“And what about your father?” he asked.
“Good. He’s good.”
“Just good?”
“Yeah. Just good. The same.”
Okay, he thought. Arthur is off-limits. Fine. “And what about Roger the snow leopard? And David Bowie?”
Olivia laughed, and Sam felt a small charge of triumph to see a spark of green-tinged light in her eye. After Alice’s death, Arthur Pennywort had amassed a number of strange hobbies that Alice never would have allowed. The Professor—who had earned his nickname for his constant indulgence in “experiments”—appreciated the artistry of a predator preserved at the height of predation. The more savage the beast, the better—panthers with long yellow teeth and sharp-hooked claws, wolverines with beady black eyes and twisted snarls. In short, he liked things with built-in biological weaponry.
But if Sam had ever felt afraid of the dead-eyed beasts as a child, it was only in the way that a person fears a ghost story or a nightmare—things not real. He and Olivia were fascinated by the menagerie, with its undercurrent of impotent threats. They named the stealthy snow leopard Roger and the silently screeching owl over the mantel David Bowie. Arthur encouraged them. For Easter, he put pink bunny ears on the bust of Cesare Maximus, the ferocious man-eating brown bear. And for one whole summer, Roger wore neon sunglasses, a plastic lavender lei, and a Hawaiian shirt. The day the elementary school teacher asked the class to bring in favorite stuffed animals was epic in Green Valley lore.
“The taxidermies are still here,” she said. “In the farmhouse. But I don’t live there anymore. I moved into the silo.”
“Why?” he asked.
“I just wanted to.”
Sam couldn’t see her face to read it. Her eyes picked up the dragon-green glow of the mushrooms, lending a fairy glint to her pupils. She was as beautiful and fearsome as a stone angel, otherworldly and remote. “I’m glad the farm’s doing so well.”
“Me, too.”
“And it’s good to hear Arthur’s still the same.”
“He is.”
“But what about you?”
He could tell from the tilt of her head that she was puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“How are you doing?”
She laughed. “You must have dozed off for a while there. I’ve been talking about myself for ten minutes straight.”
“You’ve been talking about the farm. I’m asking about you.”
She raised a shoulder, half a shrug.
“What’s your life like? Is it what you wanted?”
“Sure,” she said. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
He wanted to sigh. She was acting obtuse—and he knew it. He adjusted his perch on the concrete mushroom and wondered about Tom, if she was seeing him or if she wanted to. One of her knees was bouncing: Was she impatient? Nervous? A pale scrim of light lay on the surface of her skin, painting green on her bare shoulder like the glow of the sun on a half-dark earth, carving a green shadow beneath her jaw. Sam felt as if a thousand green eyes were scrutinizing him, nightmarish but beautiful in the gloom.
“You didn’t bring a lot of stuff with you,” Olivia said, glancing at him. “When you moved in, I mean. I thought maybe you were just … checking up on the house. I didn’t think you’d actually stay.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.
And for the first time since he’d returned, he’d felt sure that he actually was going to stay, that being back in Green Valley was more than a temporary pit stop so he could put his life back together and move on. He felt the luminous green dark expanding within him, filling him up, green seeping in between the cells of his body, pushing them infinitesimally apart. And though the sensation was heady and not exactly pleasant, he welcomed it, courted it in the silence of his mind, because it had been so long since he’d felt anything, and this, this was something. Orpheus descending into Hades must have known this feeling, must have known hell by its eerie green mushrooms. Or maybe this wasn’t Virgil’s version of hell, but Dante’s—with Olivia as Beatrice to guide him through the inferno, into the circle of punishment where a man was doomed to love the torture of being simultaneously near to and distant from a woman he wanted quite badly to know, a woman who looked so very touchable but whose smooth skin was completely wasted on him, a woman who was herself as luminous as foxfire and who even now was leaning slightly away. “Olivia—”
“What will you say in your report?” she asked. “You’re going to tell them I’m not watering, right?”
He didn’t answer immediately. Not because he didn’t have an answer, but because he didn’t like the question. “I’m not going to give you a hard time. Gloria does enough of that for all of us.”
She smiled crookedly in the half dark. “I should get back to work.”
“Right now?”
She laughed. “I told you I only had a few minutes. You can stay down here a little longer, if you want to. Just shut the door when you go.”
She stood.
“I’ll see you again,” he said. “Now that we’re neighbors.”
“Seems like,” she said. And that was all.
After she left, he stayed in the dark until it seemed to him the mushrooms had started to fade and so had his weird brain fever. (Olivia as Beatrice—really? Maybe the mushrooms gave off something less innocent than phosphorescent light.) He realized, now, that Olivia had not asked after his parents, or if he was married, or if he’d thought of her. She had not asked him anything, nor had she offered him anything of substance.
He got to his feet. There was magic in the maze, people said. Magic that gave inner clarity, that stripped away all the pretensions that a person fabricated around himself. He felt oddly shaky, light-headed, and strange. On Moggy Knob when he’d died, he’d given up on life in the most fundamental and complete way a man could. Then, when he’d found himself in the hospital—still very much living but unable to feel—he’d given up again, choosing Green Valley not because he meant to start anew but because he meant to quit. To return to Bethel, he had simply needed to stop resisting its pull, to give up fighting, and Green Valley simply absorbed him back into it, easily and naturally, like a tree that grows around and eventually engulfs a fence or pipe. In Green Valley, he could allow himself to be puppeted by normalcy, unfeeling and uninspired, and nobody would notice or care.
But then, in the garden maze, there was Olivia. And he realized that there was, to his surprise, something in Green Valley that was still interesting to him. Something that nudged him out of his stupor and made him want to actually try. He wanted to know more about her, this new Olivia who seemed both hardened and hesitant. He wanted it like he hadn’t wanted anything in a long time. He did not expect that she might ever love him again—if she ever had loved him to begin with. And he wouldn’t want her to love him—she deserved better. But the idea of getting to know her better, of drawing her out and discovering what it was that she so desperately guarded, that was a project that invigorated him. He would stay in Green Valley. He was back for good. He felt more clearheaded than he had in a long time.
He climbed the stairs out of the hidden garden, feeling oddly energized. Then he was outside in the blazing, antagonistic brightness of July, which was July in all its copious Julyness, baking the earth to powder under the sun.
In the Bud
Many years ago when she was still alive, Olivia’s mother had liked to tell her daughter a story: Once upon a time, a woman and her husband longed for a child. But the woman grew older, and the man grew older, and they came to believe they would not have a family of their own. Then, one day, the woman happened upon a fairy splashing and frolicking in a valley stream. And in order to keep the woman from giving away the secret of her existence, the fairy agreed to give the woman a daughter in exchange for her silence.
For many years the woman waited. She waited, until she decided she must have dreamed the whole thing. But then, one beautiful spring morning, she pulled up a clump of yellow dandelions onl
y to discover the tiniest of human babies, curled up within the root ball and sweetly speckled with dark brown dirt. And she knew the fairy had not forgotten her after all.
Sometimes the story changed as it suited Olivia’s mother’s mood: The man and the woman found the baby in the hollow of a tree, in a fallen robin’s nest among the blue eggs, in the closed bud of a peony after all the other flowers had bloomed. But always, the story had the same ending: The man and the woman were the Pennyworts, and the baby was Olivia, and they were very happy and surprised when she arrived.
Olivia had loved the stories—though it had been a moment of great embarrassment when in the third grade she realized that she had not in fact been found floating on a water lily, and that her appearance on the farm had more to do with what the geese and goats did in the springtime than with pixie dust or magical storms. But her mother had always insisted that the stories she’d told Olivia about her birth were the perfect truth, if not the actual truth, because they got to the fundamental moral of the story better than facts ever could: Of all the people in Green Valley, Olivia had been born special.
From the beginning, all types of flora had been drawn to her. Houseplants turned away from the sunlight to bend in the direction of her crib. A formerly well-behaved patch of Dutchman’s-pipe had climbed up the side of the farmhouse to her nursery, where it plastered itself against the windowpane as if it wanted to reach in. Olivia’s mother said she’d noticed all of this, but had decided that there was nothing menacing about the phenomenon, and if the plants wanted to be close to her little human miracle, she couldn’t blame them.
Alice’s ideas aside, Olivia did believe certain people were born gardeners, and she was one of them. She grew up playing with pill bugs and millipedes and butterflies in the furrows of her family’s fields. She’d learned to wield a dibble for seeding before she’d learned to walk on two legs. She cried like the world was ending when her parents tried to bring her indoors even for a quick snack, and the instant they set her down in the weeds and grass she turned sunny once again.
When Olivia was barely four years old, her mother had set her up with a small raised garden behind the farmhouse, and Olivia had sat with her seedlings each morning and talked softly to them as if it were the most normal thing in the world to hold a conversation with a patch of peas. When the people of the Bethel hamlets came to the farm to pick up their produce, they exchanged glances with their eyebrows raised almost off the top of their heads. They stopped one another at christenings and bar mitzvahs to speculate: What do you make of it? they said. Witchcraft? The Devil’s curse? Dropped on her head?
But Olivia herself had no idea that at four years old she’d already caused such a sandal. Her peas grew up their teepee so quickly that a person starting on a glass of fresh lemonade might see them climb a good inch by the time the last drop was gone. Her sunflowers shot up two stories high. For a time, Olivia had assumed that her experience with plants was typical. But as she became aware that the exclamations of garden visitors were not simply the obligatory phrases of adults giving praise, she came to understand that plants behaved differently in her care.
Of course, there were logical explanations—everybody knew Pennywort soil was the best in the valley, that it had been the best ever since the Concert had come to town. But Olivia had seen that when she gave any plant her attention, it flourished abnormally whether it was a tiny seedling or a half-dead peace lily brought from a neighbor as a gift. Her talents had limits; she could not single-handedly defeat drought, and there wasn’t much she could do about floods or early frosts. But in general, the Pennywort fields fared better than others in the same area. And her secret garden—that was the most prolific garden of all.
On summer nights after sunset, she could sometimes be seen heading alone into the garden maze, where it was presumed she locked herself behind the gray stone walls for hours at a time. Some people said that once inside she transformed herself into an ugly old black bear—so that when garbage cans were raided and bird feeders were pulled down, old-timers were only half joking when they said it was Olivia Pennywort having her way. Others hypothesized that when she touched the enchanted soil of her garden she turned into a giant calla lily, and so she needed the earth of her garden the way Dracula needed to sleep on native soil. Still others said the Pennyworts weren’t doing anything magical or supernatural behind their garden walls—except for growing a highly potent form of wormwood, which the reclusive old dingbat Arthur Pennywort had used to make such a powerful form of absinthe that his brain had turned a toxic, fairy green.
Wormwood and calla lilies aside, what Olivia grew in her garden had the distinction of being just as outrageous, if not more outrageous, than what people believed she grew. Her plants were the kind that unfailingly jarred mothers to tug their children’s hands and warn them to stay back, don’t touch, and get away. Some species were so rude that even the marauding, yellow-eyed goats of Green Valley—goats known to eat everything from newspaper to electrical cords—tended to avoid them. They were poison ivies and nightshades, stinging nettles and poison hemlocks, laurels and sumacs and doll’s eyes. And on certain summer nights, Olivia slept the deep sleep of a child among them, the most dangerous, toxic, and itch-inducing plants of the rudest kind.
She took a heavy key from around her neck, opened the door to her garden, and slipped inside. The sun had set, but there was still some light in the sky, and her plants seemed to rustle in greeting. Olivia felt a change come over her, as it always did when she returned to her garden—a cellular ignition that made her feel both relaxed and energized. Green poison ivy crawled up the stone walls, writhing and twisting strand over strand. Climbing nightshade clung to a moon-shadowed trellis in dozens of brilliant purple droplets. In the soft dusk, her handful of red and orange poppies were as bright as if the sun were shining on their flared petals.
But for as dangerous as the poison garden was to the outside world, Olivia herself was far more dangerous than any one of her deadly plants. Unlike them, she had human desires.
She ran her hands along the top of her rhododendron. She could not—not for one moment—allow herself to think she could spend any more time with Sam. Nor could she let herself think that he would want to spend time with her, if he knew what she was. She needed daily exposure to her garden’s miasma of various alkaloids in the same way that a normal person needed vitamin D from the sun. She was a freak, a monster—and if she ever forgot it, her garden called to her, claimed her, roped her back in. Mine, it seemed to whisper. And most of the time, Olivia whispered back: Yes, I am.
Tonight, however, she longed to see her garden set on fire, or plunged into a sinkhole, or hit with an asteroid. Tonight, she wanted something other than what she had.
It was Sam’s fault, of course. The questioning. The wondering and wanting. She’d known him again immediately, even before he’d turned around. He was taller than she might have expected him to be. He had a kind of poetic and not unattractive slouch, thin for his frame. His jaw was of average prominence above his big Adam’s apple, his eyebrows were not too thick, and his nose was straight and good-sized. His hair, so black it was almost blue, was buzzed close to his head, and it made his robin’s-egg eyes stand out in a way that made her think he’d seen things in life that he wished he hadn’t. The Sam she’d remembered was frenetic with all the energy of a young boy; the new Sam moved slowly now, as if underwater or carrying some invisible new weight within his bones.
She’d met Sam when she was six and he was eight; he and his parents had moved from a house over in Briscoe to Green Valley. One afternoon Sam had shouted to her from across the road, his toes daring the edge of the pavement: “Hey! Hey you! Can I come over?” He’d been wearing a shirt with a toadstool on it, Amanita muscaria, he told her proudly. And she knew they would be friends.
When they were very young, they’d played the way so many Green Valley children played—wildly, without supervision, their imaginations leading them to build kingdo
ms and exotic lands in the Catskill hillsides. She’d felt perfectly in sync with him: She was fascinated with the world of plants, and his personal fascination was with fungi. Where they were different, they complemented each other. The hard work of farm life meant that Olivia prized efficiency above perfection, practicality above precision. Sam, on the other hand, would get frustrated and even a little obsessive if the kite they were building together did not meet his exact specifications. Olivia knew when to leave him alone to work out his desire for absolute accuracy and when to give him a nudge toward a more practical approach, saying, The only thing that matters is that it gets up in the air.
Growing up, he was part of her family, as fundamental to her life as the fields and trees of the farm. She expected it would be that way forever between them, easy and effortless as breathing air. But then one autumn day when she was fifteen, Sam had wrapped his arms around her waist and picked her up—he was thrilled that they’d just found a dainty white destroying-angel mushroom growing in Chickadee Woods—and the world went spinning in many ways. He twirled her around, she held on to his neck, the trees blurred, the wind gave one great, sweeping gust that kicked up the leaves beneath them, and in that moment, everything changed. He put her down and blushed hotly red. He excused himself abruptly and went home. At night in her bedroom in the farmhouse, she revisited the strangeness of his chest, so firm and flat compared to hers. They were not the same. Not at all.
Two years ago, she’d made the Mushroom Garden in the maze for him. They’d always talked about creating a garden of all mushrooms, but fungi had never been Olivia’s specialty. Mushrooms lived in a different scientific kingdom than green and leafy plants, and she had a more difficult time connecting with them. She also suspected that she was not immune to their poisons due to a lack of exposure—though she had not tested the theory. In spite of her arm’s-length relationship with fungi, Olivia told herself two years ago that she would make the Mushroom Garden for Sam not because she was still thinking of him, but because she had completely let him go. She did not expect to ever see him again.
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