The Night Garden: A Novel

by Lisa Van Allen

  Halfway across town in Gloria’s shelter, the Penny Loafers were feeling itchy—not the kind of itch that attacks the surface of the skin, but more deeply itchy. Restless. Shortly after the grouped had arrived at the shelter and filled out their paperwork and signed all the forms, Mei had taken off—saying that she was finally feeling ready to go home. She’d barely bothered to say goodbye, leaving the boarders quite perplexed and feeling abandoned without their unofficial new leader. It was as if when Mei left, she took all her anger and irritation at Olivia Pennywort with her: The bluster went out of the little group as they sat in the common room watching commercials play on the television, and as their hands itched for the tasks of weeding or watering in the garden maze, they began to wonder what exactly they were doing at the shelter anyway and wishing they could go back.

  But they could not leave: Olivia Pennywort would not welcome them back, not after how they’d betrayed and embarrassed her by believing the preposterous rumor that had been going around. They sat on couches with wooden arms and overly firm cushions, and they did not speak about it but inwardly wondered if they had ruined their shot at getting clear answers to their individual questions now that they were no longer welcome in the garden maze.

  In Solomon’s Ravine, Arthur too was having his own kind of crisis. Yesterday he had taken himself for a little stroll to Hemlock Pond, just for a bit of exercise. He’d been working on his Great Confession, and he’d needed a break from the difficult memories of the past. He’d left his notepad on his spiffy new kitchen table because he had not expected Olivia until later. And now, he knew she’d seen it. She’d pulled out the pages and left them crumpled so that he would know she’d been there. If he’d felt guilty before about what he’d done, he felt a thousand times guiltier now. He’d spent all of his years since he’d realized Olivia’s condition was irreversible punishing himself by remaining in the gloom of Solomon’s Ravine, by not shaving off his damn beard even though he hated it, by taking himself away from the farm he and Alice had loved. He had no idea how he could fix the horrible thing he’d done—and he was beginning to think there was no way to fix it. No apology would ever be enough. He sat in the bottom of the ravine and watched the newly swollen river dragging debris downstream. Sometimes he thought it would be more convenient for him, and for everyone, if he would just die.

  The night passed. Not a single bird made so much as a peep. The Green Valley goats were missing from their usual haunts—but wherever they’d gone, they were certainly up to no good. When morning came, Sam excused himself from work with a phone call, saying that he suspected an ear infection—and yet, he knew that there had never been a day when it was more important to show his face at the station than this one. After he’d left Olivia, he’d gone straight to the bar, hoping to drink his blues away as he’d sometimes done in the years before he’d returned to the valley. A couple of guys had got drunk and started posturing like roosters and flapping their knives at one another near the doorway. But instead of throwing himself between the potential fighters, as everyone seemed to expect him to do, Sam had gone bottom’s up on his beer, slapped his money on the counter, and said to the men as he was leaving, Good luck.

  The good news was that the idiots had been so startled to see a Van Winkle abandon a very serious, very life-and-death fight that they’d lost interest in it and walked away with their pocketknives sheathed. But the bad news was that all of Sam’s buddies were on to him now, if they hadn’t been before. They knew he was a coward, a crappy, careless cop. They did not know that the Van Winkle talent had skipped him, that Sam was as likely to kill people as save them.

  It was 11 A.M. when Sam walked into Roddy’s office, knocking as he entered instead of before. Roddy glanced up but then went back to his work. “Sam. I see you’re feeling better. That ear infection cleared up already?”

  “I’m quitting,” Sam said.

  Roddy looked up from his computer, then took off his glasses and folded his hands. “Sit down.”

  Sam shook his head. “Not staying long.”

  “I assume you’re at least giving me the courtesy of two weeks’ notice?”

  Sam frowned; he hadn’t thought about that. “I guess.”

  “Then I’m still your boss and you still work for me. Sit down.”

  Sam sighed and obeyed.

  “You think I don’t know why you’re quitting. But I do.”

  Sam was pretty sure Roddy had no idea, so he kept his mouth shut.

  “This is because the guys give you a hard time. You’ve got to get a thicker skin, Sam. You know it’s always been that way.”

  “I don’t give a crap what they say to me. Or about me. I’m quitting because I have to.”

  “Far as I can tell, nobody here is making you quit.”

  “But I can’t do this,” Sam said. “You don’t want a Van Winkle on the force who can’t even save a damn kitten from a tree. Really.”

  Roddy spoke slowly. “Nobody in this whole town thinks that but you.”

  Sam slammed his hand on the edge of the desk. “Then I’m the only one who has his head on straight.”

  Roddy stood up, his old chair creaking beneath him. Then he came around to the front of his desk. The bright window behind him made him look formidable and wide. “Sam. Is this because of Olivia? Did something happen?”

  “A thousand things happened,” Sam said, and he tried not to remember the way she’d arched her neck to him when he leaned down to kiss it. He gripped the arms of the chair.

  “Oh well now. Don’t take it too personally, Sam. You’re not the first guy to get chewed up and spit out by that girl, and I guarantee you won’t be the last.”

  You have no idea what you’re talking about, Sam thought. There wasn’t a man in Green Valley who could compare his broken heart to Sam’s. Olivia had opened up to him; he knew her in a way no one else ever did and—he was certain—no one else ever would. She loved him, he was sure of it. But her love wasn’t strong enough to make her willing to take a risk. The pain of her unwillingness to meet him halfway was surpassed only by the pain he’d felt sitting alone in a plane with a dead man. Sam curled his hands into fists on his thighs. “I asked her to marry me,” he said.

  “Let me guess. She turned you down.”

  “Yes. But it wasn’t like that. We were serious. At least, I thought we were.”

  “Oh I know it,” Roddy said. “That girl was ass over teakettle for you. Hell, everyone in the whole damn valley knew it the day she parked her tractor at the hospital and went inside. First time anybody’d seen her off that farm in God-knows-how-many years. I was there myself, Sam. I saw the look on her face. If you’d died …” Roddy shook his head. “It would have taken a lot more than the Van Winkle magic to save her.”

  “Wait. Wait. She was at the hospital?”

  “Stayed by your bed for an hour before they kicked her out,” Roddy said. “You didn’t know?”

  “We … we didn’t really do a lot of talking since I came home,” Sam said. They’d only lain in bed, and made love, and talked about everything in the world except for the things that actually might matter. It had been some kind of unspoken agreement, a measure of protection: They did not talk about the past—not about cures or serums—or the future—not about marriage or children or the possibility that their pleasure was temporary. Only when Sam saw the red spots freckling his belly did reality intrude back in.

  “So why do you think she won’t marry you?” Roddy asked.

  Sam looked out the window at the parking lot. “I don’t know. Afraid?”

  “What’s she afraid of?”

  He bounced his fists on his knees. “What isn’t she afraid of?”

  “You’re missing my point here, Sam.”

  “What your point?”

  “My point is that girl did something for you she’s never done for anybody. Maybe she’s saying she won’t marry you, but she does love you—that’s clear as day. And to my eye, something doesn’t add up. There’s
an element you and I aren’t seeing. I don’t know what it is. But if I were you, I’d want to find out.”

  Sam stood, anxious. He’d lain in the hospital and wondered how he was going to live the rest of his life with a woman he’d nearly died for but who hadn’t been willing to drive across town to see him. But he’d been wrong—Olivia was willing to fight. Or at least, she had been. She’d kept herself out of the garden for him at one point, and he’d been the one to escort her back in. He should have guessed she’d gone to the hospital as well.

  Now Olivia was hurting in some way that put her beyond his reach. He wanted to show her that he was willing to fight for her—for as long and as hard as he had to—because he could not give up on the dream that they would be happy together if only they could get through this first treacherous leg of their path. He didn’t know how he was going to coax her to come out of the Poison Garden, but at least he could find a way to be there with her. He told Roddy, “I have to go.”

  Roddy nodded as if he’d expected as much.

  “But,” Sam said, “this doesn’t mean I’m not quitting.”

  “We’ll just see what happens. Now get out of here before somebody sees you. You’re supposed to be sick today,” Roddy said.

  What You Sow

  Gloria was furious: A dozen of the Pennyworts’ creepy white barn cats had showed up on her porch, apparently looking for food in the absence of the Penny Loafers. And no matter how Gloria stamped her feet, or squirted them with water bottles, or chased them with a broom, they simply hopped up a tree or into the yard and then sat blinking at her with mildly curious aplomb. To make matters worse, the weather had turned beastly hot again; it was heat that collected in a person’s lungs, heat that smothered and saturated, heat for which air-conditioning was little match, heat without a hint of wind.

  As she swatted at white cats with her broom, she noticed what appeared to be a man in a silver suit crossing from the boarded-up Pennywort farmhouse toward the maze. Since yesterday, the vines had exploded out of the central garden and swamped all but the outermost ring of the maze, so that the whole thing looked like a bulbous, wrinkly blister of green. Gloria was half worried that the growth might climb the hill and bury her house in the night. But her husband had told her she was being ridiculous; as far as he knew the maze always looked that way.

  Olivia, in the meantime, had no idea that her poison ivy was thriving beyond the walls of her garden; nor did she know that Sam was even now struggling to fight his way through the thickening mass. She only knew that when she awoke this morning inside her walled garden, poison ivy had claimed every available surface—scaling walls, coating the ground, toppling poppies, and wrapping around her rhododendrons like a thousand green boa constrictors. And now, with no new territory to conquer, the vines were bulking up and thickening into muscular ropes and braids.

  Yesterday, all interest in living had drained away from her; her very soul had wilted as dramatically as the fields before the rain. She’d discovered—and then lost—an incredible pleasure with Sam; it was a glimpse of happiness from which she would never recover. Their relationship was doomed to be forever complicated, burdened, and always on the brink of collapse, and Sam deserved better.

  Plus, now that the Penny Loafers had what they probably believed was confirmation of her secret, one of two things would happen: She would be burned at the stake for being an abomination of nature, or she would be forever ostracized as a monster—and she wasn’t sure which fate was worse. She wanted her secret back again.

  She also wanted, perhaps more than anything, to believe that her father could not have played God with her future, that he hadn’t been so cruel. But she’d read the words right in his own handwriting: He’d known what was happening to her in the Poison Garden, and he’d allowed it to happen. When she thought of him, with the poison vines creaking around her, she only felt anger—anger so pure it was not diluted by any other emotion. For many years, he’d been her only friend, the only person she’d dared to trust, the only person who knew her secret. If he could betray her, anyone could. She’d gone to sleep not caring if she ever opened her eyes again.

  But then, from behind her eyelids in the morning, she thought, Something about the light seems odd. And when she opened her eyes, she saw that the vines had thickened into a dense cocoon around her, with only enough room to stretch out one arm in any direction. The stems were thick as her wrists; the leaves, as big as her hands. She had come because she’d believed her garden would protect her—and that it would keep others away. But this—this was too much. This would kill her.

  She tested the strength of the vines around her by shaking them; they held firm. She tried to pry the vines apart, she pushed at them with her shoulder, she squatted and heaved her spine against the low, rounded ceiling—but the vines wouldn’t even bend. She worked for five full minutes, until sweat formed on her skin and her head began to ache, before admitting she was stuck—completely and hopelessly stuck.

  Yesterday, the poison vines had seemed to be her protectors; today they were her captors. She was trapped. She was dehydrated already and the sun was getting hotter by the moment. She hadn’t had water in nearly twenty-four hours; she could die in the heat, in not too many hours, if no one came for her. And the threat of real death, as opposed to the fantasy of it, was not at all comforting: Fear made bile rise at the back of her throat. She wished she’d listened to that small voice that had said, Get out while you still can.

  She was sweating now, pulling frantically at the unmoving vines, tearing off the poison ivy leaves in her fists just for spite. Who would save her? Not her father, who didn’t come out of his gloomy mountain glen. Not Sam—she’d been so mean to him. And he was more allergic to poison ivy than anyone she knew. Not the Penny Loafers; she had sent them away. She’d repelled the people she cared about as surely as if she herself were reaching out into the world with arms like poison vines.

  No one could help: She would need to find her way out on her own. People were known to cut off their own limbs pinned under boulders—the urge to survive could be that powerful. And Olivia felt it powerfully now—a desire that trumped all others, a need that eclipsed all questions of happiness, of what makes a good life or a full life, of what reason could be found behind sadness and loss. It was the desire to survive. Primal, fundamental, innate. And in the heat that became more dangerous by the second, she could not survive in her Poison Garden for many more hours—happiness aside.

  She worked at the vines until crescents of blood formed under her fingernails. She was sweating, hungry, weak from having not eaten. The enormous vines around her and the prolonged exposure to her Poison Garden should have filled her with superhuman strength. Instead, she was fading. An hour passed, then two. The sun burned. She worked at the vines with decreasing energy; her hands felt no more useful than lumps of clay. And when it crossed her mind to wonder how long a human being could live without water, she shoved the thought away.

  She would get out; she had to believe that. She would. She panted against the wooden bars of her cage. Her arms were shaking, her hands were cut, heat and fatigue were beginning to wear down her strength. Her brain was bleary and she thought, I’m going to have a lot of apologizing to do if I die in here. She leaned back against the warm stone of the wall and closed her eyes. She needed to rest. Just rest. Just for a while. Then she would try again.

  The day grew hotter as the sun rose higher in the sky. A gray catbird landed on a strand of poison ivy, flicked its tail feathers a few times, then lifted freely away. Occasionally a slim tendril of green would corkscrew from the hunched ceiling of her little cave, fingering her shoulder or cheek as if to see how close it could get to her, but she’d snap it off and toss it away. She was sweating even when she wasn’t moving at all, the water going out of her. She drifted in and out of something that she wouldn’t exactly call sleep: It was light, disturbed, and shallow, and sometimes she could not drag herself out of it even though she felt her heart
accelerating with panic and her breath coming fast. When she did dream, the vines came and curled around her wrists, her ankles, her throat.

  She heard Sam calling her, and she went looking for him in her dream. But even after she found him—he was waiting for her in the sun-drenched afternoon of three days ago, when she’d crawled into bed with him between cool white sheets—he still continued to call her, and call her, and she realized she was not dreaming the sound of his voice; he was actually there.

  She opened her eyes and sat up slightly; the sun was behind a cloud and the vines that had intersected and knotted all around her were a dull green. But otherwise, she was alone. Sam wasn’t with her—why would he be? She’d driven him away. She leaned back against the wall, begging herself not to cry because she couldn’t waste water on tears.

  “Olivia?”

  “Sam?” She got to her knees. “Sam? Is that you?”

  “I’m here,” he said. His voice came from over the wall, and the sound of it gave her an instant jolt of adrenaline. “I’m coming in there,” he said. Or at least, that was what she thought he said. His voice was muffled.

  “Sam! I’m stuck!”

  “Just hold on.”

  “No—no, you can’t come in here! It’s too dangerous! Get … get someone else!”

  She pushed herself against the small pod of vines and peered with one eye through the leaves. Something that looked weirdly reflective and off-putting was climbing down the thick brambles that had enveloped the stone walls. It was Sam—holding a small ax and wearing Arthur’s ancient bio-protector suit. He must have gone into the farmhouse and found it. Her heart lifted—she would not die in her walled garden after all. And, equally as important, Sam had come for her. Sam.