Arthur, however, spent every season alone, spoke to no one but her, and never had the opportunity for the mental restoration that company brings.
He was not looking at her, and so she spoke in as confident a voice as she could. “Gloria hasn’t done anything yet. I mean, she hasn’t officially logged a tip with social services or anything, so right now we’re still okay. They can keep doing what they’ve always done—you know, ignore it. But if Gloria does put in a report, it’s definitely going to look like I’m neglecting you. And they might not be able to look the other way.”
“Neglecting you?”
“No. Not you. Me.” She knew her father was plenty sharp. But he didn’t always listen. His mind wandered into territories that demanded all of his attention, and when he realized it was his turn to speak, he sometimes tried to hook back into the conversation by repeating the last words she said. This was nothing new: He’d been doing it for as long as she could remember. When he was young, it had been a quirk. Now that he was old, it seemed to be more sinister. “Are you listening?”
“Of course I’m listening. You’re the most devoted of daughters. The most devoted in the world!”
“But …” Olivia felt her throat tighten. “But from the outside I doubt it looks that way.”
“Then just … well, just—” He fumbled for words. A fish nibbled the line but he didn’t seem to notice. “Invite the woman to come down and pay me a visit. Invite the pope for all I care. They’ll all see that I’m really quite comfortable. And then they can all go home and leave me alone.”
“It’s not as easy as that.”
“Of course it is.”
“First of all, she wouldn’t be the one coming down to the ravine.”
“Then have Satan send her minions—it’s all the same to me.”
“You don’t understand,” she said, trying to keep the frustration out of her voice. “I’m talking about social services. You think they’ll see a happy old guy who’s doing just fine. The way you live—bathing in a creek, cooking on a camp stove, wearing clothes that are a step away from rags—all of it will just strengthen her argument.”
“No it won’t.”
“Dad, it will.”
“It’s a man’s choice to live the way he wants to.”
“Yes, but they’ll think you’re, uh, not in control of your mental powers.”
“I am!”
“Yes, but—”
“I’m perfectly lucid. Hear that? I can use the word lucid. If this Gloria person can’t see that, well then, I’ll …”
“You’ll what, Dad?”
“I’ll go live somewhere else. Somewhere she can’t find me.”
“Or you can move back into the farmhouse. Which would be better for everyone,” she said. Olivia bit down on the inside of her cheek. Did her father not know that he sounded like a child? Couldn’t he hear himself?
It seemed to her that Arthur had given up on living shortly after she’d become poisonous. Alice’s death had drained some of the life from him, and he might have gone on for the rest of his days in that state of half-miserable automation, marking time. But then, Olivia had confessed that she was poisonous, and sent him over the edge. Within a few weeks of learning what she had become, he had holed himself up in the ravine. Though her logical mind knew that it would be unjust to think that he’d left the farmhouse because he’d become repulsed by her, she’d been unable to stop the thought from occasionally creeping across her mind. Instead, she’d forced herself to cling to the more likely idea: that he felt responsible for what had happened to her, since it had been his fascination with poison plants that had exposed her to their toxins. It hadn’t been disgust that sent him packing; it was guilt. She tried to always keep her focus squarely on that idea, because if her focus strayed, it strayed into dark and miserable places, possibilities in which her father could not stand the sight of her and so moved away.
Occasionally—rarely—an old feeling set in, and she knew it to be anger. She’d forgiven her father for his unintentional crushing of her heart, for forcing her to grow up so fast, for putting her in charge of the farm when she hadn’t really wanted it yet. But once in a while, she suspected herself of being mad at him. And when that happened—when she woke up from a restless sleep with her jaw aching from some dream she could hardly remember—she reminded herself: In spite of everything that had happened, she’d actually done just fine. She’d learned hard but important lessons of depravation and loss. And those lessons had served her well as she’d got older because she’d learned how to be alone, how to expect very little, and how to keep from relying on others for any sense of her own happiness. In a way, all of her early difficulties meant she would be able to bear her loneliness—with grace, if not with a modicum of contentment.
She saw that her knuckles had turned white where she held the oars, and she loosened her grip. “Why won’t you move back to the farm? Back with me? Would it really be so bad?”
He began to reel in his line, but said nothing.
There was so much more she wanted to say: I know Mom’s death was hard for you. I know you dealt with it as best you could. And I know you wish we’d never made that poison garden. She wanted to tell him that it was all okay now, that enough time had passed, and that all their old sorrows were behind them, if only he could stop holding on to them so tightly and allow himself to move on. Olivia could take care of everything for him; all he needed to do was let her.
When she spoke, she kept her voice soft. “There aren’t any choices here, Dad. If you don’t move back into the farmhouse, Gloria really could take you away from me.” She felt her eyes begin to sting, tears forming. “I don’t want you to ever be taken away from me. I … I still need you. I know I’m not supposed to—I’m too old for that—but I do. I need you. If something ever happened to you, Dad, I don’t know what I’d do.”
She wiped at her face. Arthur was looking at her now, his gaze steady and green. She wished she knew what he was thinking. Slowly, she watched the bright, intelligent focus in his eyes become dull as the lake in January.
“I don’t want to be difficult.”
“Then help me. If you’re not going to move back to the farm with me, at least tell me why you won’t. Maybe I can make it better.”
“Olivia,” he said, his voice creaky. “I’m sorry. For everything. I want you to be happy.”
She felt her brow wrinkle in confusion. Sometimes it was hard to follow her father’s logic. “But … I am happy. I am.”
“What about Sam?”
Olivia stilled. “What about him?”
“That’s what I asked.”
Olivia sighed.
“What’s the problem? Has he expressed interest in you?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Of course it’s complicated. Happiness is complicated. All the poets and whatnot spend their lives going on and on about how sadness and misery are the most complicated emotions—but they would be better off trying to figure out what it means to be happy. You—Olivia—you’re young. You’ve got to take happiness when you can get it. Believe an old man.”
Olivia looked out to the edge of the water. The surface was shimmering pink, blue, purple, and gray. She wasn’t precisely sure what her father was trying to say, but she knew it had to do with Sam. Occasionally over the years, Arthur would ask, Any new friends coming around the farm these days? Olivia suspected that he was fishing to find out if she was seeing anyone. It was as close to a personal question as he’d ever asked. Of course, the question was ridiculous. Her father seemed to think that the fact that she was as dangerous as poison ivy was not enough to put the right man off.
As he fiddled with his fishing line, it occurred to her that her clever father had managed to steer the conversation away from the problem at hand: his tenancy in Solomon’s Ravine. That, perhaps, was the point of bringing up Sam’s name. Nothing more. She decided not to let him get away with it. She said, “The question here isn’t about
me. It’s about you moving back into the farmhouse before they can come take you away.”
“Let me think about it,” he said.
“Please think quickly. There might not be much time.”
He sighed. At the water’s edge, the heron lifted its wings and rose into the air. “You better row us in, Olivia. Fish aren’t biting. And the sun’s starting to go down.”
With a heavy heart, she began the slow, tedious rowing that would bring them back to the shore. Waterstriders made circular ripples on the pinkish water. Arthur spooled the line.
“Listen,” she said. “I don’t want you to worry about this, okay?” She was wavering now, and she knew it. She was on the brink of giving him an out. But there was nothing she could do to stop herself. She didn’t like to see that distant look on her father’s face, that wall of resolve that shut her out. It made her afraid.
Her father was the only person in the world who knew her. He was, in some ways, her closest friend. Her only friend. She could not afford to lose his affection. “Either way, whatever you decide to do, if you move into the farmhouse or stay here, everything’s going to be fine. Gloria’s not coming anywhere near you. I won’t let her.”
“You’re like me,” he said. “Stubborn. But one thing you get from your mother.”
“What’s that?”
“You’ve always been so good about taking care of others, Olivia. But not so good at taking care of yourself.”
“I take care of myself better than anyone else could,” she said—and then, she wished she hadn’t, because she saw her father remembering that he had left her alone, and he seemed sad.
He knocked on the wooden boat. “I’m simply saying, you’ve got to give that young man a chance. Will you think about it? Will you at least try?”
She didn’t answer. She thought: What a pair we are, having two conversations at once and trying to tell the other what to do. When they reached the shore, she did not try to help him to his feet or out of the boat because she knew he wouldn’t want her to. She busied herself with putting her boots back on, tying them slowly, her head bent in case he caught a glimpse of errant wetness in her eyes.
A New Leaf
From the bedroom window of his parents’ house, which was now his house, Sam could see the Pennywort farmstead. He’d spent many an hour looking out at it when he was a boy. He knew the way the snow tended to gather most heavily on the west gable, and the way steam on one particular window meant that someone was taking a shower. He and Olivia had invented a code involving lights turned on and off, and some nights he would watch her window for an hour, writing down letters that corresponded with her flashing bedroom light, hanging on every timed blink, only to decipher her message as: Seeyoutomorrowsam.
So much had changed. The Pennywort house had been inhabited since it was built sometime in the 1840s. But it was all boarded up now, the windows covered with plywood and roof tiles having slid to the overgrown lawn. It was hard not to be depressed about the ramshackle old place because it was as if so many of Sam’s happiest childhood memories had been barricaded inside, sealed as if in a decaying mausoleum to a lost time, or his life that might have been. Back in the old days, he’d believed he would grow up to be the kind of man that his father was, and his grandfather, and his uncle, and all the Van Winkle men he knew. He’d heard the stories about how John Van Winkle had rescued triplets from a flooded car, how Alphie “Junior” Van Winkle had saved a friend’s beloved hound dog with mouth-to-nose resuscitation, how even his toddling baby cousin had saved his parents’ lives when he escaped from his crib and tugged on their covers in the middle of the night to tell them the house smelled of smoke. He’d been prepared to fully embrace his own fate as a hero, with a pride of ownership that could never be bought in a store. And he’d also been prepared for women to fall in love with him in the way they loved all the Van Winkle heroes, so that even the old women and the married women and the little girls preened a little under the light of a Van Winkle smile.
But then, he’d had his heart broken. By Olivia. And Green Valley might as well have been Blue Valley for how awful he felt within it. He might have stayed away forever if it hadn’t been for the accident. But now he was back—back because he lost the fight to stay away. The guys down at the station were waiting for him to do something amazing—wrestle a copperhead away from a baby, or return an injured fawn to its mom. But what they didn’t know—what only Sam knew—was that the Van Winkle gift had skipped him. He’d never saved anyone from anything. As a guy who had been dead for six full minutes, he hadn’t even been able to save himself.
When calls went out for emergencies—the real kind that involved accidental ingestion of poison or heart attacks that dropped people in their tracks—Sam made himself scarce. He was a Van Winkle in name only, and he didn’t know how long he’d be able to keep the guys from realizing that. He could only keep his head down, and give people believable answers when they asked where he’d been when they needed him, and get through the hours.
Today, his day off, he was spending his afternoon at home cleaning up some odds and ends with the ex-landlord in Vermont who had refused to return his security deposit. He had been sitting on his bed checking his email when the smell of strawberries eased into his room. He didn’t notice at first. He’d thought only: I could go for some strawberries. But as the scent became more defined so did his longing. After a time, the desire for strawberries was so intense that it made his eyes blur, and his hands tremble on his computer, and any logical and serious thought he might have had was edged out by the more pressing need to sink his teeth into the smell that filled his nose. This was entirely strange: Since the accident, he’d had next to no cravings for anything. He could taste his food, but not being able to sense its temperature or texture had flattened the urge to eat.
And so to want a thing as badly as he wanted strawberries was a shock to his system. He wanted them in a way that was rapacious, desperate—greedy and almost violent. He kicked open the front screen door and took a deep, forceful breath of summer air, trying to get the smell out of his head. But it only got worse, because he saw what he wanted, down the road about five hundred feet, strawberries, red and gleaming and unmistakable, piled on the Pennywort farm stand.
If he hadn’t been wearing flip-flops, he would have walked barefoot. The farm stand bore up a sloped, corrugated roof on four-by-four posts; its chicken-wire shutters were hooked open, its evergreen paint had peeled. Bright flaring poppies and orange lilies leaned in white five-gallon buckets marked for sale. His tongue was burning by the time he picked up a carton of strawberries, so plump, so promising. He was dying for them, and he felt glad of it, because if he was dying for something it meant he was not dead. He put one in his mouth and it was everything he’d hoped it would be: a burst of sweet-tart juice, all the tastes of summer running down his throat. He thanked God that even though he couldn’t feel the fruit with his skin, he could still taste it. He hadn’t lost that. And yet, even after he had a strawberry on his tongue, his craving was not pacified.
He left the stand and went in search of Olivia—this time, he had no prefabricated excuse for seeking her out. He wanted to talk to her—really talk—in a way that went beyond pleasantries. He wanted to get things out in the open, all the silly, residual insecurities left over from those many years ago, so that they could attempt having a friendship as adults. The farm was a big place: She could be anywhere. He went to the chicken coop, the herb garden, and the barn before one of the boarders took pity and told him she was near the apiaries. The smell of strawberries was everywhere, not just coming from the carton he held, but everywhere. It floated to him like ribbons of scent on a breeze that wasn’t actually there. He wondered if he was having a stroke. His brain was playing tricks on him, memories that he’d kept a tight lid on suddenly breaching their banks.
From the day they’d first played together when he was in the second grade, all the way up until he’d been a senior in high school, they’
d been inseparable. Sam had a small family and no siblings. But he and Olivia had grown up together, side by side, and he never felt that he’d lacked for companionship of any sort in his childhood. His parents were not farmers; they’d purchased the little plot where their house stood when he was eight, and Sam had embraced everything that was fun about living next to a good-sized farm. Arthur Pennywort had taught them to fly kites and make barometers out of live leeches. The Penny Loafers kept an eye on them and taught them how to love the flowers in the garden maze.
He and Olivia had slain imaginary dragons, survived imaginary shipwrecks on deserted islands, and become world-famous scientists who had found a cure for an alien disease. Alice had already been dead when he’d moved to the valley, so he’d never known her, but he and Olivia grappled with the finality of her death as best they could, with “memorial services” held on flat, glacier-polished rocks and with games of “let’s pretend I’m dying and you have to save me” until finally, together, they managed to understand what exactly the adults were talking about when they said come to terms.
But all of their childhood closeness had begun to disappear the year Sam turned eighteen, shortly before Arthur Pennywort had confined himself to Solomon’s Ravine. Now that Sam was reconsidering the prospect of being friends with Olivia again, it surprised him to realize that he’d had no female friends since he’d left Green Valley. It wasn’t that he’d set out to eschew friendships with women—he liked women. He’d dated, of course. He’d been good at dating. But friendships with women had never materialized.
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