The Wishing Garden (3 page)

Savannah made her living working at San Francisco’s Taylor Baines advertising agency. She headed up a creative team that had linked milk consumption with true love, but when it came to fortunes, she wasn’t making things up. Take the case of the fifty-year-old spinster she’d told to look north for true love. The woman had gotten out a lawn chair, turned her back to the ineffective San Francisco sun, and refused to move. When the mailman she’d known forever came around the corner, carrying mace to ward off dogs, she wondered why she hadn’t noticed before that his thinning hair turned gold in the sunlight. She started ordering from L. L. Bean, so he’d have to spend a few extra minutes lugging snowshoes and parkas she’d never use to her door, and every time he accepted her offer of fresh-squeezed lemonade, she got a little sick thinking of all the wasted time.

Even for a nonbeliever, like the gin-drinking man who only went to Savannah’s house on a dare, there was no denying that when Savannah turned over the possibility-filled World card, his hair stood on end. He told everyone the fortune-teller was crazy. His wife had left him, his teenagers smoked pot and didn’t listen to a word he said, and if some bejeweled psychic in a velvet-paneled room thought he was going to be
happy, she was sadly mistaken. Still, the next night he didn’t fix the gin and tonic the second he walked in the door. He stepped out on the back porch for a minute and was stunned by what he’d been missing during cocktail hour—an astonishing primary-colored sunset, shades of reds and yellows he had forgotten even existed. The wind scratched up clippings from his neighbor’s freshly cut lawn, and his throat swelled. By the time he walked back in the house, he was a little bit taller, and that extra inch was pure hope.

Savannah had that kind of effect on people, so when she read her own fortune and the Three of Swords came up smack-dab in her own future, she could only sit back and stare at it.

Ramona Wendall, her best friend and a two-hundred-pound palm reader for fancy San Francisco parties, sat beside her on the leather couch in Savannah’s house. Between them, they’d polished off a bottle and a half of Chianti, which hadn’t made either of them the slightest bit drunk. Earlier, Savannah had let her fifteen-year-old daughter, Emma, have half a glass, and now Emma slept like the dead behind the bedroom door she had recently taken to locking.

“Lookie there,” Ramona said.

“I was bound to draw it eventually.”

“Well, sure.”

“It could mean anything,” Savannah went on.

“Absolutely. Probably just a bad case of indigestion.”

Savannah nodded, but she couldn’t steady her silver bracelets after she laid out the rest of the cards. Her crossing card was the Eight of Swords, the bearer of bad news, her final result the Nine of Pentacles, reversed, a card of storms. Her destiny was the Chariot, which always meant radical movement or change. One man had gotten it in his destiny and, the next
morning, withdrew two hundred thousand dollars from his wife’s savings account and disappeared off the face of the earth. Ramona had gotten it the night before her husband, Stan, proposed, and she’d driven four hundred miles before she turned around and decided to say yes. The Chariot meant to run, but where to was up for debate.

“Let’s see,” Savannah said, trying to find the thread of hope in the cards, the way she found it for everyone else. Even when a man came up with the Tower and the Five of Wands side by side, she didn’t worry. The Tower might suggest ruin, and the Fives hard lessons to be learned, but often a good old-fashioned disaster was exactly what was needed to get a heart pumping right. Sometimes it took a hurricane to blow a woman out of a house she’d always hated anyway, or getting fired in the morning for a man to find his dream job by nightfall.

“So what does it say?” Ramona asked.

“Bad news leading to sorrow.”

“And then?” Ramona laughed and poured more wine. “Don’t tell me there’s no good part. Savannah Dawson, you’ve always got a good part.”

Savannah looked at her best friend and smiled. “And when I don’t, I fake it.”

It had been obvious, when she was growing up, that Savannah took after her father, Doug, a man who could not find a fault in anyone—much to the disgust of his wife, Maggie. “The two of you have no taste,” Maggie had always told them. “It’s absolutely essential to hate a few people. Otherwise, how will you know when you fall in love?”

But Savannah had not given in. All the girls on her block in Phoenix had considered her their best friend, because Savannah could do French braids and was absolutely certain they would all find their hearts’
desires. At nine, when she had her first premonition—Dorsey Levins would meet a soap opera star and end up in a beach house in Malibu—no one could get the girls out of her house, they loved her so much.

“Idiots,” Maggie Dawson had called them.

On Savannah’s eighteenth birthday, her mother hadn’t let a single one of them into the house. “They only want you to promise them a happy life,” Maggie had said, “and believe me, they’ll sue when they don’t get it.” Then she leaned over Savannah’s double-chocolate cake and blew out all eighteen candles.

“That’s not fair,” Savannah said. “You stole my wish.”

“I did you a favor. Unfair things happen every day. Just get used to it.”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t wish when you were eighteen.”

Her mother began slicing the cake that no one was going to eat. “I wished for a life of my own, and I didn’t get it.”

Savannah stood up slowly. She had imagined herself anywhere but there thousands of times, but now she thought she saw her shadow leaving. It picked up a suitcase and disappeared into deep fog. It would take another six months for her to actually pack that suitcase, but as far as she was concerned, from that moment on she was gone.

“I wish for true love,” she said. “I wish for good health and constant happiness and a daughter I can teach about wishes. I’m going to wish until I’m sore.”

Later that night, Savannah walked into the garden her father had escaped to every day for as long as she could remember. While he bent over his beloved flannel bush, she told him she had decided what she was going to be when she grew up. “I’m going to be not her,” she declared.

Now, Savannah fingered the sorrow card. “I don’t like the looks of this.”

“Oh, honey,” Ramona said. “You’re taking this way too seriously. What’s a little sorrow, after all?”

Savannah stared out the window at the smear of the Milky Way. May nights in the Bay area were so saturated, stars got blurry, dew dripped from the tip of the crescent moon. On such nights, when most people cursed the dampness and scrubbed ineffectually at mold devouring their windowsills, Savannah looked for watery red stars, which Ramona had always insisted were a sign of good fortune.

She picked at a thread on her silk blouse. She hadn’t had any customers tonight, so she was still wearing her work clothes—white blouse, ankle-length taupe skirt, and a white beret. She’d bought the hat at Macy’s after her ad agency won a Clio for her jeans commercials. She’d bought a bowler after she was promoted to assistant creative director, and a marvelous tricorn after receiving an Effie for most effective advertising—an award the other creatives loathed, but which she treasured. She loved hats, and she wasn’t afraid to wear them, because a number of her colleagues wore dreadlocks, and her boss had been known to shave his head. The only people who got anywhere at Taylor Baines were the ones with style and a flair for the dramatic.

Some people were good at numbers; Savannah could make a vegetarian suddenly crave a steak dinner, and she had stopped apologizing for it. Some people just didn’t know what happiness was until she pointed it out to them. To a stressed-out single mother, or a man who worked two jobs and never saw his kids, pleasure might seem like something they didn’t have time for or deserve. Savannah’s job was to talk them out of misery, to prove that sometimes they
had to buy things simply for pleasure or go on a luxury vacation. They had to give themselves a break.

In advertising, there were no repercussions or side effects, and no one who worked at Taylor Baines wanted to hear otherwise. Savannah’s coworkers bought funky clothes, smoked unfiltered cigarettes, and took trips to southeast Asia in duct-taped planes. They were generally young and out of control; they bowled in the hallways and couldn’t believe they were getting paid for making things up. In the last year, when her daughter had grown more silent and huffy, and eventually lived almost exclusively in her room, Savannah had sometimes hated coming home.

But when she did, usually late, she turned on jazz music and cooked up fatty foods. She changed into ankle-length, loose-fitting dresses in shades of topaz, crimson, and royal blue, and wore silver bracelets all up one arm. She opened her door to whoever had the guts to knock.

“It’s probably just a sign of an off night or two,” Ramona said. “That card doesn’t mean squat.”

Savannah fingered the Three of Swords, its heart in the clouds, stabbed by three swords. Its sorrow was obvious. She had never had to pretty it up, and now she didn’t know how.

“Then again,” Savannah said, “it could be Harry. You think it’s Harry? You think he’s going to start in about Emma going to live with him again?”

“So what if he does? You know how Emma feels about that pretty suburb of his. That girl would either do some damage there or run away in two seconds flat. Harry can huff and puff all he wants. He knows Emma’s a city girl.”

Savannah nodded, but what she was thinking was that Harry had selective memory. He remembered the times she had let Emma roll off the couch as an infant,
or slip into the deep end of the pool for a split second before she yanked her back to the surface. He remembered those years he’d worked such long hours at the auto dealership; he’d turned himself into a rare, precious celebrity, the one Emma couldn’t help but love best.

Savannah had met her ex-husband sixteen years earlier, in Phoenix. She had been nearing the end of her sophomore year in college and discovered the tarots. Every time she read her fortune, she came up with the same thing—a lack of sound judgment in her future, which she immediately shrugged off. She was more interested in German beer and grand passion than common sense. She was drawn to the creative fields, majoring first in drama, then in writing, and finally in fine arts. “You’re breaking my heart,” her mother had told her. “You’re killing me.”

Savannah had ignored her. She was doing exactly what she’d set out to do—prove her mother wrong. She
could
enjoy every second. Every field of study held a certain appeal, every man she dated was worthy of loving. Joy was no more elusive than sorrow; she didn’t see how her mother missed it.

Out of school, she read miraculous fortunes for her friends and the occasional daring customer who came into the small grocery store where she worked as a checker. Then Harry Shaw came into her line with the strangest assortment of items she’d ever seen. Brussels sprouts, buttermilk, canned red beets, Malt-O-Meal and amaretto coffee.

“You don’t want to know,” he said, when he caught Savannah ogling his cart.

“But I do. Whatever it is, it’s wonderful.”

He came back after her shift and took her to his tiny apartment, where he never ate the same thing twice. His refrigerator was stuffed with exotic
mushrooms, smoked and whipped cheeses, and seven varieties of tofu. Fifty different boxes of cereal and a wall of plain, pickled and puréed vegetables lined the pantry.

“I don’t cook,” he said. “I sample. See, what I think is life’s too short to eat bologna every day. I mean, bologna’s good. I’ve got nothing against cured meats, but what if I died tomorrow and hadn’t eaten egg salad? I mean, wouldn’t that be a shame?”

Savannah fell in love on the spot. She closed the door to his pantry and kissed him until the air got thin. He tasted of exotic lime toothpaste. Three weeks later, over her mother’s objections, they were married.

“My God, he’s insane,” Maggie said. “What kind of person eats beets for dinner? I’m telling you, Savannah, this is headed for disaster.”

Her father never said a word against him, just went on tending his garden. The day of the wedding, he planted a lemon tree. When Savannah came out in her short-sleeved wedding dress, he covered the roots with his own mulch mixture, part puréed fish and sea kelp, part chipped bark. Every scent in his garden, coaxed out of the barren Phoenix soil, hit her at once—jasmine, hibiscus, the bite of lemons. For years after, the smell of citrus would make her cry.

“Daddy?” she said.

Doug Dawson stood up and shaded his eyes with his hand. Sweat dripped off the tip of his charbroiled nose. The thermometer had hit one hundred degrees on May eleventh and wouldn’t recede again until October. All the birds, except the mean crows who might have even wanted it hotter, had gone north. All anyone ever thought about was leaving.

“Now don’t you worry.” He held her loosely, so he wouldn’t sully her dress. “Love will carry you through.”

Savannah buried her head in the crook of his neck
and loved her father more than anyone on earth because she knew he believed what he said. Yet it was her mother’s words that had the ring of truth.

She dropped out of college to marry Harry and move to Danville, California. It seemed romantic, giving up so much for him, but as soon as they settled into the upscale suburb of San Francisco, she was disappointed. She’d expected more from California. She’d been hoping for hippies and psychics, possibly even prostitutes-turned-actresses, but all she found were the same square lawns and careful little lives she’d left in Arizona. They moved into a beige tract house and twice Savannah got lost in the subdivision, not realizing her mistake until she tried to fit her key into someone else’s beige lock.

Harry loved Danville. He got a job as a salesman at a used-car lot and worked his way up to manager. He eventually bought out the place, and followed with eight other lots in the Bay area, and was seen on their block as a real go-getter.

Savannah, on the other hand, was more enamored with San Francisco, its wild colors and unnavigable hills and absolute optimism. Half the year, no one could see the sky, but they still built skyscrapers on fault lines and landfills; everyone just closed their eyes and hoped for the best. The heavens, on clear nights, were breathtaking, an endless expanse of pulsing, pleading red stars.