Read The Night Garden for Free Online Page A

digging together in the gardens, playing hide-and-seek in the cornfields, pushing each other on an old tire swing thatalways 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 ofthe 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 hecouldn’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