The Night Garden (37 page)

“
You
told me,” she said, worrying that he was cooking his brain in that damned suit. “Remember? You proposed.”

“No—I don’t mean last week. I mean, when we were kids. I took that job at the lumber yard, rode my bike there every day, and saved up to buy you a ring.” He laughed under his breath. “It think it would have turned your finger green. But I was so set on marrying you.”

She adjusted herself a little on her knees to better look into his eyes through the crosshatch of vines. She reached to squeeze
his shoulder through his suit; she could barely feel his flesh beneath the layers of plastic and padding. His skin was beginning to look clammy. Of the two of them, he was in much more immediate danger. “I would have said yes,” she told him. She touched the plastic above his lips with her fingertips. “I am saying yes, now.”

His smile was weak.

“But first we’ve got to get ourselves out of this mess,” she said.

He rested another moment, then lifted himself back to his feet. The sound of the falling ax echoed all through the valley, and when he had cut a hole big enough, he handed it through to her so she could go at the vines with the blade on her own. When she finally managed to squeeze herself out of her cage of poison ivy, her skin was scraped and her muscles were sore. But she was out, and she vowed that no matter the perceived pain of it, she would never go back in again. She pulled Sam’s arm around her shoulders to bear up some of his weight, and together they retraced his steps out of the tangled vines.

Coming Up Roses

It was said that Olivia Pennywort came out of the great terrible maw of poison ivy without an itch on her, that she walked across the vines as gracefully as if she were walking on water that her feet barely touched. While Sam Van Winkle was by her side, entombed in a heavy suit of plastic and trudging as if gravity had spontaneously increased, Olivia emerged from the entrance of the maze with bare arms and bare legs—and not so much as a hive on her glowing skin.

There was in fact quite an audience for their escape from the maze. A dozen people had heard about the tsunami of poison ivy that had grown so monstrously overnight at the Pennyworts’, and they’d come to see the explosion in the same way that they would have stood on their porches and watched if a car accident had happened outside of their homes. The Penny Loafers too walked the long roads from the homeless shelter back to the farm, slowing traffic as efficiently as if they were a herd of cows or sheep, ignoring beeping horns and swearing drivers.
Everything’s true,
they said, passing the rumors about Olivia along to the police as they arrived, and to men on the fire trucks as they arrived, and even to the fire department’s whiny, spotted dog.
She’s poisonous. She must be.

But Olivia didn’t care if fifty people, or five hundred people, were staring at her and Sam as they stripped the last clinging vines off their legs and arms and broke out of the maze. She waved to the paramedics, called them over when they hesitated, told them Sam needed help. They took him into the shade and quickly peeled him out of the awful bio-protector suit, then gave him water and held ice to his pressure points. Some of the men clasped him on the back, offering brash congratulations and boasts about close calls. Sam turned his head weakly and smiled.

Olivia, who had accepted a glass of water of her own, approached the Penny Loafers. They were clumped together like clustered flowers, looking at her with wary gladness and perhaps a bit of mistrust. Tom was with them, his hand on one woman’s shoulder even as he looked at Olivia with eyes that were frightened and wide. Olivia stopped before them, threw her long braid behind one shoulder, and said:
Just so there isn’t any confusion, all of this means I really am poisonous—just like everyone’s been saying.

The Penny Loafers looked at one another with concern, but Olivia told them not to worry. She was quite healthy and not a danger to anyone as long as people stayed away. And as for the walled-in garden—which she admitted was full of poisonous plants—she wasn’t sure how they were going to clean up all the poison ivy, but she would figure something out even if it meant cutting every last vine from its root by herself. The maze would come back bigger and better—next year, or the year after—and that would be okay.

“Does this mean you’re not mad at us?” one of the women asked.

“Mad?” Olivia tipped her head, considering. “What would I be mad about? You guys are welcome to come and go however you please.”

She saw some of the women glance at her, and they appeared to be relieved. Olivia couldn’t say what had happened to them at the shelter, but she knew for certain that there was no better place to be in Green Valley than the wide, enchanted acres of her farm.

“And what about our answers?” one of the women asked. “Now that the maze is, um, inaccessible.”

Olivia glanced at Sam in the distance. “You don’t need a twisted and tangled old maze to give you clarity about what you want.
The only thing that stands in the way of your inner wisdom is your fear of it. You can stay here as long as you need. And when you’re ready, you can just let your fear go. Maze or no.”

Some of the women glanced at one another; Olivia wasn’t sure if they thought she was crazy or prophetic. But at any rate, the group seemed to want to stay. Tom took a few steps away from the crowd. Olivia wasn’t sure, but he seemed to be … hurt.

“So that was it all along,” he said. “You were just poisonous? That’s why you always stayed away?”

She nodded.

Then, to her surprise, Tom began laughing. “Oh for God’s sake. Come here.” He went to her and wrapped his arms around her, quick and strong, and picked her feet off the ground.

“Tom! What the heck? Did you not hear me say I’m a danger to society?”

He put her down. “I’ve never had so much as an itch from poison ivy in my whole life. Olivia, I’ve cleared it off this farm for years with my bare hands.”

She smiled, but she found herself looking toward Sam, whom the paramedics were plying with water and ice. Some people had no allergies to poison ivy—or barely any at all. Others were exquisitely sensitive. It was the luck of the draw.

Tom touched her shoulder and squeezed it. “Go on. Go to him. He needs you.”

She smiled. And for the first time, she truly understood the depth of her relationship with Tom. While she had been telling herself that he was an acquaintance only, that they spent time together only because they had to, she saw that in truth he had a lot of affection for her, the same affection that she felt for him. He’d been a friend even when she’d believed she hadn’t had any. And she’d been his friend, too, even when she’d believed she was holding herself away.

She nodded at him, then crossed the yard to sit by Sam while he recovered, and then a long time more.

The day passed, then the night. A storm blew through with gentle thunder and quiet rain. The people of Green Valley began to speculate: What on earth was Olivia Pennywort going to do about the hazardous mess that was her garden maze? How would she clean up all that poison ivy? Not even she could do the task herself. In the newspapers, the tremendous growth was attributed to the particular juxtaposition of drought, rain, and the return of a tropical heat that made everything grow with bloodthirsty fecundity. The city transplants who lived in Green Valley believed the explanation; the old-timers did not.

Sam slept in the silo, slept and slept, and while he was sleeping, he began to look better. Olivia smoothed his skin with calamine lotion and gloved hands, she kissed the pillow beside his head, she watched him sleep with such a strong sense of wanting to take good care of him that it brought tears to her eyes. How could she have been so lucky? She had resolved, in the quiet of the night, to try one last time to see if she might be able to keep herself away from the walled-in garden, which was now neither walled in nor a garden at all. She knew it would hurt;
her body had become dependent on it in some way, like any brain can become inclined to addiction. But she believed deep down that the garden had not claimed her so much as she had claimed it—and she could, if she tried hard enough, wean herself off it with patience, determination, and lots of mind over matter. If she lost motivation, she would simply remember the afternoon she’d spent with Sam in her silo, when the sun had seemed so bright and friendly, and pleasure came as easily as water running downhill, and the hours were soft as down. It would not be easy to quit the garden, but Sam would be there to help her through.

And in the meantime, her father was on her mind. For the duration of the long night she’d spent in her Poison Garden, she had been insensible with grief, with anger, with bitterness. And she’d had no idea what was happening, what was
really
happening. Yes, she’d gone to sleep knowing that the vines were growing dangerously, that they were reaching toward her and around her. Yes, she’d been aware of a lurking danger. But she hadn’t been able to process it in a
real
way; her anger was too great, her sadness too deep, and any hope of clearheadedness was obscured by insecurity. The result had almost got her—and Sam—killed.

She’d been irresponsible because of her anger. She could see what she’d done, and in a way, it was not so different from the situation her father had put himself in when he’d allowed his pain over Alice to shape his decisions. She could no longer be angry at him; she only felt sad. He’d hidden himself away from the world; he’d grown bitter with the injustices of life—just like she’d almost done. But she’d found her way out of cynicism and bitterness. He hadn’t. And though she would do everything she could to show him the way back to happiness, she had to accept that she could never heal him from the loss of Alice if he didn’t want to be healed.

She decided to go see him. She whispered to Sam that she was going, ran her hand over the shape of his calf where it was safe beneath a blanket. Outside, the rain was falling lightly beneath gray skies, but she did not bother with an umbrella. She liked the rain; it was so cool and gentle that she was soon wet without having felt a single drop fall. She walked past the barn, where the boarders were inside amusing themselves with card games, then across the spongy-wet earth of the field toward Solomon’s Ravine.

In the bottomland, she saw that the creek had swollen with the rain. The birds were singing cheerfully; a white-tailed deer had bent its head for a drink and it did not bolt when it saw her. But neither her father nor his goat was around.

She did not dwell on his disappearance; he was probably fishing at the pond. She would find him soon enough. As the rain fluttered and tapped lightly on the leaves above her, she made her way up and out of the ravine.

She was nearly back to the silo when she saw that there was a man standing on the farmhouse porch.
A reporter,
she thought.
Asking about the garden maze. Again.

She made her way toward him. He was of middling height with good pants and a shirt that had seen better days but at one point was “nice.” His white-gray hair was neatly trimmed and slicked back with gel or with rainwater. His face was shaved clean.

She started to say,
Can I help you?
But when the shape of a little goat appeared beside him, a strange feeling of recognition kicked in, followed by a jolt of understanding.
This,
this stranger, was her father. She hadn’t recognized him.

He wore no hat—that was the first reason she hadn’t known him at a distance. But also, he looked like a bigger, stronger man than her father, who was imprinted in her mind as being somewhat feeble, stooped, and decrepit. The most shocking change,
though, was the loss of his fat gray beard. Now that it was gone, she could see that his face was startlingly young. He was an old man, yes, but not
as
old as he’d made himself out to be. His cheekbones and chin were still strong, his eyes were sad but full of alertness, and life itself seemed to flow strongly through him—which was a shock, since there had been some days when Olivia had thought him to be a hair’s breadth from death. He was a little more of what she’d remembered him to be before he’d moved down into the ravine.

“Dad?”

He went to the top of the porch stairs while she looked up at him. The goat stood beside him, nervous to be out of the ravine. She could tell her father was fighting to hold her gaze; he wanted to look down. “I don’t know how to apologize to you, Olivia. I don’t even know how to begin. I’ve never known.”

She was quiet; she dropped her hand on the post at the foot of the stairs.

“I had this idea,” he said, “that if I stayed down in the ravine, it would be punishment for what I did. That if I stayed down there long enough, someday I might get the stain of it off my soul. But that was only part of it. Really—Olivia—I was afraid. I’ve always been afraid.”

“You don’t have to do this,” she said. “It’s okay.”

His gaze flickered up to meet hers, just for a second. “I don’t want to stay down there anymore if it doesn’t make you happy.”

“You being happy would make me happy,” she said. She climbed the stairs to stand beside him. And standing so close, she saw that he was crying. Though he did not sob or sniffle, his eyes were brimming over not with raindrops but with tears. “I don’t think I’ll ever understand why you did what you did. Some things just never make sense. But I love you. Nothing can change that.”

His shoulders shook. “I want to see the house again. If it’s okay with you.”

The doors had been locked up, the windows boarded. The paint was peeling, weeds had grown into trees around the foundation, and fishtail shingles had been caught in the cockeyed gutters. She said, “It might not look exactly as you remember it.”

“Still. It’s a sight for sore eyes,” he said.

He knocked on the porch rail. She did the same.

The rain was letting up and the dark purple clouds were breaking apart above them, revealing ribbons of glowing, brilliant blue.

“I’ll get a crowbar,” she said.