“It was all so good for my head,” she said. “I feel very balanced.” She started going on about how the Buddhists had taught her about her chi and how to center it, but I cut her off.
“Mom, there’s been trouble,” I said. “This man attacked Liz. There’s going to be a trial.”
Mom let out a shriek. She demanded to know the details, and as I filled her in, she kept yelling things like “What?” “How dare he?” “My girls! My babies!” and “I’ll kill him!” She was leaving immediately, she said, and would drive all night to get to Mayfield in the morning, adding, “This has shot my chi all to hell.”
Mom didn’t reach Byler by the time we left for school in the morning, but she had arrived when we returned, which was good because Uncle Tinsley had been able to explain the legal details and Liz didn’t have to go through it all again. Mom hugged her. Liz didn’t want to let go, so Mom kept hugging her, stroking her hair, and saying, “Everything’s going to be all right, baby. Momma’s here.”
Then Mom turned to hug me. I was surprised by how angry I felt at her. “Where have you been all this time?” I wanted to say. But I said nothing and hugged her back. Mom started rubbing her face against my shoulder. I felt a little wetness, and I realized she was crying and trying to hide it. I wondered if Mom was really going to help us get through all this or if she was just going to be one more person who needed reassurance.
When Liz told Mom how the other kids at school were treating her, Mom said Liz didn’t have to go anymore, at least until the trial was over. Mom would homeschool her.
She offered to homeschool me, too, but I took a pass. Most of the kids had stopped giving me a hard time, and besides, the last thing I wanted to do was sit around Mayfield all day, brooding about Maddox, listening to Mom explain the world as she saw it, and reading a bunch of depressing poetry by Edgar Allan Poe, who had replaced Lewis Carroll as Liz’s favorite writer. I needed to be out and about.
Since Liz and I had gone back to sharing a bedroom, Mom moved into the other room in the bird wing, the one that had been her playroom when she was growing up. When she told the Byler High authorities that she would take over Liz’s education for the time being, they were happy to oblige, since the upcoming trial had caused nothing but tension at school. Mom avoided getting into arguments with Uncle Tinsley and spent the days with Liz, the two of them writing in journals and talking about survival, transcendence, and life energy, all the subjects Mom had been exploring during her spiritual retreat. Liz clung to Mom and to her words, and Mom clearly enjoyed being clung to. They composed poetry together and finished each other’s sentences. Mom had brought her two favorite guitars with her—the Zemaitis and the honey-colored Martin—and she gave the Martin to Liz, promising her she would never criticize her playing no matter what rules Liz broke.
I had been ticked off at Mom when she first showed up, but she seemed to be rising to the occasion. Liz told her about the voices she kept hearing. She was hearing them more often and they were getting scarier. “If the voices are real, I’m in trouble,” Liz said. “If they’re not real, I’m in bigger trouble.” I was afraid Mom would drag her off to a psychiatrist, who would send her to a nut house, but instead Mom said Liz shouldn’t fear the voices. That was how the mind and the soul talked to each other, she said. When you argued with yourself, those were voices. When your conscience told you something was a bad idea, that was a voice. When the muse whispered lyrics in your ear, it was a voice. Everyone heard voices, Mom said. Some of us just heard those voices more clearly than others. Liz should listen to the voices, channel them, and turn them into art, poetry, and music. “Don’t be afraid of your dark places,” Mom told her. “If you can shine a light on them, you’ll find treasure there.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Mom had never made a big deal out of Christmas, telling us every year that it was a pagan holiday the Christians had co-opted, that Christ was actually born in the spring. Uncle Tinsley said he had ignored it ever since Martha died, but when school let out for Christmas break, he told us that because this was the first family gathering at Mayfield in years, we should do something to acknowledge the holiday. Uncle Tinsley and I found a small, perfectly shaped cedar in the hedgerow along the upper pasture. We chopped it down, dragged it back to the house, and decorated it with the Holladay family collection of fragile antique ornaments, some of them, Uncle Tinsley said, dating back to the 1880s.