That life of leisure turned out to require a huge amount of work on Cheryl’s part. The houseboat was rank and barely floatable, the closest supermarket an hour’s drive away. Though Cheryl scrubbed down the toilets daily, mosquitoes still grew in the tank. The thin orange carpeting sprouted dark green mold in the corners. Roy could not understand why she didn’t do something about it.
“Lower the asking price on your house,” he said one night, when his foot went right through the decking and halfway down the rotted pontoons. A couple of belly-up fish floated by, victims of the highest level of contaminants in any lake in the western United States. “Why the hell hasn’t it sold?”
Cheryl managed not to smile. It was her only victory, fooling Roy into thinking she’d give up one more thing for him. Her house had never been on the market. Jake lived there, drawing on his father’s life insurance policy to pay the mortgage and taxes.
“The market’s slow,” she told him. “Give it time.”
“Time,” Roy spat out. “Why should I wait around for a few luxuries? I like things nice, you hear me? I’m a man with some class.”
He turned so fast, she didn’t have time to react, and even if she had, she wouldn’t have known what to do differently. He slapped her hard across the face, so hard the mark of his hand would last for days. So hard she saw stars, thousands of tiny white lights that had to be a consolation for something.
“Now fix this.” He stormed off the boat to the dock, and in a moment, she heard the squeal of tires.
She lay on the deck without moving, just breathing in the stench of stagnant water and dead fish. By the time Roy came back, with flowers and plywood to fix the hole, the sun was up over the brown hills and he was crying.
“God, Cheryl,” he said, kneeling down beside her. “Why do you make me do this? Don’t you know I love you?”
He put his head in her lap and she stroked his hair. The flowers were wild daisies, the kind that grew like weeds on the hills surrounding the lake. They were already dying.
The next night, when she overcooked the spaghetti noodles, he hit her again. A week later, when she changed the channel from one of his hockey games, he grabbed the scissors and cut off her hair at the shoulders. She started sleeping on the very edge of the bed, trying not to breathe, until he hit her for that, too.
She couldn’t leave him; he would only come after her and beat her for it. Besides, where would she go? Her son was in college, better off without her, and Roy had made certain she’d lost all her friends. Roy was slowly killing her, sure, but without him she would have died a long time ago. She would have curled up in Paul Grey’s house and willed herself dead, but now she cleaned that awful houseboat, fixed Roy his rotten meals, and despised him so much her body crackled with animosity. Hate woke her up in the morning, so she could spit into Roy’s bowls of cereal. Hate straightened her spine while she made Roy double margaritas, to cover up the taste of the trout guts she’d mixed in. Hate carried her to the store, where she’d gone as far as buying a box of rat poison, which she kept beneath her bed. Hate made her stand up to almost anything, because someday she would have her revenge.
Then one night, after noticing another water stain on the carpet, Roy grabbed her right arm and yanked it back until it snapped.
“I could kill you,” he said.
“Well then do it! Although, frankly, it won’t make much difference.”
He let go. Her arm was burning, but she wouldn’t rub it in front of him. That was the game they played; he pretended he wasn’t a monster, and she never let on how much damage he’d done.
“Look what you’ve turned me into,” he said, and she thought he might cry.
After he left, she made a sling out of one of his shirts; by the next morning, her arm was gray and lifeless as the lake. She felt almost giddy from the pain, from how much she could stand. Every time he hit her, she sent Roy one notch deeper into hell.
By noon, when Roy was out fishing, she lost sensation from her hand clear to her neck. She drove one-handed all the way to Phoenix Memorial, where she wrote on the admitting form, “Broke arm falling.” The doctor looked at her skeptically, but said nothing as he reset her arm. When he was done, he put a prescription in her hand.
“A two month supply of Vicodin. It’ll help with all kinds of bruises and pain.”
Cheryl didn’t cry in front of Roy anymore, but after the doctor left, she curled up on the examining table and sobbed until she was hoarse.
Later, she drove past her house. She intended to go right by, but then she noticed the new sod Jake must have put in. The freshly painted yellow trim made her put her good arm on the steering wheel and weep. All the place had needed, she saw now, was to get rid of her.
She got out of the car and let herself in the front door. She heard the sound of pages turning in the dining room. She walked in to find Jake taking notes from his pre-law books.
Then, too late, she remembered her arm. She had avoided Jake for months, not wanting him to see her bruises, so of course his gaze went first to the cast, then to the discolorations on her arm and neck. There wasn’t a place on her body that hadn’t been damaged, but she was so adept now at avoiding mirrors, she hadn’t realized how hideous she looked until she saw herself through her son’s eyes. She hadn’t even thought herself a victim, until Jake looked at her with a horrid mixture of pity and disgust.
“What the hell?”
“Just listen,” Cheryl began, but Jake would not. He was circling her, unable to touch her anywhere without brushing a scar. His hands were already clenched into fists. “It’s not what it seems.”
Finally, Jake stopped and looked right at her. Her son was six two, with serious eyes and a deep laugh she had to pry out of him. He was his father’s son, though he’d never had the opportunity to know this.
“Look at me and tell me he didn’t do this to you,” he said.
Cheryl opened her mouth. She had every intention of lying, but Jake cocked his head a certain way, the same way Paul had, and the truth just slipped out. “He did it.”
He was gone in a split second. She hadn’t even breathed before she heard his car speeding away. By the time she ran to the door, he had turned the corner, and she knew that even if she drove as fast as she could, she would never catch him.
Now, though, Cheryl was quicker. She was no longer weighed down by bruises and twisted thinking. What her son didn’t know was that she had tracked him all these years. She knew exactly where he was and what he had suffered. She snapped shut her suitcase and walked out the door. She could get to Prescott in three hours, if she drove like a maniac. She was not about to let disaster strike twice.
When Jake awoke, he prayed his heart would keep on burning, because it had brought a beautiful woman to his bed. She held his hand tightly, her fingers twined through his. Her rings bit into his skin, her bracelets jingled when she smiled at him.
“Well finally,” she said. “A little heart attack and you think you need to sleep forever. You’ve got to get a move on. My dad wants his bench.”
Savannah laughed, which must have meant the pain in his chest was nothing to be afraid of. Maybe he’d been struggling for breath all his life. He looked around the hospital room, painted in pale blue, its single window facing another wing. He didn’t remember a thing. One minute he was standing in Doug’s garden, the next he was waking up here. He didn’t want to remember, he knew that much.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
She walked to the window, her topaz dress sweeping the floor, the peacock feather in her hat dusting her cheek. He still didn’t think he was entitled to anything, but he couldn’t stop himself from wondering what it would be like to feel her curled into his chest, her tiny hand tucked against his neck.
“The doctors said it was a mild heart attack,” she told him. “You’ll be out in a few days. But I read your fortune anyway. You want to know what it is?”
And then Jake remembered. The kids at the lake, th
e body. His stepfather’s body. It was only a matter of time before they identified it. Only a matter of time before someone figured out what had happened. At least he knew now he had a weak heart. It was entirely possible something catastrophic would happen before Cal Bentley showed up with a warrant, before he lost one more thing.
Savannah didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ll tell you. Your distant past was Death, which usually means a huge transformation or change, and your recent past the Four of Swords, which is some kind of exile. What I’d like to know, Jake Grey, is what you’re running from.”
She took off her hat and set it down on the table. Then she eased herself on the bed beside him and curled up against his chest. She pressed her lips into the pulse of his neck. She actually kissed him and he closed his eyes. Her skin was white hot, her scent sweet as peppermint, and for the moment he was grateful for every single minute of his rotten life, because it had all led here.
He kissed her hair and she slipped a leg between his. “I’d be doing you a favor,” he said, “if I kicked you out of here.”
“So don’t do me any favors.”
“Savannah.” The name stuck in his mouth, made him tongue-tied. She leaned back and just waited until he could go on. “Those bones the kids found. I put that body there.”
And then he waited. He didn’t blink, because this was what he’d been waiting for—losing, once more, what mattered most. But all she did was look at him.
“You didn’t ask what your future was,” she said.
“I know my future.”
“If you do, then you know it’s the Four of Wands. That’s rest after a long struggle. That’s when you lie here and tell me everything, so you can finally let it go.”
Jake was twenty-one when his mother showed him the bruises, and a twenty-one-year-old has many attributes, but caution is not one of them. He’d already shown he was capable of snapping. When his father had died, he’d gone out walking the day after the funeral and hadn’t come back for six days. He left with two hundred dollars, came back with twenty, and had very little recollection of what happened in between—except that it had involved rotten personal hygiene, the muddy irrigation canals used to turn the desert green, and pure fury. He was eight years old.
Even then, he’d known it was an unjust world. He could love someone to the best of his ability and still lose him. He could disappear for nearly a week, and that fact would not shatter anyone but himself. When he finally walked in the door again, his mother, who had snapped too, simply looked up and asked where he’d been.
So years later, when his mother came in with bruises, Jake was hardly surprised. In an unjust world, a woman could lose her first husband to heart failure and get beaten by her second, while the woman across the street married her childhood sweetheart and had three beautiful children who never caused her a moment’s grief. In an unjust world, he could speed all the way to Wawani Lake, on a highway usually crawling with cops, and not get stopped by anyone.
When he pulled up to the dock, it was just after dark, the time when lake moths rose up by the millions and got tangled in fishing nets and hair. They beat their velvety wings against his windshield, and a fine white powder rose up. Jake sat there, trying to come up with alternatives, but as far as he could tell, there weren’t any. He got out of the car and must have given off some kind of merciless odor, because the moths nearest him all took flight.
He walked down the dock to the houseboat. When he flung open the door, Roy Pillandro was sitting on a chair, a rifle resting on his knees.
“The boy,” Roy said. “She fucking gets the boy.”
Jake wasn’t about to start explaining that he hadn’t been a boy since the day his father died.
“This is between your mama and me,” Roy went on. “You just hightail it on back to college, boy. Go get yourself a fancy education and marry that debutante. I’ll just wait here for your mama to come crawling back.”
That’s when Jake started to smile and couldn’t stop. He couldn’t think about his exam the next morning, or Joanne and all their plans for getting married after graduation. All he could think about was how he needed to smash something, and that something was going to be Roy’s head, and it was going to feel good.
So he smiled, and Roy raised the gun. “You smiling at me, boy? You think this is funny?”
Before Roy could do anything, before he realized he ought to be wary of a smiling twenty-one-year-old, Jake charged him. He grabbed the rifle and tossed it out of Roy’s hands. Then he went straight for Roy’s throat. He landed a punch there that sent the older man crumpling to the ground.
No one could have stopped him. He became something he would never live down, a man who lost control not only of his fists, but of his whole life. It sailed up and out Roy’s window, and was quickly devoured by moths.
He punched Roy so hard, his own knuckles bruised and bled, his head got a little dizzy. And all the while he was saying, “If you ever touch her again, I’ll kill you. I swear to God I will.”
Finally, he realized the thing he was beating was not moving, and that the sobs he heard were his own. He stood up straight. He unclenched his fists and found a bloody tooth in his palm, one of Roy’s coffee-colored incisors. He stuffed it into the wallet in his pocket, and put his hands over his eyes.
He waited until he got his breath back, then walked out of the houseboat into darkness. He had reached the end of the deck when he heard the cock of the rifle.
Years later, he would wish he had just stood there and taken the bullet in the back. He might have survived the shot, he and Roy might have called it even.
But he was twenty-one, his adrenaline was racing, and he wasn’t about to let a stupid brute win. When he heard the arming of the gun, he ducked and whirled. A shot sailed over his head and, as Roy struggled to recock the gun, Jake grabbed it by the barrel. He smashed the butt into Roy’s head, and a shot went off. The bullet passed right through the palm of Jake’s left hand, but he hardly noticed because Roy had gone over the side of the boat.
Jake dropped the gun. Some woman called out from a neighboring houseboat. “Roy? You all right? You need me to call 911?” She turned on her flood-lamps, and Jake was blinded for a moment, before he came to his senses and jumped back into the shadows. She said again, “Roy?”
Jake looked down at his bleeding hand, then at the bubbles that were coming slower where Roy had gone down. Then in a voice so smooth it would become the monster voice in his dreams, he answered the woman, “No, thank you. Roy just went a little crazy with a firecracker. We’re fine.”
He had to wait until he heard the click of her door before he jumped into the water, and by then, of course, it was too late. The body he found on the shallow sandy bottom was full of water and for as long as he lived, Jake would never forget the effort it took to bring it to the surface.
He hoisted Roy over the deck of the houseboat, then climbed up after him. He was crying so hard, his cheeks were on fire. He kept opening and closing his mouth, but all that came out were cuss words, “Goddamn” and “Fuck it all” and “You son of a bitch.”
He blew air into Roy’s vicious mouth. He thumped on his chest, tried to squeeze the water out of his good-for-nothing lungs. And all the while he kept crying, because he knew none of it would do any good.
Finally, he sat back on his heels, his left hand bleeding and throbbing. He wished it hurt more, enough to cloud his thinking. Instead, his mind was sharp. When he finally stopped crying, all he could think about was how to save himself.
He started up the houseboat. He eased out past the buoys into open water. A few houseboats were anchored in the middle of the lake, their yellow lights bobbing on the surface. He went past them, to Mesquite Cove, where years ago the artificial lake had covered up an old mesquite grove, where a man’s body had every chance of getting stuck in the decaying branches and never coming up again.
He looked at Roy’s body a long time. He felt only two things: hate and more hate. Three li
ves ruined in one day, because a man didn’t know how to walk out of a room when he got angry, because a woman didn’t leave the second a man punched her. Because a boy had not yet realized he couldn’t change people, not even by force.
It took only a second to push Roy’s body overboard and ruin his own life. As soon as he heard the splash, he took ownership of Roy’s soul, whether he liked it or not. Roy would not materialize for years, but right away he would haunt him through his nightmares. Jake would go to sleep and dream of fishing, of how fast he could down a six-pack, and of a fury that swept up out of nowhere.
Over deep water, Jake got out the bleach and scrubbed away bloodstains. He vacuumed up telltale signs of hair. He took off his bloody shirt and tossed it over the side, not realizing until later that it had his wallet and Roy’s tooth in the breast pocket. Then he drove the houseboat to the far side of the lake and docked. He took an armload of Roy’s clothes out of the closet and stuffed them in a suitcase, and grabbed the rifle he was afraid would be too buoyant to sink. His hand was throbbing as he locked the door to the boat and prayed.
It would take hours to walk back around the lake to his car. It might take days for anyone to notice Roy’s houseboat wasn’t around. It would take months, he hoped, for people to realize Roy was not coming back.
He saw a tent up on the beach, but heard no signs of life. He put his head down and started walking. After an hour, his hand stopped bleeding. He tried not to breathe too deeply, because when he did he smelled fish and blood and violence. He would smell the lake on himself for years.
It was raining by the time he got back to Phoenix, but when he reached his front door, his mother wouldn’t let him in.
She looked through the screen door at his ravaged hand, the hole in the center of it, then at his face. “No,” she said.
“He’s in the lake. He’s never coming back.”
“No. No. No. How am I ever going to salvage myself now? He was mine to finish, Jake. Whatever he was, he was mine.” She backed up. When he started to open the screen, she slammed the door. He heard the click of the dead bolt.
The Wishing Garden Page 17