His shoulders shook. “I want to see the house again. If it’s okay with you.”
The doors had been locked up, the windows boarded. The paint was peeling, weeds had grown into trees around the foundation, and fishtail shingles had been caught in the cockeyed gutters. She said, “It might not look exactly as you remember it.”
“Still. It’s a sight for sore eyes,” he said.
He knocked on the porch rail. She did the same.
The rain was letting up and the dark purple clouds were breaking apart above them, revealing ribbons of glowing, brilliant blue.
“I’ll get a crowbar,” she said.
Epilogue
Autumn came; the air in the Catskills cooled, the asters bloomed, the Canada geese flew in great, noisy V’s overhead. To everyone’s amazement, the motley band of skin-and-bones goats that had been terrorizing the valley for the better part of a hundred years began to grow fat, their dull coats shining, their eyes brightening, and their general temperament improving overall. At first, no one could quite understand what change had come over them to make them so lazy and portly and disinclined to antagonize. But on the last day that the Pennywort farm stand was open, someone saw the entire family of goats going into the garden maze that had been obliterated by poison ivy. Though the garden remained closed to people, the goats went in and out as they pleased, munching poison ivy with happy contentment. They would eat until it was gone.
And in the meantime, the people of Green Valley found endless fascination regarding what had happened on the Pennywort farm. Sam was toasted and feted and fawned over in all the hamlets of Bethel, and when the snow began to fall he was asked to ride on a float in the annual holiday parade. He declined, saying he was busy. But apparently his wife decided she would talk him into doing it, and she was said to have stood on the sidewalk and waved to him as bits of red and green confetti were tossed in the air as the float passed by.
As the years passed, the stories people told about Olivia Pennywort–Van Winkle began to change. The people who claimed to be at her wedding said that her bouquet of flowers seemed to shimmer, almost glitter, under the light of an early September dusk as she walked barefoot through the grass, and that so many unseasonal fireflies attended the wedding that a person could tell who had attended by the green lights that danced in their eyes for a week afterward. Decades after the wedding, neighbors continued to have the same old not-this-again argument about whether the bride and groom had actually kissed that day, with some factions saying that of course they didn’t kiss, because everyone knew Olivia Pennywort was as beautiful and toxic as a poison berry. But others would swear to their graves that Olivia and Sam did kiss, that they specifically remembered the kiss as clear as they remembered the kiss at their own wedding, or at least, they remembered a look of such love passing between the handsome couple that they might as well have kissed, and it was practically the same thing.
The summer’s Penny Loafers had stood in attendance as Olivia’s bridesmaids, garbed in various dresses that ranged from sparkly pants to gowns fit for proms, and they were said to have made a heterogeneous, if not oddly beautiful troupe in their way. Mei too had come with her newborn, the child she had decided to keep, and motherhood appeared to have agreed with her, softening her roughest edges, though not her inclination to say what was on her mind. Shortly after the wedding and after the asters in the maze started blooming up through the poison ivy vines, the women went their separate ways, back to wherever it was they came from, like Persephone returning to Hades at the sign of the first frost. By the following spring, a few women returned to Green Valley looking for the answers they’d failed to receive the previous year, but most never came back at all—leading Olivia to believe they’d found their answers in their own ways—and a new troupe of women came to the farm to take their place. The goats ate back the poison vines, the months passed, and the maze grew in room by room, until it had reclaimed not only its previous grandeur, but a fair bit of extra grandeur besides—which was annoying to Gloria Zeiger because it attracted increasingly large crowds.
As for the women’s shelter, the organizers found themselves in an unexpected situation when women who actually needed shelter began to arrive, some with dogs and children in tow. Gloria came out of retirement to run the shelter, which became one of the most celebrated models of a community coming together in all the western Catskills, and she was given a fancy award from the governor for her selfless and tireless commitment to the less fortunate, and she seemed less preoccupied with the goings-on of the Pennywort farm.
As for Arthur Pennywort, he moved back into the old farmhouse and relearned the workings of his fields, though some said his skin never did lose its pale greenish tint from too many years spent in the bottom of Solomon’s Ravine. After a time, on a February day when the first crocuses were coming up in the garden maze, he passed away quietly in his sleep—which was not especially surprising to him, since everyone, eventually, had to die and he was no exception. But before he died, he’d found a happiness that he hadn’t thought he had the strength or worthiness to claim ever again, and he did not let himself dwell overlong on what he might have done differently and how much time he’d wasted in the ravine, because he refused to allow the past to mar the future again. They buried him by Alice on a hillside not far from Solomon’s Ravine. And people said a ghost—which was possibly his, or possibly Alice’s, or possibly both of their ghosts—liked to dance through the maze on nights when the Green Valley moon was bright enough to read by.
Olivia and Sam lived very happily and quietly together in her silo, though Sam did occasionally come home telling stories of daring rescues that made Olivia’s heart skip for fear that she might one day lose him as he was saving someone else. People wondered how the young couple withstood it—to be as in love as the two of them so obviously were and not be able to express that love in touch. But then, one spring morning after the Pennywort–Van Winkle family had stayed secluded in their farmhouse for a long, especially cold, dark, and cozy winter, a farmer driving past on his tractor swore that he heard the sound of a baby crying from somewhere on the Pennywort homestead. The weather broke and the child was rumored to be the most beautiful, healthy boy born in the valley in quite some time—and he was barely old enough to talk when he was said to have saved an old woman from a very scary spider that had made a home in her carton of strawberries. When anyone asked, Olivia said that the child had been left on her doorstep by the fairies who lived in Chickadee Wood.
Inside the maze, which was said now to be as haunted as Solomon’s Ravine, Arthur Pennywort’s spirit watched over his grandson splashing the massive goldfish in the Rock Garden, and he thought of how it was said that stories that seemed to end happily were merely stories that had not been told through to their bitter ends. But this, he had learned, was the line between cynics and optimists. Green Valley would change. Some days would be cloudy and some days the sun would shine, people would be born and then die, but as long as the great sweeping spirit of optimism that had come into the valley in 1969 still found fuel to thrive, there would be more happiness than sadness, more vegetables than weeds, and the maze would grow, and the rumors would grow around it, and plants and people would evolve new ways of managing disappointment, and life for life’s sake would go on.
Acknowledgments and Author’s Note
So many incredible people have worked on or helped with this book. I’m grateful to my editor Kara Cesare, who encouraged me as I stumbled my way into this story only during my second, almost fully rewritten draft. Kara—I can’t be thankful enough for your grace, patience, and guidance. Thanks also to Hannah Elnan—Hannah, I’ll miss you terribly!—and to Nina Arazoza, who jumped in and kept everything moving forward so seamlessly (not an easy thing to do!). Thanks to Belinda Huey and Virginia Norey for their artistic talents, and to Jane von Mehren, Jennifer Hershey, Kim Hovey, Maggie Oberrender, and Lindsey Kennedy for their continued support for both The Wishing Thread and this story.
My agents Andrea Cirillo and Christina Hogrebe continue to be my real-life heroines—thank you for your voices of both passion and reason. I also want to thank my husband, who continues to encourage my writing even to the point of his own sacrifice: Matt, I’d marry you a thousand times over again. Thanks to Alphia for sitting down to talk with me about what life was like growing up on a farm, and to the writers listed in the RHRC pages that follow for their books and stories that helped inspire mine. Finally, thanks, as always, to people who read, love, and talk about books: You make my publications possible. And I’m truly grateful for that every day.
If you, reader, want to connect with me, please send me a note via my website (www.WriterLisaVanAllen.com) or visit me on Facebook. Thanks in advance for reaching out; I look forward to hearing from you!
A Reader’s Guide
Recommended Reads from Lisa Van Allen
I’ve always had a fascination with poisonous plants. I think it started when I was a little kid and my siblings and I used to play in the woods, swinging from vines and carving forts out of thick brambles. A bush of small red berries grew “down back”; they were bright, tempting little things, but we were told under no circumstances were we allowed to eat them. We didn’t, of course. But sometimes we liked to pretend they were food, tossing them into fake salads as we provisioned ourselves for grand journeys into imaginary lands. I’m not sure that I ever stopped wondering what those berries would taste like—everything about them said, Eat me!, as if they might make a person grow very tall or very small.
As an adult, of course, a person encounters other kinds of temptations, the allure of things that we know are bad for us but that we cling to or desire anyway. The allure of poisonous plants never stopped calling to me. And so when my wonderful editor asked for my next proposal, I decided it was time to indulge in my fascination—from the safe distance of the written word!
Alas, only about half a percent of the research I did actually ended up in the story (the characters demanded most of the book’s “real estate,” and rightly so). But there’s a great, fascinating world of folklore and science surrounding poisonous plants out there, and if you’re curious, or if you’re just looking for your next read based on something that sparked your curiosity in The Night Garden, here are a few books I’d recommend.
Rappaccini’s Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne—This was the tale that started it all, twenty years ago when I first read it in high school. The story is about a beautiful and mysterious woman who flits about an enchanted Italian garden and can kill insects with her breath. “This lovely woman … had been nourished with poisons from her birth upward, until her whole nature was so imbued with them, that she herself had become the deadliest poison in existence. Poison was her element of life. With that rich perfume of her breath, she blasted the very air. Her love would have been poison!—her embrace death! Is not this a marvellous tale?” I loved the concept, and wanted desperately to love the story, but for various reasons, I just couldn’t. The ending got me. (You should read it, seriously. It’s short, and worth discussion). For a very long time, the story haunted me, even bothered me—I thought about it again and again over the years. The Night Garden was, I suppose, an effort to reconcile my feelings about the story as well as a chance to indulge my curiosity about poisonous plants.
The North American Guide To Common Poisonous Plants and Mushrooms by Nancy J. Turner and Patrick von Aderkas—I bought this book when I first started getting serious about The Night Garden, and I left it sitting on the dining room table one day when my husband got home. He picked it up, looked at me, and asked, “Is there something I should be worried about?” For many years he’s been incredibly patient on walks through the woods with me as I’m constantly stopping to either consult my various guidebooks or take pictures for future identifications. This book is a bit too big to cart into the woods, but it’s a great read for a serious-minded student of poisonous and dangerous plants.
Wicked Plants by Amy Stewart—If you’re looking for a wild, fun, fascinating, thrilling, unbelievable read about all the incredible factoids in the world of dangerous and obnoxious plants, this is your book. I adored it, front to back. It’s a brief, highly readable look at the science and stories that emerge when humans and plants collide. Oh, and apparently the author has a garden of poison plants, which just proves the adage that life is stranger than fiction.
Turn Here Sweet Corn by Atina Diffley—I read this book as one of many that I hoped would give me a glimpse into farm life. Some of my own family members were farmers, and I have childhood memories of running through the fallow fields of an old family farm that has since been sold to a developer. Atina’s book is intimate, emotionally generous, authentic, and engaging. The story of how she lost a farm to urban expansion is heartbreaking, but her family’s perseverance is an inspiration. I think of her often when I’m in the grocery store and looking at the produce section, wondering (at her prompting) why it’s the organic vegetables that get labeled, instead of the other way around. This book was a huge eye-opener and if you’re interested in farm life, the organic food movement, and environmentalism, give this a read.
The Red Garden by Alice Hoffman—One of my favorite books in recent years, this short story collection traces the life of a Massachusetts town from its frontier settlement days to the present. It’s chocked full of folklore with hints of magic—and to me, these stories feel quintessentially American. I swear, reading it fills your nose with the smells of forest soil and freshly sawn wood. This is on my keeper shelf to read again and again.
Thanks for reading The Night Garden. I would love to hear from you by email on my website (www.WriterLisaVanAllen.com) or on my Facebook page. And if your book group reads this story, please be in touch! I may be able to Skype or call in.
Good things,
Lisa Van Allen
Questions and Topics for Discussion
1. Olivia Pennywort has a unique condition that causes anyone she touches to develop a rash. What would you do if you had Olivia’s condition? How would you cope if you knew there was no way to get rid of it?
2. Olivia keeps her condition a secret at the risk of being perceived as a monster and driving everyone she knows away. What do you think would happen if Olivia was more open about her condition? Is she right to fear the public’s reaction?
3. Because of her condition, Olivia believes she “would be wrong to expect more of her life than what she had” (this page). Even though she has everything she needs to survive, do you think this is an acceptable attitude? In what ways can expectations shape how you live your life?
4. At the start, Sam’s condition has stripped him of the ability to feel. If you had this condition, which sensations do you think would be the most jarring to lose?
5. When she was younger, Olivia chose not to be with Sam because she was hurting him, even though she still loved him. Did she make the right decision to break up with him? Should she have told him the truth? What would you have done?
6. Sam comes from a family of rescuers and feels pressure to be a rescuer as well. In what ways can a positive family legacy be both a blessing and a curse? To what extent should a person attempt to live up to a family legacy? What happens if this legacy comes at the expense of carving an individual path?
7. A central theme in the novel is temptation, or the idea of desperately wanting what we know may be bad for us or for others. Is there a right way to deal with temptation? In what scenarios would it be okay to give in?
8. Another core theme is the importance of touch. How important is touch and feeling for a happy life? Is it possible to find happiness without it? Do you think you could?
9. Olivia is appalled that her father knew she was becoming poisonous and did not try to stop it. What makes Arthur’s act so reprehensible? Do you think it’s possible to atone for such a destructive act? How would you go about making things right?
10. When Sam comes to rescue her out of the poisonous garden maze, Olivia realizes t
hat “when a person could find happiness, she should seize it without question, without a single thought for the future, and with a steady resolve never to become bitter once it was lost” (this page). Does her reasoning make sense? Is this the best way to live your life?
11. When the boarders ask Olivia what they will do without the maze, Olivia replies, “The only thing that stands in the way of your inner wisdom is your fear of it” (this page). Do you agree with Olivia? Why do you think it’s so hard to figure out what we really want?
12. If you had a magical maze that could help you figure out what to do, what would you want it to help you with?
13. Why do you think Gloria continually tries to change the Pennywort farm? What do you think her actions suggest about how we respond to what we don’t understand?
By Lisa Van Allen
The Wishing Thread
About the Author
Lisa Van Allen’s writing has been published in many literary journals and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She currently lives in northern New Jersey with her husband.
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