“So,” he said. “You got another class?”
“Who’s asking?”
Eli shrugged. The bell rang, and the far doors to the hall opened. Two armed security guards, hired after boys started demanding less homework with loaded .38’s, started down the hall. Eli tossed his cigarette on the vinyl floor and ground it out with his black boot.
“Whatever,” he said, then started for the door.
“Wait!”
Emma had egged a few houses in Danville, but beyond that she’d never done a bad thing in her life. She didn’t know how to go about it. She’d never been in love before either, and she could not believe what she was feeling was the start of it because it felt like nausea. A swirl of the Diet Coke and Twix bar she’d eaten for lunch, a light panic that turned her skin green. She thought she could just as easily hate him.
“Yeah?” he said.
The security guards were running now, so the decision had to be made in a split second. But falling in love, she figured, was not something she could take time considering. She’d just have to do it. Drop her Peechee folder, take his hand, and run.
Eli flung open the doors and pulled her across campus, zigzagging around buildings until they lost the guards. He held her hand until they got to the parking lot, then he abruptly let go. He unlocked his Corvette, but didn’t open her door for her, as if he were giving her one last opportunity to turn and run. Instead, she hopped in and strapped on her seat belt. When he peeled out, it was all Emma could do not to cling to the door or beg for mercy. She dug her fingernails into her jeans and didn’t say a word.
He drove toward Granite Mountain at breakneck speed, the radio on so loud Emma could not tell what was playing. The interior of the car smelled of marijuana, but it had also been restored—a new leather dash, thick black fur seat covers, eight premium speakers in the back.
Eli took a sharp left off Granite Basin, then another left on an unmaintained dirt road. Five jarring minutes later, he pulled up in front of an old cabin.
“Home sweet home,” he said, but he did not get out of the car.
Emma stared at the shack. It was burnt on one side, with a sagging corrugated-steel roof. The walls were a mix of weathered two-by-fours and cast-off plywood. There was only one window, and it was too dirty to see through. A red steel door had been jerry-rigged into the frame; it must have beer ripped off someone’s fancy house.
She couldn’t look at the shack without crying, but she knew he didn’t want to see that. She stopped her tears, threw off her seat belt, and got out of the car.
The front door was unlocked, the interior so dark, she could make out nothing except a nauseating stench of bacon. She ran a hand along the wall for a light switch. As soon as she flipped it on, she wished she hadn’t. The whole place was little more than a single room, pitched precariously downhill to the right. The floorboards were rough cedar, and the second one she stepped on cracked beneath her feet. An old woodstove, coated in dust, squatted in the corner. Everything inside looked a thousand years old, except for the stereos and televisions still in their original boxes, stacked along the far wall.
For a long time, she just stared at the stolen goods. Her two feelings wouldn’t jibe, the rush of protectiveness she felt for anyone living in a place like this and the desire to turn him in.
Eli leaned against the doorjamb, his hands in his pockets. She tried to figure how a person got to this point, but she couldn’t do it. That was the trouble with being loved and well cared for; it often made disasters seem improbable, when actually they happened every day.
“So?” she said. “What now?”
Eli took his hands out of his pockets. He flicked back his hair and, for a moment, seemed unsure what to do. Then he shrugged. “Come on. I’ll show you the view.”
They hiked to the top of Granite Mountain, where they had a clear view down to Granite Basin Lake and the summer campers, living in more luxury while they roughed it than Eli did normally. Emma picked up a stone and tossed it over the edge, but it got lodged in a tree halfway down the slope. Eli picked up a hand-sized rock and heaved it over. It cleared the tree and kept on falling. In a minute or two, it might scare the bejeezus out of some kids roasting marshmallows, it might whack a perfectly nice woman on the head.
Emma lay down in the moist grass, while Eli sat beside her, torturing the blades. He plucked off the brown tops, then yanked whole clumps of sod out by the roots. He tossed his victims one by one over the cliff.
“How’d you find this place?” Emma asked.
“What’s to find? Nobody else will live here.”
“How long have you been here?”
Eli glared at her. He picked up a rock and stuffed it down a snake hole. Emma held her breath, wondering if next he’d take to killing small animals with his bare hands, just to show her how unsalvageable he was.
“Look,” he said, “just listen around town and you’ll hear what they say about me. My dad’s a drunk, and my mom keeps pushing liquor on him’cause that’s the only time he’s nice. It’s in all the papers.”
“What about you?”
“Don’t you get it? I’m bad blood. I’m bad all the way through.”
Then she couldn’t have stopped herself if she tried, which she didn’t. She sat up, grabbed his hand, and held on tight. She fell in way over her head. She’d dreamt about falling in love all her life, and gotten everything wrong. Turned out it had nothing to do with what was good for her. Already, her losses were mounting—half a day of classes, the desire to be with anyone else—and it was only going to get worse. In love’s twisted way of thinking, Eli Malone was the most beautiful thing on this earth. She leaned forward and kissed him straight on the mouth. His lips were cold as river water, and that just made her love him more.
She pulled away long enough to tell him, “Don’t you believe what they say about you. Don’t believe anyone but me.”
He looked like one big ball of pain, so she kissed him again, harder, until he uncurled right into the palm of her hand.
Savannah was ripping up lettuce in her mother’s kitchen when she heard the squeal of the Corvette. It came around the corner on two wheels and sent the crows shrieking. Eli Malone bolted into the driveway, cigarette dangling from his lips, and cut the engine. Emma was in the seat beside him, looking enraptured.
Maggie set down the carrots she’d been peeling and glanced at the clock. “Three hours and twenty minutes late,” she pointed out, as Eli and Emma stepped out of the car in a cloud of smoke. “Don’t tell me you haven’t been worried sick.”
Savannah said nothing. She’d had a lump in her throat for three hours, but she wasn’t about to admit that. She dropped the lettuce in the bowl, turned her back on her mother, and walked outside.
Jake was crouched by his bench; he only glanced at her, then went back to his work. He’d already etched out a slim crescent moon, and now he carved deep into the spine of Superstition Mountain. Savannah walked past him and through the jasmine-twined gazebo. Emma and Eli had sat down on the small patch of chamomile and when Emma leaned her head back, Eli reached out to pull a pine needle out of her hair.
Savannah’s throat went dry. She didn’t need her cards to realize that sometime between this morning and now, Emma had slipped right through her fingers into someone else’s palm.
Eli saw her coming first, and tossed back his hair to reveal bloodshot eyes. When she got close enough, she could smell the marijuana still clinging to both of them, and then she regretted every single joint she’d smoked, because that left her with very little room to argue.
She looked at her daughter, who was suddenly enamored with the furry texture of chamomile leaves. “Where have you been, honey?” she asked.
“School,” Emma said, not looking up. “Eli brought me home.”
“You’re a little late.”
“We went driving,” Emma said. “No big deal.”
Eli lit a cigarette, and inhaled and exhaled without removing it from his
lips. Savannah imagined young girls and senior citizens fainted from the mean look in his eyes. She imagined he thought himself gangster material. But teenage boys did not scare her. When they had come to her house for fortunes, they usually demanded she tell them they were going to make a million dollars, or lose their parents in plane crashes. Instead, when she laid out her cards and said that, actually, this one would find the girl of his dreams, and that one’s mother’s cancer would go into remission, they usually got real quiet. When one of them started crying, she didn’t say a single word.
So now, she just bent down and plucked the cigarette from between Eli’s lips. She crushed it beneath her sneaker.
“I inherited only one thing from my mother,” she said, “and that’s eyes in the back of my head.”
“So?”
“So watch yourself. Emma is fifteen. Anything you do with her is quite possibly a felony.”
“Mom!” Emma stood up, outraged. Well, maybe Savannah was outraged too. Maybe it was her worst nightmare to sound like her own mother, and she never would have if Emma hadn’t started something neither one of them would be able to stop.
“How old are you?” she asked Eli.
He got to his feet. “Nineteen.” He was thin and nervous as a jackal. Even from two feet away. Savannah could hear the beat of his heart, fast and frantic, the kind bound to wear itself out early.
“I don’t think you should be bringing my daughter home,” she said.
“Oh, Mom, come on,” Emma broke in. “He was doing me a favor. Jake vouches for him. Don’t you, Jake?”
Savannah turned around to find Jake behind them. She hadn’t even heard him come up. When he looked at Eli, the boy, whether he knew it or not, shrunk a good two inches. His heart slowed to the beat of a ballad. Jake could have squashed him flat, but all he said was “Yes, I do.”
Savannah wrapped her arms around her waist. “Well, then, that settles that. Go on in, Emma. I’m sure you’ve got a lot of homework.”
Emma glanced at Eli, then turned and ran to the garage apartment. As soon as she was gone, Eli lit another cigarette.
“Emma says you tell fortunes,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You believe in that crap?”
Savannah’s mouth twitched. “If you mean by crap that there’s a force in the universe greater than ourselves, then yes, I believe in it.”
“Jesus.” Eli shook his head then started after Jake.
“You are the Five of Wands,” Savannah called after him. “Don’t think I don’t understand.”
Eli stopped, then turned around slowly. “What’s that supposed to mean? Stop trying to freak me out.”
Savannah walked up to him, until she was just inches from his face. Before he could even consider she might be a worthy opponent after all, she was twisting the skin of his arm.
“I give Emma the benefit of the doubt,” she said, “but you’re another story. I’ve got no reason to trust you, and believe me, I don’t.”
She let go and walked to the garage. Later, when Eli was helping Jake with the bench, she would lay out her tarot cards on the porch, Five of Wands on top. She would wait until he was sweating, until he had that card in hand, before she told him the Five of Wands was the battle of life—unsatisfied desires, the struggle to overcome losses. It was a mimic of warfare, and if played right, it could very well mean victory. But if played wrong, it often meant that boys who weren’t rich or smart or popular often could think of nothing else to be but cruel.
Mabel Lewis was the first and only person to win a fight against the MesaLand homeowners board. The covenants were clear: All exterior paint colors had to be neutral and non-offensive, harmonious with the landscape (meaning brown), and approved by the ten-member architectural committee of the MesaLand Homeowners Association—all retired widowers with nothing better to do than bicker over the exact composition of ecru. Noncompliance would result in financial and legal penalties and, if still unresolved, a lien against the property.
Mabel Lewis had never read the covenants, and even if she had, she still would have painted her bungalow limestone green with banana cream shutters. She’d lost her husband three years ago and, with those chest pains she’d been getting recently, she was probably only a few years, maybe months, from joining him herself. What was the point of being non-offensive now? She would never get back her singing voice, or fill a young man with lust again. She might as well be a troublemaker.
The day of her official hearing, she wore her first miniskirt. She was seventy-two, with hair white as bone, but she’d swum a hundred laps every day for fifty years—it was about time her legs did her some good. She sat down in front of Ben Hiller and Dave Tripp, president and vice president of the board, and hiked up her skirt.
Ben Hiller just about keeled over in his chair. At one time, Mabel would have gotten a rush from that. At one time, she had found Ben interesting. There had been talk, when he and his wife Helen first moved to MesaLand, of the two of them buying a boat and sailing around the world, or him going alone to Everest, to become the oldest man to reach the summit, preferably without oxygen. Then Helen had gotten sick, and Ben had stopped playing golf and walking the mall. The day after Helen died, he sold his car, and now wouldn’t even ride the bus anymore. He paid some teenager to pick up his groceries, and he talked to all his relatives via E-mail. He only got revved up about the homeowners board, so Mabel decided she’d give him something else to think about, namely her.
She had splashed herself with that new Calvin Klein perfume, and already Ben’s eyes were watering. She hiked her skirt up another inch.
“When Ed died,” she said, “I thought I’d remember everything about him. I thought I’d be haunted by him, and that was some comfort, but now I can’t even remember the color of his eyes unless I’m looking at a photograph. They were this funny kind of green, real light, like limestone.”
She looked at Ben and saw she was not getting through. He had already raised his pen above the form that would start costing her hundreds of dollars a day in attorney’s fees. She hiked her dress up one more time.
“And besides,” she went on, “I just wanted to do something a little bit bad.”
Ben Hiller dropped his pen. He turned to Dave Tripp, but Dave was beet red and coughing up phlegm. Ben picked up the complaint signed by twenty-eight homeowners and ripped it in two.
“Maybe we could have dinner sometime, Mabel,” Dave said, once he’d recovered from his coughing fit. Mabel stood up. She smoothed down her skirt and smiled. She still had all her teeth, and thankfully she’d never gotten latte-mad like Wendy Ginger, so they were relatively white. She decided on the spot to wear miniskirts every day for the rest of her life, and also to turn down all offers. She adored being called baby and mistaken for a fifty-year-old, but she had also loved Ed Lewis with all her heart and she just didn’t want anyone else touching her.
She might be within five pounds of her high-school weight and a looker in three-inch heels, but she had cried herself to sleep for three years straight. Not even her children would guess she hadn’t slept on her own side of the bed since Ed died. She wore Ed’s pajamas and slept in the indentation he’d left behind. Right around midnight, if she was very quiet, she would swear on a stack of bibles she heard Ed’s heart beating inside her own chest.
Ed had died of a stroke at seventy-eight. Their three children, split among the big states, California, Texas, and Florida, had told her they were thankful he’d lived a good long life. Her children were fools. They hadn’t lived long enough to know seventy-eight was nothing. Ed had just been getting started. He’d finally gotten over his fear of water and had booked them on a cruise to Fiji. He had taken to making love to her on the back patio, at noon, when anyone could come by and see them.
The evening after the hearing, Mabel changed to a firetruck-red miniskirt and stepped out her front door. Simon Wasserstein, watering begonias next door, dropped his jaw, but she didn’t even wave. Mabel walked dow
n the street, making the widowers groan from their porches. She sashayed down Sage Street and up the garden path to the sign that read Amazing Fortune-teller—Know Your Future. She glanced behind her, hoping one of the harpies from her bridge club would see her, so she’d start a scandal.
Two days ago, all the bridge ladies had talked about was Savannah Dawson.
“The nerve she has,” Carol Vicenzo had said. “Preying on old people with that New Age mumbo jumbo.”
“She’s from San Francisco,” Wendy Ginger joined in, after gorging herself on a vanilla latte. “They’ll let anybody live there. Hippies, homosexuals, Jerry Brown, they don’t care.”
“Have you seen the way she dresses?” Carol went on. “Those dresses you can see through?”
“And what’s with the hats?” Barb French chimed in. “Is that some kind of West Coast thing? I don’t understand why Maggie Dawson hasn’t done something. It’s shocking.”
Mabel had gone to her liquor cabinet and poured a hefty snifter of gin into her tea. Then she stared them all down.
“Don’t talk to me about shocking,” she’d said. “Shocking is when someone ups and dies on you. Shocking is going to a funeral every other weekend, the way we do, and then still getting together for mahjongg, as if it isn’t killing us. That girl … that girl is just lovely.”
Now, she smoothed down her miniskirt and knocked on the garage door. She didn’t even look at the main house. She knew Doug Dawson was dying, and this was a thing she could not bear to see again. Four of her friends had lost husbands since Ed had died, and they had all assumed she’d be the first one to comfort them, that she’d want to spend hours having tea and crying. They were wrong. She did her grieving at night, while lying in Ed’s imprint. Her grieving was between her husband and her.
Savannah Dawson opened the door. The girl was dressed in a blue gauze dress that fell to her ankles. It was so sheer Mabel could make out the dark swirl of her navel, a fact that would have horrified her neighbors, but which, for some reason, perked Mabel right up.
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