by Karis Walsh
She had been lucky to get the job with the OSF, and fortunate to have found a job in the meantime with a kind boss and plenty of hours. Her weariness at the end of the day blended with the peace of living alone and not in a hotel room full of the tension of unmet expectations and unspoken arguments, and she had slept soundly and deeply here for the first time in years.
She finished her sandwich and licked peanut butter off her fingers. She was thrilled to have the opportunity to act again, especially with a prestigious and interesting company, but she was almost equally grateful for these past few months of labor and solitude.
She was finally starting to forgive herself for giving up on her dreams, and to heal from the negativity of her failed relationship. Still, the upcoming months would set the course for the rest of her life, and those weeks of blissful sleep had come to an abrupt end about a week ago, when she had looked at the calendar and had seen less than a month between the day she was x-ing out with a red pen and her first day of rehearsals. Soon she would either discover that she really did have a talent for this career, or she’d be back here, begging Ted to give her the assistant manager job.
Chapter Two
Arden Philips pulled her red Kawasaki Mule off the paved trail and onto the gravel shoulder, even though there were too few visitors in the park at this time of year to worry about blocking some pedestrian’s way. She parked and grabbed a rake and a bucket of pruning shears off the back shelf of the utility vehicle before heading toward the torii gate that marked the entrance to the Japanese garden. The wooden archway was dark from soaking up the steady supply of southern Oregon rain, and she laid her hand on one of the posts, scratching gently with her short fingernail. The moisture hadn’t penetrated too deeply. As soon as they had a dry spell—if they had one before summer—she’d scrape away the buildup of mildew and treat the wood again.
She continued under the arch and into the small Japanese garden, pausing for a moment before she walked any farther along the path.
“Hey, Gramps,” she whispered. This had been his favorite section of the entire ninety-three-acre Lithia Park. He had been a groundskeeper here, and she had been his shadow since she was a toddler, following him as he worked and eventually getting her own job in the park. She felt closest to him here, partly because his influence was everywhere in the plants and landscape elements of this garden, but mostly because she had scattered his ashes at the foot of his beloved gingko tree. Her actions had been strictly in violation of the municipal park’s rules, but nearly the entire staff had been present at her impromptu service. Everyone who knew Delaney Philips knew he belonged here in life or death.
Arden walked along the path of spaced pavers. In the summer, the gaps between stones would be filled with ground-covering herbs and moss, but in January there was only slimy, slick mud. She paused now and again to wipe mucky leaves off identifying plaques. They were everywhere in the park, naming trees and plants in gold lettering on brass. She cleaned off the ones marking a photinia and one of the park’s saucer magnolias. They didn’t look like much right now, but soon they’d be covered in contrasting flowers, one with tiny, cascading showers of them and the other with large, impressive blooms. She turned away from them and continued on to a stand of Japanese maples, where she set down her bucket. She pulled out a pair of shears and started snipping off the tips of its bare branches.
She loved this time of year, when her work required more imagination than skill. The maples were beautiful now, with branches in a variety of reddish hues, but they would be even more stunning in the spring. Then their delicate and lacy leaves would start to unfurl against a backdrop of larger trees full of pink and white cherry blossoms. And in autumn, toward the end of the festival season, this whole garden would be a chaos of color, rivaling any state’s fall foliage. She was pruning now, not to get the maple to a desired shape, but to get it to grow into the shape she wanted.
Arden trimmed the end of another branch and shook her head. She always got a little sentimental in this garden. She wasn’t Michelangelo, releasing a sculpture from a block of clay. There wasn’t any magic involved in what she was doing—just decades of experience from watching her grandfather and doing the work herself. She knew where to cut because she had been observing the way these trees grew since some of them were first planted.
She finished shaping the maples and raked the area underneath them and around a stone memorial bench, brushing twigs and debris off its surface even though no one would likely be sitting there for a few more weeks. She enjoyed the privacy of these days, separate from the bustle and crowds that came with the festival, but she couldn’t stop the feeling of anticipation from catching in her throat. Everything she and the other groundskeepers did from mid-November to mid-February was in preparation for the tourist season. And everything they did during the other months was designed to keep the visitors happy and help them enjoy the park. Her work life revolved around the theater schedule.
She knelt on a paving stone and used a trowel to dig up some weeds near a bamboo and stone fountain. The park was silent, except for a few birds singing in the trees, an occasional car driving down Granite Street, and the distant sound of some local children in the playground near the park’s entrance. She wanted to be fully present here in the quiet, to stop thinking ahead to the shouts and laughter and intercom announcements that came with the theater crowd, but she could no more stop hearing those future sounds than she could stop seeing the way the maples would grow.
Arden tossed the weeds into her bucket and stood. Like it or not, she owed her livelihood to the festival. She smiled to herself. Actually, she owed her life to this small town’s annual celebration of Shakespeare and his plays. Her dad had been a director here for years, until the lovely Rose Canton, otherwise known as Mom, had come to play Ophelia. He fell in love, and for a few years, according to Arden’s grandparents, they had been happy here, producing many acclaimed plays and one small daughter. Until bigger and better roles called, and they left her and the festival with barely a backward glance. They still kept in touch in their offbeat, unpredictable way, but Arden knew more about their lives from reading reviews of their plays in magazines than by talking to them.
She stopped next to one of her grandfather’s best contributions to the park, a series of narrow, primitive wooden troughs that were filled with white stones of varying sizes. The fountain was gorgeous in its simplicity, and the sound of water running through gaps between stones and dropping from trough to trough was musical. During the season, they offered Tai Chi classes here, and plenty of people came to sit on the surrounding benches and meditate to the sounds he had created.
Did she regret living here with her grandparents? Never. She had been happy with them, and she felt their loss deeply. She had considered them to be her true parents, and her birth parents were more like flaky older siblings. Would she have preferred that her parents had chosen to either stay here or take her with them? She didn’t want to answer that question. She couldn’t imagine what her life would have been like if they had stayed here.
She rested her fingers on the rough timber of the highest trough and yelped when a sudden gush of water sprayed over her hand. She turned at the sound of laughter coming from a maintenance shed hidden behind some dense rhododendrons.
“Way to ruin a contemplative moment, Jacob,” she called. Her supervisor came out of the shed, where he had turned on the fountain, looking anything but sorry for scaring her.
“I owed you, Little Philips,” he said, shaking his finger at her. He and her grandfather had been close in age and had worked together for most of their adult lives. Jacob was nearly a head shorter than Arden, with thick gray hair that made him look like Einstein. He had become her self-appointed guardian when Delaney had died four years ago, even though she was thirty-two at the time. He freely gave her advice about her love life and her career choices, whether she wanted it or not.
“Consider this step one in my evil plan to get back at you for
the viburnum incident,” he continued, shaking his head at the memory.
Arden couldn’t keep from laughing. He had started this series of pranks months ago with a fake spider in her lunchbox, but he still hadn’t found a way to get back at her for last year’s elaborate hoax. He had brought a delicate viburnum to the park and planted it with as much care as if it had been his child. Arden promptly dug it up and replaced it with a dead plant she had salvaged from the local nursery’s dumpster. He had tried four more of the shrubs in succession with the same result, determined to prove her wrong when she kept saying, I told you that spot is too shady. She wasn’t sure how long they would have continued the game if he hadn’t stumbled across the thriving patch of his plants that she had placed alongside the road. Her garden had been a gorgeous mass of cranberry and pink flowers in the fall, while the last one Jacob had planted in his original spot—threatening her job if she dug it up—had never grown as well as its transplanted cousins.
“Well, you sure startled me today, so I guess we’re even now,” she said.
“Hardly. I’ve repaid you for one single shrub. I’ll work on the rest over the season.”
Arden grinned. “Well, good luck. You’re gonna need it.”
Jacob picked out a few stray leaves that had been dislodged when the water flowed over the pristine white stones. Both fountains in the garden had been drained and shut down over the winter season. “Were you talking to your gramps just now?”
“I was just thinking about him and my parents,” Arden admitted. “But sometimes I come here and talk things out with him.”
“Me, too.” Jacob gave the wood trough a pat. “I see signs of him everywhere in the park, but nowhere more than here. Sometimes I talk to him about you, and he gives me advice to pass along.”
Arden rolled her eyes. Great, here it came. What was today’s lecture? Probably the find a nice woman and settle down one. She heard it every year before the festival started. She didn’t have trouble finding women during the season, but finding a settling-down type was another story. She had a weakness for passionate divas, even though they were destined to leave just like Rose and her dad had. She had tried to focus on locals, or even tourist theatergoers, but she couldn’t seem to resist the actors with all the accompanying drama and high emotions they brought into her life. Maybe because opposites really did attract, and Arden didn’t consider herself to be the passionate type. The only thing she was sure of was the need to keep her heart carefully under control during these relationships. They were fun while they lasted, but they didn’t last long.
“Your grandfather made some big changes in this park, Arden. We both know every plant and every stone he placed here.”
Ah, the career lecture, not the romance one. Jacob must be serious this time if he was calling her by her first name instead of the Little Philips nickname only he was allowed to use with her. “Gramps was a gifted visual designer,” she agreed. He could have been an artist, but he had chosen flowers and mulch over oils and watercolors. Her dad had the same kind of vision, but he used his talent in the theater.
“You’ve inherited those same gifts,” Jacob said, as if reading her thoughts. More likely it was because they had had this same conversation a hundred times before, and they each knew the other’s views and arguments. “But I don’t see you anywhere in this park.”
“Well, I’ll go to the nursery and pick up some geraniums,” Arden said. “I can plant them so they spell my name in orange letters, and you’ll think of me whenever you look at them.”
Jacob laughed—in spite of himself, apparently, because he quickly erased his smile. “The park is a living being, Arden. We create it anew every year, and we each put our stamp on it. It’s time you did your part.”
“The park is a living being? Seriously?”
Jacob shook his head. “Come up with something of your own to add to the park. It doesn’t have to be a centerpiece fountain or a new themed garden. Just a patch of ground that is different because you were here.”
“Are you okay?” Arden asked, suddenly worried. She had been feeling her usual exasperation at the lecture, but was he getting serious because he was sick? “Have you been to a doctor?”
He patted her arm. “I’m fine. Just passing along a message from my dearest friend to his beloved granddaughter. Now think of something before the season is over, or I’ll fire you.”
She laughed with him, somewhat satisfied that he wasn’t sick and trying to get her life in order while he still could. “Sure thing, boss. I’ll come up with something to make you proud.”
He nodded toward her and toward the trough fountain, as if assuring her grandfather that he was doing his part to whip Arden into shape. She sighed as he left, and picked up her bucket and rake again. She liked tulips and daffodils—maybe she’d plant a line of bulbs near one of the ponds and get Jacob off her back at least until next year.
She loaded her equipment on the Mule and got in the driver’s seat, but didn’t start the engine right away. She wasn’t sure why she fought Jacob’s attempts to get her more involved in the evolution of the park, but every time he brought up this subject she felt tension twist inside her stomach like the coil of stripes on a candy cane. She had been happy to create designs of her own while she was getting her degree, but she couldn’t feel the same flow of imagination and vision when she was here at the park. Right after her grandfather died and Jacob had started on this particular mission to get her more involved, she had tried to convince herself that she didn’t want to make changes to the park because so many of her memories of Gramps were tied to this place. But that wasn’t a good enough excuse because the park was practically unrecognizable from the one she had known as a child. It changed all the time.
She just wasn’t like the rest of her family. Visionary and ambitious and always looking for new horizons. Her grandfather had managed to balance stability with creativity, but Arden’s parents had chosen one over the other. Over her. The women she’d dated from the acting company had been the same.
But she loved Jacob. He was her family now, and she’d do whatever it took to make him happy. She had planted some herb gardens in her own backyard. They had a pleasing mix of scents and textures, and they were small. She could buy some seedlings and tuck a similar one in a corner somewhere in the park. Problem solved.
Arden started the engine and drove to her next pruning job.
Chapter Three
Emilie drove her used Subaru from Medford to Ashland. The small, boxy car might have been a nice shade of forest green when it was first painted, but now it looked a bit sickly. At least the shade seemed appropriate given the odd groans and noises the car made while pulling the tiny U-Haul with all her worldly belongings in it, as if it had the flu and would rather be lying in bed than speeding along I-5.
The trip only took twenty minutes, but the two cities were worlds apart in style. Medford had an industrial, sometimes seedy look, and little imagination had been put forth in the design of its blocky buildings. Ashland was all small-town charm, with unique shops and restaurants in quaint converted houses and an abundance of Tudor-style facades. The town was filled with shrubs and trees, making it seem like an extension of the beautiful park Emilie had discovered on her initial visit here.
Another thing she had learned on that trip was how much her cost of living was about to increase. Cheap and easy meals were a staple in Medford, but not here. The nearly year-round season of the festival brought a healthy tourist trade to Ashland, and the prices and styles of the restaurants here were an indication of their taste and disposable income level. At least Emilie would be likely to lose some weight without even trying, once her burger and fries diet came to an end and she was reduced to eating ramen noodles in her apartment.
She drove down the main street, past the site of the festival and the touristy stores around it and toward the campus of Southern Oregon University. Emilie had found this quiet area when she was here to audition—because she had gotten
lost, not because she was feeling adventurous. When she had started looking for an apartment to rent, she had decided to avoid the main part of town and focus her search near SOU. The relative peace would give her a chance to get completely away from the festival and recharge when she wasn’t onstage or rehearsing. She had also decided to room with a group of graduate students instead of choosing one of the places where several company members were looking for an additional roommate. She didn’t want to listen to other actors reading lines through thin walls, more because she didn’t want to compare herself to them than because the noise would bother her.
Emilie’s confidence had run the gamut from hopefully optimistic at auditions to ecstatically positive when she was hired to waveringly inconsistent after that initial elation. It had settled somewhere near nonexistent over the past week as she had packed up her meager belongings and prepared for the move. She hoped today’s welcome meeting with the company director would help her feel more settled here, like she really belonged.
She followed the directions to her new home and parked in front of the two-story blue-and-gray Craftsman. The yard was small but neat, and the neighborhood seemed quiet and pleasant. Of course, being this close to the university might mean it turned into Party Row on the weekends, but she didn’t mind. It couldn’t be much louder than her place in Medford had been.
She had to spend five minutes ringing the doorbell and knocking with increasing firmness before someone finally answered the door. The woman held the door open a few inches, and Emilie could only see one of her blue eyes, a partial halo of short, mousy brown curls, and the ragged ends of an old red sweater with a rolled neckline.