The Roots of the Olive Tree

by Courtney Miller Santo

  Callie slid her arm around Dr. Hashmi’s waist and walked up the steps. Leaning on him, her limp was less pronounced, and Elizabeth watched her daughter’s shoulders relax as they walked in the house together.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Disclosure

  When Dr. Hashmi and Callie entered the living room, there was silence for an uncomfortably long time. Then a flurry of activity erupted; cookies were brought from the kitchen, tea offered, and the women settled themselves around the doctor, who’d brought a large bag and a computer with him.

  “I’m going to make you all famous,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “Do you know what makes us old?”

  “Time,” Elizabeth said.

  “Yes, but no,” the doctor said.

  Callie jumped in with the answer he wanted. “Deterioration.”

  He smiled at her, and Elizabeth could see that his interest in her daughter went beyond scientific curiosity. When Dr. Hashmi had first come to talk with them, he’d spent many hours describing the different effects of aging. His interest was in longevity genes. Or rather, he believed that aging was controlled by genetics. He now unfolded an easel and then pulled several large poster boards out of his bag.

  He set the first one on the stand with a flourish. Bobo charged the tripod, and as the doctor reached to steady his poster board and Anna called the dog to her lap, Elizabeth wondered if he knew that the picture, with its row upon row of colored bars, meant nothing to them. He pointed to a small section near the last third of the board. “This is the Anna mutation.” He circled it repeatedly with his pointer. “You all have it.”

  Callie clapped. Elizabeth, along with the rest of her family, was silent. Callie was the first to venture a question. “What does it mean? This mutation?”

  “Everything,” he said. “You are aging environmentally, but not genetically.”

  “But what does it mean?” Anna asked. She was shaking a bit and Elizabeth reached across the table to hold her hand.

  “Stay out of the sun, eat right, keep exercising, and you could be the first to make it to a hundred and fifty,” said the doctor.

  “I don’t want to live forever,” Elizabeth said.

  “Well you probably won’t,” said Dr. Hashmi. Elizabeth imagined that the weight of their earlier conversation settled into his shoulder, and he shook his head as he spoke. “I was just trying to say that in ideal circumstances someone with this genetic mutation, who avoided all environmentally degrading substances, could potentially not age. You”—he looked at everyone in the room—“have all been exposed to—”

  “—the world,” Erin said, finishing his sentence. She held her baby close, almost shielding him from Dr. Hashmi.

  “The remarkable thing about this mutation is that it is only present in women, and a daughter can only inherit the mutation if her mother has it. So little baby Keller will have a normal life span, but any daughters you have could claim immortality. Especially now, because we know.”

  He reached for a cookie and took a long drink of his tea. Low conversations started and then stopped just as suddenly as each of the women thought about Dr. Hashmi’s pronouncement. Elizabeth clenched her fists. She couldn’t look at her daughter or her mother, who she knew felt differently than she did. Erin grinned like one of those contests on the reality shows she watched.

  Anna was first to address the group, the first to open up the discussion with question after question about the mutation, where it had come from and what Dr. Hashmi and his team wanted to study.

  “It would have come from Anna’s mother, and quite possibly from her mother’s mother and so on. We know this is not a recent mutation, but one that happened hundreds of years earlier,” Dr. Hashmi said, pulling out more posters to point at. Elizabeth realized, listening to them talk, that Anna hadn’t owned up to knowing Mims wasn’t her mother.

  Elizabeth cleared her throat. “The mutation didn’t come from Mims.”

  “Of course it did,” Callie said. “Mom, you just have to follow the logic. I got it from you, you got it from Anna, and Anna got it from her mother, Mims.”

  “No,” Elizabeth said.

  The dog pawed at Anna’s chest and licked her cheek. She pushed him down and looked at her daughter. “It doesn’t matter, does it? We can’t know for sure.”

  Dr. Hashmi had no trouble following the conversation. It was almost as if he’d anticipated this turn. “There are some unusual markers in your DNA, for someone of western European descent,” he said.

  “What about aborigines?” Elizabeth asked. “Would our DNA make more sense if Anna weren’t Irish?”

  “Papa was Irish,” Anna said.

  “What are you saying?” Callie asked. She turned to the doctor. “Amrit, what are they talking about? Is this the information you wouldn’t tell me? Is this why you told me to ask my mother about her secrets?”

  Elizabeth looked at Dr. Hashmi, imploring him not to give away the other secret. Then she turned to Anna, “Do you know this, Mom? Do you know that Mims isn’t your mother?”

  Anna smiled. “Sometimes tall tales have a bit of truth to them. Was it your uncle Wealthy who told you? I knew and I didn’t know.” She closed her eyes and leaned back into her chair. Erin and Callie whispered furiously to Dr. Hashmi, asking him for verification and more.

  Elizabeth touched Anna’s arm. “It’s your story to tell.”

  “Then get me something a bit stronger than tea to drink,” she said, setting Bobo on the ground. The dog sniffed at her feet and then trotted over to his bed and settled into sleep.

  Erin went to the linen closet, where they kept a bottle of scotch wrapped in the winter sheets. When she returned, she poured a little in everyone’s tea glass except for the doctor, who refused.

  Anna told them her story. She told them how much she’d hated her father for taking her, but how Mims made it hurt less by loving her so much. She described the image she held in her mind of her mother—a tall woman wearing a dust-covered handkerchief over her hair. “I try very hard at night when I fall asleep to see her face, but nothing is there. I think that her eyes must have been brown and that her nose must have been like mine.” Anna reached up and ran her fingers along her own face. She cupped her full cheeks and tapped her finger against her broad triangular nose. Her bottom lip was much larger than her top, and at times, when she relaxed her face, it looked like she was pouting.

  During the secret telling, Dr. Hashmi sat on his hands. Elizabeth thought he looked like a man sitting on too narrow of a seat, and at every pause in Anna’s story, he moved his lips, as if he were about to speak. Finally, when Anna had settled back into her chair and Callie and Erin had exhausted their questions, the doctor stood up and paced the room. “There’s a chance that your mother could still be living.”

  Anna shook her head. “That would take a miracle.”

  “But don’t you want to find out?” Erin came over to Anna and knelt beside her chair. She’d come to the same conclusion as the doctor; Elizabeth could see it in her eyes. She’d always been hopeful, willing to believe that the best was waiting to be found. It was what had driven her to get her mother released, and Elizabeth knew that her great-granddaughter now had a new quest.

  “I, I don’t know enough about her,” Anna said.

  Elizabeth thought about all that Wealthy had told her more than sixty years earlier. “Your brother said that she wasn’t more than fourteen when she had you. Wealthy said that she was hired to work for your parents from the orphanage and they didn’t keep girls past that age. She was pregnant the next year.”

  “Still, she couldn’t be alive. Nobody lives to be older than a hundred and twenty.”

  “She’d be a hundred twenty-eight,” said Erin. “Give or take a year.”

  “That’s an impossible age,” Elizabeth said, considering what the weight of another thirty years would do to her mind.

  “It is not impossible,” said Dr. Hashmi, placing his hand possessively over Anna’s.r />
  “It is,” said Elizabeth, standing and then sitting quickly. For the first time, she’d seen a glimpse of ego in the doctor’s mannerisms.

  “I think. No, we think Anna, even with all the environmental aging, still has another thirty years left.” Dr. Hashmi spoke so quickly he missed the nonverbal conversation that was happening among the women.

  “What else did my brother tell you?” asked Anna.

  Elizabeth looked away from her mother. “Mostly I know what I know from Mims.”

  “That’s a long time to keep this to yourself.” Anna’s tone had changed from friendly to parental, and Elizabeth felt as she had as a girl when she’d been caught lying about having done her chores.

  Callie came and stood between Anna and Elizabeth, as if in anticipation of refereeing their fight. “We could go to Australia. Try to find out. It might be a goose chase but—”

  “We have to go,” said Dr. Hashmi. “Or rather I have to go. If she is alive, or if there are other relatives with the mutation.”

  Elizabeth ignored her daughter and the doctor. “She didn’t know how much you remembered and she didn’t want to make you unhappy. Wealthy felt the same way. If you knew, why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Father told me that if I was sure I didn’t belong to the family that he’d send me back to Australia. He told me it was a dream and that Mims was my mother.”

  Erin immediately took Anna’s side. “You didn’t believe him,” she urged.

  “How could I? The memory of him ripping me from her arms was too real to be a dream. I could smell her, I tasted her tears.”

  “And you never asked Mims?” Erin said softly.

  “I was afraid she’d stop loving me. So I let Mims be my mother.”

  Dr. Hashmi opened his small laptop computer and began typing furiously. “Where did you say your parents were from? What part of Australia again?”

  “You know this,” Elizabeth said, suspicious of how much of this had been staged. She peered over the doctor’s shoulder. “Brisbane.”

  He scrolled through page after page of records. “We keep a record of anyone who claims to be older than a hundred ten. There are more than you’d think, but then the world has more than six billion people on it. You get reports like this one from a village in Somali. A pair of women claiming to be mother and daughter, but no one knows which is which and they’re so old no one in the village remembers them as anything but crones. They think they are a hundred twenty and a hundred and six, but we don’t know.”

  He highlighted a row of records and then clicked. They all opened quickly, filling up the screen of the tiny machine. “Twenty-one unconfirmed supercentenarians in Australia. And, oh my, eighteen are women.”

  “So?” asked Callie.

  “That’s much too high,” he said.

  “What?” asked Erin.

  Dr. Hashmi sat next to her with the computer on his lap. “It’s typical to have more older women than men. Women take better care of themselves; they don’t fight in wars, or take risks at the same rate as men. But this percentage is too high. Makes me think we might find a mutation like Anna’s. One that is only present in women.”

  Callie drifted over to them. Elizabeth watched as her daughter put her hand on the doctor’s back. It was a gesture of ownership. Knowing her daughter, Elizabeth was sure that she was proud that he’d discovered this mutation and so quickly connected it to Anna’s past.

  Elizabeth went to her mother. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Folks have always trusted you,” Anna said, putting her hand on Elizabeth’s head. “Tell me what you know.”

  Despite her age, and the discomfort it caused her, Elizabeth put her head in her mother’s lap. She unspun every bit of information she’d tucked away about Anna’s lineage. When she was done, she stayed with her mother and watched Callie, her own daughter. It had been decades since she’d seen her happy. She stood next to Dr. Hashmi, leaning toward him and putting her weight on her good leg. He was talking excitedly about the science of genetics and longevity and his hands, moving as he talked, looked like he was conducting an orchestra. Her eyes were bright, and Elizabeth thought she could see a slight flush that crept from her daughter’s collarbones to her cheeks.

  She thought about the other secret she and Dr. Hashmi were keeping from Callie and wondered if she were told that she was Frank’s only biological child whether she’d be able to keep her happiness. She wanted to ask her mother if she thought she should keep quiet about it, especially now that Anna had discovered the whole truth about her mother.

  Anna didn’t look happy—for the first time Elizabeth could remember, her mother looked old. She began to think that Dr. Hashmi had been wrong about how much time her mother had left.

  “Mom?” Elizabeth said. Her voice seemed to bring Anna back from where she’d been.

  “I’m fine,” she said. The color returned to her cheeks and the yellowish cast disappeared from her face. “We’ve got a trip to Australia to plan.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Leaving

  The day Callie left with Dr. Hashmi, it rained. It had not stopped raining in the month since her departure. Wet summers were an abnormality in Kidron, and glee about plump olives had turned to dismay at the signs of blight that began to appear on the drupes in August. Elizabeth liked the grayness and the drizzle. It suited her mood.

  “Cheer up, sourpuss,” Erin said, coming into the living room. “Weatherman says it’s supposed to be sunny today.” The baby rested in a fabric sling Erin had tied around one shoulder.

  “Bring that baby of yours over here. He’ll cheer me up.” The boy was nearly four months old and Elizabeth couldn’t believe how large he’d gotten. “I think his father was part sumo wrestler.”

  “His father is all of five foot six,” Erin said, sitting down in the recliner opposite Elizabeth. “He’s going to meet us in Australia.”

  “Oh?” The baby grabbed at her nose.

  “I guess after his wife was done being mad, she decided she wanted to meet Keller. They never had kids of their own.”

  “Be careful,” Elizabeth said.

  “I’ll keep an eye on everyone,” Anna said, coming into the living room. “Besides it’ll be good for the child to know who his father is.”

  Erin blushed. “I think I just got a little crazy for a while. Now it seems so foolish to have made such a fuss over a man who didn’t love me.”

  Anna laughed. “We’ve all been a little crazy about men. Just be glad you’ve got more of us in you than your mother. That was crazy.”

  “Grams!” Erin said.

  “I’m starting to think that we take our tragedies too seriously,” Anna said. “What’s God going to do? Hand the Keller family a little more smite? He should’ve figured out it doesn’t work so well on us.”

  Despite herself, Elizabeth smiled. The news about Anna’s paternity had made everyone less cautious. She bounced Keller on her knee, talking nonsense to him and thinking about what it would feel like to be in Hill House alone this winter. She’d decided not to go to Australia—it would be too much time away from Frank. She hadn’t missed one day of visiting with him since putting him in Golden Sunsets.

  “Don’t jostle him so much. He just ate and he tends—”

  “Aaaak.” Elizabeth held the baby away from her and let him finish spitting up on the floor. Her pantsuit was stained with sour milk. She handed the baby to Anna, who was laughing.

  “You never were good with babies. Don’t get me wrong, once they could walk, you were the best mother I’ve ever seen. But you barely tolerated them as infants.”

  “I’m sure you can see why,” Elizabeth said, leaving the room to change. She was supposed to meet Callie’s Realtor that morning to give him the keys to the Pit Stop. Her daughter had ended up keeping an online version of the store and selling the land and the building to an entrepreneur who wanted to open a roadside church for truckers. She changed into her plum pantsuit and gave Keller a ki
ss on the head before leaving.

  “Auntie Bets,” called the Realtor as Elizabeth stepped from the car. The boy was young, and distantly related to the Kellers. His mother was the cousin of one of the girls who’d married a nephew of Elizabeth’s. Relationships in Kidron were complicated. She waved to him, flashing the keys to the store, which were in her hand. The man who was purchasing the store had his back to her and was peering in the windows. Wanted posters with Deb’s face on them were still posted on the doors. The man wore a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. He had hairy forearms and a tattoo that reminded Elizabeth of Popeye.

  “It finally stopped raining,” said the Realtor. “It’s been a hard summer to sell stuff. No one around here wants to go out if their feet are going to get wet.”

  “I guess I had an advantage then, not being from around here,” said the man. He extended his hand to Elizabeth. “Name’s Dennis. Well, they said you Keller women look young. I gotta agree you don’t look a day over sixty.”

  Elizabeth relaxed. “Thank you. My husband often mistakes me for his nurse, and she’s not even fifty.”

  They laughed and Elizabeth offered to unlock the store and show him the fixtures that were part of the sale. The fluorescent lights flickered when she flipped the switch. The air was stale and smelled of burned coffee. The merchandise had been packed and shipped by Callie’s stock boys the week before. She gestured to the shelves and the register. “These are all yours, although I’m not sure what you’ll be needing them for.”

  “The Lord doesn’t have anything against me selling a few necessities to my congregation,” Dennis said. “I was a trucker myself for a lotta years. There’s some stuff we’ll buy no matter where we see it.”

  “Do you think they’ll stop? I’d think people want to get their religion at home with their families on Sundays,” Elizabeth said. She was concerned about his idea.