The Night Garden (25 page)

“Move!” he said.

The people around her stepped away.

She was sprawled among delicate white flowers, her head turned to the side, her hair like a rumpled flag, the toes of her tan work boots falling outward. Sam dropped to his knees. “Olivia?” She turned her head toward him, blinking up. He thought,
Thank God.
Her life did not depend on
him.
One of the women explained that she had been bending over and had simply passed out—just like that. He sent the boarders in different directions: some to get water and ice, some to fetch something sweet and sugary to help revive her, some to wait on the side of the road for the paramedics in order to lead them through the unfriendly knots of the maze. The others he told to
just go.
Olivia was very private and wouldn’t want spectators. He did not ask if any of the women had touched her after she passed out: He didn’t want to arouse suspicions if anyone had. He leaned his two hands on either side of her face and peered down. A faint sheen of sweat was on her forehead and cheeks; her lips were parted and pale.

“Olivia,” he said. “Ollie. Are you okay?”

“Sam. What happened?”

He wanted to bundle her close. Instead, he sat back on his ankles. His heart was pounding hard. “I think you fainted.”

“I did?” She started to sit up slowly. He wished he could help.

“Easy there. Did you eat today?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

She told him she’d had scrambled eggs for breakfast, with ham and melon.

“Are you thirsty?”

“A little.”

“Do you think you can get yourself into the shade?”

“I … I think so. Just …”

“What? What is it?”

She tucked her chin into her chest. “I need you to give me a little space.”

He hadn’t realized how close he was to her. He edged back. Olivia didn’t stand but scooted until she was in a triangle of deep, sharp shadow that ran on the bottom edge of a white stone wall. His training had kicked in when he’d first seen her, blocking his fear and dread, but now that she was sitting up and talking he felt utterly raw and afraid. What if something had happened to her? What if she, like Patrick Kearny, had died?

“Do you have heatstroke?” he asked.

“Heatstroke. Yes. Must be.”

She touched her forehead and he knew she was dizzy. He studied her carefully. It was not like Olivia to be careless in the heat. Arthur had schooled them both relentlessly on the dangers of heatstroke the year that a farmer on a neighboring property had dropped dead of it in the middle of his beans. They’d learned to know their limits, to rest as they needed, to stay hydrated and shaded. He also knew that Olivia had a streak of pride and obstinacy as a farmer that went all the way back to the first Pennyworts to stick a spade in Green Valley soil: Even if she did have heatstroke, it was unthinkable that she would admit to it so easily.

He heard sirens in the distance; she turned toward the sound. Her eyes went wide. “Oh no. Sam. You have to tell them I’m fine. Please. Get on your radio and tell them I don’t need them. It was a false alarm.”

He frowned.

“Please, Sam?” Sweat had broken out on her brow, and he was glad to see it. When there was a question of heatstroke,
sweating was a good sign. She said, “There’s nothing they can do for me. If they come, they’re going to want to—to examine me. They can’t touch me, Sam. They can’t find out. I don’t want to have to explain. Please? Hurry. Call them.”

“But what
happened
?” he asked. “I’m not sending my guys the other way until I know you’re fine.”

“I’ll tell you, okay?” Her eyes brimmed with pleading, and color came back to her cheeks. “I promise. I’ll explain everything. Just—
please.
Tell them to go away. Don’t let them find me like this. I don’t want everyone to know.”

Sam was swept up in her distress—but he was shocked by it, too. He hadn’t realized how afraid she was, how afraid she
always
was, that someone might discover the truth about her. But there it was: fear. Raw and undisguised. Reluctantly, he grabbed his radio from his belt to call off the dogs. He said,
False alarm.
One of the boarders had overreacted; he was sitting with Olivia Pennywort and she was right as rain.

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 stand-in 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. For 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.