Sam said that in a way, he’d been more shocked by the man’s death than by the plane dropping out of the sky. He’d had nearly three frozen days to think about all of the small things he might have done differently in those last airborne seconds, the chain of tiny adjustments that might have changed everything. He also tortured himself with the question of why he hadn’t been able to save Patrick Kearny when saving him should have been as easy as breathing. Had the Van Winkle legacy skipped him because he’d left Green Valley? By the time his rescuers arrived, he’d lost the will to fight, and he succumbed.
Sam had died. Olivia had almost lost him. She let herself down off her elbows to lie beside him, and she stared at the sky. Life on the farm had its minor catastrophes of each day, but the larger shape of any given year had remained the same for much of her adulthood. How shocking it was to be reminded of the fragility of human life, the cruelty of the world, when she’d spent so many of her days trying to believe she lived in a paradise.
Sam lifted his arm from his face. When he turned his head to look at her, she turned hers as well, and his closeness went through her like a shock. “You’re upset.”
She tried to smile; her eyes stung. “In all the years I imagined you out there in the world, I never thought anything bad had happened.”
“I’m just glad you thought of me at all,” he said. “That makes it better. A little, anyway.”
She looked away from him—she had to. Any illusion she’d had of trying to maintain some distance between them had been a joke: If they were in proximity, emotional distance was impossible. She cared about him too much to pretend she didn’t. When she looked back at him again his expression was grave, and she knew he was thinking about the dead man.
“I’m a mess, Olivia,” he said.
“No you’re not.”
“I am,” he said, insistent now. He sat up with some difficulty and leaned down over her. His brow was furrowed. “After the accident, I stopped being able to feel anything—nothing that touched my skin.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Not hot or cold. Not the sun, not any human touch. It felt like my skin was leather.” The shadow of the kite passed over his face. “The doctors said it was all in my head.”
“Oh, Sam,” she said. She’d never in her life wanted to pull someone close as much as she wanted to touch Sam now. “Go easy on yourself. You went through a lot. And your feeling might come back, in time.”
“That’s the thing. The other day when I touched you? I felt that. I really felt it. It was like … I don’t know … getting plugged back in again or something. All the circuits lighting up.”
“And since then?”
“I feel everything. And it’s because of you.” His gaze fell to her mouth.
Since Sam had returned, the pull to be with him, to make the most of him in any way she could, was strong. But he complicated Olivia’s basic idea of a good life. The question he brought into focus was weighty and fearsome: At what point was it okay to say I could be happier than I am now without disrespecting or diminishing her current happiness? How could she be content with the way her life was right now—the way she was right now—if she permitted herself to wish for something more? And how could she go back to being content with what she had now if any new joys she allowed herself were to be suddenly gone?
When he spoke again, she suspected he was having thoughts in a similar vein, about what they might mean to each other or what they might not, because he said: “When was the last time you left the farm, Olivia?”
She didn’t want to tell him. But he’d just shared such a personal moment of his life with her, that she knew it would be miserly to withhold her own secrets. She told him it had been nine years since she’d made the decision to quit leaving Pennywort land. She’d gone to Lyon’s Pharmacy and Sporting Goods Shop to pick up something her father needed—she could no longer remember what. She’d stepped off the curb, heading toward the old station wagon that had belonged to her father for as long as she could remember, when she heard a cry. A child—a girl no more than two—was jerkily running toward the road. And the girl’s mother was doing her best to follow, but she was on crutches and lagging far behind.
Help her! the woman had screamed at Olivia. Grab her. Please!
Though Olivia’s heart sped and her whole body seemed to break out into an instant sweat, she somehow couldn’t move. The child was running for the road, and Olivia could only stand there, paralyzed and afraid.
“What happened?” Sam asked. “Was the kid hurt?”
“No, thank God,” Olivia said. “At the last moment, the baby just stopped running. Just like that. Turned around and went toddling back toward her mother, laughing like it was the funniest thing in the world while the mom got on her knees right there in the parking lot and looked like she was trying not to cry.”
She picked a few blades of grass and tossed them. What is wrong with you? the child’s mother had yelled at Olivia. What kind of person just stands there when a baby is running into the road? Olivia had clutched her paper bag to her chest and said nothing. She couldn’t even apologize. In all the years since she’d discovered she was dangerous, she’d never felt more like a monster than she did that day. And she realized that it would probably be better for everyone if she stayed on the farm, where she was less in danger of hurting people, and where she wasn’t constantly, unceasingly, always reminded that she was different than everyone else. It was easier for everyone that way.
“To tell you the truth,” she told Sam now, “I don’t even know if I could leave anymore.”
“Why?”
“I think about leaving, and it’s like I get this knot in my stomach from the thought of being away from the Poison Garden for any amount of time.”
“But how do you get by without leaving? Don’t you need things?”
“We have help,” Olivia said. “Tom’s been a godsend.”
“You and Tom …”
“What?”
“Are you …?”
“Oh! No. We’re not anything. I’m not his type.”
“Because you’re sort of a redhead?”
“Because I’m a female.”
“Ah.”
He looked down at her steadily, seriously. Her heart began to pick up speed, a slow-building momentum she couldn’t control. Her skin tingled where every blade of grass and flower petal touched her. Sam gazed down on her, his look curious and transparent, and it made her bones ache.
All this—the conspiracy of her body to work against her—was a clear warning sign that she should exit the way she came, now, while she still could. Otherwise, she and Sam were both heading at top speed toward a brick wall. The old refrain swept like blowing leaves across her mind: If only, if only, if only.
“Do you want to try the serum now?” Sam asked.
“I’m not sure it’s a good idea.”
“But why? Because you don’t want me to get hurt?”
She nodded.
“I think you’re afraid.”
She scoffed. “What would I be afraid of?”
“That you might like it.”
The wind picked up forcefully enough to lift her arm at her side. “I’m not afraid.”
“Good. May I?” He reached for the bag she’d brought, which contained only the serum. He looked at it a moment—the pink plastic bottle—then unscrewed the top. “Hold out your hand.” She did. But instead of easing the serum into her palm, he dropped a pea-sized dollop on the inside of her wrist. The serum was nearly the same temperature as her body, slick and translucent gray. “What are you doing?”
“We’re trying it out.”
“But I thought—why didn’t you put it in my hand …?”
“Just rub it in. Right where I put it. Trust me.”
She pulled her hand that was held by the kite, and the kite pulled back. But she prevailed and rubbed the serum into her wrist with one thumb, aware that Sam was watching. The whole thing felt intensely
indulgent and impossibly intimate. So much of her fragile new friendship with Sam hinged on her ability to hide how much she desired him. If he knew, it would only make things awkward between them. Better to let him think he didn’t affect her.
“Is it dry?” he asked.
“I think so.”
“Good. Lay back for me.”
“Sam?”
“Just trust me.”
With some awkwardness, she lay back and felt the dry grasses buckling beneath the blanket. High white storm clouds were stacked in the sky, the sign of uneasy atmosphere. The kite tugged her wrist.
“You do that a lot,” he said.
“What?”
“Touch things. Run your hands over things.”
She stilled. She hadn’t realized she’d been toying with a blade of grass near her hip, running it absentmindedly between her fingers. She let it go. “I feel everything,” she whispered. “I can tell when the dew’s falling even when I’m in my bed with the shades down. I know spring by the smell of the crocuses. And food—God. It’s my weakness. Even if I never ate again the smells alone can make me feel like I just ate a ten-course meal.”
“Is that a side effect of your condition?”
“Maybe. Or it’s just how I am.”
“Close your eyes,” he said.
“I don’t know about that …”
“Can you stand to be out of control for one second?”
“Of course I can,” she said. “Just promise me you won’t touch me with anything more than one fingertip. That’s it. Promise?”
He put his right hand over her heart, his left pinky finger in the air. “Scout’s Honor.”
“I don’t think that’s how you do the salute,” she said. But she settled back and closed her eyes. In the red dark behind her eyelids, she wondered if she might—sometimes—make a harmless exception to her rule about not leaving the farm. But she banished the thought as quickly as it had arrived. Sam had her second-guessing the structures she’d put in place that had until this point kept her life from falling apart. She needed to do a better job of appearing indifferent to him—so they would both believe she was.
“Breathe out, Olivia,” he said.
She laughed a little, though nothing was funny. She was embarrassed by the shakiness of her breath. Then she felt the lightest press of his fingertip on the inside of her wrist, and all the sensations of the whole of the afternoon constricted into the precise and singular point of his touch, where his skin and hers connected. He kept still, the pressure firm.
“Okay?”
“Sure,” she said.
He began to draw circles, then X’s, then circles again. His touch felt foreign and invasive, but familiar, too. Had they really touched each other all the time at one point in their lives? She thought of evenings spent in the ecstatic torture of long, meandering hours, skin on skin, mouths on mouths, and now—this, such a small and inconsequential thing, the tip of his finger, sliding over the inside of her wrist, erotic in a way that penetrated deep, hammered every nerve, made the air feel thin.
She grasped for some shield to put up against the onslaught of sensation. “I think those clouds might mean rain.”
“Shh, Olivia. We don’t have to talk right now.”
She felt him trace a spiral over the tendons of her wrist, a shape closing then opening again. Years of denial had made her tightly wound and wildly sensitive; he touched her, and she felt herself coming apart cell by cell, atom by atom—and yet, she had no will to stop it. Certainly, he’d already touched her enough for the sake of their experiment. But his touch was too delicious, too satisfying and luxurious, to tell him to move away.
“I’m going to write you a message,” Sam said. “Tell me what it says.”
She felt him impress three lines on her skin; goose bumps rose on her belly, her arms. “I?” she guessed.
“Yes,” he said. “Now the next word.”
She could barely focus on the letters. The breeze when it blew was like a warm kiss; the sun was indecently hot; the kite was a cuff around her wrist. Sam drew away and she felt the loss of him.
She opened her eyes. He was leaning over her, looking down. His face, so long and handsome, was marked by what was either intense concentration or a pained scowl. His eyes had darkened, the blue irises expanded to a thin, electric rim.
“Think?” she said.
He held her gaze as he traced a new pattern, and the connection was shockingly intimate. He was watching her with an intensity that spoke of midnight: muscle, sweat, secrets whispered against skin. She held her breath, waiting for the next word to take shape as his finger drew one letter, then another, on her wrist. Her voice broke. “We? I think we?”
He said nothing, and she knew she had guessed right. If she’d had any thoughts, any reservations, they drifted away like milkweed floss lifted on the summer wind. There was only the dryness of the grass, the gold heat of the sun, and beneath the pinpoint of Sam’s touch, an ocean of desire for a thing she couldn’t have. He stopped, lifted his fingertip, watched her.
“Guess,” he said.
She’d stopped paying attention. “I’m sorry. I don’t know.” He chuckled knowingly. He knew what he was doing to her, what she was feeling. She began to panic. “I think we’ve experimented enough to know if it’s going to work.”
He paused. When he spoke his voice rasped. “God, Olivia. You’re so responsive. So perfectly tuned in. What I could do to you if—”
“Sam. Stop.” She pulled away and sat up so quickly she nearly saw stars.
“What’s wrong?”
She drew away from him farther, a dozen thoughts jumbling in her brain but only one singular enough to stand apart: What I could do to you if. His words were as thin as a wish, no more promising than the curl of smoke from a candle blown out on a birthday cake. He couldn’t touch her—that was the problem. They didn’t know if Arthur’s serum would work. And even if it did work, Arthur had said it would be best for accidental brushes, not prolonged contact like this.
This was a problem.
When Olivia had crossed the field to the oak where Sam was waiting, she’d still believed that the strength of her determination would be enough to delineate the terms of a friendship, a strict pact between two people who would not want what they could never have. But that had been a joke. In the war between restraint and desire, restraint was irresolute, unskilled, and puny; desire arrived with guns blazing, banners flying, and soldiers full of rapacious will. It always won. And yet, for Olivia, its victory could only mean loss.
Who I am kidding? she thought. Over the years, she’d mentally sifted through the possibilities of what she might or might not safely do with a lover one day, what protections or accessories they might or might not use if anyone was ever willing to get close enough to her to try. But ultimately, the thing she and Sam both wanted would elude them. She would come to feel guilty; he would grow bitter and resentful and wish for someone else. And in the meantime, the ache that seemed to transcend her physical body and hurt all the way down to her soul wasn’t going to get any better. She could not have what she could not have. And no amount of wishing would change that.
She got to her feet. “I’m sorry. I just remembered.”
“Remembered what?”
“I lost track of time.” She tried to pull her hand out of the relatively loose loop of twine, but she was shaky and fumbling. “And anyway, you should go wash your hands right away. Just in case.”
“Okay. I will. But—”
“Jeez. Where did you learn to tie knots like this?”
“I picked a few things up over the years.” He stood with her, slowly and awkwardly, then held out a hand toward the kite string. “Here. Let me try.”
“Don’t.” She moved her hand away from him. He reached out more.
“If you’ll just let me—”
“I’ve got this, Sam. I’ve—shoot!” She’d brushed against the back of his knuckles with hers. She froze. He moved
away. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
Their eyes met; they both knew he’d been grazed. He frowned a little, and with a flick of his wrist loosened the knot he’d made. He took the twine from her. The pull of the kite was gone.
“Thank you.” She rubbed at the slight red impression on her skin.
“Are you turning chicken on me?”
“No,” she said. “Of course not.” But—of course—she was.
He began to wind the kite.
“I’ll … I’ll call you,” she assured him, though she wasn’t sure she would. She wasn’t sure of anything. “I do have a phone, you know. It’s been a wonderful … time together. Not a date. A picnic! Everything was really nice. And the cider—that was a nice touch.”
“Olivia—”
“I know what this looks like, but I’m not running. I just really do have things to do. That I forgot.”
He raised his eyebrows. The kite dove headfirst to the ground. Sam sighed. “Well,” he said, almost to himself. “At least it stuck the landing.”
Olivia walked backward. She nearly tripped when she hit her heel on a stone. And then, she turned and jogged through the field, away from the leftover grapes and sparkling juice and cool shade and fallen kite, and away from Sam, whose gaze she could feel like a weight on her shoulders, until she knew she was finally, blessedly, out of sight.
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