“Fifty.” Halfway across the apartment, Henry froze.

“Fifty. Sixty-five. Seventy-five. Ninety. One hundred. One hundred and twenty-seven.”

“One hundred and twenty-seven?”

“Kidding. You get her something really fine at one hundred and you’re probably good until at least one-fifty…”

The Wish

Carolyn Haines

Carolyn Haines has written more than fifty books. The latest in her Mississippi Delta series is Ham Bones. She also writes single titles. Hallowed Bones and Penumbra were named one of the top five mysteries of 2004 and 2006, respectively, by Library Journal, and Carolyn received an Alabama State Council on the Arts fellowship. An avid animal-rights supporter, she shares her home with nine cats, six dogs, and eight horses. Because no minute should go unused, Carolyn also teaches fiction at the University of South Alabama. Her website is www.carolynhaines.com.

It hasn’t rained for weeks, longer than anyone remembers. Each gust of wind carries tiny particles of dirt—soil shifting from place to place, fleeing across the borders of lawns, counties, and states. The land is on the move, as if it’s given up hope for America and is headed vaguely north, aiming to cross the border. It’s a long way to Canada from Mobile, Alabama.

The weather is all the talk in the grocery and feed stores, the nurseries and post office, places where I carry on the business of my life. Old men, as weathered and crinkly as the grass, study the sky that looks like spring and feels like Minnesota as they stand outside the Hickory Pit and the tractor dealership. They see nothing good. The climate is changing, and the farmers are catching the brunt of it. Gamblers at heart, they have no clue where to lay the odds in this New South of hard drought and hurricane.

Sitting in my pickup, waiting for a load of mulch and fertilizer while the heater blows ineffectually, I watch the dirt fly down Highway 45 in an orange cloud. Across the road, at the Stovalls’ abandoned nursery, a tulip tree sways purple against the clear blue sky of another cold, dry, windy day.

The late February winds, unusually strong for south Alabama, pick up the fallen petals of the tulip tree, and suddenly I see her shape against grass that glistens with melting frost. The coffee cup I hold slips from my nerveless fingers and drops to the floorboard. I never hear the crockery shatter, nor the tinkling of the wind chimes abandoned at the nursery. My world goes mute. Again.

She stands beneath the tree, beside barren hydrangeas and glossy green miniature gardenias that will permeate the April air with a scent as delicious as taste. How easily I’d assumed that spring was a season I’d experience—waiting has become my only game. I haven’t been to a doctor for fifteen years, but I feel healthy enough. Illness isn’t my destiny. She’s taught me that.

She nods at me, an acknowledgment of our pact, and then she’s gone. The bruised petals fall softly to the thawing ground. Bosco, my old coonhound, breaks into a long, low howl in the backseat of the truck. He understands who and what she is. The enemy.

Mobile isn’t the center of anything, merely a small port city on a bay where lazy rivers meet in one of the last untainted habitats in the Southeast. It’s a sleepy place with smiling, crocodile politicians one step removed from the horse thieves and slave traders who first took the land from the Choctaw Nation. While the town is physically beautiful, it lacks the sophistication of New Orleans, or at least pre-Katrina New Orleans. The Moral Majority holds sway in Mobile, those prunelike faces set against the joie de vivre that made New Orleans so special.

I should have left Mobile, but it’s because of her that I’ve remained here for so many years. Her and a certain ship’s captain who finds the empty downtown of old Mobile to his liking. No Disney creation, this pirate holds the answer to my dilemma.

Anxious in my grief and unable to sleep one long night, I walked the empty streets. By happenstance that evening, I saw him plying his trade in a dark alley, and I made it my business to learn his haunts and habits. He is my field of expertise, the most important element of my future. The cobblestone alleys of old Mobile are a perfect hunting ground for him, and one he returns to regularly, because in the dark of the moon, anything that’s truly desired can be found in old Mobile.

Once I deliver the mulch and fertilizer, I’ll put my plan into action. By moonrise, I’ll find him, the man, or some would call it a thing, who will help me.

To fully explain my story, I have to go back in time twenty years to a hot August day. Sometimes I forget that once I was another person. A wife and mother. A woman with dreams and expectations. To understand how I came to this point, the past has to be pulled out like so many wrinkled snapshots and examined.

It’s an irony, really, because I hate remembering. In memory, the images are so sharply focused they slice through the layers of alcohol I’ve used to pad my pain. People tell me that I live in the past, like that’s an accusation of moral degeneracy. “You live in the past” in their mind equates with “You killed your children.” Hardly. We all have a past. We all have a present. But not all of us have a future.

Once upon a time, I had a future. I had the family and job, the normal, boring things that Middle America takes so for granted. I also had a mortgage and a car note and nights when my husband and I made passionate love and forgot the dirty dishes in the sink, the piles of laundry waiting, and the spats about bills and babies. Today, none of those things trouble me. They’re all in the past, along with my heart.

On a too-hot August morning twenty years ago, I woke up plagued with a fever of unexplainable origin. The day was sweltering, even for south Alabama, and the humidity lay on my skin like a wool suit. We were in dog days, when it rains each afternoon and Mobile takes on the foliage of the tropics, thick and lush and green. Dennis had a breakfast meeting, and even though I felt terrible, I took Kala and Kevin to day care. My intention was to return home, shower, and go to work. I had a client meeting that couldn’t be missed, a big account, a cash bonus.

The antihistamine I’d taken in an effort to dry up my sniffles had left me feeling dizzy and disoriented. The twins, identical even in their moods, were quiet as I buckled them into the car seats and headed out, a cup of hot tea in my hand. The day care was only eight blocks away. Eight short blocks in a residential neighborhood shaded by live oaks that buckled sections of the sidewalk with gnarled roots.

I was almost there—I could see the day care sign with the happy alphabet letters spelling the name—when I saw her in the Darcy yard. I thought I was hallucinating, and I slowed the car for a better look. Some would call her a wind wraith, a substanceless creature of twigs and leaves, but she isn’t. Nor is she a sprite or fairy or gremlin. I stopped the car, completely stunned at this creature formed of debris and spinning air currents who beckoned to me from the shade of the Darcys’ yard. I didn’t know it then, but I know now what she is. She’s an angel. A dark angel with a list of names. At the top of her list were Kevin and Kala.

I never saw the Ozark Water delivery truck that hit me from behind. I never even had a chance to glance at my children in the rearview mirror. My seat belt stopped me from impaling myself on the steering column, but my forehead cracked the wheel, and I was knocked unconscious, or so they told me at the emergency room when I tried to tell the doctor what I’d seen. No one believed me, but it doesn’t stop it from being true.

From far away I heard sticks and sand pelting the windshield. Semiconscious, I fought to wake up, to protect my babies. A man yelled at my window, but I didn’t pay any attention to him. I watched her, standing at the passenger side of the car. Her hands reached through the car, lovely hands, fine boned and delicate. Kala took her hand first, then Kevin. Each one so trusting.