Tom stood up and frowned. “It’s not good.”
She sighed. “Call Robbie. Tell him I want the ladies here no later than tomorrow. We can’t wait.”
“I don’t know if he’ll be able to get them here that quick,” Tom said.
“We have to,” Olivia said. She bent and turned a leaf in the sun, looking at the glistening trails of sticky honeydew that the aphids had excreted. “First it’s the aphids, then the black fungus shows up, then the ants. If the ants move in, we’re done. We need the ladybugs ASAP to start taking down the aphid population.”
“We’re going to have a lot of well-fed ladybugs,” Tom said.
Olivia wiped her hands on her long blue skirt, which she’d hitched into the belt at her waist, and she squinted under the woven brim of her hat at Tom. Tom had been working with her for eight years; he’d grown up in another of the Bethel hamlets on his own family farm. But he and his parents had different visions for farming: Their approach was chemicals first, Tom’s was more organic.
When Tom was focused on the farm, he was serious as a soldier—determined, intelligent, and bold. He was a stocky man, thick-necked and barrel-chested, and his eyes always danced solicitously when he looked at her. His face was wide across and his chin had a dimple in the middle. If someone had told her that Tom hadn’t been born but had instead been found in a field after a meteor shower, she wouldn’t have been surprised. She’d had a number of applicants on the day that he came looking for work, but Tom had gotten the edge over his competitors for one reason and one reason alone: He’d talked to her plants. While all her candidates, Tom included, demonstrated appropriate knowledge about tomato hornworms and nitrogen enrichment, only Tom had rubbed the waxy, bold leaf of a cornstalk between two fingers and said Aren’t you a pretty thing? Olivia was instantly smitten. It was also entirely comfortable for her that he was openly gay, living with a partner of ten years, and she knew there would never be a reason to worry that the terms of their professional relationship might change. She could not say that Tom was a friend exactly—in the same way that she could not say any single Penny Loafer had ever been a friend—but their relationship had been forged on hard work, mutual respect for each other’s skill and talent, daily exchanges of ideas, and many hours of picking vegetables or weeding side by side.
“Uh-oh,” Tom said. “Don’t look now. It’s Sergeant Pepper.”
Olivia stood upright and there—at the distant end of her field—was a cop.
Tom adjusted the cuff of a long cotton sleeve. “What do you think he wants this time?”
Olivia watched Sam walking toward them, down the furrow as if along a tightrope, stepping carefully. Since he’d turned up in her garden maze last week, he’d been back to visit again and again. And again. It was not enough for him to simply stop by her farm stand and buy what he needed; he always found a reason to seek her out. Some reasons were more credible than others: I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind coming over to look at my mother’s roses; she’ll kill me if they die. I wanted to ask you which kinds of herbs are more drought resistant if I decide to plant them. I caught this spider in a sandwich bag; look at the size! Olivia had done what she’d always done when people came to visit her: She was friendly and patient, but not in the least bit encouraging. She responded to comments and questions, but did not make them—though she so often wanted to. It was a necessary evil. If Sam was like any of the other men who took a passing interest in her, he would pursue her for a little while, then move on.
The difference with Sam, though, was that Olivia didn’t want him to move on. She liked the surprise of him—how unexpected he was in the middle of an otherwise ordinary day, how wonderfully handsome in his tired, hangdog way. She enjoyed looking up when she was lying on the ground inspecting the undersides of her butterhead lettuce leaves or pulling up heads of cauliflower to hunt for root maggots, to see Sam coming toward her—or, better yet, to see his tall body blocking out the sun behind him as he smiled down.
She’d dreamed of him in the days since he’d returned. She dreamed he could touch her. She’d dreamed that she could touch him. They were in her garden maze, and he ran his warm hands down her arms, circled her wrists with his fingers and let them go, traced the line of her collarbones and settled his thumb into the dip at the base of her neck. He’d wrapped her up in his arms, pressed against her, and she felt warm, safe, sated, and whole. The feeling had been so real, so exquisite, that she’d cried in her sleep for pleasure. But then the dream changed—she saw Sam’s hand turn black, charring as if it were burning from the inside out, the flesh withering beneath the skin, the bones disintegrating like wood in a fireplace, the contamination torching its way up his arm to his shoulder, his neck, his chin—and then she woke up.
Of course, it was only natural that she would remember him, the feel of him, so intimately. The body had a memory of its own, and hers had never stopped remembering Sam. Their first kiss had been premeditated, scheduled and planned. They’d seen their friends pairing off and breaking up and pairing off again in bursts of vivid drama, but Sam and Olivia had banded together in their platonic friendship and scorned other kids their age for being silly, shallow, or just plain dumb. Who needs a boyfriend? Olivia would say, even as she wondered about what it would be like if Sam offered to be hers. Often, Sam seemed more interested in pursuing the secretive little mushrooms in Chickadee Woods than in pursuing girls—and Olivia made sure he knew she loved that about him. But even if he had wanted a girlfriend, he might have had trouble finding one: He’d been a skinny kid, with features that seemed too large for his face, an unflattering haircut, and worst of all—a widely known interest in fungus. He’d also had allergies—so many allergies that he was regarded as a kind of irritant himself. He was allergic to foods that triggered him to break out in ugly hives and to flowers that made him dissolve into wet sniffles and sneezes. He was also violently allergic to bee stings, which gave him a reputation for being a wimp. Students pointed down their throats to mime gagging at him, and even the teachers would say Oh Sam with more annoyance than compassion when he sneezed. Olivia didn’t care if the other girls whispered that he was gross. His sensitivities had never once stopped him from climbing a tree, or trekking through the woods, or eating foods from her fields right off stalks and vines. As for Olivia, boys became increasingly interested in her, but it was difficult to muster any feelings of interest toward them. None could hold a candle to Sam.
In a way, Olivia and Sam had paired off, cut out the possibility of seeing other people, even without knowing it. And so, one September evening when Olivia was fifteen, they decided that since it seemed like everyone was so far ahead in the relationship race, it only made sense that they should conduct an experiment of their own. Sam, who’d always had an empirical mind, had taken the lead, telling Olivia to meet him at the tripod rock after dinner, saying they would do it there. And Olivia had been more nervous than she’d ever been before, agonizing. Should she chew a piece of gum beforehand, or would the taste of mint be too obvious? Should she put on perfume, pull back her hair that sometimes caught on her own lips if she was wearing Chapstick and might also catch on Sam’s?
In the end, she’d decided to do nothing she wouldn’t normally do. She chewed a mint leaf from her mother’s old herb garden. She wore her hair long and messy down her back. She didn’t let herself change into prettier clothes. She told her father she was leaving—he never asked where she was going or when she planned to be back—and she marched into Chickadee Woods toward the pile of stones they called the tripod. In a shady glen, an enormous boulder balanced on three smaller, nearly uniform ones—dazzling and preposterous in its arrangement. Occasionally, people liked to sneak onto the Pennywort property to visit the tripod: Alien enthusiasts came to see the signpost that they believed had been left by an ancient civilization of visitors from outer space; geologists came because it was an incredible freak show of glacial erratics; new-age types came because they believed it was a sacred wor
shipping space. To Olivia, it would always be the place where Sam first kissed her.
They’d settled themselves beneath the monolith as if they were hiding under a table in the farmhouse, and they’d attempted a bit of stilted conversation. We’ll just look at it as practicing, Sam said, so that we know what we’re doing when we do find other people to date. And then he’d gone on to talk about the benefits of study and practice and applying yourself until Olivia could stand the suspense no more and she leaned in. The first moments of their kiss were awkward: His lips felt so foreign against hers. Olivia thought, This is it? What’s the big deal? But then Sam did something—pulled away, shifted closer to sit beside her instead of across from her—and when he kissed her again the awkwardness began to fall away in one fluid collapse, unraveling even as Olivia’s thoughts began to unravel. He kissed her again, touched her hair, said, Try putting your arms around me, and little by little, with hands seeking skin, bodies seeking contact, they got better at kissing, and soon, the kiss that had started out so tepid grew hotter and wilder until it was something much more, something that made Olivia feel like she was being pulled into some deep, bottomless abyss from which she never wanted to return.
They’d spent the rest of the school year sneaking kisses and caresses when they could. Sometimes, they even talked about it in front of other kids. Do you want to practice after school today? Sam would say, right in front of everyone. Or Olivia might comment, Do you want to study later? Really apply ourselves? And no one would think anything of it, but a wash of heat would crest over Olivia’s whole body, and Sam would grin at her, and she would know that they had long passed the threshold of practicing and were as coordinated, synchronized, and hot together as any two teenagers could be. It was only by the grace of God that they’d managed to not have sex; Sam would stop, or she would, though neither one of them had a precise reason as to why they should stop except that Sam, who was two years older, said he would feel guilty if they did it because she was too young.
Now Olivia wished Sam hadn’t been so damn considerate all those years ago. Her only experience with romance would be forever limited to the illicit, fumbling, but wonderful interludes she’d had as a teenager with the boy next door. As the summer of her sixteenth year slogged on, Sam had been having increasingly sensitive reactions to what seemed to be poison ivy. It was nothing at first—just a minor itchiness. But by the summer’s end, he seemed to have poison ivy all the time. Olivia—who had no idea she was the cause of his discomfort—would have to keep herself from touching him while his skin healed. Then, once he was better and she could touch him, the rashes would reappear. It became a kind of miserable cycle. On your mouth, again? his mother asked. What, are you eating it? Sam began to spend all of his time inside.
While he was trying to figure out what was wrong with him, Olivia was beginning to wonder if there was something wrong with her. She had been trying to ignore the signs because the very idea that she might be dangerous seemed ludicrous. But the evidence of her own toxicity was constricting around her like so many merciless vines.
After she could no longer deny her condition, after she’d tried keeping herself out of the garden for a time, and after she wrestled with the problem of how she was going to tell Sam what was causing his allergic reactions, Sam’s parents finally took him to see a doctor. When he came home from the appointment, he let himself into the farmhouse, found Olivia in the kitchen cleaning up after dinner, and told her everything: The doctor said he had a rare kind of sensitivity to urushiol, that he was “exquisitely sensitive,” and that the more he was exposed to poison ivy, the worse his reactions might become over time. He did not seem especially concerned by his sensitivity; he seemed only perplexed about where he might be getting poison ivy at all. That, he said, was the main problem. He had to figure out where he was being exposed to the allergens; otherwise, he would just get worse and worse. How bad could it get? Olivia had asked him. And he’d told her that he had no idea, but that the doctor had shared a story about a patient who couldn’t get within a foot of poison ivy without having a reaction. But everyone’s different, he said.
Olivia had stood quietly at the kitchen sink, washing her father’s dishes, listening. She knew then she would not be able to tell Sam the truth about what had happened to her. She needed to keep him away from her—at least until she found a cure. She could not bear the idea that repeated exposure to her might make him worse.
Sam came up to her where she stood at the sink and started to put his arms around her waist. But she elbowed him lightly, told him she wasn’t feeling well, and did not kiss him good night at the door. The next day, she’d broken up with him. She hadn’t actually expected that she would never find a cure for her condition and never be with him again.
Now she tried to go easy on herself when she spotted Sam in the distance crossing the fields toward her. If her stomach fluttered weirdly and the backs of her knees began to itch every time she saw him, it was only because her teenage self was still lurking somewhere down beneath her pragmatic and levelheaded twenty-nine-year-old self.
“I’ll tell him to back off,” Tom said. “If you want.”
She gave a smile she didn’t feel. “It’s okay.”
Sam was with them a moment later; he wore his dark blue uniform, which only seemed to emphasize how long and trim he was. His shoes were shiny and his radio crackled at his side before he turned it down. Even in the middle of the summer, the allergies he’d suffered as a child seemed to have abated. She’d been watching him closely to see if his occasional proximity to her was causing any reactions; so far, she’d seen nothing to indicate that his sensitivity to her had worsened over time.
“Hi, guys,” he said.
“What’s going on in Mayberry, Officer Fife?” Tom said. “Rescuing cats out of trees?”
Sam stood tall in his uniform. “I need to talk to Olivia. Alone.”
“Now?” Olivia said. She felt suddenly self-conscious of the way her long cotton skirt was hitched in her belt, exposing her work boots and socks and perpetually bruised shins.
“I’m on the clock,” Sam said, his face tight. “So, yeah. Now would be good.”
“What do you think, Liv?” Tom asked.
“Well, we were just about done here anyway,” she said to Tom. “You’ll call Robbie about the bugs?”
“You got it,” Tom said. “I’ll page you in ten, let you know what he says.”
She nodded; Tom didn’t need to page her. He was just telling her he’d check up on her. The gesture embodied the kind of tacit affection that had marked her relationship with Tom from the beginning, though they’d never spent time together apart from work. She watched as he walked away, and when he was out of earshot, she turned her attention to Sam.
“Are you okay?” Olivia asked. “You seem upset about something.”
“Your neighbor’s at it again.”
Olivia rolled her eyes. “What is it now? Are the peacocks too noisy for her? Did she find one of my barn cats sleeping on her porch swing?”
She waited for Sam to laugh but he didn’t. “She was down at social services yesterday. That’s what everyone’s saying.”
“What’s that have to do with me?”
“Not you. Your father.”
“I don’t understand …”
Sam told her how Gloria had made her way to the social services offices and began asking questions—off the record, she’d said. Hypothetically speaking, what would you do if I knew someone who was abusing an elderly parent? I’m not saying I know anybody, but what if I heard this person had her father allegedly living like a dog in a shack in a ravine, without even the basic necessities? What would be the next step? Of course, the woman who worked behind the front desk, Sam’s childhood babysitter, had known immediately that Gloria was talking about old Arthur Pennywort. And she’d called Sam to tell him right away.
“But they can’t do anything,” Olivia said. “It’s not like I’m abusing him. Or neglecting him
. I trek down there to see him at least once a day, sometimes more. He’s got everything he says he needs. There’s nothing more I can do.”
“I know that. Everyone in Green Valley knows that.”
“Except Gloria. What do you think she’s trying to do?”
“Hard to say. She hasn’t actually made a move. But it seemed like she was asking about getting him in protective custody.”
“You mean, she wants him taken away,” Olivia said.
Sam nodded.
“But she can’t, right? There’s no way she could do that?”
“I don’t know. Gloria’s made friends where it counts. More every year. She’s looking for the spot where you’re going to have your greatest vulnerability.”
She looked out at the gentle rise of the field. That’s definitely my father, she thought.
“Or, who knows? It could just be that she thinks she’s doing the right thing,” Sam said.
Olivia wished there were something she might sit down on other than the ground, for her legs suddenly felt wobbly. “I don’t know what I can do to make him come back to the farmhouse. I’ve tried everything. It’s his choice.”
“Why is he down there?”
“I guess he just likes it down there.”
“Whoa. I’m not judging. If he wants to live in the ravine, then he wants to live in the ravine. But … is he … okay?”
Olivia looked toward the dense woods where the sunny fields stopped and the shadows began. She had not mentioned to Sam that her father wanted the three of them to get together; she wasn’t nearly ready for that. She didn’t like to talk about her father. She didn’t talk about him with anyone. Not even Sam. His reasons for moving down into the ravine had never been entirely clear to her.
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