Read The Roots of the Olive Tree Online
Authors: Courtney Miller Santo
The Roots of the Olive Tree (10 page)
S
he looked back. The girls who were in on short stays stood in their doorways—offering nods as she passed by. Anyone with a chance at parole ignored Deborah as the guard escorted her from her cell to Receiving and Release. It was how it had to be. There was never enough to go around in Chowchilla. If someone else had it, there wasn’t a prayer of you getting your hands on it. Deborah’s impending freedom very likely meant that some other woman on a fifteen-to-life with twenty years down was never leaving.
It was now late March, having taken more than two months for the bureaucracy to cycle through its hoops and red tape. And nobody but her lawyer, who billed by the hour, seemed to be measuring the time. None of her family had been down to see her since the day of the hearing. It felt to Deborah like they had checked her off on their to-do lists and started looking ahead—to the baby’s birth, to Anna being the oldest, to that scientist making them famous. This realization that she was being left behind, or at the least left out, pissed her off.
Careful. She felt the rage she kept coiled up in the pit of her stomach stir. It could be dangerous to get angry in Chowchilla—she’d seen girls sent to solitary, privileges revoked, and warnings put into files for as little as pounding on a wall, or shoving another inmate. The last time she let her anger overcome her, she’d lost her husband, her daughter, the whole of life, and now she had almost as much to lose. She wasn’t free yet. The guard had cuffed her too tightly. Her shoulders ached from being pulled back at an awkward angle. He’d dropped her off at the desk and then gone to retrieve the handful of other women who were also being paroled. Listening to his footsteps reverberating, she wondered at the leisure of his pace.
By 9:15
A.M
., there were three other women waiting to be loaded onto the parole van. Judging by their youth, none of them had been in Chowchilla for any length of time. Two of them were black, slightly heavyset, and they stood close to each other—Deborah figured it made them less nervous to stand by their own kind. That’s how it was in here. The only way to feel safe was to find a group of people who were like you. Kids that weren’t going to be in for that long segregated by race, but the old-timers, like Deborah, knew better.
She watched the girls for a moment, approving of the way they kept their eyes locked on the ground and their bodies soft. They had a chance of making it in the real world. The other woman was young, too, but defiant. She stared at anyone who met her gaze and held her thin body taut. She was quite short, and because being in prison had taught Deborah to classify people, she decided this woman was Hispanic—probably from Guatemala based on the broad flatness of her cheekbones and her paper-straight black hair.
A guard came around to the front of the desk and looked each of them up and down, as if they were naked. He poked each of the two young black women in the shoulder and called them by their last names. “Ferris and Sutton, you got people waiting on you in the visitors’ lot.” He turned toward Deborah and the other woman. “Ripplinger and Serna, you’re getting dropped off at the Greyhound in Fresno. Make sure you take a bus that gets you to your paroled county in the next twenty-four hours.”
Deborah froze. Her mind raced with possible scenarios to explain Erin’s absence from that parking lot.
He uncuffed Deborah second to last. She tried in her least confrontational way to tell him that he’d been mistaken. “I’m sure my daughter is waiting for me in the visitors’ lot. I just spoke with her yesterday and she knows I’m getting out today. She may just be running late—Kidron’s a long way from here and she’s pregnant—”
“She’s not there.”
“No. I’m sure she’s there. If you could just call—”
“Rules say she has to check into the gatehouse by nine. She didn’t. You’ll be going with Serna to Fresno.”
He grabbed Serna roughly by the shoulders and turned her around to unfasten the cuffs. “Don’t even think about it,” he said as Serna’s lips pursed, as if she were going to spit in his face.
He tossed the women their parole boxes, which contained a change of clothing sent by the parolee’s family or friends. The Guatemalan woman didn’t have a box. Next, the guard shoved a manila folder containing the $200 in release money provided by the state, a simple photo ID, and any pertinent papers about the terms and conditions of their parole into each of their outstretched hands. Deborah clutched at hers, calming her outrage by crumpling the envelope satisfactorily in her hands. The Guatemalan woman put a hand on Deborah’s shoulder and squeezed gently. Her eyes seemed to say, “Don’t let the bastards get to you.”
The two black women entered and then emerged from the bathroom in their street clothing and were escorted to the waiting van. The guard nodded his approval for Deborah to change. Alone in the bathroom, she let some of the frustration she felt finally show. How could Erin let her down like this? How could she be so irresponsible? Deborah had told her a dozen times over the last two weeks that she had to be at the gatehouse before 9:00
A.M
. She pulled on the baggy linen pants she was sure Bets had picked out, and tried to work up worry over her daughter’s absence. She supposed there could have been a situation with the pregnancy, or an emergency with Anna or Frank, but it didn’t feel that way to her.
They were ashamed of her. They’d always been ashamed of her. Embarrassed that she got knocked up at seventeen, horrified about the situation with Carl, and now uncomfortable with the reality of how her freedom would alter their own little, precious lives. She stuffed her prison jumpsuit into her mouth and screamed.
A softly accented voice echoed around the nearly empty bathroom. “At least you don’t have to wear this.” Serna stood by the sinks, holding up a shapeless flower-printed muumuu. “They made me give them forty dollars for it and then asked for five more to cover the cost of the underwear. I said I didn’t wear panties, but they insisted.”
“That sucks,” Deborah said, and then splashed water on her face from the sink before putting on the yellow T-shirt that had been in her parole box.
“It all sucks,” said Serna. “What were you in for?”
“Shot my husband.”
Serna raised her thin eyebrows. “Did you now. I would have thought it was something less ugly, like kiting.”
“You?”
“Got me nailed as a predator.” Serna shrugged off the last of her prison clothing and pulled the voluminous dress over her head.
Deborah backed up against the wall.
Serna laughed bitterly. “It wasn’t nothing like you’re thinking. I got high with a bunch of boys and they all thought it would be funny if I popped his little brother’s cherry. Kid was thirteen, but I’ll tell you he knew what he was doing. Got charged with all sorts of nasty, but pleaded down to felony child endangerment. Still had to do six years.”
Deborah flinched. The last twenty years she’d spent in Chowchilla had taught her to be wary of certain women. To protect herself, she needed to offer Serna a reason for respect. “I took my chances with a jury. Turns out they don’t like it when you empty a gun into a man.”
“
Cuidado con lo que dices,
” Serna said as she walked out of the bathroom.
Deborah understood just enough Spanish to know that she’d have no trouble from the girl during the hour-long drive to the bus station.
Fresno was south of where she wanted to go. She occupied herself during the drive by making more excuses for Erin. There could have been traffic, or a power outage that stopped her alarm from going off. Of course, everyone’s life existed on their phones now. That was something Deborah would have to get used to. When she’d gone into jail, cordless house phones were rare. So, even if the power had gone out, Erin would have been relying on her phone to wake her. As they neared the downtown area of Fresno, Deborah gave up on the excuses. She banged her head rhythmically against the window of the van.
The guard escorted them off the bus and into the station. They were in a shitty part of town—it looked like it had boomed in the 1960s and then been summarily abandoned. There was a light smattering of clouds in the sky, and the wind had a chill that made Deborah think of the winter in the yard at Chowchilla. Two bearded, smelly men were asleep in Day-Glo orange sleeping bags outside the terminal. The blue
h
in
Greyhound
was missing from the sign above the institutional Plexiglas doors of the station. The handful of passengers waiting in the blue and gray plastic chairs looked poor. For a moment she thought about the last time she’d been at such a bus station.
“I’ll need to see each of you purchase a ticket to the county of your release,” said the guard, checking their paperwork. “After that I am absolved of any and all responsibility for you.”
Faced with the wide open of the terminal, Serna hesitated before picking one of the two ticket lines. Deborah knew how she felt. She watched her traveling companion buy a ticket for Los Angeles and then fidget in front of the vending machines—folding and refolding her remaining dollars. Just as Deborah was about to purchase her ticket to Redding—the nearest station to Kidron—she heard someone calling her name.
“Deb! Wait! I’m here.”
Deborah hesitated before turning around. She’d immediately recognized the rich musical tone of Erin’s voice.
Her daughter stood in the doorway of the bus station, holding half a dozen Mylar balloons with welcome slogans scrawled across them in various neon shades.
“It’s about time,” Deborah said, taking her money back from the grinning clerk. In the rush to embrace and the awkwardness of maneuvering around Erin’s large belly, the balloons slipped from her daughter’s grasp and floated to the ceiling.
I
n the car Erin explained her tardiness with an airy wave of her hand. “I got a late start.”
“Any later and I would have been on that bus,” Deborah said.
“But you’re here. I’m here. We’re finally headed home together.” Erin’s voice cracked as she tried to continue the sentiment.
Deborah should have put her hand on her daughter’s shoulder and told her it was fine. Instead she asked when they were going to stop for lunch. “Nothing cafeteria-like, I want real food.”
“I know a sandwich place near Modesto,” Erin mumbled. She wiped at her tears with a loose cotton scarf she had draped around her neck. After a while, she gestured outside. “Does it look different to you? Bigger? Older?”
“I don’t remember enough to know.” Deborah studied her daughter’s profile. She must be seven months pregnant now—far enough along that she looked uncomfortable, but not so far along to look swollen. She chewed on the inside of her cheek, something her daughter had done in childhood in moments of unease.
Deborah rolled down her window and let her hand ride the currents of wind outside the car. In the median, the normally upright oleander bushes drooped with the weight of their blossoms. They were quiet until the first exit for Modesto.
“You know where you’re going?” Deborah asked.
Erin turned off the radio, which had been softly playing some opera Deborah couldn’t understand and didn’t particularly enjoy. “Next turnoff. Grandma Bets and I liked to stop here after—” She didn’t finish her thought. “I guess she met the owner’s son once.”
The restaurant was in a yellow building across the street from a bank Deborah had never heard of. The place had a slightly worn look, but the parking lot was so crammed, they’d had to park on the curb. A dull hum came from the shop as they stepped inside, and immediately Deborah wanted to leave. The restaurant had the feel of a place that needed an owner’s manual. She’d wanted a hostess, a plastic menu, and time to sip her soda before deciding what to order.
Erin motioned for Deborah to follow her into the disorderly line in front of the counter. “The specials are there,” she said, pointing to the wood paneling above the cashier, where someone with terrible handwriting had scrawled a variety of sandwiches and salads in colored chalk.
Before she could process the list, Erin leaned into the counter and ordered a Noah’s boy on whiskey with a white cow. The cheerful teenager taking her order repeated it back into a microphone and then asked her how she wanted her Murphys. Erin asked for them cold and then turned to Deborah.
“I’ll have whatever’s good,” she said to the smiling boy. “And an iced tea, if you have that.”
“Everything’s great,” the boy replied. “Sweet or unsweetened?”
Under the boy’s expectant gaze, Deborah felt itchy. “What?”
“Your tea. With sugar or without sugar?”
For more than two decades, Deborah had never had a choice about whether she wanted sugar in her tea. At Chowchilla it came sweetened. “However you serve it is fine,” she said, scratching at her neck.
“We serve it both ways.”
Deborah looked again at the chalk scrawled list above the boy and then at Erin. From behind them, she thought she heard grumbling about the wait. She had no idea of what she wanted.
“Just get it unsweetened,” Erin said. “We can pour sugar in it until you like it.”
Deborah nodded her head. The boy looked at the people stacking up behind them. “Do you want food, too?” he asked.
“What’s that smell,” Deborah asked, looking at her shoes.
“Stew,” the boy said, his forehead creasing.
“I’ll have that,” Deborah said.
“Bossy in a bowl,” he called into his microphone. He looked toward Erin and said, “It comes with B and B. Does she want that?”
Erin nodded and brought out her wallet.
“Finally,” said the man behind them.
Deborah sighted a table in the darkest corner of the room and walked unsteadily toward it. Erin followed with their drinks and a large number 14 that she slipped into a holder on the table. “This wasn’t a good idea,” Deborah said.
Erin slid the selection of sweeteners toward her. “I thought you’d enjoy it. Plus the food is good—really way better than all that Sysco stuff they feed you at Chowchilla.”
“There’s no sugar here,” Deborah said. Her fingers furiously flipped through the small colored packets. “Sweet’n Low, NutraSweet, Equal, Sugar in the Raw, Splenda.”
“What do you want? Plain sugar?” Erin reached across the table and plucked out two of the small packets. “This is what you want. It’s sugar, just in a fancy package.”
Deborah’s hand was shaking so violently she couldn’t tear open the brown envelope of natural sugar. “I should have stayed at the Greyhound. Taken the bus back.”
“Definitely wouldn’t have had all these choices to make then,” Erin said, with a half-smile. “Sandwich or soup, tea or coffee, eat in or take away—”
“Can’t you take me seriously? I’m saying none of this is right—and it can’t be, because we’ve started this whole trip off on the wrong foot.”
“You’re just being petty now,” Erin said, taking a long sip of her vanilla milk shake.
“Why weren’t you there?”
“I told you I got a late start.”
“But why? This is a big day for us.”
Erin pushed her chair back from the table and reached for the number placard. “I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Sit down,” Deborah’s shrill voice pierced the dull hum of conversation in the restaurant.
From behind, you couldn’t tell her daughter was pregnant. She took several more steps toward the counter. Deborah looked at all of the eyes on her and tried again to get her daughter back. “Erin Elizabeth Ripplinger. Come here.”
Erin didn’t even turn her head. The rejection felt as if she’d been knocked to the ground. To keep herself from literally falling over, Deborah took small deliberate sips of her iced tea. She watched her daughter wait for their food at the counter and then carry it all outside, pausing against the harsh sunlight as she opened the exit.
Next to Deborah an elderly man leaned across his table and in a conspiratorial whisper told her that in his experience it was better to give in than get left behind. Deborah nodded in agreement, and after finishing her tea and then the soupy milk shake abandoned by Erin, she left the restaurant.
The car wasn’t at the curb, where they’d originally parked. Deborah looked wildly around the busy commercial street and then heard two quick taps of a horn coming from behind her, in the parking lot. She turned and saw Erin behind the wheel of the car, eating her ham sandwich. She wondered if her daughter had actually driven away, or just moved the car to be in the shade.
The inside of the car smelled like meat. “I thought you were a vegetarian,” Deborah said to Erin.
“You don’t know all that much about me,” Erin said, handing her the paper sack with the remains of lunch.
She looked in the bag. “I guess a cold Murphy is potato salad.”
Erin shrugged. “Coming here always made me think Grandma Bets knew a secret language.”
“The two of you are close,” Deborah said. “When you were a baby and got colicky, she was the only person who could soothe you, but she’d never admit that, she thinks she’s terrible with infants.”
Deborah picked at her buttered bread and searched for a plastic spoon to eat her stew with. Erin slid her seat back as far as it would go and then half-turned, so she faced Deborah. The car felt smaller. “She made me come get you. I got cold feet or close to it. Bets told me it was time I learned to want something after I got it.”
“You weren’t going to come?” The inexorable itching sensation crept back into Deborah’s skin.
Erin looked down at her pregnant belly.
Deborah repeated herself, getting louder each time.
“Let me explain,” Erin said. “Just hold on a minute and let me try to fix this.”
The tender skin on her neck, which she’d been scratching at since the restaurant, started to bleed. Erin unwound the cotton scarf from her own neck and dabbed at the blood. “You have to stop this,” she said. “You have to listen.”
She tried, but Deborah realized that she didn’t know her daughter well enough to make sense of all that was said. Instead, she thought about the last time she’d been a mother to her daughter. A couple of days before Carl had come home for the last time, she’d taken Erin down to the park on the bank of the Sacramento River just outside of Kidron. A cushion of sawdust surrounded the small playground there. It had recently rained, and Deborah remembered that the normally sweet piney odor of the wood chips had been tinged with the smell of decomposition. She pushed Erin on the swings until her arms were exhausted and then the two of them tried to skip rocks across the water.
The spring snowmelt made the river wild and full of whorls and eddies. It was nearly impossible to make a rock skim its surface, but long after Deborah had given up and resorted to seeing how far she could launch a rock, Erin kept trying. She inched closer and closer to the river’s edge in search of flat stones. Before every throw, Erin turned her gray eyes toward Deborah and with great seriousness requested that she watch. Each time, Deborah offered her daughter some advice, or positioned her hand and wrist just so. Just as Deborah was going to insist that they leave, the water in front of them stilled and Erin let a half-dollar-size rock fly from her hand. It skipped half a dozen times across the river before it sank out of view. They both jumped up and down, hugging in excitement and success.
That was how Deborah had expected them to greet each other in the parking lot at Chowchilla. She finished the last of her stew and nodded solemnly at Erin, who was still talking about how the pregnancy had magnified the hollowness Erin had felt her whole life about not truly having a mother of her own. No matter how deeply the grandmothers loved Erin, none of them successfully had taken Deborah’s place. That brought up emotions that Erin had never dealt with previously—mostly how she felt about not truly having a mother.
Deborah reached out and patted her daughter’s knee. “You have to remember that I really am your mother. No matter what else has happened or will happen. I am your mother.”
“Do you get it then?” Erin asked.
Deborah nodded, because she couldn’t think of any other option.
“Oomph,” Erin said. “Baby’s kicking my ribs.”
“Let me see,” Deborah said. Erin’s T-shirt was tight across her belly, and each time the baby kicked, she could see the fabric of the shirt move. Erin rolled up the shirt and they waited. Her daughter’s stomach veins stood out like lines on a map. The line that ran from her pubic bone to her belly button had darkened to the color of India ink. It bisected her stomach into two perfect hemispheres. As quick as the flash of a lightning bug, part of Erin’s stomach bulged and Deborah saw the outline of a foot.
“Oh!” Tears sprang to her eyes. Deborah blinked quickly and acted as if she were about to sneeze. The air in the car stilled as Deborah focused on her daughter’s heartbeat, the baby’s heartbeat. She wished that the umbilical cord between them had never been cut.