The Wishing Garden (6 page)

M
aggie Dawson was shaking as she closed the door on her daughter. Nevertheless, she walked across her blue slate entry and turned the thermostat down another two degrees. The foot-thick stuccoed walls of her house vibrated with the pulse of air-conditioning that would run until October. Prescott was a mile high, and in summer it rarely got above eighty-five degrees, but the day Maggie had turned fifty, she’d vowed to get her hair done once a week and never be hot again. Let the students over at Prescott College smolder in their stifling dormitories, worrying about energy conservation and how to pay the summer electricity bill; they were young and slim and headed for six-figure incomes in business and computer science. Maggie was fifty-five years old, prone to hot flashes, and she’d paid her dues in Phoenix. She’d spent fifty summers there, wolfing down Wheaties so the milk wouldn’t curdle halfway through, and crushing scorpions
who got into her laundry basket and pantry and once, amazingly, a carton of milk, looking for a cool place to sleep.

Prescott was a dream compared to that, but Maggie still kept the thermostat at sixty-two or under, day and night. Her husband wore red wool sweaters and slept beneath a down comforter, but that was because now that Doug had gotten sick, he was cold everywhere, even in steaming hot baths. He would no longer drink Coca-Cola, his favorite, because he complained it chilled him going down. He had joked that all his hair falling out was a blessing, since it saved on haircuts and hers cost fifty bucks a pop. “You’re wiping me out,” he’d said, after she came home one afternoon with a new auburn tint.

She walked into the living room she’d redecorated in blue six months ago, right after Doug’s biopsy. She’d chosen an indigo leather sofa, plush turquoise carpeting, and two seascapes for the walls. You couldn’t walk into the room without shivering, and that was just how Maggie liked it. She’d bought the thickest drapes she could find, a quarter-inch of royal blue velour, and rarely opened them. This might be a mountain town, but twenty miles outside the city limits, forest turned to scrub. One more El Niño year and Lynx Lake would dry up, the pines would go down in a horrific forest fire and never reseed themselves. She’d be living in desert all over again. As it stood now, Arizona was little more than sand and crows, hot tempers and white-slacked widows staring pleadingly at an alarming expanse of sky.

At five thousand feet, there might be trees, but the sun was devastating. It sucked the burgundy right out of the gazanias; plants and animals blanched to the color of concrete. Heat-loving pomegranate trees wilted, pet iguanas left on the patio were fried crisp as
barbecued potato chips, then devoured by crows. Doug’s garden was the only thing that had flourished in the MesaLand retirement community, because he’d put in drip irrigation and knew how to Xeriscape; all the others were brown fescue lawns and junipers. Everybody else had just given up.

Maggie Dawson parted the drapes just enough to peek through. Her long-lost daughter was walking through the garden. Savannah had on an emerald green dress and black velvet sandals. Maggie would never have added that ugly baseball cap, but on her daughter it looked surprisingly chic. Of course no one, least of all Savannah, would ever give Maggie credit for her daughter’s fashion sense. Maggie was responsible for every tear and heartache—no doubt for war and famine, too—but never for Savannah’s successes, for her creativity and flair and the fact that she was happy.

Maggie gripped the curtains. Savannah was pointing out plants to Emma. Incense cedar, akebia quinata, ginkgo biloba, beard tongue, names Maggie knew but intentionally mispronounced, should anyone ask. Thirty-six years ago, Doug had taken his first gardening class at the community college. One morning he was hers, and that afternoon, poof, he was in love with begonias. He came home loaded down with sunflower seed packets, sorry-looking hibiscus cuttings, and a brand-new set of trowels, and she never saw him again. He knelt down in what passed for soil in their Phoenix yard and first replaced the burnt fescue with fairy duster and African daisies, then put in lemon and grapefruit trees for shade, dwarf pomegranate and cape weed for color. He bought mushroom compost by the truckload, then started making his own fertilizer out of coffee grinds and rotted onion skins. He planted fig trees and lantanas; he even went so far as to carve
out a lily garden, which came back stronger every year, the flowers white as moonlight. His garden became the prize of east Phoenix; every evening, their neighbors gathered beneath Doug’s bougainvillea-covered trellis and dreamed themselves right out of their hot, rotten lives into the green forests of Canada, or at least anywhere north of there.

When Doug announced he was accepting his company’s early-retirement package and moving to Prescott, the women in the neighborhood knelt in his garden, sobbing. The men tried to bribe him to stay, offering to order him those twenty-two rare species of orchids he’d been eyeing, vowing to pay his water bill for life. Doug might have wavered, but Maggie was determined to get them out of that desert hellhole. She had chosen a house in Prescott with a dull but passable garden, hoping that Doug wouldn’t have the energy to start all over again. But while the movers were still unloading their furniture, he had dug down three feet in the front yard to see what kind of soil he was dealing with. That evening, he pored over tree catalogs and ordered the rare pink-blossomed Juneberry trees, both of which had grown four feet a year.

Just like in Phoenix, everyone in the MesaLand retirement community loved the garden. Widows crept into the perennial bed and clipped bunches of sweet rock jasmine; old men got a little bit shaky, claiming they hadn’t seen such shades of lavender in years. The neighbors loved Doug, too, because he was as bright and peppy as his garden. He said the same thing to every person he met: “Hello. Wonderful to see you. Beautiful day.” Even if it was raining. Even if he was dying.

He hadn’t always been such a fraud. On their wedding night, he had made love to her like a man on fire. For weeks after, he’d left the office exactly at five and
taken her straight to bed. He’d spent hours encircling her wrist with his thumb and forefinger, marveling out loud at her exquisiteness and his luck.

He had not been afraid of anything then. He’d run across a park during a summer lightning storm just to pick her a wild daisy. When lightning struck the mesquite tree behind him and melted the rubber off the bottom of his sandals, he ran his fingers through his charged hair and laughed. He left the gooey remainder of size eleven Birkenstocks on the grass and snapped his fingers, sending sparks six feet in the air.

And then Savannah was born. Maggie remembered the morning they brought her home, because it was the first time she heard Doug Dawson cry out loud. He sat in that nursery for an hour, his head in his hands, just bawling. Then he wrapped his daughter in three layers of bunting and went out to buy safety bolts for every door. From then on, he jumped at thunder and refused to watch the news. He never ran full speed again. He loved that child past the point of passion and straight on into immobility. He discovered the horror of loving something he could not bear to lose.

Doug had a soft spot for children and weeds; he didn’t have the heart to discipline either. He had never ripped out anything with his bare hands, and he figured he didn’t have to. As far as he could tell, his garden was a miracle—not a single morning glory or azalea had ever died. That was because Maggie never let them. She was at war with Doug’s garden, but she also knew what her husband could and could not stand. If it had been up to her, she would have planted a few fruit trees and been done with it, but nevertheless she found herself on her knees at three in the morning, replacing the blueberry climber that had suffered from an unusual frost with a new five-gallon
transplant from Putnam’s Nursery. She filled in the bare patches in his walkway with plugs of chamomile and replaced every one of his wilting prize roses before he could see exactly how much damage had been done.

Her husband had never had to wake up to anything short of perfection. He drove her crazy and had never realized a woman needed as much tender loving care as a fussy rhododendron, but that didn’t mean she would break his heart. That didn’t mean she would stop shielding him from the truth only she could bear: Death came easy. It came all the time.

Years ago, Maggie had had many talents, but the best of these was fashion. She had become addicted to silk at the age of thirteen, when a momentary boyfriend bought her a topaz scarf. She didn’t give it back to him when she ditched him a week later. His awkward caresses hadn’t come close to the feel of silk against her skin.

Other teenagers spent their afternoons roaming the mall or having sex behind the new subdivisions going up on the east side of Phoenix; Maggie spent her free time at the fabric store, running her hands over bolts of silk the color of the things she wanted—the deep green of northern lawns and money, the glittering silver of skyscrapers built half a continent away.

She could dress, that’s what even the snobby cheerleaders said about her. Maggie designed and sewed her own silk dresses. She wore pantsuits of ebony velvet, regardless of the heat. She had one hundred designs in her portfolio. Slick, stunning dresses that could turn the mother of three children into a sexy woman again, silk skirts that even wild men would cling to.

As a senior, she was voted most likely to make a million dollars by thirty, and she accepted the award,
even if it was a bit of an understatement. On the day of her high-school graduation, she had five thousand dollars in savings and a one-way ticket to New York, leaving in December.

Then she met Douglas, the best friend of her older brother, Michael, and right away she knew he was trouble. His fingers were the first things that felt better than silk; when he slipped his hand beneath her blouse and played with the lace hem of her bra, she couldn’t conjure up a single dress design, she couldn’t think of anything but him. In early summer, the two of them hiked to the top of Superstition Mountain and the gods took over. There was no other explanation. Maggie knew she was in the middle of her cycle. She knew she was risking every one of her plans, but love was a good-looking terrorist: He hijacked her whole life, then charmed her right out of her outrage. One kiss and she forgave him everything. One soft word and he got her thinking she’d been headed his way all along.

They were married in October, before she started to show. Doug was already working at the electronics firm he would stay at for the rest of his life, and had saved enough for the down payment on their tract house in Phoenix. Maggie sold the ticket to New York to a starry-eyed actor headed for Broadway, an actor who later went on to make action movies for two million dollars apiece.

She sold her one-way ticket, but the day before she went into labor, she boxed up her sketches and sent them off to Delorosa’s, her favorite East Coast designer. Exactly one week later, they came back unopened, and later on Maggie would remember that rejection as the only one that didn’t hurt. She was rocking Savannah to sleep when Doug brought the package in warily, and she felt a strange calm wash
over her. She leaned down and kissed the top of Savannah’s silky head. She rubbed her cheek across a shoulder of smooth pink skin, and understood about what lasted and what didn’t, about the things that truly satisfied a soul.

The problem with epiphanies is that they have no staying power. By morning, she couldn’t believe what she’d been thinking. Was it so awful to want something of her own, something not every woman’s body could do, but a unique creation of
her
mind, of Maggie? She woke up to Savannah’s pre-dawn cries and took only half-breaths, painful little gasps in rhythm to her daughter’s tears. Her breasts were heavy and sore, she was bone tired, and it would be years before it got any better. A daughter was a ruthless blessing. From the start, Maggie felt so weak from devotion, she couldn’t hold on to the things that had once mattered most—time, quiet, order, solitude, even a subsistence level of self-respect.

For a while, though, she refused to give up. A few days after that first rejection, she wrote out a new address label, this one to Robespierre’s, and sent off the package again.

She sent the designs off to the twelve biggest New York designers, and all twelve sent them back to her. Two didn’t even bother to look at her creations; they just scrawled
Return to Sender
on the box. The other ten sent her form-letter rejections. The last one came back on Savannah’s first birthday, and by then Maggie was wearing terry-cloth robes like every other mother on the block. By then, the room she’d once vowed would be her studio was Savannah’s playroom, decorated with Lincoln Log forts and Barbie’s spring collection ensemble. By then, she’d pushed her silk dresses to the back of the closet, because she refused to have them ruined by spit-up milk curds and regurgitated
Fig Newtons, which meant she would never wear them again.

The afternoon of Savannah’s first birthday, after Maggie settled her daughter into her high chair with a chocolate cupcake topped with jelly beans, she read the last form letter. It didn’t take long.

She tossed it into the garbage can beneath the sink. She tried to kiss the top of Savannah’s head, but her daughter pulled away to jam more cake in her mouth. Maggie left the room and went into her bedroom closet. She grabbed the whole lot of silk dresses and took them out to Doug’s Spanish moss lawn, the only moss in all of Phoenix. Then she went for the lighter fluid.

She saturated every scoop neckline and double-stitched hem. She stood a little too close when she threw the match, and the hem of her robe caught on fire. If she hadn’t heard Savannah crying in the house behind her, she might have just let it go. She was only twenty years old, after all, still young enough to do something dramatic, to give up and go up in flames. But she no longer had the right to do something deadly. She was a mother, her daughter might be choking on a jelly bean, and there was nothing to do but tear off the robe, toss it on the pile, and run back to her daughter.