The Wishing Garden (31 page)

“Murderers,” she thought she heard. “The both of you.”

She whirled around, but all she saw was a thick
fog rippling over the deck like lake water. She felt a chill clear down to her toes.

She took a deep breath and walked right through the mist, holding down the desire to scream. Her skin turned ice-cold, the tips of her hair went temporarily white. She went inside and locked the door behind her.

The next morning, she grabbed her tarot deck and took out the Four of Swords, the card of exile. After breakfast, she wedged it between the slats on the deck, where the air still reeked of tobacco, where whatever had been there last night would find it as soon as darkness fell.

It wasn’t only ghosts who were taunting her. That night, Eli and his punk friends chopped up the crime-scene tape and tied yellow flags to the antenna of Eli’s Corvette. They must have dared each other all the way to Jake’s house, because after they pulled up in the driveway, they got out puffed-up and mean. Jake took two steps down the porch, but Savannah stepped in front of him.

“No,” she said. “They’re here for me.”

She walked across the gravel drive. The boys reeked of marijuana and beer, which had only made them meaner. Eli drifted toward the back, but the others elbowed each other. Finally, Rick Laufer stepped forward.

“Here’s twenty bucks,” he said, handing Savannah the cash. “Come on. Give me your worst. Drive me to suicide.”

He laughed, until Savannah grabbed his arm. She’d been second-guessing herself all day, trying to figure which warning signs she’d missed, what she’d said wrong. She’d re-created Ben’s fortune, then quickly scattered the cards. If she’d missed some ominous sign, she didn’t want to know it. She was going to
predict happy endings for everyone, even if she had to flat-out lie.

She yanked Rick Laufer into the cabin and shoved him toward a chair. Ben Hiller had been destined for that cliff long before she came along. Thousands of people were destined for cliffs; it was fortune-tellers who got them contemplating alternatives, unexpected fortunes and lovers coming from the north. At the very least, a gypsy could make a man wait a day to jump, just in case this was the day his whole life turned around.

“Sit down,” she said.

Rick sat and tried to light a cigarette, but couldn’t get his hands to stop trembling. The others stayed outside, howling like wolves. Savannah swiped the makeup to the side and dropped her cards in front of him.

“Shuffle,” she said.

She stared him down until he dropped his unlit cigarette and shuffled. Bad coincidence made her tense and mean, and it seemed nothing could be done about it. She grabbed the cards back from this two-bit hood, a boy she could see in an instant would never be bad enough to be a gangster or good enough to settle down. He’d slip right through the cracks, this one, he’d never belong to anyone, and one day he’d simply lie down and die of a broken, lonely heart.

She laid out the cards for him. Her parents were upstairs, Emma out on the back deck with the dogs, but Jake came in and sat beside her. Beneath the table, he put his hand on her knee.

She looked down at the cards, all swords, all reversed. “Tell me, have you ever been happy?”

Rick laughed, but he could just as easily have cried, she thought. She had cried for an hour beside Ben Hiller’s smashed car, and then she had looked at
his hands, still grasping the steering wheel. On his finger was his wedding ring, the one he’d kept hung around his neck. He had flown back into the arms of his lover. She had to believe that, or else how could she go on?

“I’m fucking ecstatic,” Rick said.

Savannah nodded. “Then beware. You’ve got the Five of Swords, reversed, in front of you. That’s an uncertain outlook. The chance of misfortune for a friend.”

“That’s it?” Rick said.

“What else would you like me to say?”

“Shit, I don’t know. You’re the fortune-teller. What did you tell Ben? That he was doomed?”

Jake squeezed her knee, then put his fists on the table, where Rick could see the size of them.

“Come on,” Rick said. “I want my twenty dollars’ worth.”

Jake just stared at him, and Rick pushed back his chair. “Shit. The misfortune of a friend. Who the fuck cares?”

He walked out of the cabin and slammed the door. Savannah breathed deeply. She pushed herself up from the table and gathered the cards.

“The cards don’t make things happen,” she said.

“Of course not.”

“They just show us the options. They clarify. I told Ben he had something great to do. How could I have known he’d take to driving off cliffs?”

Jake stood up and gathered her in his arms, but that only made it worse. He kissed her slowly, little feather kisses to the corners of her mouth. He kissed the line of her tears, then held her face in his hands. She was not going to love him. He was the Page of Wands, with a bad heart, and he was trouble. He conjured
ghosts and reeked of sorrow. He was everything she didn’t want.

“This is not your fault,” he said, and it was probably true, but still her throat tightened.

The boys were all howling in the yard. She walked out onto the back deck where Emma ought to be and instead found the Four of Swords ripped to shreds and scattered along the planking. Jake came out beside her. Despite the howling, she could hear him breathing.

He bent down to pick up a piece of the shredded card. It showed only a man’s hands folded in prayer. He tucked the piece in his pocket and stood up.

Savannah took his hand, but then the dogs started yelping. They both ran around the side of the house, and found the boys hurling rocks at the dogs. Sasha led the countercharge, coming at the tormentors with her teeth bared.

“Emma?” Savannah said.

She spotted her beside Eli, a rock in the palm of her hand. Her daughter might be guilty of lying and bad judgment, but never of cruelty. Savannah would not believe it, not with the evidence right in front of her, not ever. Her gaze met Emma’s, and her daughter dropped the rock to the ground.

All it took was one step forward from Jake for the boys to bolt. They leapt into Eli’s Corvette, but not before Emma grabbed Eli and kissed him. Not until all the boys cheered.

After the car was gone, Jake looked over his dogs and found only a couple of scratches. Nevertheless, he took them into the cabin for first aid and steak bones. As soon as he’d gone, Savannah charged across the yard. When she reached for her daughter, Emma flinched.

“I’m not the one throwing rocks,” Savannah said.

“Mom …”

“Come with me.”

She didn’t wait for a rebuttal. She started down the road, stopping at every elderberry bush to snip off a branch or two. By the time she reached the blind turn, where the yellow tape was now chopped in pieces and strangling the necks of sagebrush, she had an armful of limbs.

She waited until Emma was just a few yards back, then she started down the cliff. Where Ben’s car had landed, there was nothing left but pulverized pine needles and the smell of gasoline.

Savannah glanced up the hill, where Emma was making her way down slowly. When she finally reached her side, Savannah handed her a few branches.

“Plant a twig of elder on someone’s grave,” she said, “and their ghost will be at peace.” She kicked at the soil, then picked the richest spot. She spit on the bottom of her branches. “Put them in deep. Pray for rain.”

The two of them knelt in the moonlight and planted twigs. Every now and then, Emma faded in the moonlight, her heart picked its way over Kemper Peak and Desolation Canyon into Eli Malone’s shabby cabin, and there was nothing Savannah could do about it. The part Emma left behind was not even speaking to her.

Finally, Savannah stood up and wiped her hands on her dress. She led Emma back to the cabin and did not say a word about the bats that skimmed their hair. Even when Emma cried out, Savannah didn’t soothe her about how many bugs bats ate an hour, or the myth of the prince who takes up residence in a bat’s body in order to search the world for the woman he loves. For once, she just stayed silent.

She tucked Emma into her sleeping bag on the couch, then sat on the chair by the door. She waited patiently until Emma fell asleep, then she went to the closet.

One thing a fortune-teller knew was that when she started feeling things against her will, it was time to leave. When a daughter started throwing rocks at dogs who loved her, it was a clear sign that things were going down fast.

What Savannah did not expect was to discover that a ghost felt the same way. She opened the closet where she’d left her suitcase, and was assaulted by the stale smell of cigarette smoke.

She crept back to the chair and breathed deeply. Her shoulders tightened each time she heard a creak on the metal roof, but when she went outside and looked up, the roof was empty except for a scattering of pine cones.

She went back inside and packed her suitcase. So she agreed with a ghost. So what? That didn’t mean she was doing this his way. She would stay through the night, just to spite him. She wouldn’t leave until dawn, when spirits can’t materialize, because if they do, they disappear into thin air.

 F
OURTEEN
 T
HE
L
OVERS
S
ACRIFICE OF THE
S
OUL
 

E
mma fell asleep plotting ways to fool her mother. She’d tell her she was going to California to visit her father, then she’d hitchhike back to Eli. She’d simply never do another thing Savannah said. Instead of guilt, she felt high on the things she could possibly give up for love. Everything but Eli was up for sacrifice—good grades, friends, a healthy appetite, her mother’s trust.

Tonight, as always, she dreamed of him. He was twenty years older and in some kind of sales job. He’d cut off all his hair and taken to wearing suits, and he kept cocking his head when she cried. ‘Isn’t this what you wanted?’ he asked her.

A thump woke her. She was tangled in the couch pillows, her hair moist and sticky against her neck. It was just before dawn, the air purple and hallucinatory, so when a man pressed up against the sliding glass door, Emma at first thought him a lingering part of her dream. The skin along her arms puckered and burned,
but the muscles themselves were immobile. The man had dark hair, and vertical lines down his cheeks. He had the foulest-looking smile she’d ever seen.

She screamed, but nothing came out but a hollow whistle. The man put his hand on the door and began to slide it open.

“Mom,” Emma said. “Mommy?”

Savannah, who had been sleeping on the floor, got to her knees. Emma was shaking so badly, all she could do was point. But what she was pointing at had vanished, leaving behind only a white haze where he’d breathed on the glass. That, too, faded right before her eyes.

“You saw something?” Savannah asked. “I’ll go look.”

Emma grabbed her arm. “No. Don’t go out there.”

Savannah sat on the couch and tucked her up on her lap. Like a baby, Emma buried her face in the moist curl of her mother’s neck.

“It’s all right, honey,” Savannah said. “There’s nothing out there that can hurt you.”

She kissed the top of Emma’s head, then gently put her down. She stepped out onto the deck and didn’t check the drive or shadowy spaces behind the cabin. She merely put her hands on her hips and looked up.

When she came back in, she sat beside Emma and held her hand tightly. “See, there’s this ghost.”

Emma closed her eyes. She was done, absolutely done with her mother and all her superstitions. She was not going to live in a place where ghosts could materialize. She was not going to live with a woman who believed in them. She felt something harden in her chest, so that from then on it would be a little tougher to breathe and to sleep without nightmares.
That was the price she’d have to pay for deciding she didn’t want a mother anymore.

“He’s trying to stir up trouble,” Savannah went on. “But he won’t be able to, once we leave.”

Emma opened her eyes abruptly. She held her breath while her mother went to the door, where she’d already packed a suitcase. She started putting Emma’s clothes into a sack.