The Roots of the Olive Tree

by Courtney Miller Santo

  “I forget that she’s got her mother’s eyes. They’re so blue today,” said Anna.

  “Frank’s eyes. Deb got them from him.” It was not uncommon for Bets to clarify Anna’s statements, and this normalcy in the hot, windowless room made Erin feel slightly less strange.

  “Why didn’t they let anyone help her? We could have brought her something more tasteful to wear. She looks old enough to be Grandma Callie’s mother, not mine,” Erin said. The lawyer should have prepared them for this. He didn’t even suggest clothing or help with her makeup. She should have hired someone with actual parole experience, but none of the grandmothers volunteered any money to help. She clenched her fists.

  Anna patted her back softly. “It’s not important. Stay calm. Make eye contact with the commissioners. Let them see the sort of family she has behind her. Let them see her as a person, not as a murderer.”

  It was strange to hear Anna speak so plainly. In the years that she’d lived with her grandmothers, Erin had felt that the three of them felt safest with Deb in prison. Callie, Deb’s own mother, had never visited her daughter and she refused to allow Erin to visit until she was in high school. Only Bets, who Erin often thought of as the hardest-hearted of the grandmothers, had visited Deb with regularity. It had been Bets who fought Anna and Callie on the issue of bringing Erin to the prison. It wasn’t until Erin got her learner’s permit that they relented and let Erin go with Bets. She wasn’t sure what really made them change their mind, only that Anna claimed she was worried about Bets driving the four hours to Chowchilla by herself every month.

  Erin watched as Bets passed the lawyer her handkerchief and motioned for him to get Deb to wipe away some of the makeup. She wondered why Bets felt such responsibility for her granddaughter, especially because she and her daughter, Callie, rarely spoke. They’d tried to hide it from Erin, but she knew that they kept to their separate wings of Hill House. She was in her teens when she first felt the silence between her grandmother and great-grandmother. Erin had never asked about the distance between them, but sometimes she heard Anna rebuke them about unrealistic expectations.

  And yet, when she was finally allowed to visit Deb, Erin was astonished at the tenderness between her mother and Bets. They were rusty with each other and the small talk never came easily, but when Bets visited Deb, they were like mother and daughter. Erin often found herself full of envy and wishing she were grown up enough to talk with her mother as an adult.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Prison Song

  Erin was fourteen the first time she was allowed to visit her mother in prison. More than a decade had passed since the trial and she was more afraid than she would admit to anyone about seeing her mother again. That summer it was unusually hot. The women had all been cranky with one another, especially Bets and Callie, so Erin had been surprised to find Callie in the kitchen packing biscuits and dried fruit for the drive. Her grandmother had hugged her tightly, and although she’d not said it, Erin came away from the embrace feeling as if she’d been told not to go. It was the year that the Olympics in Atlanta were bombed, and when Erin watched the chaos unfold later that summer, people kept repeating that the scale of the tragedy was smaller than it could have been. She felt similarly about her first trip to the prison to visit her mother.

  Chowchilla was nestled in the dead center of Central California surrounded by pistachio and almond orchards. The trees were small, about as tall as the average man, with umbrella-like canopies covered in waxy green leaves. The order of the orchards reminded Erin of the olive grove in Anna’s backyard. Her eyes followed the parallel lines of trees as their car left the interstate and made a series of turns. The car slowed to a stop, and looking around her, Erin realized that there was a line of cars along what appeared to be a service road for farm vehicles. Straining her eyes, she saw in the distance a glint of wire and several blocky, sand-colored buildings that appeared to move with the heat. Bets turned off the car.

  “We’re early. They start letting visitors in around eight A.M.” She reached across the seat and took the visitation papers from the glove box.

  “Lots of cars,” said Erin.

  “Lots of prisoners,” said Bets.

  “Does she know I’m coming?”

  “I wrote her a letter last week.”

  “What should I call her?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  Erin had spent much of her life referring to her mother as Deb. It was how her grandmothers spoke of her and it gave her the distance she required to make sense of the situation. But she wasn’t sure she would be able to call her by her first name when she saw her. Bets opened one of her Reader’s Digest Classic Readers and Erin slid the only photo she had of her mother, her father, and herself out of the notebook she’d brought. She thought her mother looked like Elizabeth Taylor, but plumper. Her father was the same height as her mother, but he was thin with a long neck and a prominent Adam’s apple. His nose had the same sharp angles of his elbows. In the photograph, he gazed at an object outside the left frame of the picture. Erin’s chubby toddler hand was on her father’s cheek, as if she were trying to get him to turn toward her. She didn’t remember having the picture taken, but her grandmother had told her it was snapped the summer before “everything happened.”

  It was nearly nine thirty by the time Bets and Erin were allowed in the waiting room. She’d had to leave her belongings behind, and Bets carried her car keys and a small amount of cash, all in dollar bills, in a clear change purse. Her great-grandmother had ushered them through the checkpoint and security with the exactitude of one who tolerated the rules but didn’t respect them. “It gets worse every time,” she’d said to herself as a female corrections officer gently patted up and down her legs and checked around the underwire of her bra.

  They waited with the other prisoners’ families in a rectangular room with small oblong windows near the ceiling. There were dozens of children—all running and jumping around the room, their exuberant shouts made all the louder by the bare concrete floor and walls. Bets stiffened each time one of these children came near them. Erin understood that her great-grandmother didn’t think of Erin as a child any longer. And then she felt a surge of rage that she’d never had the chance to be one of these unruly children waiting to visit their mothers. These children, as lawless as they were, knew what she didn’t, and that knowledge gave them power far beyond their years. She was more a child than they were.

  When the guard called their name, Bets stood and nudged Erin toward the heavily guarded door that led outside to the courtyard. A female guard who looked to be about Callie’s age held the door open with her baton and reminded them that embraces were only allowed at the beginning and end of the visits. The midmorning sun had reached the valley floor and Erin was momentarily blinded by the light, which reflected off every inch of the metal fence and the rolls of razor wire that snaked around the tops of the fences, like ribbon curls on a birthday package. She blinked to clear the tears from her eyes and when she focused again, she found that Deb was standing in front of them. She looked nothing like her picture. She was thin and her skin had a waxy, sallow texture. She wore an oversize denim jumpsuit and her hair had been tightly bound into hundreds of small braids. It was still the color of a ripe olive, but it held none of the sheen that was present in the photographs.

  “Your mother sends her love,” said Bets, leaning in for the briefest of hugs. Erin wondered why Bets lied.

  “How is she?” asked Deb.

  “She’s fine, she’s working.”

  Erin wanted to say “She’s not working. She just didn’t want to come,” but instead, she extended her hand toward Deb. “I’m finally here.”

  Instead of shaking her outstretched hand, her mother clasped it with both her palms and squeezed gently. “I should have insisted that they let you come earlier, when you were smaller.” Her voice was low and the words had a vibration to them, as if they’d been hummed instead of spoken. All around th
em children climbed on their mothers and babies were being cradled. Erin sat next to Deb, but far enough away that their legs didn’t touch.

  In the weeks leading up to this trip, Erin had carefully planned her reaction to seeing her mother. She would be restrained, distant, even a little brisk if necessary. All of these intentions left her when Deb spoke. The vibration in her mother’s voice felt familiar, and almost instantly an energy sprung up between them that obliterated Erin’s hesitation. Deb fired question after question at Erin: Favorites? Turquoise, pearls, Anne of Green Gables, Backstreet Boys, math, linguini, chocolate, Sound of Music. Boys? Tommy Kilpatrick. Skateboards. When the questions stopped, Erin was almost dizzy—it was not often she’d ever been the center of attention.

  Bets coughed, and although Erin couldn’t be sure, she felt that her great-grandmother was clearing a sob from her throat. After that, Bets began to brag about Erin’s accomplishments. She said that Erin’s algebra teacher was convinced that she could be an engineer and that she’d been the only freshman with a speaking role in the musical. They talked about her singing and that her voice coach was sure she’d be able to get a scholarship to Berklee or Juilliard or anyplace she wanted to go. This chitchat continued and then it slid into what her grandmothers always talked about when they ran out of words—the olives, the weather. It was always the same, sound for the sake of not sitting in silence. Erin couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t bear for a moment to be wasted talking about the number of buds per branch.

  “Why did you shoot my father?”

  Deb squinted hard at Erin and then turned her back to her and studied her fingernails.

  “Mom!” Erin raised her voice, and several families turned to look at them. Bets, who sat across the table, shook her head quickly and tried to fill the silence with stories about Frank. Erin looked around the cement slab where the prisoners sat with their families. She saw that most of the women there were young, and her eyes settled on a middle-aged black woman disciplining her son for climbing on the table. Her prison blues were wrinkled and her hair had been flattened, but not styled. She was the sort of woman who would wear a wig if she weren’t in prison. Probably had a different one for every day of the week and three different ones for Sundays. Erin expected the woman to grab the boy and yell, but was surprised to see the woman wordlessly put her hand on the boy’s shoulder and then gently lean in and whisper to him. Erin had been yelled at as a child. Callie, especially, shouted and swatted. Her grandmothers were of a different generation.

  Bets looked at her watch and began to set out the food purchased earlier from the prison store. It was the stuff of convenience—chips, soda, and soggy sandwiches. Erin realized that they were going to move past her question, to ignore her need to understand. Later, when she was older and had read the newspaper accounts, the trial transcript, and talked with her therapist, she realized that even if her mother understood why she’d killed Carl, it was not something she could put into words. But that day, Erin felt like it was deliberate action, a conspiracy to keep her from entering their grown-up world.

  The sandwich Erin ate was tuna fish and the bread was so soggy it fell to pieces. The prison photographer made her way to their table, and the women slid around to one side and put their arms around each other as she gave them a thumbs-up and told them to say “parole.” In the following years, Erin would put together a collection of these photographs tucked into the frame of her mirror at home. None of her smiles went past her cheeks. Bets circled back to Erin’s singing.

  “Have you heard her sing?” she asked Deb.

  Erin’s mother shook her head. “When she was little, but it was nothing but the alphabet and that song about the wheels on the bus.”

  “She placed third as a mezzo-soprano this year at the state competition.”

  “I keep up on things,” said Deb, nodding.

  Erin had sent her mother the ribbon she won. She didn’t know if it was the sort of item they let prisoners keep, but when she sang Com’è bello she thought of her mother and father. She made sense of their story by thinking of it as an opera. In Lucrezia Borgia’s renaissance world, rife with treason, murder, and illegitimate children, the story of a woman killing her husband felt like a minor subplot. She wondered if her mother knew much about opera.

  “Do you know the aria?” she asked Deb.

  She shook her head. The movement of the tight braids gave the gesture more force.

  Bets rushed to speak over Deb, who was fumbling around an excuse. “We never listened to opera until you started singing it. Heck, even Mom never liked the classical stuff, she sang folk songs and then it was all jazz growing up.”

  “Sing it for me?” Deb spoke quietly.

  Erin knew she could pretend not to hear her mother, but she didn’t want to let this opportunity slip by. She needed to show her mother how different they were. How different she was from all the Keller women. She stood.

  She thought of what her coach had told her about Lucrezia. She considered the emotions of a woman singing to a child she had not seen and then she opened her mouth and with a raw intensity and earthy richness, she sang, Com’è bello quale incanto.

  She finished, and there was sporadic clapping and some laughter, as if this audience wasn’t sure what to make of the thin child with hair the color of asphalt singing in a voice that belonged to an older woman, a larger woman.

  Deb wiped away her tears and asked, “What does it mean?”

  Bets translated the first bit before Erin could answer. “Holy Beauty. Child of Nature.”

  “It was lovely. I wish I could have been there.” Her mother reached for her hand and then stopped, deciding instead to tuck a strand of Erin’s hair behind her ear. “Just lovely.”

  A bell rang and all around them visitors gathered their possessions and made a stab at last embraces. Guards were supposed to allow only a quick hug and a kiss, but they turned their eyes from the children clinging to their mothers’ legs and let the women with infants walk with them cradled in their arms right up to the door. Deb’s good-byes were quick and followed the guidelines exactly. She tried to hold on to Erin a bit longer, but she pulled away from her mother after just seconds into her embrace. It was Bets who turned for one last wave as she walked through the door.

  In the car, more than an hour into the drive, Erin asked Bets why she’d changed the subject when she’d finally found the courage to ask Deb about the murder.

  “Why did you take her side, Bets? I have a right to know why she did it.”

  “It isn’t the sort of question you can surprise a woman with.”

  “It wasn’t a surprise. It’s what I’ve wanted to ask her my whole life.”

  “But you know what happened. There’s no hidden complication, no other suspect. Your mother shot your father during an argument. What you need most is to get to know each other again.”

  “I’ve never known her. I don’t even know what Deb does all day in that place.”

  “You mean your mother?” Bets narrowed her eyes. “It’s all quite routine. Get up. Wait. Get dressed. Wait. Eat breakfast. Wait.”

  “She must do something,” Erin insisted.

  “There’s television and the other inmates.”

  “So she has friends?”

  “No. Not exactly. They’re more like—”

  “Frenemies?” She’d learned the word this summer reading Seventeen.

  “Is that what you call it these days?” Bets smiled. “Then yes.”

  Erin was silent for a while. She pushed the car to go faster and was thrilled when Bets didn’t seem to notice they were flying by the other cars. She had been angry the whole day at her mother, about her mother, and now that she was behind the wheel—only the second or third time since she got her permit—she felt the anger slip away, and a sadness that she’d always had overcame her. “I should have asked her about that instead. Asked her about her friends, about what she does with all her time.”

  Bets sounded tired. “She wou
ldn’t have told you. Deb waited nearly ten years to see you. She wanted nothing more than to hear your voice and let you tell her about your life.”

  “Then you can tell me what it’s been like for her.”

  “I can’t. That’s why I brought you today. You need to see it, to hear it in her voice.” Bets leaned her head against the window. “Slow down.”

  Erin eased up on the accelerator but stayed in the carpool lane. “Why won’t Grandma Callie come?”

  “God only knows,” said Bets, closing her eyes. “My daughter has a stone heart.”

  Erin had never thought of Callie as cold. It was Bets who distanced herself from the other women, and this trip had begun to change Erin’s perception of Bets. There was a tiredness about her—because of the strained relationship with her daughter Callie, and the dementia that had taken her husband away from her. Erin wanted to erase some of the distance between Bets and all those she loved. With an open face, she turned to ask Bets about Callie, what she’d been like as a girl, but as she did, she heard her great-grandmother’s snoring. Erin pushed down on the accelerator, turned on the radio, and instead began to wonder what her grandmothers’ lives would have been like if she’d not come to live with them.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Other Side

  The hearing started late. The heat of the room made every second seem like a minute.

  “Why are we waiting?” asked Anna.

  “It’s ten after,” said Bets loud enough for everyone in the room to hear.

  Deb’s lawyer spoke quietly with her and then turned to the grandmothers. “Carl’s mother had an episode of some sort in the waiting area.”

  “Episode?” Erin looked at Deb, who had folded her arms on the table and laid her head down. The few times she’d asked her mother about her father’s family, or even about Carl himself, she’d shut down—turned away from Erin or ended visits abruptly. It was also a difficult subject with the grandmothers. Erin put her hand on her stomach and wondered if her father’s family knew about her pregnancy. At five months she was showing, and today, to draw attention to herself, she wore a tight T-shirt that emphasized the swell of her abdomen.