The Night Garden (4 page)

“She died from pokeweed?”

“No. It was a mushroom. We don’t know what kind, exactly. I remember she had a bellyache and then a few hours later said she was better. We thought she just had a bug. But the thing about some kinds of mushrooms is that they kill you when you’re not looking. By the time we realized what had happened, she was too far gone.”

“God,” Mei said. “I don’t get it. Why didn’t she get help right away?”

“That’s just the way of the farmers of Green Valley; they don’t complain about things.” Olivia put a hand on the large henbane blossom that led into the maze. “Anyway, that’s why the gardens are so important to me. And why I keep the barn open. I lost my mother early on. But I like to think we’re close to each other because of how much we both love the maze.”

Mei uncrossed her arms and peered into the opening of the maze. Olivia knew she was thinking the things that all the new Penny Loafers thought, having the internal debate they all had. Should she stay with the lonely, crazy woman who was offering her a sanctuary but who had seriously bizarre rules and apparently
a phobia of human touch? Or should she hit the road and burn rubber out of the parking lot and thank her lucky stars she got away?

“I have to get back to work,” Olivia said. “If you stay or don’t stay, it’s not up to me. But take a stroll in the maze before you go. Here’s the entrance. But there are any number of exits you can take.”

“Isn’t a maze supposed to have only one finish line?”

“Not this maze. The good thing about problems is that it seems like there’s only one way to get into them, but there’s usually lots of ways out.”

Mei sighed, and a kind of distance crept into her eyes. Olivia saw suddenly how young she was, and how tired. She wished she could reach out a hand to squeeze it, or even offer a pat on the back. But a gesture like that would hurt more than help.

“I’ll leave you to it,” Olivia said. “When you’re done, stop by the farm stand. Whether you stay with us or go on your way, I’ll have the other boarders make up a bag of our best produce for you. And hey—you don’t even have to steal it.”

“Thanks,” Mei said.

“It’s no problem. I’m not doing anything my mother wouldn’t have done for you if she were still here,” Olivia said. “The garden maze should help.”

Of course, the Pennywort maze was not the kinder and gentler way of getting at the heart of a tough decision: It could be cruel and blunt, as it did not temper its advice with platitudes or gentle coaxing as a kind listener might. Instead it flung people from their comfort zones like a plane’s ejector seat, it severed relationships as with an executioner’s sword, it bound lovers to affairs that would be best swept under the carpet, and it mangled people’s peace of mind. Some visitors were thrilled by the discovery of an inner truth. But others were angry when the clarity that they’d hoped to find turned out not to be an easy
clarity, but instead the kind of clarity that makes a person forsake loved ones, or give up valuables, or throw away their future, or go after a dream without the safety net of common sense or a viable Plan B.

“Go on,” Olivia said. “Just keep your question in your mind.”

Mei gave her one last uncertain glance. The entrance to the maze was before her, the flower so big it could make a human feel like a bee, the large human-sized hole in the center of the flower beckoning Mei into the maze. For a split second before Olivia could quell the feeling, she was struck with a pang of jealousy. Because for as generous as the maze had always been in helping others make difficult decisions, the maze had never—not once—seemed to convey anything of value to
her.

She could only suppose the maze’s silence toward her was because she had no more need of difficult answers than she’d had need of exits or escape routes: everything she needed was all around her, right here, on the farm. It
would be wrong to expect more of her life than what she had.

In the bright blue sky, turkey vultures had gathered over Solomon’s Ravine, riding the current of the heat. Olivia listened as the sound of Mei’s footsteps softened inside the maze. Then she returned, mindlessly if not contentedly, to the work of the day.

An Olive Branch

Samuel Van Winkle, who had lived across the road from the Pennywort farm during his young life, had been unable to prevent himself from entertaining the idea that if he returned to the gardens of his youth, he would find a little bit of his old, youthful energy waiting there to be reclaimed. He would walk into the Pennyworts’ garden maze, where he’d played for so many hours as a kid, and be overwhelmed by its infinite botanical stimulations—because wasn’t stimulation what gardens were about?—and he would drink in all the wild and profuse colors of snapdragons and phloxes and roses and orchids; he would breathe in the fragrant musk of flowers with its faint underpinnings of fertility and sex; he would listen to the droning of overfed honeybees as they bumbled from bloom to bloom—and then, maybe, if he was really freakishly lucky, he would run his hands over the green walls of the hedges, and he would
feel
them,
actually feel them,
in the normal, miraculous, and mundane way he used to feel things before his accident.

But—as it turned out—he’d been right to keep his ridiculous optimism about miracle cures boxed up and buried. Because even in the Pennyworts’ garden, where anything was possible, he found no miracles. He still couldn’t feel, not like he used to.
He touched the petals of lady’s slipper, pink and pretty when it should have already lost its bloom. He rubbed a soft leaf of a flower he did not recognize against his chin—but there was nothing. No small frictions from infinitely tiny hairs on the underside of a leaf, no raised veins catching his fingertips. His skin might as well have been a leather hide. He let his hand fall.

The Pennywort maze could do many things for a man, but it couldn’t cure him of a disease that the doctors said didn’t exist. For eighteen months, Sam had been unable to feel the workings of the world around him through his skin: If it was raining gently, he knew it only by the look of drops on his shirt. If a bag was heavy, he could sense the weight of it in the workings of his muscles, but he could not feel the bite of a strap on his skin. And though he’d gone as far as kissing a few women, it had been a long time since he’d felt even the slightest pleasure in human touch—almost two years of walking around in his own skin with the understanding that he was, at the most basic level, hardly more feeling than a dead man.

The doctors had told him that despite the violence of his accident, they couldn’t find anything wrong with his brain. His condition, they said, was probably the result of emotional trauma as opposed to physical
—a somatoform disorder,
one young doctor had said, though an older physician had called it
psychosomatic.
That word alone had been enough to keep Sam from sharing his secret with anyone—not that he would have mentioned it anyway.
Psychosomatic,
he said the word to himself sometimes.
It means you’re nuts,
his father would have said.

No one in Green Valley knew what had really happened to him before he’d returned. No one would glance twice if he slipped up and let his limp show occasionally, or if he groaned too much when the weather got cold. All over Green Valley men and women bore the injuries of life in farming: gnarled nail beds and missing fingers and toes, arms scarred by machinery
and faces turned leathery by the sun. Compared to some of the old-timers, Sam looked perfectly intact. And that was a good thing: He would never be able to tell anyone what had happened, especially not his relatives. The Van Winkles were tall men, lanky and knobby, with scrawny chicken necks during puberty and pronounced Adam’s apples later down the line. They were known for having big, amiable personalities no matter the kinds of dark thoughts that were going on inside their skulls. The Van Winkles were born noncomplainers. Heroism was not merely woven into their genetic makeup; it was their makeup. Sam came from a family tree of long, forking lines of doctors and paramedics, firefighters and cops. If a guy was ejected out the windshield of a car and lying in a pile of bones on the roadside, it was a Van Winkle that he wanted to see bending over his body, because no Van Winkle had ever let anyone in Green Valley die. Their talent for rescuing people who could not be rescued and reviving people who could not be revived was legendary—even if more than one branch of the family tree had been snapped off by Van Winkles who hadn’t hesitated to throw down their lives to save others.

For many years, Sam had forestalled, skirted, and deflected his filial obligation to Green Valley. He’d wanted to be young and free, to see what there was to see and do what there was to do. But mostly, he’d wanted to get the hell out of Bethel. Like many young men, he’d done his best to demonize the land where he’d grown up—decrying it as a place of backwoods, aging, redneck flower children who were wallowing away their golden years in the deluded and watered-down fantasies of youth. The few times he had returned to his parents’ house during his twenties, he was regularly struck down by a terrible indigestion—a sour burn that flared like a match in the back of his throat and only began to fizzle out when his tires were putting Green Valley in his rearview mirror.

After his accident, Sam had lost the will to fight against the current that had swept up so many of the Van Winkles; he didn’t have to work too very hard to find a place on the Green Valley police department. If there hadn’t been a position open for him, they would have created one. He’d only had to let it be. After zombie-walking his way through training and testing and working out, Sam had officially taken up his post at the police department last week, and the entire force seemed to breathe a sigh of relief that a Van Winkle was once again among them—even though Sam himself felt unsure that he could live up to the Van Winkle reputation. In the week since he’d been back, he’d gone out for shots at Kilcoin’s Tavern; he tossed horseshoes (badly) in Matt Weber’s backyard and listened to classic rock albums; he chased a raccoon out of Mrs. Alexandrov’s garage and then helped her from her rocking chair though he could not feel her hand; and when he got the assignment to check in on the Pennyworts, he told the guys it really was no big deal. No big deal at all.

Now, as he walked among the hedgerows, the maze made him feel as if he were in a pocket of air in which lightning was about to materialize—which was as close as he’d come in eighteen months to feeling anything at all. He paused for a quick moment in the Remembering Garden, which might have been cut out of a Victorian greeting card. And though he could not feel it, he dipped his hand and let the water from the fountain wash over his palm. He said hello to the fat koi in the Rock Garden, and if he didn’t know better, they seemed to remember him, coming to the surface and wagging their bodies in greeting. He passed by the Promise Garden and did not dare to look inside for fear of encountering the ghost of his old, smitten, stupid teenage self within it, still standing there, still clueless and hopeful, still utterly ignorant about the many ways life could and would disappoint a man as he went along.

People had told wonderful tales that had filled Sam’s head with magic when he was a child. They’d said the maze was magical—that it could help a person better know him- or herself. That each room of the garden had its own particular kind of magical workings, magic that couldn’t be explained except to say that all of Green Valley had seemed enchanted since the Concert had come through in 1969. Sam had spent enough time in the garden to believe that strange things could happen there; Olivia’s blooming lady’s slipper was proof enough for him that Green Valley was special. And he’d seen people go through the garden maze and come out the other side claiming to be
changed.
It was, in part, the idiosyncrasies of the Green Valley that had driven him away. He’d wanted to go where flowers bloomed only when they were supposed to, and wild goats did not look at you as if they understood English when you spoke to them, and nobody had ever heard of the Van Winkles.

But—here he was. Back again.

It wasn’t until he was standing at the padlocked wooden door surrounded by rusted warning signs that Olivia Pennywort caught up with him. He heard her footstep before he saw her. He prepared himself, then turned around.

“Can I help you?” she said.

The outdated black radio clipped to his belt went off, and he looked down at it quickly to lower the volume. The frisson of shock he’d felt at seeing her was gone by the time he looked up again. “Olivia.”

“Yes?”

She stared at him blankly and he realized: She no longer recognized him.

“Can I help you?” she said again.

She was as beautiful as she’d ever been, or more beautiful, since he remembered her as a flighty, giggling teen—all elbows and teeth and knees—and she had grown into a woman of muscle
and curves. She stood with her work boots slightly apart beneath the dusty hem of her yellow skirt. Her white tank top was dirt-smudged, threadbare, and torn at a spot near the bottom. Her hands were on her hips and her wide shoulders were squared as if she were readying for a battle. And yet, in spite of all of this, she was the most breathtaking, staggering, punch-in-the-throat-beautiful sight he’d seen in a long time.

He didn’t know what to say. Would it be easier, he wondered, if she
didn’t
recognize him—for the moment at least? Should he wait for her to recognize him, just to see how long it took? He cleared his throat. “This is a heck of a garden.”

She didn’t exactly smile. “Thank you.”

“It’s very green.”

“I have a green thumb,” she said.

“Maybe a little too green. We got a report that you’re watering. Illegally.”

She crossed her brown, bare arms. “Well, I’m not.”

“It sure looks like you’re watering. There’s one green patch in the valley, and it’s right here.” His voice sounded harsher than he’d meant it to. But he’d expected to find she was at least a
little
glad to see him.