The Night Garden Read Online Free PDF Page B

said the word to himself sometimes. It means you’re nuts, his father would have said.
    No one in Green Valley knew what had really happened to him before he’d returned. No one would glance twice if he slipped up and let his limp show occasionally, or if he groaned too much when the weather got cold. All over Green Valley men and women bore the injuries of life in farming: gnarled nail beds and missing fingers and toes, arms scarred by machineryand faces turned leathery by the sun. Compared to some of the old-timers, Sam looked perfectly intact. And that was a good thing: He would never be able to tell anyone what had happened, especially not his relatives. The Van Winkles were tall men, lanky and knobby, with scrawny chicken necks during puberty and pronounced Adam’s apples later down the line. They were known for having big, amiable personalities no matter the kinds of dark thoughts that were going on inside their skulls. The Van Winkles were born noncomplainers. Heroism was not merely woven into their genetic makeup; it was their makeup. Sam came from a family tree of long, forking lines of doctors and paramedics, firefighters and cops. If a guy was ejected out the windshield of a car and lying in a pile of bones on the roadside, it was a Van Winkle that he wanted to see bending over his body, because no Van Winkle had ever let anyone in Green Valley die. Their talent for rescuing people who could not be rescued and reviving people who could not be revived was legendary—even if more than one branch of the family tree had been snapped off by Van Winkles who hadn’t hesitated to throw down their lives to save others.
    For many years, Sam had forestalled, skirted, and deflected his filial obligation to Green Valley. He’d wanted to be young and free, to see what there was to see and do what there was to do. But mostly, he’d wanted to get the hell out of Bethel. Like many young men, he’d done his best to demonize the land where he’d grown up—decrying it as a place of backwoods, aging, redneck flower children who were wallowing away their golden years in the deluded and watered-down fantasies of youth. The few times he had returned to his parents’ house during his twenties, he was regularly struck down by a terrible indigestion—a sour burn that flared like a match in the back of his throat and only began to fizzle out when his tires were putting Green Valley in his rearview mirror.
    After his accident, Sam had lost the will to fight against the current that had swept up so many of the Van Winkles; he didn’t have to work too very hard to find a place on the Green Valley police department. If there hadn’t been a position open for him, they would have created one. He’d only had to let it be. After zombie-walking his way through training and testing and working out, Sam had officially taken up his post at the police department last week, and the entire force seemed to breathe a sigh of relief that a Van Winkle was once again among them—even though Sam himself felt unsure that he could live up to the Van Winkle reputation. In the week since he’d been back, he’d gone out for shots at Kilcoin’s Tavern; he tossed horseshoes (badly) in Matt Weber’s backyard and listened to classic rock albums; he chased a raccoon out of Mrs. Alexandrov’s garage and then helped her from her rocking chair though he could not feel her hand; and when he got the assignment to check in on the Pennyworts, he told the guys it really was no big deal. No big deal at all.
    Now, as he walked among the hedgerows, the maze made him feel as if he were in a pocket of air in which lightning was about to materialize—which was as close as he’d come in eighteen months to feeling anything at all. He paused for a quick moment in the Remembering Garden, which might have been cut out of a Victorian greeting card. And though he could not feel it, he dipped his hand and let the water from the fountain wash over his palm. He said hello to