The Night Garden: A Novel

by Lisa Van Allen

  But still, she was alive—and that was something. She had the work—the wonderfully exhausting and meaningful work—of running her farm. She lived in a paradise of such extravagant enchantments that the world had not seen such a place since Adam and Eve, and she alone heard its secrets whispered in her ear. The Pennywort farm with its fields and woods and outbuildings and barns and garden maze was like a living, human-sized terrarium: exclusive, self-sustaining, self-contained. What happened on the farm happened for the farm, so that in the same way a plant made its own food from sunlight the farm kept itself running by effortlessly drawing toward it and claiming the things it needed—including Olivia. The edges of Olivia’s universe were delineated by wooden fences or old railroad spikes on the property lines, and even on the worst day of the year the farm was the best place a person could be—the only place Olivia could be what she truly was with any degree of happiness about it. Even now, as Olivia noticed a woman running toward her at top speed across a field of acorn squash, the great green gears of the farm were turning, and the things that manifested themselves as “problems” were actually just signs of life going on.

  “Hey, Olivia! There you are!”

  “Here I am,” Olivia said. The woman—a boarder named Libbie who had started sleeping in the barn three weeks ago—stopped a few feet before Olivia. And Olivia, without thinking, stepped a few feet back. She had been hoeing weeds down row after row of cucumbers for hours; her arms ached and her lower back was cramped. But this was not unusual—just another sign of midsummer, like cicadas and thunderstorms.

  “We caught somebody!” Libbie said, breathing heavily. “Trying to steal … from the farm stand!”

  Olivia frowned. “Really?”

  “Yeah. Bram saw it with her own eyes.” Libbie put her hands on her hips, her shoulders curved with the effort of breathing. This was the most exciting thing that had happened on the farm in a very long time. “This girl just starts shoving things in her bag—like we wouldn’t notice. How do you like that?”

  “Not someone we know …”

  “No. A stranger. From out of town.”

  “Of course.” Olivia squinted toward the distant structure of the roadside farm stand. No one from any of the Bethel hamlets would steal from the Pennywort farm; they knew better. Since the garden maze had first been built in the years following the Concert, speculation about it had been vigorous. People said that a person who picked a flower from the maze would be cursed. They pointed to the birds and the bears and the foxes for corroboration: Not even the hungriest wild animal would pilfer its breakfast from Pennywort land.

  But an outsider who didn’t know any better—that was a different story.

  Olivia squinted at Libbie in the relentless sun. Libbie was in her mid-twenties, and her colorful and slouchy skirts always put Olivia in mind of a woman overplaying the part of a gypsy in a stage show. She’d had a field day with the clothing donations that were sometimes dropped off at the barn by the local churches and synagogues. Libbie had come to the maze trying to decide if she should continue with college or follow her dream to act. When the maze hadn’t offered an immediate answer, she did what so many maze-walkers did: She’d decided to stay on. Olivia peered at her face. “Do you … are you getting a black eye? Did somebody hit you?”

  Libbie smiled, beaming proudly. “Don’t worry. We caught her and locked her in the pen. She put up a fight, but it was three of us against one of her.”

  “Wait. You locked a person in the peacock pen?”

  “The birds aren’t using it right now,” Libbie said, sheepish. “Plus, we didn’t want her to run.”

  Olivia tried to hide her reaction. “Well, I guess that’s … functional.”

  “Do you want me to call the police?” Libbie asked, perhaps a bit too enthusiastically. “Have them come arrest her?”

  “Not just yet,” Olivia said.

  She thanked Libbie for handling the situation as best she knew how. Then she carried her hoe and crossed to the far side of the barn, near the old silo, where the peafowl were set up to roost. She wore clothes typical for her workday: a close-fitting tank top, work boots, and a long cotton skirt that she took a lot of flack for but that struck her as cooler and more accommodating than denim—it was the best balance she’d found between being protected and being comfortable. Her hair, so heavy and long, had been braided and swirled into a loaf that sat smack on the middle of her head. A wet red bandanna around her neck helped her keep cool.

  As she approached the peacock’s cage she could see a figure sitting on the hay with her back curved against the wire fencing. Her knees were curled into her chest. She wore old white tennis shoes with beaded denim shorts that were so tiny the pockets stuck out under the hem. Her tank top was hot orchid pink and tacked with spangles that threw lasers of fuchsia every which way. Her black hair was held back by a glittery teal band.

  “Hello there,” Olivia said to the thief. She leaned against the front of the cage but did not open it. The girl did not answer, did not even turn her head. “This kind of gives a whole new meaning to the idea of getting thrown in the pen.”

  The girl didn’t laugh. “Bite me.”

  “What did you try to steal?”

  The girl didn’t answer.

  “Are you hungry?” Olivia asked.

  “I want you to let me go.”

  “What’s your name?”

  The girl’s face was shaped like a cut diamond, wide temples and narrow chin, and her eyes sparkled like anthracite coal. Her nose was small and flat at the tip, her skin a warm color between taupe and cream. Her hair was long, thick, and black, running straight as a river at midnight.

  “Are you going to call the cops?” the girl asked. “Or are you just going to leave me locked in here all day.”

  “That depends on you,” Olivia said. “Look—you don’t have to tell me your whole name. Just your first name’s good enough. Just so I know what to call you.”

  Suspicion cut through her gaze. But she said, “I’m Mei.”

  “Good. And I’m Olivia. I own this farm, so it was me you were stealing from.”

  The girl made a noise that was a cross between a resigned sigh and a huff of frustration. “I’m sorry, okay? Yes, I was hungry. You’ve got, like, a ton of food. It’s not like it was going to throw you into bankruptcy if I took a tomato.”

  Olivia leaned the hoe against the peacock pen. Her fruits and vegetables and beans were irresistible, even for the most stubborn of meat-and-potato types. She believed that her produce called to people, that if it had arms it would stretch them out and draw people in the same way that people reached out and picked up an apple or plum, so that it wasn’t a customer picking a peach but the other way around. She also had learned that a little human salesmanship didn’t hurt, either; they crushed the unsellable onions on the underside of the tables so the scent bloomed beautifully around the stand. They sprinkled fragrant basil leaves among the tomatoes, and offered cubes of watermelon on toothpicks. It was impossible to resist for adults with full bellies; it was more than impossible, Olivia guessed, for hungry kids.

  “How old are you?” Olivia asked the girl in the pen. Mei.

  “Nineteen.”

  “Do you live around here?”

  “No.”

  “Where you from?”

  “Everywhere.”

  “Are you a runaway?”

  “I’m an adult,” she said. “Nobody owns me. I didn’t run away from anybody.”

  Olivia pulled a handkerchief from the back pocket of her pants and rubbed her sweaty face. Though she and all the farm’s denizens wore loose-fitting cotton and big straw hats to fight the high summer sun, there was no escaping the tyrannical, merciless heat. Humidity congested like water in everyone’s lungs; dust became a skin on their skins. She tucked her handkerchief away.

  “Listen, Mei. I—” The walkie-talkie clipped to her waistband chirped for attention; Tom was looking for her. She’d told him she would walk the fie
lds with him (again) today to inspect the drought damage and talk over the possibility of putting in an irrigation system—which they normally wouldn’t need. Eastern farms had to contend with difficult, rocky soil, but one thing that did work to their advantage was a normally reliable amount of rain. This year, though, the fact that they hadn’t put in irrigation was finally catching up to them. She didn’t have much more time to give to Mei at the moment, though the girl seemed like she could use a little attention. Olivia told Tom she would be with him in a minute. Then she flipped open the lock of the cage where the girl was penned. “Come on out.”

  Mei crawled through the door. The girl stood and brushed off her knees, and in a moment, everything Olivia had been planning abruptly changed.

  The girl’s belly was swollen before her.

  Tom would have to wait.

  A runaway was one thing. A pregnant runaway was another.

  “Am I free to go?” Mei asked. “Or are you just going to keep staring at me because I’m pregnant.”

  “Sorry,” Olivia said. “Why don’t you walk with me for a minute?”

  “Why should I?”

  “I want to show you something.”

  “Just tell me what it is,” Mei said.

  “I can’t tell you. I can only show you. And, given your situation, I think you’ll want to see this for yourself.” Olivia started walking; the girl stayed put. But when Olivia didn’t slow down, or gesture for her to come, or even ask Did you hear what I said? Mei began to follow on her own just as Olivia guessed she would. (Over the years Olivia had seen many women come and go. The farm—the valley—seemed to open up and draw in, and in the center of the valley was the garden maze, filled with its own enchantments for wanderers, worriers, and women trying to find their way.)

  Olivia spoke as they walked, softly, so that Mei had to stay close by her to hear. “The first thing you should know is that you’re welcome to stay here, if you want to. No questions asked.”

  “You mean, like, on the farm?”

  “We’re not exactly the Hilton, but we’re … well … we’re here. See that old barn there, the one that looks like it’s about to fall down? There are cots, blankets, outhouses, outdoor showers, a little kitchenette, and all the food you could ever want and then some.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. I’ve got eleven women staying with me right now.”

  “Staying in there. You’re not kidding.”

  “It doesn’t look like much. But it’s been standing for over eighty years and it hasn’t fallen down yet.”

  “Why?” Mei asked, her voice having lost some of its hard edge.

  “Some people come to Green Valley because they’re trying to find direction. Or answers. They want to make a decision or a change, and they don’t know what to do. For the people who need a little time to themselves and some room to think, there’s nothing better than a stay in the barn. We Pennyworts have been doing this since before I was born.”

  “So how much do you charge a night?” Mei asked as Olivia walked them closer to the garden maze, as slowly as she could stand.

  “It’s free,” Olivia said.

  “No way.”

  “Well, you don’t have to pay any money to stay.”

  Mei narrowed her eyes. “What’s the catch? You might as well spill it now.”

  “You have to work while you’re here.”

  “What exactly do you mean by work? This isn’t some sex trafficking place …?”

  “God no,” Olivia said. “Anyone who stays works on the gardens in return for room and board.”

  “I’m not sure how much work I could do.” Olivia watched Mei’s big eyes begin to water. “I just … I can’t do much of anything right now. I’m pregnant, see?” She gestured awkwardly toward her belly. “And everybody wants me to give up the baby. But I’m not sure if I should.”

  Now Olivia looked blatantly at her belly; she wasn’t past the six-month mark, if Olivia had to guess. “You don’t have to do any work you’re not comfortable doing. And … maybe there’s a way I can help you.”

  Mei wiped her face and blinked rather prettily. “How?”

  “Our garden maze has these … I don’t know … properties. If you walk through it alone, and you hold your question or your problem lightly in your mind, you might just get your answer by the time you find your way out.”

  Mei looked at her incredulously. “Your garden maze is supposed to bring me a magical answer to my … my question. That’s what you’re seriously telling me right now.”

  “You haven’t been in Green Valley very long,” Olivia said. “But things are different here. Lots of things.”

  Mei made a noise between a snort and a laugh. “And what if I don’t get an answer?”

  “Then you’re welcome to stay here until you do.”

  Mei glanced at the barn as they neared it. “So … like, all the women in the barn …”

  “They’re waiting on answers,” Olivia said. “When they’re ready to go, they’ll go.”

  “Hmm,” Mei said. And now, instead of looking at the barn, or the tall hedges that marked the maze, she was looking at Olivia. Olivia didn’t flinch; she’d been looked at this way before, with speculation, distrust, and even disbelief. She’d been looked at this way her entire life—by people who called Green Valley home and by strangers passing through. The fact that she allowed outsiders to sleep in her barn didn’t help her popularity in town: Some people supported her, some people felt bad for her boarders, and some—like her neighbor Gloria—seemed to hate her guts. Inevitably, the crowd that lived in the barn was ragtag, scattered, sundry, and mismatched. Most of the women were quiet minders-of-their-own-business; a few were occasionally rowdy and had to be escorted from local watering holes by annoyed policemen. Somewhere along the line, people got the idea that the women who stayed on the Pennywort farm were moochers, freeloaders, and delinquents—lazy and unwilling to get real jobs. The town had given the Pennywort tenants a nickname: the Penny Loafers.

  But Olivia knew better than the people of Green Valley; she knew the Penny Loafers intimately. They were as close to her as the sisters she didn’t have. Green Valley, and all of the Bethel communities, simply had trouble knowing what to make of them: They were women who couldn’t be defined by the people they took care of (husbands, daughters) or the people who took care of them (mothers, sisters, aunts). They came from hard lives of every kind and were never the same group of women twice. In another century, they might have had something in common with vestals, or handmaidens to a goddess, or sacred oracles—they dedicated their waking hours to cultivating the Pennyworts’ garden maze as they waited to discover what they meant to do with their lives. All summer long, Olivia welcomed them and then watched them go. They were her family, her staff, and the closest thing she had to friends. Then in the fall, when the garden died away and the nights grew too cold to sleep in the barn, she did what she always did: she watched with a heavy heart as they left, not to return until the maze began to bloom again.

  Mei’s eyes seemed clearer now, cautiously hopeful. “You’re not going to, like, try to convert me to join some cult to save my immortal soul, or lock me in a peacock cage again, or turn me in to the cops?”

  Olivia laughed. “No. None of those things. But—there are some rules you have to follow.”

  “Of course there are,” Mei said. “Here we go. What are they?”

  Olivia cleared her throat, and for the first time since they’d started talking, looked away. “If you decide to stay, two things are off-limits. The first is the garden in the center of the maze, the locked garden behind the high stone walls. Don’t go in.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because that’s the rule,” Olivia said, in the tone of voice that she’d learned from her father when she was young, the tone that said No conversation allowed.

  “Okay … What’s the second thing that I’m supposed to steer clear of?”

  Olivia steeled herself.
“That would be me.”

  And though she’d warned people off a hundred times, a thousand, she’d never quite been able to fully defend her heart against their reactions. It always cut her, always hurt, to have to build the same kind of wall around herself that she’d built around her garden. But she had no choice. For a very long time, Olivia had been stuck with a particular affliction: an accidental brush against her arm, a bump of summer-bare legs—anything—would inflict uncomfortable skin irritations on the person who touched her. The pain was not immediate, but it was inevitable. Within a few hours of directly touching Olivia’s skin, a person would begin to itch. Then he might see the first strawberry-colored smatterings of deep irritation. Soon the itching might turn into welts, and then welts into blisters, and no amount of calamine lotion or long baths in oatmeal could fully erase the angry burn or make it more quickly run its course.

  As far as Olivia knew, the secret of her condition had not spread far and wide; the very few people who had reason to suspect it kept the suspicion to themselves with a kind of soured reluctance, an unwillingness to outwardly admit a thing they could not inwardly believe. The best thing to do, Olivia had found, was to warn people to stay away from her right from the beginning. Olivia had hurt people, even when she tried not to. She’d hurt her father long ago when instinct had compelled her to grab him and stop him from falling into a manure pile (she would have been better off letting him fall). She’d hurt the occasional male who attempted to make love to her with friendly, hands-on offers of an oh-you’re-so-tense massage, or an eyelash brushed off her face and wished upon. She hurt her boarders even though she did her best to stay away from them; when she heard them complain of how they must have gotten poison ivy somewhere while hoeing weeds, she could only keep silent, her skin prickling with self-awareness and guilt, as she listened. She’d used to hurt children—back in the days before she stopped leaving the Pennywort property—and that was the worst: to feel the thump of a toddler just learning to walk as he crashed into her at the hardware store, and knowing the anguish and confusion the child’s mother would feel when the redness began to form on her baby’s skin. It was better for all of the Bethel hamlets if she stayed where she was: hidden, safe, minimizing her interactions and minimizing the damage she might do to the town she loved.