The Night Garden Read Online Free PDF

said. “Just keep your question in your mind.”
    Mei gave her one last uncertain glance. The entrance to the maze was before her, the flower so big it could make a human feel like a bee, the large human-sized hole in the center of the flower beckoning Mei into the maze. For a split second before Olivia could quell the feeling, she was struck with a pang of jealousy. Because for as generous as the maze had always been in helping others make difficult decisions, the maze had never—not once—seemed to convey anything of value to her.
    She could only suppose the maze’s silence toward her was because she had no more need of difficult answers than she’d had need of exits or escape routes: everything she needed was all around her, right here, on the farm. Itwould be wrong to expect more of her life than what she had.
    In the bright blue sky, turkey vultures had gathered over Solomon’s Ravine, riding the current of the heat. Olivia listened as the sound of Mei’s footsteps softened inside the maze. Then she returned, mindlessly if not contentedly, to the work of the day.

An Olive Branch
    Samuel Van Winkle, who had lived across the road from the Pennywort farm during his young life, had been unable to prevent himself from entertaining the idea that if he returned to the gardens of his youth, he would find a little bit of his old, youthful energy waiting there to be reclaimed. He would walk into the Pennyworts’ garden maze, where he’d played for so many hours as a kid, and be overwhelmed by its infinite botanical stimulations—because wasn’t stimulation what gardens were about?—and he would drink in all the wild and profuse colors of snapdragons and phloxes and roses and orchids; he would breathe in the fragrant musk of flowers with its faint underpinnings of fertility and sex; he would listen to the droning of overfed honeybees as they bumbled from bloom to bloom—and then, maybe, if he was really freakishly lucky, he would run his hands over the green walls of the hedges, and he would feel them, actually feel them, in the normal, miraculous, and mundane way he used to feel things before his accident.
    But—as it turned out—he’d been right to keep his ridiculous optimism about miracle cures boxed up and buried. Because even in the Pennyworts’ garden, where anything was possible, he found no miracles. He still couldn’t feel, not like he used to.He touched the petals of lady’s slipper, pink and pretty when it should have already lost its bloom. He rubbed a soft leaf of a flower he did not recognize against his chin—but there was nothing. No small frictions from infinitely tiny hairs on the underside of a leaf, no raised veins catching his fingertips. His skin might as well have been a leather hide. He let his hand fall.
    The Pennywort maze could do many things for a man, but it couldn’t cure him of a disease that the doctors said didn’t exist. For eighteen months, Sam had been unable to feel the workings of the world around him through his skin: If it was raining gently, he knew it only by the look of drops on his shirt. If a bag was heavy, he could sense the weight of it in the workings of his muscles, but he could not feel the bite of a strap on his skin. And though he’d gone as far as kissing a few women, it had been a long time since he’d felt even the slightest pleasure in human touch—almost two years of walking around in his own skin with the understanding that he was, at the most basic level, hardly more feeling than a dead man.
    The doctors had told him that despite the violence of his accident, they couldn’t find anything wrong with his brain. His condition, they said, was probably the result of emotional trauma as opposed to physical —a somatoform disorder, one young doctor had said, though an older physician had called it psychosomatic. That word alone had been enough to keep Sam from sharing his secret with anyone—not that he would have mentioned it anyway. Psychosomatic, he