Open Door

      To my family, on both sides

      Prologue

      Apricot Jam

      What is an apricot? An apricot is a small fruit, from a small tree. Apricots fit into your hand. They fit into your pocket.

      Everyone knows about peaches. Peaches get good publicity. They appear on posters and in poems. Apricots are the poor relation of the peach, the cousin with only a suitcase. But when you eat an apricot, you understand its power.

      The flavor is deeper, stronger. It comes alive on your tongue and bites. You can cook with apricots. You can dry them. Dried apricots keep their flavor like no other fruit. Apricots can be addictive.

      Inside the apricot is a stone. Inside the stone is a soft heart. Inside the soft heart? Some say poison. Some say health. Eat too much and it can kill you. Eat just enough and it can cure you.

      Where do apricots come from? China? India? People have been eating apricots for a long time. You can find traces of apricots in ruins three thousand years old.

      The scientific name for the apricot is Prunus armeniaca, the Armenian plum. Today in Palestine if you say, “during apricot-blossom time,” you mean “never.” In Turkish, to say a thing is like “an apricot from Damascus” means there is nothing better.

      There are many ways to make apricot jam. If you want a clear, sweet jam, it is easy. Find some lovely fruit. Take out the hard stones. Cut the fruit up into pieces. Put it into a big pot. Bring it to a boil. Add sugar. In ten to fifteen minutes, the fruit is cooked. Pop it into jars and voilà!

      There is another way to make the jam, which I learned from my brother-in-law from Beirut. He learned it from his Syrian mother. Put the cooked apricots in pans. Use the pans your mother gave you. If you have lost your mother, buy new pans. Leave the pans in the sun. Cover them with cloth. The heat will pull up the water. Soon the fruit will turn the color of copper, of smoke. The taste deepens as the color darkens.

      After a week, this jam will be ready for your jars.

      When you eat this sun-ripened jam, part of you sings and part of you cries. You want to put spoonful after spoonful into your mouth until your belly hurts.

      All the apricots in the world are linked to the first apricot. That piece of fruit came from a wild forest. One day, a human walking through the woods looked up. There in the branches was a glint of gold. Luckily for us, our ancestors knew how to climb. They knew how to reach. They knew how to grab for sweetness wherever they could.

      Chapter 1

      On the Road

      Friday Afternoon

      Lisa Katsouris left Los Angeles to drive eighty-three miles north to the family orchard in Ojai. She was alone in the car. Alone was not what she had expected to be.

      The first time Lisa had done this trip, she was a baby in the back of her parents’ car. Fifty years later, her hands were on the wheel.

      It was her grandfather Joe’s hundredth birthday. His family was gathering to celebrate. Some lived nearby. Some were arriving from as far away as New York.

      Lisa’s grandfather bought the orchard in 1957, the same year Lisa was born. All her life, she had felt linked to those trees.

      Joe Katsouris came to America in 1925. He was an orphan with an orphaned wife. Both Joe and Anna had been born Greeks in Turkey under the Ottoman Empire. They lost their families when a rise in nationalism broke up the old borders. Greece for the Greeks. Turkey for the Turks. Muslim Greeks were expelled from Greece and ethnic Greeks were forced out of Turkey. Many people died. Lisa’s grandparents were among a million refugees who fled to Greece.

      Joe and Anna met in a camp in northern Greece. They were too Greek for the Turks, but too Turkish for the Greeks. So they ended up in America. They settled in California, where they had four children. Joe and Anna worked so hard they never looked up.

      Never looked up, according to Joe, until the day he saw a parcel of land for sale in Ojai. There were rows of apricot trees in blossom; there were poppies growing in the grass. The orchard reminded him of the world he had known at the beginning of his life, a world unbroken.

      He bought the land. For years afterward, his family grew around him: children, grandchildren. They gathered every weekend, then every month. Eventually, they came once a year. Then Anna died. The generations scattered. Still, his family came back when they could, from close by and from far away.

      When Lisa had a daughter, Anya, she brought her, too. For twenty years, mother and daughter travelled to the orchard together. Lisa was a good gardener. She nurtured her daughter well. But now a blight had come between them.

      How would she explain it to her family? She might have to lie. There was always a chance Anya would come on her own.

      At midday the lanes of the highway were empty. Lisa had cleared her schedule to get ahead of the weekend crowds. She zipped through North Hollywood and most of the Valley.

      At a place where three freeways came together, the traffic slowed. Lisa shifted gears. The early-summer sun muscled through the June gloom. Soon she was out of the suburbs and racing into the open hills near Thousand Oaks.

      Already, the spring grass had dried to gold. The hills shone under blue skies. The road dropped into the farmland