Free The Night Garden by Lisa van Allen Page B

trespassing. Or I swear I was just leaving. But instead, she smiled a little, stretched her arms, and said, Hey, Daddy-o, you got anything to drink? And he knew he was a goner.
    That evening, she’d asked if she might stay in his barn for a few days, because she’d lost track of the friends who had brought her from California, and she thought his barn was groovy and kind of hip in a way. Arthur had told the girl he was a scientist, and she believed him. Nobody had ever believed him, because of course there had never been even a kilogram of proof that Arthur had a scientist’s brain or training. But Alice had always been a skeptic when it came to proof. She only stayed one more night in the barn. And the rest of her nights, until the day she died, she’d spent with him.
    Gradually, Green Valley began to put itself back together after the Concert—people carting truckloads of garbage that littered the roadsides, and birds cautiously considering whether to return to their nests. But Arthur could see that his home would never be the same again. Something had happened. Something was fundamentally changed.
    After the Concert, the night was brighter in Green Valley than it was anywhere else in the Catskills, so that a person could read a book by the moon when it was only the barest crescent. The birds in the valley began to sing such intricate and virtuosic songs that scientists with recorders and binoculars started to come from miles around, enraptured by avian talent. The soil, too, changed: The inexhaustible rain that had drenched so many concertgoers and coated them in suits of mud had lent the earth new fertility, and the valley quickly became renowned for its vegetables and fruits.
    The Concert had worked its magic on Green Valley, and Alice had worked her magic on him. He began to see the world as more than just a collection of facts; he forgave his parents for so doggedly instilling in him the idea that life was about work, and that work was drudgery, and that happiness was not an acceptable life goal. He resigned from the League for Common Sense, for he no longer saw anything particularly admirable in too much levelheadedness. He fell in love with his life, as if a faded curtain had been drawn back and revealed Green Valley in all its magnificent colors, and the hopes of his boyhood returned.
    As for his wife, she’d seemed to be broken in some way when he first met her, but every day on the farm seemed to make her stronger. She called herself a gypsy; Arthur had never been fully sure if this meant she was of gypsy blood or merely gypsy mentality. She mentioned an abusive father who was a descendant of freed slaves and a mother who read palms and talked wearilyof suicide at least once a day. She had always wanted a maze garden, and for their first wedding anniversary, Arthur had staked out an acre of land in the front of the farm and said: For you. Within a year, the maze had started taking shape. Each day she watered and planted, and each night she worked with an artist’s coiled energy to design new garden rooms. Rumors began to circulate that the maze was clarifying, that it helped a person make up her mind, and the garden rooms themselves seemed to harbor their own subtle enchantments. Eventually the work got to be more than Alice could handle on her own. And so, one summer when she found a woman crying in the Supplicant’s Garden, she told the woman she could stay in the old barn that Arthur was about to tear down—the barn that she had such fond memories of sleeping in—and for payment, all the woman needed to do was work a little with Alice on the maze. The woman agreed. By the next summer, the barn was teeming with visitors and the maze was a thing people came to see from miles around. The gardens grew wilder and wilder, as if they had intentions of their own.
    The Green Valley farm became the Pennyworts’ joint project, tucked low in the folds of the hills. Arthur and Alice were building their own world