Read The Roots of the Olive Tree Online
Authors: Courtney Miller Santo
“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.”
T
he 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.”
T
he 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 daughter’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.”
N
obody 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 worrying 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.
T
he 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.”
“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.
B
ets 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 baby’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.