The Roots of the Olive Tree

by Courtney Miller Santo

  “Still,” Deborah said. She pressed her tongue to her bottom teeth. “How long until you get the test results back?”

  Ms. Holt narrowed her eyes. “Do I have to be worried about this test?”

  At that moment, there was a sharp knock on Ms. Holt’s half-closed office door. Turning around, Deborah saw her mother in the doorway, and then before she could react, Ms. Holt had motioned her into the empty chair across from Deborah.

  “Erin’s in labor,” Callie said.

  Deborah looked at Ms. Holt for permission to leave. “Fix it,” she said, and then waved them out the door. They spoke only courtesies to each other during the hour-long drive back to Kidron. Her mother asked if a particular radio station was okay, Deborah suggested turning on the air-conditioning. They said they hoped Erin’s labor was easy. The late-afternoon sun bore down on her mother’s side of the car. No matter how the visor was adjusted, the sunlight seemed to bounce around the interior of the car, making it difficult to clearly see her mother’s profile. She listened to her sing along quietly to every ballad that played on the radio. There were times when her mother’s voice caught with emotion over one love lyric or another, and Deborah thought about patting her on the leg, or making some physical gesture that would give them both the assurance that happier times were ahead, but she couldn’t bring herself to reach out.

  Bets ran toward them when they stepped off the elevator. “You’ve got to talk some sense into her. She won’t do it and the doctors keep telling her she has to.”

  For reasons that Deborah didn’t fully understand, her daughter had decided that Bets should be her birth coach. Erin claimed it was because Bets had delivered all her children at home without the aid of pain medication, but to Deborah, it was ridiculous to pick a woman who’d made those choices not because she shared Erin’s ideology but because there hadn’t been a proper hospital in Kidron when Bets had her children.

  Callie took both Bets’s hands in hers. “Slow down, Mom. What is going on?”

  Not wanting to wait for an explanation, Deborah sprinted toward the room Anna was pacing in front of. Inside, Erin argued with her doctor, a small Korean woman, who shouted down her daughter’s objections by repeating the phrase “the baby’s in distress.”

  “I’m not having a C-section,” Erin said, pushing away a metal tray next to her bed. Her thick black hair was damp with perspiration, and her heavy bangs were clumped along her forehead in small sections like badly applied mascara.

  “At least not yet,” Deborah said, stepping between her daughter and the doctor.

  “Mom!” Erin said, and Deborah thought she started to cry, or maybe she had already been crying. Either way her soft gray eyes darkened to the color of ash, and she held her hand out.

  For the first time since she’d left Chowchilla, Deborah felt like she had a purpose. She thought about how she’d had to carry herself all those years in prison so that the other women knew to leave her alone. She straightened her shoulders and jutted out her chin and then narrowed her eyes at the doctor. “You will give us five minutes to discuss our options. We’re going to ask you questions and you are going to answer them, without prejudice. My daughter doesn’t want medication, and she doesn’t want the baby cut out of her.”

  “Yes,” Erin echoed. “No cutting.”

  Before stepping away, the doctor explained that while monitoring Erin’s contractions, the nurse had noticed a troubling pattern. The doctor held out a receipt-size slip of paper and pointed at it. “You see here that with each contraction the fetal heart tones dip below the baseline, and then are taking a long time to return to normal.”

  Deborah wasn’t sure she understood, but she nodded to the doctor to continue. Behind her Erin began to hum as a contraction overtook her.

  “She’s contracting fairly regularly, about every three minutes, and she’s dilated to five centimeters. But this pattern, it worries me.” The doctor looked around the room and then motioned to Deborah to move closer. She lowered her voice. “It can mean the cord is wrapped around the body of the baby.”

  “The neck?” Deborah asked, darting her eyes back to Erin, who had turned on her side after the contraction passed.

  “No, no, no. But the torso or the legs or most often the shoulder and the chest, like a sash. It puts stress on the baby. It’s a risk, and one we can avoid if we do a C-section. We get in, we get the baby, we get out.”

  “Can we have our time now?” Deborah asked the doctor.

  “Time. I need to call the anesthesiologist if we’re going to do this, and since he lives in Redding, it’ll be at least an hour until he’s here. If the baby’s heart tones continue to be distressed, we’ll be doing the surgery without anesthesia.”

  “Just a few minutes?”

  A nurse sidled up to the doctor and spoke in low tones, passing along another strip of paper. They looked at it together, and then with a curt nod of her head, the doctor left the room.

  At the door of the room, Anna talked with Bets and Callie. They seemed to be waiting for Erin to invite them in. In the hospital bed, Erin sat with her knees up, and her face was flushed and pale at the same time. Deborah motioned the other women in and they gathered around Erin, each offering advice or words of support.

  “Try the next contractions on your hands and knees,” Bets said. “Got through the hardest part of labor with two of my boys that way.”

  “Poor baby,” Callie said, rubbing Erin’s back. “It’ll all be over soon and we’ll have our little girl here.”

  Anna said, “Do you know how to make God laugh?”

  Reflexively, Deborah answered, “Make a plan.”

  With some difficulty, Erin changed positions and then Deborah and Callie stationed themselves on either side of the bed. Her humming grew louder, the pitch rising with the intensity of the contraction and at the peak she let out a musical chirp.

  “It’s not so bad,” Erin said, leaning forward onto her arms and pushing her head against the mattress. “Grandma, tell the doctor I can do this. I can get my baby out. I really can.”

  Callie tucked Erin’s hair behind her ears. “You don’t have to.”

  “She wants to,” Deborah said from the other side of the bed.

  “You’re in no position to say anything about this,” Callie said.

  “I’m her mother,” Deborah said, the words faltering as they left her mouth. “I am,” she said with more force when she saw that Anna and Bets were shaking their heads.

  “This is not the time or the place,” Bets said, stepping forward and kneeling in front of the bed so that she looked Erin right in the eyes. “Sometimes the most courageous acts are ones of submission.”

  “There are other options,” Deborah said. “There have to be.”

  Erin banged her head rhythmically on the mattress. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  Anna rapped sharply on the wooden door. “Stop all your nonsense,” she said. At once the women in the room turned to her. She trembled like a leaf about to be blown from a branch. “What is the baby telling you? Listen.”

  Erin dropped to her side and curled herself around her stomach. She clenched her eyes shut and covered her ears with her palms. Both Callie and Deborah stepped back from the bed, leaving a buffer of emptiness around the girl.

  They waited.

  The doctor came to the door of the room. She waited.

  An image of a chain of paper dolls cut so that the space between each joined arm created a heart came into Deborah’s mind. After a moment that felt like a day, Erin started her humming again. When the contraction had passed, she looked up at the doctor. “We’re going to do this.”

  Over the next few hours, the nurses fluttered around Erin with grim faces. They tore off strips of paper from the fetal monitor and took them back and forth on their charts. The doctor inserted a tube to pump fluid into the uterus, explaining that it would relieve some of the pressure of the umbilical cord, if it were indeed wrapped around the bab
y’s body. Bets gave charge of coaching to Callie and took Anna to get coffee. Deborah worked to make sure her daughter had a peaceful labor. She kept the lights dimmed and the music volume adjusted and unpacked Erin’s overnight bag into the small chest of drawers in the room. Unpacking the baby’s first outfit, Deborah realized that her daughter didn’t think she was having a girl. The small layette was white with a blue ribbon threaded around the collar.

  “This is pretty,” she said to her mother, holding the outfit up. Another contraction hit and Callie leaned over her granddaughter as she pushed and smoothed her hair. “You are the strongest woman I know.”

  “So you don’t think it’s a girl?” Deborah couldn’t help asking after the contraction had passed.

  Erin groaned and then said something in Italian that to Deborah’s ears sounded like “Shut the hell up.”

  “I think she’s ready to push,” Callie said.

  Their complete dismissal of her made Deborah feel useless. She folded the clothing and slipped out into the hall to look for the doctor and the rest of her family. Anna put a hand on her shoulder before going into the room, and Deborah understood that it was her great-grandmother’s way of forgiving her for all that had happened between them.

  Two nurses entered the room rolling a cart affixed with a clear bassinette and an assortment of hospital equipment. It reminded Deborah of the media carts she’d transported to and from the prison library. The doctor nodded at them as she entered and said to Erin, “Everything is going to be just fine. You keep pushing. The baby’s heart rates are no worse than they’ve been, and we’ve got our neonatal specialist on his way in. Just in case.”

  Bets put her arm around Deborah, and they watched from the doorway. “You were right to stand up for her,” she said.

  “One last big push,” one of the nurses said to Erin.

  Her daughter’s scream as the baby emerged was not altogether different from some of the notes she held when she sang her arias. The musicality of her voice seemed to hold the room in a spell for a moment, and then chaos erupted.

  “Heart rate dropped,” said the nurse who’d been standing by the portable bassinette.

  “Come on, come on, come on,” the doctor said, pulling the baby out and clamping the umbilical cord.

  “You did really, really, well,” Callie said to Erin.

  “It’s a boy,” Anna said.

  “Is he okay? What are you doing?” Erin said. She lay back on the hospital bed, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “It’s a boy,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Coming and Going

  Except for Callie, they’d been made to wait outside Erin’s room once the baby had been delivered. They looked at the doors. The clock ticked, and again Deborah became aware of time. She wanted to step outside and breathe in air that wasn’t institutionalized. It was May, and that meant all of Kidron would smell faintly of olive blossoms, and the pollen from the bunchgrass would tickle the back of her throat. She wanted to be on better terms with her mother so she could ask her to go home and make mashed potatoes and roasted beets. The potatoes in prison had been instant and the beets canned. She felt time speeding up again, and she tried to contain these thoughts and those about her daughter before the clock ticked again.

  It was not like the soaps that Deborah had watched in prison. No doctor, no nurse, no attractive person in fitted scrubs burst through the door to rip off a surgical mask and exclaim that the baby was alive. Instead nearly an hour later, Callie stepped through the large double doors and told them the baby was fine, that Erin was fine, and that everyone needed sleep.

  “Thank God,” Deborah said. “Can I see her? Can I see my grandson?”

  “You realize,” Callie said, taking a step toward Deborah, “that this is all your fault?”

  “No,” Deborah said. “I was just doing what a mother—”

  “But you’re not her mother. She has Anna, who held her hand on the first day of school, and Bets, who taught her to ride a bike, and me. Do you know what I did for your daughter?”

  “It isn’t my fault,” Deborah said, looking behind her for support. Bets slumped awkwardly in the plastic waiting chair and Anna turned her bright eyes on them both.

  “Have it out and get it over,” Anna said. “Set it on fire and see what’s left after it burns. This back and forth is going to destroy us all and we’ll be right back where we were.”

  Her mother hardly waited for Anna to finish speaking. “It is your fault. You shot her daddy. Do you understand that? All of this is because of you. She had no chance of getting married and living happily ever after. You did this to her. And then you couldn’t leave well enough alone and let the doctor do what was needed. You decided to take her side now? Why now?”

  Deborah was at a loss for words. She looked desperately for help, for kind eyes. The other people in the waiting room, including Bets, had their heads down. She looked at her mother. She was damp and her clothing wrinkled. Her roots needed to be touched up and her hair lay flat against one side of her head, from leaning in close to Erin to coach her through childbirth. For once, her eyes seemed to be clear and focused, but her hands were shaking.

  Deborah closed the remaining distance between them. She spoke forcefully, nearly spit the words out at her mother. “It turned out okay. What’s wrong with you? That you had to come out and find a way to make it all my fault? I spent my whole childhood trying to make you see me, see that all that was wrong with you, I wasn’t one of those things. You’re the one who’s broken. You’re crippled and not just because of your leg.”

  “Take responsibility. Just admit that you are at fault for some damn thing in your life. Do you see me limping around, begging for sympathy? Playing people because I was dealt a shitty hand?” Her mother grabbed her by the shoulders and started shaking her. “Why are you so selfish? Where did I go wrong with you?”

  Deborah shoved her mother with enough force that Callie fell backward onto the linoleum floor, scattering several of the plastic chairs. A man who’d been in the waiting area since they’d come in with Erin yelled at them to knock it off. Deborah advanced on her mother, who had trouble standing back up because of her leg. She could have helped her mother up, but Callie scuttled away when she offered her hand. Deborah kicked at her mother, who screamed, and the man who’d yelled at them stepped between them. Deborah screamed and grabbed blindly for something to throw. Picking up one of the waiting chairs, she flung it across the room into the portable stand with a coffee urn sitting on it.

  The crash seemed to awaken the rest of the hospital.

  A security guard stepped off the elevator and lumbered toward them. Bets wrapped both her arms tightly around Deborah and whispered “shhhh, shhhh, shhhh” into the crown of her head. The man helped Callie up, settled her into a chair, and immediately a nurse knelt next to her, asking if she had any pain.

  Deborah struggled against Bets. The old woman was not as strong as she’d been and she easily broke free and moved toward her mother. “I’m hurting. What about me?”

  The security guard caught one of her flailing arms and twisted it behind her back. In a moment he’d secured her with plastic cinch cuffs. “I’m taking her outside,” he said to nobody and everybody. Then he whispered into her ear, “Calm the fuck down. What are you trying to do causing a big scene like this? What are you thinking, messing up my hospital like that?”

  She relaxed against his grip and nearly fell. She felt the energy drain out of her body and into the linoleum of the hospital, which smelled of the same industrial supply wax they’d used in Chowchilla.

  Deborah and the security officer watched the sunrise on the bench in front of the hospital’s circular driveway. Because the sun came up behind the northern Sierra Nevadas, the arrival of the sun always happened first in shadow. It was a cloudless day, and the sky didn’t give them much of a show, transitioning from murky blue to orangey yellow with little gradation.

  “Should be
here any minute,” the guard said.

  They were waiting on the Kidron Police Department to send an officer out to take down a report of what had happened. The hospital wanted a record of the events so that it could file an insurance claim on the damage to the waiting room. “I don’t think my mom will press charges,” Deborah said, as much to herself as anyone.

  The squad car’s tires rubbed against the concrete curb with a squeaky wail as the officer pulled up. A small peach of a man in a brown uniform stepped out of the car. He was round and blond, closer to fifty than thirty, but still solidly middle-aged. His hair had a tinge of pink to it, which made Deborah think he could catch fire at any moment. His eyes were a muddy brown, and he had small Kewpie doll lips. He didn’t look at her, but glad-handed the security guard.

  They greeted each other with familiarity, and the guard explained the fight that had taken place a few hours earlier. When he questioned her, the officer stood a distance from Deborah. She was taller than him by half a foot, and she felt he was trying to maintain a sense of superiority over her. She tried to explain to him that they’d all been tired and overwhelmed by the emotional experience of the delivery. “I’m sure my mom will tell you it wasn’t a big deal. Not big enough for these,” Deborah said, lifting her hands as best she could. They’d remained tightly cuffed behind her back.

  The small officer rocked back and forth on his heels. “You say you’re on parole?”

  Deborah felt her stomach heave. She nodded, trying to make herself appear smaller by dipping her knees and sagging her shoulders.

  “Hmmm.” He frowned and made note in a skinny notebook he pulled from his back pocket. “Lemme go see how much damage you’ve done.” The officer hitched up his pants and entered the hospital.

  “What were you in jail for?” the security guard asked.

  “I killed my husband.”

  The guard slid away from her on the bench.

  “Shot him with a gun I stole from my grandfather.”

  “You don’t sound sorry about it,” the guard said.