The Night Garden (16 page)

When they were finished she cleared her throat and said, “Sam was here today.”

“Of course he was,” Arthur said, and he smiled his crooked smile behind his beard. “And did you send him away or did you let him enjoy your company for a while?”

“He … he grabbed my arm.”

Arthur’s gaze shot up. “He hurt you?”

“No. He would never. But I might have hurt him.”

“Ah. I see.” Arthur’s gaze returned to his bowl.

“He was so extremely allergic to everything,” Olivia said. “I’m sure he’s going to have a reaction. Everyone does—but, Sam especially.”

“So you’ll have to tell him. Is that what you’re worried about?”

She nodded.

“My love, you are what you are. Sam will understand.”

Olivia shook her head, but said nothing. Perhaps Sam might understand. Perhaps he wouldn’t mind or care. He would tolerate her, be polite to her, treat her no differently. But she didn’t want him
knowing.
She liked it better when she could be distant
and perfect, as opposed to intimate and imperfect. She didn’t want him to look at her and feel sorry for her, or feel afraid of her, or think
What a shame.

But there was no way around it now.

“Think of this,” her father said. “Once he knows, he’ll know. And then you won’t have to worry about him finding out anymore.”

“Thanks, Dad,” she said. She knew he was right. And she should have felt some relief. But she’d liked being able to look into Sam’s eyes and know that when he was looking back, what he was seeing was not a monster, not a freak, just a woman.

She felt her father looking at her, trying to puzzle out the things she couldn’t say. At last, he stood up. The goat too got to his hooves, ready to follow. She thought he would say good night, but instead he said, “Just a minute.”

She watched the brief argument between them as Arthur told the goat to stay put and the goat resolutely followed him inside the shack. When they emerged Arthur was holding a pink bottle of sunscreen she’d given him the year before. His face was somber as he put it in her hand. The goat sniffed to investigate, looking for food, but she tugged the bottle away.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“I’ve been working on it. It’s for you.”

“Sunscreen?”

“Oh no. That’s just the bottle I had on hand. This is something much more special. I’ve been working on it since Sam got back.”

Olivia twisted the lid and brought the bottle to her nose. It smelled bitter and metallic beneath a heavy dose of menthol. Her father was always making one concoction or another—his own brand of animal scent for hunting, his own ointment to keep the winter cold off his cheeks, his own form of antacid tablets. She peered down into the bottle’s neck but could not see
what was inside. “Well, don’t keep me in suspense any longer. What is it?”

“It’s a protective serum, made with a linseed oil base. It forms a barrier between one person’s skin and another. Or at least, it’s supposed to.”

“Wait. Say that again.”

“It forms a barrier, Olivia. A nearly imperceptible one. Between your skin and someone else’s. In theory. But I haven’t tried an actual test.”

“I thought you stopped doing this years ago. Trying to … to find a solution, I mean.”

Arthur glanced up sheepishly. “Do you not want it?”

Olivia looked at the bottle. All of Arthur’s cures and experiments had failed in the past; she could not imagine this one would be any different. But still, the fact that he’d continued working on her behalf when she’d thought he’d given up touched her deeply. “I don’t know what to say.”

Arthur shrugged. “It might not work. We don’t know precisely how your condition has come about, if one kind of allergen or another is more prevalent in your skin, or if it’s a cocktail of allergens, or what. I did what I could to cover our bases. But there’s no telling.”

“Still,” she said. Her heart was beginning to pound. The implication of the serum working was enormous—if it worked. Her breath came fast.

Maybe she could hug her father.

Maybe she could kiss someone hello.

Maybe she could high-five a child.

And … Sam …

“Oh now,” Arthur said. “No cause for waterworks.”

“Sorry,” she said. She composed herself quickly while her father busied himself with picking up dirty pots and bowls, the goat puttering behind him. He’d never quite known what to do
with himself when Olivia accidentally displayed a bit too much emotion. She took quiet breaths and gathered her wits. She ran a thumb over the plastic bottle. Even if it could work, who might she ask to try it with her? Her father was no longer a suitable test subject because he was old and didn’t heal the way he used to; even if he’d volunteered to let her try it with him, she would have refused. He needed his strength.

But surely her father didn’t mean for her to try it with Sam? He was far too sensitive to take that kind of risk. Plus, there was every chance that Sam would avoid her, and rightly so, from here on. Probably he would take a conciliatory approach: He would not mention his irritated skin, would continue to flash a neighborly wave now and again, would stop to talk with her politely about the weather, would perhaps throw her newspaper on the porch if he saw it in the road. But he would never touch her again.

She felt a familiar tightness in her chest, and she ignored it. “I’ve got to get going,” she said, more because she was afraid of betraying the oceans of her feelings than because she had work to do. She tested the weight of the bottle in her hand; it felt about half full.

“Well, thanks for this.”

“It’s nothing,” Arthur said. “Nothing at all.”

She patted the goat and then headed up the hard slant of the ravine, thinking she might go into her poison garden for a while. She felt shaky and off, unfamiliar to herself in some way. When she first truly understood the life that had been put before her, she’d mourned for a year that began with her twentieth birthday, indulging in self-pity of every kind. She gained weight, she grew mean-spirited, she sulked. Then, on a winter day when the snow fell and she realized she had not spoken to any other human being besides her father in three days, she understood that her despair had been nothing but a prolonged temper tan-tram,
a protest like throwing herself at the feet of the Almighty if there was one and saying
Make it stop!

Lilies of the field did not threaten to uproot themselves if they didn’t like where they were planted. On the slopes of the mountains, saplings struggled to grow in the shallowest puddles of soil that collected on bald rocks. Along the side of the valley’s single road, chicory and yellow trefoil had learned to thrive in waste spaces, where passing cars blew exhaust against them all day long. Like Olivia, they had no say over where their seeds took hold: When they could not change their surroundings, they themselves had to change.

And so, Olivia realized that she would never be able to change her desire for a normal future, but she could change her expectations. She would farm; she would continue her mother’s work in the maze and she would hold her work as sacred to Green Valley; she would keep her father company in his old age; she would create a world that sustained the Penny Loafers, who were colorful if inconsistent company. This would be all the satisfaction she would allow herself to expect, and it would be enough.

But with the bottle in her hand as she reached the top of the ravine, she saw that all her many years of telling herself
it’s all okay
were now in jeopardy. Denial was a fragile and reedy thing, possible to keep in place as long as there were no strong winds, no distractions, no temptations.

What would she do if the serum worked?

What would she do if it
didn’t
?

From outside of her central garden, she could smell the fertile odor of her plants, notes of sweet green hanging in the air, calling to her like old friends, welcoming, affirming, telling her she was okay, she was perfect, she should never change. She took the key from around her neck and went inside.

Garden-Variety Magic

Sam saw the first fireflies speckling the shadows in the bottom of the valley and knew that tonight would be a firefly night. It was as if the creatures came to gather from all the far corners of the earth; their yellow-green glow dappled the shadows of bushes, made halos of treetops, and trailed through the air like a glowing vapor. Arthur used to say that he could make a wish if he caught one of the bugs, which wasn’t a difficult task when the weather shifted and brought the lightning bugs in: All he had to do was reach out a hand and close it, like catching rain. Some nights, Olivia and Sam would run around gently corralling as many bugs as they could, filling glass jars with fireflies and then freeing them all at once, so a brilliant column of light would erupt into the night, bathing their upturned faces in gold. Sometimes they would lie on their backs and let their eyes go unfocused until Sam lost the difference between the fireflies and the stars.

Tonight was a firefly night. And as Sam settled on a bench in the maze to wait for Olivia, the air was a dark ocean of electricity, simultaneously peaceful and charged. He’d come back to Green Valley thinking he would never again be surprised, that life was mostly a dull thing, and that what surprises did come
were more likely to be misfortunes than windfalls. And yet, the town had done nothing but surprise him since his return.

When Sam had opened his eyes in the morning, his right hand had been itchy. Just a little. And it made him think of his mother.
That’s good luck,
she would say.
An itchy palm means something good’s coming your way.
He was certain the superstition was right, because in the hours before he went to bed last night, he’d wondered—
Am I actually feeling the sheets and the lamp switch, or is it my imagination?

By morning, he was certain: He could feel—everything—again.

The joy was overwhelming. He’d been living under a cloud for a year and a half, and suddenly the sun was out. He’d wanted to run to Olivia to tell her:
Look what you did!
He was certain that, somehow, contacting her skin had boosted his sense of touch like a defibrillator jolts the heart of a dying man. Getting ready for work was a carnival of the senses, absolute decadence. The water in the shower was wet.
Wet!
The shaving cream was cool and silky. The bath towel was scratchy—he’d had no idea they were so cheap, and he couldn’t have been more thrilled because the texture of stiff terry on his cheek was heaven.

In his daydreams as he dressed for the day, he imagined the silver-haired doctor at the hospital—the one who had insisted Sam’s condition was all in his head—telling him that the only thing to change had been his state of mind. But he was certain that Olivia’s touch had changed him, or at least, her touch had flipped the switch that turned his nerve endings back on. His cells were waking up again, snapping back to life one by one like kernels of popcorn. He knew it by the dewiness of the morning air, the feel of the sun on his face, and the itching on his palm.

He’d bought doughnuts for everyone at the station—it didn’t matter that it was cliché—and he gave the ancient and angry
secretary Dorothea the shock of her life when he kissed her good morning on her papery cheek. In spite of the mild itch of his hand, he could not stop himself from wondering: Had he been brought back to Green Valley for a reason? The whole of his twenties—spent in bars and motels, spent with women he didn’t love and friends who hadn’t really understood him—had been an utter waste of a perfectly good life. Then the accident had wrecked him, and he’d lost all sense of desire, all feeling, all purpose.

But now, he
wanted
again. He was interested and excited and curious and greedy and eager to see what might happen next. And he had plans. Because when Olivia had touched him, he realized: Part of what he wanted was
her.
He’d barely given a thought to anything remotely sexual for almost two years—there was no point—but now he felt as if desire had been building up in his system all along and was suddenly battering him from the inside out.

Olivia was conflicted about him, reticent and withholding—he could acknowledge that. But he’d never been patient. He felt oddly giddy, intoxicated, as he cruised Green Valley. He allowed speeding cars to go by unimpeded; he didn’t yell at the kids who threw rocks at the decaying drive-in movie theater; he almost hit a disorderly shopping cart at the grocery store. His fantasies were wild distractions that raced well ahead of his rational brain and blazed into ridiculous territories—he saw himself making love to Olivia on a blanket in Stony Field, he saw Olivia laughing as she unpacked her boxes to move into his house, he saw a crackling winter fire and an evening spent contemplating the name of their first child.

The morning sun, the heat of the steering wheel, the gentle giants of the green hills, the songs on the radio—everything seemed to be saying:
Yes! Sam! You’re meant to be here! This is all for you!
If each of his prior struggles or miseries was like a puzzle
piece that ultimately created this exact picture of his life, he would not change a single struggle or misery or mistake he’d made—except for one. Things were turning around. This feeling of his mood being a hot air balloon and carrying him through the day, this, at last, was the definition of the word
sublime.

But by lunchtime—a Coca-Cola and an egg sandwich from the convenience store/pharmacy/bait shop/deli—the itching of his palm had stopped being ignorable. The webs at the base of his thumb became an angry hornet’s nest of red skin. The creases on the undersides of his knuckles were like miniature whip lines, and the bumps at the bases of his fingers swelled. He itched, and itched, and itched, and the misery of it would not go away.

The afternoon also descended into the mundane: His colleagues teased him about holding the record for the longest stretch a Van Winkle had ever gone without saving somebody’s life; Mrs. Oradell had yet another raccoon in her garage; Dorothea, who had seemed so sunny when he’d kissed her cheek in the morning, suddenly turned mean as the north wind and refused to give him a new notepad upon request. The swell of his good energy and optimism eroded as the minute hand swept the wondrous morning under the rug of an average day.