“I want to.”
She turned away from him to give him better access to her hair. She felt the brush of his fingers—no, the brush of the strands of her own hair, moving by his conduction—at the nape of her neck. Gently, he searched for the pins she’d used to fasten her bun. He prodded and sought and plucked until the weight of her hair landed squarely on the back of her neck. And then he was threading his fingers into the mass, twisting and untwisting it in his hands. She didn’t even try to make conversation while he touched her; the sensation was too exquisite, too painful and pleasurable at the same time. He combed his fingers through her hair from top to bottom, and each time he caught a tangle it was like a little bite, a small and precise blast of desire like the spark from flint and steel.
When he was done, her hair combed through and trailing down, he asked her to lie back. He spread her hair out around her. She knew the way the thin cotton of her damp dress was clinging to her, and Sam made no secret of looking at her body. His perusal was slow and delicious, his countenance full of naked desire. With other men, her sense of her own beauty had been theoretical—a thing sketched out on paper that she didn’t much care about. When Sam looked at her, she was glad he thought she was beautiful—and the sensation of being glad was entirely new.
“Do you want to know the other reason I stayed out of the garden?” she asked softly.
He ran a strand of hair through two fingers, a gentle, tugging pressure. “Tell me.”
“Because nobody’s ever made me feel the way you do. And I’m … afraid of it. I know how to solve just about any problem that can come up on any given day on this farm. My whole life is about solving problems from sunup to sundown. But with you, I have no idea what to do. There’s a problem, and I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t know if I ever will.”
“There’s nothing to fix.” His gaze roamed her body, greedily and intimately, and the look on his face was pained. “God, Olivia.” His voice was tight. “Can I see you?”
She felt a breeze cool her skin, fanning the beads of water on her bare legs. The Green Valley moon was as bright and fat as it always was, magnified by the lens of the sky. “Yes. All right,” she said, breathless. She reached for the top button of her dress.
“Please,” he said. “Let me.”
She hesitated.
“It only hurts me if I touch your skin. Trust me.”
“But—”
He tugged a button and lifted the puckering fabric. “I’ll be fine.”
She let her hands drop to her sides.
With unbreakable focus, he worked open the top button, and then the next, and the next, leaving the two sides of her dress no more than an inch apart. She could not take her eyes off him; it was as if with each button that bared more of her skin, more of who he was had been exposed. She was breathing heavily by the time he got to the last button at her thighs. He looked at her face—a quick checking in to make sure she hadn’t changed her mind—and then he peeled the dress open, and she was fully bared.
“You’re perfect,” he said. There was tension in his voice that made her skin break out in goose bumps. He looked at her for a long time; she fought the urge to move. His gaze was almost tangible, sliding over her hotly. He leaned over her to peer into her eyes. “Will—will you touch yourself?” he asked. “Will you do what I can’t?”
She felt a frisson of uncertainty.
“Please?” he said.
The way his voice cracked made her bold. “Like this?” She ran her hands along her ribs, up her belly, across her breasts.
“Yes,” he said.
All at once she felt immensely powerful, beautiful, and sure. She closed her eyes and heard only the sound of his breathing, and then the sound of his voice, giving instructions that were somewhere between demands and pleas. She held on to his words, his dictations and appeals, and somewhere along the line, her hands became his hands, so that it was his palms that skimmed her belly and cupped her breasts, his fingers that found her, wet and aching, until at last her body bowed, and shook, and collapsed against the grass.
She drew her dress closed, fastened a few key buttons. The wind blew. Slowly, the heat went out of her, and in spite of the warmth of the evening she began to feel cold.
“Are you okay?” Sam asked.
The water shimmered black and silver at their feet. She rolled toward him and propped her head on her palm. “I want you to be happy.”
“I am happy,” he said. “Are you?”
She nodded.
“Then what’s the problem?”
“I just keep thinking you’ll, you know, get frustrated and want to—to find someone else.”
He didn’t speak for a long while. “I know what I’m doing.”
She bit her lips, chagrined. He was right, of course. He was willing to give up a life of normal sex. But was she willing to let him? “And what about kids?”
“What about them?”
“Do you want any?”
He cupped the side of her head over her thick hair. “I guess I always pictured myself having a family someday.”
“You can’t with me,” she said. The words hurt.
“There’s adoption.”
“But I can’t put a Band-Aid on somebody with a scraped knee.”
He dropped his hand. “We’ll just have to get a subscription service for surgical gloves,” he said. “And besides, you can do the important things. You can read bedtime stories. And teach a kid how to plant seeds, and shuck corn, and work the farm that you love. Those things matter. A lot.”
“Something tells me an adoption agency wouldn’t like ‘mother is deadly’ when they see it listed under medical conditions.”
“Mmm,” Sam said.
Olivia got to her feet; her legs were shaky. “I want you in my life, Sam. Any way I can have you. But the moment you want to walk, I’ll … I won’t try to keep you in a position you don’t want to be in.”
He frowned and sat up. “It’s almost like you’re expecting me to run away.”
The words caught her heart at a surprising angle, like banging an elbow in just such a spot that it radiates tremendous pain. Even as he promised to stay with her, she expected him to go. To vanish from her life as swiftly as he’d flown back into it. And why shouldn’t he? He’d done it before. And he wasn’t the only one. Nature took its course. People were there and gone and there again, and only the farm remained the same—the farm, and the great safe bastion of her Poison Garden, hidden in the heart of the maze.
She said, “I want you to be happy. And I just don’t feel right about making any permanent claims on your heart.”
He laughed and got to his feet, his T-shirt balled in his hand. “Too late for that. You had your stamp on my heart when you were eleven years old and you made me spend an afternoon chasing a frog down a creek because you were certain it belonged to a family of fairies.” Carefully, he tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear. “Do you remember that night in the Promise Garden?”
She closed her eyes. She remembered. They had been fooling around together since September, and the spring before she’d turned sixteen was one of the happiest she’d ever known. The Penny Loafers had not yet arrived for the year; the garden was blooming only with the earliest of winter flowers. Even in the cold of early spring, the Promise Garden was beautiful. The walls were set with mismatched mirrors: hardy frames of plain pine, ornate and scrolling frames of brass, carved wooden frames festooned with grapes, vines, and acanthus leaves. The largest mirror was circled by a frame inscribed with the words: VIEWER BEWARE: HERE, YOUR YES SHALL MEAN YES AND YOUR NO SHALL MEAN NO.
Alice had believed that promises made in the Promise Garden would be forever binding, in part because false promises were impossible to utter there. Olivia herself had tested the theory. She’d tried saying I promise only to eat vegetables for the rest of my life. I promise never to chase the peacock up the tree ever again. But her promises had no blood in them. They’d dried up in her mouth and got caught in h
er throat and could not be spoken no matter how she tried to choke out the words.
Sam had stood in the Promise Garden that day after school had ended and he’d promised her, easy as water flowing over rocks, I love you. I’ll always love you. For the rest of my life. And Olivia had said, Me, too.
“You remember,” she said. “I’m glad.”
“Let’s just enjoy this. We’ll go one day at a time.”
“One day at a time,” she said.
He smiled. And though she couldn’t take his hand as they walked back toward the barn, and he couldn’t put his arm around her, they shared the same air, and walked out under the same moon, and most important, they were together. It was enough, more than enough, for now.
A Thorn in Her Side
From her house on the hill, Gloria Zeiger looked down at the garden maze of the Pennywort farm, a maze she had been looking down into for such a long time that she could probably walk the thing with her eyes closed and not get lost. In the last month, her retirement had become a lackluster, plodding, undignified march through the hours. Dust from the fields rose up and coated her picture windows; her husband’s mother had announced her plans to move in with them next year; some person visiting the Pennywort maze had parked directly in front of her driveway yesterday and blocked her in; and all of these things increased her irritability until it was far too much to bear. She would not allow herself to consider the possibility that perhaps she’d made a mistake in constructing her dream house in Green Valley, where a woman had to drive for fifteen minutes for gasoline, where the library was a glorified collection of bookshelves salvaged from the 1950s, and where the word nightlife referred to things that walked on four legs. She had expected to enjoy rural life more than she actually did. There was only one thing to do: use her anger as a kind of fertilizer for her resolve to make Green Valley a better place.
Arthur Pennywort allegedly continued to live in a state of delinquency and neglect, which saddened her, since she did not like to think of any old man being allowed to live in such a way. But the social workers had come and gone, and they’d refused to give up any details on their decision to let him be. Gloria did not plan to let the issue drop. She would go up the chain of command as far as she needed to in order to save Arthur Pennywort when no one else would.
In the meantime the homeless shelter had opened, but as far as she knew not one of the vagrant women who slept in the Pennywort barn had decided to move in. Her plastic-covered mattresses and neatly tiled showers remained unused. She’d heard a whisper that some people in town were calling the shelter the Goat Motel, since only the valley’s horrid pack of goats had shown any interest, and they regularly had to be chased away to keep their disruptive little hooves off the neat green lawn. Gloria had staked her reputation on that shelter—its necessity, its good purpose, its enormous price tag. And now Green Valley talked, criticized, and grumbled about it—and by extension, about Gloria. She could only imagine what people were saying about her. Her husband, in the meantime, slept with his mouth open in his chair.
Gloria was not the only person in the valley keeping an eye on the Pennywort farm. Men and women would lean out their car windows to talk, each asking the other to confirm that Sam Van Winkle, their beloved prodigal son, had begun spending a noteworthy amount of time at the Pennywort farm. And though not one person ever saw Sam put an arm around Olivia Pennywort’s shoulders, nor saw her give him a peck on the cheek, everyone remained hopeful that if any man was to crack the cipher that was Olivia Pennywort, it would be Sam.
As Sam continued to make his appearances on the farm, fixing rotten boards in the Penny Loafers’ barn or patching the greenhouse sheeting, Olivia found that her popularity in Green Valley had unexpectedly spiked. The Penny Loafers remarked among themselves that she seemed happier than usual, freer in a way they couldn’t articulate. Even Tom had noticed a change; it wasn’t that Olivia hadn’t always been friendly, but it was as if she no longer scrutinized herself so closely, no longer measured out her words before she said them. People didn’t feel quite so inclined to take a deferential distance—even when she herself tried to stay away. Members of her farm who arrived to pick up their pathetic sacks of vegetables sought her out to chat: They wanted to exchange recipe ideas for her produce, they wanted to talk about what new plans she had for the maze, and a teacher had asked Olivia if she might allow her theater kids to film their production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the gardens. Her own theory as to why the valley seemed so much friendlier toward her was not that she herself had changed but that Sam’s approval and companionship had made her seem more approachable. But whatever the cause for the shift, she loved it. The sticky air felt just a little lighter, people’s smiles were friendlier, and even her three meanest chickens did not try to peck her when she collected their eggs but only lifted their fat feathers out of the way.
As Olivia watched the little troupe of high school thespians file into her maze, trailing ribbons behind them, she did not worry that the children might find their way into her Poison Garden. It seemed the drought had finally begun to whittle away at whatever charm had caused her garden to need constant trimming, and she found that many days had passed and she had not needed to prune it back at all. Normally, its lack of overly wild growth would have worried her, but with the brightness of Sam’s company and the sense that their relationship was deepening like a plant stretching its roots into the soil, she decided she would not worry about the lack of freakish growth in her central garden.
There was only one dark spot she found in her otherwise jubilant days: The happier she felt on the sun-drenched surface of the valley, the more she dreaded climbing down into Solomon’s Ravine. There, in the glowering shadows, Arthur Pennywort spent his days as he always did, and seeing him was a surprising reminder of the possibility that her dull, old life could return at any given moment, and that if it did return, she would not know how to be content with it again. For himself, Arthur was doing his best not to be annoyed with Olivia, even while the rest of Green Valley seemed to be newly discovering her. Normally, she might visit him twice a day or more in the summer, bringing news and food and a little conversation. But lately she made only one trip each day to see him—just one—and he was too annoyed with her to say anything about it. He was even more annoyed when she didn’t seem to notice that he was annoyed at all. She dropped off his food or other things he’d requested without meeting his eye. And then she stood shifting from foot to foot, scraping the bottoms of her boots absentmindedly on the rocks or picking bits of bark off a tree, only half invested in conversation, until she seemed to determine that she’d stayed for a socially acceptable amount of time and made her move to go.
Arthur knew what had changed: Sam. It had to be Sam.
He wanted to be happy for her, he truly did. But how he wanted to feel wasn’t exactly how he felt. He was irritated that her visits to him had become spotty. He felt slightly undermined and ignored. And yet, he’d known this was what would happen. It was nothing less than what he deserved.
“I hope that boy’s going to be good to you,” Arthur said one day when Olivia had come to visit him and seemed to be groping about for an excuse to get away.
The look that came over her face was nothing shy of dreamy. “He is,” she said. “He’s … amazing.” And Arthur’s heart fell a little, because it meant his suspicions were right.
“And you’re sure he’ll be happy with you, the way things are? Forever?”
She laughed as if he’d said something outrageous. “I’m just trying to enjoy the moment right now, Dad. We’re not talking about forever.”
“That’s not true,” Arthur said. “Maybe you’re not talking about it. But you’re thinking about it. I can see it in your eyes.”
She looked away.
Arthur faked a smile he didn’t feel. He reminded himself that he’d wanted Sam to fall for Olivia; he’d encouraged her. But now that it had happened, he didn’t feel good about it. He felt wary an
d unnerved. Olivia was still a young woman. She did not yet understand the relationship between happiness and heartbreak—that all happiness was just a step in the direction of heartbreak. The rules of the universe dictated that temperature moved from hot to cold; happiness too left the body, just like heat, after a time. And there was only one true lesson that all the other minor lessons in life pointed back to: to be wary of happiness in the same way most people were wary of loss, for they were one and the same.
Arthur took a few steps toward her, and though they had long ago decided that he would not touch so much as a shoelace on her boot for fear of an allergic reaction, the thing he wanted to say to her was quite possibly the most important thing he would ever have to say to her in his life. So he reached out and put a hand on her shoulder over the sleeve of her T-shirt, and he kept it there even when her eyes went wide. “Once you’ve had love, Olivia, real love—the kind I felt for your mother—and then you’ve lost it … You can never come back from that. It changes you as surely as if it could move your organs around in your chest cavity. It makes you into a different person. You can’t understand until you’ve been there. I just don’t want to see that ever happen to you. And, I’m sorry, but you face a greater chance of heartbreak than most because of … because of how you are.”
She stood for a moment looking down into his eyes, and then she pressed her lips together and took one step away. “I thought you wanted me to be happy.”
“I do.”
“Then will you help me?” Her eyes were full of pleading. “Will you find a way to make the serum work?”
He bowed his head.
“Dad. Please?”
“If being with Sam is what you want, I will dedicate my every talent to it. You have my promise.”
“Thank you.”
“But if you ever get the feeling for one second that he thinks you’re not good enough exactly as you are, then you’ve got to promise me you’ll break it off right there and then.”
“I’ll … take it under consideration.”
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