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Authors: Christy Yorke

The Wishing Garden (27 page)

BOOK: The Wishing Garden
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“It’s all right,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve done fine.”

Cheryl pulled back to look at him. She wiped her eyes and glanced up at the roof, where the ghost had materialized out of the blue and was watching them steadily. His mother saw nothing. She turned around and fingered the buttons on her silk blouse.

“I sold the house. I’ve been working at Dillard’s. In lingerie. They’re moving me up to the women’s nine-to-five department.”

The ghost slid down the gutter behind her. He was smiling, but in a second his grin stopped cold, and
even Jake, who was always expecting a fight, was not ready for the fist when it came at his mother.

Roy swung at Cheryl’s head, but the blow went right through her and landed on the side of Jake’s chin. Jake put his hand to his skin, expecting to find blood. His fingers came away clean.

“Jake?” Cheryl said. “Is something wrong?”

The ghost seemed as surprised as he was. He stared at his hand, twisting it right and left. He tapped the porch railing and Cheryl whirled around at the sound.

“Woodpeckers?” she asked.

Roy threw back his head and laughed.

“No,” Cheryl went on, “robins. Definitely robins.”

Jake took a deep breath and realized something would have to be done. It was entirely possible he would have to kill Roy Pillandro twice.

He looked back at his mother, but she was just smiling, looking out at the woods. “It’s beautiful here,” she said. “I’ll give you that.”

For a moment, she looked half her age. She looked like a woman who wouldn’t hesitate to fight back. Jake looked for the ghost, but Roy must have noticed the same thing, because he was gone.

“It took me thirty days to get up the nerve to go back to the lake,” Cheryl said. “You know the first thing I did when I got there? I leaned over the pier and spit on that son of a bitch’s grave.”

Jake reached out and touched her white hair. When she pushed her cheek against his hand, he remembered why he’d killed a man. He remembered why he’d been glad.

“I’m happy you’ve found someone,” his mother said.

Jake looked through the window into the cabin. Savannah and Maggie were sitting at the table. Savannah
had laid out her cards, but Maggie refused to look.

“I haven’t found anyone,” he said. “She’s not staying.”

“Why not?”

“She’s not the staying type.”

“So you’ll go with her.”

“I can’t go anywhere. Not anymore. What will happen will happen. I don’t really care anymore.”

Cheryl grabbed his hands. “Oh, you care. Don’t think I don’t understand what you’re doing. Your father was the same. He’d get all quiet and stoic when inside he was dying. He never told me a thing about that heart of his until it exploded on him. That was just plain cruel, Jake. I didn’t even know where the checkbook was. I couldn’t get his damn stick shift out of the driveway.”

“Mom.”

“You care,” she said. “And if you don’t, I’ll bet that woman in there does. I saw the way she looked at you. You better care, Jake Grey, or you’re going to break that woman’s heart in two.”

“I think that it will be the other way around.”

Cheryl stayed for the night, but the next morning had to get back to work in Tucson. Jake walked her out on the porch, which during the night had been dusted with a slick coating of pine pollen.

“I’ve got a bedroom this color,” Cheryl said, swiping a finger through the yellow dust on the railing. “I’m in a book club, too. Did I tell you that? We meet every Wednesday night. We read John Irving, if you can believe that.”

Jake smiled. “That’s great, Mom.”

“I’ll come back the second you need me. I’ll quit if I have to. One won’t make up for the other, but nevertheless, this time I’m doing it right.”

After she left, Savannah met him on the deck. The morning sky was closing in, smelling of rain again, and birds seemed to fly at them out of nowhere. A pine cone fell right out of the sky, or maybe from off the roof, but Jake wasn’t about to turn around to check.

He stood stiff as wood. He might never have held her, if she hadn’t held him first.

“I can see why you love it here,” Savannah said quietly. “I fell asleep the second my head hit the pillow. I dreamed of vanilla ice cream.” She laughed and leaned into him.

When he had asked them to come, he had not considered that Savannah would ruin his cabin for him. Now he’d never be able to stand in this spot without wishing for something soft to hold. He’d never sit in front of his fire again without craving ice cream. He’d be relegated to the few spaces she hadn’t touched—his woodpile, the basement, the dim corners of his workshop.

“The sheriff came to my mother’s house,” he said.

She nodded. She flicked at a mosquito hovering around her face, then turned to him. “There’s no way they can link you to that body. And even if they could, you did what you had to do. It’s been fifteen years, Jake. No one’s going to pursue this now.”

“Like hell they aren’t.” Maggie had come out onto the deck with a cup of coffee.

Savannah stepped out of Jake’s embrace. “Jake doesn’t deserve—”

“It doesn’t matter what he deserves,” Maggie said. “Jake understands this.”

He nodded, because he did. Life unfolded as it would, whether you were good or bad. If he ever learned to pray again, he’d pray for luck, not love or money.

“He’s suffered enough,” Savannah said. “God can’t hold this against him.”

“God can do whatever he damn well pleases,” Maggie said, “if he’s even there. God does not pay very good attention, if you ask me. People are falling through the cracks left and right.”

She walked off the deck toward the woods, scattering the morning grasshoppers, who leapt out of the way of her sneakers. She left deep, dark footprints in the soggy ground.

“She’s right,” Jake said.

“Please don’t side with her.”

He heard the plea in her voice, and reached out to touch her cheek. “How do you do it? I’ve seen your deck. It’s full of swords and turmoil. It goes against logic and fairness that good things could happen all the time.”

Savannah walked into the cabin, then came back out with the cards. “Shuffle and pick one,” she said.

“Savannah—”

“Just do it. If you already think bad things will come, then you certainly can’t be afraid.”

He shuffled the cards, then turned over the top one.

“The Seven of Swords,” she said. “New plans. Confidence. Proof that not all the swords are bad. Pick another.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“No, it’s fate. Pick.”

He reached into the middle of the deck and drew Strength. “Self-explanatory,” she said. “And good, I might add. Pick again.”

He chose the Knight of Cups. “That’s attraction. Sometimes falling in love, often a challenge. Go again.”

Jake picked twelve cards, and to all twelve, she had
a promising future in store for him. “How do I know you haven’t stacked the deck?” he asked. “How do I know you’re not cheating?”

She yanked the cards back and flipped them over. He saw, very clearly, that the bad cards were in there, but they had all sunk to the bottom with his shuffling.

“Magician,” he said.

“I didn’t touch the cards. You did. So don’t you tell me you have no luck, Jake Grey. Don’t you dare tell me this can’t all work out all right.”

She placed the cards back in his hands, then closed his fingers over them. When she turned and walked into the house, all his dogs followed her.

Jake breathed in the vanilla morning air and squeezed the cards tight. Then he opened his fist and picked one out of the middle. It was the Ten of Pentacles, a man, woman and child all dancing, an old man reaching out to pet a dog. He quickly threaded it back in the deck. It was some kind of trick, and he wasn’t falling for it. Only a fool wished for the one thing he really wanted.

 T
WELVE
 T
HE
S
EVEN OF
W
ANDS
C
OURAGE
 

S
avannah Knew the superstitions. Kill a cricket in the house and bad news will come to your door. Rip the wings off a bee and you’ll lose everything you treasure within a month.

So when she hiked the trail to Kemper Peak and stepped on an anthill, smashing it flat, she said a prayer not only for the ants she’d annihilated, but for herself. Earlier, she’d swatted a fly without thinking twice and flushed a gargantuan spider down the toilet. How many more signs did she need? Obviously, something bad was about to happen.

No doubt it had to do with the boy in front of her. Eli Malone, along with Emma and Jake, were showing her the path to Kemper Peak. Savannah never saw the bald granite mountain ahead; instead, her gaze stuck on Eli Malone’s back. His brown hair was tied in a ponytail, bobbing from one shoulder to the other. Jake had given the boy his job back, but had promised to
keep him away from Emma, if that was what Savannah wanted. The problem was, Savannah didn’t know what she wanted. Since Jake had collapsed in the garden, nothing was a sure bet, not heartbeats or Emma’s happiness or even her very own desires.

Jake was the last kind of man she ought to fall for, all silence and misery, a festering heap of neglect. But when she’d been holding him, waiting for the ambulance, she’d known she was falling then and there. When she had looked up and seen Eli crying, she’d known she didn’t have the heart to keep him from her daughter. Sometimes, you just fell for the wrong person, plain and simple. Sometimes, you just had to ride it out.

Emma walked in front of Eli so he could watch her every move. She kicked up rocks and dust, sliced breezes in two with the sway of her hips. She snatched up dandelions and blew the cottony seeds in his path. Because she didn’t turn around, she never knew Eli snatched them right out of the air and tucked them into his shirt pocket. She never knew just how much effect she had.

The summit was still a half-mile ahead, a jagged boulder that jutted into the air like a fist. The peak was the site of the biggest avalanche ever recorded in Arizona. The slide had taken off fifty feet of mountain and killed every tree but one. The north face they were maneuvering through now was a minefield of granite debris, with a single, stunted ponderosa growing in a three-inch deep pocket of soil.

Savannah watched her daughter and Eli scramble toward the summit, kicking up landslides of their own. Above them, three clouds were brewing, and the air smelled of smoke, from a controlled burn that had immediately gotten out of control and was now threatening a ritzy new subdivision ten miles up the road.

Every once in a while the wind changed, and Emma’s voice floated down, or rather the new Emma’s voice did, because Savannah didn’t recognize a single strain.

She turned to Jake, who was walking slowly now, his initial adrenaline at breaking his doctor’s orders withering beneath the hot sun and obvious chest pain. She put her hand on his arm.

“What does this prove?” she asked.

He wiped the sweat off his neck. “Nothing.”

She kept hold of him to make him walk slower. By the time they reached the summit, Emma and Eli were lying on their backs on the rock, the tips of their fingers touching. Emma was telling the story of Agamano, an Indian girl—a story Savannah had created the first time they hiked the Sierras.

“The Indians lived in these mountains a long time ago,” Emma was saying. “This peak, they said, was the sacred temple of the sky god. If the Indians got too close, the mountain grabbed them with its claws and fed them to the sky.”

Savannah and Jake sat down, while the dogs raced past the boulder and down the ragged south flank, hunting for squirrels in the rock.

“One day,” Emma went on, “Agamano, a young squaw, decided it was all superstition. She set off up the mountain alone and, halfway up, no claws had grabbed her. Ten feet below the summit, she was sure she was going to make it, and that’s when a shadow fell over her and a stone claw rose up. It grabbed her in its tentacles and lifted her to the sky. The clouds opened up, and behind it a huge, gaping mouth. The sky ate her whole, and the rain turned red with her blood.”

Eli had been throwing rocks off the side, but now he stopped. “Shit, Emma.”

BOOK: The Wishing Garden
11.47Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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