The Wishing Garden (19 page)

But the other day, she had scoffed when Savannah drew the pregnant Ace of Wands for a girl from Prescott High.

“She’s only going to be a sophomore,” Emma had said. “Nothing meaningful can happen in high school, believe me. It’s some kind of rule.”

Since school had let out, Emma had taken to drinking lemonade with Maggie on the back porch and catalog shopping like mad. Now, when something magical happened right in front of her, Emma was not about to admit it.

“Don’t be so hasty to get cynical,” Savannah said. “You’ve got plenty of time.”

Emma shrugged and sat down on her cot. She picked up a bottle of blue nail polish and started to paint her toes.

Savannah gathered up the cards. She put the Swords and the Devil back in every morning, after she’d read her father’s fortune, so Mabel Lewis had gotten a fair reading. Now, while the room still smelled of a man’s minty cologne, she shuffled them quickly. To get at her heart’s desire, she couldn’t think at all. Fast as she could, she spread the cards out on the table and sat down to read her own fortune.

Her crossing card was still the Eight of Swords, bad news coming. She rapped her knuckles on the table; for the first time, she got a little mad at what she’d dealt.

“Come on, come on.”

She actually considered reshuffling and starting again, but that would have been worse than removing the bad cards, that would have made all her readings
suspect. She laid out the rest, ending with the Ten of Pentacles, the card of bad odds, a gamble with potential for great losses.

“Emma?” she said, without turning around. “I think we ought to go home.”

All of a sudden Emma was standing beside her. “I’m not going anywhere,” Emma said, and it was obvious she wasn’t. If she could have, she would have sunk herself half an inch deep in the concrete floor.

“I thought you wanted to go back.”

“Well, I don’t.” Emma stepped right onto one of Savannah’s hats, a green beret, and smashed it flat. “You know what I think?”

Savannah realized she did not. This girl wearing a silk blouse mail-ordered from Nordstrom’s was a stranger. She wore blue fingernail polish and never spoke unless spoken to, and then she did it with such truculent words, Savannah wished she would just stop.

“I think you’re afraid things might get a little ugly here,” Emma said. “I think you’re looking for a place to hide.”

“I’m not hiding.”

Emma raised her voice. “That’s all you ever do. You’re chicken. Stop taking out all the swords. You’re not fooling anybody.”

Savannah stood up slowly. Emma was already taller than she was by an inch and would just keep growing. Very soon, she would be entirely out of her reach.

“I’m scared of one thing,” she said. “That something might happen to you.”

“Well, don’t be. I’m fine. I’m capable of taking care of myself.”

“This is about Eli, right? You want to stay because of Eli.”

Emma didn’t answer. She didn’t have to; her skin was flushed with longing. Savannah sat down again. She was afraid for her daughter, all right, but the real reason her throat tightened was that she had never looked as radiant as Emma did now. She had never grown luminously pale, miserably beautiful. Moonlight did not lust after her, following her into dark houses or behind the shadows of oak trees.

“The thing with Eli is …” Savannah began. “What? That he’s poor? That nothing’s ever gone his way? I know what you think. You think happiness is a choice, but that’s only true until your luck sours. Until all your gods and angels leave you and you have to stand alone, the way Eli has. Just wait, Mom. Just wait until your luck leaves you.”

Savannah didn’t say that it already had. When she reached out for Emma, her daughter was already halfway across the room, her heart even farther, out there somewhere in a boy’s black Corvette. Savannah’s luck had left her as soon as she started wishing for a nice boy and easy life for her daughter, because to a fifteen-year-old, that was a threat. That was the moment she got a mutinous look in her eye, and went looking for exactly the opposite.

 E
IGHT
 F
OUR OF
P
ENTACLES
Y
EARNING
 

O
nce school let out for the summer, Emma’s life became a complete and utter waste. She could have stayed in bed all day, and it wouldn’t have made any difference, except she would have had to put up with the crazy old people. Since Mabel Lewis and the purple cloud scam, her mother’s business had gone hog-wild. Savannah took an hour a day to publicize grapes for a dollar a pound, and spent the rest of her time with pathetic widows hoping to talk to dead men.

Emma didn’t believe any of it. Her mother had staged some kind of trick, that’s all, to get the fortune-telling ball rolling. Indoor clouds were made with steamers, an old man’s aftershave bought at the five-and-dime. Didn’t these fools know her mother wrote lies for a living? Everything she did was accomplished with a lot of chutzpah and a trick of the light.

Still, it was just as well her mother was busy; otherwise, Savannah might want to talk. Emma had nothing
to say, not a single word that wouldn’t sound dangerously demented. She had not thought it possible to go stark raving mad from wanting someone, but now she knew it could happen. Eli had not come around for two weeks, and her mind and body had started to decay without him. She couldn’t form any sentence that didn’t begin with his name. She cried at the drop of a hat, at the swish of her mother’s dresses, at lightning that died out just as she was getting used to it. And she was racked with fever, one hundred and three morning, noon, and night. Her mother told her to rest, but that was worse. When she slept she dreamed of Eli, of kissing him enough to make up for every waking hour he was denied her. When she woke, she was worn down and raw.

She was not the only one. Every day, her grandfather sat in a chair by his bedroom window, puckering his lips at every brown-tipped leaf. He’d been able to make it to the garden for a week or two, then suddenly turned frail again. In the last few days, his aura had gotten blacker, and though she would never say this out loud, she thought it might be better for some people to just die rather than dragging it out forever. She thought a man should be able to get to his own garden, and if he couldn’t, well then, that was telling him something.

Lately, the only thing that had made Emma even remotely happy was shopping. Her grandmother had entrusted her with a credit card, and she’d ordered four hundred dollars’ worth of jeans and shirts from Eddie Bauer. She was in one of her new pima cotton T-shirts when she woke one morning to knocking. She threw on a new waffle-weave robe and beat her mother to the door.

When she saw her father standing there and felt only disappointment, she realized she had not only
changed beyond recognition, she’d turned into someone she didn’t particularly like. She leaned against her father’s chest and started crying.

“Well, pumpkin,” Harry said, “I’m glad to see you too.”

Her mother came up behind her. “You could have called.”

“I did. I spoke to your mother yesterday.”

Savannah glanced at the house, then walked back to the makeshift kitchen, where she was flipping bacon. Emma kept her face pressed into her father’s chest.

“Come on, honey,” Harry went on. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

Emma could only shake her head. She was not even a real person anymore. She was made of glass and shattering fast.

“She’s emotional,” Savannah said. “It’s my dad.”

“How’s he doing?”

“Better. That second round of radiation finally kicked in. And I read his fortune. He’ll beat this.”

“I’m really glad.” Harry squeezed Emma tightly, until her tears subsided, then he ran his fingers through his hair. He opened his mouth and closed it again. Emma stiffened a little. Her father had been car dealer of the year for three years straight. He never had trouble with words.

“Dad?” she said.

He didn’t even hear her. “Savannah, I’d like to talk to you.”

Her mother didn’t look up from the sizzling bacon. “I’ve got a full slate this morning. Business is finally picking up.”

“I heard you’re reading fortunes again.”

Savannah turned off the burner on the stove and put her hands on her hips. “Don’t start with me,
Harry. I’m not bringing crazies into Emma’s world. When I go home, I’ll get my old job back. I’ll go back to wearing suits and writing slogans for cereal. I won’t shame you two.”

There were tears in Savannah’s eyes, and Emma could not believe it. She had blamed her mother for almost everything, except the one thing she felt guilty for. Savannah did not embarrass her. In fact, she did just the opposite; she seemed too good to be true, too much to live up to.

“I didn’t mean that,” Harry said.

“I think you did.”

“Look, I just want to talk. Not about that. About … well … I’m having trouble again, Savannah. I’m getting that empty feeling in the pit of my stomach.”

“Oh, Harry.”

“Can we have dinner tonight?”

“You’re too old for this,” was her reply, but she also agreed to meet him.

Emma’s father turned to her. “Let’s go for a walk, princess.”

Emma dressed in a new pair of slim-fitting jeans and a T-shirt, then met her father outside. The wind was already sweeping off Kemper Peak, whirling up newly cut grass and shavings from her grandfather’s incense cedar. She was close to crying again, so she turned her face to the sky and stared straight into the sun.

“I’m sorry I missed your call the other day,” Harry said. “Melinda told me you sounded upset.”

“It’s just …” She breathed deeply. “Don’t listen to what Mom says. Grandpa’s dying, Dad.”

Harry led her down Sage Street to Red Rock Lane, past houses with three different floor plans, all painted in shades of brown. They didn’t hit color until they
turned the corner and reached Mabel Lewis’s limestone-green bungalow, which now had a Sold sign on the lawn. Three widowers had bid on it in a single afternoon, one for twenty thousand over the asking price.

“I’ll take you hiking this afternoon,” Harry said. “You pick the trail.”

Emma shrugged. Since the fever had begun, she’d had trouble moving uphill.

“Emma,” Harry went on, “you ever feel like you don’t know what’s going on? Like you haven’t got a clue how to be happy?”

Emma stopped. She didn’t like the sound of this at all. She had no desire to become her father’s confidante. It had been so much easier to admire him and do what he told her when she was little and thought he was perfect. Then one night she came in on him dead drunk and passed out on the table, one afternoon she actually heard him telling a neighbor he’d be damned if he’d let a black couple move in across the street. There was no question of her loving him, but if he wanted her to like him, he ought to just shut up.

She kicked a rock, aiming for the base of a telephone pole, but instead hit a mesquite tree ten feet away. Not only was she losing her ambition and appetite, she was losing the things she’d always counted on, like good aim and faith in her parents’ common sense.

“Dad, go home to Melinda.”

Harry ignored the disgust in her voice. “See, that’s just it. Melinda’s so good to me, it only makes me feel worse. She supports me every time I stake out a new dealership to buy, she looks great in a Donna Karan suit, but sometimes I wonder if I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

“You’re crazy. You’ve got everything you want.”

“Jesus, Emma, no one’s got that. Especially not me. I want a little sunshine now and then, a nicer car, definitely a house farther up in the hills in Whidbey Heights. I want some inner peace. I want to stop dreaming about your mother.”

Emma walked across Mabel’s browning lawn. Since Mabel had moved to California, Emma had spotted the MesaLand widows walking past her yard at all hours of the day and night. They pocketed blades of grass and ran their hands over her fading rhododendrons, hoping whatever secret charm she’d used to woo Ed Lewis back from the grave would rub off on them. By the time they got to Savannah’s table, they reeked so badly of yearning, Emma had to leave the room. It didn’t seem right, so much wanting streaming out of chalky bodies like that.