The Roots of the Olive Tree

by Courtney Miller Santo

  “You ready to tell me about the hearing? All you wanted to do last night was sleep.”

  Deborah wasn’t ready to talk to LaJavia about her freedom. “I got to get out of here.”

  The pain in her voice silenced the girl, and they both sat on their bunks, waiting for the morning guard to come and let them out for breakfast. She needed to be social, got to talk with Nella Santos about getting a present made for LaJavia. The women in Chowchilla had learned to improvise. Nella, an artist, made her own supplies.

  A few days later, Nella undid the padlock on her locker and pulled out an eight-by-ten piece of homemade paper. She made her own paper by shredding the cheap greeting card envelopes and soaking them in the sink. Then she spread the pulp over the vent to dry. She was meticulous about it, and her paper was indistinguishable from the fancy sort that real artists used.

  “I had to improvise a little—not knowing what LaJavia’s kid actually looked like.”

  “Were you here when she lost him?” Deborah asked.

  “In a different block, but we all heard about it. Some of us said she’d have a reason to sue if she wanted, but I guess it never came to that.”

  “I still can’t believe that boyfriend of hers wanted conjugal visits. He’s in a chair,” Deborah said.

  Less than a year ago, LaJavia had gotten knocked up by Calvin, that boyfriend that she’d tried to kill. His family had petitioned to get custody when she gave birth, and LaJavia used to say she felt like an incubator. “She took it real hard when he died, said that God was punishing her.”

  “I know that. When you’re in here, it’s hard to think you don’t deserve every shitty gift the fates give you,” Nella said, handing over the portrait. “I guess most babies look alike, huh?”

  “Looks like a boy, all right. I just wonder if he looks too old,” Deborah said. She didn’t know much about watercolors, but she remembered from painting with Erin when she was a child that if you didn’t have the right paper, the paint just rolled off. She traced her finger along the ridges and wells in the paper where the paint had settled. The baby’s eyes were closed.

  “It’s a baby. That’s how babies look.” Nella was sorting through the canteen order.

  Deborah shook her head. “I wish she had a picture. I guess you’ve seen what her daughter looks like, though. The one comes on visiting days.”

  “Yeah, but she’s what, almost twelve? I just sort of used the shape of LaJavia’s eyes and then gave the baby a lot of curly hair, so you know he’s black.”

  Deborah saw that Nella’s teeth were nearly all rotten—a sure sign of meth use. She knew the girl had run off her own family by stealing from them, too. It was why she needed to earn canteen money. Bets made sure that Deborah had plenty of canteen money and sent quarterly packages full up with stuff. She held the portrait close to her chest.

  When she got back to her cell, Deborah borrowed a pencil from one of her bunkies and wrote a note to LaJavia on the back of the painting.

  “Nella done a good job for you. Looks just like LaJavia’s kid,” said a new bunkie, who’d got put in their cell a week earlier. She was black and didn’t think much of Deborah’s relationship with LaJavia. Told them both that what LaJavia needed was a prison husband, not a prison mother.

  “Nella’s a fucking junkie,” Deborah said, knowing this new bunkmate was also in for selling meth.

  The girl backed away from Deborah, muttering under her breath. She could be trouble, Deborah thought. She considered adding a warning to the note she’d left for LaJavia, but instead, she slid the picture into a large envelope and put it on LaJavia’s bunk. In her small, tight handwriting, she’d written, “Don’t open until I’m sprung.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Fools

  The simple pleasure of sitting at the kitchen table eating dinner together brought Deborah immeasurable joy. After eating, she usually sat on the porch and sometimes was joined by Anna, Bobo nipping at her heels, and Bets. Her daughter preferred to watch some televised singing competition and her mother disappeared with the phone into her bedroom. Glancing across the sweeping view, she saw that the olive trees looked to be on the verge of flowering.

  “I was thinking about throwing Erin a surprise party,” she said one night in late March.

  “For the baby?” Bets asked.

  “No. It’s her birthday on Wednesday,” Anna said.

  “It snuck up on me, too,” Deborah said. The last few days that she’d been home had moved by with incredible speed. Even the hours she spent working with her mother at the store seemed to be no more than minutes.

  “She doesn’t like big to-dos,” Bets said. “All those pranks when she was in school—”

  “There wouldn’t be pranks,” Deborah said quickly, wanting to make sure she stayed in charge. “Just cake and maybe a few friends of hers from high school who live around here.”

  Anna and Bets exchanged a sour look. “I’m not sure who she’d want to see. And she’s never been good with surprises. You remember the year she turned twelve and that Parker boy—”

  “You know I don’t remember any of this,” Deborah said, convinced that Bets had been trying to hurt her feelings.

  Bets laid a hand on her knee. “We just want what’s best for her, same as you.”

  “It’s been so long since I’ve been able to give her anything,” Deborah said, rocking a little faster in her chair.

  “When you were with her, you were a good mother,” Anna said. Her chair moved back and forth so slowly, Deborah couldn’t be sure if she was moving it or the wind.

  After a while, Erin came to the screen door. She was sniffling and her cheeks were tear-stained. “That show is all schmaltz, but it still gets to me. They had to pick ballads to sing tonight.”

  Deborah and the other women murmured their agreement of the difficulty of listening to love songs. “Come, sit with us.”

  Bets, who’d been humming a few bars of “Always,” broke off and began talking about the night Erin was born. They’d all thought Deborah was pranking them when she called from the boardinghouse to say she was in labor. Callie took over telling the story. “Hand to God I thought it was an April Fools’ Day joke,” said Callie. Deborah remembered her family’s inaction when she told them about her water breaking. Carl had been too drunk to wake up. She’d lain next to him, feeling the contractions strengthen and become more regular as the hours from midnight to dawn passed.

  Callie became the hero of the story, telling Erin how she had run every stop sign and the one red light in town to get her to the hospital in time. Deborah didn’t want to hear this, didn’t want to have her mother be praised. It only reminded Deborah of how her mother couldn’t stand to be alone in the same room with her. How she hadn’t visited Chowchilla one time since she’d been locked up, and how on all of the birthday and Christmas cards she received, Bets had obviously signed her mother’s name, writing “All my love, Mother” in a script too close to her own. As Callie spoke, Erin had crept onto the porch and was now sitting with rapt attention at her great-grandmother’s feet. The dog curled itself against her hip. It was clear to Deborah that this was a story her daughter hadn’t heard before.

  “Where was Daddy?” Erin asked.

  There was a long silence. Anna coughed and the creak of the rocking chairs filled the porch. “He was at a rodeo,” Deborah said. “Made it to town that afternoon. I wouldn’t let anyone else hold you until he got there.”

  “I’d forgotten that,” Anna said. “You were quite persistent, too, got outta bed and yelled at that nurse for reaching to pick Erin up.”

  The party had been a surprise, though Anna had been right about Erin not wanting to see old acquaintances. Those who’d remained in Kidron had married young and were either in the midst of bitter divorces or happily pregnant with their third or fourth child.

  Deborah needed her daughter’s expression to say: I feel loved and look how many people care about me. Instead, she realized, watching her daugh
ter’s eyes, that what her expression held most of all was bewilderment. She’d made the mistake so many mothers make of thinking that what they want is what their daughters need.

  Most of the presents were baby-related items and a few albums and sheet music from those girls who’d been in choir with Erin. The only personal gift had come from a quiet man, who’d married one of the choir girls. In high school, he’d been charged with making videos of all the performances, and he and his wife had spliced together all of Erin’s solos and put them on a single DVD for her.

  “We made one of my singing when we first got pregnant. I thought it would be fun to show the kids how me and their father met. Of course, they hate watching it. They tell me it’s boring.”

  The husband grabbed his wife around the waist. “It’s not boring.”

  After everyone had left, the women gathered around the table in the kitchen. Deborah’s mother cut herself another slice of the enormous sheet cake. “Who’s going to clean this place up?” Callie asked.

  “Not me,” Erin said, leaning back from the table and rolling down the stretchy fabric of the maternity jeans she wore. “I’m partied out.”

  “Sorry about that,” Deborah said to her daughter. “I guess it wasn’t what you wanted.”

  “It was lovely, just lovely,” she said, picking at the icing on the leftover cake.

  “Have another piece,” she urged. “There’s so much left over.” Erin hadn’t eaten much of the cake. “You sure you’re not hungry? What about you, Grandma?”

  Bets pushed the Happy Birthday paper plate toward the center of the table. “When you get as old as I am, nothing tastes good for more than a bite. I used to love steak. Thought there was nothing better than a well-aged filet, but then I turned eighty and all my brain says when I eat is ‘not this old thing again.’ Even took to trying exotic food, but it’s the same. No pleasure in it anymore.”

  Anna laughed. “I tried switching to spicy food when that happened to me, but it tore up my insides pretty bad.”

  “Isn’t that something,” Deborah said. She turned to her daughter and mouthed, “What’s wrong?”

  Erin shook her head. “We’ve just had a long day and the burger I ate at lunch is giving me indigestion.”

  Idle chatter started and stopped among the women, and for the first time in decades, Deborah had clarity. Looking at the women around her, she could see her past, present, and future. She had so much more life in front of her. Forty-two wasn’t that old. She could still start a family, go to college, start her own business. Why did being in this damned home make her feel like her life was over? It was one problem when she was behind bars and had no choices, no opportunity to keep growing. But not now; the world should be wide open to her.

  Anna excused herself to use the bathroom and Callie looked up from her third slice of cake. She slowly licked the pink and blue frosting from her fork while her glazed eyes looked at a spot above Deborah’s head. The emptiness in her gaze seemed to enter the room itself.

  “I should check on Anna,” Bets said.

  “Bets is depressed,” Erin said when her great-grandmother had crossed the threshold of the kitchen.

  “Has she done anything about it?” Deborah glanced toward her own mother, to see if she was listening to any part of their conversation.

  “You know how she is. Won’t even take an aspirin for a headache. It has to do with Frank, you know.”

  “Frank’s a bastard,” Deborah said. She and her grandfather had never gotten along. “You’ve all been building him up in your minds, ever since he started losing his. But I remember him from before, when he was mean to me just because my presence meant his little girl wasn’t little anymore.”

  “Nobody else seems to think that,” Erin said. “It’s more than that. You haven’t been around. You haven’t seen the way he is in the nursing home. He’s different.”

  Deborah didn’t want to talk about her grandfather. “Did you at least enjoy the party? A lot of work went into it.”

  “Don’t you mean to say you put a lot of work into it?” Erin asked. Her daughter had inherited her directness from Bets.

  Callie snorted. “Never could fool her,” she said, still looking above their heads.

  Deborah ignored her mother. She lowered her voice and said to her daughter, “You talk to the father of your baby yet? Tell him when the due date is? Invite him out for the birth?”

  “The party sucked,” Erin said. She picked up what was left of the cake and dumped it in the trash can before leaving the kitchen.

  “She never thought she was really coming back here,” Callie said from the end of the table. “I used to be like that, and yet here we both are, stuck in Hill House with the kind of people we can never escape.”

  “You have a real problem, Mom. Just keep your mouth shut.”

  “There’s the little girl I know. Do you know you were always mean? Even as a child. If your feelings got hurt, you’d lash out at people. One time, you couldn’t have been more than eight, you pushed your brother down the stairs because I’d told him I liked a drawing he’d done of the olive trees. Broke his arm in two places. For two days you stubbornly insisted that he’d fallen on his own, even though we all saw it happen. And then, when you finally admitted it, you told me it was my fault for not loving you enough—”

  “Shut up. Shut the fuck up.” Deborah stood up and pushed at the table until it pinned her mother to her seat. “You are as good as a damned junkie. Do you hear me? A junkie. You’ve always been a junkie. Those pills—they let you escape the hard stuff around you and leave you with what? Nothing.”

  “I can’t breathe,” her mother said, making a dramatic show of pushing back against the table.

  The commotion drew all the women back into the kitchen. In a moment, Bets had unpinned Callie from the table and Erin had wrapped both arms around Deborah and started pulling her into the living room. Anna repeated the Lord’s Prayer in a thin, reedy voice.

  “You never loved me,” Deborah shouted toward her mother as Erin wrestled her onto the couch. “Nobody has ever loved me.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Mother and Child

  Nobody ever spoke directly about the fight. For the rest of April, everyone made an effort with Deborah. The house was icy with politeness. She told herself that Erin was the only one who mattered. In a normal world, Bets and Anna would have already passed on, their funerals would have been well attended and their memories frozen by banality. Never speak ill of the dead. If that were only true, then this schism with her mother wouldn’t matter. Lots of women hated their mothers. She just didn’t want Erin to be one of them.

  She tried to give advice. When Erin winced in discomfort, she said, “Make sure you’re sleeping on your side. It’ll help with the back pain during the day.”

  Watching her daughter write out her birthing plan, Deborah shared with Erin her own birth story. Explaining that the women in their family had an easy time of it. “It goes quick for us, and none of the kids have gotten stuck. With you, they barely had time to give me the pain meds. It was just a few quick pushes, and there you were, a long, skinny baby, head not even a little deformed from the birth canal, and a little rosebud mouth.”

  Silence.

  “You mewed. It was sort of a joke with the nurses because your cry was so small and seemed to say ‘I hate to inconvenience anyone, but I’m hungry.’ ”

  Erin looked at her through the bangs she was growing out. “I’m not doing meds. It’s bad for the baby.”

  As they closed in on the baby’s due date, everyone began to tread a little lighter in the house. Ears listened for any sound that Erin was in labor. Deborah watched her daughter sleep in the afternoons on the worn couch in the living room. Sometimes, when she woke up, she seemed to forget the unhappiness between everyone and her face was full of joy.

  “You know,” Deborah said one late afternoon in May when she came in from working at the Pit Stop, “I did all this planning and wor
rying about being pregnant and giving birth, but it never occurred to me to visualize what my life would be like when you were actually here. Maybe it is because I was so young.”

  “It’s not just you,” Bets said. “Every woman I know makes that mistake with her first.”

  “And then we vow to never do it again,” Anna said, the corners of her eyes crinkling.

  Callie came through the front door, leaning heavily on her good leg. “Helluva day,” she said. They listened as she stomped through to the kitchen and ran the faucet. Deborah guessed she needed water to wash down the handful of pills she’d just swallowed.

  Whatever playfulness had been in the room evaporated, and each of the women turned back to what had been occupying their interest. Deborah watched her daughter watch the singing competition and listened to her mother’s giggly voice as she spoke to that doctor in Pennsylvania.

  The next visit with Ms. Holt did not go well. Deborah felt ambushed, first by the random drug test and second by the parole officer’s suggestion. “I think you and your mom need to have a face-to-face.”

  “Did I tell you my mom’s a junkie?”

  Ms. Holt pursed her lips. “I understand she has a prescription for Vicodin. Same as your prescription for Paxil.”

  “I didn’t get it when I was a kid. You know, it took being in prison, where I saw junkies day in and day out. The pill poppers were the worst.”

  “Don’t be so hard on her. Deborah, I think you need to understand the harder you are on people, the more they’re going to expect out of you. And meeting expectations, that’s something your whole family needs a lesson in.”