The Night Garden (35 page)

He told himself: If she said one word, any word at all, to make him think she was willing to work for them, to put in some effort, then he would resolve not to give up. But a man could only handle so much failure, so much of a sense that he could not make the woman he loved happy. And when she remained quiet, he knew he could not succeed with her, and he quietly slunk away. Behind him, the vines crawled.

*  *  *

Inside the Poison Garden, Olivia sat with her back curved against one of the stone walls that she and her father had built. Overnight, she’d slept deeply, as if at the dark bottom of a great, heavy lake, but she woke in the morning with no sense of having been restored. Her body ached and her heart was as low as if she had not gone looking for the rejuvenating breath of her Poison Garden at all. Around her where she sat, scowling at the earth, vines of poison ivy had formed a kind of pod or shell, all woven together in a spindly and tangled mess. The sun shone through the toothed leaves and cast a yellow green on her skin in between clusters of shadows. Olivia had not panicked to have woken up caught in a living green cage; instead, she’d felt only a kind of sour acceptance, as if it was the most natural thing in life that she should be entombed by poison vines.

She gathered her knees in closer to herself. Soon, the news of how she had evicted the boarders because of their suspicions—and the news of how her Poison Garden had gone haywire with her inside—would be all over the valley. Her secret would be out. People, neighbors that she’d always liked to think of as friends, would be afraid, hateful, maybe even malicious. Perhaps they would accuse her of trying to harm others, or of being negligent with their safety, since it was about to be known that she’d purposely cultivated the valley’s most toxic plants in the valley’s most visited garden. How her father ever could have thought that making her this way would protect her was beyond comprehension. The fact that he had betrayed her so horrifically meant anyone could.

Only her plants seemed to promise any kind of real and permanent safety to her—perverse though it was. In her Poison Garden, many of the toxic alkaloids of her leaves and berries were bitter—nature’s weapons of self-protection. She too felt a kind of deep bitterness growing in herself, a bitterness she’d never quite felt before, and she did not hate it. This was what
happened to a person when happiness proved just how fickle it could be: She found ways to guard herself, protect herself. She became as bitter as her plants.

And what was so bad about that?
Olivia thought in her cave of vines. Wasn’t that natural? Happiness filled a person up, filled and filled and filled. And when it was gone, and only a vulgar empty sac was left behind like a deflated balloon,
something
had to ease in and take its place. Bitterness was the urge toward survival in the face of danger—functional as any alkaloid. Plus, there was something nasty and gratifying about giving in to mean-spiritedness. Happiness would
not
disappoint her again. Soon, Olivia thought, the vines would grow too thick to get through without serious equipment; Olivia did not feel as worried about this as she probably should have been.

Her sin was in focus: She’d wanted too much for herself. Before, she’d been happy with her quiet, calm, even
dull
kind of life. She’d been safe, and when a person was safe, she could be happy—or at least content, which was as much as a woman could dare hope to be. It was wrong to have thought she could take her satisfactory life and add more happiness to it without skewing the precise balance of everything and ruining what she’d had. The farm had taken care of her in its way. But when she’d started questioning herself—asking, Am I happy
enough
?—everything started breaking down.

She looked up into the vines, where the leaves had turned translucent around her in the sun, and then she lowered her shoulder to the earth and curled up in a ball to sleep, not caring if the vines were thickening behind the walls, even if they engulfed all of Green Valley before they were done.

In the midafternoon, Gloria happened to glance out of her window and down into the valley while she was vacuuming her
living room carpet. What she saw was enough to make her turn off the machine: The Pennywort garden maze was overgrown—not with bright flowers but with some kind of climbing green vines. The passageways had all been obscured as if a child had taken a green crayon and covered the middle parts of maze with circles and spirals and tangles and slashes that paid no attention to staying in the lines. Gloria paced in front of the window; the whole valley seemed to give off a terrible groaning breath that made the floor of her living room vibrate for a moment, barely perceptible, under her feet. A single antique white dinner plate fell off her wall.

She reached for the phone. Reached for it—then stopped. For once she decided that she would
not
call the police to alert them. If a giant alien man-eating vine was swallowing the garden maze whole—hell, if the thing got up and started tap-dancing—well then, more power to it. The important thing was that the poor, defenseless Penny Loafers were no longer in danger on the farm. Yesterday, her girl Mei had finally found some way to convince them all to move to the shelter, where it was safe, and comfortable, and halfway across town. Gloria wasn’t quite sure how the girl had managed to move the homeless women off the farm: Mei got a funny look in her eye and refused to go into detail when asked. But at any rate it was done, and that was the important thing. The shelter was at full capacity and her unwanted neighbors were safe behind its walls. Feeling a sudden urge for a strawberry daiquiri, Gloria closed the shades.

Halfway across town in Gloria’s shelter, the Penny Loafers were feeling itchy—not the kind of itch that attacks the surface of the skin, but more deeply itchy. Restless. Shortly after the grouped had arrived at the shelter and filled out their paperwork and signed all the forms, Mei had taken off—saying that she was finally feeling ready to go home. She’d barely bothered to say goodbye, leaving the boarders quite perplexed and feeling
abandoned without their unofficial new leader. It was as if when Mei left, she took all her anger and irritation at Olivia Pennywort with her: The bluster went out of the little group as they sat in the common room watching commercials play on the television, and as their hands itched for the tasks of weeding or watering in the garden maze, they began to wonder what exactly they were doing at the shelter anyway and wishing they could go back.

But they could not leave: Olivia Pennywort would not welcome them back, not after how they’d betrayed and embarrassed her by believing the preposterous rumor that had been going around. They sat on couches with wooden arms and overly firm cushions, and they did not speak about it but inwardly wondered if they had ruined their shot at getting clear answers to their individual questions now that they were no longer welcome in the garden maze.

In Solomon’s Ravine, Arthur too was having his own kind of crisis. Yesterday he had taken himself for a little stroll to Hemlock Pond, just for a bit of exercise. He’d been working on his Great Confession, and he’d needed a break from the difficult memories of the past. He’d left his notepad on his spiffy new kitchen table because he had not expected Olivia until later. And now, he knew she’d seen it. She’d pulled out the pages and left them crumpled so that he would know she’d been there. If he’d felt guilty before about what he’d done, he felt a thousand times guiltier now. He’d spent all of his years since he’d realized Olivia’s condition was irreversible punishing himself by remaining in the gloom of Solomon’s Ravine, by not shaving off his damn beard even though he hated it, by taking himself away from the farm he and Alice had loved. He had no idea how he could fix the horrible thing he’d done—and he was beginning to think there was no way to fix it. No apology would ever be enough. He sat in the bottom of the ravine and watched the
newly swollen river dragging debris downstream. Sometimes he thought it would be more convenient for him, and for everyone, if he would just die.

The night passed. Not a single bird made so much as a peep. The Green Valley goats were missing from their usual haunts—but wherever they’d gone, they were certainly up to no good. When morning came, Sam excused himself from work with a phone call, saying that he suspected an ear infection—and yet, he knew that there had never been a day when it was more important to show his face at the station than this one. After he’d left Olivia, he’d gone straight to the bar, hoping to drink his blues away as he’d sometimes done in the years before he’d returned to the valley. A couple of guys had got drunk and started posturing like roosters and flapping their knives at one another near the doorway. But instead of throwing himself between the potential fighters, as everyone seemed to expect him to do, Sam had gone bottom’s up on his beer, slapped his money on the counter, and said to the men as he was leaving,
Good luck.

The good news was that the idiots had been so startled to see a Van Winkle abandon a very serious, very life-and-death fight that they’d lost interest in it and walked away with their pocketknives sheathed. But the bad news was that all of Sam’s buddies were on to him now, if they hadn’t been before. They knew he was a coward, a crappy, careless cop. They did
not
know that the Van Winkle talent had skipped him, that Sam was as likely to kill people as save them.

It was 11
A.M.
when Sam walked into Roddy’s office, knocking as he entered instead of before. Roddy glanced up but then went back to his work. “Sam. I see you’re feeling better. That ear infection cleared up already?”

“I’m quitting,” Sam said.

Roddy looked up from his computer, then took off his glasses and folded his hands. “Sit down.”

Sam shook his head. “Not staying long.”

“I assume you’re at least giving me the courtesy of two weeks’ notice?”

Sam frowned; he hadn’t thought about that. “I guess.”

“Then I’m still your boss and you still work for me. Sit down.”

Sam sighed and obeyed.

“You think I don’t know why you’re quitting. But I do.”

Sam was pretty sure Roddy had no idea, so he kept his mouth shut.

“This is because the guys give you a hard time. You’ve got to get a thicker skin, Sam. You know it’s always been that way.”

“I don’t give a crap what they say to me. Or about me. I’m quitting because I have to.”

“Far as I can tell, nobody here is making you quit.”

“But I can’t do this,” Sam said. “You don’t want a Van Winkle on the force who can’t even save a damn kitten from a tree. Really.”

Roddy spoke slowly. “Nobody in this whole town thinks that but you.”

Sam slammed his hand on the edge of the desk. “Then
I’m
the only one who has his head on straight.”

Roddy stood up, his old chair creaking beneath him. Then he came around to the front of his desk. The bright window behind him made him look formidable and wide. “Sam. Is this because of Olivia? Did something happen?”

“A thousand things happened,” Sam said, and he tried not to remember the way she’d arched her neck to him when he leaned down to kiss it. He gripped the arms of the chair.

“Oh well now. Don’t take it too personally, Sam. You’re not the first guy to get chewed up and spit out by that girl, and I guarantee you won’t be the last.”

You have no idea what you’re talking about,
Sam thought. There wasn’t a man in Green Valley who could compare his broken
heart to Sam’s. Olivia had opened up to him; he knew her in a way no one else ever did and—he was certain—no one else ever would. She loved him, he was sure of it. But her love wasn’t strong enough to make her willing to take a risk. The pain of her unwillingness to meet him halfway was surpassed only by the pain he’d felt sitting alone in a plane with a dead man. Sam curled his hands into fists on his thighs. “I asked her to marry me,” he said.

“Let me guess. She turned you down.”

“Yes. But it wasn’t like that. We were serious. At least, I thought we were.”

“Oh I know it,” Roddy said. “That girl was ass over teakettle for you. Hell, everyone in the whole damn valley knew it the day she parked her tractor at the hospital and went inside. First time anybody’d seen her off that farm in God-knows-how-many years. I was there myself, Sam. I saw the look on her face. If you’d died …” Roddy shook his head. “It would have taken a lot more than the Van Winkle magic to save her.”

“Wait. Wait. She
was
at the hospital?”

“Stayed by your bed for an hour before they kicked her out,” Roddy said. “You didn’t know?”

“We … we didn’t really do a lot of talking since I came home,” Sam said. They’d only lain in bed, and made love, and talked about everything in the world except for the things that actually might matter. It had been some kind of unspoken agreement, a measure of protection: They did not talk about the past—not about cures or serums—or the future—not about marriage or children or the possibility that their pleasure was temporary. Only when Sam saw the red spots freckling his belly did reality intrude back in.

“So why do you think she won’t marry you?” Roddy asked.

Sam looked out the window at the parking lot. “I don’t know. Afraid?”

“What’s she afraid of?”

He bounced his fists on his knees. “What isn’t she afraid of?”

“You’re missing my point here, Sam.”

“What your point?”

“My point is that girl did something for you she’s never done for anybody. Maybe she’s saying she won’t marry you, but she does love you—that’s clear as day. And to my eye, something doesn’t add up. There’s an element you and I aren’t seeing. I don’t know what it is. But if I were you, I’d want to find out.”

Sam stood, anxious. He’d lain in the hospital and wondered how he was going to live the rest of his life with a woman he’d nearly died for but who hadn’t been willing to drive across town to see him. But he’d been wrong—Olivia was willing to fight. Or at least, she had been. She’d kept herself out of the garden for him at one point, and he’d been the one to escort her back in. He should have guessed she’d gone to the hospital as well.