The Night Garden (34 page)

He’d wiped the dirt off his hands and stood upright, not quite believing what he’d heard. Sam told him Olivia had no idea that a proposal was coming, and that while he planned to propose now, they wouldn’t actually marry until next year. Then she would be of legal age to get married—but only if Arthur would give parental consent.

Arthur had looked Sam in the eye and clasped his hand and said that he was doing the right thing by asking permission. But in the meantime, a wicked thought had formed, an incredible thought, a thought that jolted him like the old thrill of holding a new stuffed predator or a sharp antique blade. Olivia was becoming poisonous: Arthur knew it. He had realized just that morning, and he’d planned to tell Olivia she should never go into the garden again.

But now, with a black fear growing in his heart like a cancer, he made a new decision. Sam was foolish—excessively young, excessively amped up on teenage hormones. If only Sam could no longer touch Olivia for a while, his ardor would cool and he would not feel so intent on plunging into marriage. There was a way Arthur could make that happen: He would simply
guard the secret of the Poison Garden inside his own poison heart.

It was the most terrible thing Arthur had ever done in his entire life—in eighty-three years of living, he could pinpoint the moment that had doomed him to hell. In his old age, with his head clearer and memories of Alice becoming more distant by the day, he knew that he would never have taken such a risk if he’d been in a more generous state of mind. But it all happened almost exactly as Arthur thought it might. Olivia realized her condition, the school year started, and Sam stopped coming around. The threat of marriage was over. Arthur was momentarily pleased.

But then, Olivia grew sullen. Autumn came. The Penny Loafers left—just as they always did—and the gardens died. To Arthur’s dismay, Olivia’s condition did not reverse with the death of her Poison Garden. He’d never once thought the effects of the Poison Garden would be permanent. He watched her grow sickly, thin, and pale—and he was certain that he was facing the punishment of an angry God for what he’d done. It was sheer accident that had taught them the Pennywort honey could help revive her; they spread it on their toast one October morning, and while Arthur had gotten sick eating it, Olivia had been slightly revived.

But she had not recovered. The light of childhood went out of her eyes. Her optimism and warmth vanished, a new kind of coldness and aloofness settled into her bones. As the autumn progressed, Arthur’s guilt rubbed him raw. The Olivia he’d known faded away, even with daily doses of honey. He could not bear to see it. Nor could he stand the sight of himself. In trying to keep Olivia by his side for just a few summers more, he’d accidentally bound her to the farm forever. In a way, he’d got what he wanted: Olivia would never be able to leave him. And he would spend the rest of his life in penance at the bottom
of Solomon’s Ravine, suffering in the green gloom and murk like an animal. If he lived to be a hundred, it wouldn’t be enough time to atone for what he’d done.

Olivia finished reading her father’s messy and disjointed confession. And when she was finished, she went up to the Poison Garden and shut the door.

Late Bloomer

What happened next went down in the lore of Green Valley for generations to come, although the way it all went down was up for debate, and even those who were there the day it happened argued about what was honest fact and what was just the natural human tendency to exaggerate. Mrs. Lee McAlester said she knew something was about to happen because while she was doing her crossword on the back deck, she turned around to see an owl sitting on the eaves, and everybody knew an owl over your shoulder was bad luck. Jesse Marshall said he knew because all the starlings that liked to gather on his lawn on August mornings just up and vanished, and didn’t return for three days.

Gloria Zeiger had remarked to the cashier at the nail salon that the thunderstorms had kept her up all night—only to be told that no one else heard so much as a raindrop on the window. But Gloria had been sure she’d heard storms, and she’d argued the point: Every few hours she woke up to feel that the metal coils of her mattress were buzzing as if being vibrated from below, and she heard a sound like distant, groaning thunder. The girls in the nail salon found it was better to agree than argue, or else the conversation would never move on.

But Gloria was not the only one to hear the groaning, grumbling
creaking: A mile away, a middle-aged dairy farmer named Johannes Larsen had pushed open his screen door in the wee hours expecting rain, but the sky was crystal clear and starry, the great swath of the Milky Way stretching from one end of the night to the other in a glittery band.

Sam too had not slept well, but he had not expected to sleep well given the events of the day. He believed the low, sporadic sawing-groaning-creaking kind of noise that kept waking him up was nothing more than the sawing of his own teeth in his head. His shift had kept him busy well into the night, and so he had not seen Olivia since he’d left her in the silo kitchen yesterday. His dreams of her were choppy and disturbed. When he woke in the morning to the sound of banging, he realized that someone was at the door and he hurried to answer it.

The little pregnant girl from the barn was there in a black shirt and glittery blue shorts. Her features were small and solemn. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“I think I made a mistake,” she said.

He pushed open the door.

She followed him, then sat down on his couch as if she’d made herself at home in his house a thousand times before. He listened as the girl—
Mei,
he remembered—told him what had happened on the farm: that the boarders had turned on Olivia, that Mei had instigated them to do it, that Olivia had booted them out. Sam listened with increasing panic. Mei said Gloria had promised her a hundred dollars for every Penny Loafer that she could get to move out of the barn and into the homeless shelter. Mei knew she wouldn’t get anywhere trying to convince the women to leave—they were too in love with the barn, too set on staying there until the maze gave them their answers. If Mei wanted the women to leave, she would need to work on Olivia, to create a reason strong enough that Olivia would need to kick them out.

Mei looked up at Sam from beneath short, dark lashes. “I shouldn’t feel bad about this. I shouldn’t. I mean, I got the money—I should have just skipped town already.”

“So why are you still here?”

Mei played with a thread that hung from her shorts. “Olivia said something to me. It just … it made me think.”

“You got your answer,” Sam said. “In the maze.”

Mei nodded and touched her belly. “I guess … I just have a better idea of who I want to be.”

“So, what can I do?”

“I want you to help me fix it. Get Olivia to invite the boarders back to the barn.”

“Did you start by apologizing to her?”

“That’s why I came back. But … she wouldn’t talk to me.”

“Did you
ask
her if she’ll take the boarders back? I’m sure she will. She’s never been stubborn like that.”

“Sam, I think something’s wrong. Like, really wrong.”

“What?”

“I think it would be better for you to see for yourself,” she said.

“See what for myself?”

She stood with effort, one hand on her lower back. “Go to the garden. You’ll find her there.”

He didn’t wait; every instinct in his body that had failed him on the night Patrick Kearny died suddenly filled him with the certainty that Olivia needed him. He didn’t pause even to escort Mei out of his house; he walked quickly toward the maze thinking of the last time he’d seen Olivia, with her skin glistening in the kitchen of her steamy silo, jars of preserved fruits all around. When he crossed the street into the old barnyard, the farm appeared to have been abandoned. No boarders in their odd collections of mismatched clothes were crossing in and out of the garden maze. He could not hear any of the usual sounds of
Tom and the farm crew calling to one another over the puttering drone of a tractor in the fields. Even the wandering peacock was relatively somber, dragging its train of feathers and blinking at him with beady eyes. There was nothing: just an eerie silence. But suddenly, through the quiet, he felt the ground tremble beneath his toes, heard a low creaking groan like the earth itself was sighing.

He began to run, across the farm, into the maze, toward the Poison Garden. The maze unraveled, corners kinking before him, spirals winding him one way and then the other, and he had a sense that it was leading him, but also that it was changing around him like water, so familiar paths seemed strange. He was certain the next right would bring him toward the center of the maze, but instead he found himself in the Sundial Garden and had to double back. The lines of sunflowers that stood along the corridor had all fallen over, crisscrossing the pathway like rows of ceremonial swords, and Sam did his best to stand them upright as he passed them.

Finally, he reached the alcove at the foot of Olivia’s Poison Garden. What he saw stopped him.

A great wave of poison ivy had swelled over the top of the walled garden like the hand of some enormous green god. Finger-thick tendrils had wound around the barbed wire at the tops of the walls, then cascaded in a green waterfall down toward the ground. Olivia had planted the outside of her garden with touch-me-not, which was actually a cheery and benign plant used in folk medicine to treat poison ivy. But now the leaves-of-three had formed such a thick mat on top of the touch-me-not that it cast a shadow so dense it was nearly blue. He circled the garden, looking for a break in the vines, but there were angry, lush, matted, zealous, wild, perilous green snares covering every inch of the walls.

“Olivia!” Sam called. “Olivia? Are you in there?” He took a
few steps closer toward the plants, his toes just an inch away from the edge of the ragged green tide. “Olivia! Are you there?” He was standing before what he thought was the door to the garden, but he could barely make it out. He worried: Was she in there? Was she stuck? Was she hurt? “Olivia—if you’re in there you’ve got to tell me. Otherwise I’ve got to find a way to get in.”

“Don’t come in.” He heard her voice over the wall.

“Are you okay?”

“Just go away.”

He looked down at his shoe: a tendril of poison ivy had curled on top of the leather toe. He kicked it off. “We’ve got to get you out of there, Ollie. You wouldn’t believe what’s happening out here. It’s like poison ivy Armageddon.”

“I told you to go away.”

“I know about the boarders. Mei told me.”

She was quiet.

“We’ll work it out, Olivia. We’ll just ask them to come back. It won’t be a big deal.”

“I don’t want them back.”

“You don’t?” She didn’t answer. “What’s going on then? What’s got you upset like this? Is it because I can’t touch you anymore?”

“I want you to go away, Sam. Just leave me alone.”

An awful feeling constricted like a vine cutting into his heart. This—the dangerous flood of poison ivy—this was no freak coincidence. Olivia was doing this in some way. He took a small step backward. His throat itched. Was she mad at him? He knew she’d been hurt by the boarders, but her anger as he stood outside the walls seemed to be directed
at him.
Was she mad at him, too?

“If this is about your father, it wasn’t a secret or anything. I was going to tell you.”

She didn’t speak.

“Olivia, please. You know I want to marry you. I was going to propose even if your father hadn’t tried to make me.”

The vines were not moving, not that he could see. And yet, they seemed closer. The air had grown thicker with the smell of green.

Her response came after a long pause. “He
made
you propose to me?”

Sam took a step back. His throat was definitely itchy. He wasn’t sure how much longer he would be able to stand so close to the vines. And yet, apparently Olivia hadn’t known about Arthur’s scheming, so Sam had no choice but to explain. “Listen,” he said. “Your dad told me he would help me with the honey, but not until we were married. I was going to ask you anyway. And he was just trying to look out for you.”

“Look out for me! Ha!” she said, and he couldn’t tell if the sound was a laugh or a sob.

Sam’s throat was getting tighter. “Olivia I can’t stay here. And the vines—you have to stop this. It’s dangerous. You have to come out.”

“I don’t have to do anything.”

“What happened? Talk to me, Ollie. You can tell me. I love you. Just … just come out of there and we’ll sort this all out.”

She didn’t answer. He was talking to a wall. And his throat was tightening. “I can’t stay here,” he said.

“I don’t want you to stay,” she said. “I wish you’d never come back in the first place. Before you showed up, everything was fine.”

He tried to hold back a swell of anger. “Everything was not fine. You were just pretending it was fine. You can’t hide forever, Ollie. You have to come out.”

“Did you not hear me? I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to see you. And I certainly don’t ever want to marry you.”

He drew himself up straighter. “What the hell? What’s gotten into you? Why are you acting like a child?”

She replied with words that shocked him, two words he’d never thought he would have heard her say—and certainly not to him. He threw his hands up and turned his back. He started to walk away from the center garden, but the urge to finally get his frustrations off his chest was too strong. “You know what, Olivia? I’ve been bending over backward for you, trying to make this work, and you’re not even trying to meet me in the middle. You didn’t even come see me in the hospital when I was on my damn deathbed because you couldn’t leave your precious farm. And I’m tired of it! I’m tired of pulling all the weight for both of us. I’m tired of having to give so much and not getting anything back.”

She didn’t answer; he didn’t expect her to. He balled his hands into fists.

“I want to love you. Just as you are. But I can’t do it if you won’t let me. What kind of future is there for us if you’re always thinking I’ll leave you and you’re literally hiding behind a wall?” He took another step back; in another minute, he would be in real danger—if he wasn’t already. He needed an antihistamine, fast. “Ollie. Do you hear what I’m saying here? You have to decide what you want. And if you want me, then you’ve got to come out of there. Right now.”