The Night Garden: A Novel

by Lisa Van Allen

  Together, they listened as the sirens continued their approach down the one road that snaked through the valley. Olivia was still, her chest not even moving with her breath. Then the sirens stopped. She leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. Rainbows of colored light were cast about the garden room from the hanging crystals, speckling all the white flowers of the garden, alighting on white roses and white gladiolus, coloring Olivia’s shoulders.

  “Thank you,” she said. She drew her thighs against her chest and curled around them; he could see her muscles trembling under her skin.

  He had a thousand questions. But he waited quietly with her until two of the boarders arrived with a tall, sloshing glass of water, lemon candies, and a bag of ice. He wanted nothing more than to press an ice cube to Olivia’s wrist and hold it there against her skin, to help her cool off, to do something. But all he could do was open the bag of her homemade lemon drops and watch her long throat work as she drank the water down. He had not thought about what it might mean for her to get sick or hurt. Nor had he understood the depths of her fear that people would find out about her condition. Politely but firmly, he thanked the boarders and told them to go. They ignored him, loyal only to Olivia, until she told them: It’s fine.

  She took small sips and little by little seemed to revive. He sat closer to her, as close as he dared. “Olivia … What’s going on?”

  She swallowed and rested the glass of water on her thigh.

  “I want you to tell me,” he said.

  She looked into her lap at the bunched folds of her skirt. “I haven’t seen much of you lately.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said earnestly.

  She rubbed her thumb along the column of her glass.

  He asked, “Did you … think of me?”

  “I always think of you,” she said. “Even when I can’t help it. Even when I would rather not.”

  He looked at her shoulders, the hard lines of her collarbones, the lean muscles of her arms. “I know what you mean.”

  She smiled, but the expression held more commiseration than joy. A sense of bone-deep understanding between them settled into his body, as if he’d spent the last two weeks suffering with her, instead of suffering apart.

  “So … what happened? Why did you faint?”

  “Oh Sam. I don’t want to tell you. It’s embarrassing.”

  “I wonder if I might be able to guess.” He rested his hand on the dry earth beside her hip; small stones bit his skin. “You haven’t been going into the garden.”

  She glanced at him, then closed her eyes, and he knew he was right.

  He also knew, as certain as he knew the strength of his own bones, that she had stopped going into the garden because of him. Perhaps even for him. And the stark fact of her sacrifice—of her willingness to suffer so that she could be with him—made him despise himself for having stayed away from her for so long.

  “You’re in pain,” he said. She didn’t deny it. “Olivia, if you don’t go back in, couldn’t you die? Isn’t that what you told me?” She turned her head slightly away; it was all the answer she gave.

  His heart was breaking for her, for him, and most of all for his stupidity in having thought he could stay away from her, could force himself not to love her or want her. How clear everything seemed to him all of a sudden, here, in the garden, with the fat lazy bees plodding from bloom to bloom and the large ladybugs watching them from the green tongues of the leaves. The answer to his uncertainty had been with him all along. The way to happiness wasn’t nearly as convoluted as the various channels of the maze: It was simple and straight. It was unresisting acceptance of what was. He could love Olivia—yes—and it did not have to be about difficulty, or sacrifice, or risk, or danger, or what he might be giving up. It was only about what he could gain from loving her, about being as complete as a man could come to be by accepting his own desires and not fighting them, no matter how inconvenient. He did love her, he saw that now. There was no way around it. Nor would he want there to be. The question then was only this: Could she love him too?

  “Come on,” he said. He got to his feet.

  She stood and leaned a shoulder against the wall. “What?” she said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I’m just sorry I stayed away for so long.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I won’t do it again.”

  “Sam—”

  “I want you to feel better. I don’t like to see you hurting like this.” She was quiet. Her eyes were as dim as a pine forest, deep greens layered with coppery brown.

  “I … I think I can manage to keep myself out of the garden a little longer,” she said.

  “But I don’t want anything to happen to you. I don’t want to take that risk.”

  She drew in a deep breath, then handed him her empty glass.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’ll walk you there.”

  Slowly, they made their way out of the Rainbow Garden and toward the center of the maze. Olivia had to stop a couple of times before they arrived at the door that led to her Poison Garden, reaching out to a wisteria branch or pillar to steady herself. He thought of an art class he had taken when he’d first gone to college after he left Green Valley: In some paintings, a walled garden was a symbol of the virginity of Mary, mother of God. Olivia’s garden had forced her to remain a virgin all these years, he was sure of it. But not from any kind of purity or piety. Only from Arthur Pennywort’s failure to protect his daughter, and from the strange magic of Green Valley, and from the bad luck of being the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. Still, Sam would rather spend his life writhing in unconsummated desire than attempt to slake his lust with a standin and be left equally unsatisfied.

  She drew the key from around her neck but did not turn to the garden door. “I don’t want you to see me go in.”

  “All right.”

  “Sam. Thanks for coming. For helping me.”

  “No problem.” He felt his chest expand a little with the first hint of pride he’d felt since he’d returned to the valley. “I’ll be back. Later.”

  She smiled sadly, then he turned to go.

  Make Hay

  By nightfall, after a few hours in the Poison Garden, Olivia was slightly revived—and far too restless to sleep. She tried not to allow her occasional bouts of insomnia to dampen her spirits; there would be plenty of time for sleeping come the winter. While the Penny Loafers settled into their cots for the night, Olivia walked out under the dome of the murky sky with the sense that there were storms in the area. She could feel them—isolated squalls that popped up fast then wrung themselves dry. They were out there, the storms. But they were not in Green Valley.

  She crossed the fields, and then the shallowest end of Solomon’s Ravine, and then she was walking toward the east side of the property, toward the old Pennywort stone quarry, which had been abandoned decades ago. In the still of the summer night, the swimming hole was filled with water that was always cold no matter how hot the day. At one point, the pool of still water had been called the Gates of Hell, because supposedly the very bottom of the pool contained a hidden entrance to an underground system of caves, and those caves were allegedly full of gold and silver hoards that had been mined by the gnomes who lived below the mountains. But almost everyone who wasn’t a Pennywort had forgotten about the Gates of Hell a long time ago, and the only thing that kept the name alive at all had been Sam and Olivia’s love of the place when they were kids. It was only when they were referring to the Gates of Hell that they’d been permitted to swear.

  At the foot of the water, Olivia unbuttoned her cotton dress and hung it over a bush. The chill of the water made her naked skin pebble and tighten, but she waded up to her shins, then her knees, then her belly button—and then she was submerged to her shoulders, immersed in silky, opaque black.

  And yet, the water of the old swimming hole was doing nothing to lower the temperature of her overheating body or mind. Fo
r two weeks, she had tried to keep herself out of the Poison Garden. She’d dealt with the irritability, then the shaking, then the dizziness, then the pains that lit up her nervous system like scorching fire. She thought, during moments of stillness that came between the waves of pain, I can do this. She had a sense that if she could only stay out of the garden long enough, she would be able to wean herself off it entirely.

  Today, when she’d opened her eyes in the Rainbow Garden, she thought she’d been dreaming. Sam was leaning over her, backlit by the bright blue sky and limned by gold sun. The sight of him had reinvigorated her vow not to return to the Poison Garden—the garden cost too much, demanded too much of her. She would rather die than live without the kind of happiness that most people took for granted each day. But then, her whole body ached like someone was stretching apart her every joint, and the sun was a living nightmare, and her head was in danger of collapsing under the weight of the air, and she knew she wouldn’t succeed in keeping herself out of the garden. Not now, and not ever. The only way out of her reliance on the Poison Garden was death.

  She raised her arms to float them on the surface of the water. She’d been happy before Sam had returned. Or at least, she’d been happy enough not to torture herself with questions of whether or not she could be happier. Then Sam had come and his very presence had whispered like a devil in her ear: Don’t you want more? And she did. Not just sex—though of course she wanted that and had spent a good number of nights during her adult life imagining it. But she wanted more than her quiet life, her tepid happiness. She wanted a relationship with another person that was as bottomless as the quarry pool.

  She stepped her toes over the slick rocks and felt her inner temperature begin to drop. She did not know what Sam wanted from her. She only knew what he didn’t want: to be with a woman he couldn’t touch. She was so distraught and frustrated and bent out of shape—her every nerve threatening revolt in a way that had nothing to do with the Poison Garden—that when she saw the figure of a man on the shore in the moonlight, she thought for a moment it was her imagination. When she saw him fold his shorts and shirt and set them on a stone, she knew he was real. The moon traced the barest silhouette of silver on his shoulders and the crown of his head; his boxers were dark—blue or black, she couldn’t tell. She did not raise her hand from the concealing fabric of the swimming hole to wave at him, but he seemed to know the moment he’d been seen.

  “How’s the water?” Sam asked.

  She was acutely aware of the way the black surface obscured her from view, small ripples lapping her hair where she’d pinned it off her neck. “It’s freezing.”

  He put his hands on his hips and his chest broadened with the movement. She was glad for the semidarkness because it let her admire him in secret, the contours and planes of his body so unlike hers. “Freezing, huh? Then why don’t you come out?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  She pointed to her dress, slung over a shrub.

  “Ah. I see. Well, I could use a splash of cold water myself,” he said, and he waded in. The moonlight made his skin glow unusually pale, with undertones of purple and blue so that he looked almost more water-creature than man. He dove when the surface reached his belly, and she lost sight of him. While he was underwater, she had the oddest sensation that she was alone and yet not alone, the high, dark walls of the quarry rising around her. After a time, she grew nervous. Where was he? Had he hit his head on a rock? Was he okay?

  He finally surfaced ten feet behind her in the deepest part of the swimming hole. And she let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.

  “Oh man,” he said, laughing. “I’m much taller than the last time I tried this, and I still can’t touch the bottom out there.”

  She smiled. “How did you know where to find me?”

  “It’s a summer night. You’re either in bed, in the garden, or here. Not bad odds.”

  She pushed herself backward a few feet closer to the shore. In the years since he’d left Green Valley, she’d thought of what it might be like to have him back, right here, swimming with her. But in her reveries, she’d always felt very peaceful and carefree with him: They splashed and laughed and floated on their backs to look at the stars. Instead, she felt tangled, torn, and edgy. Too serious for play. She eyed him as he swam through the water, making a slow, languid circle around her, disturbing the smooth surface of the pool.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Better. A thousand times better. I could jump the moon.”

  “Good,” he said.

  “I recover pretty quickly. Once I go back in.”

  “Olivia …”

  She braced herself. She knew what question was coming. All day she’d thought of it, and yet she hadn’t been able to settle on an answer.

  “Why did you try to stay out of the garden?”

  She bobbed away from him, just a few feet. Admitting the truth would put everything out in the open. She wasn’t sure she could do it. She was afraid that if he felt the same way she felt, and they both spoke it aloud, she might as well condemn him. “I wanted to see if I could.”

  “But … why?”

  She dropped her arms below the water. “I just thought …”

  “What?”

  Something about Sam’s face made her want to tell the truth, to be brave. She said, “I want to be able to touch you again.”

  He exhaled, moved closer in the water. The sounds of the waves lapped at the rocks near the stony walls. She could not make out the color of his eyes in the darkness, but she could see his intentions, his longing, and—maybe—his relief. “Ollie. I want that, too.”

  “So … What do we do?”

  “We figure something out. We try the serum again, tweak the formula. And in the meantime … we consider creative alternatives.”

  Her face heated. “I don’t think there’s … much. It seems like you’re still pretty sensitive to poison ivy. Is that right?”

  “Well … it’s a little better.”

  “But not much better.”

  “A little better. That’s all.”

  “So we would have to be really, really, really careful.”

  “We will,” he said.

  “I don’t think I could handle the risk. I wouldn’t want to hurt you. And I wouldn’t want your sensitivity to get worse.”

  He was quiet.

  “Also …” She ran her palms over the water. “I don’t want to risk our friendship.”

  “You couldn’t. Not even if you tried. You know that, right?”

  “I do,” she said. But she was not being completely honest with him. She did believe that she could rely on Sam’s friendship for the rest of her life in one form or another. The bond between them felt strong and deep, almost fundamental. But while his friendship was certain, she did not know that she could always be happy with just his friendship, or if a near-but-not-near-enough relationship was destined to be more painful than rewarding. Would he tire of her someday? Would she have to watch as he slowly but surely relegated her to the “friends without benefits” category of people in his life? Would she have to witness him bringing home a real lover, a woman who could share his bed and fill his house with children—while she would be alone on the farm? How would she be able to stand it?

  He seemed to sense some of her misgivings. “You don’t have to have all the answers right now, Olivia. I want to be with you. Just you. Just as you are.”

  Two white points of moonlight shone out from the dark of his eyes. She was glad for the water around her; it held her up a little, and she needed holding. She didn’t have the willpower to turn away his affection—not anymore. She wanted, more than anything she’d wanted in a long time, to wrap her arms around his neck and press her whole body against him. She knew exactly how he would feel, his skin cooled by the water, his muscles warm beneath. Her hair was damp at her neck, tendrils curling around her face. She pushed them behind her ears.


  “We should head in,” she said.

  “Suit yourself.”

  She fanned her arms over the surface of the water. “My dress is hanging up.”

  “So?”

  She laughed. “I need you to turn around.”

  “I’m not going to.”

  “Please?”

  He splashed her with his fingertips. “How did you get to be so modest?”

  “How did you get to be so stubborn?”

  His chin dipped below the water and bobbed up again. “Oh, fine. But only because your lips are turning blue.”

  Olivia touched her mouth. She was getting chilly; her teeth were beginning to chatter. But all of it—the cool night air that smelled of wet rocks and moss, the way the water had darkened Sam’s hair, and even the cold ache in her bones—she loved it all. He winked at her and turned around. On the rocky shore, she slipped on her dress, one arm at a time, then turned away from the water to work the buttons. She heard Sam making his way toward her, the whoosh of each step echoing in the quarry like a roar.

  When she was done, she went to sit beside him on the grass, where he was wiping droplets of water from his chest and legs with his T-shirt. She turned to him with a smile, but his mood had changed. His cheery eyes had darkened; his mouth was a hard line.

  “Olivia … is your hair safe?”

  “Safe?”

  “To touch.”

  “Oh.” She reached up instinctively to pat the wayward strands of damp hair that had loosened from her bun. “I think so. My hair and nails don’t seem to be affected. Once in a while someone will brush into my hair, if I have it down, since it’s so long. But I don’t think it’s ever caused a problem.”

  “May I?”

  At first, she didn’t understand what he wanted. May he what? But then he reached out and worried a single heat-curled tendril that had fallen beside her cheek. “Oh. Yes. If you’re sure you want to …”