The Night Garden (36 page)

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.

“Where are you?” he asked, looking around.

She shoved a hand through the vines to catch his attention. “Here. I’m right here. Oh, Sam. I didn’t mean for this to happen. I went to sleep and the next thing I knew it was morning, and—hey, are you all right?”

He had worked to get himself over the bristling carpet of vines until he was as close to her as the poison ivy would allow. Behind the clear plastic of his mask, his face was a bright, deep red and his skin was shiny.

“Sam. Oh my God. You’re overheating in there!”

“I’m fine,” he said.

“No, you’re not. Sam—that suit is practically an oven. You’ve got to get out of here and take it off!”

“I’m not leaving without you,” he said. But he leaned heavily against the tangled vines for a moment, breathing hard. She knew he was in danger, as much danger now as when he’d decided to try a mouthful of Pennywort honey. The heat was more deadly than standing in an open field during a thunderstorm; Sam was in real, mortal peril—from the sun, the suit, and the poison plants around him.

She wrapped her fists tighter around the vines. “You came for me.”

“Of course I did,” he said. “I knew something was wrong.”

He didn’t ask what had driven her away from him and inside the garden—and she was glad. There would be time to talk about what her father had done later. In the meantime, she looked at his face, obscured in part by leaves and by the scratched-up plastic of his visor, and she knew she would never
doubt him—would never doubt
them
together—again. How could she have ever thought it was a
good
idea not to marry him? She’d never felt so clear or so sure of anything in her life—that
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. For all her years of having not found a single hint of clarity in the garden maze, it now seemed ready to teach her what she had never before understood about herself.

If only it wouldn’t kill her in the process.

“Sam. I’m stuck in here. The vines—I can’t get out.”

“Don’t worry. Just get back—as close to the wall as you can. We’ll cut through these vines like a knife through hot butter.” She did as he asked, pressing herself against the stones. She couldn’t help but admire him as he lifted the ax over his head, a look of firm resolve crossing over his face, her hero, after all.

The ax came down in a brilliant silver flash.

And stuck there, embedded in the vine.

“Oh. That was kind of unsatisfying,” Sam said. He tugged on the ax, wiggled it around. It finally popped out of the vine. “Let’s try that again.”

He swung the ax again; and again it stuck. But this time he pulled it out more easily. Soon he was hacking at the vines with focused energy, and the visor of Arthur’s bio-protector suit was fogging with his breath, and his face had grown as red as Olivia’s beets. He’d chopped through only one vine.

“You have to stop,” she said. “You have to take a break.”

But he wouldn’t.

“Sam! Please! If you pass out, I can’t climb out of here and help you. And then they’ll find us both dead. I need you to take it easy!”

He lowered the ax; his face was weary and apologetic. “It’s hot.”

“I know,” she said mournfully, wishing she could relieve him.

“I’ve been at this for hours,” he said.

“Hours? You only just got here.”

“Hours,”
he said. He sat down and leaned a shoulder against the hard vines. “The poison ivy is covering everything from here to the edge of the maze. It took me three hours to get here.”

Olivia shuddered. “But …” She started to say that wasn’t possible. But she supposed in Green Valley, anything was. “How did you get through it?”

“One step at a time,” he said.

She moved closer to him. Her Poison Garden had become dangerous to others. And she had a deep, real sense that it was her fault. She’d always thought her plants had a life of their own, and that
she
was dependent upon them. But she wondered now if she’d been wrong the whole time: that she was not
responsive
to her plants, that in fact they were a by-product of something inside her and were actually responsive to her.

In the back of her mind she wondered: If that was the case, that she controlled her relationship to the Poison Garden and not the other way around, then perhaps there was hope that someday, maybe, she might simply no longer need it?

Sam put his gloved hand on a fat vine, holding her gaze through fogged plastic. “Did Arthur ever tell you that I wanted to marry you?”