The Night Garden (21 page)

“Breathe out, Olivia,” he said.

She laughed a little, though nothing was funny. She was embarrassed by the shakiness of her breath. Then she felt the lightest press of his fingertip on the inside of her wrist, and all the sensations of the whole of the afternoon constricted into the precise and singular point of his touch, where his skin and hers connected. He kept still, the pressure firm.

“Okay?”

“Sure,” she said.

He began to draw circles, then X’s, then circles again. His touch felt foreign and invasive, but familiar, too. Had they really touched each other all the time at one point in their lives? She thought of evenings spent in the ecstatic torture of long, meandering hours, skin on skin, mouths on mouths, and now—this, such a small and inconsequential thing, the tip of his finger, sliding over the inside of her wrist, erotic in a way that penetrated deep, hammered every nerve, made the air feel thin.

She grasped for some shield to put up against the onslaught of sensation. “I think those clouds might mean rain.”

“
Shh,
Olivia. We don’t have to talk right now.”

She felt him trace a spiral over the tendons of her wrist, a shape closing then opening again. Years of denial had made her tightly wound and wildly sensitive; he touched her, and she felt herself coming apart cell by cell, atom by atom—and yet, she had no will to stop it. Certainly, he’d already touched her enough for the sake of their experiment. But his touch was too delicious, too satisfying and luxurious, to tell him to move away.

“I’m going to write you a message,” Sam said. “Tell me what it says.”

She felt him impress three lines on her skin; goose bumps rose on her belly, her arms.
“I?”
she guessed.

“Yes,” he said. “Now the next word.”

She could barely focus on the letters. The breeze when it blew was like a warm kiss; the sun was indecently hot; the kite was a cuff around her wrist. Sam drew away and she felt the loss of him.

She opened her eyes. He was leaning over her, looking down. His face, so long and handsome, was marked by what was either intense concentration or a pained scowl. His eyes had darkened, the blue irises expanded to a thin, electric rim.

“Think?”
she said.

He held her gaze as he traced a new pattern, and the connection was shockingly intimate. He was watching her with an intensity that spoke of midnight: muscle, sweat, secrets whispered against skin. She held her breath, waiting for the next word to take shape as his finger drew one letter, then another, on her wrist. Her voice broke. “We? I think we?”

He said nothing, and she knew she had guessed right. If she’d had any thoughts, any reservations, they drifted away like milkweed floss lifted on the summer wind. There was only the dryness of the grass, the gold heat of the sun, and beneath the pinpoint of Sam’s touch, an ocean of desire for a thing she couldn’t have. He stopped, lifted his fingertip, watched her.

“Guess,” he said.

She’d stopped paying attention. “I’m sorry. I don’t know.” He chuckled knowingly. He knew what he was doing to her, what she was feeling. She began to panic. “I think we’ve experimented enough to know if it’s going to work.”

He paused. When he spoke his voice rasped. “God, Olivia. You’re so responsive. So perfectly tuned in. What I could do to you if—”

“Sam. Stop.” She pulled away and sat up so quickly she nearly saw stars.

“What’s wrong?”

She drew away from him farther, a dozen thoughts jumbling in her brain but only one singular enough to stand apart:
What I could do to you if.
His words were as thin as a wish, no more promising than the curl of smoke from a candle blown out on a birthday cake. He
couldn’t
touch her—that was the problem. They didn’t know if Arthur’s serum would work. And even if it did work, Arthur had said it would be best for accidental brushes, not prolonged contact like this.

This
was a problem.

When Olivia had crossed the field to the oak where Sam was waiting, she’d still believed that the strength of her determination would be enough to delineate the terms of a friendship, a strict pact between two people who would not want what they could never have. But that had been a joke. In the war between restraint and desire, restraint was irresolute, unskilled, and puny; desire arrived with guns blazing, banners flying, and soldiers full of rapacious will. It always won. And yet, for Olivia, its victory could only mean loss.

Who I am kidding?
she thought. Over the years, she’d mentally sifted through the possibilities of what she might or might not safely do with a lover one day, what protections or accessories they might or might not use if anyone was ever willing to get close enough to her to try. But ultimately, the thing she and Sam both wanted would elude them. She would come to feel guilty; he would grow bitter and resentful and wish for someone else. And in the meantime, the ache that seemed to transcend her physical body and hurt all the way down to her soul wasn’t going to get any better. She could not have what she could not have. And no amount of wishing would change that.

She got to her feet. “I’m sorry. I just remembered.”

“Remembered what?”

“I lost track of time.” She tried to pull her hand out of the relatively loose loop of twine, but she was shaky and fumbling. “And anyway, you should go wash your hands right away. Just in case.”

“Okay. I will. But—”

“Jeez. Where did you learn to tie knots like this?”

“I picked a few things up over the years.” He stood with her, slowly and awkwardly, then held out a hand toward the kite string. “Here. Let me try.”

“Don’t.” She moved her hand away from him. He reached out more.

“If you’ll just let me—”

“I’ve got this, Sam. I’ve
—shoot
!” She’d brushed against the back of his knuckles with hers. She froze. He moved away. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

Their eyes met; they both knew he’d been grazed. He frowned a little, and with a flick of his wrist loosened the knot he’d made. He took the twine from her. The pull of the kite was gone.

“Thank you.” She rubbed at the slight red impression on her skin.

“Are you turning chicken on me?”

“No,” she said. “Of course not.” But—of course—she was.

He began to wind the kite.

“I’ll … I’ll call you,” she assured him, though she wasn’t sure she would. She wasn’t sure of anything. “I do have a phone, you know. It’s been a wonderful … time together. Not a date. A picnic! Everything was really nice. And the cider—that was a nice touch.”

“Olivia—”

“I know what this looks like, but I’m not running. I just really do have things to do. That I forgot.”

He raised his eyebrows. The kite dove headfirst to the ground. Sam sighed. “Well,” he said, almost to himself. “At least it stuck the landing.”

Olivia walked backward. She nearly tripped when she hit her heel on a stone. And then, she turned and jogged through the field, away from the leftover grapes and sparkling juice and cool shade and fallen kite, and away from Sam, whose gaze she could feel like a weight on her shoulders, until she knew she was finally, blessedly, out of sight.

It was only later that she wished she could have waited long enough to learn what his message might have been.

Greener Pastures

On late July evenings, the sunset often hit Green Valley at just such an angle that it bent people’s thoughts toward the things they wanted most but believed they could not have for fear of actually getting them. This particular psycho-meteorological summer phenomenon stood in direct contrast with a similar winter event on the year’s shortest days, when the small gray sun set so quietly and slowly that people failed to notice that the change between night and day had happened at all—and this made them sleepy, and lazy, and content with everything they had.

Of course, only the oldest survivors in Green Valley, those who could recognize the telltale patterns of pink and gold in the sky, sensed that an evening of heartsickness was imminent and shuttered their minds against the coming onslaught like someone preparing a house for a storm. So when the summer evening shone its last burnt-pink light on each person’s thorniest desires, most of Green Valley was defenseless against it, especially the young, the dreamy, and the newly in love.

Mei, the newest boarder to stake her claim on a cot in the Pennywort barn, told a captive audience of sleepy Penny Loafers how she had always wanted a child but never thought she would actually get one, which prompted one of the women to
point out that she was about to have a baby, like it or not. In Briscoe, Tom was thinking of how he had such a terrible desire to eat the entire buttery pound cake that was displayed so seductively on a stand in the kitchen—but of course, the fat would be hell on his cholesterol levels and he couldn’t decide if he wanted to deal with the various consequences from his doctor and his partner and his own uncooperative arteries.

Arthur was slumped by the feeble stream in the glen and was daydreaming about the farmhouse where he’d grown up, got married, had his daughter—where he’d had all the things life in an actual house could give a man, like razors, and hot showers, and insulation, and window fans. And yet in spite of how badly he wanted to climb out of the ravine and back into the farmhouse, in spite of how he longed, yearned, and pined for the creature comforts of a normal life, he could not allow himself to return to the place he’d been happiest. He would not be able to live with himself if he ever caught himself being happy again.

Sam, in his parents’ faded blue colonial and surrounded by his parents’ old furniture, was supposed to be watching television but was instead faced with the most painful wish he’d ever faced in his life—because he knew that desire for Olivia could only be desire that wasn’t good for him, and he thought for a moment that the greatest failure of evolution was that human beings could not claim perfect mastery over their propensity to fall in love. Better to want something that was good for you and easy to accrue. He was certain that great numbers of humans had died indulging in desires for things that they knew were bad for them—irresistible purple berries clustered on a shrub, the latex of the opium poppy seedpod, the friendship of wild animals that could turn vicious at a moment’s notice, and—even—the desire to lift wheels off the ground and own the sky. He decided that people were experts at not seeing danger when danger proved inconvenient. Although the things he wanted to
do with Olivia would almost certainly kill him, that didn’t stop him from wanting to do them anyway, and as the clouds changed from gold to purple to ashy gray, the weight of desire made his heart feel heavy and hollow at the same time.

Olivia too felt the ache of longing as the shadows grew. The pain of isolation stung more acutely than usual. It was so big it choked out all other feelings, growing around her heart like a tangle of murderous vines. It was unfair that desire—for a thing she’d so long told herself she didn’t need or want—could shake her understanding of herself. Some part of her wished Sam hadn’t come back to the farm. Hope had disarmed her—against him, against herself, against the burn of the sun going down.

The day was over, the last color draining from the pale sky, when she realized she’d forgotten something: her father. She’d promised to join him for dinner—and then she forgot. In the kitchen of her modified silo, she threw something together with panicked clumsiness: cold beet soup with cucumber, dill, and chives. Crusty bread and soft white farm cheese completed the meal. Then she hurried into the semidark, a flashlight lashed to her belt loop for the walk back.

“I’m here!” she called once she reached the gloom of the ravine. “Dad! I’m here!”

She skidded the last few feet to the floor of the gorge. She spent a long moment scanning the area before she saw her father. He was sitting at the edge of the sludgy remnants of the stream, his back hunched in a way that made her think, for a moment, that he was no more animate than the boulder beside him. Her greatest fear, which she lived with like a low hum each day but rarely allowed herself to think of, was that she might one day come down into the ravine and find that something had happened to him—that he’d fallen and cracked his head on a stone, that he’d lost a tussle with a copperhead, that he’d needed her help and she’d failed. And each day that she came into the
ravine and saw him waiting for her and ready to bust out with whatever strange new observation he couldn’t wait to share, she felt a thrill of relief that he was still with her and she was not yet alone.

“I’m here!” she said. “Here I am!”

“Here you are,” he said, his voice like a creaking tree. “Food?”

“Cold beet soup with buttermilk. You’ll love it.”

She lowered herself onto a rock beside him and opened the container of soup for him. She handed him the bowl and a spoon, and she put the bread and cheese on her own lap. Arthur did not eat immediately. Around them, the night creatures were beginning to come out—bats and salamanders and owls. Olivia could sense them but could not see.

“Sorry I’m late tonight,” she said. She wouldn’t admit to outright forgetting him. That would be cruel.

“I hope that there was some good reason for your having come late?”

“Good reason?”

“A
good
reason,” he said. “As opposed to a problem.”

“Oh,” she said. But she didn’t elaborate. There
was
a problem, a problem that consumed her, that made her accidentally pull up her chives in her herb garden when she should have been pulling weeds, that made her call the boarders by the wrong names. There was the problem of what she was going to do about Sam. She’d thought she could allow herself to want his companionship without wanting anything more. But that was the trouble with happiness: Once a person got a little bit of it, it was only human nature to want more, and more, and more—until the thing that might have made her quite content and sated actually made her quite wretched with longing.