The Wishing Garden (39 page)

“Honey, it’s Mom,” Maggie said. “Your dad’s in the hospital. You need to come home.”

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T
he mountains had been playing tricks on them. Savannah should have known thin air would cause hallucinations, in their case conjuring what they wanted least and most, a mean-spirited ghost and all the signs of remission. When Doug had collapsed in Jake’s garden, Maggie and Jake had rushed him to Yavapai Regional Medical Center in the flatlands, where people were thinking straight and not mistaking suntans for cures. Now, when Savannah stepped into her father’s hospital room, she found Doug lying flat and still, his arms sticking out of the blanket like half-buried bones. He finally looked like what he was—a man who did not have the energy to open his eyes.

Savannah’s gaze whizzed past the gadgets and IVs and ominous monitors to her mother, who sat on the edge of the bed holding Doug’s hand.

“Begonias,” Maggie was saying. “Rhododendrons. Azaleas. Bougainvillea.”

Savannah leaned against the wall. She banged her head against it once, just hard enough to see stars, but not a single one of them was red.

“Purple coneflower,” Maggie went on. “Black-eyed Susans. Lilies of the valley.”

Savannah squeezed her eyes shut. She remembered a few years back when a good friend, Carol Deidrich, had come to her after her mother died of heart failure. Savannah had held her and told her that death was a release, a beginning. She was surprised now that Carol hadn’t hit her, that she’d had the grace to simply walk away and never speak to her again.

Savannah walked to her mother’s side and put a hand on Maggie’s shoulder. Maggie stiffened, then sagged. She was wearing cotton pajama bottoms and a raincoat. There were tears in her eyes.

Savannah sat down next to her. She leaned over her father and kissed his cool, moist forehead. What she should have told Carol was that death was indeed a beginning, of learning how to live with less, often without the very sustenance of your life.

“Chamomile,” Savannah said. “Winter honeysuckle, golden trumpet trees, magnolia grandiflora.”

Maggie nodded and leaned against her. She took a sip of water. For all Savannah knew, she’d been naming plants all day.

“Jacaranda,” Savannah went on, choosing only the flowering trees now, the ones her father had always grown best. She called on whatever magic a daughter had, and maybe it was all in her imagination, but she swore the air around them swelled with the scent of orange blossoms, and her father’s breathing evened out, the way it always had when the plants in his garden had bloomed.

*  *  *

Doug saw colors. Exotic variations on green. Lime, jade, emerald, green so green it blinded him. His entire field of vision was a landscape of grass and well-tended perennials. Begonias. Rhododendrons. Azaleas. Bougainvillea. Then suddenly a grove of navel oranges just coming into flower. Plants shot up and bloomed in seconds. It was the most amazing thing.

Somewhere beyond the garden, though, he heard his wife and daughter crying. He wished he had the strength to open his eyes and tell them it was all right. All the pain was gone. Every thought in his head was a poem.

He was going to die with dirt beneath his fingernails, and that was a good thing. That way God would know what kind of man he’d been. He wondered if he’d planted enough flowers. He wondered if any of those gladiolus he’d sneaked into the soil around his neighbors’ yards had come up yet. He wondered if he’d done enough.

After a while, he heard the slapping of cards in the corner. He could smell his daughter’s sweat and Juicy Fruit gum. He swam through the green grass, laughing when it tickled his stomach. He forced himself up through the top of it, and was suddenly gasping for air.

Maggie was above him, trying to get him to drink, but he pushed the cup away. Savannah leapt off the floor and came to his side. They both moved so fast they were blurs to him. He wished they would slow
down so he could see them clearly. They spoke in some language he could not understand.

He shook his head and said:

Or that was what he thought he said. Maggie and Savannah only looked at each other. He concentrated hard, until he could make out a little of what they said.

“—doesn’t know … for the … pointless now.”

“How can … please.”

Doug took a deep breath. “Green,” he said, and they both looked at him.

“Green?” Maggie said.

He smiled. With all his strength, he squeezed her hand, but she must not have felt it, because she pulled away to stroke his head.

“Rest now, love,” she said. “You don’t look green. You look fine. Everything’s going to be fine.”

The green was misting over his eyes, but he managed to keep them open for a few seconds more. He looked straight into his wife’s eyes. He spoke the truest thing he knew.

He thought he’d reached her, and he closed his eyes in relief. But just before the grass closed over his head, he heard Maggie crying. “What’s he saying?” she said. “I can’t understand a word he’s saying.”

Maggie had insisted on sleeping at the hospital, so the next morning Jake packed her clothes and brought
them to Doug’s room. The blinds were closed, the room dark, and Maggie was not there. According to the machinery, Doug was still alive, but Jake could see no sign of the man’s chest rising and falling. His eyes were closed, his skin blue. A tube went into his nose, another into the bruised vein on his wrist, feeding him the things he needed to survive, but there was no doubt in Jake’s mind that Doug Dawson was already somewhere else. If he wasn’t, Jake pitied him. Though there were fresh bouquets of roses and carnations in his room, there was no scent of soil here.

He heard cards slapping, then finally noticed a black-dyed Panama hat bobbing in the corner. Savannah didn’t even look up when he said her name. She sat on the floor, laying out her cards again and again. Once, she began to flip over a card, then placed it instead on the bottom of the deck and picked another.

He had known he would deteriorate without her, but he hadn’t realized to what extent. First, he’d lost his concentration and sawed through the headboard of a two-thousand-dollar bed. A few days later, he’d thrown away a bottle of Digoxin, so now his heart was skipping beats regularly, and he was always gasping for air. Yesterday, he’d forgotten to feed his dogs. When they jumped up on the table to snatch his steak, he felt so light-headed and awful, he just let them have it.

Rufus and Gabe were no better. The dogs had gone into mourning, pacing the floor where Savannah had lain at night, howling from dawn until dusk. Even Roy had not been able to stand it; since Savannah had left, Jake hadn’t seen him once.

He stepped forward, but couldn’t think of anything to say, except that he’d been stupid enough to hope she would come back for
him
.

Maggie arrived a few minutes later. Jake heard her barreling down the hall, arguing with a security guard.

She carried an armload of Doug’s plants, their roots hanging clear to her knees, spilling fishy soil. It was obvious the guard would have to tackle her to get her to stop, and finally he simply stepped back and let her through with her contraband.

She brushed past Jake and dropped the flowers on the chair beside the bed. She picked up a cutting with small leaves and red tubular flowers. She laid it on Doug’s chest.

“Beard tongue,” she said, and Jake watched the man’s eyes. Not a flicker. She grabbed the next three. “Bitterroot. Honeysuckle. One of the fans from the ensete.”

She piled the plants on Doug’s chest. When he gave no response, she twined a strand of fragrant blueberry climber around his ear. She crushed the chamomile leaves in the palm of her hand and held them beneath his nose.

Jake saw it from clear across the room. Doug’s nostrils flared for a moment, then went still. Maggie dropped the leaves on his chest and leaned forward to kiss him.

“Now go,” she said. “Stop dawdling. You’re driving me crazy.”

Jake walked across the room and put his hand on her shoulder. She was trembling, but her eyes were dry. She leaned against him a moment, until Savannah slapped down another round of cards.

“For God’s sake, stop that,” Maggie said. “What’s it going to prove?”

Savannah said nothing. Where she’d parted her hair, Jake could make out the pink line of her scalp, and his chest tightened. The problem with devotion was that it was bad for the heart. It clogged major arteries, took years off his life, but the alternative was a long, healthy life without ever getting worked up at
the sight of someone’s tender skin. The alternative was a life with dogs.

He crouched down beside her. “Any luck?”

She slammed down the cards in answer. Then she picked them up and shuffled again. “I don’t accept this.”

“Savannah.” He took the deck from her hand. She tried to snatch it back, but he held on tight and waited until she looked him in the eye. “There’s no good fortune here.”

“You don’t know anything.”

“I know it’s no challenge to lay out cards and come up with a good result every time. That’s just a circus trick. Anyone could do it.”

“You couldn’t.”

Jake leaned back. She reached out to him, then drew away her hand before even getting close. She was not going to love him; that was clear as day. He was everything she couldn’t accept—unhappiness and guilt intensified by years of neglect. He was the Three of Swords.

“Well, I’m another story,” he said, standing up. He tucked her cards into his shirt pocket. He was keeping something, even if it was only that. Maggie was sitting at Doug’s side, holding his limp white hand. He walked to the door.

“I was wrong about Sasha,” Savannah called after him. “There was no reason to thank God.”

Jake breathed in deeply. He put his hand on the door. “In a rich and beautiful world, there are still horrors. The real challenge is to find a way to be happy anyway.”

Emma had wanted to come to her grandfather’s funeral, but now she couldn’t figure out why. As far as
she was concerned, sitting in a church didn’t prove your devotion to anything except ritual and what people thought of you. If anything, once they closed the thick double doors and started the funeral hymn, whatever trace of Doug Dawson had been lingering in the air vanished. No doubt her grandfather’s spirit had escaped through a stained-glass window and was out in the church garden right now, trying to figure a way to get solid enough to rip out the rows of junipers and replace them with those outlandish giant allium he’d adored.

At least she wasn’t crying. She had promised herself that much. After two weeks of doing nothing but that, she’d finally given it up. Tears and prayers changed nothing. Probably, if it was this easy to lose the love of her life, God wasn’t even there.

Harry put an arm around her and pulled her close. On her left, Melinda dabbed at her tears before they damaged her makeup. Emma chanced a look around, but all she saw was a sea of coarse white hair. There wasn’t a soul under thirty, not a patch of brown hair and green eyes in the bunch.

“You want to say hello to your mother?” Harry asked, when the service was finally over.

Emma shook her head vigorously. She wanted one thing, and he wasn’t here. Harry took her hand and led her instead to Maggie. Maggie shook off one of her neighbors and took Emma in her arms. “Well, thank goodness. Someone I actually want to see.”

Emma hugged her tightly. She was not going to cry, then Maggie pulled back to touch her face, and her eyes betrayed her. Worse than that, she started gasping—big, gulpy noises that only got louder when she tried to rein them in. Maggie and Harry each took an arm and led her outside.

Emma was still sobbing when she saw her mother
by the oak tree, hiding beneath a huge black hat festooned with ebony feathers. Savannah had that slightly green tint she always had when there was too much crying going on.