The Roots of the Olive Tree

by Courtney Miller Santo

  Erin nodded. “I don’t think I understood how worn-out our bodies are until I had him.”

  “You’ve spent too many years with us,” Elizabeth said. “We were tired when we got you.”

  “That might be true of other grandmothers, but all of you have Anna’s blood. I’m practically convinced you’ll live forever.”

  Erin’s tone was light, and as Elizabeth watched her, she realized how much the girl thought she could control. “No one wants to live forever,” she said and then lifted the baby off her knees and folded him against her chest. When she was younger, holding a child, anyone’s child, made her chest tighten, and she’d feel the old pressure of milk against her nipples. A phantom pressure, as if her body remembered. Now she felt nothing. Her breasts were flat and hardened, like the rest of her skin, dull to sensation.

  “Don’t say that.” Erin looked away from Elizabeth. “You’ve got years and years left. I expect you’ll be at Keller’s graduation, and there will be other children.”

  Elizabeth shouldn’t have been honest. She took it all back. Put her hand on her great-granddaughter’s knee and murmured assurances that she’d be there for all of it. “Maybe by the time you’re my age, they’ll have found a cure for death. For all of us. Figured out a way to bottle immortality.”

  With Keller asleep, the two of them stood and walked out to the porch to join Anna in her rocking. They talked about their upcoming trip to Australia, with Erin and Anna giddy at the prospect of such a journey and the potential of finding someone else who shared their genes, their mutation. Elizabeth looked out at the setting sun and wondered how she could keep her secrets for an eternity.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Grafting

  The next morning, Elizabeth walked the orchard. She left her room before the sun rose, impatient with the day. Sleep was different in her old age. When she was younger and her muscles were fresh, she slept like the dead, waking in the same position she’d fallen asleep in. But sometime in her seventies, after Frank had been sent to Golden Sunsets, her sleep became restless. She often rose when the morning star was still visible and walked through the orchard, checking on the trees. In August, the trees were already getting ready for fall. She ran her fingers over some of the branches in the older section, twigs that she’d helped her father to graft. After more than half a century, the limbs looked like nothing more than part of the tree.

  At the joint, where her father had made a small notch, the bark was thicker, like scar tissue over an old burn. The branches had become limbs and sprouted their own branches and network of switches that gave the tree its shape. She walked to the newer part of the grove and saw the work that the foreman had been doing. It was a different world, now that they leased their orchards and were responsible for nothing but paying the taxes on their acreage. She had no ownership over these newer trees; she didn’t feel the need to speak to them, to cajole them into producing fine olives. She’d not climbed them when she was a girl.

  The sun’s pink and orange lights began to filter through the grove and Elizabeth made her way toward the Hill House. Now that the sun had come up, she could go and see her husband. She’d been wrong to skip her visit to Frank the day before. She wanted to be there as soon as the nurses would allow her to enter. As she left the shelter of the trees, the wind blew up the legs of her pants and she hurried into the house.

  Even with the early morning orchard walk, she’d still arrived too early. The day nurses started their shifts at 7:00 A.M. and she knew them well enough that they’d let her in, even though visiting hours didn’t begin until nine. She watched the night shift stagger out through the electric glass doors and blink wearily at the dawn. It surprised her to see that most of those who worked at night were Hispanic, and as they made their way to their waiting cars in the far reaches of the parking lot, she imagined she understood the snatches of Spanish they exchanged.

  Frank was wearing a hat, a derby she thought, and his iron gray hair, which was too long, lay like a fringe on the collar of his shirt. The front desk nurse said he was having a good day.

  “He’s chipper. Keeps walking around singing we’re in the money and telling everyone it’s a good day to play the lotto.” The girl squinted up at Elizabeth and smiled. “I think I will get one of those mega tickets at lunch.”

  Elizabeth watched Frank for a bit from the door to the rec room. Her husband was in excellent spirits, and she thought if she’d asked him, he’d tell her that the war in Europe was nothing to worry about and that if it came to it, he fancied himself a navy man. He turned away from the man in the wheelchair he’d been talking to and saw her at the door.

  “Were you looking for me?” he asked, taking off his hat and smoothing his hair. “They said you were coming today. It’s been so long that I hardly know you.”

  Elizabeth could see that he was struggling to decide who she was. His eyes were trained on her, waiting for her to give some indication of who she was to him. “I’ve missed you, Frankie,” she said.

  The diminutive allowed him to believe that she was an older female relative. Sometimes he picked his sister and other times his mother. Frank’s sisters had families of their own when he was born, and his older brothers were already squabbling over who would inherit his family’s forty acres. Elizabeth knew that he adored his sisters but felt distanced from his mother, who never got over having a son when she was nearly fifty. Elizabeth never lied to him, never called him brother or son, but she let him choose who she was to him.

  “Sister,” he said and grinned.

  “Brother,” she said, opening her arms for an embrace.

  They hugged long enough that Elizabeth began to hope a small part of Frank knew who she was. She was on the verge of whispering into his ear when he pulled away and motioned to the man in the wheelchair, who was wearing an improbably dark toupee.

  “Do you know Guy?”

  Elizabeth did in fact know Guy. She’d been introduced to him at nearly every visit since he took up residence at Golden Sunsets seven years earlier. He was Frank’s boyfriend. He was a delicate man with a fine bone structure and strong Roman features. He did not have dementia, like her husband, but always played along when Frank introduced them. His family had abandoned him in the 1980s when his wife had died and he’d burned through her family money on a series of much younger lovers. He’d had a stroke about fifteen years earlier, which had left him with limited use of his left side and brought him to Golden Sunsets.

  For all these reasons, Elizabeth wanted to dislike Guy, but she couldn’t. He was one of the most charming men she’d ever met. Callie, when she’d met him, said it was like Clark Gable had stepped off the screen and into a retirement facility in Kidron. “What’s he doing here?” she’d asked.

  Before Elizabeth understood about her husband and Guy, she’d come to Golden Sunsets on the pretense of visiting Frank and then gather around Guy to hear him tell of his USO adventures. He’d been a sound man and traveled with all the big name stars to the concerts they gave servicemen. It was where he’d met his wife, who’d been part of a sister act that only managed to put out two records. “They could have done more,” Guy lamented. “The thing about dames is they like to go and get themselves knocked up.” This way of talking, as braggarts had done when Elizabeth was younger, made her laugh. He didn’t always speak this way though; when he wasn’t entertaining, as he called it, he spoke languorously with a bit of a midwestern accent.

  Those first few months, she’d arrive at Golden Sunsets and find Guy and Frank in the corner playing checkers. Their conversation would be about their childhoods—dogs they’d had, swimming holes, movies Elizabeth never remembered seeing.

  Guy had tried to tell her what was happening between them. One fall afternoon when Frank had fallen asleep, he confessed preference for men to Elizabeth. St. Elizabeth he called her. He told her that the last straw for his son had been when a lover, a prostitute really, had taken his wallet and left him stranded in Reno. “The boy I
was with was no older than my grandson at the time. Kids both of them, and my son looked at me like he did the year I told him the truth about the tooth fairy and said he was done bailing me out. That was in 1989 and I haven’t seen him since. It was his wife that paid for all this.” Guy’s hand swept across the air, and the gesture, although small, made the entire place feel larger.

  The daughter-in-law, as it turned out, was a second cousin to one of Elizabeth’s uncles, and she’d put her own grandmother in Golden Sunsets. “It’s pretty easy to be related to us,” she’d said to him. They both looked at Frank at that moment, and then Guy turned to Elizabeth and put his hand on her knee.

  “There’s not many of us, you know. Maybe one in a couple of hundred, and for a person my age . . .” He trailed off, and Elizabeth for the first time found she wasn’t charmed by Guy. His voice had flattened and slowed and she saw that his eyes were on Frank.

  She wished now he’d been explicit about his relationship with her husband.

  “Now which sister are you? Winifred?” Guy asked, and shook her hand.

  “Please call me Winnie,” Elizabeth said.

  Guy winked at her and told Frank to sit down. “Did I ever tell you about the time Bob Hope fell out the back of a jeep and broke his arm?”

  Elizabeth hadn’t heard this story, but she couldn’t focus on Guy’s voice. She felt the pressure of the last few days building up on her, and she began to pray that Frank would have just a glimmer or two of lucidity. She needed him to be himself long enough to ask him if she should confess her own sins to their children—tell the boys that Frank wasn’t their father. The nurses said that such lucidity was rare. It had been more than two years since his last clear moment. There were some nurses who believed that it only came when a patient was on the verge of death. Elizabeth talked to enough other spouses to know there was no pattern. One man she’d met brought violets every visit because the smell of them sometimes would bring his wife into the present.

  Frank interrupted her thoughts. “You’re no fun today, Winnie.”

  “She’s just tired,” Guy said, and Elizabeth saw that they were holding hands. His thumb stroked her husband’s softly.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Frank said.

  “Can’t,” Guy said, indicating his chair and then the room they were in.

  Elizabeth had, on occasion, taken Frank out of Golden Sunsets, especially in those early years. When she spoke to him in the rec center, he asked too many questions. He wanted to know who Callie was and Deb and how he was related to them. Being outside the reach of the smell of antiseptic and the sea of aged faces quieted Frank’s mind. He didn’t feel like he needed to make sense of his world, he just let Elizabeth talk. There were times right after Deb had been sent to prison, that she would put him in the car and they would drive for hours, Frank’s head resting against the window and Elizabeth unspooling all her pent-up feelings about their daughter and their granddaughter.

  Frank looked at Elizabeth. “She can take us. She drives.”

  “It’s too much,” Guy said.

  “No, she wants to. Do you see how beautiful it is out there?” Frank walked to the window, which looked out over the small courtyard where residents were allowed to wander. “She doesn’t want to be here any more than you do, than I do.”

  Elizabeth protested; she mentioned that her car was small and that there wouldn’t be a place for the wheelchair. Privately, she had concerns about how she’d get Guy in and out of the car. She wasn’t strong enough to lift him.

  Guy assured her that he’d be fine getting in and out of the car and that the chair could be left behind. “It’s just a drive, and it may do us some good.”

  She felt herself waver—wanting to believe that a change of location would change their reality, erase the heaviness that had settled into her bones since talking with Dr. Hashmi, and most of all change Frank into someone she knew.

  There was a flurry of activity around the three of them as they left Golden Sunsets. The desk nurse gave strict instructions about how long they were to be gone and where they were to go. The other residents, overhearing the commotion, looked toward the three of them and frowned. Elizabeth didn’t know if their looks were out of disappointment at having to stay or disapproval for disrupting the routine.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The River

  Where to, boys?” Elizabeth asked. Beside her, Frank had rolled down the window and let his head lean ever so slightly into the wind. Guy was spread across the rear seat with his back against the door. They were both smiling.

  “Las Vegas,” Guy said.

  “Mexico,” Frank said.

  Elizabeth made a left onto Sixth Avenue and headed toward the river. She thought about taking them to the casino in Red Bluff, but worried that Guy wouldn’t be able to get out of the car. It had taken him a good five minutes to get himself into the backseat, and that had been with the front desk nurse watching closely, ready to call the trip off if he stumbled. This time of year, the park down by the river was typically beautiful, and it would be a good place to sit and talk.

  Frank and Guy talked across the seat and occasionally broke into giggles. They made jokes about the nursing staff and traded gossip about the other residents. Guy did impressions of a woman they called Gladys, although Elizabeth couldn’t place the name. He sucked in his cheeks and batted his eyelashes and dropped his voice two or three octaves to deliver her come-ons.

  She drove past Frank’s old family farm, which had been sold and turned into tract homes. They were identical structures with large, imposing garages that faced the streets and tile roofs that somehow managed to look like plastic instead of clay. She started to point it out to Frank, but then changed her mind. Instead she tried to explain to Guy what the land had looked like when she was young, how she could look down from Hill House and see row after row of olive trees.

  “Driving past the rows of ordered trees could give a person vertigo,” she said, thinking of the optical illusion the rows of trees created.

  “I don’t like olives,” Guy said. “Too salty.”

  Elizabeth felt a chill and rolled up the windows in the car. Frank turned to Guy and asked if he’d ever tried olives that weren’t cured in brine. She glanced quickly at her husband. This was something Frank would have asked before his dementia. He rarely talked about olives anymore. She slowed down to make the turn into the river park.

  “Tried ’em all,” Guy said, listing off all the olives he knew. “Don’t like the oil either, it puts too much of itself into whatever you’re making. Canola oil is better, just gives food a little bit of slipperiness.”

  Elizabeth pulled into a parking spot, surprised to find few other cars in the lot. It was summer and the children were out of school. When she’d come down before with Erin, a few weeks earlier, there had been scads of young people tossing disks and kicking around balls to one another. Even the playground was quiet, no squeaking swings or squeal of children as they slid down the aluminum slide that heated up to an almost unbearable temperature on hot, sunny days.

  Frank said, “Have you ever tried my daughter’s oil? I guess it is still made from olives, but she uses the fruit from a special grove of trees that Anna’s father planted when he arrived here from Australia.”

  Elizabeth’s breath caught.

  “Honey,” Frank said turning to her. “Tell him what I mean. Callie’s oil has special properties, right?”

  Guy sat up and leaned toward Frank. “What do you know?”

  Elizabeth put her hand on her husband’s arm. “Frank? Do you know who I am?”

  He laughed and then kissed her on the forehead before getting out of the car.

  She hurried after him, and then remembered Guy. She turned the key and rolled all the windows down in the car, speaking quickly to him, trying to explain about Dr. Hashmi and her children and that lucidity was so rare.

  Guy shushed her. “Go after him,” he said. “I’ll be fine. I can see the river from
here, and the air smells sweet. Not a trace of disinfectant.”

  When she reached Frank, he was standing on the sidewalk that ran parallel to the river. She slid her hand into his and realized then why the park was empty. The thunderstorms of the past month had overloaded the river. It had crept past its banks and covered the strip of grass where the teenagers usually spread their blankets and played their games. The water lapped at the edge of the playground, soaking the wood curls that were spread six inches deep around the structures to keep the children from cracking their heads. The few other cars in the parking lot belonged to people who needed a place to ponder. She looked over her shoulder to check on Guy and saw the people in their cars, eyes closed, heads resting on steering wheels or eyes focused on a point in the horizon. She’d parked on the far side of the lot so that the view of the river was through the back window of her Skylark. She saw Guy’s face, round as the moon, squinting at them.

  “I need to talk to you about the boys,” she said.

  “How’s Callie doing? I worry about her and Deb. When is she up for parole?”

  Elizabeth squeezed his hand tightly. She wanted to tell him about that summer, about Deb’s escape, Erin’s baby, their planned trip to Australia, and the incredible news about Anna, but she couldn’t waste time with it. He needed to know about Callie, that she was finally happy.

  “Your daughter is in love,” she said. “She’s like a teenager, but he’s a good man, a scientist, widowed.”

  “Is he from someplace else? Pakistan? India? Did I meet him?” Frank’s blue eyes searched her face. “I did, didn’t I?”

  Elizabeth rushed to assure him. “He’s part of this. What I need to talk with you about. He did some tests on us—”