The Night Garden (12 page)

“See you around,” he said. He turned and walked his slow, serious walk back toward the road. And when her walkie-talkie chirped she was glad to hear Tom’s voice, calling her back to the steady, dependable work of the farm.

The Forest for the Trees

It was just before sundown when she went in search of her father. She did not bother heading into the geological gutter that was Solomon’s Ravine because she knew he would not be there. She’d come to know his habits like she knew her own. On an evening like this, when the air felt a little lighter on a person’s skin than it had in ages, he was more likely to be found at Hemlock Pond than in the ravine. Certain summer days were made for fishing, and this was one.

“Hey!” Olivia called out toward the lake as she strode through knee-high grass. Her father, who was struggling to push the rowboat off the rocks and into the glassy pink water of the lake, looked over his shoulder with the quickness of a wild animal. He relaxed when he saw it was her.

“Olivia. How nice. You’re just in time!”

Hemlock Pond had been dammed in the early 1900s by some enterprising Pennywort. It was the family’s private fishing hole. The moldering ruins of a small bungalow stood near the water’s edge, its only inhabitants a family of mischievous raccoons.

She hurried past a cluster of wild rhododendrons toward her father; the keel of the rowboat was half in the water. “Allow me,” she said. He climbed in, groaning a little as he pulled one
leg into the boat using his two hands. Olivia took off her boots and left them at the water’s edge; then she gave the boat a strong push and hopped in. A blue heron stood at the lake with its head bowed as if in prayer.

Her father had long relied on Olivia to bring him his food, his coffee beans, and his vitamins, but he had never stopped taking pride in catching his own fish. Pike, bass, perch, and sunnies—as well as a fair number of frogs—were plentiful in the pristine waters. Though Arthur’s move out of the farmhouse all those years ago had curtailed many of Olivia’s favorite father-daughter activities—like pancake breakfasts and hours spent paging through field guides and seed catalogues—they had never stopped fishing together. It was a thing they had done when Alice was alive; it was a thing they did now.

“Good day today?” Arthur asked in the way he always did.

“Yeah. Good,” Olivia replied in the way she always did. “Where we headed?”

Arthur scanned the perimeter of the quiet, low lake. “Round about those aspens at the far edge.”

She pulled the oars gently, in no hurry, absorbing the peace of the evening while it was still there to be absorbed. There were choppier waters ahead. She and Arthur had not had many serious talks apart from discussions of the farm. In conversation they regularly avoided anything that might call up any kind of deep emotion. They did not acknowledge Olivia’s long life stretching out before her, forever void of romance, children, or lasting friendship; and they certainly did not talk about what had happened with the poison garden—what was the point? What was done was done, and what was coming they could not control. Instead, they chatted as any two strangers would chat. They talked about their most basic of basic needs, always offhandedly. Moments of mild discord sometimes came when Olivia said Arthur needed a doctor, and Arthur was insistent
that he could self-diagnose and heal. In the end they’d learned to compromise: No doctor would trek into the bowels of Solomon’s Ravine, but Arthur’s old friend Jacob, a retired veterinarian, agreed to do it—and according to Arthur, what was a human but an animal anyway?

There had been times, Olivia thought, when her father had meant to have some heart-to-heart with her. He would get a cloudy look in his eye and say
I need to talk to you.
She would wait patiently while he struggled to find the right words, muddling through convoluted logics and non sequiturs that would eventually sidle right up close to the thing he wanted to say—but then, inevitably, fail to reach it. He would remind her of a misstep or mistake that he or she had made, utterly trivial compared to the dramatic warm-up, and Olivia would know he’d dodged his true topic yet again. He usually ended on a note that went along the lines of “Well, I suppose we’re okay then.” At which point she would assure him, “Dad. We’ll always be okay.”

But now, they truly did need to have a difficult conversation. And Olivia found she had little useful knowledge of how she might seriously and directly approach the subject of his leaving Solomon’s Ravine. He knew it was on her mind; she alluded to it often enough, nudging him via offhanded remarks and short asides to consider it. But the time for consideration was over. This was serious, and needed a full, serious conversation. The few times she had tried to have a heart-to-heart with him—about Alice, about his unending grief—he looked afraid she might shoot him and she’d felt so guilty afterward that she regretted putting him through it.

She rowed in silence, glad for the friendly song of the peepers in the trees around them, while her father went about arranging his bait box and pole.

“Dad,” she said.

He blinked toward her; the rough gray-white of his beard
made the color of his eyes stand out with shocking greenness, like moss against a fresh snow. He seemed, for the moment, happy. It had been some time since they’d fished together and she hated to ruin the moment. But the great hidden gears of Gloria’s machinations were turning, and something had to be done.

“There was one thing I needed to talk to you about,” she told him.

He was slow to answer. He put on his glasses then baited his hook, his eyes crossing as he focused on the work. “Go ahead.”

“You know the neighbor, Gloria.”

“Gloria?” He stuck his tongue out of his mouth sideways; his eyebrows were raised as he focused on his task. “Gloria … Gloria …”

He wasn’t paying attention. “The neighbor, Dad.
Gloria
.”

The worm popped on the hook. “Ah yes. Gloria. The one on the ridge.”

She hesitated. “You know Gloria’s been after me to kick the Penny Loafers out of the barn.”

“Bah,” he said. Olivia held her breath as he cast, and breathed easier when no bit of fabric or flesh was inadvertently hooked. “That barn’s as sturdy as it’s ever been. Hasn’t lost so much as a roof tile in ten years.”

“How would you know that, if you haven’t been up to see it?”

“Oh—well. An educated guess.”

She let off on the oars. “It looks a lot different since you were last up there.”

“I’m sure it does.”

“You should see the maze. We’ve been working on a new garden of all yellow flowers. I swear it’s shaping up to be as bright as the sun.”

Arthur glanced at her as if to say,
I know what you’re up to.
He
adjusted the tension on his line. “So what’s this Gloria person doing?”

“She’s snooping.”

He scoffed. “For what?”

“Information on you.”

“Well, that’s not very polite.”

“We think there’s a possibility she’s considering asking social services to, um, intervene.”

“Who is we? You and Tom?”

“Me and Sam,” Olivia said.

“Really? Well then …”

Well then what?
she wanted to ask him. But instead she said, “You’re missing the point here. She’s got a problem with you living in the ravine.”

“It’s my right to live here.”

Olivia dug the oars in hard. “Yes, it’s your right. But I’m the one who’s going to get in trouble for it. She could say I’m neglecting you. Or abusing you. She could say that you’re unable to take care of yourself, and that I’m incompetent as a guardian.”

“Guardian? You’re not my guardian; you’re my daughter.” He shook his head, frowning. “I spend more time taking care of myself than any man my age. Look at me: I’m out here
fishing
for my own dinner, for God’s sake. I don’t have a guardian.”

“Okay, Dad,” she said softly. “Just calm down. I just … I’m afraid you’ll be taken away if we don’t do something about your living situation.”

The end of his fishing pole bobbed. “What’s this,
taken away
? To have me
taken away
? Do you mean to jail? Because I can’t be put in jail, Alice. I never broke a law in my life.”

“Olivia.
Dad,
I’m Olivia.”

“Of course you’re Olivia. That’s what I said.”

She sighed and rested her arms for a moment. She didn’t believe
her father was crazy—even if the evidence mounted more each day to suggest otherwise. But he was getting older. And while he wasn’t losing his mind, he did seem to momentarily misplace it now and again. His life of solitude didn’t do much to help his clarity of thinking. Olivia knew this from her own experience: The long cold winters did things to her, body and mind, wrecking her with bouts of miserable and interminable loneliness, when the minutes crystallized into hours as the temperature dropped. As the days grew shorter and harder, she caught herself talking to people who weren’t there, or to herself, or to her houseplants. She waited in desperation for the mailman, who—truth be told—always seemed a little afraid of her. She lived for the work that needed to be done over the winter: of breaking the scrim of ice on the chicken’s water before she fed them, of organizing the seeds in her greenhouses, of chopping wood, of shoveling snow and ice, of anything that might ease the ache of being so completely and utterly alone. By March, when the Penny Loafers began to return, she had trouble finding the words she was looking for, trouble following the thread of a conversation for very long. Little by little as the valley turned green once again, she felt her spirit rejuvenated, her hope renewed.

Arthur, however, spent
every
season alone, spoke to no one but her, and never had the opportunity for the mental restoration that company brings.

He was not looking at her, and so she spoke in as confident a voice as she could. “Gloria hasn’t done anything yet. I mean, she hasn’t officially logged a tip with social services or anything, so right now we’re still okay. They can keep doing what they’ve always done—you know, ignore it. But if Gloria does put in a report, it’s definitely going to look like I’m neglecting you. And they might not be able to look the other way.”

“Neglecting you?”

“No. Not you. Me.” She knew her father was plenty sharp. But he didn’t always
listen.
His mind wandered into territories that demanded all of his attention, and when he realized it was his turn to speak, he sometimes tried to hook back into the conversation by repeating the last words she said. This was nothing new: He’d been doing it for as long as she could remember. When he was young, it had been a quirk. Now that he was old, it seemed to be more sinister. “Are you listening?”

“Of course I’m listening. You’re the most devoted of daughters. The most devoted in the world!”

“But …” Olivia felt her throat tighten. “But from the outside I doubt it looks that way.”

“Then just … well, just—” He fumbled for words. A fish nibbled the line but he didn’t seem to notice. “Invite the woman to come down and pay me a visit. Invite the pope for all I care. They’ll all see that I’m really quite comfortable. And then they can all go home and leave me alone.”

“It’s not as easy as that.”

“Of course it is.”

“First of all,
she
wouldn’t be the one coming down to the ravine.”

“Then have Satan send her minions—it’s all the same to me.”

“You don’t understand,” she said, trying to keep the frustration out of her voice. “I’m talking about social services. You think they’ll see a happy old guy who’s doing just fine. The way you live—bathing in a creek, cooking on a camp stove, wearing clothes that are a step away from rags—all of it will just strengthen her argument.”

“No it won’t.”

“Dad, it will.”

“It’s a man’s choice to live the way he wants to.”

“Yes, but they’ll think you’re, uh, not in control of your mental powers.”

“I am!”

“Yes, but—”

“I’m perfectly lucid. Hear that? I can use the word
lucid.
If this Gloria person can’t see that, well then, I’ll …”

“You’ll what, Dad?”

“I’ll go live somewhere else. Somewhere she can’t find me.”

“Or you can move back into the farmhouse. Which would be better for everyone,” she said. Olivia bit down on the inside of her cheek. Did her father not know that he sounded like a child? Couldn’t he
hear
himself?

It seemed to her that Arthur had given up on living shortly after she’d become poisonous. Alice’s death had drained some of the life from him, and he might have gone on for the rest of his days in that state of half-miserable automation, marking time. But then, Olivia had confessed that she was poisonous, and sent him over the edge. Within a few weeks of learning what she had become, he had holed himself up in the ravine. Though her logical mind knew that it would be unjust to think that he’d left the farmhouse because he’d become repulsed by her, she’d been unable to stop the thought from occasionally creeping across her mind. Instead, she’d forced herself to cling to the more likely idea: that he felt responsible for what had happened to her, since it had been his fascination with poison plants that had exposed her to their toxins. It hadn’t been disgust that sent him packing; it was guilt. She tried to always keep her focus squarely on that idea, because if her focus strayed, it strayed into dark and miserable places, possibilities in which her father could not stand the sight of her and so moved away.

Occasionally—rarely—an old feeling set in, and she knew it to be anger. She’d forgiven her father for his unintentional crushing of her heart, for forcing her to grow up so fast, for putting her in charge of the farm when she hadn’t really wanted
it yet. But once in a while, she suspected herself of being mad at him. And when that happened—when she woke up from a restless sleep with her jaw aching from some dream she could hardly remember—she reminded herself: In spite of everything that had happened, she’d actually done just fine. She’d learned hard but important lessons of depravation and loss. And those lessons had served her well as she’d got older because she’d learned how to be alone, how to expect very little, and how to keep from relying on others for any sense of her own happiness. In a way, all of her early difficulties meant she would be able to bear her loneliness—with grace, if not with a modicum of contentment.