
The sheriff led him to the car. The principal, who Emma had forgotten, squeezed her shoulder.
“You stay away from them,” she said, leading her toward the school. “They’re nothing but bad news.”
Emma nodded. But she looked over her shoulder and saw Eli staring at her out of the backseat of the cruiser. His eyes seemed capable of burning holes straight through the glass, not to mention the thin lining around her heart.
The dogs started howling when the car was still a mile away. When Jake came out of his workshop, they leapt into the air and took to snapping at each other. Rufus, the chocolate Lab, went a little crazy chasing his tail, until he finally fell over, winded and dizzy, on the gravel driveway.
Jake walked up the pebble path to the drive. He got all the way to the top before the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. He’d had some warning, but still when he turned around and looked where the metal roof of his cabin peaked by the chimney, his heart skipped painfully. His hallucinations had taken solid form; his worst nightmare sat smoking a cigarette, his leg draped over the eave, a big black boot tapping against the log post. Jake closed his eyes. When he reopened them, the nightmare was gone. Then he heard a twig snap behind him.
He turned around in time to see a vague form disappearing into the woods. A shadowy man, with black hair and teeth the color of creamed coffee. Jake had had plenty of time to think of something profound to say, and it all came down to this: “Go to hell.”
The wind through the pine needles sounded exactly like laughter.
When Jake had first built his cabin, the apparition had been no more than an occasional glow between the trees. The problem was, Jake had not denied the vision outright. He probably could have put a stop to it immediately, if he’d had the guts to turn away, like the spirit was nothing, not even worth his worry. Instead, he stared at the ghost’s bloodshot eyes too long. He remembered the living man’s black boots and, bam, the ghost was wearing them. He showed some signs of panic, and the ghost got high on his own power, which put a little more meat on his bones.
Give a ghost an inch and he’ll take a mile. Pretty soon, he wouldn’t be afraid to cross Jake’s doorstep or perhaps even sleep in his bed.
“Get out,” Jake called after him. “I mean it. Get fucking lost.” He charged into the woods, but found nothing except a blackened hedge of bitterroot, as if something had burnt the life out of it.
He was being haunted, all right, but sometimes it was difficult to tell if it was by a ghost or his own bad dreams. For one thing, the ghost had never spoken, not in fifteen years. It was an awesome kind of power, holding back all the things he could say. Silence was as good as a firearm; when it finally broke, it would go off, right between Jake’s eyes.
He started to walk out of the woods. The car he’d heard was closer now. He recognized the deep hum of Cal Bentley’s squad car, just a hundred yards down the winding road.
He was friends with Cal Bentley for two reasons: because the man knew how to be quiet, and because every time he drove up the dangerous road to Jake’s cabin, Jake assumed he had figured out everything. For fifteen years, Jake had been waiting for someone to find him out so he could finally confess. Not to murdering a man—that much was obvious—but to being glad he’d done it.
He was tormented by his own satisfaction. When the nightmares came, he was appalled at himself for waking up smiling. He was abominable, a man he would never want to know, because what he regretted most was not what he’d done, but the things he’d lost—his family, his woman, the certainty that deep down, he was a good man.
Guilt had eaten at him all right, guilt at ruining his own life. So he left out clues for Cal, like the picture of his mother and stepfather on the mantel, the only personal thing in his cabin, a thing he never referred to, not once. And the rifle in the locked gun cabinet, a spattering of blood still on the handle. And when he reached for one of his home-brewed beers, he always reached with his left hand, the one with the sca
r in the middle, the size of a dime.
If Cal Bentley noticed these things, he gave no sign. He seemed content to let Jake come to him, which despite everything, Jake was never going to do.
He had learned a few things in fifteen years, and probably the worst was this: If given half a chance, even a man who despised himself couldn’t help wanting to survive. Throw a monster into a lake and he’ll sputter to the surface. For some reason Jake could never understand, he got up each morning and started breathing.
When Cal Bentley’s cruiser finally came into view, Rufus and Gabe were on it, leaping onto the trunk and down again, twice even vaulting over the roof, their nails on the metal sending chills down Jake’s spine. Sasha flung herself at the passenger door, leaving scratch marks all down the white paint, which Cal had stopped patching years ago, when Jake first got his Husky.
Cal stopped the car and got out. Sasha snarled at him. “Good afternoon to you too, sweetheart,” Cal said.
He looked at Jake and smiled. “Got a present for you.” He opened the back door and yanked out Eli Malone, still cuffed. Eli looked at him through a part in his long, greasy hair.
“What is it this time?” Jake asked.
“Trespassing. The school might sue.”
Jake said nothing. Cal thought him a fool for hiring Eli, and he was probably right. Jake, though, hadn’t been able to stop himself. Eli was a runaway of a different sort, an escape from his own family, and he was getting ready to snap, anyone could see that. Jake never touched anyone but his dogs, but whenever he got close to Eli, he nearly took the boy in his arms and told him he knew exactly what it felt like to live inside a body you hated, in a world that didn’t want you anyway.
“All right,” Jake said at last. “Uncuff him.”
The boy had thrown back his hair and was doing his best to look rotten all the way through, but his left leg kept skidding out beneath him. While Cal uncuffed him, Jake walked to the side of the house and picked up the ax.
The Wishing Garden Page 7