The Wishing Garden (16 page)

“Well,” the woman said. “Don’t get me started on that.”

Seven years ago, when Sasha had lived with sixteen other sled dogs in a ten-by-ten concrete kennel, she’d spotted the good man peering through the chain-link fence. The next day, the man scaled the fence and tossed each dog a steak bone. The day after that, he cut the fence with a pair of steel loppers. He cracked the chains shackling all sixteen sled dogs, and every one of them bolted for the woods. All except Sasha, who’d had to pull a twenty-mile trek that morning in subzero weather and at last turned on her owner, biting him through the neck before he beat her bloody for it.

The good man had picked her up gently and carried her to the cab of his truck. He had put a blanket on the seat inside, along with a bowl of water. He drove an hour without stopping, then finally pulled to the side of the road. Sasha bared her teeth when he
reached for her, but he was either too stupid or brave to care. He found the single patch of her fur that wasn’t bloody or scarred and stroked her there. He leaned his face down to hers.

She would have torn him to shreds, if she hadn’t smelled the strange scent of his tears—fishy and rank, like sulfur. She had no pity, not since her owner beat it out of her, but nevertheless she licked the thin trails of tears at the corners of his eyes. He was ashamed to be human, and that was enough for her.

Back then, the good man talked very little, but when he did he yelled. He took his rifle out of the gun cabinet and jumped in his truck, the sweat on his arms charged with spite. Then for some reason he just stopped. He got out of the car and ran six grueling miles to the top of Kemper Peak. He ran until his heart was straining, and he was gasping for air. He let out a sound she hadn’t known humans could make, the sound sled dogs made when they couldn’t run anymore, but a man kept driving them forward anyway. The sound they made when they wished he’d whip them harder, so they could just die.

Despite the good man’s kindnesses, Sasha occasionally thought of escape. When wolves passed through, she stood at attention on the deck, imagining running until her paws were bloody, taking down a rabbit and flinging it side to side in her jaws to break its neck. Then she heard the good man’s quiet breathing in the cabin behind her, she felt the pull of him, almost like a tug on her collar, then like a caress. She turned her head away and let the wolves pass. She felt their scorn and understood it; nothing wild could understand that she could be trapped and content at the same time. Nothing untamed could comprehend that once she’d seen a man cry, she no longer needed adventure. She lived on love alone.

Rufus came to them the next year. Sasha was the first to notice him roaming the woods, so thin the first frost would kill him. Wherever he went, he left a trail of blood-lined feces and regurgitated grass.

The good man started leaving out food. First kibble on the ground, then rawhides on the stone steps, then a T-bone steak on the deck, which Rufus lunged at. Sasha let him eat the entire steak, bones and all, then she bolted out of the cabin and nipped his ear. Rufus cried out, then threw himself on his back—a good thing—or else she would have had to draw blood to show him who was in charge. He had welt marks on his nose, scabs on every inch of his paws and belly. When the good man saw the scars, he looked the same way she had when the wolves had passed through. As if he was debating the kind of man he wanted to be. As if he could go either way.

Six months later, they picked up a brown heap on the side of the highway, with its leg pointed in the wrong direction. Gabe was a mangy mess, and when Jake brought him to the vet, the woman said it would be kinder to put him to sleep. The good man didn’t do anything but step forward, but the vet ran for her splints. After that, Gabe could run like the wind, like there were villains on his heels.

Sasha could still make them cower just by growling, but she could no longer outrun them. In the last year, her legs had started shrinking at different rates. She was off-kilter now, her front paws shorter and curled inward. She hurt all the time, and though she wasn’t afraid of dying, she was afraid of leaving behind the one man who needed her.

The good man was in the back garden now, his face in shadows. She pushed herself to her feet. The pain whistled through her bones, but she was the meanest dog in town, so she didn’t show it. She
stepped off the gazebo and walked over to the good man. She pressed her snout against his leg and he reached down and stroked her. She had spent the last seven years trying to make him believe he was worth loving, but she had not succeeded. Every dog spent his or her life doing the same, but people were so stubborn; they saw their own greed and bitterness and cruelty and never bothered to look deeper, to their goodness, to the only parts of themselves dogs paid any attention to.

When the good man looked at her, she tried to tell him everything through her eyes: It was enough for one being to love you. Without him, she would have been another creature, she would have been vicious.

But he didn’t see this. He never had. She watched his eyes harden and by the time the hat woman reached him, he was a man who could frighten anyone, if they didn’t know he was really scared to death.

Savannah stood behind Jake as he attached the second arm to the bench without the benefit of nails. He used some intricate puzzle pattern, wood biscuits and glue. The sky reflected onto the sweat on his neck, turning his skin blue and glistening. His face, when he turned, was hard as stone.

She wandered around the garden, gathering clusters of pink flowers from the Juneberry trees. It was said the tree bloomed in April when the shad were running in the rivers, but this year, the fish must have been lazy. The flowers hadn’t come up until May, and the leaves were just now turning from purple to green.

Since no one was interested in her fortune-telling, she had been spending her days extolling the lusciousness of Fulsom tomatoes, and her nights in the garden. It had gotten so she could dig down two feet and
name a plant by the feel of its roots. She could identify a smell—jasmine, hibiscus, or freesia—ten feet away.

The other dogs raced back from the street now, tearing out black clumps of chamomile. They practically upended her as they passed, stirring up sawdust and leaves.

“You should get them under control,” she said.

Jake didn’t turn around. “How?”

Savannah snapped her fingers, and Sasha left his side for hers. She pressed her nose into Savannah’s thigh.

“Impressive,” Jake said. “But the others couldn’t care less.”

It was true. Rufus was peeing on the fussy rhododendrons, Gabe was running in circles around the mountain silver bell, cutting an ugly path through the Boston ivy.

Jake stood up. “They disappeared once for five days. When they came back, their paws were bloody. They wouldn’t eat anything but raw meat for a month.”

“You think that’s impressive? A bit of wildness? Seems to me the real challenge would be to go beyond what you were born as. To discover what makes you exceptional.”

She bent down to stroke Sasha’s throat, and heard the rock music of the dog’s heart. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Jake’s arms, and in the hush that followed, the muscles there tensed.

“I’d rather be ordinary,” he said finally.

Savannah looked up. He was the kind of man she’d do well to steer clear of, because he had obviously never been loved right. He looked like someone she’d have to spend a lifetime rehabilitating with long, slow kisses.

“What about you?” he asked. “What’s your area of greatness?”

Savannah was thankful for the diversion, and for the easiest question of all. “Emma,” she answered.

She walked around the garden, touching the velvet tops of the lilies. She stole glances at Jake, watching him hunch forward over his work.

“How long have you told fortunes?” Jake asked suddenly.

She snipped off a pure white lily and held it up to her nose. “I learned the tarots right after high school. In one way or another, I’ve been trying to make a go of it ever since.”

“What does your husband think of that?”

“Ex-husband,” Savannah said automatically. “He thinks it’s a crock of shit, but that’s because he was always drawing the Moon.”

Jake crouched down on his heels, like a catcher. He was not working now, just staring at what he’d done. “What’s the appeal of fortune-telling?”

“Are you kidding? I can change a person’s life just by letting them know good things are coming. It isn’t sorrow that kills people. It’s thinking the sorrow will never end.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

“Oh, I’m never wrong. Good news comes to everyone eventually, especially when they’re looking for it. I tell my clients to make ten wishes a day. God likes that kind of greed. The more you want, the more you get. The more you get, the happier you are. The happier you are, the more God likes it. So wish, wish, wish. Out of ten wishes, one is bound to come true.”

Jake stood up straight and stiff. He had not wished in years, anyone could see that. His hands were closed tight, so that even if a falling star headed straight for him, he wouldn’t be able to catch it.

“Here,” she said, “let me try something.”

She put the flower in her pocket and walked to his side. She took his left hand and had to pry it open; even then his fingers kept curling back down protectively. He had a three-quarter-inch scar in the middle of his palm. She ran her finger over it, then across the domed calluses. He tensed, but when she looked up he was staring past her, into the setting sun.

“I’m not very good at this,” she said. “My friend Ramona is the palm reader, but she’s taught me a few things.” She traced her finger along his lifeline. “You’ve had to change course. You see this break here? You went in a new direction, while your break went on its own path. You see? It will swing around and meet you again. You will come full circle.”

When he finally met her gaze, she couldn’t tell a thing about him. It was entirely possible he was the madman people whispered about, but she thought it was just as likely he was someone in desperate need of kissing.

She didn’t think, just rose up on her tiptoes, and even then she only reached his bottom lip. He didn’t even kiss her back for a moment, that’s how stunned he was. Then he slipped his arms around her waist and lifted her up to meet him, and something raw slipped out of his throat.

She had never been careful who she kissed. Most men needed kissing, in her opinion. But she might have made a mistake kissing this one, because once he started, he wasn’t about to let go.

But suddenly he set her down and stepped back, out of touching distance. She wanted to pull him back, but he gestured toward the house, where her father was coming out, a sweatshirt pulled on over his pajamas.

Doug was waving a piece of paper in his hands. “The first carving for the bench,” he said.

He weighed one hundred thirty pounds now; three months ago, he had been one sixty-eight. He had lost all his hair, but at least the radiation treatments were over and he could make it to the garden for a few minutes now and then. Every morning, Savannah read his fortune, and she didn’t even stop to consider all the Swords and Fives she’d taken out of the deck. The cards would find a way to tell the truth even without the worst cards, but what her father needed now was not close calls, but the World or the Ten of Pentacles. He needed extravagant possibilities. He needed to be assured, absolutely, that everything would be all right.

Doug held up the piece of paper. The skin on his wrist bubbled with gooseflesh, though it was over ninety, and even the black-eyed Susans were bending over in the heat. He started across the cobblestone walk, teetering on the uneven stones, but Jake bridged the gap in seconds, in three huge steps. He steered Doug to the porch swing, the one Doug had painted in bright yellow, and helped him sit down.

“See?” Doug said, oblivious. He held out the drawing. “I’ve finally come up with the perfect thing. The first carving ought to be of Superstition Mountain.” He turned to Savannah and smiled. “That’s where I asked your mother to marry me. That’s when my life began.”

Savannah stepped up on the porch. She sat beside him on the swing, while Jake studied the drawing.

“It was late in the day,” Doug went on. “Everyone else had already headed on down the mountain, but your mother wouldn’t leave. She held her arms up to the sky, and I swear, she caught the setting sun in her hands. Her hair turned this blistering shade of copper. I tell you, I think she swallowed the sun.”

Savannah smiled and took his hand, though she didn’t believe a word of it. Her mother closed her drapes against the sun every day. She didn’t hike any farther than the outlet mall.

“How could I not ask her to marry me then?” Doug asked. “She was made of fire.”

“And she said yes.”

Doug laughed. “Oh no. She said, ‘No way. Not until I start fashion school and hitch up with Delorosa’s in New York and then start my own line. Maybe ten years down the road.’ ”

“But it didn’t happen like that, because of me.”

“You made it better.”

“She never got what she wanted.”

“Well, that all depends on how you look at it,” Doug said. “It depends on how much Maggie is willing to admit on a given day.”

Savannah looked up at Jake. He tucked the drawing into his shirt pocket, then stared right back at her. He had eyes as blue as ice, and he didn’t blink.

“I’ll get going on this carving,” he said.

He walked around the side of the house. She hadn’t swallowed the sun, but she still felt on fire. Already, she had forgotten how cool fog could be. She was having trouble remembering why she’d wanted to avoid Jake in the first place.

“Nice man,” Doug said.

Savannah tensed, but when she turned to her father, his eyes were closed. She might have even thought he was sleeping, if a smile hadn’t crept slowly across his lips.

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