The Wishing Garden (41 page)

Cheryl found her sitting on the bench an hour later, the poem clasped tightly in her hands, her face raw from crying. She sat down beside her.

“After Paul died,” she said, “I was afraid to tell anyone what I was feeling, because it wasn’t exactly sorrow. I was furious that he’d done this to me. Every day he didn’t walk through the door, I hated him more.”

Maggie said nothing. Her throat was completely closed now. Doug had had the words all along. He’d been quiet because he’d been hoarding them, stuffing them into his poetry, so that when he was gone, she would be mute with love for him. She would be stuck in this garden, breathing him in with every scent.

“But that wasn’t the worst,” Cheryl went on. “The
worst was when I woke up one morning and didn’t think of him first thing. The worst was letting him go.”

Maggie leaned her head against Cheryl’s shoulder. “I just don’t see—”

“Of course you don’t. What’s to see? You loved him and he left you. There’s no great lesson to be learned from that. Right now, all you’ve got to do is get up every morning. Right now, that’s all that can be expected of you.”

Maggie ran her hand over the arms of the bench, carved now into wrists and hands, with bracelets and rings on all its fingers.

Maggie patted Cheryl’s hand. “Jake will be all right, you know.”

Cheryl jerked her head up. They hardly ever talked about Jake, but now Cheryl squeezed her hand tightly. “They scheduled the lineup for Monday. It doesn’t seem to matter that Jake’s already been in jail for fifteen years.”

“No, it doesn’t matter,” Maggie said. “In God’s eyes, what you want most doesn’t even count.”

The next morning, the last of summer led an awesome assault. It started out hot and turned wicked. The garage apartment was eighty degrees by nine, ninety by noon. Flies who alighted for even a second on the roof found their legs melded to the cedar shingles. By late afternoon, birds were falling right out of the sky.

Savannah packed her one bag, but in that heat could not find the energy to get in her car and drive sixteen hours back to San Francisco. Instead, she walked to the mermaid fountain, where even the algae beneath a foot of water had turned brown and died. She crawled right into the bowl, her red dress fanning
out around her. She scooped lukewarm water onto her neck and shoulders, but it dried on impact.

Her mother came out ten minutes later. Savannah scooped another handful of water and splashed it on her face.

“I spit in that bowl every morning,” Maggie said.

Savannah hesitated, then went on splashing. Maggie reached into her pocket and handed over a twenty.

“Are you serious?” Savannah asked.

“Don’t I look it?”

Savannah looked at the cash, then climbed out of the fountain. “Well, it’s thirty now.”

Maggie turned and went back in the house. She came back carrying another ten, shoved it at her, then walked into the garage.

Savannah stood there as steam rose up from her dress. She was having trouble reading fortunes. She’d let in a few customers last night, and had predicted new love for a man who’d been happily married for thirty years and revenge for a woman who had everything. She might get the Ten of Cups, the card of peace and contentment, in her mother’s recent past. She might get anything.

Blisters were forming on her feet, though, so she went in the garage. Maggie had already sat down at the table and swiped everything that had been on it—books and magazines and Savannah’s hats—to the floor.

The fan was oscillating in the corner, but the torpid air refused to budge. Already, the hem and arms of Savannah’s dress were dry. Sweat slid down her neck, curling around each shoulder blade. She picked up the vivid Voyager deck, but Maggie scoffed at it.

“Those are too pretty,” she said. “Get me the ruthless cards. You think I’ve got anything to fear now?”

“I threw them all out.”

Maggie smiled and walked to the makeshift kitchen. She opened the top drawer and started pulling out Savannah’s old decks. “Rider-Waite. The Yeager Tarot. The Thoth. My God, what kind of name is that?”

Savannah stared at her, too hot to ask why her mother had saved what she did not believe in.

“Which has the worst odds?” Maggie asked, swiping at the sweat on her forehead.

“The Rider-Waite.”

“All right then.” Maggie brought the deck to the table. She sat down, brushed the sweat off her palms, and started to shuffle.

“You don’t believe in this,” Savannah managed to say.

“Well, maybe I don’t have the luxury of not believing anymore. Did you ever think of that?”

“I don’t know if I can read this for you. All my fortunes have been coming out strange.”

“Stop acting scared. I don’t care what you have to do, Savannah, just read my fortune. My husband’s dead and I’ve got one more chance to tell him I love him, so you just sit down and tell me how to do it.”

Maggie shuffled the cards ruthlessly, twelve times, then held them out. Savannah hesitated only a second, then sat down and laid them out. The heat strangled clear thinking, because she automatically reverted back to the old Celtic spread.

The first card was the King of Swords, which was no surprise. The King was the card of force, an authoritative, controlling person. The crossing card, though, was the Hierophant, the card of timidity, mercy, and forgiveness.

“I don’t know what that means,” Savannah said.

Maggie stared her down, and Savannah looked back at the cards. It was getting hard to even breathe
now. The flies in the window were languid, lying on their backs on the sill. Savannah pulled her dress away from her chest and fanned it. “Your future and destiny go together. The Tower and Six of Swords. Both are cards of major changes. A trip or journey.”

Her mother said nothing, and Savannah noticed she had stopped sweating. She was looking over Savannah’s shoulder at the corner. Savannah laid out the last four cards, then massaged her temples.

She could have started crying when she turned over the King of Wands, the card of fathers and honest men. Or later, when the Star, the card of hope, came up as her mother’s final result. Then the room turned cool as rain and was drenched with the smell of garden soil, of incense cedar and sweet peas and Breath of Heaven. Squeaky sounds escaped her mother’s lips, and she looked up to find Maggie Dawson crying.

Savannah followed her gaze to the corner, but saw nothing. If anything was truly there, it had not come for her. Her father was bred to love her, but loving Maggie had required of him a daredevil leap of faith. For thirty-six years, Doug had risen to the challenge of loving his wife despite everything, and he may never have known that in return, Maggie had become a different person from the one she had intended to be. She had had a happy life despite herself.

Savannah got up from the table and walked outside. She stood in the hottest spot, where the sun reflected off the garage and melted pavement, where even the sun-loving sage had wilted. She stood until she was burning up. It was a sad, sad thing to realize her mother was more prone to romance than she was. It was pitiful that Maggie Dawson was the one seeing her lost lover as a shadow on the wall.

Maggie came out ten minutes later with the Star tucked into her pocket and tears all down her cheeks.

She reached into her other pocket and pulled out a wrinkled piece of paper.

Savannah looked at it, then began to shake. Somewhere along the way, she must have stopped believing in everything, because she even doubted this. It was a poem written in her father’s hand, and at the top was a hand-drawn portrait of eight stars and a woman, a perfect copy of the Star.

“I don’t know how to break this to you,” Maggie said, “but one way or another, if you’re lucky, love will break your heart.”

Savannah reached out to touch the paper, but recoiled when she felt how cool it was, like a slab of ice. She slid her hands into the pockets of her dress.

“Did you see Dad?” she asked.

Maggie turned away. She slid the poem back into her pocket and looked at the sky. “It’s all mumbo jumbo,” she said, but she was crying hard.

“That may be, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

Maggie walked to the mermaid fountain and ran her hand over the copper rim. “The lineup is on Monday. In case you want to stay.”

Savannah walked over and laid her cheek against her mother’s shoulder. Right now, in San Francisco, it would be cool as a cave. The bay would be dotted with sailboats, the hills smothered in pastel houses that looked like flowers. Tonight, there would be a chill in the air, the better for lovers to kiss and girls to wrap themselves up in red-hot dreams. San Francisco was the city of desire, but only if her heart was in it. Only if there was nowhere else on earth she’d rather be.

 E
IGHTEEN
 J
USTICE
J
UST
R
EWARD
 

W
hoever opened the front door was light on their feet, nearly silent, but what unnerved Jake more was that the intruder didn’t rouse the dogs. Rufus and Gabe were both downstairs, lying by the fire, and they ought to be going crazy. Instead, he heard their toenails clicking on the hardwood floor, Gabe’s fat tail thumping against the wall.

He sat up in bed. Since he’d moved back to the loft, he’d been disoriented and achy. Maggie and Doug must have moved the bed a few inches, because whenever he looked through the skylight, all the stars seemed out of place. Orion and Cassiopeia sneaked closer together each night, until she’d coiled herself around his belt. When dawn broke, he swore the sun rose out of the west. Besides that, he’d grown used to the unyielding concrete floor in his workshop. Softness just taunted him.

He got to his feet soundlessly. The gun was still in
the locked gun cabinet downstairs, useless. He looked around for a weapon, then froze when he heard footsteps coming up the stairs.

“You’re this close to a bullet between the eyes,” he bluffed.

The footsteps stopped, then started up again. Jake grabbed the lamp off the bedside table.

“Don’t shoot,” the voice said, and then a feathered hat rose up out of the stairwell.

Jake set down the lamp. It was almost certain he was dreaming, and if he was, then he just wouldn’t wake up. Someone had come back for him, and he would like to end it right there, with the one happy ending he was entitled to. He prayed she didn’t say another word.

Savannah walked toward him and would have kept on coming, if he hadn’t stuck out his hand and stopped her a foot away. “Whatever you’re doing,” he said, “you might want to reconsider. No doubt I’ll be picked out of a lineup Monday morning.”

She brushed aside his hand and slipped her arms around his waist. He closed his eyes tight. He might not be good enough to love, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to take what was offered. That didn’t mean he was a fool.

She tilted back her head to kiss him, and when she was done, she smiled. “We’re ditching Roy.”

She grabbed a few of his clothes, then pulled him downstairs. The dogs were already in her car, tearing up the leather upholstery. Jake looked back at the house, where he swore he saw Roy Pillandro standing on the roof, meteor dust building up on his shoulders.

“You see that?” he asked.

Savannah followed his gaze, then slipped her arm around his waist. She smelled so good he didn’t care if
he was crazy or not. She kissed the warm pulse at the corner of his neck.

“He can haunt you all he wants,” she said, “he’s still dead.”