The Roots of the Olive Tree (18 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Lovers

S
he met Amrit at the hotel just before midnight. Calliope felt like a teenager sneaking out of the house after everyone else had gone to sleep. Walking down the long corridor from her room, she’d held her shoes in her hands until she reached the porch. The conversation with Anna had lightened her mood, and instead of wearing a sensible outfit, she’d put on the only bra she owned that put most everything back in its rightful place and a half slip instead of underwear. Over this ensemble, she’d pulled on her raincoat and sprayed herself with perfume. She put her overnight bag, packed with sensible pajamas and a change of clothes, in the backseat and thought how when she was younger she never gave a thought to the outfit being sexy. The perks of youth were that the body was enough. It didn’t need to be pushed up, smoothed, or hidden in the dark—now she tended to keep her nakedness under wraps until both parties were too far to turn back.

Calliope understood that the world would think her ridiculous. But she didn’t care, it was possible for a sixty-six-year-old woman to have sex without absurdity. Just look at Raquel Welch or Sophia Loren, beautiful and well into their sixties. Even Elizabeth Taylor, overweight as she was, clearly still had sex.

The motel was not far from Hill House. It was, because of the nature of Kidron, of the interstate variety and served as a stopover for drivers who found themselves too sleepy to make it over Mount Shasta in the dark. There were a dozen other cars parked behind the motel. Callie put on red lipstick, adjusted her bra for maximum lift, and cinched the waist of the coat tightly. She stood for several moments watching shadowed figures move behind the curtains of the hotel. As a stewardess, she’d slept with a fair number of pilots—all of them older and most of them married. It was strange to think she was older now than most of those men.

Amrit opened the door at her first knock. She smiled and opened her coat.

“How very American of you,” he said. His voice was like it’d been on the phone: throaty and low.

She leaned in and smelled his neck. His hand came to her breast and he squeezed gently, slipping his thumb inside the lace of the bra. She moaned, and all thought of her sagging, wrinkled, and puckered body left her mind. Calliope was transported to the first time she’d let a boy touch her breast. The feeling of power and submission she felt as the warmth and fluttering started in her belly and spread like fire through her body. She was greedy to let that fire burn, to feel it in every part of her. She knew from the other times that Amrit was a man of irksome patience. She pulled at his belt, and he took her hands and put them on his face.

“Kiss me first,” he said.

He had soft, full lips and tasted of cloves. She had to stand on her tiptoes to reach his mouth. His tongue pushed gently into her mouth, which she opened wider.
Yes
, she thought.
It’s all yours. I’m all yours.
He pressed against her and she could feel him against her soft stomach. He nibbled at her neck and then bit her shoulder gently, pulling at the straps of her bra with his teeth.

She let her hands move down his broad back and then pushed herself against him until he walked backward with her in his arms toward the bed. She knew his wife had not been an adventurous woman. He’d called their lovemaking adequate, and because of this, Calliope had some confidence with him. They fell onto the bed together.

“Naughty,” he said, his breath coming quicker. “Such a naughty American woman.”

He withdrew from her and ran his hands along every inch of her, telling her what he loved about her collarbone, her elbows, and even her legs—kissing the scar tissue on her calf.

The guest in the next room banged on the wall and told them to hurry it up. She lay back and pulled him on top of her. She opened her eyes wide and watched Amrit’s face as he made love to her. He was smiling, and she could see in his eyes a hint of what he’d looked like as a young man. She had a vision of the two of them coupling when their bodies were young, and she knew they would be together until death claimed them. She bit his shoulder to quiet her screams and let the joy wash over her entire body. She turned toward him to find him smiling. “I’ve missed you,” he said.

H
e’d awakened before her. Calliope had not, after all, put on her sensible pajamas, and she felt the rough texture of the sheets brush against her skin. Her arm was asleep and she’d drooled all over her pillow. He opened the bathroom door, and she expected to see him in a towel, still wet from the shower. Instead, as the steam escaped around him, he stepped toward the bed cinching the knot of a plum-colored tie. “We should see your father first,” he said.

“You are being terribly old-fashioned,” Calliope said. “Daddy won’t even know who I am, let alone that you’re trying to ask his permission to shack up with me.”

“It’s more than that. I want him to understand that you’re going away. That you, whoever you are to him, will be in Pittsburgh now instead of Kidron. Plus I’m dying to meet the famous Mr. Frank.” Amrit winked, as if he knew something about her father that she did not.

“What did my mother tell you?”

“Nothing that I can tell you,” he said, reaching over to pinch her cheek.

Calliope felt a new awareness of the decrepit state of her body. “I’ll get showered and dressed,” she said, wrapping the sheet around her and taking it to the bathroom with her.

They discussed her father’s medical history on the way to Golden Sunsets. Amrit wanted to know all the technical details, the story of how Frank was initially diagnosed with Parkinson’s and then Alzheimer’s and finally Lewy body dementia. “It’s all the same to me,” Calliope said. “Dad can’t remember what he wants to, what we want him to.”

“It must be hard,” Amrit said.

Calliope shook her head. “Dad and I, we’ve got a pact. When I was sick for so long, I tired of people coming in with sad faces casting their worries all on me. I got into it with Mom after I’d been back for about two weeks. Told her I didn’t want to hear how sad she was. She wasn’t the one with two broken arms, a broken leg, and a lung puncture.”

Amrit patted her leg. “How awful.”

She stopped the car hard at the stoplight. “That’s it. That’s what I’m talking about. No sympathy, no special treatment. Just treat me like you would if I were normal. That’s what I do for Dad. Mom can’t bring herself to be that way, and that’s why he can get so violent with her. When she’s there, he knows there’s something wrong with him.”

The light turned green, and Calliope waited for the cars to clear before making a left into Golden Sunsets’ lot. “It makes every visit an adventure,” Amrit said.

“Yes. That’s it exactly. You don’t know who you’ll be until he talks. So get ready to play along,” Calliope said.

A
thena,” Frank said when he saw her enter the rec room. He was seated next to his friend Guy, who despite being thirty years younger than her father looked a good deal older. Calliope didn’t mind it when her father confused her with his sister.

“Franky,” she said and extended her arms. The embrace was awkward. Her father’s fedora fell to the floor, and then Amrit stepped on it. He stammered an apology as he bent down to pick it up.

“It’s been too long,” Frank said, looking at her closely. “You look good. There’s a new gleam in your eyes. Is it this man you’ve got with you or are you going on a trip?”

“Both,” Calliope said, and Guy laughed. She liked her father’s friend, who was in the wheelchair because of a stroke. When he was around, her father’s confusion seemed humorous. With Guy, he was quick to laugh, whereas before, the dementia had made him angry and the intensity of his emotion frightened Calliope.

Amrit extended his hand to both Guy and Frank. “I’m taking her away from you. Asked her to move out east with me to Pittsburgh.”

“Well now,” said Frank.

Guy grasped for Calliope’s hand and squeezed it tightly. “Good for you. You need this,” he said.

“Don’t believe I’ve ever been to Pennsylvania,” Frank said. “What kind of racket you got going on out there?”

Guy winked at Calliope. “Don’t you recognize him?” he asked Frank. “This here is one of the premiere exotic animal veterinarians in the world. Got his start working with the elephants in India and then Ringling hired them.”

Amrit opened his eyes wide and started to disagree with Guy.

Calliope, wanting to have fun, talked right over his protestations. “Oh yes. We’re going to start a sanctuary for exotic animals. They’ll be lions and tigers and bears.”

“Oh my,” said Frank, and all four of them laughed like they were children.

Calliope watched as Amrit relaxed and followed Guy’s lead. It was difficult to believe that Frank was the same man who’d nearly beat her mother to death. It had happened just three months after Deb had been sentenced for killing Carl. Although her father had been deteriorating for several years, the sudden progression of his dementia startled them all. Calliope worked sixty hours a week and still lived in the small house on Butte Street, where she’d moved when she’d married. During those months, there had been a period of silence between Calliope, her mother, and Anna. The coldness between them had solidified into ice when she refused to help with Erin.

If it hadn’t been for Frank nearly killing Bets, she isn’t sure the coldness between them would have ever thawed. She was closing up at the Pit Stop when a neighbor who lived at the bottom of the hill called. Nancy, who had just started working there, picked up the phone, and Calliope remembered watching the woman’s ruddy complexion turn yellow. “Something awful has happened to your mother,” Nancy said, and then she nearly commanded Calliope to go to Hill House. “There’s bad trouble,” she said, shoving Calliope out the door.

The cops who met Calliope at the bottom of the hill told her that her father had broken her mother’s arm and then run into the orchard with his shotgun and started shooting the trees. “They won’t leave,” the policeman said. “The women and your granddaughter are hiding in the back room and refused to budge. We got men looking for Frank.”

She drove as fast as the wind would carry her to the house, hustled everyone into the car, and drove to the hospital. Her mother was undone that day. Bets’s shirt was torn and bloodied, and her hair, its careful chin-length bob, was ratty and disheveled, leaves stuck to her clothing. On the way to the hospital, Anna prayed. It was not the formal scripted prayer that Calliope remembered from her childhood, but a naked pleading that mostly consisted of
please God
,
please
.

Erin sat in the front seat of the Camaro next to Calliope. “Bang,” the little girl said. She was holding her Strawberry Shortcake doll, the one Bets had made to replace the doll she’d had when her father was shot. She pointed her fingers at the doll’s head and again said, “Bang.”

Joy Fielding had been at the intake desk that night. Even in high school, she had been bitter. Her mouth was small and hard, small as an olive pit, and her lips were so pale they were almost yellow. She and Calliope had gone to school together but had not been friendly. Calliope realized, watching Joy exhale with irritation at the sight of her family in the flickering fluorescent lights, that the Keller family was getting a reputation for trouble.

She sent Anna with Bets and stayed in the waiting room with Erin. Calliope wondered what the girl thought about guns. They’d always been present in Calliope’s life; her father had hunted, and so had her husband. There had been the wars and all of them had grown up playing at cowboys or bank robbers, pointing their fingers at one another and saying, just as Erin had: Bang.

Erin was a strange child. They’d expected to have to be delicate around her—walk on tiptoe and whisper about Deb, but she’d accepted her father’s death more easily than they expected. She wasn’t one of those children who were silent about their tragedy. That first year she spent living with Anna and Bets, she talked about it constantly: telling the clerk at the bank that her mother was in jail, asking the stock boy at the grocery store if he’d ever fired a gun, and pestering them all with endless questions about her parents.

Erin looked up at Bets. “Why’d Grandpa Frank shoot the trees?”

“I don’t know, sweetie,” Calliope said. Her leg ached and she wanted to get down on the floor and play with Erin, but she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to get back up. She reached her arms out to the girl and pulled her close. “I think Grandpa Frank is sick.”

“He’s funny,” Erin said. She crawled into Calliope’s lap and began to playact with her Strawberry Shortcake doll and another one she’d pulled from a basket in the corner of the waiting area. The found doll was grimy and had most of its blond hair pulled out. Its eyes were supposed to open and close, but one of them was stuck shut. Erin made the dolls talk to each other.

“Who are you?” asked the one-eyed baby doll.

“I’m me,” said the strawberry doll. “You know me.”

“Who are you?” Erin raised the baby doll in the air so it looked down at the other doll and then she had it ask again.

Calliope kissed her granddaughter’s head. “He knows who you are,” she said. “He forgot for a little while, but he’ll remember.”

At that moment, the police brought Frank through the hospital doors. He’d been handcuffed to keep him from attacking the people who were trying to help him. Calliope couldn’t help herself, seeing her father in handcuffs muttering incoherently. “Daddy,” she screamed.

“Daddy,” echoed Erin.

Frank looked at them, but Calliope could see that he didn’t know who they were. Erin had dropped the baby doll to the ground and hugged her Shortcake doll tightly. “That’s your daddy,” she said and patted Calliope’s cheek.

“My daddy,” agreed Calliope.

“He’s gone,” Erin said, and Calliope didn’t turn to look to see if the child meant that he’d been taken back to an examination room.

Her granddaughter curled into Calliope’s shoulder and began to suck her thumb, and even though her leg felt like it was on fire, she rocked back and forth until the child had fallen asleep. Two weeks later, after her father had been moved into Golden Sunsets, Calliope moved into Hill House with her mother and Anna.