“But we had a witness,” I said.
“Not today you didn’t.”
We got into
the Woody. Uncle Tinsley headed down Holladay Avenue saying nothing. I took Liz’s hand, but she pulled it away and
leaned against the door. Mom was so agitated that she could hardly contain herself. Her fingers trembled as she lit a cigarette. That defense attorney was a monster, she told us. All those
outrageous, untrue things he had said about her. And the way he had behaved toward her girls was hideous. He had treated Liz even worse than he had me, she went on. He had taken Liz’s
imagination and creativity and used them against her. He accused her of constantly making things up—for example, changing the endings of the stories she read to Maddox’s daughter,
Cindy. He said Liz’s banged-up face in the police photos could have been caused by Tinsley Holladay smacking her for coming home late. He asked Liz about the perv we’d ditched in New
Orleans, then told the jury that this was evidence she called men “perverts” without any proof and that she considered outsmarting them a game and a challenge. The lawyer actually said
that Liz’s two favorite authors, Lewis Carroll and Edgar Allan Poe, were themselves perverts. He declared that Liz was essentially a habitual liar with an overactive imagination and an
obsession with the idea of perverts—and that in itself, he told the jurors, was more than a little perverted.
Mom started going on about how much she hated Byler. The town was full of hicks, rubes, crackers, and lintheads. It was small-minded and mean-spirited, backward and prejudiced. Sitting in that
courtroom was the most humiliating experience of her life. We were really the ones on trial, not Maddox, put on trial for our values and our lifestyle, for our willingness to go out in the world
and do something different and creative with our lives instead of wasting away in this stifling, dying, claustrophobic mill town.
“Shut up, Charlotte,” Uncle Tinsley said.
“That’s the problem with this town,” she said. “Everyone’s supposed to just shut up and pretend nothing’s wrong. Little Bean was the only one with the guts to
stand up and say it was all a pack of lies.”
“The jury thought what I said was all a pack of lies,” Liz said in a quiet voice. “Nothing happened. You heard the verdict. Nothing happened.” I was sitting next to her
in the back of the Woody. She looked out the window. “Was it a pack of lies,” she said, “or a lack of pies?” She pulled up her legs and wrapped her arms around her knees.
“Pack of lies. Lack of pies. Plaque of eyes, arranged by size. Or black-eyed lies?” Liz was speaking in a distant monotone, almost to herself. “Plucked-out eyes. Lucked-out lies.
Synthesize. Between my thighs.” She paused. “To no surprise, to our demise.” She was still staring out the window. “All the liars told their lies.” There was another
pause. “Who denies the lies? Who will scrutinize the lies? The size of lies? Who will pluck the liars’ eyes? Who cries, who spies, who sighs, who dies?”
“Please stop it,” I said.
“I can’t.”
The day seemed to have gone on forever, but it was only midafternoon by the time we got back to the house. While the morning had been clear, the sky had clouded over, and a
cold, foggy drizzle had started up. Liz said she was going up to the bird wing to spend a little time by herself and maybe take a nap. Uncle Tinsley decided to build a fire in the living room and
sent me out to fetch kindling from the woodshed. I couldn’t find any good kindling, so I chopped some from a couple of small logs, using the little hatchet that hung on the wall.
After the trial, it felt good to be doing something simple and physical. You set up the wood on the chopping block, brought the hatchet down hard, and the wood split cleanly into two pieces.
Then you stacked it and set up another piece of wood. Everything went the way it was supposed to. No tricks, no surprises.
When I had enough kindling, I laid it in the canvas tote, added some twigs from the old tack box Uncle Tinsley stored them in while they dried out, then carried it all back to the house,
covering the tote with my arm so the wood wouldn’t get rained on.
Uncle Tinsley was on his knees in front of the fireplace, wadding up newspaper and tearing cardboard into strips. Mom was sitting in a brocade wing chair next to the hearth. She and Uncle
Tinsley seemed to have decided that they were tired of fighting. Instead, Uncle Tinsley was going on about the importance, in getting a good blaze going, of the right amount of starting
material—paper, cardboard, twigs, kindling, small seasoned pieces—and not until that was burning in a lively way did you add your logs. Otherwise, all it did was smoke.
“Bean, why don’t you go see if Liz wants to come down,” Mom said. “She could probably use a little primal heat.”
I climbed the stairs to the second floor. Uncle Tinsley always kept the radiators off except when the temperature fell below freezing, and the hall was chilly. The rain had gotten heavier, and
you could hear it drumming on the metal roof. When I opened the door to our room, I saw Liz lying on the bed with her clothes still on. I was going to turn around and let her sleep, but she
suddenly made this groggy, gurgling noise that scared me.
“Liz?” I said. “Liz, are you okay?”
I sat down next to her, shaking her arm and calling her name, and when she looked up, her eyes were blurry and unfocused. She said a few words in a slurred voice, but I couldn’t understand
them. I ran back downstairs. “Something’s wrong with Liz!” I screamed.
Mom jumped out of her chair, and Uncle Tinsley dropped the log he was holding. We all ran up the stairs. Uncle Tinsley shook Liz hard, and she responded with the same sort of slurry and
incomprehensible noises.
“Did you take anything?” Uncle Tinsley shouted at her.
“Pills,” she mumbled.
“Pills? What pills?”
“Mom’s pills.”
Uncle Tinsley looked over at Mom. “What kind of pills is she talking about?”
“She must mean the sleeping pills,” Mom said.
“You’ve got sleeping pills?”
“So?”
“Jesus, Charlotte. Go check the bottle.”
Uncle Tinsley started slapping Liz’s face and dragged her off the bed. Liz stumbled and fell to the floor. Uncle Tinsley said that we needed to get Liz woken up.
Mom came back and said the bottle was empty but there had been only a few pills left, maybe six or eight at the most. Uncle Tinsley half-carried Liz into the bathroom while Mom followed,
explaining that as the trial got nearer, she’d given Liz a pill from time to time to help with her nerves. At the sink, Uncle Tinsley forced Liz to drink several glasses of water and then
kneel over the toilet while he stuck his fingers down her throat. She vomited all over his hand, but Uncle Tinsley kept at it until all he got from her was dry heaves. Then he pulled her into the
bathtub and turned the shower on cold and they stood there in their clothes, getting soaked. Liz started coughing and flailing around, hitting Uncle Tinsley and asking Mom to make him stop, please
stop.
“He’s getting the poison out, honey,” Mom said.
“It’s not supposed to be fun,” Uncle Tinsley said.
“Shouldn’t we call an ambulance?” I asked.
Mom and Uncle Tinsley said no at exactly the same time. Tripping over each other’s words, Uncle Tinsley said, “We’ve got it under control,” and Mom said,
“She’ll be all right.” After a moment, Mom added, “We’ve had enough dealings with people in uniform for one day.”
Once it seemed like the drugs were out of Liz’s system, Uncle Tinsley brought her one of his big flannel shirts. Mom and I helped her into it, then wrapped her in a
blanket and took her down to sit by the fire while Uncle Tinsley changed into dry clothes. Mom made Liz hot coffee, and I toweled and combed her hair.
“Did you try to kill yourself?” I asked Liz.
“I just wanted to go to sleep,” Liz said. “I just wanted everything to go away.”
“That’s really stupid,” I said. I knew it wasn’t a nice thing to say, but I couldn’t help myself. “That’s what Maddox has been doing, trying to kill us,
and you’re going to do it for him?”
“Leave me alone,” Liz said. “I feel like crap.”
“Bean’s right,” Mom said. “He’d love to hear you came home and OD’d. Don’t give him that satisfaction.”
Liz just sipped her coffee and stared at the fire.
Liz was still
deep asleep when I woke up the next morning. I nudged her to see if she was okay, and she muttered that she was alive
but wanted to be left alone. Since it was Saturday, I let her stay in bed.
I went down to the kitchen, where Uncle Tinsley was drinking coffee and reading his latest geological newsletter. I fixed myself a poached egg on toast and was sitting next to him eating it when
Mom came in carrying a book.
“I’ve got a terrific idea for a road trip,” she said, and held up the book. It was a guide to the famous trees of Virginia. Mom said Liz and I were always going on about the
special trees around Byler, the big poplars by the high school and the chestnut in the woods behind the Wyatts’ house. But those trees were nothing compared to some of the truly spectacular
trees in this book—the bald cypress in the Nottoway River Swamp that was the biggest tree in the entire state, the three-hundred-year-old red spruces in the Jefferson National Forest, the
enormous live oak in Hampton under whose branches a Union soldier read the Emancipation Proclamation to a group of slaves, the first time it was ever read in the South. There were dozens, Mom went
on, each of them fascinating and potentially life-changing, and what the three of us girls could do was drive around visiting the trees, communing with their spirits. “They’ll inspire
us,” Mom said. “It’s exactly what we need right now.”
“A road trip, Charlotte?” Uncle Tinsley asked. “Seems a little half-baked.”
“You’re always so negative, Tin,” Mom said. “Whenever I come up with ideas, you always want to shoot them down.”
“What about school?” I asked.
“I’ll homeschool you,” she said.
“We’re just going to leave?” I asked.
“We can’t stay here,” Mom said. “That’s out of the question.” She looked at me strangely. “I mean, you’re not saying you want to stay here, are
you?”
I had been so overwhelmed by the trial and the verdict and Liz’s taking those dumb sleeping pills that I hadn’t even thought about what we were going to do next. “Mom, I
don’t know what I want to do,” I said. “But we can’t just leave.”
“Why not?” Mom asked.
“Every time we run into a problem, we just leave,” I said. “But we always run into a new problem in the new place, and then we have to leave there, too. We’re always just
leaving. Can’t we for once just stay somewhere and solve the problem?”
“I agree,” Uncle Tinsley said.
“You tried to solve a problem by bringing those charges against Maddox,” Mom said, “and see where it got you.”
“What should we have done? Run away?” Suddenly, I was furious. “You’re pretty good at that, aren’t you?”
“How dare you speak to me like that? I’m your mother.”
“Then act like one for a change. We wouldn’t be in this whole mess if you had been acting like a mom all along.”
I had never talked to Mom like that before. As soon as I said it, I realized I had gone too far, but it was too late. Mom sat down at the table and started sobbing. She tried to be a good
mother, she said, but it was so hard. She didn’t know what to do or where to go. We couldn’t all fit into the crummy little one-room apartment she’d rented in New York, and she
couldn’t afford anything better. If we didn’t want to go on the road trip, maybe we could find a house in the Catskills near her spiritual retreat, but there was no way she was staying
in Byler. There was just no way.
Uncle Tinsley put his arm around Mom, and she leaned into his shoulder. “I’m not a bad person,” she said.
“I know you’re not,” Uncle Tinsley said. “This has been difficult for all of us.”
I almost apologized for what I’d said, but I stopped myself. I felt I was right and Mom needed to face facts. So I let Uncle Tinsley comfort her, poured a glass of orange juice for Liz,
and went upstairs to see how she was doing.
Liz was still asleep, but I kept nudging her until she finally rolled onto her back and looked up at the ceiling.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
“How do you think I feel?”
“Pretty awful,” I said. “Here, drink this.”
Liz sat up and took a sip of orange juice. I told her about Mom’s idea for the road trip and the possibility of moving to the Catskills near that spiritual retreat of hers. Liz
didn’t say anything. In any event, I went on, Mom said she had to get out of Byler, so we had to decide what we were going to do.
“You’re the older one, but here’s how I see it,” I said. Mom’s roadtrip idea was just as cockamamie as all her other ideas. And the Catskills plan was downright
wacky. I didn’t want to go off to some spiritual retreat and live with a bunch of Buddhist monks. And what if Mom took off or had another one of her meltdowns when we got there? Were the
monks going to take care of us? Also, there were only three months of school left. We should at least finish out the school year in Byler. It wasn’t such a bad place. We had Uncle Tinsley and
we had the Wyatts. They weren’t going to take off. Finally, the business with Maddox was over. We might not like how it ended, but it had ended.
“I don’t know,” Liz said. “This all makes my brain hurt.” She set her orange juice down on the nightstand. “I just want to sleep.”
I went back downstairs. Uncle Tinsley was building another fire in the living room, and Mom was sitting in the wing chair. Her eyes were a little puffy from that crying jag.
She seemed unusually calm but also sad, and I realized I was no longer angry. “Mom, I’m sorry about some of those things I said. I know it hurt.”
“It wouldn’t hurt if weren’t all so true,” Mom said.
“I can be a jerk sometimes,” I said.
“Don’t apologize for who you are,” she said. “And don’t ever be afraid to tell the truth.”