The Night Garden (3 page)

Mei crawled through the door. The girl stood and brushed
off her knees, and in a moment, everything Olivia had been planning abruptly changed.

The girl’s belly was swollen before her.

Tom would have to wait.

A runaway was one thing. A pregnant runaway was another.

“Am I free to go?” Mei asked. “Or are you just going to keep staring at me because I’m pregnant.”

“Sorry,” Olivia said. “Why don’t you walk with me for a minute?”

“Why should I?”

“I want to show you something.”

“Just tell me what it is,” Mei said.

“I can’t tell you. I can only show you. And, given your situation, I think you’ll want to see this for yourself.” Olivia started walking; the girl stayed put. But when Olivia didn’t slow down, or gesture for her to come, or even ask
Did you hear what I said?
Mei began to follow on her own just as Olivia guessed she would. (Over the years Olivia had seen many women come and go. The farm—the valley—seemed to open up and draw in, and in the center of the valley was the garden maze, filled with its own enchantments for wanderers, worriers, and women trying to find their way.)

Olivia spoke as they walked, softly, so that Mei had to stay close by her to hear. “The first thing you should know is that you’re welcome to stay here, if you want to. No questions asked.”

“You mean, like, on the farm?”

“We’re not exactly the Hilton, but we’re … well … we’re here. See that old barn there, the one that looks like it’s about to fall down? There are cots, blankets, outhouses, outdoor showers, a little kitchenette, and all the food you could ever want and then some.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. I’ve got eleven women staying with me right now.”

“Staying in there. You’re not kidding.”

“It doesn’t look like much. But it’s been standing for over eighty years and it hasn’t fallen down yet.”

“Why?” Mei asked, her voice having lost some of its hard edge.

“Some people come to Green Valley because they’re trying to find direction. Or answers. They want to make a decision or a change, and they don’t know what to do. For the people who need a little time to themselves and some room to think, there’s nothing better than a stay in the barn. We Pennyworts have been doing this since before I was born.”

“So how much do you charge a night?” Mei asked as Olivia walked them closer to the garden maze, as slowly as she could stand.

“It’s free,” Olivia said.

“No way.”

“Well, you don’t have to pay any money to stay.”

Mei narrowed her eyes. “What’s the catch? You might as well spill it now.”

“You have to work while you’re here.”

“What exactly do you mean by work? This isn’t some sex trafficking place …?”

“God no,” Olivia said. “Anyone who stays works on the gardens in return for room and board.”

“I’m not sure how much work I could do.” Olivia watched Mei’s big eyes begin to water. “I just … I can’t do much of anything right now. I’m pregnant, see?” She gestured awkwardly toward her belly. “And everybody wants me to give up the baby. But I’m not sure if I should.”

Now Olivia looked blatantly at her belly; she wasn’t past the six-month mark, if Olivia had to guess. “You don’t have to do
any work you’re not comfortable doing. And … maybe there’s a way I can help you.”

Mei wiped her face and blinked rather prettily. “How?”

“Our garden maze has these … I don’t know … properties. If you walk through it alone, and you hold your question or your problem lightly in your mind, you might just get your answer by the time you find your way out.”

Mei looked at her incredulously. “Your garden maze is supposed to bring me a magical answer to my … my question. That’s what you’re seriously telling me right now.”

“You haven’t been in Green Valley very long,” Olivia said. “But things are different here. Lots of things.”

Mei made a noise between a snort and a laugh. “And what if I don’t get an answer?”

“Then you’re welcome to stay here until you do.”

Mei glanced at the barn as they neared it. “So … like, all the women in the barn …”

“They’re waiting on answers,” Olivia said. “When they’re ready to go, they’ll go.”

“Hmm,”
Mei said. And now, instead of looking at the barn, or the tall hedges that marked the maze, she was looking at Olivia. Olivia didn’t flinch; she’d been looked at this way before, with speculation, distrust, and even disbelief. She’d been looked at this way her entire life—by people who called Green Valley home and by strangers passing through. The fact that she allowed outsiders to sleep in her barn didn’t help her popularity in town: Some people supported her, some people felt bad for her boarders, and some—like her neighbor Gloria—seemed to hate her guts. Inevitably, the crowd that lived in the barn was ragtag, scattered, sundry, and mismatched. Most of the women were quiet minders-of-their-own-business; a few were occasionally rowdy and had to be escorted from local watering holes by annoyed policemen. Somewhere along the line, people got the
idea that the women who stayed on the Pennywort farm were moochers, freeloaders, and delinquents—lazy and unwilling to get real jobs. The town had given the Pennywort tenants a nickname: the Penny Loafers.

But Olivia knew better than the people of Green Valley; she knew the Penny Loafers intimately. They were as close to her as the sisters she didn’t have. Green Valley, and all of the Bethel communities, simply had trouble knowing what to make of them: They were women who couldn’t be defined by the people they took care of (husbands, daughters) or the people who took care of them (mothers, sisters, aunts). They came from hard lives of every kind and were never the same group of women twice. In another century, they might have had something in common with vestals, or handmaidens to a goddess, or sacred oracles—they dedicated their waking hours to cultivating the Pennyworts’ garden maze as they waited to discover what they meant to do with their lives. All summer long, Olivia welcomed them and then watched them go. They were her family, her staff, and the closest thing she had to friends. Then in the fall, when the garden died away and the nights grew too cold to sleep in the barn, she did what she always did: she watched with a heavy heart as they left, not to return until the maze began to bloom again.

Mei’s eyes seemed clearer now, cautiously hopeful. “You’re not going to, like, try to convert me to join some cult to save my immortal soul, or lock me in a peacock cage again, or turn me in to the cops?”

Olivia laughed. “No. None of those things. But—there are some rules you have to follow.”

“Of course there are,” Mei said. “Here we go. What are they?”

Olivia cleared her throat, and for the first time since they’d
started talking, looked away. “If you decide to stay, two things are off-limits. The first is the garden in the center of the maze, the locked garden behind the high stone walls. Don’t go in.”

“Why not?”

“Because that’s the rule,” Olivia said, in the tone of voice that she’d learned from her father when she was young, the tone that said
No conversation allowed.

“Okay … What’s the second thing that I’m supposed to steer clear of?”

Olivia steeled herself. “That would be me.”

And though she’d warned people off a hundred times, a thousand, she’d never quite been able to fully defend her heart against their reactions. It always cut her, always hurt, to have to build the same kind of wall around herself that she’d built around her garden. But she had no choice. For a very long time, Olivia had been stuck with a particular affliction: an accidental brush against her arm, a bump of summer-bare legs—anything—would inflict uncomfortable skin irritations on the person who touched her. The pain was not immediate, but it was inevitable. Within a few hours of directly touching Olivia’s skin, a person would begin to itch. Then he might see the first strawberry-colored smatterings of deep irritation. Soon the itching might turn into welts, and then welts into blisters, and no amount of calamine lotion or long baths in oatmeal could fully erase the angry burn or make it more quickly run its course.

As far as Olivia knew, the secret of her condition had not spread far and wide; the very few people who had reason to suspect it kept the suspicion to themselves with a kind of soured reluctance, an unwillingness to outwardly admit a thing they could not inwardly believe. The best thing to do, Olivia had found, was to warn people to stay away from her right from the beginning. Olivia had hurt people, even when she tried not to.
She’d hurt her father long ago when instinct had compelled her to grab him and stop him from falling into a manure pile (she would have been better off letting him fall). She’d hurt the occasional male who attempted to make love to her with friendly, hands-on offers of an
oh-you’re-so-tense
massage, or an eyelash brushed off her face and wished upon. She hurt her boarders even though she did her best to stay away from them; when she heard them complain of how they must have gotten poison ivy somewhere while hoeing weeds, she could only keep silent, her skin prickling with self-awareness and guilt, as she listened. She’d used to hurt children—back in the days before she stopped leaving the Pennywort property—and that was the worst: to feel the thump of a toddler just learning to walk as he crashed into her at the hardware store, and knowing the anguish and confusion the child’s mother would feel when the redness began to form on her baby’s skin. It was better for all of the Bethel hamlets if she stayed where she was: hidden, safe, minimizing her interactions and minimizing the damage she might do to the town she loved.

Mei was looking at Olivia now with pointed distrust. “I’m supposed to stay away from
you
?”

“I don’t like people to touch me,” she said, the lie coming off her lips so easily that it almost felt true. “It’s important that you don’t—not even by accident. Not under any circumstances. No matter what.”

“So …” Mei tipped her head. “So, say you were drowning …”

“No,” Olivia said.

“Say you were hanging by your fingertips from the top of a cliff, and I was bending over the edge holding out a hand …”

“Not even then.”

“But what if—”

“Never,” Olivia said sharply, feeling her muscles go rigid with tension. Mei apparently liked to instigate. But she wasn’t the first woman to arrive at the barn with a chip on her shoulder and she wouldn’t be the last.

“You must not have much of a sex life,” Mei said.

“Do you always have to say everything you’re thinking out loud?”

“Generally, yes.”

They came to the entrance to the garden maze. It was the kind of entryway that teetered between impressive and gaudy, between awe-inspiring and way-too-much. It was in the shape of an enormous yellow flower with glittery purple tendrils corkscrewing away from the center. A crosshatch of deep purple lines drew the eye into the center of the petals, where a tall opening had been cut to allow humans to climb through. The flower was called henbane, a beautiful but deadly plant when ingested. A sensitive person could faint from standing too close to henbane on a hot day. Henbane was also a key ingredient, supposedly, in the potions that made medieval witches fly. Olivia loved henbane: its gorgeous, gaudy bloom, its wicked green tongues of leaves, its centuries of folklore. When faced with the task of replacing the old, crumbling wooden entrance with a new one, she thought henbane was the perfect choice.

Mei eyed the gigantic, not exactly friendly-looking flower with suspicion. “Why aren’t you getting me arrested right now?”

“I’d rather help you.”

“But
why
?”

Olivia was quiet. One thing she’d learned from having kept herself so isolated was that the less she could say about herself, the better. Once, a woman named Editha had come to the barn, and Olivia had the strangest sense upon meeting her that they
were intensely connected. It was the pull of innate understanding and friendship; in five minutes, they’d talked as if they’d been friends for a lifetime. Editha had told Olivia about every detail of her impending divorce—which was not unusual, since the boarders talked about their problems all the time. But Olivia had shared something of herself with Editha too; she’d talked about her mother’s death, her father’s retreat from the world, the rewarding agony of being so closely tied to the land, and she’d
almost
confessed the truth about her condition, how she’d become the woman she was and what cruel Green Valley magic was behind it.

But one day, she and Editha had been gathering eggs inside the musty shadows of the old coop, and Editha had put an arm around her in happy camaraderie faster than Olivia had been able to dart away in the small space. For one moment Editha had forgotten the “no touching” rule, and Olivia had been too horrified and upset to make an excuse for herself or explain; she told Editha to go shower, immediately, and as far as she knew the woman did. But whether she got her answer from the maze or not, Olivia never knew. The next morning, the other boarders had told Olivia that Editha had gotten a case of poison ivy all down her right side, and she’d left in the night for treatment. Olivia waited, hopeful, but Editha never returned. Whether Editha had left because she’d realized Olivia’s secret was unclear, but the result was undeniable: She would not, after all, be Olivia’s friend.

It had been an extremely painful summer, and the winter that followed was especially lonely and cold. But it had served as a good reminder that the only way Olivia could safely love the world was from a distance. There was too much danger—to her and to others—when she opened her heart.

Mei was waiting on her for an answer. Olivia said, “My family ended up with a lot of open space in the old barn when my father
had the new one built, so when my mother was still alive, she figured she should put it to good use.”

“Your mom’s dead?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I don’t really remember her that much. She died when I was four.”

“How did she die?”

“She used to forage for wild foods. Berries, leaves, that sort of thing. One of my last memories of her was walking through Chickadee Woods while she pointed out the young pokeweed shoots—which you’d only want to eat if you knew just when to pick them. Otherwise, they turn toxic to humans.”