The Roots of the Olive Tree (6 page)

CHAPTER TEN

Chowchilla

T
he pregnant and the old have weak bladders. Erin confirmed this during the four-hour drive to Chowchilla. She remembered from her teenage years the constant torture of stopping, but this time around, because the baby seemed to be using her bladder as a punching bag, she was grateful for each of the five gas stations they pulled into. Neither Bets nor Anna responded to Erin’s one-sided chatter, and so after the third stop in Yuba City, Erin kept her mouth busy snapping chewing gum and kept her mind off the monotony of the drive by chasing one pop music station after another down the whole of state route 99.

Erin still wasn’t used to the special treatment often afforded her because of the pregnancy. As she approached the guard gate at the Central California Women’s Facility, she steeled herself for the hostile appraisal of the guard. The gaze they always gave her, with hard eyes that seemed to be assessing the worst acts Erin was capable of, had made her itch when she was a teenager. This morning though, when she’d handed the sentry the papers indicating their intent to attend the parole hearing, he’d looked into her eyes as he raised the gates and given her a nod, which to Erin seemed to say “you’re right to do this.” The unexpected welcome made the cool January day seem a bit warmer.

At check-in, the women were assigned a corrections officer, who was overweight in the way that sometimes happens to college athletes as they age. They followed the heavyset man into the nearly empty hearing room and settled themselves in the row of chairs reserved for civilians. The air in the small room had a stale, sour odor that reminded Erin of the smell of the alleyways of Rome. A blue weave that was more burlap than fabric and felt scratchy to bare skin covered the chairs. Anna adjusted herself several times and then took off the yellow scarf she’d tied carefully around her neck that morning, and draped it over the back of her chair. She moved as easily as a person half her age and her voice was still strong. “I expected it to be more Perry Mason and less—” Anna paused, searching for the right comparison.

“DMV,” said Erin.

“It’s all scripted anyway,” said Bets, grimacing. “You should have been here for the last one. The district attorney, the commissioners, Deb—they all will play their parts, the parts they’ve always played, enforcer, judge, petitioner. It’s all a farce.”

Anna patted Erin’s knee. “Except for our lovely granddaughter. Erin is most certainly not part of their script.”

There was no script, Erin thought. For a moment, she wished she were back in Rome, or that she’d even once considered not having the baby. Her face burned with shame when she thought of how rash her decisions had been since peeing on that plastic stick. She wanted to blame some other force for her actions. Her mouth trembled, and not wanting to draw any attention to how truly vulnerable she felt, Erin turned her eyes to the paperwork that had made her presence at the hearing possible. Normally parolees weren’t allowed to have anyone testify on their behalf and instead their supporters were encouraged to write letters. It took Erin weeks to craft her letter. She believed that she fully supported her mother’s release, but no matter what she wrote, her pleas to have her mother with her for the birth of her first child felt empty when put on paper. Then, in December, as the hearing neared, she discovered a loophole that would allow her to have the last word at the parole hearing.

Erin’s thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of two male members of the Board of Parole Hearing. They strode to the front of the room, took their places on the far side of the folding table, and were then joined by a tiny woman of indeterminate age who set up a portable stenography machine. Erin looked at the two commissioners and worried about what Bets had said earlier. Sitting there, she felt as if she were involved in a first-class hoax—a pseudotrial to determine whether after nearly twenty years in prison Deb was suitable to reenter society. Too much time in an institution made it impossible to be suited for life outside. Erin studied the men who would decide Deb’s fate. They each had a stack of papers more than a foot thick in front of them along with a tabletop microphone. The larger of the two commissioners wore a short-sleeve dress shirt without a tie. He had a substantial white mustache that was yellow at the ends and a scar that zigzagged up his left forearm. His eyebrows were as thick as his mustache and they nearly covered his small brown eyes. He was not looking through his file but scanning the handful of observers, relatives, and staff who were installed in the hearing room. Erin blushed when his gaze landed on her, and she looked quickly away toward the other man, who had not yet lifted his head from the papers.

The second commissioner was thin, like a long-distance runner, and wore a yellow polo shirt with khaki trousers. His blond hair was cut unevenly and his fingernails were bitten to the quick. He paged through the file with speed and randomness. Anna, when she saw Erin watching the man, leaned over and whispered, “He’s a good-looking one, no ring.”

“I’m not looking,” said Erin louder than she’d intended and the guard left his post near the door to stand behind them.

Erin felt that pregnancy had not heightened her beauty but obscured it. The swelling overwhelmed her delicate bone structure and gave her skin a mottled appearance. Overall the effect was one of a ripe tomato on the verge of splitting its skin. This change altered how men now reacted to her—before, they’d let their eyes linger on her breasts or the curve of her waist and now they could find nowhere to rest their gaze. She knew her best strategy would be to appear to the commissioners like a motherless girl. She’d taken Callie’s advice and tied her black hair into braids, put on a touch of mascara and a glancing sweep of lip gloss. She kept her eyes on her shoes while they settled themselves into the first row of seats behind a folding table set up at the front of the room. She thought of the mannerisms of schoolgirls—their hesitations, their habits. And now, as the commissioners watched, she crossed one arm over her stomach and brought the other to her mouth and began to tear at her thumbnail with her teeth.

“Stop that,” said Bets and grabbed her hand, bringing it to her lap.

“Don’t be nervous,” said Anna.

Erin willed the men to keep their eyes on her—she needed them to look up and see a young girl comforted by women too old to take care of her.

Bets waved an embroidered handkerchief in front of her face and sighed. “It’s too hot in here.” She directed this at their corrections officer, who had visible sweat rings under the arms of his short-sleeved uniform shirt. Then she turned to Anna. “Mother. This heat can’t be good for you. You look peaked.”

Anna dismissed her daughter’s worry with a slight shake of her head and pulled her cardigan tighter around her shoulders. “I’m fine.”

“Erin?”

She shrugged. And then seeing the concern that settled into the mustached-commissioner’s eyes, she said, “It is stuffy. Maybe if there were a fan or—”

“A fan!” Bets clapped her hands together, and the two commissioners looked up. The guard nodded at Bets but didn’t make eye contact. Before Bets could push the issue further, the door opened and Deb and her lawyer entered the room.

Instead of her prison blues, Deb wore a yellow cotton jumper covered in delicate pink roses over a long-sleeve pink shirt that was badly stained at the cuffs. This was the first time Erin had seen her mother outside of visiting hours at Chowchilla, and she had never considered that her mother’s plainness had not been by choice, but by regulation. She studied her as she crossed the length of the small room to sit in a folding chair placed on the opposite side of the same table the commissioners occupied. With her black hair carefully curled into ringlets, blush that was too orange and applied too low on the left cheek and too high on the right, and eyes obliterated by blue shadow and clumpy mascara, Deb looked like she belonged in a mental institution.

“Didn’t someone give her a mirror?” asked Bets. “Maybe she can rub some of it off before they get started.” She leaned forward and tried to get Deb’s attention by waving her handkerchief and clearing her throat.

“No communication with the prisoner,” said the guard who had escorted Deb into the room.

Deb turned her head and shook it quickly, but forcefully, at the three of them. Then she glanced at Erin, who looked away and then brought her hands to her belly. She’d written her mother about the pregnancy, but they’d not spoken about it.

“I forget that she’s got her mother’s eyes. They’re so blue today,” said Anna.

“Frank’s eyes. Deb got them from him.” It was not uncommon for Bets to clarify Anna’s statements, and this normalcy in the hot, windowless room made Erin feel slightly less strange.

“Why didn’t they let anyone help her? We could have brought her something more tasteful to wear. She looks old enough to be Grandma Callie’s mother, not mine,” Erin said. The lawyer should have prepared them for this. He didn’t even suggest clothing or help with her makeup. She should have hired someone with actual parole experience, but none of the grandmothers volunteered any money to help. She clenched her fists.

Anna patted her back softly. “It’s not important. Stay calm. Make eye contact with the commissioners. Let them see the sort of family she has behind her. Let them see her as a person, not as a murderer.”

It was strange to hear Anna speak so plainly. In the years that she’d lived with her grandmothers, Erin had felt that the three of them felt safest with Deb in prison. Callie, Deb’s own mother, had never visited her daughter and she refused to allow Erin to visit until she was in high school. Only Bets, who Erin often thought of as the hardest-hearted of the grandmothers, had visited Deb with regularity. It had been Bets who fought Anna and Callie on the issue of bringing Erin to the prison. It wasn’t until Erin got her learner’s permit that they relented and let Erin go with Bets. She wasn’t sure what really made them change their mind, only that Anna claimed she was worried about Bets driving the four hours to Chowchilla by herself every month.

Erin watched as Bets passed the lawyer her handkerchief and motioned for him to get Deb to wipe away some of the makeup. She wondered why Bets felt such responsibility for her granddaughter, especially because she and her daughter, Callie, rarely spoke. They’d tried to hide it from Erin, but she knew that they kept to their separate wings of Hill House. She was in her teens when she first felt the silence between her grandmother and great-grandmother. Erin had never asked about the distance between them, but sometimes she heard Anna rebuke them about unrealistic expectations.

And yet, when she was finally allowed to visit Deb, Erin was astonished at the tenderness between her mother and Bets. They were rusty with each other and the small talk never came easily, but when Bets visited Deb, they were like mother and daughter. Erin often found herself full of envy and wishing she were grown up enough to talk with her mother as an adult.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Prison Song

E
rin was fourteen the first time she was allowed to visit her mother in prison. More than a decade had passed since the trial and she was more afraid than she would admit to anyone about seeing her mother again. That summer it was unusually hot. The women had all been cranky with one another, especially Bets and Callie, so Erin had been surprised to find Callie in the kitchen packing biscuits and dried fruit for the drive. Her grandmother had hugged her tightly, and although she’d not said it, Erin came away from the embrace feeling as if she’d been told not to go. It was the year that the Olympics in Atlanta were bombed, and when Erin watched the chaos unfold later that summer, people kept repeating that the scale of the tragedy was smaller than it could have been. She felt similarly about her first trip to the prison to visit her mother.

Chowchilla was nestled in the dead center of Central California surrounded by pistachio and almond orchards. The trees were small, about as tall as the average man, with umbrella-like canopies covered in waxy green leaves. The order of the orchards reminded Erin of the olive grove in Anna’s backyard. Her eyes followed the parallel lines of trees as their car left the interstate and made a series of turns. The car slowed to a stop, and looking around her, Erin realized that there was a line of cars along what appeared to be a service road for farm vehicles. Straining her eyes, she saw in the distance a glint of wire and several blocky, sand-colored buildings that appeared to move with the heat. Bets turned off the car.

“We’re early. They start letting visitors in around eight
A.M
.” She reached across the seat and took the visitation papers from the glove box.

“Lots of cars,” said Erin.

“Lots of prisoners,” said Bets.

“Does she know I’m coming?”

“I wrote her a letter last week.”

“What should I call her?”

“I can’t answer that.”

Erin had spent much of her life referring to her mother as Deb. It was how her grandmothers spoke of her and it gave her the distance she required to make sense of the situation. But she wasn’t sure she would be able to call her by her first name when she saw her. Bets opened one of her
Reader’s Digest Classic Readers
and Erin slid the only photo she had of her mother, her father, and herself out of the notebook she’d brought. She thought her mother looked like Elizabeth Taylor, but plumper. Her father was the same height as her mother, but he was thin with a long neck and a prominent Adam’s apple. His nose had the same sharp angles of his elbows. In the photograph, he gazed at an object outside the left frame of the picture. Erin’s chubby toddler hand was on her father’s cheek, as if she were trying to get him to turn toward her. She didn’t remember having the picture taken, but her grandmother had told her it was snapped the summer before “everything happened.”

It was nearly nine thirty by the time Bets and Erin were allowed in the waiting room. She’d had to leave her belongings behind, and Bets carried her car keys and a small amount of cash, all in dollar bills, in a clear change purse. Her great-grandmother had ushered them through the checkpoint and security with the exactitude of one who tolerated the rules but didn’t respect them. “It gets worse every time,” she’d said to herself as a female corrections officer gently patted up and down her legs and checked around the underwire of her bra.

They waited with the other prisoners’ families in a rectangular room with small oblong windows near the ceiling. There were dozens of children—all running and jumping around the room, their exuberant shouts made all the louder by the bare concrete floor and walls. Bets stiffened each time one of these children came near them. Erin understood that her great-grandmother didn’t think of Erin as a child any longer. And then she felt a surge of rage that she’d never had the chance to be one of these unruly children waiting to visit their mothers. These children, as lawless as they were, knew what she didn’t, and that knowledge gave them power far beyond their years. She was more a child than they were.

When the guard called their name, Bets stood and nudged Erin toward the heavily guarded door that led outside to the courtyard. A female guard who looked to be about Callie’s age held the door open with her baton and reminded them that embraces were only allowed at the beginning and end of the visits. The midmorning sun had reached the valley floor and Erin was momentarily blinded by the light, which reflected off every inch of the metal fence and the rolls of razor wire that snaked around the tops of the fences, like ribbon curls on a birthday package. She blinked to clear the tears from her eyes and when she focused again, she found that Deb was standing in front of them. She looked nothing like her picture. She was thin and her skin had a waxy, sallow texture. She wore an oversize denim jumpsuit and her hair had been tightly bound into hundreds of small braids. It was still the color of a ripe olive, but it held none of the sheen that was present in the photographs.

“Your mother sends her love,” said Bets, leaning in for the briefest of hugs. Erin wondered why Bets lied.

“How is she?” asked Deb.

“She’s fine, she’s working.”

Erin wanted to say “She’s not working. She just didn’t want to come,” but instead, she extended her hand toward Deb. “I’m finally here.”

Instead of shaking her outstretched hand, her mother clasped it with both her palms and squeezed gently. “I should have insisted that they let you come earlier, when you were smaller.” Her voice was low and the words had a vibration to them, as if they’d been hummed instead of spoken. All around them children climbed on their mothers and babies were being cradled. Erin sat next to Deb, but far enough away that their legs didn’t touch.

In the weeks leading up to this trip, Erin had carefully planned her reaction to seeing her mother. She would be restrained, distant, even a little brisk if necessary. All of these intentions left her when Deb spoke. The vibration in her mother’s voice felt familiar, and almost instantly an energy sprung up between them that obliterated Erin’s hesitation. Deb fired question after question at Erin:
Favorites? Turquoise, pearls,
Anne of Green Gables,
Backstreet Boys, math, linguini, chocolate,
Sound of Music
. Boys? Tommy Kilpatrick. Skateboards.
When the questions stopped, Erin was almost dizzy—it was not often she’d ever been the center of attention.

Bets coughed, and although Erin couldn’t be sure, she felt that her great-grandmother was clearing a sob from her throat. After that, Bets began to brag about Erin’s accomplishments. She said that Erin’s algebra teacher was convinced that she could be an engineer and that she’d been the only freshman with a speaking role in the musical. They talked about her singing and that her voice coach was sure she’d be able to get a scholarship to Berklee or Juilliard or anyplace she wanted to go. This chitchat continued and then it slid into what her grandmothers always talked about when they ran out of words—the olives, the weather. It was always the same, sound for the sake of not sitting in silence. Erin couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t bear for a moment to be wasted talking about the number of buds per branch.

“Why did you shoot my father?”

Deb squinted hard at Erin and then turned her back to her and studied her fingernails.

“Mom!” Erin raised her voice, and several families turned to look at them. Bets, who sat across the table, shook her head quickly and tried to fill the silence with stories about Frank. Erin looked around the cement slab where the prisoners sat with their families. She saw that most of the women there were young, and her eyes settled on a middle-aged black woman disciplining her son for climbing on the table. Her prison blues were wrinkled and her hair had been flattened, but not styled. She was the sort of woman who would wear a wig if she weren’t in prison. Probably had a different one for every day of the week and three different ones for Sundays. Erin expected the woman to grab the boy and yell, but was surprised to see the woman wordlessly put her hand on the boy’s shoulder and then gently lean in and whisper to him. Erin had been yelled at as a child. Callie, especially, shouted and swatted. Her grandmothers were of a different generation.

Bets looked at her watch and began to set out the food purchased earlier from the prison store. It was the stuff of convenience—chips, soda, and soggy sandwiches. Erin realized that they were going to move past her question, to ignore her need to understand. Later, when she was older and had read the newspaper accounts, the trial transcript, and talked with her therapist, she realized that even if her mother understood why she’d killed Carl, it was not something she could put into words. But that day, Erin felt like it was deliberate action, a conspiracy to keep her from entering their grown-up world.

The sandwich Erin ate was tuna fish and the bread was so soggy it fell to pieces. The prison photographer made her way to their table, and the women slid around to one side and put their arms around each other as she gave them a thumbs-up and told them to say “parole.” In the following years, Erin would put together a collection of these photographs tucked into the frame of her mirror at home. None of her smiles went past her cheeks. Bets circled back to Erin’s singing.

“Have you heard her sing?” she asked Deb.

Erin’s mother shook her head. “When she was little, but it was nothing but the alphabet and that song about the wheels on the bus.”

“She placed third as a mezzo-soprano this year at the state competition.”

“I keep up on things,” said Deb, nodding.

Erin had sent her mother the ribbon she won. She didn’t know if it was the sort of item they let prisoners keep, but when she sang
Com’è bello
she thought of her mother and father. She made sense of their story by thinking of it as an opera. In Lucrezia Borgia’s renaissance world, rife with treason, murder, and illegitimate children, the story of a woman killing her husband felt like a minor subplot. She wondered if her mother knew much about opera.

“Do you know the aria?” she asked Deb.

She shook her head. The movement of the tight braids gave the gesture more force.

Bets rushed to speak over Deb, who was fumbling around an excuse. “We never listened to opera until you started singing it. Heck, even Mom never liked the classical stuff, she sang folk songs and then it was all jazz growing up.”

“Sing it for me?” Deb spoke quietly.

Erin knew she could pretend not to hear her mother, but she didn’t want to let this opportunity slip by. She needed to show her mother how different they were. How different she was from all the Keller women. She stood.

She thought of what her coach had told her about Lucrezia. She considered the emotions of a woman singing to a child she had not seen and then she opened her mouth and with a raw intensity and earthy richness, she sang,
Com’è bello quale incanto
.

She finished, and there was sporadic clapping and some laughter, as if this audience wasn’t sure what to make of the thin child with hair the color of asphalt singing in a voice that belonged to an older woman, a larger woman.

Deb wiped away her tears and asked, “What does it mean?”

Bets translated the first bit before Erin could answer. “Holy Beauty. Child of Nature.”

“It was lovely. I wish I could have been there.” Her mother reached for her hand and then stopped, deciding instead to tuck a strand of Erin’s hair behind her ear. “Just lovely.”

A bell rang and all around them visitors gathered their possessions and made a stab at last embraces. Guards were supposed to allow only a quick hug and a kiss, but they turned their eyes from the children clinging to their mothers’ legs and let the women with infants walk with them cradled in their arms right up to the door. Deb’s good-byes were quick and followed the guidelines exactly. She tried to hold on to Erin a bit longer, but she pulled away from her mother after just seconds into her embrace. It was Bets who turned for one last wave as she walked through the door.

In the car, more than an hour into the drive, Erin asked Bets why she’d changed the subject when she’d finally found the courage to ask Deb about the murder.

“Why did you take her side, Bets? I have a right to know why she did it.”

“It isn’t the sort of question you can surprise a woman with.”

“It wasn’t a surprise. It’s what I’ve wanted to ask her my whole life.”

“But you know what happened. There’s no hidden complication, no other suspect. Your mother shot your father during an argument. What you need most is to get to know each other again.”

“I’ve never known her. I don’t even know what Deb does all day in that place.”

“You mean your mother?” Bets narrowed her eyes. “It’s all quite routine. Get up. Wait. Get dressed. Wait. Eat breakfast. Wait.”

“She must do something,” Erin insisted.

“There’s television and the other inmates.”

“So she has friends?”

“No. Not exactly. They’re more like—”

“Frenemies?” She’d learned the word this summer reading
Seventeen
.

“Is that what you call it these days?” Bets smiled. “Then yes.”

Erin was silent for a while. She pushed the car to go faster and was thrilled when Bets didn’t seem to notice they were flying by the other cars. She had been angry the whole day at her mother, about her mother, and now that she was behind the wheel—only the second or third time since she got her permit—she felt the anger slip away, and a sadness that she’d always had overcame her. “I should have asked her about that instead. Asked her about her friends, about what she does with all her time.”

Bets sounded tired. “She wouldn’t have told you. Deb waited nearly ten years to see you. She wanted nothing more than to hear your voice and let you tell her about your life.”

“Then you can tell me what it’s been like for her.”

“I can’t. That’s why I brought you today. You need to see it, to hear it in her voice.” Bets leaned her head against the window. “Slow down.”