Read The Roots of the Olive Tree Online
Authors: Courtney Miller Santo
Erin eased up on the accelerator but stayed in the carpool lane. “Why won’t Grandma Callie come?”
“God only knows,” said Bets, closing her eyes. “My daughter has a stone heart.”
Erin had never thought of Callie as cold. It was Bets who distanced herself from the other women, and this trip had begun to change Erin’s perception of Bets. There was a tiredness about her—because of the strained relationship with her daughter Callie, and the dementia that had taken her husband away from her. Erin wanted to erase some of the distance between Bets and all those she loved. With an open face, she turned to ask Bets about Callie, what she’d been like as a girl, but as she did, she heard her great-grandmother’s snoring. Erin pushed down on the accelerator, turned on the radio, and instead began to wonder what her grandmothers’ lives would have been like if she’d not come to live with them.
T
he hearing started late. The heat of the room made every second seem like a minute.
“Why are we waiting?” asked Anna.
“It’s ten after,” said Bets loud enough for everyone in the room to hear.
Deb’s lawyer spoke quietly with her and then turned to the grandmothers. “Carl’s mother had an episode of some sort in the waiting area.”
“Episode?” Erin looked at Deb, who had folded her arms on the table and laid her head down. The few times she’d asked her mother about her father’s family, or even about Carl himself, she’d shut down—turned away from Erin or ended visits abruptly. It was also a difficult subject with the grandmothers. Erin put her hand on her stomach and wondered if her father’s family knew about her pregnancy. At five months she was showing, and today, to draw attention to herself, she wore a tight T-shirt that emphasized the swell of her abdomen.
“Panic attack, I think. The attorney from the DA’s office is with them,” said the lawyer and then turned back to his note cards and the massive file Deb had amassed during her twenty years in prison.
At Deb’s first parole hearing, Carl’s mother, Lucille, and his sister had testified under California’s victim’s rights law. That winter, after coming home from Rome, Erin had read the transcript of the hearing in preparation for Deb’s second chance at parole, and that was when she’d realized that she too qualified as a victim under the parameters of the law. She was the child of the murder victim, which gave her the right to speak at any parole proceedings. The law was intended for testimonies like those of Carl’s mother: impassioned demands and tear-filled pleadings that the murderer of a loved one not be allowed to serve anything less than the life portion of their sentence. A life for a life.
In 1986, when a judge had sentenced Deb to fifteen years to life for the second-degree murder of her husband, no one expected her to serve more than seven years. Erin remembered Anna telling her that her mother would be home before she was a teenager. However, in the years since, sentiments turned against convicted criminals—especially in California. At Deb’s first hearing, the board had denied parole and given her another thirteen years before she could seek parole a second time. This devastated Erin. She was eleven, and her dreams of her mother coming home were the puff and hue of a child’s imagination. But two months ago, reading the transcript, she was surprised to discover that she empathized with Carl’s mother. She didn’t sleep well for days and was on the verge of abandoning the whole idea of getting her mother out of jail, when she realized she alone had a way of overcoming the bias intrinsic to the parole process. As victim of the crime, she was expected to speak on behalf of her dead father, but there was no provision to keep her from instead speaking on her mother’s behalf. She had the right to speak, and they could not censor her words.
There was a small commotion when Carl’s family entered the courtroom. Ms. Rivera, the attorney for the DA, had her arm around the waist of Carl’s mother. The older woman clutched a white handkerchief embroidered with pansies that she dabbed at her nose and eyes. Every few steps, she let out a ragged sigh and leaned heavily on Ms. Rivera. It was strange to think that if Carl hadn’t been killed, Erin would have called this nervous wreck of a woman grandmother.
“That woman never could hold herself together,” said Anna.
“Didn’t she collapse at the trial?” asked Bets, who leaned over Erin to speak directly to her mother. “At least her daughter isn’t crying.”
Carl’s sister, Loraine, took her mother’s elbow and guided her to a seat across the aisle from Erin and her grandmothers. She was the same age as Deb, but with her bleached hair teased into a chignon and her charcoal suit, which was immaculately tailored, she looked ten years younger. There was a hard edge to her, though, and as she gently helped her mother into the chair, she let out an exasperated sigh as the old woman scooted forward and complained that the chair itched.
Ms. Rivera, the attorney who represented the state, sat on her side of the table in front of Carl’s family and smiled warmly at the commissioners and then at Erin and her grandmothers. She was young—maybe only a few years older than Erin. Her coffee-colored skin had a golden sheen to it and her overall roundness gave off an appearance of warmth instead of gluttony. There was a hint of foreignness to her speech, but it was more of a purr than an accent.
“We’re ready,” she said to the commissioners.
The men relaxed in her presence, and the tension that Erin had felt build up in the room evaporated as the wait dragged on. Erin took up Anna’s hand and stroked the cool paperlike skin on the back of it. The feel of Anna’s hands had calmed her since she was a child. From the moment they’d learned of her father’s death, Carl’s family had wanted nothing to do with Erin. The closest they’d come to an explanation was a card she received on her thirteenth birthday with a long note from her paternal grandfather who had prostate cancer and wanted to clear his conscience before he died. The only line Erin recalled from the card had stuck in her memory like an overplayed pop song.
We didn’t have it in us to take a chance on you. You are your mother’s daughter.
“I’ve been waiting twenty years to tell that woman what I think of her,” said Bets as the commissioners made procedural statements. “Abandoning a four-year-old child. And what she said at the trial—”
“—hush. This isn’t the place; besides we wanted Erin all to ourselves,” said Anna. “It would’ve been awful to have to share her.”
Deb looked back at them anxiously, and Erin tried to catch her eye and smile.
“Are you okay?” Deb mouthed. She was not allowed to speak directly to anyone but her lawyer and the commissioners.
“Fine,” said Erin, standing and then stretching with her hands on her lower back and pushing her abdomen out in front of her.
At that moment, the daughter leaned over to Carl’s mother and spoke loudly, “I should think they’d force those women to stop breeding. Nothing good comes of their blood.”
Carl’s mother looked over at Erin, and a furrow appeared over her artificially tight skin and sculpted nose. “It seems a little too timely. Probably a ploy to get sympathy from the board. Poor me. I’m pregnant and my mother’s in jail.”
Erin and Bets both started to stand, but Anna, who sat in between them, put her hands on their knees and whispered, “Not now.” Deb’s lawyer looked back at the audience and shook his head quickly back and forth. The blond commissioner, with the ravaged fingernails, looked up and spoke sharply into his microphone, which wasn’t plugged in.
“They’ll be no discussion from those present until statements are taken at the end of the proceedings. Failure to comply will result in removal.” He then looked at the stenographer and nodded.
As the district attorney’s representative, Ms. Rivera waded through several formalities, cleared her throat, and drank nearly all the water from her cup before opening what looked, to Erin, like a prepared statement. “I’d like to remind the commissioners of the violent and horrific nature of Deborah Keller Ripplinger’s crime and I think that is best done by reading a description of the crime scene, which the responding officer called ‘a bloodbath.’ ”
At the original trial, the responding officer testified that he had found the body of Carl Ripplinger on the floor of the rented room he shared with his wife. He had been shot multiple times, mostly in his chest and groin area. Erin lowered her head and placed her hands on her stomach. It had started so quickly, hardly enough time to realize that the agenda of Ms. Rivera was not to let anyone forget what Deb had done. Erin didn’t want the baby to hear this. She didn’t want to hear this. She began to sing that lullaby from
Dumbo
in her mind.
Baby mine, don’t you cry / Baby mine, dry your eyes
. Erin willed the baby to hear her voice, to listen to her thoughts and not to the vulgar description of its grandparents’ legacy.
A
s far back as she could remember, Erin had collected slivers of the story of her mother and father. She eavesdropped on her grandmothers, studied family photographs, dug through the attic boxes with
KEEP FOR DEB
scrawled on the side in careless cursive. She’d spent hours puzzling over that handwriting and the bits and pieces of her mother’s childhood stored in those boxes. The contents told her that at one time, Deb had fallen in love with porcelain cats, at another, based on the contents of two different paper sacks, rainbow erasers and rabbit feet. The real find came when Erin was sixteen and opened her mother’s copy of
The Call of the Wild
. Tucked inside in a hollowed space created by cutting pages out of the book was her mother’s diary.
The powder blue, imitation leather volume had thick ivory gilded pages. Her mother held no regard for margins—every available inch of space was filled up with scrawling purple handwriting. The looping cursive letters were the same width and height, making the words difficult to separate from one another. Erin felt a vague uneasiness when she read the journal—thinking that such intimate confessions should only be read when the writer was dead. She wasn’t sure that Chowchilla counted as a cemetery.
Still, she came to view the diary as the truth. She realized as she grew into adulthood that the grandmothers were holding on to a crucial piece of information about Deb. There were silences to some of the questions she asked, and occasionally, Erin would catch the tail end of a conversation between Anna and Bets expressing concern at the time that she spent with her mother at Chowchilla. The year she found the diary, she got her unrestricted license and drove herself there nearly every Sunday. Erin almost always left Kidron with the intention of asking about the diary and about her father, but by the time she saw the glimmer of the razor wire atop the fence, she’d lost her nerve.
Despite her desperate faith that being able to see her mother, to touch her, would create a bond between them, it had not. She pinned her hopes on the diary, only to find that nothing she read reminded her of the woman she’d come to know during her visits to the prison. Deb seemed like an echo of the person on the pages of the blue journal. It carried over into her actions, into the letters sent from prison. The handwriting was even altered. Deb’s script was compressed, subdued, as if she knew that what she wrote was for everyone’s eyes and it needed to be small and compact to avoid letting these secrets out. The secrets in her journal, however, were almost gleefully revealed—in large loopy script.
Erin read the diary four times before she went in search of other stories about her mother. The first page was dated January 1, 1978:
What’s crackin? I can’t believe I have to go back to school next week! I know that Heidi and little Miss perfect, Natalie, are going to be laughing at me and trying to get all the other kids to pick on me. I figured it out, though, I’m going to be really nice to Natalie and then sneakily let her know that Heidi only likes her because of her horses. Natalie even looks like a horse with her long nose and big fat nostrils!!!! I should draw a picture of her and pass it around. Mom better keep her nose out of my diary. Daddy promised he wouldn’t let her read it. And I know what she’ll say. Just because she’s got that stupid limp and people make fun of her for it, she’ll tell me I’m being mean. But they were mean first. Heidi was my best friend not Natalie’s.
The subsequent entries were full of scheming, plotting, and vows to find a best-friend necklace that splits three ways.
I will make them like me again and then I will make them hate each other.
The first time she read it, the anger surprised Erin. She’d never seen such rage from Deb during their visits at Chowchilla, and Erin had never experienced that level of passion during any of her friendships. When the natural ebb and flow of high school pulled one girlfriend away, she always found another. The entries, taken together, revealed Deb to be impulsive, intolerant, fearful of betrayal and most of all of being alone. Erin searched for signs that she would have liked her mother as a teenager, but the picture she kept coming up with was one of a slightly overweight tyrant.
The entries became sporadic and Deb only seemed to write when she was having trouble with her friends. But then Deb met Carl and the entries became part of Deb’s daily ritual. Reading those pages, Erin learned that her parents fell in love at the annual Redding Round-up. Deb was supposed to be in algebra class, but at sixteen, she was often places she shouldn’t be. Kidron was too small a place for teenagers to find trouble, and so on a warm day in May, Deb and her girlfriends ditched—driving an hour north to Redding to sit on dusty bleachers that were downwind of the stock pens, but within shouting distance of the men.
Cowboys
. That was the word Erin’s mother used in her diary. The girls covered their noses with scented hankies when the breeze rushed through the arena and then waved them at the cowboys as they straddled pens, waiting for a turn to ride. It was late afternoon when the steer wrestling competition started, and Carl was first out of the gate. She’d never seen bulldogging before and was stunned when Carl leapt from the saddle of his galloping horse and wrapped his forearms around the horns of a 750-pound steer named Monkey Lip. It took him less than four seconds to turn the tar-colored beast on its side—fast enough to win a little prize money and Deb’s interest. She wrote that it was
love at first sight,
but she’d written that often in the pages of her journal. There had been other boys, but as far as Erin could tell, no other men.
Carl was a short man, built like a fire hydrant, with eyes the color of an empty bottle of pop—translucent green. He was twenty-seven, but his round cheeks and soft mouth made him look ten years younger. Deb watched him closely as he dusted off the seat of his Wranglers, took off his hat, and bowed to the crowd. She saw that his reddish blond hair was damp with sweat and before she realized what she was saying, she screamed
mine, mine, mine
. The other girls laughed and teased, but she didn’t care. Looking at him made her think of necking with Bobby, the neighbor boy, in the olive grove that summer and how she’d pushed his boy’s hand away every time he slid it up her skirt. She knew that if she ever got the chance to neck with this cowboy that she’d let his hand travel all the way up.
Erin kept her virginity until the summer before college. She knew the feelings her mother wrote about in her diary, but she’d only imagined them, her kisses with boys had been chaste and few. The grandmothers monitored all her social activities closely, but more than that, they filled up her days and left her no time for foolishness. There were dance lessons, cello lessons, performances with the community theater group, the three-hour drive on Saturdays to San Francisco where she worked with an ex-principal from the Royal Opera, and afternoons working for Callie at the Pit Stop. It wasn’t until she returned home from college for winter break and for the first time faced unfilled days that she realized the busyness had been a deliberate strategy on her grandmothers’ part.
Those early sections about Carl had given Erin a bit of hope that her mother was growing out of being a bratty teenager, but the entries ended two months after they met in 1981 when she wrote:
knocked up, getting hitched
in the same blocky script that Erin would later recognize in her mother’s letters from jail.
The rest of her mother’s story came the summer before Erin left for college, when she spent several hours hunched in front of the microfiche machine at the county library. Hundreds of stories had been written about the murder. They were all versions of the same story—scorned woman shoots husband in fit of rage. They differed only in the smallest details. Some reporters focused on the gun, others on her family’s history in Kidron, and one or two near the end of the stories in paragraphs that could be cut off if their editors needed more space for furniture or car ads, pointed out that all of this—the shooting, the fighting, the drinking—had taken place with their four-year-old daughter on the floor of a closet in the bedroom.
Erin knew soon, very soon, Ms. Rivera would get to that detail, and when she started to talk about the way the pillows had been arranged and the Rainbow Brite doll, Erin would have trouble breathing. She’d spent most of her life making herself forget, but when she had to remember, a terror like the hard, dry Santa Ana winds would sweep through Erin as if she were nothing more than the scrub grass in Kidron. She wanted to rush from the small room and into the car and leave the women in her life, leave the trouble. She curled her fingers tightly around the arms of the scratchy blue chair and held on. The baby rolled and twisted and then began hiccupping, as if to tell Erin that it felt what she felt. This fear wasn’t about the shooting, it wasn’t about not knowing her mother, it was about not understanding her own part in Carl and Deb’s story. She’d felt it before—remembered bending over the screen of the microfiche machine, feeling the relief of being able to in the year 2000 still hide behind its beige partitions and read about the murder in the
Chronicle
. She had been hungry for the details, desperate to find an answer to the question no one would answer, and then three-quarters of the way into the sparse account, she found herself.
A four-year-old child in the next room
. There she was, in a place she didn’t remember with people she no longer knew, and that was where the fear came from.