The Night Garden (14 page)

But then one day—the day he’d returned from a doctor’s appointment—she’d acted cool to him. He’d thought it odd but decided that she simply must have had a bad day. The next morning, with his rashes once again beginning to clear, he’d asked her to meet him at the old janitor’s shed near the tennis courts after school for a “study session.” The school day dragged on, he could hardly think, he was full of expectation and excitement to once again be close to her, to touch her the way she liked and to know that she still loved him. But when she met him beneath the dripping eaves, she had no warmth for him, not even the smallest smile. She told him that she didn’t want to be his girlfriend anymore, that she’d never really meant to be, that she’d thought they were making out just as an experiment, and that she’d never meant for Sam to think they were supposed to be a serious couple. Then, just like that, she’d walked out into the rain.

The shock left him standing there, bereft and stupid, with no idea what had happened or what do to. Olivia had never been moody or dramatic compared to other girls; he knew her explanation had to be full of lies. But what was the real reason for her dismissal? Had he done something to offend her? Had she fallen for someone else? No matter how he tried, the only explanation he could come up with was that she’d been disgusted by him, all his blotchy skin and hives, and she wanted someone she could touch without worrying about triggering his itches. Almost as quickly as his sadness had swelled, it was replaced by anger and resentment. Standing beside the shed, he put his hand out beneath the leaking gutter, and the marker between his childhood and his adulthood was the cold slip of rain running between his fingers and splashing on the ground.

As the school year went on, he could not get himself out from under the misery of losing her. He hadn’t realized that when the poets from his English class talked about the pain of love, they’d meant
real
pain, sometimes like the very tip of a knife pricking his heart, sometimes like a thousand books had been piled on his chest and made it too much trouble to breathe. When he heard the rumors that Arthur Pennywort had abandoned her and moved into Solomon’s Ravine, he forced himself to go to her. Some small, dark part of him half hoped she was suffering—just a little—because maybe then she would need him the way he still needed her. He planned to offer her his friendship—only that and nothing more—even if he secretly hoped that she would begin to want him again now that his poison ivy problems seemed to be gone. He planned to ask if she was okay, to ask why Arthur had moved out, and to tell her he would do anything to help. But when he got to the farmhouse and started in on his meticulously planned speech, she’d only looked at him, a little sad, and told him she wanted to be left alone. Months later when she quit high school without even a word to him about it, he understood that whatever they’d had—or almost had—was really and truly over. Three weeks after his graduation, he put Green Valley behind him and didn’t look back.

Now he spotted Olivia in the distance near the bee yard, where five boxy whitewashed hives stood on a gentle, grassy rise. And when he thought back on all the drama and pain of their breakup, it struck him as a little silly and melodramatic. The real dramas of life didn’t happen in high school hallways. They happened in hospitals, in ambulances, and on mountaintops where the cold could feel so intimate and death came like an old friend.

Olivia was examining the frame of honeycomb, and even
from a distance Sam could see that it was undulating with the dark bodies of bees. Though he wasn’t quite as sensitive to poison ivy as he’d been that one summer, he was still allergic to bee stings, and so he hung back from the hives. The veil Olivia wore fell over her face from the brim of a large straw hat, the netting wrapped winsomely around her neck. She wore denim overalls that were so blocky and worn they only made her look more fresh and feminine. The smell of strawberries was stronger than ever; Sam bit one from the carton he carried, but still—the craving did not go away.

She waved to him slowly, as if underwater, not to startle the bees. Everyone in Green Valley knew the Pennywort bees; they were recognizable by sight because of the faintly copper-green glint in their eyes. The farmers who worked the valley held that the Pennywort bees were good luck; they were as big as hailstones, dumb creatures that occasionally knocked themselves out on windowpanes and bird feeders, and they were exceedingly friendly to people who were friendly toward them.

But for as goofy as the Pennywort bees were, everybody knew that their stings were the most painful kind of stings a person could get—more painful than the stings of the paper wasps that made enormous gray nests under the eaves of the abandoned summer motels, more painful than the sting of the yellow jacket and hornet combined. Sam had never been stung by a Pennywort bee, but he knew enough to be wary of them. Pennywort bee stings turned children’s arms swollen and black, and killed curious spring black bear cubs, and landed more than one angry, swatting drunkard in the emergency room. If the bees were docile, it was only because they were coaxed into docility by Olivia’s particular, drugging magic, which apparently had as great an effect on bees as it did men. She was beautiful, more now than before. Sam could only stare.

As she walked toward him, she unwrapped the veil around her neck and tossed it up and over her stiff-brimmed hat. She stopped a few feet away and put her hands on her hips, looking at Sam. He felt the faintest illumination like the light that comes through the crack of a slowly opening door.

“Hi, Sam,” Olivia said. Did he imagine that she was happy to see him, but was trying not to seem that way? “Any new intel on Gloria?”

“No,” he said. He looked down at his clothes—his shorts and T-shirt. “I’m not working today. Just—stopped by for some strawberries.”

“It’s … good to see you,” she said.

He smiled and something within him warmed.

She cleared her throat. “How are the berries?”

“Perfect.”

“Perfect! Wow. High praise.”

“It’s been a long time since I’ve had strawberries like this,” he said. “I forgot they were so good. I mean—I remembered they were good, but the memories can’t compare to the real thing.”

She tipped her head and looked at him, and he felt the tremulous hope that something had changed between them, that she was willing to let him in at least a little. He couldn’t imagine what made her keep acting so cool toward him. It was hard to believe that she would still hold a grudge against him for high school. But just in case, he wanted to make sure they got their old childish shenanigans out in the open so they could move on.

“So, how are the bees doing?” he asked.

“The summer’s been so dry,” she said, almost a little shy. “The honey yield isn’t looking good for this year.”

“Do you still sell it?”

“No. I’ll keep it for the winter. I use it in my tea and whatnot.
And like I said, it might be a small yield this year. They’re really suffering.”

“Can you move them to the garden? To be closer to the flowers?”

“I could,” she said. “But it’s a weird thing about bees. If I moved the hive far away, they wouldn’t have a problem finding their way back home. But if I move it across the yard, I’ll lose some of my field bees because they’ll keep trying to return here, to the original location.”

A honeybee circled and Sam held his breath.

“Oh, shoot. I forgot you’re allergic.” Olivia glanced back at the hives and worried her lip between her teeth. He knew what she was thinking: She was considering making an excuse to go on her way.

“You could take a
quick
break,” he said.

He saw the rise of her chest, the pause of a held breath. She was still looking out to the fields and not at him.

“Come on,” he said. “What’s it going to hurt?”

She glanced at him—a quick flash of the most beautiful copper brown he’d ever seen. “Okay. But I really can’t stay long.”

“Not long. Come on.”

He led her away from the beehives, to the edge of the field where thick trees held their browning branches high, and Solomon’s Ravine began its steep plunge into the rocky depths. Olivia took off her hat, then sat down with her back against a tree trunk. Sam joined her, lowering himself stiffly to the ground. His joints hurt, and each flare of pain felt so exceptionally cruel—because even though he couldn’t have felt the softness of Olivia’s, he
could
feel the kinds of pains that happen deep in the body—the ache of wrecked tendons, tired bones. The doctors had said he would recover, and technically he had. But what the doctors hadn’t told him was that “recovery” wasn’t the same thing as going back to the way he’d been before, when
his body had been so good to him, though he hadn’t known enough to appreciate it at the time.

“I used to be better at this,” he joked as he tried to adjust his legs on the lumpy, acorn-spotted grass. “My bones aren’t so good at sitting on the ground anymore.”

“You’ll get used to it again.”

“Strawberry?” He extended his arm as far as it would go in her direction, the carton in his hand. She looked at it for a moment like Eve might have looked at the apple from the snake.

But at last she said, “Why not?” She leaned toward him, and the breeze picked up ever so slightly. She took a bite and closed her eyes.

“Are you wearing perfume?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

She laughed.

“Right,” he said. “Right.”

She was not looking at him, and that bothered him. She had the kind of nervous alertness he’d only ever seen in red foxes and white-tailed deer; it was an edgy awareness that straddled the line between suspicion and fear.

“We should talk,” he said.

“What’s on your mind?”

“An apology, actually.”

She slanted her eyes at him. “For what?” she asked. But then he saw her chest flush red between the straps of her thin green tank top, and he knew she remembered.

On the night before he planned to leave Green Valley for good, under the purple-blue shine of moonlight, Sam had gone to the maze. He wound his way through the crawling, slinking shadows, down the maze’s kinks and turns, over footbridges, under tunnels of hanging flowers, past moon-gilt ponds. He wanted the maze to give him answers. As much as he’d burned
to leave Green Valley—with its irritating quirks and familial expectations and memories of heartbreak and failure at every turn—he was also reluctant to leave it. He’d arranged to stay the summer with a cousin in New York City before he went away to college. And he wanted the maze to tell him whether he was doing the right thing.

He walked the corridors slowly in the dark, feeling the weight of the whole world on his shoulders and wondering if he would ever
not
feel that way again. He’d been through the maze countless times, and he knew every curve and bend, but that night, it had seemed as if the maze was changing around him even as he was walking through it, and he quickly lost his way. Nothing seemed familiar, and what did seem familiar was positioned in an unfamiliar place.

When he came to the walled-off garden in the center of the maze, he was surprised to discover that the door was just slightly open. The door was never open. Olivia and her father had built the garden without Sam’s help; in fact, he’d been told to stay far away. And he’d never once thought to question what was inside the garden walls. But now the open door was a temptation he couldn’t resist, and he dared, inch by inch, to look through it.

He wasn’t alone.

Inside the garden, to his intense shock, was Olivia. In the middle of the night. She was standing beside a pink shrub with her nose to one of the flowers. She might have been whispering, or talking, or at the very least, smiling. She looked as slick as a water creature in the moonlight, smooth, silvery-blue, and languid. He realized this was because she was naked.

It was only much later that the rational observations and questions took hold: What was she doing in the maze in the middle of the night? And why was she doing it with no clothes on? But in that moment, Sam was not thinking of things like meanings and repercussions. His overwrought and blood-starved
teenage brain wasn’t thinking much at all. He forgot his grievances with Olivia. He forgot his plans. He thought:
Of course I won’t leave Green Valley.
Gently, he said her name.

Olivia gasped, turned her head. She stuttered over the word
Sam.
And then the invectives began. She walked straight up to him, not bothering to cover the smoothness of her belly, the slight bounce of her breasts, and she whispered loudly,
Don’t come in here. Get away.
She was so forceful he felt as if
he’d
been the one who had been caught off guard, and not the other way around. He was stunned into silence.

Go!
She’d said.
Please, get back!

He’d walked backward heel over heel until he tripped, knocking his tailbone on the hard dirt and scraping his palms. She’d slammed the door in his face. The next morning, his father drove him to the city and he didn’t see Olivia again.

Now she looked at him. The shade of a leafy tree dappled the weedy grass around them. Her gold-tan skin gleamed with sweat. Her hair, the color of a mild sunset, peachy and red, was gathered back into a tight, single braid that had been pinned up off the back of her neck.

“I didn’t mean to surprise you that night,” he said. “I didn’t expect you to be there.”

“I know.”

“I’ve always kind of wondered what you were doing in there, in the middle of the night like that,” he said, as lightly as he could.

“Oh, nothing really. It wasn’t anything mysterious. I went into the garden when I couldn’t sleep. Sometimes I still do.”

“Naked?”

She laughed. “It just makes me feel more … I don’t know … uninhibited.”

“I imagine you’d have to be kind of uninhibited to start with.”

“Not if you don’t expect to bump into anybody,” she said.

He smiled, and she smiled, too, for a moment before she looked away. He could not get a read on her. Sometimes she seemed so sincerely glad for his company. Sometimes a little crease would form like lightning between her eyebrows, and he suspected she was going to bolt. He wondered what she would do now. She fiddled with her bee hat, turning it like a steering wheel inch by little inch. In the distance Sam heard the drone of a gas engine.