The Wishing Garden (20 page)

“You shouldn’t be talking about this,” she said.

“Absolutely not, but I can’t help it. I dream of her every night. The way she laughed, her head thrown back and her mouth so wide I could see clear down her throat. She’d laugh at anything, stupid movies, your silly jokes for the hundredth time, and usually I’d tell her to be quiet. I’d tell her she was making a fool of herself.”

“Dad—”

“What else was I supposed to do? She was so happy, it was like a direct assault. I couldn’t compete with it, I didn’t even admire it. Joy is unambitious and blind.”

He ran his hand along the back of his neck, then suddenly seemed to remember Emma was there. He put his arm around her and kissed her forehead.

“Forgive me, Emma. I’m delirious. I caught a flight out here before I could even think. Let’s talk about you. You don’t have to wait until August for your visit. Why not come early? You can stay the rest of the summer,
if you want. And if, in the fall, you feel like going to school there, you know you can stay.”

Emma turned away. She’d made the hour trek to Danville every summer for the past seven years and she despised it. It was too pink and phony over the hill—all storybook castles and perfumed dogs and people doing one thing while dreaming about doing something else. It was one colossal waste of time.

“Did you know you loved Mom right away?” she asked. “Like, in an instant?”

Harry dropped his arm and stepped back. Emma wished he would take off all his rings and forget about hair gel. She wished they were going backpacking again soon, just the two of them, yet even as she thought this, she knew she would only lie beneath those stars and dream of Eli. She knew that simple pleasures like solitude and stargazing and nights alone with her father had been ruined the moment she kissed Eli Malone.

“Well now,” he said, “maybe not right away. But I proposed awfully quick. She was … Your mom’s different, you know? She’s like the warm part of the world, and sometimes, in winter, you just crave her. I’ve been craving her, Emma. But I’m no fool. I know she can drive me crazy, too.”

“But you still want her.”

“Maybe I do. Maybe everyone’s got to want at least one thing they can’t have.”

They started walking again, and when they came around the corner of Sage Street, Emma stopped short. For the first time in two weeks, Jake’s truck was there. Her eyes widened, and her stomach rose clear to her throat when she spotted Eli in the bed, handing Jake his tools.

Before she even knew what she was doing, she was halfway down the block, running hard.

“Emma!” her father called.

She had to stop, but she tapped her foot on the sidewalk. Every second she had to wait for him chipped off another chink of her devotion. She hadn’t thought he would ever get this old. He looked like someone a woman would be crazy to love.

Harry finally reached her. “Jeez. Give your old man a break.”

“I just remembered,” she said, looking past him. “Grandpa asked me to talk to the psycho about the bench.”

She tried to pull away, but her father caught her arm. “Excuse me? The psycho?”

“That’s just what Grandma calls Jake. He’s the furniture maker, the one Mom’s falling for.”

Then she tore away and started running. He called out after her, but she didn’t stop. No one had control of her now, not even herself.

She reached the truck just as Eli hopped out of the back. He rose up straight and stared at her. He had no idea he was this close to being her sole purpose for living.

“Tomorrow night,” he said. “Pierce Park.”

Emma had felt faint for two weeks, and now it got worse. She wrapped her arms around her stomach and held on tight. By the time her father reached her, she was light-headed, but also sure of one thing. She wasn’t going to be standing on someone’s front lawn when she was seventy, yanking out blades of grass and still yearning. She was going to get what she wanted now, when she was still young and brave enough to enjoy it.

That night, Savannah and Harry met at Luigi’s, a small Italian restaurant downtown on Cortez Street. Harry
asked for the back booth, the one up against the faux brickwork, and ordered them a bottle of Chianti.

“Nice place,” he said, though she could tell from his tone and the way he eyed the red-netted candles that he wouldn’t have been caught dead here, if not for her. He had to shout to be heard over the Italian opera tunes that someone in the back was singing along with.

Savannah tapped her fingers on the table, waiting for the wine. The last time she’d gone out to dinner with Harry, he had been telling her how easily he’d fallen out of love with her. She had been drinking hard then, straight bourbon if she recalled. Not to numb herself, but to trigger tears, to tickle up some regret, because no marriage ought to end with a casual list of complaints and no heartbreak on either side.

A handsome waiter brought the wine and smiled at Savannah while he poured it. She drained half her glass at once. She liked this restaurant, not only for the music and gorgeous waiters, but because the place was so dark everyone was cast in shadows. That way, she didn’t have to take Harry’s shadow seriously, the one that sat huddled against the faux brick wall, crying.

“How did Emma seem to you?” she asked.

Harry sipped his own Chianti. “Distracted. I took her hiking up Granite Mountain, and she kept stopping to rip off blades of grass.”

Savannah said nothing. She was not going to start in about Eli. Whenever she woke up during the night and found Emma sitting by the window, her knees curled up to her chest, she reminded herself she had been in love with forty different boys in high school. Love was like desert lightning at that age, dramatic and threatening, but dying out as soon as the sun went down.

“She’s glad to see you,” she said.

“Well.” Harry set down his glass and reached across the table. He hadn’t touched her for so long, Savannah just stared at his hands. His fingers had puffed out and whitened with age.

“Are you glad to see me, too?” he asked.

She tapped his hands, then pulled away. “Of course.”

He grabbed his Chianti and downed it quickly. When he started twisting off his rings and staring at her as if she were a new-model Ferrari, she knew she should have picked a brighter restaurant, one where he could have made out all the reasons he had left her in the first place.

“Melinda reads the stock page every morning,” he said, yanking hard on his pinkie ring. “She highlights all our gains in yellow, the losses in pink. Whenever she walks into my office, she’s always got some plan on how to buy a new dealership or sell those old Troopers we can’t give away. I am telling you, Savannah, every time I see her it’s like looking at myself, and it’s not pretty.”

He put down every ring in a row between their water glasses. She couldn’t take her eyes off the jewels—one fat ruby, an emerald, two sapphires, a two-carat diamond.

“What’s it all for?” he went on. “I mean, with bonuses now I’m making close to two hundred thousand a year. That ought to make me happy. That ought to be enough. Will you tell me, please, when I’m going to have enough?”

His voice broke, but before Savannah could respond, their dark-haired waiter returned. Savannah ordered baked lasagna, though she wasn’t going to eat a bite. She had lost her appetite as soon as she realized she would have to break somebody’s heart.

After the waiter left, she took Harry’s hand. She massaged beneath the knuckles, along the tan lines from his rings. Once, she had dreamed of Harry; now, she only dreamed of the meanest man in Prescott. When she woke every morning, she fully expected to find burn marks on her neck and black hairs on her pillow from his beard.

“You want someone to make you another person,” she said softly. “I already tried that. It doesn’t work.”

He looked up. Tears piled on his lower lashes, but they weren’t going to fall. “Every morning when I look in the mirror, I despise myself. The trouble is, that doesn’t stop me from putting some fresh-faced newlyweds into a car they can’t afford, just so I can make enough bonus points for an all-expense-paid trip to Bermuda.”

“Harry—”

“I’m sick of it, Savannah. The whole thing. The money and the worry about the money. I could never have enough. Every time I get what I want, I just want something more.”

Savannah could think of a million things to say, but eight years with Harry was enough for her to know he wouldn’t listen. There were certain people who had to be miserable, or they wouldn’t feel alive. There was no talking them out of it.

“Melinda’s good to me,” Harry said. “Too good. I wake up every morning knowing I don’t love her enough.”

Savannah moved next to him and kissed him on the cheek. He tried to turn his lips to her, but it never worked. They got tangled in noses, they were still all wrong.

Harry pulled away and poured more wine. He put his rings back on. Savannah covered his hand with hers and squeezed tightly.

“Here’s the secret, Harry. Pick one person and love her for all you’re worth.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Yes, it is.”

She returned to her seat on the other side of the booth. They were silent for a long time. The food came and got cold. Harry finished the bottle of Chianti. His gelled hair came loose on one side and hung in a clump above his left eye. Finally, he tapped his rings on the table.

“Emma told me you’re interested in the psycho.”

Savannah snapped her head up. Her mother had been spending way too much time with Emma. “He is not a psycho. He’s a furniture maker.”

Harry stared at her, as if he were sizing up her weaknesses. She hadn’t gotten through to him at all.

“So,” he said, “are you interested?”

She looked away. She stabbed at her lasagna, then left the fork standing there. “I’m going back to San Francisco. There’s no future for me here.”

“Maybe you should tell the psycho that before you fuck him.”

Savannah might see the good in people, but she was no fool either. She’d lived with Harry long enough to know love could turn to hate, just like that. Before Harry even blinked, she lunged across the table and twisted the slick fabric of his Armani suit between her fingers.

“You know what your problem is, Harry? You’ve forgotten how to be kind.” He blinked twice, then she shoved him away and stood up.

“You pay,” she said. “You’ve got the money.” Then she put on her fedora and walked out.

*  *  *

Harry Shaw drove to Sage Street and stomped through his ex-father-in-law’s overgrown garden. Within seconds, he was attacked from all sides by dogs. A chocolate Lab threw himself at his knees and some kind of retriever mutt took him down by the ankles. Once on his back, a Husky leaned over his neck, growling from deep in her throat. She had rotted teeth and breath that smelled of fresh meat and feces. She snapped her jaws, and Harry just lay there, whimpering.

“Off!” a man yelled.

Suddenly, the dogs were gone and the psycho was standing over him, holding out his hand. The man was as large as some of the foreign cars Harry sold, and certainly better built. His hand was the size of a steering wheel.

“You stay down any longer,” the man said, “and Sasha will mistake you for kibble.”

Harry took his hand. It was cool to the touch and heavily calloused. The man hoisted him up, and a quick burst of wind covered them both in sawdust. Harry immediately brushed himself off.

He had a world-class headache, and it got worse when he realized he ought to be home. He was grasping at straws here, but he didn’t see a way to stop. He swore he had holes in the bottom of his feet, because everything he professed to love just went right through him. It had been so long since he’d been truly happy, he couldn’t even remember what it felt like, if it was simply the lack of heartache, or something more.

He wished he was already on a plane home. He might not be happy there, either, but at least no one went crazy in Danville, or if they did the police pulled them off the street before they could disturb anyone’s sleep. There were no thunderstorms there, only interminable drizzle, and no one got lost in the mountains because they weren’t mountains at all, only hills,
fenced off and reseeded yearly. Right now, Melinda was probably opening up a bottle of Pinot Noir and ordering out.

“You’re Savannah’s ex-husband,” the psycho said, turning back to his bench.

The dogs were behind him again, growling. Harry drew himself up to his full height. Maybe he had been grasping at straws with Savannah, but that didn’t mean he was going to let her fall into animal hands. That didn’t mean he’d leave her and Emma to the wolves.

“And you are …”

He waited, but the man said nothing. On the bench, the psycho had carved in the outline of what looked like Superstition Mountain, beneath a crescent moon. At the top of the mountain were the silhouettes of two people, facing each other. Harry had no intention of being moved by primitive art, but he couldn’t deny the chill down his spine. This was not the kind of thing he expected a madman to be capable of.

The man took one of the smallest knives on the grass beside him and chinked away a crevasse in the mountain. “What I’d like to know is why a man lets a woman like that go?”

“Look,” Harry said, “you don’t know anything.”

“True.”

“It was years ago, all right? I wanted to move up. She wanted … God only knows what Savannah wants. Sometimes I think she doesn’t want anything. You know how hard that is to live with?”

Harry marched around the cobblestone courtyard. “You know the trouble with Savannah? She looks good in the beginning. I mean, what’s not to love? She’s happy, she’s beautiful, she sees only the good in things. But then what happens when you have a bad day? What happens when your dog gets run over or
you lose a huge sale and you just want to curl up and die? You can’t turn to her. She’ll just tell you to sparkle up. She’s good for parties and fortune-telling, but I’m telling you, when it comes right down to it, there is nothing substantial there to hold on to.”

Harry had walked to the other side of the bench without realizing it. He was now staring the psycho in the eye. When the man said nothing, Harry continued, more shakily this time. “Look, you can do what you want with Savannah. But when it comes to my daughter …”