The Wishing Garden (22 page)

Years ago, her mother had told her the fortune of love. The Sun and the Moon, brother and sister, had once stood side by side in the sky. The Sun was mesmerized by his sister’s pale skin and gentle tug on the oceans. He grew jealous of the men who sailed in her light and sang to her beauty, so one night, without warning, he tried to seduce her. From that moment on, the Moon started running, and from that moment on, the Sun followed her, destined to wander in her wake forever.

Emma had loved that story as a child, but now she knew it was dead wrong. Love did not run from anything. She took Eli’s hand and put it on her breast. She would stand there until she made him another person. She was in love, but she wasn’t a fool. He was not fit for love. But what was love, if not the ability to change someone’s life for the better? What was love, if she couldn’t make Eli give up everything for her?

They drove to the liquor store off Union Street. “Wait here,” Eli said, opening his car door. “Don’t move.”

She watched him walk into the store, his jacket hunched up to his ears. He headed straight to one of the back aisles, and Emma didn’t even have time to fix her lipstick before he was running out, a six-pack beneath his jacket, and a furious, six-foot clerk running after him.

He dove into the car. Emma didn’t have time to think, so she was staring right at the clerk when he took the handgun out of his pocket and aimed it at her head. She screamed, and Eli pushed her down in the seat. He sped off, his head thrown back, laughing.

“Chickenshit didn’t even take a shot,” he said. Emma was still on the floor beside him, her head tucked over her knees. Eli made a quick right, then left, then pulled to the side of the road. “Come on,
Emma. It’s over. What did you think, that I’d let you get hurt?”

When he held out his hand, she realized this was her last chance. She could walk away now, still relatively intact. She could hike back to the liquor store, tell the clerk who had stolen from him, and continue to have what passed for a life.

But when she touched Eli’s hand, she knew if falling in love was a choice—which she was beginning to doubt—she’d already made it. She was in way over her head and hoping to stay that way. She was halfway to throwing up and halfway to laughing, and when Eli hoisted her into her seat, laughter won out. He handed her a beer and she drank down as much as she could stomach in one gulp. In three seconds flat, she was warm all the way through.

They drove ninety miles to Wawani Lake, arriving at two-thirty in the morning to a crowd of fifty—drunk boys, mostly, with beer and shovels. Since they’d started draining Wawani Lake, the greatest sport for miles was coming to await what the lake would spit out. According to the papers, a fifty-year-old woman had stumbled across a rusted coffee can filled with solid gold Canadian coins. An eight-year-old had picked up a live hand grenade and had his right arm sheared off, which was all the incentive bored teenagers needed to sneak out at night and tempt fate.

Eli led Emma across the sand. They sat down by a dirty dune and he took two Camels out of his pocket. He lit them both, then handed one to her.

They smoked and listened to drunk talk—boys boasting they could swim across the shrunken lake in one breath, that they’d driven one hundred miles an hour the whole way here while their parents, the fools, thought them asleep in their beds. Emma looked up at
the gritty stars. There were billions of them, but not a single one was red.

Eli took the cigarette from her fingers and put it out in the sand. Then he was on her, sinking her into the beach, his tongue in her mouth. He was trying to scare her, but all she did was twine her hands through his long hair and pull him closer. She might never have stopped kissing him, if someone hadn’t started to shriek.

Suddenly, the drunk boys were hooting. Eli jumped up, but Emma was slower. She kept looking at the stars, feeling Eli’s lips on her.

“Come on.” Eli pulled her to her feet. “Let’s check it out.”

By the time they reached the crowd, half the bones had been found. Two femurs, a tibia, sternum and clavicle. Two of the drunks were tossing a skull like a baseball. Emma backed up, but her heel caught in a rib cage. She screamed and yanked out her shoe, then stepped on an arm bone poking out of the sand like a flag.

“Excellent,” Eli said.

When two of the boys started playing swords with femurs, Emma took off running. By the time Eli started after her, she was halfway around the shrinking lake. She threw up over what had once been lake floor, fifteen feet down. Eli finally tackled her by a rock formation that had ripped the bottoms out of half a dozen boats over the years.

She fought against him, until he laid his body out over hers on the moist sand. He pressed his lips into her pulsing neck. “Stop, okay?” he whispered. “Just stop.”

He kissed the pulse beneath her ear, then her ear lobe, then her bottom lip. He slipped his hand up beneath her blouse and covered her breast. She breathed
in so deeply, she’d never get the scent of him out of her lungs. When he started unbuttoning her jeans, she was as helpless as this lake, watching itself be sucked into another body.

“That was a person,” she said. “Don’t you get it? It was a living person.”

“Shhh. Don’t talk.”

He kissed the tears at the corners of her eyes. When he slipped inside her, contrary to what she’d heard, it didn’t hurt at all. It just sealed her fate. It made her his then and there.

Savannah slept late, her morning dreams filled with wild dogs who turned to wood when she touched them. When she woke, she still smelled the scent of fur and pine. Then she opened her eyes and realized the smell was real; her window was open and Jake Grey was in the garden, already at work on her father’s bench.

She walked to the window. Jake crouched beside his creation, studying yesterday’s work. He’d finished Superstition Mountain and begun Doug’s next design, an intricate bird-of-paradise, which Doug had planted the day she was born, and which had never become the small shrub most people knew, but instead grew into a twelve-foot tree.

She turned from the window and picked up her cards. She was ready for disaster, even for the Three of Swords, but not for what she laid out. Today the cards issued a warning, the Page of Wands as her crossing card, which can mean either a faithful person or a man who would probably break her heart.

She looked over at Emma’s bed, but there was no movement there yet. “Emma,” she said, “rise and shine. Shake a leg.”

She cleaned up her hats and jewelry, then looked over her shoulder at Emma’s bed again. “Come on, lazybones. Get a move on.”

She walked across the room and was about to brush back her daughter’s hair when she realized Emma was not there.

For a long time, she just stared at the pile of blankets and deceit. At first, it wasn’t panic she felt so much as disbelief. She would have let Emma stay out all night if she’d known where she was going, if Emma had only asked. But obviously, it wouldn’t have been the same if she had asked. It would have sucked the thrill right out of it.

Savannah leaned against the wall. The Three of Swords had not been her father dying after all. It was the future of every parent of teenagers. Sorrow, disappointment, opposition. The Three of Swords was that moment when Savannah realized it really had been better fifteen years ago, when Emma’s colic had kept her so sleep-deprived, she couldn’t form a single coherent sentence. Then, at least, she had known where Emma was. No matter how miserable they were, the bottom line was they both were safe.

She started to get shaky, but managed to walk out the door and around to the back yard, where Jake was carving the frond leaves of the bird-of-paradise.

“Is Eli with you?” she asked.

He stood up straight. “Should he be?”

“Emma’s not in bed. Probably, she hasn’t been there all night.”

She sat down on the porch stoop, her legs suddenly flimsy as paper. Sasha came to lie at her feet and she buried her hands in the dog’s silver fur.

Jake looked toward the street, then set his knife down on the bench. He came and sat beside her. His big hands tapped his knees, then slid off to the concrete
stoop. He didn’t seem to know what to do with them when they were not holding some kind of tool. He certainly had no clue what to say to a woman or, worse, to a mother who was fighting for control and losing, whose hands were clenched in tight, terrified fists.

“Savannah—”

“Tell me about this Eli of yours,” she said, trying to talk instead of cry, to keep herself in what passed for one piece.

“He’s not my Eli. He’s a boy who needed a job. I thought it might keep him out of trouble.”

“Has it?”

“Not yet.”

Savannah nodded. She felt the panic now. It seeped beneath the skin and turned her blood icy. It numbed the tips of her fingers and toes. She knew, too well, the things teenage boys did for fun. They raced cars through steep, one-lane canyons. They dared each other to drink a pint of tequila in five minutes flat. They drove girls to the desert, screwed them in the sand, then left them there.

Jake reached over and took her hand. “She’ll be all right.”

“How can you know that?”

“Because I’ve known Eli awhile, and he’s never looked at anyone the way he looks at her. He’s not about to let anything happen to her.”

That did not soothe her. Love was more cruel than teenagers, teasing girls with little bits of rapture, then vanishing into a deep, bottomless hole. Emma could very well end up like Savannah’s heartbroken clients, women who had once been beautiful, but now were thin and pale as night moths. Women who would wear nothing but the faded shirts their lovers had left behind.

She pulled her hand away and stood up. She walked to the end of the courtyard and back again. There were a hundred things that could have happened to Emma already, and each stabbed at a different part of her. Her head ached with the horror of fatal car accidents, her stomach clenched around brutal police arrests. She didn’t know how other women stood motherhood, because it was clearly killing her. She’d walked straight into the trap of loving the one person who could do the most damage to her.

Something awful must have escaped her throat, because Jake came up next to her. He cradled her in his arms and whispered “Hush” into her hair.

“I should have left weeks ago,” she managed to say.

“Absolutely.”

“You don’t even know how to laugh.” She pressed her face into his chest and breathed in deeply.

He wrapped his arms tighter around her, even while telling her, “I’m worse than Eli.”

“I’m not fifteen.”

“You don’t want to know me. I’m not from your kind of world.”

She leaned back. “Maybe I can make you happy.”

“Maybe I’m not capable of it.”

Savannah tapped her foot. “Don’t talk to me that way. It’s as bad as swearing.”

“You can’t close your eyes to ugliness, Savannah. It’s everywhere. Just listen to the news, figure out where your daughter is, take a history of my life.”

Savannah would have told him he didn’t scare her if Eli and Emma hadn’t driven up then. Emma stepped out of the Corvette with bite marks all over her neck, and sand still clumped in her hair. She raced across the garden and, without a word to anyone, ran into the garage and slammed the door. In a heartbeat, Savannah
became the mother she had always sworn she wouldn’t be, the mother no woman can help being if she is going to do the job right.

She felt light-headed relief, but only for a second, and then she was furious. She started for Emma, then changed her mind and charged Eli. He was leaning against his car, lighting a cigarette, and he smelled of fish and Emma. Savannah jabbed a finger into his chest and might have hit a boy for the first time in her life if Jake hadn’t reached around her and grabbed Eli by the scruff of his collar.

“You’re fired,” he said, then shoved him away. For the first time, a little of the boy broke through that tough veneer. Savannah saw a flash of scared green eyes.

“Hey,” Eli said. “Come on, Jake. It was an accident. It got late. There was this body—”

“A body?” Savannah said. “You took my daughter out to see some body?”

“We went to Wawani Lake. They’re draining it, you know? For the reservoir? And this body washed up. All bones now, and then the cops came, and it was like the first real thing that’s ever happened to me. It was the first time cops talked to me without hauling me in.”

Savannah jabbed him in the chest again. She kept jabbing him and jabbing him, until he started giving way. “You stay away from my daughter. You hear me?”

Her voice was high and shrill; she hadn’t even known she was capable of the sounds. Eli glanced at Jake, then Savannah noticed him too. He’d gone absolutely still and the dogs had started whining. Sasha was pressing her head against his thigh. When he didn’t move, she threw back her head and howled.

Savannah shoved away Eli and went to Jake’s side. His left arm was limp and cold as ice.

“Jake?” she said.

He was falling so slowly, Savannah and Eli had the chance to get beneath him. When he took them all to the ground with him, Savannah saw that his face had gone pure white. She cradled him in her arms while Eli crawled out from beneath him.

“I’m all right,” Jake whispered, but it came out mostly like a sigh.

“Call an ambulance,” Savannah told Eli. “Hurry.”

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