Emma yanked away her hand and folded her arms across her chest. “You’re not listening to me. Not even when I tell you things from the very bottom of my soul.”
“You’re wrong,” Savannah said softly. “I hear every word you’re saying.”
Emma walked to the door, then back again. “You know what I think? I think you never loved Dad. You couldn’t have, if you let him go so easily. Did you cry when you married him? Did it hurt going down?”
“Emma, that’s not love, it’s surrender. It’ll break your heart in two.”
“So then break it. People walk around with broken hearts all the time, and that’s kind of beautiful, if you think about it.”
Savannah took a deep breath. “Emma, you can’t see him anymore. I’m sorry, but he’s the kind of boy who can only do you harm.”
Emma stared at her, but Savannah didn’t back down, just as her mother had never backed down. She was a parent, which meant she had to stand there and take her daughter’s loathing. She had to do what was best, even if it meant Emma would never talk to her again.
Emma walked out without a word. Savannah picked up the discarded willow and tried to reknot it, but her hands were clumsy. She ended up with nothing but a palm full of splinters too.
Her mother came in soon after and put her hand on her shoulder. “There’s no joy in motherhood,” Maggie said.
“Oh, that helps.”
“Nothing helps except time.”
Savannah dropped the willow and turned around. “She hates me.”
“And she should. You’re stopping her from having the only thing she wants.”
“I can’t just let her go to him. That boy—”
“She wants to be free and you want to keep her safe, and there is no middle ground. The tighter you hold her, the more she’ll squirm, until she flies right out of your hand.”
“Mom, you are not comforting me.”
“If I did, you wouldn’t be prepared. Now listen to me, Savannah. At this very moment, Emma’s figuring ways to get around you. She’s plotting her little guts out, and you’ve got to be ready. This is just the beginning of years of being defied and despised.”
Savannah stepped back. The worst part was not what her mother said, but that she was beginning to believe her.
“Just stop,” she said.
“Why? Emma won’t. She’ll fight and plot and become more devious and mean than you can imagine and you know what? That’s good. That’s what you want. Those kids who never rebel, they’re the ones who go crazy with machine guns in McDonald’s. Emma’s turning into a well-adjusted young woman.”
“Mom,” Savannah pleaded.
Maggie stepped back. “Listen to me.” As always, when she said that, Savannah braced herself. She stood up straight and glared, but all Maggie did was turn toward the door. “This is when she starts mistaking your love for prison. When she starts swearing she never loved you at all. Don’t believe her. I never did.”
She walked out quickly, so neither of them could see the other crying, which was a ridiculous thing, after all this time.
Sasha was digging up the pea seeds the dying man had sneaked out to plant when she heard the grating of steel against granite. To humans, it sounded like nothing more than a snap, perhaps an old tree splitting in two in the distance, but the one thing Sasha hadn’t lost over the years was her ability to hear trouble. The sound sent a pulse of hot pain down her spine, and she threw back her head and howled. She sped past the hat woman who’d just come out of the workshop, and made her brittle legs run.
She followed the scent of exhaust smoke and gladiolus. Around the blind turn, she spotted smoke. She hesitated on the edge of the ravine, where the side had given way. She could hear the woman and the good man behind her, calling her name and running hard. Sasha could easily outrun them, even when slowed from arthritis and plain old dying, and for a moment she considered the possibility. If she started now, she could reach the big mountain by nightfall. She could run until her heart gave out, the way every dog prayed to go.
But she was not so much a dog anymore, that was the trouble. The good man had been messing with her all these years, playing a subtle game of kindness that could drain the wildness out of any beast. He’d tricked her into craving kibble instead of squirrel meat, and going to sleep every night with a pillow beneath her head. She was so soft now she couldn’t even run without checking to see that he was following her, so she waited on the precipice until the good man and woman came around the corner, then she started down the path of the slide.
She found the car hung up between two fifty-year-old ponderosas. She could smell the blood when it was still fifty feet away, and she howled again. A few flames shot out of the engine, then died out. That old man must have died on impact; he’d come halfway through the windshield, and still managed to keep his eyes wide open.
Sasha circled the car, peeing on all four corners to keep the wolves at bay. Already, crows were circling. A coyote approached stealthily until Sasha growled and ran him off.
The man and woman finally reached the wreck, but only the man really looked at it. The woman grabbed hold of a knobby pine and threw up. She held onto the tree and wept until Sasha’s spine shivered. The good man closed the old man’s eyes, then tried to hold the woman, but she acted like an injured wolf, the kind it was too late to help, who paced until he died.
“It was a blind turn,” the good man said. “An accident.”
But the woman was no fool. Sasha had known that from the start. She had the ability to look at things the way a dog would, stripping them down until she found the core of truth. She knew, for instance, that all men were worth saving, and that this had all the makings of an old man running until his heart gave out.
She looked straight at Sasha, and though Sasha thought most of those words they uttered were wasted effort, she wished she had some of them now. She wanted the woman to know what else she had heard at that first crash of metal on granite, the sound of an old man cheering.
Instead, she walked over to her and pressed her muzzle into the woman’s thigh. The woman just went stiff.
“Dear God,” she said, “what have I done?”
When Savannah saw the blood on Ben’s face, she easily could have sat down and never gotten up again. When an excited deputy cordoned off the whole hillside with yellow tape, and a crane pulled up Ben’s mangled car, she thought about running and never coming back. When word filtered down to town, and the crank calls started that night, she might have taken to crying, but instead let Jake take the phone off the hook.
She vomited again after her mother made pot roast, then late that night lay listening to her own quick, scared heart. At midnight, still wide awake and sick to her stomach, she walked out onto the deck.
That’s when she smelled it, not clean mountain air but stale cigarette smoke. She felt an unsettling coldness at her ear.
“Murderers,” she thought she heard. “The both of you.”
She whirled around, but all she saw was a thick fog rippling over the deck like lake water. She felt a chill clear down to her toes.
She took a deep breath and walked right through the mist, holding down the desire to scream. Her skin turned ice-cold, the tips of her hair went temporarily white. She went inside and locked the door behind her.
The next morning, she grabbed her tarot deck and took out the Four of Swords, the card of exile. After breakfast, she wedged it between the slats on the deck, where the air still reeked of tobacco, where whatever had been there last night would find it as soon as darkness fell.
It wasn’t only ghosts who were taunting her. That night, Eli and his punk friends chopped up the crime-scene tape and tied yellow flags to the antenna of Eli’s Corvette. They must have dared each other all the way to Jake’s house, because after they pulled up in the driveway, they got out puffed-up and mean. Jake took two steps down the porch, but Savannah stepped in front of him.
“No,” she said. “They’re here for me.
”
She walked across the gravel drive. The boys reeked of marijuana and beer, which had only made them meaner. Eli drifted toward the back, but the others elbowed each other. Finally, Rick Laufer stepped forward.
“Here’s twenty bucks,” he said, handing Savannah the cash. “Come on. Give me your worst. Drive me to suicide.”
He laughed, until Savannah grabbed his arm. She’d been second-guessing herself all day, trying to figure which warning signs she’d missed, what she’d said wrong. She’d re-created Ben’s fortune, then quickly scattered the cards. If she’d missed some ominous sign, she didn’t want to know it. She was going to predict happy endings for everyone, even if she had to flat-out lie.
She yanked Rick Laufer into the cabin and shoved him toward a chair. Ben Hiller had been destined for that cliff long before she came along. Thousands of people were destined for cliffs; it was fortune-tellers who got them contemplating alternatives, unexpected fortunes and lovers coming from the north. At the very least, a gypsy could make a man wait a day to jump, just in case this was the day his whole life turned around.
“Sit down,” she said.
Rick sat and tried to light a cigarette, but couldn’t get his hands to stop trembling. The others stayed outside, howling like wolves. Savannah swiped the makeup to the side and dropped her cards in front of him.
“Shuffle,” she said.
She stared him down until he dropped his unlit cigarette and shuffled. Bad coincidence made her tense and mean, and it seemed nothing could be done about it. She grabbed the cards back from this two-bit hood, a boy she could see in an instant would never be bad enough to be a gangster or good enough to settle down. He’d slip right through the cracks, this one, he’d never belong to anyone, and one day he’d simply lie down and die of a broken, lonely heart.
She laid out the cards for him. Her parents were upstairs, Emma out on the back deck with the dogs, but Jake came in and sat beside her. Beneath the table, he put his hand on her knee.
She looked down at the cards, all swords, all reversed. “Tell me, have you ever been happy?”
Rick laughed, but he could just as easily have cried, she thought. She had cried for an hour beside Ben Hiller’s smashed car, and then she had looked at his hands, still grasping the steering wheel. On his finger was his wedding ring, the one he’d kept hung around his neck. He had flown back into the arms of his lover. She had to believe that, or else how could she go on?
“I’m fucking ecstatic,” Rick said.
Savannah nodded. “Then beware. You’ve got the Five of Swords, reversed, in front of you. That’s an uncertain outlook. The chance of misfortune for a friend.”
“That’s it?” Rick said.
“What else would you like me to say?”
“Shit, I don’t know. You’re the fortune-teller. What did you tell Ben? That he was doomed?”
Jake squeezed her knee, then put his fists on the table, where Rick could see the size of them.
“Come on,” Rick said. “I want my twenty dollars’ worth.”
Jake just stared at him, and Rick pushed back his chair. “Shit. The misfortune of a friend. Who the fuck cares?”
He walked out of the cabin and slammed the door. Savannah breathed deeply. She pushed herself up from the table and gathered the cards.
“The cards don’t make things happen,” she said.
“Of course not.”
“They just show us the options. They clarify. I told Ben he had something great to do. How could I have known he’d take to driving off cliffs?”
Jake stood up and gathered her in his arms, but that only made it worse. He kissed her slowly, little feather kisses to the corners of her mouth. He kissed the line of her tears, then held her face in his hands. She was not going to love him. He was the Page of Wands, with a bad heart, and he was trouble. He conjured ghosts and reeked of sorrow. He was everything she didn’t want.
“This is not your fault,” he said, and it was probably true, but still her throat tightened.
The boys were all howling in the yard. She walked out onto the back deck where Emma ought to be and instead found the Four of Swords ripped to shreds and scattered along the planking. Jake came out beside her. Despite the howling, she could hear him breathing.
He bent down to pick up a piece of the shredded card. It showed only a man’s hands folded in prayer. He tucked the piece in his pocket and stood up.
Savannah took his hand, but then the dogs started yelping. They both ran around the side of the house, and found the boys hurling rocks at the dogs. Sasha led the countercharge, coming at the tormentors with her teeth bared.
“Emma?” Savannah said.
She spotted her beside Eli, a rock in the palm of her hand. Her daughter might be guilty of lying and bad judgment, but never of cruelty. Savannah would not believe it, not with the evidence right in front of her, not ever. Her gaze met Emma’s, and her daughter dropped the rock to the ground.
All it took was one step forward from Jake for the boys to bolt. They leapt into Eli’s Corvette, but not before Emma grabbed Eli and kissed him. Not until all the boys cheered.
After the car was gone, Jake looked over his dogs and found only a couple of scratches. Nevertheless, he took them into the cabin for first aid and steak bones. As soon as he’d gone, Savannah charged across the yard. When she reached for her daughter, Emma flinched.
“I’m not the one throwing rocks,” Savannah said.
“Mom …”
“Come with me.”
She didn’t wait for a rebuttal. She started down the road, stopping at every elderberry bush to snip off a branch or two. By the time she reached the blind turn, where the yellow tape was now chopped in pieces and strangling the necks of sagebrush, she had an armful of limbs.
She waited until Emma was just a few yards back, then she started down the cliff. Where Ben’s car had landed, there was nothing left but pulverized pine needles and the smell of gasoline.
Savannah glanced up the hill, where Emma was making her way down slowly. When she finally reached her side, Savannah handed her a few branches.
“Plant a twig of elder on someone’s grave,” she said, “and their ghost will be at peace.” She kicked at the soil, then picked the richest spot. She spit on the bottom of her branches. “Put them in deep. Pray for rain.”
The two of them knelt in the moonlight and planted twigs. Every now and then, Emma faded in the moonlight, her heart picked its way over Kemper Peak and Desolation Canyon into Eli Malone’s shabby cabin, and there was nothing Savannah could do about it. The part Emma left behind was not even speaking to her.
Finally, Savannah stood up and wiped her hands on her dress. She led Emma back to the cabin and did not say a word about the bats that skimmed their hair. Even when Emma cried out, Savannah didn’t soothe her about how many bugs bats ate an hour, or the myth of the prince who takes up residence in a bat’s body in order to search the world for the woman he loves. For once, she just stayed silent.
She tucked Emma into her sleeping bag on the couch, then sat on the chair by the door. She waited patiently until Emma fell asleep, then she went to the closet.
One thing a fortune-teller knew was that when she started feeling things against her will, it was time to leave. When a daughter started throwing rocks at dogs who loved her, it was a clear sign that things were going down fast.
What Savannah did not expect was to discover that a ghost felt the same way. She opened the closet where she’d left her suitcase, and was assaulted by the stale smell of cigarette smoke.
She crept back to the chair and breathed deeply. Her shoulders tightened each time she heard a creak on the metal roof, but when she went outside and looked up, the roof was empty except for a scattering of pine cones.
She went back inside and packed her suitcase. So she agreed with a ghost. So what? That didn’t mean she was doing this his way. She would stay through the night, just to spite him. She wouldn’t leave until dawn, when s
pirits can’t materialize, because if they do, they disappear into thin air.
FOURTEEN
THE LOVERS SACRIFICE OF THE SOUL
Emma fell asleep plotting ways to fool her mother. She’d tell her she was going to California to visit her father, then she’d hitchhike back to Eli. She’d simply never do another thing Savannah said. Instead of guilt, she felt high on the things she could possibly give up for love. Everything but Eli was up for sacrifice—good grades, friends, a healthy appetite, her mother’s trust.
Tonight, as always, she dreamed of him. He was twenty years older and in some kind of sales job. He’d cut off all his hair and taken to wearing suits, and he kept cocking his head when she cried. ‘Isn’t this what you wanted?’ he asked her.
A thump woke her. She was tangled in the couch pillows, her hair moist and sticky against her neck. It was just before dawn, the air purple and hallucinatory, so when a man pressed up against the sliding glass door, Emma at first thought him a lingering part of her dream. The skin along her arms puckered and burned, but the muscles themselves were immobile. The man had dark hair, and vertical lines down his cheeks. He had the foulest-looking smile she’d ever seen.
She screamed, but nothing came out but a hollow whistle. The man put his hand on the door and began to slide it open.
“Mom,” Emma said. “Mommy?”
Savannah, who had been sleeping on the floor, got to her knees. Emma was shaking so badly, all she could do was point. But what she was pointing at had vanished, leaving behind only a white haze where he’d breathed on the glass. That, too, faded right before her eyes.
“You saw something?” Savannah asked. “I’ll go look.”
Emma grabbed her arm. “No. Don’t go out there.”
Savannah sat on the couch and tucked her up on her lap. Like a baby, Emma buried her face in the moist curl of her mother’s neck.
“It’s all right, honey,” Savannah said. “There’s nothing out there that can hurt you.”
The Wishing Garden Page 22