The Night Garden (5 page)

“I only water once a week. I swear. There’s a brook that runs through the center of the gardens—I can show you. I borrow a little water from it from time to time. But I’m not doing anything wrong.”

“You’ll get a fine if you’re caught watering illegally.”

“Thanks for looking out for me,” she said not impolitely. “But if you don’t mind, if you’re not going to fine me or write me a summons, then I’d like to get back to work.”

The shock of her hard words was a wake-up call. At one time, Olivia had been as close to him as one child could be to another, digging together in the gardens, playing hide-and-seek in the cornfields, pushing each other on an old tire swing that
always smelled of sweet black rubber and dry rope. Together they had gazed up at the lolling, lazy mountains—the hills with their bluestone teeth cutting between the green trees—and they’d picked out recognizable images from amorphous, leafy shapes:
I see a dragon, I see a ship, I see a horse, a cow!
They waded into the cold mountain quarry and were dazzled by the way the sun sliced into the clear water, lighting it up all golden like rippling leopard spots. They had lived side-by-side lives for what had seemed back then to be a lifetime but had in fact been not very long at all.

And now, she didn’t recognize him.

He’d known that returning to Green Valley meant he would have to see her again. There was no way around it; they were neighbors. Eventually their paths would cross. He’d ignored the urge to go looking for her because he hadn’t wanted to appear overly eager to connect with her again.

But of course, now that she was standing before him, he realized that he
had
been eager—overly eager—to see her. He’d thought about Olivia as many times over the years as there were stars in the sky. His on-and-off bar buddies had heard stories about her—stories that were always drunken, always mournful and pathetic, always told late at night, when men begin to swap their remembered heartaches under cover of dim lights and bad music.
Are you thinking of your Olivia?
a friend might say. And if Sam hadn’t been thinking of her at that moment, he inevitably started to. Though he’d lost Olivia’s friendship before he left the valley, he knew she would always be
his Olivia,
because he would always be burdened with the memory of everything she had given him, everything she had taken away—and all of that, the whole big picture of their history together, was his to bear now and forever, so that she was and would always be
his
Olivia, even in absence.

But
this
woman standing in the obscenely decadent throes of
the garden maze—with her cold and wary eyes, her crossed arms—this was
not
his Olivia. This was a brick wall, not much different than the high stone wall behind her, dotted with warning signs, topped off by barbed wire, and surrounded by jewelweed (also called
touch-me-not,
Olivia once told him) blooming at the base. This Olivia was not what he’d expected or known.

She tilted her head. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, I’m … Well, I’m …”

He hitched up his belt a bit, buying time.

He was suddenly assailed by the oddest, most fraught, most fist-clenching desire. He wanted Olivia to know him, somehow, to
know.
And he wanted her to feel the way he was feeling, standing in the garden maze with her again after all this time.

“Olivia,” he said. He started toward her, compelled by the urge to stand a little closer. But she took three juddering steps back, a cloud of yellow dirt rising around her work boots, and he withdrew. “You really don’t know me?”

He saw her throat, the long narrow column of it, work as she swallowed. “
Sam?”

He smiled.

“You’re a … cop?”

“Wasn’t it inevitable?”

“A cop in Green Valley,” she said. “I’m surprised.”

“Why?”

“You always said you wanted to be a cop here. But then—” She broke off. And unless he imagined it, she’d colored slightly under her tan.

“But then I left,” he said.

“You did.”

“But I’m back now.”

“Yes. And a cop.”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“Look at you,” she said so brightly, so chummy, that he
couldn’t help but think she was trying too hard. “You’re just like what you said you’d be.”

“Right,” he said. “Just like.”

He squinted at Olivia in the cruel sun. As a child, he’d wanted what his father had. As a young man, he’d rejected that dream. Now he didn’t know what he wanted. He had come back to Green Valley, back to the police force, solely because he’d failed at everything else—not because he
wanted
to be here, living alone in the house his parents had deeded to him out of pity, with nothing to show for his time away from the valley but a few books he could fit in a suitcase, his favorite pillow, and skin as impervious to sensation as the neoprene seats of his old Jeep. Olivia was supposed to have been the bright spot in his return to Green Valley—and yet he couldn’t get past the awkwardness of being with her again, as if he was just some half-remembered acquaintance, and not the person that she’d once trusted with her most intimate thoughts and dreams.

“Look, could we go somewhere, um, shadier to continue this conversation?” he asked.

“But I told you I’m not watering. You’ve got to believe me. I don’t know what else to say. It’s not my fault that Gloria has it out for me. She—”

“Olivia—”

“She decided she doesn’t like the boarders living in the barn, and I swear she’ll do anything just to get under my skin. She doesn’t—”

“Olivia!”

She stopped. And in the silence was forced to meet his eye.

“I don’t want to talk about the garden,” he said.

“Then … what do you want to talk about?”

He rubbed the back of his neck but didn’t feel it. “I just wanted to talk with you.”

She said nothing; but she looked away with a pained expression on her face.

He’d heard the latest stories about Olivia from the guys at the station: that she was kind and self-sacrificing, that she’d be the first person to send fresh produce to a family in need if she heard of them, that she cared for her screwball father who got screwier by the year, that she could look at a man and make him feel like he was the only man in the world who mattered—but that beneath her outward radiance and kindness she was oddly inaccessible and cold. She lived like a nun, people said. No one could remember the last time she’d been spotted on a date—not that Sam cared if Olivia was seeing every guy in Green Valley. Her love life meant nothing to him—not in any practical sense.

Losing the sensation of his skin had quashed his interest in women like losing his taste buds might have made him turn away food. He was, in many ways, dead to the world. He’d died eighteen months ago on a mountain in the Adirondacks called Moggy Knob. After his Cessna went cartwheeling along the tops of the thick green pines and landed half crushed against a rocky outcropping, he’d managed to hold on for three and a half days, drifting in and out of sleep, in and out of shock, eating handfuls of snow from pine boughs through a broken window, pinned inside the jagged metal teeth of his crushed plane. In the chattery cold of Moggy Knob nights, when the clear, starry sky gave a man all the room he needed to think, he’d realized that he had no idea what he was meant to do with his life, except to know that what he’d done already wasn’t it.

Minute by minute, he’d managed to grit his teeth and hold on, hold on, hold on. But the moment his rescuers found him, he could hold on no more. And he’d died. Just like that. He remembered it perfectly: He heard the sound of a helicopter, then voices. He felt strong hands. As his relief at being rescued
swelled, the mental scaffolding that had kept him conscious for more than three days suddenly imploded, and he passed gently away.

Later, they told him he’d been clinically dead for almost six straight minutes. Six minutes—gone. And when he came to again in a hospital bed, everyone gathered around him and called him a lucky son of a bitch—as if anything about two broken legs and a wrecked face was lucky.
We’ve got a saying,
one of the orderlies told him.
A guy’s not dead unless he’s
warm
and dead. You, my friend, were definitely not warm.
Apparently, the cold temperatures that had nearly killed him had also saved his brain when his heart finally gave out.

Six minutes you were on the other side,
his buddies said with admiration.
What was it like?
Sam half recalled making a joke about asking St. Peter for directions, to get the guys off his back. But what he did not tell them was that even though the doctors had claimed Sam was well on his way to a full recovery, some part of him secretly feared that his real self was still caught in that dark, cold place that he couldn’t fully remember or forget. He had not, in fact, revived in the helicopter, as everyone said. Yes, he looked like he was a living, breathing guy. He could eat, sleep, and piss with the rest of them. But he felt
more
certain of the fact that some part of him was still high up on the frozen mountain than he was certain of being alive. His ego, his heart, his soul—whatever word a person could scrounge to talk about fundamental self—had been lost to him like Peter Pan losing his shadow. And it was cruel that the part of him that remained couldn’t stop longing for the part of him that was gone.

Now Olivia was looking at him like he was somehow dangerous to her—he couldn’t fathom it. She wasn’t afraid, but she was wary. He felt like he needed to excuse his request to spend some time with her, as if he’d asked for some outrageously intimate favor instead of just a chat. He said, “I just thought we
could, you know, catch up. But if you don’t have time, that’s fine. It’s not a big deal. Just a thought. Spur of the moment. You know. Just for … for old times’ sake.”

“I … I only have a few minutes.”

“A few minutes is perfect. I only have a few minutes, too.”

“I guess we could go look at one of my gardens. I think … maybe you’ll like it.”

“Yes. Let’s do it. Lead the way.”

They wound the twists and turns of the hedge maze. He passed garden rooms he recognized and rooms he did not. The maze unfurled and kinked and unfurled again before him, green walls running parallel and even, running before him and alongside, and he had to walk quickly to keep up with her. It was so familiar. He’d dreamed of the garden maze a thousand times since he’d been away from Green Valley. In his mind, brick alleyways had transformed themselves into the maze’s straight reaches. Politic bronze statues in city parks morphed into memories of the Marble Garden, with its classical nude figures draped in diaphanous stone garments and posed for maximum erotic appreciation. And now he was in the maze again. It had changed over the years; he no longer knew the byways and shortcuts. But the fantastical, fundamental character of it had not changed and did not disappoint him. In the sky, near the edges of the tree line that peeped over the top of the hedges, he thought he spotted the slightest gathering of clouds.
Maybe,
he thought.
Maybe today it will rain.

“Keep up, slowpoke,” Olivia said, laughing a little. “If you lose me, you might never find your way out.”

There would be worse things,
he thought. He followed her into a room at the edge of the maze that he’d never seen before. The space was perfectly circular, trimmed green hedges tall and straight on all sides, so the effect was like standing inside a vase open to the sky. But the room was empty. No shrubs, no flowers,
no benches. Just perfect green grass, even and thick, that carpeted the ground in a flat circle like a pie chart. A hole in the hedges led to the outside, an exit from the maze. But there was nowhere to get out of the sun.

Sam put up a hand to shade his eyes. “This isn’t really the kind of thing I had in mind.”

“No?”

“I was hoping for something with a little more UV protection.”

Olivia grinned. “Well then. I hope you’re not claustrophobic.”

She walked into the middle of the plain, grassy circle. Then she bent down and plucked up what seemed to be a brass ring. As she pulled, a hidden door groaned open like the cover of a heavy book. Olivia carefully let the door drop until it was flat on the ground, the undersides of old wooden boards exposed now to the sun.

A rectangular stone stairway had been sunk sharply into the middle of the grassy circle. It descended into the ground, its terminus obscured by shadow.

“We usually keep it open all day long,” Olivia said, brushing dirt from her hands. “But not when it’s this hot.” She walked a few steps down into the earth, and it looked like she was walking into a grave. Her smile as she glanced up at him was friendly and yet somehow, it made her more opaque. “Coming?”

He nodded and followed her down the stone stairs.

It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. He was standing in a square, small, low-ceilinged room like a root cellar. It smelled of things wet and sweetly rotting, fallen logs and moss. He guessed the room was made of cinder blocks.

At first he saw nothing. But then, little by little, he noticed the mushrooms. They were scattered like families of river stones along the ground. They billowed like giant eggs in the
corners. They climbed the walls. When Sam’s eyes had fully softened to the darkness, he saw that the mushrooms emitted the faintest, ethereal phosphorescence, like pinholes of green glowing against a dark canvas. They were everywhere, odd flowers of alien light blooming through the chthonic murk, casting a faint green shadow on darkness itself. He was looking down at the bowels of the earth, but he was seeing stars.

“Do you like it?” Olivia asked softly.

Around him, the spongy darkness seemed to breathe bright electric green and to glow as if it had been filled with embers of green coals. Only Olivia could have had the vision to understand how a cave full of fungus could be so transcendent.

He tried to control his excitement. But he’d always loved mushrooms. Other boys had loved dinosaurs and trains and professional sports: He had loved mushrooms. He loved that they were such alien little things—shy, fast-growing, unique. His amateur interest had managed to stay strong for his first few years out of Green Valley. But eventually, like so many fading passions, his love for mushrooms became little more than a passing interest.