She walked to the window. Jake crouched beside his creation, studying yesterday’s work. He’d finished Superstition Mountain and begun Doug’s next design, an intricate bird-of-paradise, which Doug had planted the day she was born, and which had never become the small shrub most people knew, but instead grew into a twelve-foot tree.
She turned from the window and picked up her cards. She was ready for disaster, even for the Three of Swords, but not for what she laid out. Today the cards issued a warning, the Page of Wands as her crossing card, which can mean either a faithful person or a man who would probably break her heart.
She looked over at Emma’s bed, but there was no movement there yet. “Emma,” she said, “rise and shine. Shake a leg.”
She cleaned up her hats and jewelry, then looked over her shoulder at Emma’s bed again. “Come on, lazybones. Get a move on.”
She walked across the room and was about to brush back her daughter’s hair when she realized Emma was not there.
For a long time, she just stared at the pile of blankets and deceit. At first, it wasn’t panic she felt so much as disbelief. She would have let Emma stay out all night if she’d known where she was going, if Emma had only asked. But obviously, it wouldn’t have been the same if she had asked. It would have sucked the thrill right out of it.
Savannah leaned against the wall. The Three of Swords had not been her father dying after all. It was the future of every parent of teenagers. Sorrow, disappointment, opposition. The Three of Swords was that moment when Savannah realized it really had been better fifteen years ago, when Emma’s colic had kept her so sleep-deprived, she couldn’t form a single coherent sentence. Then, at least, she had known where Emma was. No matter how miserable they were, the bottom line was they both were safe.
She started to get shaky, but managed to walk out the door and around to the back yard, where Jake was carving the frond leaves of the bird-of-paradise.
“Is Eli with you?” she asked.
He stood up straight. “Should he be?”
“Emma’s not in bed. Probably, she hasn’t been there all night.”
She sat down on the porch stoop, her legs suddenly flimsy as paper. Sasha came to lie at her feet and she buried her hands in the dog’s silver fur.
Jake looked toward the street, then set his knife down on the bench. He came and sat beside her. His big hands tapped his knees, then slid off to the concrete stoop. He didn’t seem to know what to do with them when they were not holding some kind of tool. He certainly had no clue what to say to a woman or, worse, to a mother who was fighting for control and losing, whose hands were clenched in tight, terrified fists.
“Savannah—”
“Tell me about this Eli of yours,” she said, trying to talk instead of cry, to keep herself in what passed for one piece.
“He’s not my Eli. He’s a boy who needed a job. I thought it might keep him out of trouble.”
“Has it?”
“Not yet.”
Savannah nodded. She felt the panic now. It seeped beneath the skin and turned her blood icy. It numbed the tips of her fingers and toes. She knew, too well, the things teenage boys did for fun. They raced cars through steep, one-lane canyons. They dared each other to drink a pint of tequila in five minutes flat. They drove girls to the desert, screwed them in the sand, then left them there.
Jake reached over and took her hand. “She’ll be all right.”
“How can you know that?”
“Because I’ve known Eli awhile, and he’s never looked at anyone the way he looks at her. He’s not about to let anything happen to her.”
That did not soothe her. Love was more cruel than teenagers, teasing girls with little bits of rapture, then vanishing into a deep, bottomless hole. Emma could very well end up like Savannah’s heartbroken clients, women who had once been beautiful, but now were thin and pale as night moths. Women who would wear nothing but the faded shirts their lovers had left behind.
She pulled her hand away and stood up. She walked to the end of the courtyard and back again. There were a hundred things that could have happened to Emma already, and each stabbed at a different part of her. Her head ached with the horror of fatal car accidents, her stomach clenched around brutal police arrests. She didn’t know how other women stood motherhood, because it was clearly killing her. She’d walked straight into the trap of loving the one person who could do the most damage to her.
Something awful must have escaped her throat, because Jake came up next to her. He cradled her in his arms and whispered “Hush” into her hair.
“I should have left weeks ago,” she managed to say.
“Absolutely.”
“You don’t even know how to laugh.” She pressed her face into his chest and breathed in deeply.
He wrapped his arms tighter around her, even while telling her, “I’m worse than Eli.”
“I’m not fifteen.”
“You don’t want to know me. I’m not from your kind of world.”
She leaned back. “Maybe I can make you happy.”
“Maybe I’m not capable of it.”
Savannah tapped her foot. “Don’t talk to me that way. It’s as bad as swearing.”
“You can’t close your eyes to ugliness, Savannah. It’s everywhere. Just listen to the news, figure out where your daughter is, take a history of my life.”
Savannah would have told him he didn’t scare her if Eli and Emma hadn’t driven up then. Emma stepped out of the Corvette with bite marks all over her neck, and sand still clumped in her hair. She raced across the garden and, without a word to anyone, ran into the garage and slammed the door. In a heartbeat, Savannah became the mother she had always sworn she wouldn’t be, the mother no woman can help being if she is going to do the job right.
She felt light-headed relief, but only for a second, and then she was furious. She started for Emma, then changed her mind and charged Eli. He was leaning against his car, lighting a cigarette, and he smelled of fish and Emma. Savannah jabbed a finger into his chest and might have hit a boy for the first time in her life if Jake hadn’t reached around her and grabbed Eli by the scruff of his collar.
“You’re fired,” he said, then shoved him away. For the first time, a little of the boy broke through that tough veneer. Savannah saw a flash of scared green eyes.
“Hey,” Eli said. “Come on, Jake. It was an accident. It got late. There was this body—”
“A body?” Savannah said. “You took my daughter out to see some body?”
“We went to Wawani Lake. They’re draining it, you know? For the reservoir? And this body washed up. All bones now, and then the cops came, and it was like the first real thing that’s ever happened to me. It was the first time cops talked to me without hauling me in.”
Savannah jabbed him in the chest again. She kept jabbing him and jabbing him, until he started giving way. “You stay away from my daughter. You hear me?”
Her voice was high and shrill; she hadn’t even known she was capable of the sounds. Eli glanced at Jake, then Savannah noticed him too. He’d gone absolutely still and the dogs had started whining. Sasha was pressing her head against his thigh. When he didn’t move, she threw back her head and howled.
Savannah shoved away Eli and went to Jake’s side. His left arm was limp and cold as ice.
“Jake?” she said.
He was falling so slowly, Savannah and Eli had the chance to get beneath him. When he took them all to the ground with him, Savannah saw that his face had gone pure white. She cradled him in her arms while Eli crawled out from beneath him.
“I’m all right,” Jake whispered, but it came out mostly like a sigh.
“Call an ambulance,” Savannah told Eli. “Hurry.”
TEN
THE DEVIL SELF-DESTRUCTION
Things did not start to go Cheryl Pillandro’s way until both her husbands were dead. The first thing she did was stop living in dumps. She moved out to the classy Tucson suburbs, leased a two-bedr
oom condo, and started reading novels. She cut off nearly all her hair without worrying that someone would turn over a table because of it. She didn’t just throw out her high heels and short skirts, which her second husband, Roy, had forced her to wear, sometimes at knifepoint; she took one of Roy’s knives and slashed the clothes to rags, then used them to clean out the engine of her car.
Without a man around, she never watched hockey or bought beer, which was a good thing, because the smell of Budweiser made her go cold all over. Sometimes, of course, she missed a man’s arms around her. She missed someone taking out the garbage and scaring off door-to-door salesmen and stumbling into bed at night. She missed that old sense of martyred superiority, when she had known that even if no self-respecting woman would look her in the eye, she was still better than the creature who drank too much and swung a mean right hook.
Now, she couldn’t date a man more than twice, or else he would find out he was too good for her. The men she went out with drank Cabernet and held doors open; they would never call again if they knew the things she had once stood for. What Roy had said fifteen years ago was true: He’d ruined her for anyone else. No other man would want her once he saw the marks Roy had left, once he knew the pain Roy had gone through to make her his.
Roy might have been right, but what he hadn’t reckoned on was that one day Cheryl would discover she didn’t need a man around at all. With her job at Dillard’s and the sale of her Phoenix house, she had enough money to pay the rent, even eat out occasionally. Why would she want a man choosing tacky restaurants, or getting violent over the color of her hair? As it stood now, she ate salad for lunch every day and hadn’t heard a cuss word in fifteen peaceful years.
Up until the time the sheriff showed up on her doorstep, Cheryl Pillandro actually thought her life might turn out fine.
“I’m Sheriff Merrill,” the man said. “I’m afraid I’ve got bad news about your husband.”
Cheryl walked back into her house. She picked up her water glass, then immediately spilt it. The sheriff took it out of her hands and went into the kitchen. He came back with a rag and the glass full of gin.
“Drink,” he said. When she finished it, he got her another, then sat down beside her.
“Your husband’s remains washed up from Wawani Lake last night. We’re doing an autopsy. We’ve already pulled the missing person’s report you filed fifteen years ago.”
She set down the glass and stood up. She had no mementos in this house. Not a single photograph of either of her husbands, or one of her son, Jake. When her first husband, Paul Grey, had died of a sudden heart attack, she had worn his sweatpants and slept in his white work shirts. She didn’t cry until his smell went out of them, and then she didn’t stop for three weeks.
After Roy, though, she bought all new sheets and towels. She burned every pair of his underwear and held a garage sale for anything he might have touched—furniture, plates, even canned goods. She took pennies, if that was all she could get. After Roy, she slept thirteen hours a night and slowly but surely stopped ducking when a man reached for her, but now she was having trouble looking the sheriff in the eye. If she wasn’t careful, she’d start jumping at the sound of footsteps again, she’d start attracting trouble and figuring she deserved it when it came.
She tried to meet the sheriff’s gaze, but couldn’t. “Do you need my permission or something?”
The sheriff stood up. He was a good six feet, but tall men didn’t scare her. Tall men didn’t have anything to prove. No, what scared her were men who had flunked algebra and never been good in sports. Men who had known, early on, that they would never amount to anything and had better make other plans for getting what they wanted. Worthless men were the worst sort of mean; they had nothing to lose by taking a woman down with them.
“What I’d like, what would save us a whole lot of time, is for you to tell me the truth,” the sheriff said. “Roy Pillandro didn’t disappear. Someone smashed his skull in, and what I’d like to know is who.”
Fifteen years was a long time. Long enough to forget the tinny taste of fear and all the reasons she’d let a man do the things he did. When she looked back now she was just stupefied; she couldn’t come to any conclusion except that she’d been weak and stupid. She’d made the wrong choice years ago, when her son had stood outside her door in the rain, and she hadn’t let him in. She’d never forgotten the sound of her grown boy crying.
Cheryl Pillandro had a good life now, except that she regretted every minute of it.
“I have no idea,” she said. “As far as I know, Roy disappeared. He was a mean, drunken bastard, but if you’re asking if I killed him, no, I did not.”
“You have no idea who did?”
“That’s right.”
When the sheriff finally left, Cheryl sat down at her kitchen table. She drank three more shots of gin, but did not feel the slightest bit drunk. Then she walked into her bedroom and started to pack.
When she was through, she sat on the bed and ran her hand over the canary-yellow comforter. Roy would have detested the color, along with the four-poster bed and the baskets she’d hung low from the ceiling, so that anyone over five seven would crash into them. She had gone to work in the lingerie department of Dillard’s to help pay for this place, and Roy would have detested her work ethic, too. He had met her when she was nearly catatonic, and he had done his best to keep her that way.
The day after her first husband died, Cheryl quit her job and began sending her eight-year-old boy out for the essentials—toilet paper, Hostess Cup Cakes, which she served for breakfast, and frozen dinners. She let the lawn die and never got the Buick serviced. It chugged along for six years, then simply stopped one afternoon at the intersection of Fifth and Central and refused to start up again. She had it hauled to the junkyard, where she got fifty dollars for parts.
She left the house only for Jake’s school plays, and then no happily married woman could bear to look at her. All of her so-called friends stopped calling a year after Paul’s death. They couldn’t drive past her house without weeping at her broken fence and dead lawn. Because of Cheryl, no man on the block got a moment’s peace. Their wives followed them everywhere, into bars and their sanctified garages, making sure they didn’t collapse in some dark corner, the way Paul Grey had.
Cheryl might have stayed locked up and shunned forever, if her water heater hadn’t blown. Her one pleasure was her afternoon bath, and when she stepped into a tub of ice-cold water, she knew she’d have to get help. The repairman was a thirty-year-old named Roy Pillandro who, after he’d replaced a gasket, plopped himself in Cheryl’s kitchen and refused to budge.
“I could use a glass of water,” he’d said. Cheryl had gotten it for him, careful not to touch his thick fingers as she handed him the glass. He had dirt under his fingernails. The top three buttons of his gray shirt were unfastened, revealing a bush of wiry black hair. She backed up until she was flush with the counter.
“And a bagel or something.” Roy Pillandro tapped those fingers on the table and stared at her. He had wavy black hair and ripples running down both cheeks. He had teeth the color of creamed coffee, which she would find out later he drank by the gallon. But when he smiled, which he did a lot, at least in the beginning, he made her itch in Paul Grey’s clothes.
While she was spreading cream cheese on Roy’s bagel, Cheryl caught a glimpse of herself in the toaster—the thick wad of bangs in her eyes, the purple caverns beneath her eyes. She started shivering then and there. Roy got up from the table and put his hand on her shoulder.
“See now,” he said, “I happen to specialize in broken hearts.”
They were married one year later, and for the wedding Cheryl dyed her hair jet black, Roy sang his wedding vows in a deep, luxuriant voice. No one could have convinced her she wasn’t the most beautiful woman in the world that day. Or the luckiest.
Roy moved out of his mobile home and into the shambles of her house. Immediately, he threw out Paul Grey’s
clothes without asking. He walked through the rooms turning around pictures on the walls.
“Can’t have him watching us. You have any idea the things a ghost can do?”
When he left for work the next day, Cheryl stored every picture of Paul Grey in a box in the attic, but still, a week later, she came home to find Roy ripping out the daylilies Paul had planted along the back concrete wall. The dead lawn was smeared with pulverized gold petals, Roy was up to his elbows in soil and plant guts, but Cheryl didn’t feel more than a ripple of fear. She thought it was kind of sweet, actually, the way Roy was jealous of a man who was dead as dust.
After Jake started his second year at ASU, Roy sold his classic Mustang and bought a used forty-foot houseboat. He quit his job and called a realtor, all in one afternoon. He strutted into the kitchen and grabbed Cheryl from behind.
“Pack your bags, babe. We’re heading to Wawani Lake for a life of leisure.”
“But this house …”
“Fuck this house. We’re selling it. We’ll make a ton.”
“It’s my house,” she said. “I’m not—”
She didn’t see it coming. In the early days, she never did. She thought he was just leaning in to hug her. By the time his fist landed in her stomach, she was already puckered for a kiss.
The force slammed her into the cabinet. She didn’t lose her footing, something she would always do later, when she discovered it was harder for him to hit a low target. She grabbed the countertop for support, then Roy punched her again, this time in the ribs.
“You’ve got nothing without me,” Roy whispered, rubbing his fist as if she’d done him damage. “You got that?”
She couldn’t breathe well enough to answer, so he took that for a yes. He drove her to the real-estate broker’s office that afternoon, but when he left to go to the bathroom, she ripped up the paperwork. “I’m not selling. My boy’s going to stay in that house and go to college. I’m headed for a life of leisure.”
The Wishing Garden Page 16