The Night Garden (27 page)

She closed her eyes. She remembered. They had been fooling around together since September, and the spring before she’d turned sixteen was one of the happiest she’d ever known. The Penny Loafers had not yet arrived for the year; the garden was blooming only with the earliest of winter flowers. Even in the cold of early spring, the Promise Garden was beautiful. The walls were set with mismatched mirrors: hardy frames of plain pine, ornate and scrolling frames of brass, carved wooden frames festooned with grapes, vines, and acanthus leaves. The largest mirror was circled by a frame inscribed with the words: V
IEWER BEWARE
: H
ERE, YOUR
YES
SHALL MEAN
YES
AND YOUR
NO
SHALL MEAN
NO.

Alice had believed that promises made in the Promise Garden would be forever binding, in part because false promises were impossible to utter there. Olivia herself had tested the theory. She’d tried saying
I promise only to eat vegetables for the rest of my life. I promise never to chase the peacock up the tree ever again.
But her promises had no blood in them. They’d dried up in her mouth and got caught in her throat and could not be spoken no matter how she tried to choke out the words.

Sam had stood in the Promise Garden that day after school had ended and he’d promised her, easy as water flowing over rocks,
I love you. I’ll always love you. For the rest of my life.
And Olivia had said,
Me, too.

“You remember,” she said. “I’m glad.”

“Let’s just enjoy this. We’ll go one day at a time.”

“One day at a time,” she said.

He smiled. And though she couldn’t take his hand as they walked back toward the barn, and he couldn’t put his arm around her, they shared the same air, and walked out under the same moon, and most important, they were together. It was enough, more than enough, for now.

A Thorn in Her Side

From her house on the hill, Gloria Zeiger looked down at the garden maze of the Pennywort farm, a maze she had been looking down into for such a long time that she could probably walk the thing with her eyes closed and not get lost. In the last month, her retirement had become a lackluster, plodding, undignified march through the hours. Dust from the fields rose up and coated her picture windows; her husband’s mother had announced her plans to move in with them next year; some person visiting the Pennywort maze had parked directly in front of her driveway yesterday and blocked her in; and all of these things increased her irritability until it was far too much to bear. She would not allow herself to consider the possibility that perhaps she’d made a mistake in constructing her dream house in Green Valley, where a woman had to drive for fifteen minutes for gasoline, where the library was a glorified collection of bookshelves salvaged from the 1950s, and where the word
nightlife
referred to things that walked on four legs. She had expected to enjoy rural life more than she actually did. There was only one thing to do: use her anger as a kind of fertilizer for her resolve to make Green Valley a better place.

Arthur Pennywort allegedly continued to live in a state of
delinquency and neglect, which saddened her, since she did not like to think of any old man being allowed to live in such a way. But the social workers had come and gone, and they’d refused to give up any details on their decision to let him be. Gloria did not plan to let the issue drop. She would go up the chain of command as far as she needed to in order to save Arthur Pennywort when no one else would.

In the meantime the homeless shelter had opened, but as far as she knew not one of the vagrant women who slept in the Pennywort barn had decided to move in. Her plastic-covered mattresses and neatly tiled showers remained unused. She’d heard a whisper that some people in town were calling the shelter the Goat Motel, since only the valley’s horrid pack of goats had shown any interest, and they regularly had to be chased away to keep their disruptive little hooves off the neat green lawn. Gloria had staked her reputation on that shelter—its necessity, its good purpose, its enormous price tag. And now Green Valley talked, criticized, and grumbled about it—and by extension, about Gloria. She could only imagine what people were saying about her. Her husband, in the meantime, slept with his mouth open in his chair.

Gloria was not the only person in the valley keeping an eye on the Pennywort farm. Men and women would lean out their car windows to talk, each asking the other to confirm that Sam Van Winkle, their beloved prodigal son, had begun spending a noteworthy amount of time at the Pennywort farm. And though not one person ever saw Sam put an arm around Olivia Pennywort’s shoulders, nor saw her give him a peck on the cheek, everyone remained hopeful that if any man was to crack the cipher that was Olivia Pennywort, it would be Sam.

As Sam continued to make his appearances on the farm, fixing rotten boards in the Penny Loafers’ barn or patching the greenhouse sheeting, Olivia found that her popularity in Green
Valley had unexpectedly spiked. The Penny Loafers remarked among themselves that she seemed happier than usual, freer in a way they couldn’t articulate. Even Tom had noticed a change; it wasn’t that Olivia hadn’t always been friendly, but it was as if she no longer scrutinized herself so closely, no longer measured out her words before she said them. People didn’t feel quite so inclined to take a deferential distance—even when she herself tried to stay away. Members of her farm who arrived to pick up their pathetic sacks of vegetables sought her out to chat: They wanted to exchange recipe ideas for her produce, they wanted to talk about what new plans she had for the maze, and a teacher had asked Olivia if she might allow her theater kids to film their production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
in the gardens. Her own theory as to why the valley seemed so much friendlier toward her was not that she herself had changed but that Sam’s approval and companionship had made her seem more approachable. But whatever the cause for the shift, she loved it. The sticky air felt just a little lighter, people’s smiles were friendlier, and even her three meanest chickens did not try to peck her when she collected their eggs but only lifted their fat feathers out of the way.

As Olivia watched the little troupe of high school thespians file into her maze, trailing ribbons behind them, she did not worry that the children might find their way into her Poison Garden. It seemed the drought had finally begun to whittle away at whatever charm had caused her garden to need constant trimming, and she found that many days had passed and she had not needed to prune it back at all. Normally, its lack of overly wild growth would have worried her, but with the brightness of Sam’s company and the sense that their relationship was deepening like a plant stretching its roots into the soil, she decided she would not worry about the lack of freakish growth in her central garden.

There was only one dark spot she found in her otherwise jubilant days: The happier she felt on the sun-drenched surface of the valley, the more she dreaded climbing down into Solomon’s Ravine. There, in the glowering shadows, Arthur Pennywort spent his days as he always did, and seeing him was a surprising reminder of the possibility that her dull, old life could return at any given moment, and that if it did return, she would not know how to be content with it again. For himself, Arthur was doing his best not to be annoyed with Olivia, even while the rest of Green Valley seemed to be newly discovering her. Normally, she might visit him twice a day or more in the summer, bringing news and food and a little conversation. But lately she made only one trip each day to see him—just one—and he was too annoyed with her to say anything about it. He was even more annoyed when she didn’t seem to notice that he was annoyed at all. She dropped off his food or other things he’d requested without meeting his eye. And then she stood shifting from foot to foot, scraping the bottoms of her boots absentmindedly on the rocks or picking bits of bark off a tree, only half invested in conversation, until she seemed to determine that she’d stayed for a socially acceptable amount of time and made her move to go.

Arthur knew what had changed: Sam. It had to be Sam.

He wanted to be happy for her, he truly did. But how he wanted to feel wasn’t exactly how he felt. He was irritated that her visits to him had become spotty. He felt slightly undermined and ignored. And yet, he’d
known
this was what would happen. It was nothing less than what he deserved.

“I hope that boy’s going to be good to you,” Arthur said one day when Olivia had come to visit him and seemed to be groping about for an excuse to get away.

The look that came over her face was nothing shy of dreamy.
“He is,” she said. “He’s … amazing.” And Arthur’s heart fell a little, because it meant his suspicions were right.

“And you’re sure he’ll be happy with you, the way things are? Forever?”

She laughed as if he’d said something outrageous. “I’m just trying to enjoy the moment right now, Dad. We’re not talking about
forever
.”

“That’s not true,” Arthur said. “Maybe you’re not talking about it. But you’re thinking about it. I can see it in your eyes.”

She looked away.

Arthur faked a smile he didn’t feel. He reminded himself that he’d wanted Sam to fall for Olivia; he’d encouraged her. But now that it had happened, he didn’t feel
good
about it. He felt wary and unnerved. Olivia was still a young woman. She did not yet understand the relationship between happiness and heartbreak—that all happiness was just a step in the direction of heartbreak. The rules of the universe dictated that temperature moved from hot to cold; happiness too left the body, just like heat, after a time. And there was only one true lesson that all the other minor lessons in life pointed back to: to be wary of happiness in the same way most people were wary of loss, for they were one and the same.

Arthur took a few steps toward her, and though they had long ago decided that he would not touch so much as a shoelace on her boot for fear of an allergic reaction, the thing he wanted to say to her was quite possibly the most important thing he would ever have to say to her in his life. So he reached out and put a hand on her shoulder over the sleeve of her T-shirt, and he kept it there even when her eyes went wide. “Once you’ve had love, Olivia, real love—the kind I felt for your mother—and then you’ve lost it … You can never come back from that. It changes you as surely as if it could move your organs around in
your chest cavity. It makes you into a different person. You can’t understand until you’ve been there. I just don’t want to see that ever happen to you. And, I’m sorry, but you face a greater chance of heartbreak than most because of … because of how you are.”

She stood for a moment looking down into his eyes, and then she pressed her lips together and took one step away. “I thought you wanted me to be happy.”

“I do.”

“Then will you help me?” Her eyes were full of pleading. “Will you find a way to make the serum work?”

He bowed his head.

“Dad. Please?”

“If being with Sam is what you want, I will dedicate my every talent to it. You have my promise.”

“Thank you.”

“But if you ever get the feeling for one second that he thinks you’re not good enough
exactly as you are,
then you’ve got to promise me you’ll break it off right there and then.”

“I’ll … take it under consideration.”

He sighed. “Go on. Go back up there. Gather ye rosebuds and whatnot. There’s nothing for you down here.”

“Of course there is,” she said, and she knocked her knuckles on the tree beside her, and he, feeling like his hand was a cannonball, did the same. Then she turned to leave, and Arthur felt the long, slow drain of helplessness as he watched her go.

Gilding the Lily

The days that had seemed to drag so heavily since Sam’s accident on Moggy Knob suddenly began to soar with all the swiftness of the barn swallows that swooped about the Pennywort farm. Instead of lying in bed and trying to talk himself into a reason to get up each morning, Sam set his bare feet on the floor of his childhood bedroom with firmness and alacrity, ready to meet the day head-on. His hours with Olivia were full of infinite tiny joys. They worked side by side when they could as Sam relearned the rhythms of the farm. Olivia pointed out warblers and spittlebugs and the heads of near-microscopic flowers, and it reminded him of how to see beauty in things that were simple—he’d forgotten that in his years away. Olivia, in spite of her condition, was one of the most deeply content people he’d ever met. The dishes that they cooked together in her silo kitchen each evening spoke volumes about her. They were not elaborate or designed to impress, but they were simple, fresh, unaffected, and Sam had never eaten so well or so joyfully in his life. Arthur used to repeat his wife’s advice to Sam and Olivia:
It’s not a good day unless you go to sleep utterly exhausted.
Sam was half asleep before he hit the bed.

He began to amass a clearer picture of who Olivia had become in the years since he’d been away. She’d come to be a good
leader of the Penny Loafers and the people who worked the farm, though he suspected that she did not have any particular love of being in charge. Her life was both simple and complicated: All summer long, she was surrounded by people she cared about who didn’t know or understand her at all. In the winter, she had only Arthur. She was still the same woman he’d known so many years ago, but circumstances had changed her. It seemed to him that the whole of her life was devoted to self-preservation, protection, and—in the same vein—isolation. He wanted to show her what he saw when he looked at her, since she did not seem to look at herself in a particularly generous way. She was no monster. No menace to society. She was simply different, no more “good” or “bad” than any poison plant that had learned to adapt to survive.

In the meantime, his own Green Valley atavism continued to plague him. He was sure that with Patrick Kearny’s death on the mountaintop, he’d forfeited his birthright. The guilt would rise up at random moments, and it was enough to make him stop talking in the middle of sentences, or fail to reply to questions, or forget that he was holding a sandwich near his lips to take a bite. His father called the house groping for news of Sam’s exploits, and Sam didn’t bother to so much as hint that he’d done something worthwhile. Since the incident with the tractor he had not seen any more life-and-death situations in the valley. But the unbidden thought arose that perhaps he might give up his position on the force, that perhaps it would be better for everyone that way. He thought,
Maybe I’m doing the wrong thing. Maybe I missed my calling.
But he did not know what his calling was if not to serve and protect. He did very much want to be an integral part of Green Valley. He had been walking around in his life as if the most fitting tribute to Patrick Kearny would be to suffer, to become—in his own way—dead, too. But now, with Olivia at his side and Green Valley around him, he
saw that line of thinking had been a disservice to the man he hadn’t been able to save. He wanted his life to mean something after what had happened on Moggy Knob. He wanted to
be
a Van Winkle. And yet, when calls came that hinted at real danger, he was filled with doubt and stayed away.