The Silver Star(73)

“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.





CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT


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.