The Roots of the Olive Tree (9 page)

Sometimes he spoke like Shane did to Joey. “You make sure she grows up strong and straight, even if I’m not around. You can explain things to her.”

The fight would have escalated. Mrs. Castello’s pictures had been knocked off the walls, and the photos the police took of Deb when they put her in jail showed a woman with a busted lip and a slightly swollen cheek.

The first shot had hit Carl in the back of the left shoulder, passed clean through, and lodged itself in the solid wood door. He would have turned around and tried to wrestle the gun away from her.

The second shot passed through his right hand and into his upper thigh. He fell to the floor and screamed like the sound a calf makes the first time it’s hog-tied. He pleaded with Deb, who stood above him, but she fired again. The third, fourth, and fifth shots hit him in the groin. He would have been unconscious. One shot to his thigh hit his femoral artery. The police were already on their way. They’d been called when the downstairs neighbor heard the first shot.

The sixth shot was through Carl’s heart. Deb lay on top of him to deliver this final bullet. There were powder burns on his shirt and her blouse as if she had laid her head one last time on her husband’s chest and pulled the trigger.

The police didn’t find her on top of Carl. She stood when she heard the sirens, tucked the gun into a pocket in her skirt. She then went to the closet where Erin slept and curled around her daughter. Sometimes Erin knew that she was wide awake after the first shot and that her mother came into the small closet and lulled her back to sleep, but she didn’t always remember it that way. In any event, this was how they slept at Grammy Callie’s house—mother curled tightly around daughter, and now whenever her mother was close, Erin smelled gunpowder.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Erin’s Performance

I
’m so sorry. So very sorry,” murmured Deb as Ms. Rivera finished her account of Carl’s murder. At first it was a low mumble, more of a catch in her throat than words, but as the bullet count increased so did Deb’s sniffles and apologies. She looked at Carl’s mother and his sister as she groveled. Her lawyer put a hand on her arm and pushed Bets’s handkerchief toward her. This was not a good scene. Erin felt the commissioners begin to turn against her mother, and she willed Deb to pull it together before Ms. Rivera introduced the psychiatrist’s report. The younger commissioner appeared annoyed by the tears and shook his head slightly from side to side. He set his pencil down and stopped following Ms. Rivera through the report. The older man with the scarred forearm leaned over and whispered to him, and they both glanced at Carl’s mother. She’d set her mouth in a deep frown and turned her body away from the proceedings. Erin hoped that the older woman didn’t remind either of the men of their own mothers, she held on to the faith that they were born to kind-hearted women who didn’t look as if they sucked on lemons. Carl’s mother felt their gaze, and instead of softening her face, which would have made her seem frail, she leaned across the space that separated her from Deb. “Nobody cares about your apologies, my dear. Nobody cares.”

Their assigned guard moved from the back of the door to stand in the aisle between the two families. Deb pulled herself together and used the handkerchief to wipe her face—taking with it much of the makeup she’d been wearing. Erin felt the mood in the room shift, and knowing that the commissioners were still on her side relaxed her, allowed her to leave the horrors of her memories behind and start to prepare for her performance. Ms. Rivera asked the commissioners to turn to the psychiatrist’s report, and Erin focused her energy on her upcoming speech. She trusted that the lawyer had already painted a picture of Deb as a near-perfect prisoner, and in the rebuttals he would counter the report, which claimed that Deb suffered from borderline personality disorder. He had two evaluations by private psychiatrists that showed while Deb had poor impulse control, she wasn’t crazy. Crazy might be a good television defense, but it was the kiss of death in a parole board hearing. The objections and clarifications portion of the proceeding passed quickly.

“You ready?” Bets picked at her pale peach nail polish. Her great-grandmother had asked Erin countless times if the speech she was about to give in defense of Deb was legal and wouldn’t agree to come to the hearing until the lawyer sent her a copy of the rules, which specifically stated that next of kin were allowed to speak with no restraints placed on content.

“I just wish they’d let me get in the last word. Giving it to Carl’s mother doesn’t seem right,” Erin said.

“I’m sure they’re saying the same thing about you speaking,” said Anna, who spoke louder than a whisper and drew a shush from the guard. A few moments later the older commissioner asked for the next-of-kin statements.

Erin struggled to rise from her chair. She arched her back, pushing her stomach as far out as it would go, and then placed her hands on the arms of the chair to steady herself. At that moment she knew she looked like she was twice as far along as she actually was.

“You can sit if you’d like,” said the blond man, and Erin felt a quiver of attraction toward him.

She shook her head. “What I need to say needs to be said standing up. It’s not a casual request, asking a couple of men to give my mother the chance to come home. Just doesn’t feel like something I can say unless I can stand eye to eye with you.” She spoke clearly but softened the vowels so that her words floated over the room and sort of settled into the commissioners’ ears. She’d been trained to do this, to speak, to sing, in a way that changed how a person felt. Her voice coach said that before television and movies, folks were used to feeling moved by a person’s voice. Creating shared consciousness was a gift that especially great preachers had, or dictators and all actors of Shakespeare. But now no one understood live performance, and when those transformative performers took the stage in a Puccini opera or a Beckett play, audiences couldn’t put the experience into words.

So many years of working on her singing had taught Erin about voice modulation—how to control a crowd with the speed and tone of her voice. It was easier to achieve with music, because certain combinations of notes, dissonant chords, were as good as a hypnotist’s watch. It could be done with just words. It was harder, but possible. Pastors, mostly men, did it by increasing the pacing and speed of their voices until if one said
jump,
the crowd would jump. Erin had studied the women who knew how to use their voices, and they were always softer, gentler, but still with a firmness that didn’t allow anyone to escape. The women were better at extracting money, the men at extracting obedience. She needed the latter.

“I’m a girl without a father. I’m a girl without a mother. I’m an orphan, but like Annie, I carry with me the hope that one day I’ll have a mother again, that one day she will come home and I can put my head in her lap and feel her hand brush over my hair, as if to tell me it’s going to be okay. I don’t have a locket or a letter promising my parents’ return, what I do have is the promise of the State of California that once it fixed my mother, rehabilitated her, that she could come home. I trusted that California would keep its promise—” She put her hands on the table and leaned across the space that separated her from the commissioners.

“That you would keep your promise.”

Erin let silence fill the room. She allowed the fan’s gentle whir to enter everyone’s ears to fill up the space in their minds, and then in the moment before their attention drifted, she raised her voice an octave, to make her sound younger, to make the commissioners fully weigh their authority. “I’m not going to ask you to let my mother go, but I want to tell you how much I need her”—she brought both hands to her belly and looked at the floor—“a girl’s bound to make mistakes without a mother around. I messed up and I need someone to tell me that my mistakes can be fixed, that there’s a light at the end of all this darkness. I need my mother to tell me so that I can tell my baby that falling down is part of learning how to get up. But right now I don’t believe that. I hear other people say it, but I’ve been waiting and waiting for my mother to get back up again, and she’s not been able to. I know she’s tried.”

Erin wished she could touch one of the commissioners, lay a hand on a shoulder or an arm to make the connection, but she couldn’t cross the table, so she did as her teachers had taught her, she reached with her voice. “Amends. Isn’t that what you call it? She’s been here my whole life and she’s never been reprimanded, never written up for talking back or fighting. She started the young mothers program for women like herself who came here and left children behind. But you know all this, you know everything. Except how it feels to not have a mother. To have the idea of a mother, to have my mother’s mother.”

She shook her head, as if this tangent wasn’t where she wanted to go. The last part of the speech was tricky, she had to make the commissioners believe that what Carl’s mother would say would be false, that her emotion, however theatrical, wouldn’t be genuine, couldn’t be real. She turned away from the commissioners and addressed Carl’s mother. Her head was lowered. “I know you lost your son, but I lost my father. You got to see him grow up, become a man, and you saw him as a father. I got none of that. Please don’t keep punishing me, your only grandchild, because your son is gone. I know there are no words to make up for that loss. I
know
this. But please. God please. She’s served her time.”

Erin nearly sank into her seat, surprised by the exhaustion and how unlike a performance her plea for her mother’s life had become. She looked at Anna and saw that she was crying.

She’d never seen Anna cry and felt an oppressive culpability. She wondered again if she was doing the right thing, this gambit to get her mother released. This idea, this desire to have her mother with her had come to her just after she found out she was pregnant, and the plan to achieve this had consumed her nearly the entire winter. Now that it was almost over, now that the hearing was almost over, she was no longer sure. She decided that God would give her a sign. If her mother wasn’t meant to be released, then Carl’s mother would give the speech of her lifetime, would find all the flaws in Erin’s argument, would make them see that to give Erin a mother who had killed her father was worse than to have no mother. She bowed her head and made the deal with God.

Carl’s mother didn’t make it through her speech. She began crying uncontrollably after the first sentence and could only choke out “my son, my only son” before her daughter took the paper out of her mother’s hands and read the statement. Loraine, the daughter, read badly. She stumbled over the words and kept forgetting to replace the “I” with “my mother.” Erin watched as Ms. Rivera’s shoulders slumped, and then she looked closely at the commissioners and saw they’d stopped listening.

G
UEST COLUMN PUBLISHED IN THE
Washington Post
IN
M
ARCH 2007

“The Silver Tsunami: Global Aging”

by Amrit Hashmi

We’re all getting older. Your knees aren’t what they used to be, and names that once came easily to mind are forever lost in the jumble of memories. This isn’t just a problem for the baby boomers in the United States. In every country, the population continues to age. The United Nations predicts that by 2050 the proportion of the world’s population age sixty-five and older will have doubled from 7.6 percent to 16.2 percent. That will account for nearly one billion people.

So what, you might ask? Maybe you are young and can’t fathom what the problem is with getting old. Or maybe you’re old and have just come to accept aging as part of the natural life cycle. Although scientists can’t yet stop you from getting older, we do understand one important fact about the process—it isn’t natural. For most of the last century, people believed after a person became incapable of reproduction that their body essentially started the process of dying. That theory, born of evolutionary science, has turned out to be wrong. What we believe about aging today is that in many ways it mimics many other diseases we are currently in a war against, like cancer.

Many conditions that were once considered part of the natural aging process have turned out to be a result of one’s lifestyle. Cataracts? They’re directly related to how much exposure your pupils had to direct sunlight. Experiencing heart disease? Look back and count up how many pounds of red meat you ate over your lifetime. You’ll find the correlation.

I know what you’re thinking: I can prevent cataracts, but can I prevent my knees from hurting, or my hearing from going? And what about my brain? Can I prevent Alzheimer’s? The answer is yes. But more than that, we are close to uncovering the secret behind slowing the entire processes of aging. And if we can identify the specific environmental causes of aging, there is a strong possibility we can eradicate aging altogether. I predict that by the end of this century, we will be a world full of Methuselahs.

Just this past year, I started working with an extraordinary group of women who seemed to have naturally, as part of their genetic makeup, slowed down the aging process. There are five generations—each more healthy than the next, and the youngest is expecting a child. A child who hasn’t been exposed to the environmental toxins we’ve all come to accept as part of our lives. This family and their genes hold the key to not only eternal life, but also life without aging.

Yet recently, the federal government in a fit of austerity decided to cut funding to the National Institution on Aging, which administrates grants to research organizations across the United States to fund studies just like mine. These are the studies that have the potential to use the work I’m doing or others’ work to uncover the fountain of youth—to give you all a chance to drink from the holy grail.

I understand there are more pressing concerns—we are fighting two wars and the economy is struggling. But consider this: The gains in life expectancy over the last thirty years alone added about $3.2 trillion dollars to national wealth, according to a study published this last month in the
Journal of Political Economy
. Want more proof? Consider that the cure for aging will in all likelihood also lead to a cure for virtually all cancers, and that would be considered a $50 trillion boon to our economy.

Without funding, we can’t reverse the tide of this so-called silver tsunami. Join me in supporting an increase in funding for the National Institution on Aging. If this trend is not reversed, it has the potential to cripple established researchers in the midst of crucial projects and will have the effect of keeping younger scientists out of the field. Our populations are aging—this is an epidemic that you don’t have to wait for your grandchildren to see. It is affecting your grandparents today, and soon it will affect you.

Amrit Hashmi is on the board for the American Council on Aging. He serves as director of the Center for Aging Research at the University of Pittsburgh, where he holds the Lillian G. Moss Chair of Excellence in Biology. Dr. Hashmi, an endocrinologist, was the first researcher to link longevity to genetics and is currently working with the Human Genome Project to identify the specific genes linked to prolonged life in humans.