The Night Garden (33 page)

One of the other women stepped forward. “We know it’s a ridiculous rumor. We just want you to set it straight.”

“She means, prove it,” another woman said.

“Yes, just prove it!”

“Let us in the garden.”

“Prove you’re not dangerous.”

“Let us in!”

Olivia took three steps backward as the voices increased. The sound, so brash and hostile, nearly made her want to hold up her hands against it, as if she could block it that way. “Stop,” she said. “Please. Just stop. Everyone.”

The boarders grew quiet.

“I’m not poisonous. That’s not even possible.”

Mei stepped forward. “So then you won’t mind proving the theory wrong.” She held out her hand, palm down. “Just one little touch. You can draw an
O
for Olivia. And if nothing happens within a day, then we’ll know what people are saying isn’t true.”

Olivia looked at Mei’s outstretched hand. In her mind, she could imagine the raised red
O
that would eventually form there if she did as she was asked. How damning it would be. Everyone would look at Mei’s skin, and they would know the truth. Would they leave if they found out what she was? Would they leave if they
didn’t
? And what would she do without them?

She gazed at Mei. “Why are you doing this?”

Mei said nothing.

“Are you angry that you didn’t get your answer yet?”

Mei shrugged.

“Someone’s making you do this. It’s not a choice. Who?”

“Enough talking,” Mei said. “Are you going to touch me or not?”

“Look, I don’t have to prove
anything
to you or to anyone.”

“We say you do.”

“And what if I don’t?”

Mei tipped her head. “Your leaky old barn isn’t the only place for us in town.”

Another woman, Libbie, stepped forward. “This is getting out of hand. Olivia, you don’t have to touch her if you don’t want to.”

“Thank you, Libbie.”

“Just let us peek in the garden at least, so we can set the record straight about the things people are saying you’ve got in there.”

“No!” Olivia nearly shouted, surprising herself. “No one’s touching me and no one’s going in the garden. And if you all don’t like it then you don’t have to stay here. You can—you can just—”

“What?” Mei said. “We can what?”

“You can go!” Olivia’s breath came fast. And then the words were spilling out of her, angry and hurt and defensive, all her pain over Sam, her sense that she’d failed him, failed her father, failed everyone. “Just go! Right now.” She saw the boarders look at one another in confusion and disbelief. “I mean it. All of you—out! No more questions. Don’t just stand there looking at me. Go!”

One of the boarders stepped forward. “Wait—Olivia, we just—”

“No. No more. Everyone out. Now. I don’t want to see any of you again.”

“No skin off my back,” Mei said. “Come on, ladies.”

It was a moment before they began to move—some of them glaring at Olivia, some looking at her with a kind of pity that Olivia wished she hadn’t seen. Olivia was struck dumb by the sense that she’d just done something horribly and irreversibly wrong. But what else could she do? They’d forced her to it. They’d brought it on themselves. Whether she revealed her secret to them or not, they were going to leave. And the only choices she had were either to see them leave in horror of her, with the full knowledge of her monstrous nature, or see them leave like this—annoyed, suspicious, but still uncertain of anything that could damn her.

She watched the boarders file out of the little alcove at the
foot of the Poison Garden, Mei sauntering behind. “Mei,” Olivia said.

Mei turned around and looked at her.

Olivia spoke through clenched teeth. “I know you think you’re here looking for an answer about whether or not to keep your baby. But what you don’t realize is that the real question you’re trying to figure out is who you want to be. That’s what everyone here’s trying to figure out. It’s the
only
question.”

Mei frowned.

Olivia pulled herself up. “Who do you want to be, Mei? Yourself? Or the person that other people want you to be?”

“You figured it out.”

Olivia nodded. “I don’t know what Gloria promised you. But I hope it was worth it. Now go. I don’t want to see you here again.”

When they were gone, Olivia stood at the door of the Poison Garden, key in hand and Mei’s words ringing in her ears. Though every cell of her body wanted her to open the door, she did not. Instead, she ran as fast as her exhausted legs could carry her, down and down until she was at the bottom of Solomon’s Ravine. She had lost the safety and pleasure of touching Sam and had become once again dangerous to him. She had lost the Penny Loafers. Winter was going to come whether she liked it or not, the smell of it lurking under the changing breezes. She at least wanted to know that nothing with her father had changed.

But instead of finding Arthur bent over his grill in Solomon’s Ravine, she found only a notepad on his kitchen table. It was full of crossed-out words and did not look like a finished draft, but there was her name on the top of a paragraph, clear as day, in her father’s handwriting. She began to read, and as she did, she sat down.

About the Bush

Solomon’s Ravine was haunted—that’s what people said. It was haunted, alternatively, by a virgin in a prom dress, an Indian shaman, a murdered slave, and a turncoat soldier from revolutionary days. Arthur Pennywort was intimately familiar with the ghosts who lived in the bottom of the ravine, but the ghosts that haunted him were far more terrifying than any ghosts in stories. He saw himself again and again, his young self on repeat, making the mistakes he wished he could go back and unmake, while his old self tried fruitlessly to make sense of it—what he’d done, why he’d done it, and how it all seemed to have gotten away from him so fast.

One day shortly after Sam Van Winkle had reappeared in Green Valley, Arthur had sat down and started writing. He had resolved to put his last confession on paper, with the intention of either giving it to Olivia on his deathbed or of burning it someday on the coals of a simmering fire and taking his secrets to his grave. The decision of what to do with his confession could wait, but the urge to write it—which sat so heavily on his chest he sometimes could not breathe for the weight of it—could not be put off. And so each night he sat scratching at his notebook and trying to find a way to explain.

Very early on, he and Alice had known their daughter was unusual, just like so many things on the farm were unusual in their varying ways. One day when she was three, Arthur had found Olivia wrapping her chubby hands around a stray sprig of poison ivy that had climbed up a post around the chicken yard, and he’d panicked and scooped her up and away. She’d had no adverse reaction—not to that ivy, not to the pokeweed berries he’d caught her eating, not to the stinging nettles that she’d tried to give her mother as a bouquet. When the three of them were together, it seemed that nothing could harm them, that happiness was effortless and would go on forever and ever and never change.

After Alice died, Arthur’s mind became like a pit of black tar under a black sky and a black moon. He raged and groveled and moped before a God that he didn’t even believe existed—as if he could haggle and bargain for things to be other than how they were. The Pennywort fields produced a barely adequate yield, which everyone said was miraculous given how little effort Arthur made to help things along. Olivia had assumed responsibility for her father’s basic needs, keeping him fed and functioning, and attempting to bolster his mood with agreeable behavior and good food, to point out beautiful things he might not have otherwise noticed, to encourage him to find tiny reasons to be happy if he had no big reasons. Though Arthur sometimes felt guilty about Olivia fussing over him, he made only the most feeble attempts to tell her that she shouldn’t bother so much with him, that she should be going out with her friends and doing the things kids do. But Olivia insisted on staying close, and since she was the only thing that made him happy, he didn’t really have the strength to shoo her away. As she grew older, the maze and even the farm began to thrive under her care.

For all those years the only thing that made Arthur happy was his daughter. Hers was the only company he could stand. When he wasn’t with her, he sometimes felt he didn’t exist—or at least, that he had no point in existing. But then, when Olivia was not quite thirteen, something changed.

It started with a dog. A neighbor had come with it in the back of his pickup, saying he’d found it by the side of the road and asking if Arthur wanted it. It was a furious, red-brown mutt named Sagebrush that growled, barked, and lunged toward anyone who got near it. It drooled and snarled and looked at Arthur with blood rage in its eyes. Arthur took one look at the animal and felt violently energized.
I’ll straighten him out,
he said.

For six months Arthur had been dedicated to bringing the beast into submission, promising Olivia that the dog she was so desperately afraid of would soon be her most loyal protector and friend. But then Sagebrush had decided to pick a fight with a black-clawed sow in the late spring, and that was the end of that.

When the snarling dog was gone, Arthur took up collecting snarling taxidermies, which were less intimidating to his sweet daughter but equally as thrilling to him. Anyone could get a mean dog, but not anyone could get a snow leopard. He invited the other farmers in the area to the farmhouse to show off his magnificent hunting owl and snappish wolverine, and for a time, the joy of it sustained him. But soon the thrill of stuffed animals eventually stopped being so thrilling. And so next he turned to antique firearms, the older the better. Unfortunately, the farm barely broke even that year and he’d already spent too much money on his taxidermies, so he could afford only one-half of a set of eighteenth-century dueling pistols. But inevitably, even that partnerless gun failed to please him. On and on it went, one not exactly dangerous hobby leading to another, each leaving him emptier than the one before.

In Solomon’s Ravine, where he’d had a lot of time to think, he understood what his young self could not: that after Alice died, he’d wanted to thumb his nose at death, to dominate it in his small way. He’d wanted to take charge of a world he had no control over, to be master of dangerous things. He was—looking back—more than a little unhinged.

One day when the early spring clouds were splotchy in the sky, he found his beautiful daughter behind the barn admiring a delicate young lattice of bittersweet nightshade, and though he’d seen the plant before, each sweetly drooping dart of petals now struck him like an arrow to the heart. He suggested, in that moment, that he and Olivia start their own garden of poisonous plants and flowers. If Olivia had reservations, she didn’t voice them; she just said yes.

A space in the center of the garden maze was cleared—because where better to hide questionable judgment than in plain sight? Walls were put up, and the first flower they transferred was the nightshade behind the barn. Olivia seemed proud of their work; she made decisions about which plants should go where and how they should be cared for. Arthur enjoyed seeing his daughter take charge of the garden; she was an accomplished gardener, fearless and creative. She’d taken Arthur’s idea of a garden of poison plants and she’d made it her own.

But as he and Olivia watched the new flowers and shrubs flourishing in the Poison Garden, Arthur also began to notice Olivia spending more time with Sam. As far as he could tell, they were as innocent as they’d ever been. But then, one late summer day when Olivia had not known he was inside the chicken coop swapping out old bedding for new, he caught a glimpse of the two with their arms around each other beneath the old hickory in a way that was definitely not innocent.

He looked away, finished with the chickens, and resolved that he would not bring up what he’d seen. He wanted to be
happy for his daughter. He truly did. But in those days, his pessimism about his own life lent a pessimistic lens to what he predicted for her. He worried about her. Sam was a good boy—but would he always be? He was older than Olivia; Arthur knew his daughter had a good head on her shoulders, but nature was nature, fate was fate, and youth was a garden of bad choices. He became suspicious of Olivia—and paranoid. He worried that one day he would wake up and discover that she and Sam had decided to elope, that she’d left the farm and left him alone there forever. And why wouldn’t she want to leave? It was a miserable place, with only her miserable father for company. Probably she’d been making secret arrangements to abandon him and thought him too old and doddering to know.

When he wasn’t fretting about her secret plot to forsake him, he began to worry that something would happen to her—an accident with a tractor, a slip on concrete, lightning and falling trees. There was nothing in the universe that could guarantee he wouldn’t lose Olivia, too. When she complained about a headache or a tickle in her throat, he felt as if his world was about to go into a tailspin, as if she were dying. There was no small voice in his mind to point out that he was being excessively nervous and paranoid—there was only fear, fear like he’d never known before. A mistakenly identified mushroom had killed Alice so fast that when he’d learned she was gone it took days and days before he really understood it. He couldn’t lose Olivia so suddenly and unexpectedly. He
wouldn’t.

And so, as Sam’s interest in his daughter continued to increase, so too did Arthur’s worries. Until one day, the worst thing—the very worst thing that could have happened apart from Olivia’s death—came to be: Sam sought him out among rows of acorn squash the summer Olivia was sixteen and said:
Sir, I’m in love with your daughter. And I want to ask your permission to marry her.

If the rows of his fields had turned black in that moment Arthur could not have been more distressed. But he hid his anger away under the guise of fatherly concern, even while he was already making secret plans. He
was
perfectly prepared to part with Olivia—all fathers must part with their daughters someday. But not
yet.
Not
then.
He would die before he let Sam take her away from him, Sam who walked around Green Valley like he held the key to the town, but who was definitely hiding something dark and sinister within him that Olivia needed to be protected from.