The Night Garden (17 page)

Some of the guys saw him itching—or forcibly trying not to itch—and asked if he’d gotten himself into poison ivy. Some saw him itching, slid their eyes away from him, and asked nothing at all.

All afternoon long he repeated a silent mantra: Olivia had nothing to do with the itching. She wasn’t his irritant. She was his cure.

But as the day went on, he found himself stopping once again at the convenience store/pharmacy/bait shop/deli—this time for Benadryl and calamine lotion. And soon the horrible, awful,
heartbreaking truth of what he didn’t want to suspect became impossible to ignore.

Olivia had tried to warn him.

The one woman in almost two years he’d been able to feel—and he was allergic to her.

Despair
wasn’t the word.

Now, under the diffused glow of fireflies, he looked up from the bench in the garden maze to see Olivia crossing toward her central garden. He’d known she would come, here, where she always retreated when she wanted to get away. The fireflies had concentrated around her, so he could see that she was wearing a pale cotton dress that made her look as sweet and cool as an ice cream cone. Her hair had been loosely pinned off her neck, tendrils hanging artlessly around her face, and a large white flower was tucked behind one ear.

“Olivia,” he said softly.

She was startled but she didn’t cry out. She only pressed a hand to her chest for a moment. “Sam,” she said. The fireflies rippled a little on the vibration of the word.

He suddenly felt the heaviest pain in his heart that he’d known since he’d died on Moggy Knob, a despair made to feel even darker by juxtaposition with the wild joy of the morning. His flirtation with optimism had been the practical joke of a cruel universe. The return of desire wasn’t a reward; it was a punishment.

“Is it just
me
?” he asked. His voice was hoarse; he hadn’t realized how long he’d been sitting alone in the garden. He held up his bandaged hand. “Am I the only one this happens to?”

“It’s not just you,” she said. “It’s anyone I touch. I … I hurt them.”

He got to his feet and immediately he noticed a change in Olivia’s posture, that animal wariness he’d glimpsed before but hadn’t been able to place. He saw now that she was always on
guard, keeping herself away, watching for sudden moves. No wonder she worked so hard to hold him at arm’s length—physically, but emotionally, too. She was afraid.

“How did this happen?” he asked.

“I promised you an explanation,” she said. “But … I don’t know how to tell you. I’ve never told anyone.”

“But you’ll tell me?” he said.

“Don’t I have to?”

“No. You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she gestured to him, and he followed her through the maze. The fireflies circled and clustered curiously around them, lighting the quiet pathways and twinkling like drunken stars. He smelled every earthy and floral scent, felt the air as if each molecule had noticeable weight, but the sensations no longer thrilled him as they had this morning. As she walked before him, he stared at the base of her narrow neck, the smooth expanse of skin between the straps of her dress and the arcs of her shoulder blades, and it was the most simultaneously beautiful and excruciating sight he’d ever seen. He was intensely gratified when she took a wrong turn. Even in the dark he could tell she was blushing with embarrassment. She excused herself and they continued down the hollows and meanders, beneath a long, firefly-lit tunnel of tumescent purple flowers, until she stopped.

“Here we are,” she said at last. She gestured for him to go first into the room of the garden maze.

The garden was laid out in a circle. Lunettes and stars had been pruned into the tops of the hedges. And the flowers, softly white under the moon, seemed to glow, actually glow, as if lit from within by their own secret light. The Mushroom Garden had been impressive. But this, this was astonishing. Each white petal of each white flower echoed the light of the moon behind the gauze of threadbare clouds. A heavy perfume of flowers
hung in the air, which itself seemed to be a living thing, a breathing thing, full of the songs of night animals and the glow of fireflies. Olivia had created a garden for lovers, a place for stolen kisses, extravagant promises, caresses as intense and heady as the garden itself. Sam reached out, touched the edge of a petal that felt shockingly like flesh. Much as he loved the romance of the garden, it also made him sad: so many implied fantasies that he knew he would never own.

“What do you call this place?” he asked.

She looked at him over her shoulder. “The Night Garden.”

“It’s beautiful,” he said.

She sat down on a white marble bench and he joined her, too aware of her proximity. She smelled of flowers and coconut oil. He wished he could lie down with her, explore all the possibilities that had been promised by the return of sensation in his skin, lose himself in the overwhelming textures and scents of the Night Garden, of her. But he only sat beside her and stared.

“Can I see your hand?” she asked him.

He told her it was better if she didn’t.

“I’m really sorry,” she said.

“How could something like this happen?”

“I don’t know—not specifically. I only have theories.”

“Tell me.”

She leaned back with her palms against the bench to look out to the garden, where fireflies clustered low among the leaves of the moon-pale flowers. “It was the garden,” she said. And then she explained. Sam could remember one afternoon that Arthur had spent telling stories about poisonous plants, how jimson-weed got its name from the Jamestown settlement, where it had killed many colonists by accident and many soldiers by design. He told Sam about how certain plants could be harmless under some circumstances and poisonous under others: potatoes, rhubarb, cashews, and kidney beans. Sam had thought nothing of
Arthur’s odd excitement and sudden interest in poisonous plants: Arthur had also, at varying times, been interested in keeping small sharks in an aquarium in the farmhouse living room and in building his own catapults based on medieval plans. That Arthur might have been actually growing the dangerous plants he talked about had never crossed Sam’s mind, and even if the thought had occurred to him, it wouldn’t have been the strangest thing to happen on the Pennywort farm. Even on the night Sam had accidentally peered into Olivia’s garden and seen her there, he hadn’t realized the plants around her had been so dangerous. He’d been too focused on her to notice there were plants at all.

As the fireflies circled and swirled, Olivia told the story of discovering her condition, and the way she told it—in stops and starts—suggested she’d never told it before nor ever meant to. For the first time, Sam understood why he’d been so sensitive to poison ivy that summer of his senior year; the sensitivity had never been quite as “exquisite” again, but neither had it fully left him. He remained more sensitive to poison ivy than most. It had never occurred to him that he was allergic to Olivia; that was too preposterous a leap of understanding to make. Olivia also had no idea that the cause of everyone’s discomfort wasn’t the garden, but was
her.

One night, Olivia had summoned all her courage and spoke to her father about the garden, which was becoming more dangerous by the day. The Professor had been vacuuming Roger the snow leopard’s fur with a Dustbuster, and Olivia had to shout over the moan of sucked-up air.
I think we should stop,
she told him as he worked on the fur between Roger’s ears. She had yet to realize how connected she already was to the garden. She said,
Everyone’s getting these rashes and we don’t know why. I think we should just close up the walled-in garden and leave it be.
Her father turned off the vacuum, and the look in his eyes was so sad,
so disappointed and forlorn that Olivia would have given anything to take her words back and would have said anything to make the sadness on his face go away. When he told her the rashes were nothing to worry about, she quickly agreed. He said that something in his detergent was irritating his skin, and she said
Yes of course,
even though she had been doing the Professor’s laundry once a week and she’d been using the same detergent that her mother had used since Olivia was born. But she did not argue with him. She much preferred to see her father distracted by the plants in his greenhouse and walled-in garden than by his own thoughts, which sometimes seemed to lead him down into such remote and shadowy places that Olivia worried he might one day disappear into them altogether.

One terrible day just after the school year began and shortly before Arthur moved into the ravine, Olivia crept up behind her father and traced a distinct X with her index finger on the back of his sun-spotted neck—just to prove that her secret niggling suspicions about herself were unfounded, ridiculous, and flat wrong. But only a few hours later, she saw him mindlessly itching while he was reading his dog-eared copy of
On The Origin of the Species,
and she did not let herself draw a conclusion until she walked around behind him and saw, there on his fragile skin beneath his white hair, a red, angry X. She’d gone running into the bushes to throw up her lunch.

“It was the last time I touched my father. The last time I deliberately touched anyone,” Olivia said. “Now, you understand.”

She was looking out at the Night Garden, the fireflies whirling like snowflakes, the white flowers glowing, the smell of unbridled fertility hanging in the air. To think that Green Valley’s odd magic had put Olivia out of reach to him—Olivia, the first woman he’d been able to feel in ages—was infuriating. And yet, as difficult as the news was for him to hear right now, she had been living with it for years.

Olivia’s fingers were twisted together on her lap, her shoulders stiff. In spite of her agitation, she was lovely. Her reddish hair in the moonlight had deepened to a winelike color and had taken on a silvery sheen; her skin seemed to glow like the flowers around her. But her face was turned away from him, as if she was afraid of what she might see in his eyes now that he knew the truth about what she was.

“Olivia.”

She glanced at him.

“I’m glad you explained this to me.”

“I only told you because I knew you would probably figure it out.”

“Still,” he said. “I wouldn’t have known the details. Your perspective. I’m glad you shared.”

She unlaced her fingers and slid her palms down her arms. Her skin was pebbled with goose bumps that had nothing to do with the temperature, and he wanted to run his hands over the raised bumps, over the pebbling and stiffening that he knew would feel exquisite under his fingertips. Had he ever paid attention to such things before he’d lost his feeling? He wasn’t certain. But he would pay attention now. The next time he made love—he stopped mid-thought. In spite of his desire, the next time would
not
be with Olivia. Maybe it never would. He didn’t quite know what to do with the realization, so he put the problem aside for now. “Does anyone else know about this?”

“Only my father,” she said.

“How have you kept the boarders from finding out? What about Tom?”

“It’s been tricky. I’ve had a few close calls. But the boarders are in and out all summer long; they’re never the same group twice. And even if they were gossiping about me, if someone did have a suspicion, who would believe it? It would sound too insane.”

“You must be lonely,” he said. She lifted a shoulder as if she didn’t care. But he knew better. “Is there a way to … to change things?”

She shook her head. “If I don’t go into the garden regularly, I’ll die. I need it in some way I can’t explain. It’s like, you know how normal people take vitamins? I need to be exposed to all the various chemicals in my garden on a regular basis. I think maybe they can be absorbed through my skin.”

“What about the winter? When your garden dies?”

“I do bring some of my poison plants with me into the silo for the winter. But I need more than that. I need a supplement.”

“What?”

She gave him a sly smile. “Can you guess?”

He leaned back and crossed his arms, thinking. “Hmm. Do you dry the leaves or something? Make them into a tea?”

“No. My method is a lot sweeter.”

“Sweeter …”

“Yes. Much sweeter.”

He saw her with his mind’s eye at the beehives, walking toward him, her face hidden behind her veil. “The honey,” he said.

She smiled—the first smile he’d seen all evening that reached her eyes. “I knew you’d figure it out.”

He thought of the apiaries, the fat, friendly, noxious Pennywort bees. “The bees pollinate the plants in the Poison Garden.”

“Yes. That’s why I don’t let anyone buy it. It could be deadly, even in small doses, to anyone but me. A few tablespoons of honey a day seems to keep me going during the winter. It’s not as good as the real thing, but it works.”

“Have you tried not going into the garden? Or not taking the honey over the winter? Just to see?”

He saw her bristle. “Yes. It doesn’t work.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure, Sam. That’s a dead end,” she said tightly. Maybe even defensively.

His mind was racing. He wanted to fix the problem of the Poison Garden for her, for the sake of her happiness—and also for his. He wanted, he realized, to be her hero in some way that he couldn’t be anyone else’s. The need to help her was an urge that was almost crushing in its intensity. “What about going to a doctor? Have you been?”

She laughed. “God, no. I’m not prepared to be anyone’s exciting new lab rat. And, really, in and of myself, I’m totally healthy. I’m fine. It’s everyone else that’s got a problem with me, if you think about it.” She stood and took a few steps away from him, the fireflies shifting and blinking around her. There was a small stone fountain in the garden, its water still for the night, and she touched her fingertips to the bowl’s surface. It rippled in concentric light. “Anyway, who knows why things are the way they are. Maybe it’s better this way—that no one can touch me. I’ve got a good life here, Sam. Quiet. The only thing I worry about except for my father is the farm. People stay away. And I’m … I’m used to that. I’m okay with it. It makes things easier if you think about it. People … people are so much more dangerous than any of my plants.”