The Night Garden

Polly Horvath

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To Arnie, Emily and John, Rebecca, Andrew and Zayda

A LITTLE BACKGROUND

This is the story of Winifred, Wilfred, and Zebediah; Crying Alice; and Flying Bob. It is in part the story of Thomasina and Old Tom. It is only in small part my story, but I get to do the telling. My name is Franny, and I am living with Thomasina and Old Tom because of a series of mistakes involving their neighbors. Old Tom always calls Thomasina Thomasina. But I have always addressed her as Sina because when I was little “Thomasina” was too difficult for me to say. When I was just a baby I was supposed to be adopted by the family who lived next door to Sina and Old Tom, but the night before this was to happen the neighbors’ house burned down and the neighbors burned with it. No one bothered to inform the adoption agency. The caseworker knocked on Sina and Old Tom’s door, and when Sina answered the caseworker said, “I was supposed to drop this baby off next door, but there appears to be no next door.”

Sina stuck her head around the door and spied the smoke. The smoldering embered remains of our neighbors’ house were quite a ways down the lonely stretch of coastal farm road, but across our eastern cove you could see what was left of the house. It was the smoke billowing above the waters that Sina was staring at when she said, “So there doesn’t.”

Old Tom came into the front hall and said, “Ah, that’s what all the commotion was about last night.”

“Can you hold the baby?” asked the caseworker, handing me to Old Tom. “I seem to be having a pain.”

Old Tom passed me to Sina. “I don’t have much to do with babies if I can help it,” he said. “It’s not that I don’t like them. I just don’t know what to do with them.”

Then while Sina held me and she and Old Tom looked on, the caseworker had a heart attack and died right there on the doorstep.

“My goodness,” said Sina.

“I guess we’ll have to keep her,” said Old Tom, meaning me, not the caseworker. He knelt down to see if she required anything in the way of CPR. She was quite dead, but he tried anyway. “You have to,” he told me whenever he related the oft-told tale. “Even though it is clear it will do no good. You have to try anyway if you belong to the Church of Lost Causes.”