Her father guns the Prius and veers around a lumbering semi. “Is it weird if I ask you whether there’s someone you like?” he asks.
“Dad! God. Yes. It’s weird.”
He glances sideways at her. “You know, I barely dated at all in high school, too. I didn’t get girls, and they didn’t get me. It wasn’t until I got to college that I felt comfortable with myself and grew up, sexually speaking. At which point I went a little crazy with the girls, but that’s another story.” He clears his throat awkwardly. “My point is, it’s OK if you feel like you’re still trying to understand those kinds of feelings. That’s normal.”
“Dad, seriously. TMI. I don’t want to know how and when you lost your virginity, OK? Please change the subject.”
He laughs. “This is nice,” he says. “We should spend more time talking this way.”
She nods and looks out at the orchards and thinks of the way her mom used to creep into her room in the middle of the night when she was little, crawling into her bed and prodding her awake to whisper hungrily in her ear: Tell me everything. Tell me what’s in your heart today. Protected by the dark, in that vulnerable twilight state of semi-sleep, she found it a relief to spill everything for her mother’s consumption: the way other girls could be so casually cruel, the times when her teacher made her cry, how the collective pain of the world sometimes made it hard to breathe. Her mother would listen intently, the heat of her body warming Olive’s side until Olive finally slipped back into sleep, teary-eyed and depleted.
At some point after she started at Claremont, though, Olive grew tired of these emotionally exhausting nocturnal talks. She wanted more privacy, and she wanted to sleep. She started locking her door at bedtime. The first night her mother tried to come in, Olive cowered guiltily under the covers as she heard her mother rattling at the doorknob, softly calling her name. Hating herself for her betrayal, yet feeling like there was something precious that she was protecting. At breakfast the next morning, she could barely meet her mother’s eyes, which were puffy and pink, even though Billie smiled as if nothing was wrong while she was buttering her toast.
Olive unlocked her door again after that, but her mother never came back.
After a while, her father pulls off the freeway at a sun-bleached freeway exit north of Bakersfield. They buy drive-through burritos from Taco Bell, and then her father parks the car on the side of the road in front of a peach stucco Motel 6. Plastic grocery bags blow through the mostly empty parking lot and catch on the edges of the hotel’s concrete portico. The rooms on the upper floor appear to have an excellent view of the interstate, a hundred yards away.
“I’m pretty sure your mom stayed here the April before she died,” her father says. “I think she must have been visiting your grandparents.”
Surprised, Olive cranes her neck to look at the motel. She tries to imagine her mother stepping out from under that portico, a duffel bag slung over her shoulder. “She stayed here? How do you know?” she asks.
Her father leans forward and wraps his arms around the steering wheel, looking up at the windows of the hotel. “Something I found on her computer recently,” he says.
“But why would she visit them? I thought she hadn’t talked to them in like thirty years.”
He shakes his head. “I have no idea. But maybe they’ll be able to answer that.”
Olive looks at her father. Behind his glasses, the skin around his eyes is tender and raw, and for the first time, Olive wonders why her father does not seem as excited about the possibility of Billie’s ongoing existence as she is. Does he know something she doesn’t? She is trying to figure out how to ask him when he starts the car and, with one final flick of his eyes toward the motel, pulls back on the interstate. The moment passes.
A few minutes later, he exits to a country highway where closed-up fruit stands advertise strawberries on splintered signs, and disused harvesters sit in ditches, gray with road dust. Distant hills bookend the flat expanse of the valley. Her father slows the car as they pass an orchard where drought-damaged almond trees have recently been bulldozed; the dead trees lie in rows like body bags at a disaster site. Two migrant workers with bandannas tied over their faces are feeding limbs into a wood chipper.
Finally, he turns right at a row of mailboxes and begins bumping down a country road, passing the occasional clapboard farmhouse. In every direction, Olive sees indistinguishable trees and cold dirt and a featureless sky that looks like it’s been painted on with a roller brush. The land feels separated from modern times, a place where existence still founders on the elemental and cruel. Save the earth, she thinks reflexively, but this earth doesn’t seem like it particularly wants saving. The foreign objects planted in its soil will flourish, or they will wither, and everything will continue on regardless.
Nonetheless, she likes the idea that she has this in her family history: something rural, connected to the land, people who once coaxed food from the earth. “I didn’t realize that Mom grew up on a real farm,” Olive says.
Jonathan frowns. “It wasn’t a working farm. Her dad was a preacher, actually. I seem to recall that they sold off most of their land before she was born. Kept the house, though; your mother said it had been in the family for generations.”
They pass a small horse farm where a woman in riding gear is slowly circling a paddock on a steaming black mare, churning up pillows of yellow dust. Finally, the GPS informs them that they’ve arrived at their destination, and Jonathan slows, turning up a driveway.
“This is it,” he says.
The farmhouse that stands before them is falling to its knees. White paint curls from the edges of the house; the wraparound porch has collapsed at one end. A fraying rope hangs from the branch of an almond tree near the front door, but whatever once hung from it—a tire swing, maybe?—is long gone. A rusting Pontiac sits in the front yard, weeds growing up through its missing engine block. It’s the farm from her vision, but a far more run-down version.
Jonathan cuts the engine. He’s quiet for a minute. “You know that your mom didn’t like her parents very much,” he says. “Her father did some pretty bad things. I’m not sure they’re nice people. They may not be happy that we’re here.”
“I know, Dad,” Olive says. She can hear the wind in the branches of the almond trees, whispering about their presence. A chain-link fence surrounds the farmhouse, separating it from the orchards that lie beyond.
She pushes the car door open and climbs out, looking up at the house. The car door slams and her father comes to stand beside her. They gaze at the house together, and the house seems to stare sullenly back at them, its windows shrouded in yellowing lace curtains. The air smells faintly of burning wood and fertilizer.
Olive struggles to remember stories that her mother told about her childhood here. There aren’t many. But she recalls, when she was much younger, playing treasure hunt in the garden with her mom, and asking if this was something she had done with her own mother. Something hard passed across her mother’s face. “My mother didn’t play,” she said. “She believed in only two things: chores and prayers. I spent every minute that I could outside, so that I could get away from her.” She was holding Olive’s hand, and all of a sudden her grip was too tight. Olive whimpered, and her mother released her. She turned to Olive, smiling reassuringly. “It’s OK. The trees were my friends.”
Olive has always liked this image of her mother playing in the almond trees, like the little boy in The Giving Tree—swinging in their branches, making crowns from their papery white flowers. Olive looks around now at the cold, bare trees that stretch in every direction. They do not come off as particularly friendly.
“I can’t imagine who would want to buy this place,” Jonathan says, looking at a sign half buried in weeds: FOR SALE BY OWNER. He starts up the porch, stepping gingerly on the collapsing steps, Olive close behind him. He presses a doorbell, then, when that doesn’t seem to work, knocks loudly.
No one answers.
&nb
sp; Olive peers through the window closest to the door. The house is half abandoned, as if someone began to remove their belongings and then gave up halfway through. Each piece of furniture left behind suggests the absence of another piece, making the room feel even more barren than it would were it completely empty. Olive can see dining room chairs but nothing to eat on, a coffee table but no couch, a TV stand but no TV. On the far wall, over a solitary folding chair, hangs a painted cross, Jesus’ face twisted up serenely despite the blood dripping down his cheeks.
On the other wall, she notices a collection of drawings in cheap frames, hung crookedly above the spot where the couch probably once sat. “Look.” She points. “Are those some of Mom’s drawings?”
Her father cups his hands to the glass. “I guess so.”
She pushes at the window to see if it will open, but it’s locked tight. “It doesn’t look like anyone is actually living here.” She is whispering, though she’s not sure why.
Jonathan shakes his head. “Her parents would be in their mid- to late eighties at this point. It’s possible they’re dead.”
Olive thinks about this. “Maybe that’s why she came here,” she realizes. “For their funeral. She thought it would be too depressing for us, or that we would feel obligated to come with her, so she didn’t say anything about it.”
Her father gives her a funny look and then lets out a quick, surprised laugh. “I hadn’t considered that.” He cups his hands and peers in through the window on the other side of the door. “Well, clearly, your mom isn’t here.”
He steps back and wipes his dusty hands on the legs of his pants, his face contorting with some emotion that Olive can’t identify: Relief? Disappointment? “Did you think she’d be here?” she asks. She remembers how she felt that day on the butterfly beach with Natalie when her mom failed to appear. She knew better this time. But still—there’s got to be a reason her mom directed them here.
Her father shakes his head. He looks around, examining the trees, the state of the porch. “I don’t really know what I thought,” he says, turning to Olive. “Run me through what you saw again? Anything more you can remember?”
“I didn’t see anything specific. Just the farm, like this, except not so run-down. She was swinging on a tire swing.” Olive points to the rope hanging from the tree. “She said, ‘What’s taking you so long?’ And that was it.”
The fascinated way her father is looking at her—as if she’s a delicate creature that requires careful handling—makes her uncomfortable. She feels like some kind of a freak show, and she begins to suspect that he’s humoring her. “Dad?” she says. “Why did you change your mind? Why do you believe me now about Mom being alive?”
Her father waits a beat too long. “I believe you because I love you, Bean,” he says.
“Gosh, thanks, but that’s not a very convincing reason,” she says. Then she hears the high-pitched squeal of slowing brakes. Olive and Jonathan turn to see a pickup truck idling at the foot of the driveway. The woman from the horse farm down the road sits in the front seat, her arm hanging out of the rolled-down window.
“Are you looking for Mrs. Thrace?” she calls. “Because she’s not here anymore.”
Jonathan and Olive step down off the porch, the boards of the steps creaking ominously under their combined weight. “She’s alive?” Jonathan asks.
The woman shrugs. “Far as I know. She moved out after her husband died.”
“When did he die?”
“Back in February of this year. He had a heart attack.”
Olive watches her father take this in, doing the math, his Adam’s apple working up and down. She figures it out quickly—February means that her mother didn’t secretly come here for a funeral in the year before she disappeared. Maybe she was just visiting her parents, then? But why?
The truck belches a plume of black exhaust. “You relatives or friends or something?” the woman asks.
Jonathan puts his arm around Olive and gently grips her upper arms, framing her. “I’m Jonathan. This is Olive. She’s their granddaughter. I’m her dad, I was married to the Thraces’ daughter.”
The woman cuts the engine. She puts a hand up as a visor to shade her eyes and examines them closely. Her short hair is matted from the riding helmet and ringed with drying sweat. “How about that. I didn’t know they even had a kid.”
Olive speaks up. “Her name was Billie. Sybilla. You never met her? She never came by?”
The woman shakes her head. “I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t very tight with the Thraces. They kept to themselves.” Her pale eyes dart to the farmhouse and back. “I heard there was some scandal a long time ago, back when he was still a preacher. People around here leaved them be, no one wanted to have much to do with them.”
Jonathan nods. “So what happened to Rose?”
“Well, she came down with dementia a few years back. Sometimes I’d find her in my barn, wandering around confused, convinced it was her living room. Things were pretty bad here, I think; your grandfather didn’t seem to be handling it very well.” She coughs wetly and then turns and spits out the window. “And then your grandfather finally had his heart attack in February.” She squints at them. “I found him, you know. Out in the road by the mailbox. So I felt some responsibility. Did what I could, contacted some agencies on Rose’s behalf, but she couldn’t stay here alone, of course. There weren’t any relatives who could take her in. Except you, I guess. But I didn’t know about you.”
“Where is she now?” Jonathan asks.
“A government-run nursing home in Oildale. Up on Chester, across from the BK.” She hesitates. “You’ve never met her? Rose?”
They shake their heads in unison.
The woman starts her car. “Well, let me warn you: She’s not much of a conversationalist these days.”
—
When Olive was young, Billie set out a tiny table and chairs underneath a giant fern by the back fence, gave her a spade and a magnifying glass, and declared this Olive’s “private exploration zone.” Her mother kept their garden wild and overgrown, and its dark soil was a source of endless fascination, so rich with life and decay. Olive would sit there in the dappled shade, absorbed in the treasures that she’d unearth: a waterlogged earthworm; a rotting camellia; the bones of a sparrow she’d buried the summer before; the remains of a dehydrated beetle.
Olive’s grandmother, collapsed in the wheelchair, reminds Olive of the things she used to examine in her garden laboratory: There is more death in her than life, as if she’s a translucent husk outlining the space where a human once existed.
Rose Thrace sits in a corner of the community room at the nursing home in Oildale. Someone has wheeled her over to the window to take in the view, but she has obstinately turned her head away, so that instead of looking at the expanse of the parking lot and the Burger King across the street, she is staring blankly at a paper Halloween skeleton pinned to the community room wall. Her features are buried underneath an avalanche of wrinkles; only her tiny dark eyes peer out dimly from within the withered flesh.
She fixes these eyes on Olive and flicks them across her granddaughter’s features, taking in the gold hoops in Olive’s ears, the green clip that holds back her hair. She seems more interested in the individual parts than their sum.
The air smells like disinfectant and urine. Olive glances around, saddened by the institutional nature of this place; couldn’t someone have tried to make it more cheerful for these poor people at the end of their lives? The couches are covered in a shiny stain-obscuring plaid fabric; the floor is carpeted in faded blue that doesn’t conceal the spill marks scattered across it. The room is quiet except for a talk show blaring on the TV, which only a handful of the residents seem to be watching. Many of the rest sit motionless in wheelchairs like hibernating bears, chins drooping to their chests. A few of the more alert women, playing bridge on a battered folding table, have stopped their game to watch the visitors cross the room. They smile at Olive with hun
gry eyes, and she smiles guiltily back at them, feeling like she should try to compensate for all the visitors who have failed to walk through the doors today.
Beside Olive, on one of the chairs that the nurse dragged over for them, Jonathan clears his throat. “Mrs. Thrace,” he says slowly, his words wincingly loud in this silent room, “I’m Jonathan, Billie’s husband. This is your granddaughter, Olive.”
Rose’s eyes slide briefly over toward Jonathan before settling back on the paper skeleton.
“Hi, Grandma,” Olive says softly, self-conscious in the face of her grandmother’s disinterest. But she’s senile and probably can’t understand. Olive thinks of Grandma Annie, her dad’s mom back in Wisconsin, who is in her seventies and needs a walker because of her arthritis but still calls weekly and recently attempted a Facebook profile so that she could “keep up with my grandbaby.” Olive has often wondered about this grandmother, the woman her mom loathed so much that she barely ever mentioned her. Imagining Rose, Olive used to envision someone tall and intimidating, a granite face in a Sunday suit with a hat pinned to her head like the nasty aunts in a Roald Dahl book. But the woman who sits before her is concave and balding, with stains down the front of her robe, a poster child for elder negligence rather than the formidable monster Billie insinuated. She bears no resemblance at all to Olive’s beautiful mother.
“I’m really glad to meet you,” Olive says, carefully enunciating each syllable.
Rose reaches one hand up and clutches at the neck of her robe. Still she says nothing.
“This is Billie’s daughter, Mrs. Thrace,” Jonathan repeats even more slowly.
“No it’s not.” Rose’s voice is tinny and small.
Olive looks at her father just to check: Do they have the wrong person, or is this the disease talking? But then Rose’s face abruptly snaps into focus. She turns her head across the room to watch the nurse who wheeled her in and drops her voice to a whisper. “That nurse over there, she stole my cross. Solid gold. She took it from me when I was sleeping, from right around my neck. You see, she’s a spic.” Olive flinches at the racial slur, but Rose smiles sweetly and continues, dropping her voice. “I think she’s under Satan’s power. But I have the light of the Lord within me, so I can help her.”
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