It was one of those hot days right in the middle of summer and the humidity of freshly turned dirt made Lydia’s ankles feel swampy. Invisible steam rose up to the cuffs of her crisp, white pants. A large, floppy, sun-hat shaded her face from the blazing sun. Hands on hips, she stood with a long roll of paper under one arm. They were the landscaping plans for a new back garden, a real entertainer’s paradise. Lydia peered down into the giant crater that her crew had just finished digging in the middle of the luridly green grass. It was day three of a new project in the fashionable new Pacific Oaks neighborhood. Houses lined the long streets with flat, cockily angled roofs. Doors with cascading, rectangular windows gave a peak to neatly kept interiors, each with latest and most fashionable Kroehler Moderne sleeper sofas prominently displayed. Shiny Chevy Bel Airs and Continental Mark IIs sat under the shade of newly planted palm trees lining the wide lanes. Lydia peered up, “Those definitely won’t make it,” she thought. If Lydia knew anything, it was plants, and she knew that transplanting a mature tree would kill it. Shaking her head, her gaze slowly lowered back to the site of the future in-ground swimming pool.
Lydia was a landscape architect, or “gardener” as her current client was fond of calling her. As much as it made her eyes roll, men still acted shocked that a woman could have graduated college, let alone with a technical degree. “Your father, was he a professor at your college?” “No.” She was tall and lean, her tanned, muscular forearms glinted in the sun. Far too young to be so bossy, the laborers muttered amongst themselves. The look in their eyes offered themselves to her. “Don’t you need someone to take care of you?” “Wouldn’t it be nice if you could give up all this responsibility and settle down?” “Aren’t you lonely?” Their eyes bled with pity and lust whenever they fell on her. Even as she stood amid the swaying palms, the thought made her eyes flick to the back of her skull. They had no idea, none whatsoever of the price she paid to remain so unattached. Success comes at a price, often hidden and unseen
This particular job hadn’t started off particularly smoothly. Her client, the husband of a newly married couple, had hired her in the hopes of surprising his wife with a freshly landscaped backyard, complete with pink azaleas, a swimming pool, and an outdoor bar. The wife had been “a little down” and had taken a sudden holiday to visit her sister in South Padre Island. This was as good a time as any to start the renovation, he told Lydia upon their initial introduction.
The wife, a timid blonde barely out of bobby socks, had come home the day before yesterday. Her eyes lighted with panic as they scanned the construction site. “Don’t worry sweetie, it always looks worse before it gets better,” Lydia had said comfortingly. The wife’s head spun around to her new husband.
“What were you thinking?” She screeched. The husband’s eyes widened and his shoulders drooped. “I thought you would like it,” he said pleadingly.
“I thought it would make you happy.” His arms reached out to pull her in but she slapped him away.
She turned back to the yard and marched over to the back fence where the only pre-existing landscaping, a scrawny pink tea rose, stood. Her eyes rapidly flitted around at the soil crusted laborers and then at Lydia. Bringing herself up to her full five feet-two inches, she commanded in a shaking voice, “No one touches this rose. Do you understand?” With slightly amused looks on everyone’s faces they all nodded, muttering quiet assurances that no one would disturb the ratty bush.
With this incident in mind, Lydia walked around the edge of the freshly dug hole until she came to the pink rosebush. The couple was gone at a neighbor’s house for a cocktail party, thankfully. The foreman of the job site had just informed Lydia that the only way to hook up the pool to the artesian well was if they had access to the water line that ran, as far as he could tell, right under that bush. She told him to take a lunch and that she would think about it. It would be a simple matter of connecting a couple lines and she knew that she could handle that without disturbing the bush too much. Lydia was sure that if she did it herself and was gentle enough, the wife would never even know.
Mind made up, Lydia took a hand spade and under the hot California sun she began to dig around the base of the rosebush.She worked quickly against the possibility of the couple’s early return. After only a few minutes, she felt something impede her shovel. Pleased that access to the well was so shallow, Lydia plunged her hand into the earth, searching for the smooth, cool terracotta pipe. What she touched wasn’t smooth or cool. There was something soft, some sort of fabric, grazing her bare fingertips. With a good tug, Lydia wrenched out what she quickly realized was a light pink pillowcase patterned with little yellow and white roses, and there was something inside. “Jesus,” she thought. “A new neighborhood and there’s already garbage in the ground.” Knowing that she would have to keep digging to find the well access but curious about the contents of the pillowcase, Lydia decided to take a quick peak, assuming she would likely find rotten food or some other lost and forgotten object inside.
She opened it. Whatever it was stuck to the pillowcase forcing Lydia to peel away the layers of fabric. It wasn’t long before she knew exactly what she had found. Her own memories, the ones she pushed down deep, the ones from her senior year in college, the ones that made her simultaneously feel two equal and opposing emotions, flashed vividly inside her and she knew. The tiny ribcage, what looked like the bones of a tiny, doll-sized hand and the curve of a spine no longer than a pen cap. It was a fetus. With a sharp inhale, Lydia clenched the top of the bag, wrenching it tightly closed. She shut her eyes tight, her body tense and unsure of whether to drop the bag or scoop it in tight to her chest. It could have been hours or seconds that she knelt in the fresh dirt, her mind racing in an isolated loop of her own memory. Only the mid-afternoon sun burning on the back of her neck reached through the tidal wave roar pounding in her ears.
It was hers, it must be. The wife’s. Lydia began to regain control of herself, slowly loosening her grip on the pillowcase and lowering it to her bent knees. There was no evidence as to whether it was with fear or love with which the pillowcase had been buried. Certainly heartbreak if nothing else. She had certainly felt it when it was her plodding out of the doctor’s office that November day.
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It took another three weeks to finish the project. Lydia stood at the edge of the pool, watching as the last chlorine tablets slowly dissolved. The white light reflecting off the pale, blue-green water flashed, making her squint. Everything looked exactly as the husband had described, with the addition of a cluster of five more light pink rose bushes that clustered around the now slightly less frail looking original.
After Lydia had carefully folded the pink pillowcase, she had dug the whole even deeper and carefully replaced the package. “You need to find another way,” she told the foreman when he came back from lunch that day. And he did, begrudgingly, find another way to supply water from the well to the pool.
