The Wishing Garden (5 page)

“You can’t judge the world by the Truffs. Things haven’t always gone their way.”

“You know what they talk about at dinner?” Emma went on. “She tells him it’s his fault she got pregnant so young, and she never got to be an actress, then he tells her if she wasn’t so goddamn fat, she could still try, then she says he’s an asshole, then he says he never loved her, then Diana tells them both to shut the fuck up, then they yell at her for cussing, then they watch
Home Improvement.”

Savannah put an arm around Emma’s tight shoulders, but Emma shrugged her off. Her daughter stood up and walked across the soggy grass, leaving imprints of tiny feet, her middle toes adorned with slim gold rings.

Savannah sighed. Emma had dieted herself down to nothing, wore hideous makeup and said ‘Fuck’ like
an anthem, but anyone with eyes could see that her skin was smooth as water. Even when she cut her hair herself—which she’d done on a dare a week ago—it curled appealingly around her face. One day, Savannah prayed, Emma would just give up trying to ruin herself. One day, she’d just snap out of it.

“I’ll tell you the absolute truth,” Savannah said. “Life is glorious. Love is spectacular. If anyone tells you differently, they’re blind. Happiness is a choice you have to make every morning.”

Emma snorted again, and went back inside for more coffee. She drank it on the front porch, too far away for conversation.

Savannah sat on the stoop and didn’t turn around. She took what she could get now, even if it was only a twenty-foot intimacy. Half an hour later, the mailman walked up the hill. He handed her a stack of catalogs, and a single letter on top. “Not a bill in sight,” he said, and smiled as he walked away.

Savannah looked at the Prescott, Arizona, postmark and dropped the letter into her lap. Her mother had scrawled the address in nearly indecipherable purple ink, and something in Savannah’s stomach curled up, rising high and tight against her lungs. A sane person would have just burned the letter, but Emma was behind her, staring so hard the back of Savannah’s neck burned, so she blew on the envelope once for good luck, then slit it open.

Savannah squeezed her eyes shut. She’d gone home only a few times in fifteen years, to show off Emma as a baby and young girl, before—she hoped—any damage could be done. She hadn’t been back in six years, hadn’t even seen this house in Prescott her parents had retired to. In the last two years, they had stopped asking her to come.

Yet her father had planted a fig tree the day she was born and held it upright for three hours during a ravenous spring flood. He’d been the one she hadn’t wanted to leave. Her fortune had just come true—the Eight of Swords had issued its warning, and if the Three of Swords was her father dying, then of course she had no choice.

All of a sudden, Emma was beside her. “What is it?”

Savannah opened her eyes and handed her daughter the letter. Emma read it over, then crumpled it in her hands. “So what does this mean?”

“I guess it means we’re going to Arizona,” Savannah said.

“For a few days?”

“For as long as we’re needed.”

“Oh no. No way. I’m going to the dance next Friday. Diana is having her sixteenth-birthday party in two weeks.”

“Emma, he’s dying.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but you’re the one who never cries at funerals, who’s got the guts to smile at sobbing widows. You can’t just yank me out of school. There’s only a month left.”

Savannah stood up, but Emma backed away. “You can finish up the semester in Prescott. It’s a pretty town. I heard it’s a big retirement community now.” She saw the look on Emma’s face and touched her arm. “Emma, he’s my father. He worked as a buyer for an electronics firm all his life, but I always thought he must have doubled as a spy. Whenever I slept beneath his roof, I never felt the slightest threat. I thought he was made of lead.”

Emma jerked her hand off. “Well, goody for you. You had a dad around.”

“Emma—”

Emma folded her arms across her chest. “Let me stay at Diana’s. I’m fifteen. You know I can handle it. Trust me.”

“I do trust you,” Savannah said quietly, then turned away before her daughter could see her eyes. Obviously, she’d taken up lying without warning. She’d given Emma unqualified devotion and as much freedom as she thought safe, and she’d still ended up with a daughter she could not predict. Emma had taken up smoking just when Savannah thought she’d sign up for track. She’d picked friends Savannah would never have chosen in a million years.

But that wasn’t what frightened Savannah most. No, what scared her was how much energy Emma put into being miserable—reading only suicidal poets and watching the movies where everyone dies at the end.

Savannah had never monitored the foods Emma ate or what she wore out in public, but she’d made sure her daughter knew luck was everywhere. Heads meant a wish would come true and tails gave you three more wishes. Sudden rain always brought good fortune, a penny in your pocket was a sign of a visitor, and three clouds in the western sky meant you were about to fall in love.

Now it turned out it had all been wasted effort. Emma hadn’t believed a word she’d said.

“Then let me stay,” Emma said.

“I need you with me. This is important, Emma. It’s family.”

“Great. Fine. Let’s uproot our lives for the sake of some family you can’t even stand to visit. I’m calling my dad.”

She walked into the house. Savannah heard the beep of the phone, then a long pause, then Emma crying.

Savannah hung her head, but not before she saw the shadow of that wolf again, first rearing up, then lying down at her feet. She stood up and walked into the house.

“I can’t believe this,” Emma was sobbing into the phone. “I thought you, of all people, would be on my side.”

Savannah walked past her and started packing. Every day, she thanked God for something, and today she decided it would be for Harry, for the fact that he had never given in to spite.

By the time Emma got off the phone, Savannah had stuffed most of her dresses and a few hats in a suitcase. Emma walked into her room and threw herself on the bed.

Savannah snapped shut the suitcase, then walked into Emma’s room. She looked at her sobbing daughter,
then out the window. “We’ve got a life here,” she said. “We’ll come back.” Emma only cried harder, as if she’d seen what Savannah had just seen—Savannah’s shadow getting up after that wolf, then following him west, as far as he would go.

Savannah called the office and arranged a leave of absence. Emma did not say a word for the two-day drive to Arizona. Her only pleasure came from the Holiday Inn in Barstow, which had free HBO and conditioner. Somewhere in the Mojave Desert, the sky got so wide and light, bees could not spot land. Crows sat on the tops of telephone poles and plucked the frustrated insects, one by one, out of the air. Outside Needles, the temperature hit one hundred degrees and kept climbing. Savannah licked her lips and tasted salt.

Once in Arizona, she stopped the car to point out the first saguaro. Emma just shrugged. She would not get out of the car.

“There’s a story about these trees,” Savannah said, stepping out of her light blue Honda.

“Here we go,” Emma said.

The sun took up half the sky and was the color a child might use, Lemon Yellow or Tangerine Dream. It was scorching and added a tang to the air. Even if a woman broke her heart, it would be too hot to cry.

“A long time ago,” Savannah said, “the saguaro lived on the edge of the forest. Believe it or not, he had skin as smooth as silk and, at night, the moon spirit took him in her arms and they waltzed together over the mesa.”

She walked along the car, drawing her name in the dust on the hood. “But the desert kept creeping in on him,” she went on, “cracking the earth around his roots. He began to yearn for rain and the smell of grass and the chance to live higher up, where the pines grew
and the air had a chill to it. He even envied the fact that when there was a fire, the pines all went down together, while he survived alone.”

The stories came like breath to her now. Inhale, a tale of moon spirits, exhale, the love story of the mermaid and the sea. She believed every one of them, because not to believe would have made the world too magicless to contemplate, it would have reduced true love to chemicals.

“The saguaro grew so bitter and angry,” she said, “he hardened his own soul, turned his bones brittle. He covered himself in thorns so when the moon spirit came down to swing him in her arms, she pricked herself instead. Betrayed, the moon spirit cast the saguaro far out into the desert, to live alone forever.”

She looked back at Emma, who was staring at the largest saguaro, one of its stumps sheared off by pranksters. There were Pepsi cans on the desert floor, and Burger King wrappers twisted in cacti.

Savannah got back in the car and started the engine.

“And the moral is?” Emma asked.

“Learn to love what you’ve got.”

“Ah. Right. I should love leaving everything I know for a dying stranger.”

Savannah drove the last two hundred miles to Prescott with the radio on loud. The temperature dropped to the eighties after they entered Flagstaff, and when they dipped down into the thick stands of ponderosa pines near Prescott, Arizona, the air smelled surprisingly of vanilla. She stopped at the first Mobil station in town to ask directions to her parents’ house.

She knew the place halfway down the block, because of the garden. Her father would never settle for a lawn and junipers. He had planted a pair of June
berry trees along the curb, and their branches sagged beneath clusters of pink flowers. Honeysuckle vines and akebias wound up the porch columns; the front garden was a sweet curl of chamomile and lily-of-the-valley and bitterroot, names she had rolled across her tongue as a child.

Savannah pulled into the driveway and cut the engine. She had hoped her first sight would be of her father, working in his garden. But the yard was empty, so she just sat there.

“Aren’t we going in?” Emma asked.

Savannah tucked her hair beneath a baseball cap and got out of the car. Her emerald green dress was light as tracing paper, but wherever it brushed her, she felt little pinpricks of pain. When they reached the porch, she ran her hand down one of the columns and came away with a clump of honeysuckle blossoms. They smelled like the summer mornings of her childhood, when she’d left open her window so that the first thing that touched her would be something borne by her father.

She was reaching out to knock on the front door when a huge gray and white Husky bounded around the corner of the house, barking furiously. Savannah went still, except for an arm she swung out around Emma. The dog charged them, teeth bared, and Savannah used the only weapon she had—the white blossoms in her hand. She threw them at the dog and they fell in a flutter in front of the beast’s eyes, so much like rain the dog stopped suddenly to shake herself dry. By then, Savannah had crouched down menacingly; by then the dog only rumbled.

“Just give it up,” Savannah said. “You don’t scare me.”

The Husky still came on, and when she got within biting distance, Savannah reached out and slapped her
nose. The dog was so shocked, all she could do was lie down and whimper. She curled into a pitiful ball at Savannah’s feet.

The door opened and Maggie Dawson stood there. She had one hand on her hip, the other clutching a meat mallet. She looked down at the dog, then up at Savannah.

“One of the psycho’s dogs,” she said. “She’ll eat anything human if you give her half a chance.”

Savannah reached down and stroked the dog’s fur. It was soft as angel hair. The dog’s heart thundered in her chest. “She’s just scared.”

“Scared, shmared. She’s a psycho too.”

Savannah stood up. “Well, we made it.”

Her mother tilted up her chin. Maggie Dawson was five feet four, with dark brown hair cut in a bob. She lived in the MesaLand retirement community and no doubt played bridge every Tuesday, but she still had the meanest gray eyes Savannah had ever seen.

“I can see that,” Maggie said. “You should have gotten here before he started dying.”

“Mom—”

“Don’t talk to me. I’m not interested.” She rubbed her hands over her arms, which were covered in goose bumps. A frigid blast of Lysol-scented, air-conditioned air streamed out of the house behind her. Maggie looked at Emma, still hiding behind Savannah’s arm. “The last time I saw you you were nine years old, and your mother kept you in a motel. I couldn’t even hug you, that’s how afraid she was I’d contaminate you.”

“Mom, don’t,” Savannah said.

Maggie squared her shoulders, then picked up the meat mallet. “Your father’s out with the psycho, cutting trees for the goddamn bench. You can wait for him in the garden.” Then she went back in the house and slammed the door.

Emma stepped forward, then jumped back again when the dog growled. Savannah tapped the dog’s mouth until she quieted.

“Shit,” Emma said. “Welcome home, Mom.”

Savannah turned, ready to apologize, then realized there was no point, because Emma was smiling.

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