The Wishing Garden (40 page)

“Honey,” Savannah said, coming forward.

Emma had seen her after midnight some nights, parked outside her father’s well-lit house. Whenever Savannah called, Emma locked herself in her room and refused to acknowledge Melinda’s pleas to come to the phone. When she felt herself weakening, she remembered her mother just standing there while her father and Melinda led her away from everything that mattered.

Savannah reached out and ran a finger over Emma’s wet cheek, but Emma slapped her hand away. For a moment no one breathed. Then Savannah tossed her hat on the ground and walked away.

Emma had lost ten pounds over the summer, but it wasn’t until that second that she felt too thin. A strong wind could break her. Once she had fallen in love, she’d put herself at the mercy of everything.

“That was cruel, Emma,” her grandmother said. “Your mother’s walking a very thin line.”

Emma’s throat burned as Maggie led her to the family limousine. Emma got in beside her grandmother, and her father and stepmother took the seat across from them. She tried to quiet herself down to sniffles, but her grandmother nudged her.

“Don’t tone it down for me,” Maggie said. “If I were twenty years younger, I’d cry like that too. But I can’t do it anymore, Emma, and I don’t know why.”

The guests pushed up to the limousine, and Maggie rolled down the window. “Don’t even think about coming to my house. I don’t have any cold cuts. I’m not even in the mood for a party, if you can believe that.”

Then she put her arm around Emma’s shoulders and told the driver to move.

Back at the house, Cheryl Pillandro had brought in the last of Doug’s vivid purple coneflowers and set them in vases on the table. She’d set out wine and cheese and a box of tissues, and when Maggie came in, she touched her cheek softly.

Maggie poured them all a glass of wine. “To Doug,” she said, and then she left them all standing there and took her wine outside.

Emma drank her wine and found it dull. In the last two weeks, she’d lost her taste for alcohol and cigarettes and anything criminal. She walked to the front door and watched her grandmother through the porch screen. Maggie touched every plant in Doug’s garden. When she reached the ensete, she crouched down.

“You doing all right?” Harry asked. “You want to watch some TV or something?”

Emma stared at him, then walked out after her grandmother. Sometime during their stay at Jake’s cabin, the ensete had bloomed. Its tiny bronze flowers were insignificant beside the huge palm leaves, and it was amazing to think something so delicately beautiful could be the very thing that ruined everything.

“Well,” Maggie said. “This is where it gets dicey. Go get your grandfather’s shears. We’ve got to cut it all the way back. We’ll do the best we can.”

Emma walked to the garage apartment, where they had lived amongst garden tools and strange fortunes. She found the shears on the wall, along with two of her mother’s hats left behind. She put on a straw one, then walked back to the garden.

Maggie pruned the plant ruthlessly, cutting the blooms and fronds clear back to the plant’s crown. It was nothing more than a dead-looking stump when
Maggie was finished with it. She tossed the shears onto the lawn of chamomile, and Emma started to cry again.

“Come on.” Maggie put her arm around her. “It’s all right. I don’t have Doug’s touch, but it might grow. You never know.”

Emma didn’t think so. Her grandfather had had some kind of magic. Fragile plants had grown just to please him. They might grow for her grandmother, too, just to keep her from getting riled, or for her mother, to make her happy again. But they would not grow for Emma; she inspired no devotion. No one was breaking down doors to get to her. The one boy who could fill the hole in her heart hadn’t even noticed she was bleeding.

That boy stood down the street, watching Emma and her grandmother bend over the ensete. Twice, he took a step around the boxwood hedge he was hiding behind, but he couldn’t cross his own shadow. It hid nothing, not his mangy hair or gangster clothes or the fact that he was so thin and jittery, he’d never be able to hold Emma tight enough to get the point of his love across.

He would never consider himself a hero, but every morning for the last two weeks he had done something no one, especially not Emma, would ever appreciate. He had woken up and not driven to California. Instead, he had returned another stolen stereo. He’d left them on retail doorsteps all over town, and when his cabin was finally cleared out, he slept the night through for the first time in nineteen years.

Turned out falling in love was easy. The hard part was making sure he didn’t contaminate what he loved. It was also the only gift he could give Emma.

He closed his eyes and stood behind a boxwood hedge; he left her to her life. When he finally tried to walk away, every step hurt. When he reached the corner, he froze. He breathed deeply, then whirled around again. But by then Emma and Maggie were walking back into the house. By then it was all over.

Melinda would not fly on anything less than a full-size jet, so Savannah drove all the way to Sky Harbor Airport to see Emma off. Once in the terminal, Emma never unhooked her arms from her waist or looked her in the eye. She was still intent on despising her, and there was no telling someone like that she was the love of your life and always would be.

Savannah turned her attention to Melinda, who was making all the conversation anyway, talking about her cousin, a pilot for United.

“So he likes the job,” Savannah said, when they reached the boarding gate.

“Oh yes.” Melinda glittered in her pale pink traveling ensemble. “You would not believe the process he had to go through to get hired. Phenomenal. These pilots are the best. The safety features on these jets are phenomenal.”

“No one thinks it’s going to crash,” Harry said.

Everyone within earshot looked out at the plane, shimmering beneath the Phoenix sun. When the pilot stared hard at a wing, you could hear people swallowing. A young woman said, “Fuck it,” and turned around and left.

They started boarding First Class, and Harry grabbed his carry-on. “That’s us.”

Savannah turned to Emma. Her daughter’s eyes were red-rimmed. Last night, she had stayed with Harry and Melinda at the Holiday Inn, and probably
spent every waking moment praying Eli would kidnap her. She had no idea Eli had sat on the curb in front of the garage apartment from midnight till dawn, thinking Emma was inside and might come out to him. She had no idea her entire future could hinge on one night of missed opportunities, and Savannah wasn’t about to break that to her. She could hardly bear it herself.

“Try not to worry,” she said.

“Right, Mom.”

Savannah grabbed her hand. “No, I mean it. The odds of an asteroid falling on you are like a billion to one. The same odds that you’ll never fall in love again.”

“You still don’t get it. I don’t want to fall in love again. I only want him.”

Harry took her arm. “Come on, honey. Let’s go.”

Savannah watched them walk into the boarding chute, then she went to the window. Outside, the sky was clear to the horizon, except for three clouds in the west, which they would have to fly right through to get home.

She left the airport and drove back to her mother’s house. Maggie had not returned to Jake’s cabin after Doug died, and Savannah doubted she ever would. She found her on the porch step with Cheryl Pillandro, both sipping spiked lemonade and circling items from an L. L. Bean catalog.

“Cheryl’s thinking about an Alaskan cruise,” Maggie said. “We’re ordering her Gore-Tex.”

“I got a new pre-approved Visa application in the mail last week,” Cheryl said.

Savannah had never envied Harry until this moment. He had his daughter at his side, he knew which way was home. She, on the other hand, no longer felt at ease in either bright sun or fog. Up here, sorrow was as abundant as sky. Every widower on Maggie’s block
would agree to die tomorrow, if today they could be someone’s darling again. Back at sea level, no fog was thick enough to conceal the obvious: She read good fortune for everyone but herself.

“So I take it you’re leaving?” Maggie said.

“I suppose.”

“Running,” Maggie said to Cheryl. “That’s what she was always good at.”

Savannah put her hands on her hips. Without her father here, she didn’t feel the need to restrain her anger, and that scared her. She felt capable of saying just about anything, even what she really felt.

She took a step toward her mother, and saw Maggie smiling. “You want me to crack.”

Maggie shrugged. “Maybe I do. Maybe I like cracked people. Maybe the only real things are on the inside.”

Savannah shook her head. “You were never very good to me.”

For a moment, there was pure silence, then Cheryl Pillandro let out her breath. She got up to leave, but Maggie pulled her back down.

“Oh no. I need a witness. They always blame the mothers.”

Savannah took a good whiff of her mother’s perfume and realized she’d been hating it since the moment she came back. “You are the villain here.”

“My husband just died on me. Don’t you dare start with me now.”

Savannah stepped forward. She took short little breaths, then spit them back out. “I’m starting, all right. If there’s anything good in me, it’s because of Dad. You never supported me. Never consoled me when I needed you. Never even took me seriously. You were too busy spitting at God.”

When Maggie said nothing, Savannah wrapped
her arms around her waist. “You can’t stand to see anyone happy, including me,” she went on. “You contaminate joy. You sabotaged me at every turn. Well, congratulations, Mom. I’m scared to death now of the basic process of living.”

She was shaking, trembling so hard against the clematis-covered trellis she caused a downpour of deep purple petals.

Maggie just waved her off. “That’s hogwash. You’re mourning your father, Savannah. Don’t confuse that with a personality trait.”

“Why can’t you just be nice?”

Her mother actually seemed to consider the question, then she just shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You’ve hurt me beyond belief.”

Maggie sighed. “I’m sure I have. I never said I was a particularly good mother. But the truth is, you’re an exceptional person, and if you give me credit for the bad things, then you have to give me credit for that too.”

Savannah tilted her head to the sky. She shouldn’t try to win. Her father had known the odds of topping Maggie were a million to one, so instead he’d stayed silent and happily married for thirty-six years. The trouble was, lately she’d been feeling less and less like her father.

“I don’t give you credit for anything,” she said quietly, “except making yourself nearly impossible to love.”

She walked to the garage and slammed the door behind her before her mother could hear her crying. She grabbed a pillow and flung it across the room. She hated her mother and worse, she hated the hate. It was traitorous. In less than an hour, she was curled up on the bed sobbing, afraid she had broken her mother’s heart.

*  *  *

Maggie watched her daughter slam the door to the garage, then stood up. Cheryl stood up too, and squeezed her hand.

“You all right?” Cheryl asked.

Maggie smiled. Without Doug to temper her, she was only going to get meaner, and that was all right with her. Meanness got her through a day quite nicely. Meanness covered up the fact that her heart was broken and there was no chance of fixing it. Sometimes, too, it snapped people to their senses.

“She’s coming along,” she said.

Cheryl looked at her in astonishment, then laughed. Maggie was glad she had asked Cheryl Pillandro to stay on. When Cheryl ruined a casserole, which she did nearly every day, she cussed like nobody’s business, and Maggie admired that. And it had been something, knowing someone would be in the house that first night she came back without Doug. It was something just to hear someone in the bathroom, turning on and off the water, brushing her teeth, breathing.

Maggie walked through Doug’s garden, yanking off a few yellowed leaves. She had vowed to let the garden go, but so far she had not been able to do it. It was all drip-irrigated, but nevertheless each night she was out watering. She must have picked up Doug’s techniques by osmosis, because somehow she knew it was time to fertilize the small patch of lawn and prune back the dying petals of the coneflowers. She knew her chances of saving the ensete were a hundred to one.

Jake showed up while she was watering the sheared stump. He had the bench in the back of his pickup, and she didn’t say a word as he unloaded it. He looked at her to see where she wanted it, and again
she remained silent. She didn’t want it at all, and that was the truth. It was morbid, a dead man’s life, and if Doug had thought it would help her get over him, he was stupid as a man could be. She was never going to get over him. She didn’t even want to.

Jake set the bench on the cobblestone patio, then walked over to her. “I carved in the sun. There’s still room for one more design. I think Doug was leaving the choice up to you.”

“Then he was an idiot. I want nothing to do with it. Staple on a picture of a frog for all I care.”

Jake stared at her, then took something out of his back pocket. “I found this under the bench. I read it before I realized it was for you.”

Maggie didn’t take it. Her husband had been too sweet for his own good, and look what it had gotten him. He should have been mean like her. Mean people never died young.

“Take it, Maggie,” he said. “It was all he could give.”

He put the paper in her hand, then scanned the yard. Maggie put her hand on his arm. “She’s in the garage and not coming out. She’ll sneak off in the middle of the night again and never come back.”

Jake closed his eyes briefly, then lifted her hand and kissed her palm. Maggie hoped Savannah was looking out her window, so she could see what she’d be missing. She ought to fall in love whenever she had the chance. She ought to kiss a man like there was no tomorrow, because very often there wasn’t.

Much later, after Jake had gone, and Cheryl was inside botching another casserole, Maggie looked at the poem. At the top, Doug had been doodling. He’d drawn eight stars and a woman. Then she got to the poem.