The Wishing Garden (23 page)

T
hings did not start to go Cheryl Pillandro’s way until both her husbands were dead. The first thing she did was stop living in dumps. She moved out to the classy Tucson suburbs, leased a two-bedroom condo, and started reading novels. She cut off nearly all her hair without worrying that someone would turn over a table because of it. She didn’t just throw out her high heels and short skirts, which her second husband, Roy, had forced her to wear, sometimes at knifepoint; she took one of Roy’s knives and slashed the clothes to rags, then used them to clean out the engine of her car.

Without a man around, she never watched hockey or bought beer, which was a good thing, because the smell of Budweiser made her go cold all over. Sometimes, of course, she missed a man’s arms around her. She missed someone taking out the garbage and scaring off door-to-door salesmen and stumbling into bed
at night. She missed that old sense of martyred superiority, when she had known that even if no self-respecting woman would look her in the eye, she was still better than the creature who drank too much and swung a mean right hook.

Now, she couldn’t date a man more than twice, or else he would find out he was too good for her. The men she went out with drank Cabernet and held doors open; they would never call again if they knew the things she had once stood for. What Roy had said fifteen years ago was true: He’d ruined her for anyone else. No other man would want her once he saw the marks Roy had left, once he knew the pain Roy had gone through to make her his.

Roy might have been right, but what he hadn’t reckoned on was that one day Cheryl would discover she didn’t need a man around at all. With her job at Dillard’s and the sale of her Phoenix house, she had enough money to pay the rent, even eat out occasionally. Why would she want a man choosing tacky restaurants, or getting violent over the color of her hair? As it stood now, she ate salad for lunch every day and hadn’t heard a cuss word in fifteen peaceful years.

Up until the time the sheriff showed up on her doorstep, Cheryl Pillandro actually thought her life might turn out fine.

“I’m Sheriff Merrill,” the man said. “I’m afraid I’ve got bad news about your husband.”

Cheryl walked back into her house. She picked up her water glass, then immediately spilt it. The sheriff took it out of her hands and went into the kitchen. He came back with a rag and the glass full of gin.

“Drink,” he said. When she finished it, he got her another, then sat down beside her.

“Your husband’s remains washed up from Wawani Lake last night. We’re doing an autopsy. We’ve already
pulled the missing person’s report you filed fifteen years ago.”

She set down the glass and stood up. She had no mementos in this house. Not a single photograph of either of her husbands, or one of her son, Jake. When her first husband, Paul Grey, had died of a sudden heart attack, she had worn his sweatpants and slept in his white work shirts. She didn’t cry until his smell went out of them, and then she didn’t stop for three weeks.

After Roy, though, she bought all new sheets and towels. She burned every pair of his underwear and held a garage sale for anything he might have touched—furniture, plates, even canned goods. She took pennies, if that was all she could get. After Roy, she slept thirteen hours a night and slowly but surely stopped ducking when a man reached for her, but now she was having trouble looking the sheriff in the eye. If she wasn’t careful, she’d start jumping at the sound of footsteps again, she’d start attracting trouble and figuring she deserved it when it came.

She tried to meet the sheriff’s gaze, but couldn’t. “Do you need my permission or something?”

The sheriff stood up. He was a good six feet, but tall men didn’t scare her. Tall men didn’t have anything to prove. No, what scared her were men who had flunked algebra and never been good in sports. Men who had known, early on, that they would never amount to anything and had better make other plans for getting what they wanted. Worthless men were the worst sort of mean; they had nothing to lose by taking a woman down with them.

“What I’d like, what would save us a whole lot of time, is for you to tell me the truth,” the sheriff said. “Roy Pillandro didn’t disappear. Someone smashed his skull in, and what I’d like to know is who.”

Fifteen years was a long time. Long enough to forget the tinny taste of fear and all the reasons she’d let a man do the things he did. When she looked back now she was just stupefied; she couldn’t come to any conclusion except that she’d been weak and stupid. She’d made the wrong choice years ago, when her son had stood outside her door in the rain, and she hadn’t let him in. She’d never forgotten the sound of her grown boy crying.

Cheryl Pillandro had a good life now, except that she regretted every minute of it.

“I have no idea,” she said. “As far as I know, Roy disappeared. He was a mean, drunken bastard, but if you’re asking if I killed him, no, I did not.”

“You have no idea who did?”

“That’s right.”

When the sheriff finally left, Cheryl sat down at her kitchen table. She drank three more shots of gin, but did not feel the slightest bit drunk. Then she walked into her bedroom and started to pack.

When she was through, she sat on the bed and ran her hand over the canary-yellow comforter. Roy would have detested the color, along with the four-poster bed and the baskets she’d hung low from the ceiling, so that anyone over five seven would crash into them. She had gone to work in the lingerie department of Dillard’s to help pay for this place, and Roy would have detested her work ethic, too. He had met her when she was nearly catatonic, and he had done his best to keep her that way.

The day after her first husband died, Cheryl quit her job and began sending her eight-year-old boy out for the essentials—toilet paper, Hostess Cup Cakes, which she served for breakfast, and frozen dinners. She let the lawn die and never got the Buick serviced. It chugged along for six years, then simply stopped one
afternoon at the intersection of Fifth and Central and refused to start up again. She had it hauled to the junkyard, where she got fifty dollars for parts.

She left the house only for Jake’s school plays, and then no happily married woman could bear to look at her. All of her so-called friends stopped calling a year after Paul’s death. They couldn’t drive past her house without weeping at her broken fence and dead lawn. Because of Cheryl, no man on the block got a moment’s peace. Their wives followed them everywhere, into bars and their sanctified garages, making sure they didn’t collapse in some dark corner, the way Paul Grey had.

Cheryl might have stayed locked up and shunned forever, if her water heater hadn’t blown. Her one pleasure was her afternoon bath, and when she stepped into a tub of ice-cold water, she knew she’d have to get help. The repairman was a thirty-year-old named Roy Pillandro who, after he’d replaced a gasket, plopped himself in Cheryl’s kitchen and refused to budge.

“I could use a glass of water,” he’d said. Cheryl had gotten it for him, careful not to touch his thick fingers as she handed him the glass. He had dirt under his fingernails. The top three buttons of his gray shirt were unfastened, revealing a bush of wiry black hair. She backed up until she was flush with the counter.

“And a bagel or something.” Roy Pillandro tapped those fingers on the table and stared at her. He had wavy black hair and ripples running down both cheeks. He had teeth the color of creamed coffee, which she would find out later he drank by the gallon. But when he smiled, which he did a lot, at least in the beginning, he made her itch in Paul Grey’s clothes.

While she was spreading cream cheese on Roy’s bagel, Cheryl caught a glimpse of herself in the
toaster—the thick wad of bangs in her eyes, the purple caverns beneath her eyes. She started shivering then and there. Roy got up from the table and put his hand on her shoulder.

“See now,” he said, “I happen to specialize in broken hearts.”

They were married one year later, and for the wedding Cheryl dyed her hair jet black, Roy sang his wedding vows in a deep, luxuriant voice. No one could have convinced her she wasn’t the most beautiful woman in the world that day. Or the luckiest.

Roy moved out of his mobile home and into the shambles of her house. Immediately, he threw out Paul Grey’s clothes without asking. He walked through the rooms turning around pictures on the walls.

“Can’t have him watching us. You have any idea the things a ghost can do?”

When he left for work the next day, Cheryl stored every picture of Paul Grey in a box in the attic, but still, a week later, she came home to find Roy ripping out the daylilies Paul had planted along the back concrete wall. The dead lawn was smeared with pulverized gold petals, Roy was up to his elbows in soil and plant guts, but Cheryl didn’t feel more than a ripple of fear. She thought it was kind of sweet, actually, the way Roy was jealous of a man who was dead as dust.

After Jake started his second year at ASU, Roy sold his classic Mustang and bought a used forty-foot houseboat. He quit his job and called a realtor, all in one afternoon. He strutted into the kitchen and grabbed Cheryl from behind.

“Pack your bags, babe. We’re heading to Wawani Lake for a life of leisure.”

“But this house …”

“Fuck this house. We’re selling it. We’ll make a ton.”

“It’s
my
house,” she said. “I’m not—”

She didn’t see it coming. In the early days, she never did. She thought he was just leaning in to hug her. By the time his fist landed in her stomach, she was already puckered for a kiss.

The force slammed her into the cabinet. She didn’t lose her footing, something she would always do later, when she discovered it was harder for him to hit a low target. She grabbed the countertop for support, then Roy punched her again, this time in the ribs.

“You’ve got nothing without me,” Roy whispered, rubbing his fist as if she’d done him damage. “You got that?”

She couldn’t breathe well enough to answer, so he took that for a yes. He drove her to the real-estate broker’s office that afternoon, but when he left to go to the bathroom, she ripped up the paperwork. “I’m not selling. My boy’s going to stay in that house and go to college. I’m headed for a life of leisure.”

That life of leisure turned out to require a huge amount of work on Cheryl’s part. The houseboat was rank and barely floatable, the closest supermarket an hour’s drive away. Though Cheryl scrubbed down the toilets daily, mosquitoes still grew in the tank. The thin orange carpeting sprouted dark green mold in the corners. Roy could not understand why she didn’t do something about it.

“Lower the asking price on your house,” he said one night, when his foot went right through the decking and halfway down the rotted pontoons. A couple of belly-up fish floated by, victims of the highest level of contaminants in any lake in the western United States. “Why the hell hasn’t it sold?”

Cheryl managed not to smile. It was her only victory, fooling Roy into thinking she’d give up one more thing for him. Her house had never been on the market.
Jake lived there, drawing on his father’s life insurance policy to pay the mortgage and taxes.

“The market’s slow,” she told him. “Give it time.”

“Time,” Roy spat out. “Why should I wait around for a few luxuries? I like things nice, you hear me? I’m a man with some
class.”

He turned so fast, she didn’t have time to react, and even if she had, she wouldn’t have known what to do differently. He slapped her hard across the face, so hard the mark of his hand would last for days. So hard she saw stars, thousands of tiny white lights that had to be a consolation for something.

“Now fix this.” He stormed off the boat to the dock, and in a moment, she heard the squeal of tires.

She lay on the deck without moving, just breathing in the stench of stagnant water and dead fish. By the time Roy came back, with flowers and plywood to fix the hole, the sun was up over the brown hills and he was crying.

“God, Cheryl,” he said, kneeling down beside her. “Why do you make me do this? Don’t you know I love you?”

He put his head in her lap and she stroked his hair. The flowers were wild daisies, the kind that grew like weeds on the hills surrounding the lake. They were already dying.

The next night, when she overcooked the spaghetti noodles, he hit her again. A week later, when she changed the channel from one of his hockey games, he grabbed the scissors and cut off her hair at the shoulders. She started sleeping on the very edge of the bed, trying not to breathe, until he hit her for that, too.

She couldn’t leave him; he would only come after her and beat her for it. Besides, where would she go? Her son was in college, better off without her, and Roy
had made certain she’d lost all her friends. Roy was slowly killing her, sure, but without him she would have died a long time ago. She would have curled up in Paul Grey’s house and willed herself dead, but now she cleaned that awful houseboat, fixed Roy his rotten meals, and despised him so much her body crackled with animosity. Hate woke her up in the morning, so she could spit into Roy’s bowls of cereal. Hate straightened her spine while she made Roy double margaritas, to cover up the taste of the trout guts she’d mixed in. Hate carried her to the store, where she’d gone as far as buying a box of rat poison, which she kept beneath her bed. Hate made her stand up to almost anything, because someday she would have her revenge.

Then one night, after noticing another water stain on the carpet, Roy grabbed her right arm and yanked it back until it snapped.

“I could kill you,” he said.

“Well then do it! Although, frankly, it won’t make much difference.”

He let go. Her arm was burning, but she wouldn’t rub it in front of him. That was the game they played; he pretended he wasn’t a monster, and she never let on how much damage he’d done.

“Look what you’ve turned me into,” he said, and she thought he might cry.

After he left, she made a sling out of one of his shirts; by the next morning, her arm was gray and lifeless as the lake. She felt almost giddy from the pain, from how much she could stand. Every time he hit her, she sent Roy one notch deeper into hell.