The Night Garden: A Novel

by Lisa Van Allen

  It was only later that she wished she could have waited long enough to learn what his message might have been.

  Greener Pastures

  On late July evenings, the sunset often hit Green Valley at just such an angle that it bent people’s thoughts toward the things they wanted most but believed they could not have for fear of actually getting them. This particular psycho-meteorological summer phenomenon stood in direct contrast with a similar winter event on the year’s shortest days, when the small gray sun set so quietly and slowly that people failed to notice that the change between night and day had happened at all—and this made them sleepy, and lazy, and content with everything they had.

  Of course, only the oldest survivors in Green Valley, those who could recognize the telltale patterns of pink and gold in the sky, sensed that an evening of heartsickness was imminent and shuttered their minds against the coming onslaught like someone preparing a house for a storm. So when the summer evening shone its last burnt-pink light on each person’s thorniest desires, most of Green Valley was defenseless against it, especially the young, the dreamy, and the newly in love.

  Mei, the newest boarder to stake her claim on a cot in the Pennywort barn, told a captive audience of sleepy Penny Loafers how she had always wanted a child but never thought she would actually get one, which prompted one of the women to point out that she was about to have a baby, like it or not. In Briscoe, Tom was thinking of how he had such a terrible desire to eat the entire buttery pound cake that was displayed so seductively on a stand in the kitchen—but of course, the fat would be hell on his cholesterol levels and he couldn’t decide if he wanted to deal with the various consequences from his doctor and his partner and his own uncooperative arteries.

  Arthur was slumped by the feeble stream in the glen and was daydreaming about the farmhouse where he’d grown up, got married, had his daughter—where he’d had all the things life in an actual house could give a man, like razors, and hot showers, and insulation, and window fans. And yet in spite of how badly he wanted to climb out of the ravine and back into the farmhouse, in spite of how he longed, yearned, and pined for the creature comforts of a normal life, he could not allow himself to return to the place he’d been happiest. He would not be able to live with himself if he ever caught himself being happy again.

  Sam, in his parents’ faded blue colonial and surrounded by his parents’ old furniture, was supposed to be watching television but was instead faced with the most painful wish he’d ever faced in his life—because he knew that desire for Olivia could only be desire that wasn’t good for him, and he thought for a moment that the greatest failure of evolution was that human beings could not claim perfect mastery over their propensity to fall in love. Better to want something that was good for you and easy to accrue. He was certain that great numbers of humans had died indulging in desires for things that they knew were bad for them—irresistible purple berries clustered on a shrub, the latex of the opium poppy seedpod, the friendship of wild animals that could turn vicious at a moment’s notice, and—even—the desire to lift wheels off the ground and own the sky. He decided that people were experts at not seeing danger when danger proved inconvenient. Although the things he wanted to do with Olivia would almost certainly kill him, that didn’t stop him from wanting to do them anyway, and as the clouds changed from gold to purple to ashy gray, the weight of desire made his heart feel heavy and hollow at the same time.

  Olivia too felt the ache of longing as the shadows grew. The pain of isolation stung more acutely than usual. It was so big it choked out all other feelings, growing around her heart like a tangle of murderous vines. It was unfair that desire—for a thing she’d so long told herself she didn’t need or want—could shake her understanding of herself. Some part of her wished Sam hadn’t come back to the farm. Hope had disarmed her—against him, against herself, against the burn of the sun going down.

  The day was over, the last color draining from the pale sky, when she realized she’d forgotten something: her father. She’d promised to join him for dinner—and then she forgot. In the kitchen of her modified silo, she threw something together with panicked clumsiness: cold beet soup with cucumber, dill, and chives. Crusty bread and soft white farm cheese completed the meal. Then she hurried into the semidark, a flashlight lashed to her belt loop for the walk back.

  “I’m here!” she called once she reached the gloom of the ravine. “Dad! I’m here!”

  She skidded the last few feet to the floor of the gorge. She spent a long moment scanning the area before she saw her father. He was sitting at the edge of the sludgy remnants of the stream, his back hunched in a way that made her think, for a moment, that he was no more animate than the boulder beside him. Her greatest fear, which she lived with like a low hum each day but rarely allowed herself to think of, was that she might one day come down into the ravine and find that something had happened to him—that he’d fallen and cracked his head on a stone, that he’d lost a tussle with a copperhead, that he’d needed her help and she’d failed. And each day that she came into the ravine and saw him waiting for her and ready to bust out with whatever strange new observation he couldn’t wait to share, she felt a thrill of relief that he was still with her and she was not yet alone.

  “I’m here!” she said. “Here I am!”

  “Here you are,” he said, his voice like a creaking tree. “Food?”

  “Cold beet soup with buttermilk. You’ll love it.”

  She lowered herself onto a rock beside him and opened the container of soup for him. She handed him the bowl and a spoon, and she put the bread and cheese on her own lap. Arthur did not eat immediately. Around them, the night creatures were beginning to come out—bats and salamanders and owls. Olivia could sense them but could not see.

  “Sorry I’m late tonight,” she said. She wouldn’t admit to outright forgetting him. That would be cruel.

  “I hope that there was some good reason for your having come late?”

  “Good reason?”

  “A good reason,” he said. “As opposed to a problem.”

  “Oh,” she said. But she didn’t elaborate. There was a problem, a problem that consumed her, that made her accidentally pull up her chives in her herb garden when she should have been pulling weeds, that made her call the boarders by the wrong names. There was the problem of what she was going to do about Sam. She’d thought she could allow herself to want his companionship without wanting anything more. But that was the trouble with happiness: Once a person got a little bit of it, it was only human nature to want more, and more, and more—until the thing that might have made her quite content and sated actually made her quite wretched with longing.

  But she couldn’t think of Sam now. Here was her father, and though he was as pleasant as he always was, she had a sense that beneath it all he was mildly annoyed with her. She’d hated for him to be annoyed; it unsettled her in some fundamental way. Because of that, she tended to humor him when she probably shouldn’t, from occasionally bringing him food that she knew wasn’t good for him to letting him live for so many years down in the ravine. If she’d one day decided to stop bringing him the things he needed to survive, there was some possibility that he would emerge from the ravine and go looking for them. But the other possibility—that he would rather let himself die in the ravine than heft himself out of it—was not out of the question, either. Stubbornness ran in the Pennywort blood. And so she catered to him, allowed him to continue in his folly—just like she’d always done, just like she’d done when he’d pitched the idea of building a poison garden, and just like she did now.

  “So,” she said in her most ordinary voice. “How was your day?”

  “Fine.”

  “Where’s the goat?”

  “Sleeping.”

  “Are you going to eat?”

  He spooned a bite of soup. “Delicious.”

  “Good,” she said. She’d allowed two days to pass since she’d told him about Gloria’s inquiry a
t social services. She hadn’t heard anything new since Sam’s first report. But time was ticking, and she needed her father to see that he could no longer stay in the ravine without repercussions. She said, “So I’m thinking that I might clean out the old house. Just for the heck of it. It hasn’t been gone through in a while—and I never feel like doing it in the winter. Is there anything you want me to bring you if I do clean it out?”

  He only glanced at her.

  She went on. “I also thought it would just be good to get everything ready—you know, make sure everything’s clean and put together—just in case you decide to move back in.”

  “Olivia. I know what you’re trying to do.”

  “What?”

  He dropped his spoon into the soup. “I haven’t forgotten.”

  Maybe it was the heat, the frustration of her afternoon with Sam, the melancholy drilling of the sunset, or a combination of all those things. But when she spoke her voice was unusually pinched with impatience. “Dad. I don’t understand. I need you to explain this to me. Why won’t you even consider moving back in?”

  He stirred his soup.

  “Why don’t you want to?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Of course you can.” She got to her feet, drew in a deep breath for fortification, and glanced around. The only thing worse than Solomon’s Ravine during the day was the ravine at night. Olivia thought she saw the glint of bright eyes peering at her from the shadows, but when she blinked they were gone. She shivered. “What would it hurt to move back?”

  He said nothing, but seemed to slump deeper into himself.

  “Please help me. Tell me what you’re afraid of and maybe I can fix it.”

  “I’m not afraid of anything.”

  “Is it that you’re afraid you won’t be as independent in the farmhouse as you are down here? Because I promise I won’t bother you. I don’t even live in the house anymore, remember? I moved into the silo. You would have the place to yourself.”

  He looked up at her from his seat. “And why did you leave the farmhouse, Olivia? Why don’t you tell me?”

  She was slightly startled; her father was never so direct. The question was fair, but how could she tell him the answer without hurting him? In her mid-twenties, she’d decided to use some of her extra income from the farm to rebuild the old silo into a house for herself. For many years, she’d been summering in the barn with the Penny Loafers and wintering in the farmhouse. But each winter got a little harder, a little longer, a little lonelier, and she thought it would be expedient to get away from both her old memories and from visions of a future that would never fill the house with children, with a husband, with the happy pandemonium of family.

  She told her father a piece of the truth: “Part of the reason I moved out of the house was because I thought that would make it easier for you to move back into it. I didn’t want you to think that you were ever imposing on me if you moved back in.”

  “I know you think I’m just a stubborn old man. I’m not trying to be. But I’ve made my decision. And I’m staying here.”

  “You can’t mean that. It just doesn’t make sense.” Olivia thought that their relationship was as good as any father-daughter relationship could be, or better, even, because she and Arthur never fought and rarely disagreed. They were a good pair. Though Olivia remembered very little about her mother, and often wished she could have known Alice better, she had pieced together enough memories and stories to know that she was more like her father than her mother. Alice had been a chatter, a storyteller, a dreamer who thrived on the company of other people. Arthur was quieter, more listener than talker, and most often happy to be alone. In theory, she should perfectly understand what it meant that he did not want to move back into the farmhouse, if only because they were so alike. And yet, she didn’t understand. She only said, “If you moved back up I’d see you more. I could take better care of you. And I like when you’re around.”

  “I am around.”

  “You know what I mean. What is it you want me to do here, Dad? Just … wait? Do nothing?”

  “We don’t even know that Gloria is planning to do anything for sure,” he said.

  “We don’t know she isn’t either. I’ve been as patient as I can and given you some time to think. But this isn’t a problem to just sweep under the rug.”

  “Something’s bothering you, my darling,” he said. “Not the farmhouse. Not me.”

  She stepped away from him. In the dark he was turning into a smudge of greenish black shadow. “No. I’m fine. There’s nothing else.”

  “I am unconvinced.”

  “There’s nothing going on. I’m just stressed-out about the neighbor. I don’t want to wake up one morning and find out that they’ve hauled you off to some nursing home and I can’t get you out. Do you understand that’s what could happen?”

  He crossed his arms loosely around his middle, less like he was angry and more like he was protecting himself. She hated to see him this way.

  “Are you mad?” she asked.

  He said nothing.

  She felt a familiar, destabilizing panic and a sweeping need to keep him from being mad at her. “If it were up to me, you could stay down here forever. You know that you aren’t any trouble to me—I like climbing down here to see you every day. I think you’re doing fine. But I don’t know how to stop Gloria from reporting you if she decides to do that.”

  “It’s not your fault, Olivia,” he said.

  She let out the smallest of breaths. She suddenly felt tired, so tired she could fall asleep standing on her feet.

  “Thanks for the soup,” her father said.

  She climbed the steep slope of the ravine in the darkness, knowing each stone and tree like she knew the furniture in her kitchen or living room. But instead of returning to the silo, she found herself wandering into the garden maze. In the dim light, she meandered the dusky corridors, the yew walls towering high above her, the tunnels burrowing through her thick rhododendrons. She believed her maze helped people. Alice had always said it did, that nothing could give a person a stronger sense of direction than getting lost in the garden maze. But Alice had died before Olivia had been old enough to ever need the maze’s guidance for herself. Sometimes she missed her mother horribly; she wanted to be held in her mother’s arms and rocked like she was still a child. She wanted to cry on Alice’s shoulder because she had never been able to let her father see her weep. And most of all, she wanted to ask her mother why all the hard work she did to create a maze that helped other people would never help her.

  “What do I do?” she said aloud inside the Willow Garden, where hundreds or thousands of tiny blue beetles clung to the leaves of delicate willows, turning them into iridescent chandeliers. She did not know what question she was asking—about her father, about Sam, about whether to go back to her old ways or whether it was acceptable to hope for something new. She had a sense that she was at a crossroads. But the question didn’t matter because the maze didn’t answer. She found no comfort in the garden, in her father, in the mother who had left her too early—and certainly no comfort in thoughts of Sam. She felt only the call of her Poison Garden, beckoning her safely inside.

  Off the Rose

  The Green Valley of Sam’s childhood had had its share of unusual characters, and Sam was pleased that even though he and Olivia had grown up to live quite different lives than they’d expected to, some things in the valley hadn’t changed. Grammercy’s Pool Shack had never bothered to fix the bulb in its broken l. Hobo Jim—who had shown up for the Concert in 1969—had been squatting in an abandoned milk house for so many years that most people in the valley assumed he owned it. A few aging folks continued to hold peace rallies on Fridays at six in front of the Green Valley Bank, as a reminder to everyone that war hadn’t actually been eradicated yet, and sometimes when the weather was just right, the streetlamp made a kind of bubble of light around them like a rainbow if you looked at it right.

  By the ti
me dawn managed to drill its way through the haze of morning clouds, Sam had stopped by the pool shack to investigate a possible shoplifting, had visited Hobo Jim just to make sure he was still alive, and had dropped by the Green Valley Bank to make a deposit and chat with the owner about his fundraising for veterans with PTSD. Sam had also done his best not to make too much of a fool of himself when he’d gone on his first call. There had been an accident—a man on a tractor had been swiped by a sports car that had attempted to speed around him. Sam and one other cop were first on the scene, finding the victim conscious but pinned in a ditch under his massive John Deere. The red car was long gone. While the other cop comforted the man, assuring him that help was on the way, Sam hung back and pretended to busy himself with the radio, with paperwork, anything so that he didn’t have to look the scared kid under the tractor in the eye. Big Lou Ryerson, a dairy farmer who had come out to see if he could help, had questioned Sam with a great, deep worm of a wrinkle between his eyebrows: What are you doing, Van Winkle? Get over there. That’s Rick Glover’s kid lying in that gutter, and he needs a Van Winkle right now. But Sam had put him off, waving papers and saying Can’t you see I am trying to help if only you’d give me some space? When they finally got the tractor out of the ditch, they discovered the victim was pretty banged up but not in mortal danger. Sam had needed to hide behind the big white wall of the ambulance to steady his shaking hands.

  It was midmorning when he stopped by Olivia’s. The boarders directed him to find her in the Marble Garden, which had been Alice’s design and had scandalized the valley for its voluptuous and erotic nude figures. More than once as a child Sam had wandered into the Marble Garden for a curious peek; when he touched the statues—because how could he not—he swore he felt their stone bodies turn to warm human flesh under his hand. Now he found Olivia bending before a statue of some naked Greek athlete, and his brain lit up with indecent thoughts. She wore a yellow skirt with bands of yellow lace, and her thick hair had been pulled back under a purple bandanna. When she saw him, a flash of hope appeared on her face and he knew what she was thinking: that the serum had worked. Maybe even that he could touch her again. He hated to disappoint her. But all morning he’d been living with the reminder of their perfect afternoon that had turned out to be not so perfect after all.