The Wishing Garden (10 page)

“There are covenants against this sort of thing.” Hiller gestured at her sign with the sharp white point of his elbow. He was tall, silver-haired, and thin as a pear sapling. He wore all white, which only highlighted the fact that his skin was the color of macaroni and cheese. From the smell of his breath, she was sure that was all he’d been eating for weeks.

“Come on in,” she said. “Let me give you a reading.”

He had to bend his head down to look at her. She could smell sadness a mile away, and it reeked to high heaven on him. She put a hand on his arm, right over a liver spot shaped like a bird. He studied her bracelets a moment, then pulled away.

“We will not have any businesses run on our properties. We’re here to live out our days in peace and quiet.”

Savannah adjusted her hat. “I don’t read to rock music. You won’t even know I’m here, unless you come for a reading. I could tell your fortune right now. I’ll do it for free, just to get the word out.”

“Young lady,” Ben said, “I’ve lived on that corner for twenty years. I think I know a thing or two about my neighbors. They’re already scared enough, for one thing. They’re not going to be lining up here so you can tell them they’ve got only two more years to live.”

Savannah drew back as if he’d insulted her. “I’d never say that. The tarots are not fortune cookies, you know. They’re not so much a prediction of the future as a way to get in touch with your own intuition. A way to see things clearer. Did you know the tarots go back to Egyptian times? The cards are based on mythical archetypes. The major arcana correspond to the twenty-two letters of the kabbalah. I’m telling you, I am not messing around here.”

Ben Hiller stepped back and grasped the black string around his neck. It held two silver wedding rings, a woman’s and a man’s, which he tucked beneath his faded white shirt, against his heart.

“That is not the issue,” he said.

“I’m not going to tell anyone they’ll get in a car crash or have a heart attack,” Savannah went on. “There’s nothing in the cards for that. But four Fours often means a journey is near at hand. And there is no
doubt about it, the Two of Cups means you’re going to fall in love.”

“No one on this block wants to fall in love again. I guarantee you.”

Ben looked through the lemon stamp of lamplight at his house on the corner, the one with an overwhelming expanse of blue fescue, like an ocean he’d have to cross just to get to his front door. He stepped back, right into the path of a blueberry climber Doug had planted along the walls of the garage.

“Young lady, you take down that sign and don’t even think about practicing your witchcraft here.”

Savannah put a hand over her heart. “I swear I will not practice witchcraft.”

Ben Hiller squinted at her. He was trembling, and they both heard the wedding rings slapping against his chest. He stepped back, until he crushed a blood-red tulip, which had just opened up. It was a well-known fact that crimson tulips from Canada to Texas bloomed on the same day, as if by magic. On that night, mothers put their toddlers to bed early and asked their stunned husbands to dance, girls pricked their fingers and said a boy’s name one hundred times, and hard men cried. But Ben Hiller just scraped the blossoms off the bottom of his heel.

Savannah touched his shirt, above the rings. “What was her name?”

Ben Hiller stepped back and put a hand over his chest, as if she’d burned him. The wind curled around their shoulders and arms, but went no higher; it never rocked the top branches of the trees, it did nothing to deter the flight paths of crows. It was a wind for landlocked humans, and tonight it swirled around a widower’s shirt collar, then collapsed into his pocket, where it trembled against his chest.

“Helen,” he said. “She died sixteen years ago this summer.”

Savannah suddenly felt unsteady, and reached for the wall of the garage. Husbands and wives ought to grow old together, not leave one another hanging. Life ought to reward true love, and if it didn’t, then she didn’t want to know about it. She looked at the blueberry climber and the darkening sky, everywhere except at the pain in one old man’s eyes.

“Well,” she said. “Thanks for the warning.”

She left Ben Hiller standing in the garden and went back inside. She didn’t even think about taking down the sign. But a few days later, she knew Ben had warned the neighbors, because no one in the MesaLand retirement community would come near her. Even after the ad appeared with her new phone number, she got only three calls, all high-school girls wanting to know how to win back their ex-boyfriends. Her neighbors hung up on her whenever she phoned with offers of a free introductory reading. They crossed the street when they saw her coming. Ninety-year-old Mark Ridley went so far as to ask his grandson to move in, just in case something funny should happen.

Savannah ignored this entirely. She read for the high-school girls and tried to stop dreaming of her old life—her corner office overlooking the Bay Bridge, and the dodgeball games her writers would be playing in the conference room. She tried to stop thinking Arizona was making her another person. Outside her father’s garden, there was not enough color, so she wore nothing but crimson dresses and sapphire rings. She still woke up humming, but sometimes it took her awhile to figure out a tune. Sometimes, in the middle of frying up bacon, she couldn’t think of one more note.

After two weeks, when her father had turned a
paler shade of chalk, she began to get a little nervous. When she was down to five days of sick leave, she ignored Emma’s lethal stare and called her boss.

“I can’t go back now,” she said.

Taylor Baines was one of the most successful ad agencies in the city, second only to the Goodby Silverstein agency. There were a hundred people standing in line to take her job, but she couldn’t consider that. Not while her father needed help getting from his bed to the bathroom, not while she heard her steely mother crying in the middle of the night.

“You could take family leave,” her boss said. “Your position will be waiting for you when you come back.”

He suggested freelance copywriting just to keep her finger in the business, and she found such work writing newspaper ads for Fulsom Foods, an independent supermarket chain in decline. Though the work was minimal, some days she found it harder than her job at Taylor Baines.

“Shop with experience,” she said out loud. She was stirring up another batch of homemade cream of mushroom soup in her mother’s kitchen. “Freshness
and
experience. No one can beat our quality and service.”

“I got food poisoning from one of their tomatoes,” Maggie said, coming into the kitchen.

“You did not.”

Maggie went to the cupboard. “I most certainly did. Besides that, I prefer the new Smitty’s. Have you seen the size of their deli? They’ve got a sushi chef on staff, if you can believe that.”

Savannah stirred the soup, while her mother found a wineglass. Beyond the glasses, there was an inordinate amount of frying pans and utensils, and a cutting board to die for, none of which appeared to have ever been used.

“I’ll get going with the fortune-telling anyway,” she said. “This could all be fate, you know.”

“You’re a successful woman. Don’t ruin it.”

“I’m not ruining anything. I’m trying to follow my heart.”

“Do you know what I would have given for a life like yours?”

Savannah looked at her mother’s hands clenched tightly around the stem of her wineglass. She turned away. “We are two different people, Mom.”

“So you’d like to think.” Maggie unpeeled the tag from the wineglass, then filled it with chilled Chardonnay. She took a good, long sip, then finally turned to Savannah. “You won’t do any fortune-telling business here. My neighbors already know their future. It’s cream of mushroom soup.”

Savannah’s hand shook as she poured the bone-colored soup, but she wasn’t about to start falling for doomsday thinking now. She took the soup on a tray to her father, but he had already fallen asleep. She put the tray down on the side table and pulled the blankets up under his chin.

She pressed her face into the crook of his neck, and breathed in deeply. She ignored the stench of illness entirely—the bitter breath and moldy sweat—because beneath that he still smelled of himself, of citrus and fishy soil and rose petals. Of the only cherry tree in all of Phoenix. He still smelled of the living, and she swept that up into her heart.

She pressed her cheek firmly against him. She adored him, but his dying was not bringing out the best in her. In fact, it had made her selfishness crystal clear. She didn’t care what else he did, he just couldn’t leave her. She could walk away and never come back, she could break his heart in two, but a father was
meant to be there. He didn’t have to say a word; he just had to last.

This didn’t speak well for her, but she knew what she had to do—read her father’s fortune and, if it came up badly, stack the cards. A child had to have some power, after all, and hers would be to make him live.

She sang a song she’d made up years ago, when she’d spent her nights on that back lawn in Danville, Emma tucked against her, her palms unfurled.

She stroked her cheek against her father’s arm. The hair had fallen out there, too, so he now had skin like a baby’s, so smooth and pink it brought tears to her eyes. She cried the way she laughed, from the pit of her stomach, from way down deep. And while she cried, she realized she had married Harry Shaw not only to escape her irascible mother, but also to get away from the goodness of her father, from loving someone so much, losing him would make her another person. She might suddenly forget the things he’d taught her—how to ride a bicycle and do long division. Worst of all, with her champion gone, she might start looking at the world differently, as if it were a predator and had been after her all along.

She felt a hand on her hair and looked up to find her father awake, staring at her. He stroked her hair and tried to smile, but his bottom lip split with the effort. She reached for the washcloth by the side of the bed and wiped off the blood.

“It’s always darkest before the dawn,” he said.

He had said the same thing every time she lost a boyfriend, or Maggie yelled, or a friend moved away. She had clung to those words, she had believed them, but now she was not so sure. She thought it might very well be darkest right before midnight, when there was still a whole night of darkness to get through.

The second Emma stepped onto the grounds of Prescott High, she knew she had made a mistake sticking around. Mission High in San Francisco was a small charter school devoted to the arts, and the students were even more bohemian than the artists south of Market and the witches who gathered on misty Tank Hill. The boys wore ponytails and backpacked all summer, the girls read Keats and hardly ever fell in love. Popularity was based not on athletics or looks, but on which part you got in
Othello
, on whether or not people cried while you sang a Tracy Chapman song.

Emma had been Desdemona in
Othello
, she had had friends hanging on her every word. Now, though, she was frozen solid; she was hideously out of place. Prescott High was double the size of Mission High, sprawling, nondescript, a vague brown. People had way too much land to play with out here, they had entirely too much access to concrete and computer-aided design. The school was a fortress of cement, with every window locked tight—a security measure since a boy in neighboring Flagstaff went crazy with an Uzi during homeroom. She was supposed to find room
203 for History, but she wasn’t going anywhere, not any farther than the flagpole near the front gate.

A clique of girls in tight blouses and short skirts walked past her and snorted at her clothes—she’d worn her favorite ankle-length gray skirt, oversized gray blouse, and sandals. One of them said something about foreigners and the others laughed.

Emma picked up a handful of dirt and flung it at them. The girls yelped and turned around, but Emma was already picking up another handful. Ramona had taught her how to throw a hex. Emma spit on the dirt for luck, then hurled it at the tallest girl’s eyes, all the while cussing like there was no tomorrow.

“Fuckshitgoddamnyoumotherfucker.”

She must have done it right, because long before the dirt wad hit them, the girls were running. They flung themselves inside the Science building, where they hugged one another and sobbed. Emma slapped her hands clean, satisfied.

“Good aim,” someone said.

Emma turned around to find a band of punks behind her. They were too old for high school, nineteen or early twenties, with cigarettes in their pockets and mean, ugly haircuts. The boy she’d seen drive up in front of her grandparents’ house had already taken a step toward her.

“They had it coming,” she said.

“No doubt.”

He lit a cigarette and squinted when the smoke flew past his eyes. He was hard and audaciously thin, a lean coyote who has the guts to nudge open a kitchen door, looking for food. Long brown hair fell over his eyes and a nasty scar ran down his left cheek. He sucked on his cigarette but, as far as she could tell, never exhaled.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Emma Shaw.”

“Emma Shaw. Emma Shaw.”

She did not know if he was singing her name or mocking her. The others passed around a joint and didn’t bother to put it out when a woman in a blue linen suit slammed out of the administration building. Emma recognized her as Principal Harris, whom she’d met when she enrolled.

“Eli Malone,” the woman said, “I told you if I caught you here one more time, I was going to call Cal Bentley. You’d better get moving, because he’s already on his way.”

“I’m shaking. I’m shitting my pants.”

The boys all laughed. They passed the joint to Eli right in front of her.

“Haven’t you got anything else to do?” the principal asked.