The Night Garden: A Novel

by Lisa Van Allen

  Lilies of the field did not threaten to uproot themselves if they didn’t like where they were planted. On the slopes of the mountains, saplings struggled to grow in the shallowest puddles of soil that collected on bald rocks. Along the side of the valley’s single road, chicory and yellow trefoil had learned to thrive in waste spaces, where passing cars blew exhaust against them all day long. Like Olivia, they had no say over where their seeds took hold: When they could not change their surroundings, they themselves had to change.

  And so, Olivia realized that she would never be able to change her desire for a normal future, but she could change her expectations. She would farm; she would continue her mother’s work in the maze and she would hold her work as sacred to Green Valley; she would keep her father company in his old age; she would create a world that sustained the Penny Loafers, who were colorful if inconsistent company. This would be all the satisfaction she would allow herself to expect, and it would be enough.

  But with the bottle in her hand as she reached the top of the ravine, she saw that all her many years of telling herself it’s all okay were now in jeopardy. Denial was a fragile and reedy thing, possible to keep in place as long as there were no strong winds, no distractions, no temptations.

  What would she do if the serum worked?

  What would she do if it didn’t?

  From outside of her central garden, she could smell the fertile odor of her plants, notes of sweet green hanging in the air, calling to her like old friends, welcoming, affirming, telling her she was okay, she was perfect, she should never change. She took the key from around her neck and went inside.

  Garden-Variety Magic

  Sam saw the first fireflies speckling the shadows in the bottom of the valley and knew that tonight would be a firefly night. It was as if the creatures came to gather from all the far corners of the earth; their yellow-green glow dappled the shadows of bushes, made halos of treetops, and trailed through the air like a glowing vapor. Arthur used to say that he could make a wish if he caught one of the bugs, which wasn’t a difficult task when the weather shifted and brought the lightning bugs in: All he had to do was reach out a hand and close it, like catching rain. Some nights, Olivia and Sam would run around gently corralling as many bugs as they could, filling glass jars with fireflies and then freeing them all at once, so a brilliant column of light would erupt into the night, bathing their upturned faces in gold. Sometimes they would lie on their backs and let their eyes go unfocused until Sam lost the difference between the fireflies and the stars.

  Tonight was a firefly night. And as Sam settled on a bench in the maze to wait for Olivia, the air was a dark ocean of electricity, simultaneously peaceful and charged. He’d come back to Green Valley thinking he would never again be surprised, that life was mostly a dull thing, and that what surprises did come were more likely to be misfortunes than windfalls. And yet, the town had done nothing but surprise him since his return.

  When Sam had opened his eyes in the morning, his right hand had been itchy. Just a little. And it made him think of his mother. That’s good luck, she would say. An itchy palm means something good’s coming your way. He was certain the superstition was right, because in the hours before he went to bed last night, he’d wondered—Am I actually feeling the sheets and the lamp switch, or is it my imagination?

  By morning, he was certain: He could feel—everything—again.

  The joy was overwhelming. He’d been living under a cloud for a year and a half, and suddenly the sun was out. He’d wanted to run to Olivia to tell her: Look what you did! He was certain that, somehow, contacting her skin had boosted his sense of touch like a defibrillator jolts the heart of a dying man. Getting ready for work was a carnival of the senses, absolute decadence. The water in the shower was wet. Wet! The shaving cream was cool and silky. The bath towel was scratchy—he’d had no idea they were so cheap, and he couldn’t have been more thrilled because the texture of stiff terry on his cheek was heaven.

  In his daydreams as he dressed for the day, he imagined the silver-haired doctor at the hospital—the one who had insisted Sam’s condition was all in his head—telling him that the only thing to change had been his state of mind. But he was certain that Olivia’s touch had changed him, or at least, her touch had flipped the switch that turned his nerve endings back on. His cells were waking up again, snapping back to life one by one like kernels of popcorn. He knew it by the dewiness of the morning air, the feel of the sun on his face, and the itching on his palm.

  He’d bought doughnuts for everyone at the station—it didn’t matter that it was cliché—and he gave the ancient and angry secretary Dorothea the shock of her life when he kissed her good morning on her papery cheek. In spite of the mild itch of his hand, he could not stop himself from wondering: Had he been brought back to Green Valley for a reason? The whole of his twenties—spent in bars and motels, spent with women he didn’t love and friends who hadn’t really understood him—had been an utter waste of a perfectly good life. Then the accident had wrecked him, and he’d lost all sense of desire, all feeling, all purpose.

  But now, he wanted again. He was interested and excited and curious and greedy and eager to see what might happen next. And he had plans. Because when Olivia had touched him, he realized: Part of what he wanted was her. He’d barely given a thought to anything remotely sexual for almost two years—there was no point—but now he felt as if desire had been building up in his system all along and was suddenly battering him from the inside out.

  Olivia was conflicted about him, reticent and withholding—he could acknowledge that. But he’d never been patient. He felt oddly giddy, intoxicated, as he cruised Green Valley. He allowed speeding cars to go by unimpeded; he didn’t yell at the kids who threw rocks at the decaying drive-in movie theater; he almost hit a disorderly shopping cart at the grocery store. His fantasies were wild distractions that raced well ahead of his rational brain and blazed into ridiculous territories—he saw himself making love to Olivia on a blanket in Stony Field, he saw Olivia laughing as she unpacked her boxes to move into his house, he saw a crackling winter fire and an evening spent contemplating the name of their first child.

  The morning sun, the heat of the steering wheel, the gentle giants of the green hills, the songs on the radio—everything seemed to be saying: Yes! Sam! You’re meant to be here! This is all for you! If each of his prior struggles or miseries was like a puzzle piece that ultimately created this exact picture of his life, he would not change a single struggle or misery or mistake he’d made—except for one. Things were turning around. This feeling of his mood being a hot air balloon and carrying him through the day, this, at last, was the definition of the word sublime.

  But by lunchtime—a Coca-Cola and an egg sandwich from the convenience store/pharmacy/bait shop/deli—the itching of his palm had stopped being ignorable. The webs at the base of his thumb became an angry hornet’s nest of red skin. The creases on the undersides of his knuckles were like miniature whip lines, and the bumps at the bases of his fingers swelled. He itched, and itched, and itched, and the misery of it would not go away.

  The afternoon also descended into the mundane: His colleagues teased him about holding the record for the longest stretch a Van Winkle had ever gone without saving somebody’s life; Mrs. Oradell had yet another raccoon in her garage; Dorothea, who had seemed so sunny when he’d kissed her cheek in the morning, suddenly turned mean as the north wind and refused to give him a new notepad upon request. The swell of his good energy and optimism eroded as the minute hand swept the wondrous morning under the rug of an average day.

  Some of the guys saw him itching—or forcibly trying not to itch—and asked if he’d gotten himself into poison ivy. Some saw him itching, slid their eyes away from him, and asked nothing at all.

  All afternoon long he repeated a silent mantra: Olivia had nothing to do with the itching. She wasn’t his irritant. She was his cure.

  But as the day went on, he found himself stoppi
ng once again at the convenience store/pharmacy/bait shop/deli—this time for Benadryl and calamine lotion. And soon the horrible, awful, heartbreaking truth of what he didn’t want to suspect became impossible to ignore.

  Olivia had tried to warn him.

  The one woman in almost two years he’d been able to feel—and he was allergic to her.

  Despair wasn’t the word.

  Now, under the diffused glow of fireflies, he looked up from the bench in the garden maze to see Olivia crossing toward her central garden. He’d known she would come, here, where she always retreated when she wanted to get away. The fireflies had concentrated around her, so he could see that she was wearing a pale cotton dress that made her look as sweet and cool as an ice cream cone. Her hair had been loosely pinned off her neck, tendrils hanging artlessly around her face, and a large white flower was tucked behind one ear.

  “Olivia,” he said softly.

  She was startled but she didn’t cry out. She only pressed a hand to her chest for a moment. “Sam,” she said. The fireflies rippled a little on the vibration of the word.

  He suddenly felt the heaviest pain in his heart that he’d known since he’d died on Moggy Knob, a despair made to feel even darker by juxtaposition with the wild joy of the morning. His flirtation with optimism had been the practical joke of a cruel universe. The return of desire wasn’t a reward; it was a punishment.

  “Is it just me?” he asked. His voice was hoarse; he hadn’t realized how long he’d been sitting alone in the garden. He held up his bandaged hand. “Am I the only one this happens to?”

  “It’s not just you,” she said. “It’s anyone I touch. I … I hurt them.”

  He got to his feet and immediately he noticed a change in Olivia’s posture, that animal wariness he’d glimpsed before but hadn’t been able to place. He saw now that she was always on guard, keeping herself away, watching for sudden moves. No wonder she worked so hard to hold him at arm’s length—physically, but emotionally, too. She was afraid.

  “How did this happen?” he asked.

  “I promised you an explanation,” she said. “But … I don’t know how to tell you. I’ve never told anyone.”

  “But you’ll tell me?” he said.

  “Don’t I have to?”

  “No. You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

  She looked at him for a long moment. Then she gestured to him, and he followed her through the maze. The fireflies circled and clustered curiously around them, lighting the quiet pathways and twinkling like drunken stars. He smelled every earthy and floral scent, felt the air as if each molecule had noticeable weight, but the sensations no longer thrilled him as they had this morning. As she walked before him, he stared at the base of her narrow neck, the smooth expanse of skin between the straps of her dress and the arcs of her shoulder blades, and it was the most simultaneously beautiful and excruciating sight he’d ever seen. He was intensely gratified when she took a wrong turn. Even in the dark he could tell she was blushing with embarrassment. She excused herself and they continued down the hollows and meanders, beneath a long, firefly-lit tunnel of tumescent purple flowers, until she stopped.

  “Here we are,” she said at last. She gestured for him to go first into the room of the garden maze.

  The garden was laid out in a circle. Lunettes and stars had been pruned into the tops of the hedges. And the flowers, softly white under the moon, seemed to glow, actually glow, as if lit from within by their own secret light. The Mushroom Garden had been impressive. But this, this was astonishing. Each white petal of each white flower echoed the light of the moon behind the gauze of threadbare clouds. A heavy perfume of flowers hung in the air, which itself seemed to be a living thing, a breathing thing, full of the songs of night animals and the glow of fireflies. Olivia had created a garden for lovers, a place for stolen kisses, extravagant promises, caresses as intense and heady as the garden itself. Sam reached out, touched the edge of a petal that felt shockingly like flesh. Much as he loved the romance of the garden, it also made him sad: so many implied fantasies that he knew he would never own.

  “What do you call this place?” he asked.

  She looked at him over her shoulder. “The Night Garden.”

  “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  She sat down on a white marble bench and he joined her, too aware of her proximity. She smelled of flowers and coconut oil. He wished he could lie down with her, explore all the possibilities that had been promised by the return of sensation in his skin, lose himself in the overwhelming textures and scents of the Night Garden, of her. But he only sat beside her and stared.

  “Can I see your hand?” she asked him.

  He told her it was better if she didn’t.

  “I’m really sorry,” she said.

  “How could something like this happen?”

  “I don’t know—not specifically. I only have theories.”

  “Tell me.”

  She leaned back with her palms against the bench to look out to the garden, where fireflies clustered low among the leaves of the moon-pale flowers. “It was the garden,” she said. And then she explained. Sam could remember one afternoon that Arthur had spent telling stories about poisonous plants, how jimson-weed got its name from the Jamestown settlement, where it had killed many colonists by accident and many soldiers by design. He told Sam about how certain plants could be harmless under some circumstances and poisonous under others: potatoes, rhubarb, cashews, and kidney beans. Sam had thought nothing of Arthur’s odd excitement and sudden interest in poisonous plants: Arthur had also, at varying times, been interested in keeping small sharks in an aquarium in the farmhouse living room and in building his own catapults based on medieval plans. That Arthur might have been actually growing the dangerous plants he talked about had never crossed Sam’s mind, and even if the thought had occurred to him, it wouldn’t have been the strangest thing to happen on the Pennywort farm. Even on the night Sam had accidentally peered into Olivia’s garden and seen her there, he hadn’t realized the plants around her had been so dangerous. He’d been too focused on her to notice there were plants at all.

  As the fireflies circled and swirled, Olivia told the story of discovering her condition, and the way she told it—in stops and starts—suggested she’d never told it before nor ever meant to. For the first time, Sam understood why he’d been so sensitive to poison ivy that summer of his senior year; the sensitivity had never been quite as “exquisite” again, but neither had it fully left him. He remained more sensitive to poison ivy than most. It had never occurred to him that he was allergic to Olivia; that was too preposterous a leap of understanding to make. Olivia also had no idea that the cause of everyone’s discomfort wasn’t the garden, but was her.

  One night, Olivia had summoned all her courage and spoke to her father about the garden, which was becoming more dangerous by the day. The Professor had been vacuuming Roger the snow leopard’s fur with a Dustbuster, and Olivia had to shout over the moan of sucked-up air. I think we should stop, she told him as he worked on the fur between Roger’s ears. She had yet to realize how connected she already was to the garden. She said, Everyone’s getting these rashes and we don’t know why. I think we should just close up the walled-in garden and leave it be. Her father turned off the vacuum, and the look in his eyes was so sad, so disappointed and forlorn that Olivia would have given anything to take her words back and would have said anything to make the sadness on his face go away. When he told her the rashes were nothing to worry about, she quickly agreed. He said that something in his detergent was irritating his skin, and she said Yes of course, even though she had been doing the Professor’s laundry once a week and she’d been using the same detergent that her mother had used since Olivia was born. But she did not argue with him. She much preferred to see her father distracted by the plants in his greenhouse and walled-in garden than by his own thoughts, which sometimes seemed to lead him down into such remote and shadowy places that
Olivia worried he might one day disappear into them altogether.

  One terrible day just after the school year began and shortly before Arthur moved into the ravine, Olivia crept up behind her father and traced a distinct X with her index finger on the back of his sun-spotted neck—just to prove that her secret niggling suspicions about herself were unfounded, ridiculous, and flat wrong. But only a few hours later, she saw him mindlessly itching while he was reading his dog-eared copy of On The Origin of the Species, and she did not let herself draw a conclusion until she walked around behind him and saw, there on his fragile skin beneath his white hair, a red, angry X. She’d gone running into the bushes to throw up her lunch.

  “It was the last time I touched my father. The last time I deliberately touched anyone,” Olivia said. “Now, you understand.”

  She was looking out at the Night Garden, the fireflies whirling like snowflakes, the white flowers glowing, the smell of unbridled fertility hanging in the air. To think that Green Valley’s odd magic had put Olivia out of reach to him—Olivia, the first woman he’d been able to feel in ages—was infuriating. And yet, as difficult as the news was for him to hear right now, she had been living with it for years.

  Olivia’s fingers were twisted together on her lap, her shoulders stiff. In spite of her agitation, she was lovely. Her reddish hair in the moonlight had deepened to a winelike color and had taken on a silvery sheen; her skin seemed to glow like the flowers around her. But her face was turned away from him, as if she was afraid of what she might see in his eyes now that he knew the truth about what she was.

  “Olivia.”

  She glanced at him.

  “I’m glad you explained this to me.”

  “I only told you because I knew you would probably figure it out.”

  “Still,” he said. “I wouldn’t have known the details. Your perspective. I’m glad you shared.”

  She unlaced her fingers and slid her palms down her arms. Her skin was pebbled with goose bumps that had nothing to do with the temperature, and he wanted to run his hands over the raised bumps, over the pebbling and stiffening that he knew would feel exquisite under his fingertips. Had he ever paid attention to such things before he’d lost his feeling? He wasn’t certain. But he would pay attention now. The next time he made love—he stopped mid-thought. In spite of his desire, the next time would not be with Olivia. Maybe it never would. He didn’t quite know what to do with the realization, so he put the problem aside for now. “Does anyone else know about this?”