The Night Garden (6 page)

Now he was surrounded by mushrooms, all of them phosphorescent, and he had to control his breathing. He had not remembered how much he loved them, and seeing them again, his old friends, was like encountering his younger, happier self—disorienting and exhilarating at the same time.

“Is that … foxfire?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said softly.

“And jack-o’-lanterns?”

“You got it.”

“When did you get to be such a show-off?” he said, making light of the whole thing because if he didn’t, he might begin to gush and emote like a ten-year-old boy.

“I think of it more like stretching my creative muscles.”

“This isn’t stretching. This is horticultural contortionism. How did you …? How is this possible?” He bent to look more closely and smelled the strong odor of decaying wood. He reached out to touch it, but could not feel its dampness or cold. “How did you do it?”

“It’s not me. It’s the valley.”

“It’s a little you.” He stood up again and looked at her. “A lot.”

“So you do like it?” she asked. It was the first hint of vulnerability he’d heard in her voice.

“It’s incredible,” he said. Ages ago—a lifetime ago—they had talked about making a garden of mushrooms together, back when they’d been naïve enough to believe that he, and she, and all of Green Valley would never change. In the back of his mind, he thought: Was it overly hedonistic of him to wonder if perhaps she’d made the Mushroom Garden
for
him, that she’d meant for him to see it someday if he ever returned, and that perhaps she’d been thinking about him as the years went by, even when he’d been thinking of her?

Of course, there was no way to ask. Not without admitting he’d thought of her a lot, too—and he wasn’t quite prepared to do that with this cold and distant version of
his
Olivia.

“Do you …?” She gestured toward shapes in the dark. “Do you mind if we sit?”

“Feet hurt?”

“Feet, and … other things,” she admitted. “
Every
thing. The farm’s been busy.”

“I bet. I wasn’t back in the valley for five minutes before I heard people gushing about your strawberries,” he said. He saw her cross the shadows; he could track the motion by the way her body blinked out the spotty green glow as she moved. Apparently, some of the mushrooms were not mushrooms at
all, but poured stone garden stools that looked like mushrooms. He chose to sit on the seat nearest to her, and he did not fail to notice that she leaned slightly away.

He asked her about the farm: He thought it was a safe topic. She talked about the day a hailstorm had ruined all her lettuces, slicing them to pieces as efficiently as any food processor; about how she’d swept the produce awards last year at the Sullivan County fair, winning in every category she entered. She seemed happiest when she was talking about her vegetables. But she also talked a lot about a man, Tom, and Sam felt an entirely unjustified pang of irritation.

“And who
is
Tom?” he asked.

“Oh right. I hired an AFM. A manager. He’s great. He oversees my crew, handles the farmers’ markets and the subscribers, soil management, and a whole bunch of other things besides—marketing, making sure we’re within regulations, deliveries, everything. He’s really good with people, too. Everybody likes him. Frees me up to spend more of my time with the boarders, working in the maze.”

“And what about your father?” he asked.

“Good. He’s good.”

“Just good?”

“Yeah. Just good. The same.”

Okay,
he thought.
Arthur is off-limits. Fine.
“And what about Roger the snow leopard? And David Bowie?”

Olivia laughed, and Sam felt a small charge of triumph to see a spark of green-tinged light in her eye. After Alice’s death, Arthur Pennywort had amassed a number of strange hobbies that Alice never would have allowed. The Professor—who had earned his nickname for his constant indulgence in “experiments”—appreciated the artistry of a predator preserved at the height of predation. The more savage the beast, the better—panthers with
long yellow teeth and sharp-hooked claws, wolverines with beady black eyes and twisted snarls. In short, he liked things with built-in biological weaponry.

But if Sam had ever felt afraid of the dead-eyed beasts as a child, it was only in the way that a person fears a ghost story or a nightmare—things not real. He and Olivia were fascinated by the menagerie, with its undercurrent of impotent threats. They named the stealthy snow leopard Roger and the silently screeching owl over the mantel David Bowie. Arthur encouraged them. For Easter, he put pink bunny ears on the bust of Cesare Maximus, the ferocious man-eating brown bear. And for one whole summer, Roger wore neon sunglasses, a plastic lavender lei, and a Hawaiian shirt. The day the elementary school teacher asked the class to bring in favorite stuffed animals was epic in Green Valley lore.

“The taxidermies are still here,” she said. “In the farmhouse. But I don’t live there anymore. I moved into the silo.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I just wanted to.”

Sam couldn’t see her face to read it. Her eyes picked up the dragon-green glow of the mushrooms, lending a fairy glint to her pupils. She was as beautiful and fearsome as a stone angel, otherworldly and remote. “I’m glad the farm’s doing so well.”

“Me, too.”

“And it’s good to hear Arthur’s still the same.”

“He is.”

“But what about you?”

He could tell from the tilt of her head that she was puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“How are you doing?”

She laughed. “You must have dozed off for a while there. I’ve been talking about myself for ten minutes straight.”

“You’ve been talking about the farm. I’m asking about
you.
”

She raised a shoulder, half a shrug.

“What’s your life like? Is it what you wanted?”

“Sure,” she said. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

He wanted to sigh. She was acting obtuse—and he knew it. He adjusted his perch on the concrete mushroom and wondered about Tom, if she was seeing him or if she wanted to. One of her knees was bouncing: Was she impatient? Nervous? A pale scrim of light lay on the surface of her skin, painting green on her bare shoulder like the glow of the sun on a half-dark earth, carving a green shadow beneath her jaw. Sam felt as if a thousand green eyes were scrutinizing him, nightmarish but beautiful in the gloom.

“You didn’t bring a lot of stuff with you,” Olivia said, glancing at him. “When you moved in, I mean. I thought maybe you were just … checking up on the house. I didn’t think you’d actually stay.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

And for the first time since he’d returned, he’d felt
sure
that he actually was going to stay, that being back in Green Valley was more than a temporary pit stop so he could put his life back together and move on. He felt the luminous green dark expanding within him, filling him up, green seeping in between the cells of his body, pushing them infinitesimally apart. And though the sensation was heady and not exactly pleasant, he welcomed it, courted it in the silence of his mind, because it had been so long since he’d felt anything, and this, this was
something.
Orpheus descending into Hades must have known this feeling, must have known hell by its eerie green mushrooms. Or maybe this wasn’t Virgil’s version of hell, but Dante’s—with Olivia as Beatrice to guide him through the inferno, into the circle of punishment where a man was doomed to love the torture of being simultaneously near to and distant from a woman he wanted quite badly to know, a woman who looked so very
touchable but whose smooth skin was completely wasted on him, a woman who was herself as luminous as foxfire and who even now was leaning slightly away. “Olivia—”

“What will you say in your report?” she asked. “You’re going to tell them I’m not watering, right?”

He didn’t answer immediately. Not because he didn’t have an answer, but because he didn’t like the question. “I’m not going to give you a hard time. Gloria does enough of that for all of us.”

She smiled crookedly in the half dark. “I should get back to work.”

“Right now?”

She laughed. “I told you I only had a few minutes. You can stay down here a little longer, if you want to. Just shut the door when you go.”

She stood.

“I’ll see you again,” he said. “Now that we’re neighbors.”

“Seems like,” she said. And that was all.

After she left, he stayed in the dark until it seemed to him the mushrooms had started to fade and so had his weird brain fever. (Olivia as Beatrice—
really
? Maybe the mushrooms gave off something less innocent than phosphorescent light.) He realized, now, that Olivia had not asked after his parents, or if he was married, or if he’d thought of her. She had not asked him anything, nor had she offered him anything of substance.

He got to his feet. There was magic in the maze, people said. Magic that gave inner clarity, that stripped away all the pretensions that a person fabricated around himself. He felt oddly shaky, light-headed, and strange. On Moggy Knob when he’d died, he’d given up on life in the most fundamental and complete way a man could. Then, when he’d found himself in the hospital—still very much living but unable to feel—he’d given up again, choosing Green Valley not because he meant to start
anew but because he meant to quit. To return to Bethel, he had simply needed to stop resisting its pull, to give up fighting, and Green Valley simply absorbed him back into it, easily and naturally, like a tree that grows around and eventually engulfs a fence or pipe. In Green Valley, he could allow himself to be puppeted by normalcy, unfeeling and uninspired, and nobody would notice or care.

But then, in the garden maze, there was Olivia. And he realized that there was, to his surprise, something in Green Valley that was still interesting to him. Something that nudged him out of his stupor and made him want to actually
try.
He wanted to know more about her, this new Olivia who seemed both hardened and hesitant. He wanted it like he hadn’t wanted anything in a long time. He did not expect that she might ever love him again—if she ever had loved him to begin with. And he wouldn’t
want
her to love him—she deserved better. But the idea of getting to know her better, of drawing her out and discovering what it was that she so desperately guarded,
that
was a project that invigorated him. He would stay in Green Valley. He was back for good. He felt more clearheaded than he had in a long time.

He climbed the stairs out of the hidden garden, feeling oddly energized. Then he was outside in the blazing, antagonistic brightness of July, which was July in all its copious Julyness, baking the earth to powder under the sun.

In the Bud

Many years ago when she was still alive, Olivia’s mother had liked to tell her daughter a story:
Once upon a time, a woman and her husband longed for a child. But the woman grew older, and the man grew older, and they came to believe they would not have a family of their own. Then, one day, the woman happened upon a fairy splashing and frolicking in a valley stream. And in order to keep the woman from giving away the secret of her existence, the fairy agreed to give the woman a daughter in exchange for her silence.

For many years the woman waited. She waited, until she decided she must have dreamed the whole thing. But then, one beautiful spring morning, she pulled up a clump of yellow dandelions only to discover the tiniest of human babies, curled up within the root ball and sweetly speckled with dark brown dirt. And she knew the fairy had not forgotten her after all.

Sometimes the story changed as it suited Olivia’s mother’s mood: The man and the woman found the baby in the hollow of a tree, in a fallen robin’s nest among the blue eggs, in the closed bud of a peony after all the other flowers had bloomed. But always, the story had the same ending: The man and the woman were the Pennyworts, and the baby was Olivia, and they were very happy and surprised when she arrived.

Olivia had loved the stories—though it had been a moment of great embarrassment when in the third grade she realized that she had not in fact been found floating on a water lily, and that her appearance on the farm had more to do with what the geese and goats did in the springtime than with pixie dust or magical storms. But her mother had always insisted that the stories she’d told Olivia about her birth were the perfect truth, if not the
actual
truth, because they got to the fundamental moral of the story better than facts ever could: Of all the people in Green Valley, Olivia had been born special.

From the beginning, all types of flora had been drawn to her. Houseplants turned away from the sunlight to bend in the direction of her crib. A formerly well-behaved patch of Dutchman’s-pipe had climbed up the side of the farmhouse to her nursery, where it plastered itself against the windowpane as if it wanted to reach in. Olivia’s mother said she’d noticed all of this, but had decided that there was nothing menacing about the phenomenon, and if the plants wanted to be close to her little human miracle, she couldn’t blame them.

Alice’s ideas aside, Olivia did believe certain people were born gardeners, and she was one of them. She grew up playing with pill bugs and millipedes and butterflies in the furrows of her family’s fields. She’d learned to wield a dibble for seeding before she’d learned to walk on two legs. She cried like the world was ending when her parents tried to bring her indoors even for a quick snack, and the instant they set her down in the weeds and grass she turned sunny once again.

When Olivia was barely four years old, her mother had set her up with a small raised garden behind the farmhouse, and Olivia had sat with her seedlings each morning and talked softly to them as if it were the most normal thing in the world to hold a conversation with a patch of peas. When the people of the Bethel hamlets came to the farm to pick up their produce, they
exchanged glances with their eyebrows raised almost off the top of their heads. They stopped one another at christenings and bar mitzvahs to speculate:
What do you make of it?
they said.
Witchcraft? The Devil’s curse? Dropped on her head?