When Amelia woke, she was lying on the bloody bathroom floor,
her housedress smeared with red and her blonde hair unkempt. Silence
rang like a thousand screaming children throughout the colossal, empty
house, and she felt tiny needles pricking her temples and a tugging
sensation around her inner thighs. She raised her head and met a whoosh
of dizziness as she stared at the umbilical cord stretched taut between
herself and the toilet, and saw the tips of gray fingers peeking out from
inside the bowl.
With a calmness that surpassed the most disciplined of Buddhist
monks, Amelia reached up and into a drawer, withdrew a pair of scissors
and severed the tie between mother and child. She sunk her hands into
the water and retrieved her child, carried it through the soundless house,
and laid it to rest in a shoebox from her closet.
She stood there for a while, contemplating God’s reasons for
punishing her by cursing her with a deformed gray mass instead of a
healthy baby boy or girl. She had never sinned in her life; she was a
devout Christian; she attended church every Sunday; she prayed on her
knees beside her bed each night to thank Him for the blessings in her life.
She was not evil. Yet an evil act was done unto her.
Amelia grasped the shoebox between her shaking hands and
headed out into the backyard. The red oak and sycamore trees towered
over her, mocking her. Infertile. Barren. Cursed. She laid the box onto
the grass and retrieved a shovel from the shed. She dug until the dirt
grave was as deep as the length of her arm, then placed her baby into the
very bottom. Eerily calm, she reached over for an unplanted bunch of
chrysanthemums and gently positioned them over the box. With each
mound of dirt that she grasped with her still-bloodied hands and placed
on top of her child, an overbearing pressure grew stronger and stronger
inside of her, until tears finally leaked from the corners of her eyes to
release the tension.
Mrs. Landry’s garden was of such beauty and prestige that it put
the Butchart Gardens of Canada to shame. She spent the majority of her
time in this garden, tending to the weeds that would constantly grow out
of the rich, dark soil encasing her beloved blossoms. She would chase
202