Harry had walked to the other side of the bench without realizing it. He was now staring the psycho in the eye. When the man said nothing, Harry continued, more shakily this time. “Look, you can do what you want with Savannah. But when it comes to my daughter …”
He stopped. He took a good, long breath. He was a mess of a man, but not so pathetic that he couldn’t see the one clear thing. He was worthless without Emma. She was the one person on this planet he would sleep on the ground for; when they were backpacking, he never noticed rocks beneath his sleeping bag or the biting cold. At ten thousand feet, he got a little dizzy, but not from thin air. He was high on his daughter, on the kind of man he might have been if he’d been able to keep her all these years. It occurred to him that Emma was the only person who could save whatever was left of his used-car salesman’s soul.
He planted his feet. “Let me be clear about this. My daughter’s not going to live in some shack in the middle of the woods with wild dogs. It’s always been my intention to bring Emma to Danville, to give her a chance at a normal life. You get serious with Savannah and, frankly, you’ll give me all the ammunition I need to take my daughter home with me. You’ll play right into my hands.”
The psycho stood up. He rose well into the air, but there was no way Harry was backing down now. He turned his back on the dogs and walked to the garage apartment. He knocked on the door and in a moment Emma opened it up, bleary-eyed. He took her hand and led her back to the sleeping cot in the corner.
He tucked her in and brushed her hair with his fingers. She tried to keep her eyes open, and he would always be grateful for that. Because for the few minutes before she fell asleep, he got to look in the one pair of eyes that saw him as something more than a huckster.
He leaned down beside her as her lids finally closed in sleep. He put his lips to her forehead and just left them there. “Here’s the secret,” he said softly. “Pick one person, and love her for all you’re worth.”
NINE
THE PAGE OF WANDS HEART-BREAKER
Maggie stepped out her front door into a line four fools deep. She put her hands on her hips and glared at her neighbors, but since they’d all sworn they hadn’t believed Mabel Lewis, none of them would look up from their fold-up lawn chairs and meet her gaze.
“Have you all gone crazy?”
Sitting beneath someone’s beach umbrella, they were dressed in the clothes their dead husbands and wives had loved best, their white, pasty hands clutching twenty-dollar bills. Only Dick Leoni had the guts to speak up. He had on half-inch-thick glasses and extra-wide white sneakers without a stain on them. In his jacket pocket was a red carnation, the kind he’d bought for his wife, Francine, every single day of her life. “Well, now, Maggie, if you’d heard Mabel before she left. She swore—”
“Mabel has always been one trunk short of a tree.”
“That may be, but she swore on a stack of bibles Ed was talking to her through the cards. And you know, I got to thinking it would be worth twenty dollars to get a chance to talk to my Francine again. I mean, twenty dollars, Maggie. That’s nothing. What have we got to lose?”
“Your minds, for one thing. Your reputation. Your hard-earned money. Your self-respect.” She would have gone on, but the door to the garage apartment opened and Sally Trabelli came out, red-eyed. They all stood up, but she shook her head.
“He never talked to me when he was alive,” she told them. “I don’t know why I thought it would be any different now.”
“There, you see?” Maggie said. “Mabel was delirious.”
“Not just Mabel,” Savannah said, coming out after Sally. Maggie did not know what to make of her daughter. Savannah wore a peacock-blue dress and rings on all her fingers. Somehow she had managed to convince Maggie’s unsuspecting neighbors that with enough faith, anything was possible.
“You know that nice man from Thunderbolt Road?” Savannah went on. “Vern Wilson? His wife died eight years ago, and since then he hasn’t let himself even look at Lucy Frish, even though it’s common knowledge she lost her heart to him years ago. He was shuffling the cards and then all of a sudden we smelled this marvelous lavender perfume. After that, he got all Cups. I swear to God, every card a Cup, the suit of love. His wife was telling him it was all right. He could fall in love again. I’m not making this up, Mom. I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how.”
Maggie’s head hurt. The idea that a wife would wait until she was dead to tell a husband all the things he needed to hear made her blood run cold. “You will not bilk my friends out of their social security money.”
“I’m not bilking anyone. I couldn’t conjure up Sally’s husband. Her fortune was to stay away from enterprising men. If I was conning people, don’t you think I’d make it work every time?”
“I don’t even pretend to know the game you’re playing.”
Savannah pushed back her feathered hat and looked Maggie in the eye. “As a matter of fact, I am trying to make people happy. You should try it.” She walked over to Dick Leoni and took his hand. “You ready?”
He took the carnation out of his pocket and handed it to her, along with his twenty.
Maggie tapped her foot. “This is outrageous. You’re giving them false hope.”
“There is no such thing.”
“Savannah, you’re breaking my heart.”
“Well, good. Maybe it will mend itself correctly this time.”
Maggie stared her down. “That is just plain mean.” She glanced at her neighbors, sitting in a line like sheep. “Go on then. You deserve to be bilked, every last one of you.”
She clutched her purse and headed to the car. She’d gotten only to the first Juneberry tree when she spotted the paper stabbed through one of the lowest branches.
At first, she thought it a teenage prank, perpetrated, most likely, by those Dunbar boys who side-swiped mailboxes and spray-painted pentagrams on the garage door of any girl who wouldn’t go out with them. Then she caught the handwriting. It was Doug’s wavery, post-cancer script, and for a moment she just stared at it. For a moment, she had herself convinced she could go right past it and not be taken in by whatever strange sentimentality Doug had gotten into his head this time. She took one step toward her car even, before she stomped back and ripped the paper from the branch, slicing it in two.
She took both pieces to her car and started the engine. She had backed halfway out of the drive before she slammed on the brakes. “Son of a bitch,” she said.
She lined up the pieces. It was another of Doug’s poems, poems she had not known about until he got sick, as if it was all right to let her go on for thirty-six years thinking he was someone he wasn’t, as if failing to mention he had a heart was just a small oversight. Maggie had already decided she detested his poetry, but nevertheless she started reading.
This one, she saw right away, had been composed recently. She cursed him the whole time she read it, because he had to have known it would break her heart.
I can’t die
while you love me,
so you must love me forever.
I can’t leave you
until you realize my garden
was for you.
The woolly thyme and gray sage
to sweeten your air.
Sweet alyssum and freesia
to brighten your table.
And the Juneberry trees
to stand in my place,
thick enough to wrap your arms around,
strong enough to keep you.
I cannot die
until you know the secret of my garden
was you.
Maggie closed her eyes. She was a fool to love this sentimental man. She was a fool to love anyone. It would only end in heartache.
She opened her eyes and backed out of the drive. If Doug was going to die and leave her, then she was going to spend every last penny he’d ever made before he went. She was going to get in way over her head. Something should be happening to her along with hi
m; at the very least, she should have a comparable terminal disease—AIDS maybe, or even better, Alzheimer’s, so she could forget all this was happening. Every day he woke up retching while she was feeling fine was a mockery of what marriage ought to be.
She drove the ten miles to the outlet mall, but once she got to the parking lot, she just sat there.
I cannot die
until you know the secret of my garden
was you.
That was ridiculous. The secret of Doug’s garden was time, time spent away from her. Time when he could have been telling her these sweet things years ago, when she’d been unsure of his love and needed to hear them. Who was he to start getting sappy on her now? She was an old, bitter woman; she needed a hand up the stairs and more dinners out, not poetry.
Nevertheless, she couldn’t get out of the car. She stared at the Dansk outlet, at the marvelous display of white porcelain plates and hand-crafted goblets, and could not move an inch. The sun heated the interior of the car to ninety. She liked the idea of one of those nose-ringed salespeople from the Levi’s outlet finding her decaying body tonight after closing, but nevertheless, she started the car and was back home in seven minutes.
The line to Savannah’s scam was now eight fools long, and she ignored them all. She got out of the car and found Doug in their bedroom, trying to put on his pants. He’d gotten down on the floor to do it, the way a two-year-old does, and now he could not get back up.
If he hadn’t been dying, she would have killed him for what he was doing to her. But things being what they were, she simply knelt down in front of him and helped him on with his pants. She kept her head down, her concentration focused on the buttons.
“It’s these buttons,” he said. “My fingers …”
“Just be quiet, Doug. Don’t say another goddamn word.”
She was shaking so badly, she could hardly pull him to his feet. Once they were both standing unsteadily, she just held on. “I swear to you, I’ll let the garden go to weeds. I’ll let the dandelions take over. I’ll never water a damn thing again, so you’d better work a little harder staying alive.”
“Maggie—”
She pushed away from him. No one would ever know this from looking at her, but after slipping socks on Doug’s icy feet, she’d cry her eyes out. After buying him a book he might never finish, she actually felt herself going to pieces.
But she didn’t tell him that. He was not going to get better by having to take care of her. She walked to the bathroom, turned on the water, then let it run while she cried. She watched the most precious thing in this desert go right down the drain.
Doug came in behind her. “Maggie.”
She squared her shoulders, stopped her crying, and stared at him. He was slim as a boy now and fragile as parchment. He was dying right before her eyes.
“I don’t want any more poems,” she said. “You’re killing me, Doug. These are the things you should have said to me years ago.”
He lowered his head, and when he lifted it again there were tears in his eyes. “You are my breath and soul, Maggie. I couldn’t stop the poetry if I tried.”
“You’re insane,” she told him, but nevertheless she turned off the water and clutched him to her. When he fell asleep an hour later, she taped the poem back together. She fingered it until ink began to come off on her fingers.
Emma waited until her mother went to sleep, then crept out of bed. She was out the door and down the street, and by the time she reached Pierce Park, her heart was thundering against her chest and leaving bruises on the other side. Eli was leaning against his Corvette, his denim jacket frayed at the wrists. He said something when he saw her, but with the ringing between her ears, she couldn’t tell what it was.
She could not see his eyes through his hair and he never once unclenched his fists. He was bad enough to rip someone’s heart out, but Emma had already come this far, so she just walked right up and kissed him.
He tasted of smoke and fury. His arms came around her hard; in the morning, she would find bruises the color of his purple aura. He ran his fingers through her hair, then pushed her away.
“You’re a kid,” he said, then pulled a pack of Camels out of his pocket. He lit one and blew the smoke in her face.
She didn’t flinch, didn’t even get nervous. That’s how certain she was this was meant to be. “You may be right. But then again, I’m free until morning, and I’ll go anywhere you’ve got the guts to take me.”
Years ago, her mother had told her the fortune of love. The Sun and the Moon, brother and sister, had once stood side by side in the sky. The Sun was mesmerized by his sister’s pale skin and gentle tug on the oceans. He grew jealous of the men who sailed in her light and sang to her beauty, so one night, without warning, he tried to seduce her. From that moment on, the Moon started running, and from that moment on, the Sun followed her, destined to wander in her wake forever.
Emma had loved that story as a child, but now she knew it was dead wrong. Love did not run from anything. She took Eli’s hand and put it on her breast. She would stand there until she made him another person. She was in love, but she wasn’t a fool. He was not fit for love. But what was love, if not the ability to change someone’s life for the better? What was love, if she couldn’t make Eli give up everything for her?
They drove to the liquor store off Union Street. “Wait here,” Eli said, opening his car door. “Don’t move.”
She watched him walk into the store, his jacket hunched up to his ears. He headed straight to one of the back aisles, and Emma didn’t even have time to fix her lipstick before he was running out, a six-pack beneath his jacket, and a furious, six-foot clerk running after him.
He dove into the car. Emma didn’t have time to think, so she was staring right at the clerk when he took the handgun out of his pocket and aimed it at her head. She screamed, and Eli pushed her down in the seat. He sped off, his head thrown back, laughing.
“Chickenshit didn’t even take a shot,” he said. Emma was still on the floor beside him, her head tucked over her knees. Eli made a quick right, then left, then pulled to the side of the road. “Come on, Emma. It’s over. What did you think, that I’d let you get hurt?”
When he held out his hand, she realized this was her last chance. She could walk away now, still relatively intact. She could hike back to the liquor store, tell the clerk who had stolen from him, and continue to have what passed for a life.
But when she touched Eli’s hand, she knew if falling in love was a choice—which she was beginning to doubt—she’d already made it. She was in way over her head and hoping to stay that way. She was halfway to throwing up and halfway to laughing, and when Eli hoisted her into her seat, laughter won out. He handed her a beer and she drank down as much as she could stomach in one gulp. In three seconds flat, she was warm all the way through.
They drove ninety miles to Wawani Lake, arriving at two-thirty in the morning to a crowd of fifty—drunk boys, mostly, with beer and shovels. Since they’d started draining Wawani Lake, the greatest sport for miles was coming to await what the lake would spit out. According to the papers, a fifty-year-old woman had stumbled across a rusted coffee can filled with solid gold Canadian coins. An eight-year-old had picked up a live hand grenade and had his right arm sheared off, which was all the incentive bored teenagers needed to sneak out at night and tempt fate.
Eli led Emma across the sand. They sat down by a dirty dune and he took two Camels out of his pocket. He lit them both, then handed one to her.
They smoked and listened to drunk talk—boys boasting they could swim across the shrunken lake in one breath, that they’d driven one hundred miles an hour the whole way here while their parents, the fools, thought them asleep in their beds. Emma looked up at the gritty stars. There were billions of them, but not a single one was red.
Eli took the cigarette from her fingers and put it out in the sand. Then he was on her, sinking her into the beach, his tongue in her mouth. He was tryi
ng to scare her, but all she did was twine her hands through his long hair and pull him closer. She might never have stopped kissing him, if someone hadn’t started to shriek.
Suddenly, the drunk boys were hooting. Eli jumped up, but Emma was slower. She kept looking at the stars, feeling Eli’s lips on her.
“Come on.” Eli pulled her to her feet. “Let’s check it out.”
By the time they reached the crowd, half the bones had been found. Two femurs, a tibia, sternum and clavicle. Two of the drunks were tossing a skull like a baseball. Emma backed up, but her heel caught in a rib cage. She screamed and yanked out her shoe, then stepped on an arm bone poking out of the sand like a flag.
“Excellent,” Eli said.
When two of the boys started playing swords with femurs, Emma took off running. By the time Eli started after her, she was halfway around the shrinking lake. She threw up over what had once been lake floor, fifteen feet down. Eli finally tackled her by a rock formation that had ripped the bottoms out of half a dozen boats over the years.
She fought against him, until he laid his body out over hers on the moist sand. He pressed his lips into her pulsing neck. “Stop, okay?” he whispered. “Just stop.”
He kissed the pulse beneath her ear, then her ear lobe, then her bottom lip. He slipped his hand up beneath her blouse and covered her breast. She breathed in so deeply, she’d never get the scent of him out of her lungs. When he started unbuttoning her jeans, she was as helpless as this lake, watching itself be sucked into another body.
“That was a person,” she said. “Don’t you get it? It was a living person.”
“Shhh. Don’t talk.”
He kissed the tears at the corners of her eyes. When he slipped inside her, contrary to what she’d heard, it didn’t hurt at all. It just sealed her fate. It made her his then and there.
Savannah slept late, her morning dreams filled with wild dogs who turned to wood when she touched them. When she woke, she still smelled the scent of fur and pine. Then she opened her eyes and realized the smell was real; her window was open and Jake Grey was in the garden, already at work on her father’s bench.
The Wishing Garden Page 15