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.
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.
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, bu
t 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.”
“Miss Clay at school says I got myself one ugly mouth.”
“She’s right,” Mom said. “And if you can make it work for you, that ugly mouth will get you far.”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Liz stayed in bed all that day and slept through the night. The next morning, she still refused to get up. After breakfast, Uncle Tinsley asked me to help him clean the gutters. We were walking back from the barn, each carrying one end of the aluminum extension ladder, when all of a sudden those two emus came wandering up the driveway. The birds didn’t seem afraid at all, cocking their heads and looking around with their enormous caramel-colored eyes.
“They must have gotten loose from Scruggs’s field,” Uncle Tinsley said. “Scruggs never did tend his fences.”
We set the ladder on the ground, the emus studied it warily, and I ran inside to get Liz, who pulled on a pair of jeans and rushed down the stairs. By then, the emus were moseying up toward the barn, making that gurgly drumming noise deep in their throats. They took those long, deliberate steps, bobbing their heads each time they raised a leg. The smaller emu had one foot that turned to the side and dragged slightly when it walked, as if the foot had once been injured. Their movements were somehow both awkward and graceful, and they kept glancing back and forth as if to reassure each other that it was safe.
Uncle Tinsley decided he’d better get in touch with Scruggs, who needed to know about any loose livestock, and he went inside to make the call. When he came back out, he said he’d spoken with Scruggs and the emus actually belonged to Scruggs’s son-in-law, Tater, who was working a job over in the valley and wouldn’t be back until the day after tomorrow. Tater was the only one who knew how to catch the birds, so Scruggs had asked if it wouldn’t be too much of an imposition for us to keep them until Tater returned.
“I reckon that’s the neighborly thing to do,” Uncle Tinsley said. “But we’ll need to get them into the pasture.”
The emus had meandered past the barn into the orchard. They were a few feet from the gate that led into the main pasture, which was surrounded by old three-board fencing. Walking slowly behind the emus, our arms stretched out, we were able to herd them the short distance to the open gate. Once they had gone through, Liz quickly shut the gate and latched it.
Later that morning, we brought Mom up to the field to show her the emus, but when she got a good look at them up close, the size of their talons unnerved her, and she said she wanted nothing to do with them. Liz, however, found them captivating. While Uncle Tinsley and I got back to the business of cleaning the gutters, which were so clogged that little green sprouts were growing out of them, Liz spent the whole afternoon leaning on the fence, watching the emus. She couldn’t believe anything so strange-looking as those two emus would just show up. They seemed not of this world, she said, like creatures from a prehistoric era, or aliens from another planet, or maybe even angels. She decided that the bigger one was a male and the smaller was a female, and she named them Eugene and Eunice.
Not only did Liz love the emus, she also fell in love with the word “emu.” She pronounced it “emyou” and also “emooo,” drawing out the sound like a mooing cow. She pointed out that “emu” was “youme” backward, and she came up with a whole list of neat words that rhymed with “emus,” everything from “refuse” to “snooze” to “blues” to “choose” and “chews.”
That night, she looked up emus in Uncle Tinsley’s Encyclopaedia Britannica and kept bombarding us with information about them, how they came from Australia, how they could run forty-five miles an hour, how the males sat on the nest, how they had these unique double feathers with two plumes growing from each quill.
“They’re so weird and so beautiful,” she said.
“Like you,” I said.
I meant it as a joke, but Liz nodded. She felt that she was sort of like an emu herself, she said. Maybe that was why she’d had flying dreams ever since she was a little girl—at heart, she was an emu. She was sure the emus also dreamed of flying. It was another thing they had in common. Both she and the emus wanted to fly—they just didn’t have the wings they needed.
CHAPTER FIFTY
On Monday morning, I went back to school. The trial had been over for two days, but we still hadn’t figured out what we were going to do next. Mom was set on clearing out of Byler. She kept talking about that harebrained road trip and also about going to the Catskills, or maybe Chincoteague Island to see the wild ponies. Liz, meanwhile, kept refusing to go to school. When she wasn’t watching the emus, she was in our room, obsessively writing emu poetry. One poem went:
Never fight with emus
Because emus never lose.
Another one went:
When they sneeze,
Emus choose
To use
Tissues.
And then there was:
Emus do peruse
The news,
Sometimes alone,
Sometimes in twos.
But,
Asked what they think,
Emus just blink.
Emus rarely share their views.
They don’t refuse.
They use a ruse,
Pretending to be quite confused.
On Wednesday afternoon, Tater and a couple of buddies arrived in a pickup with an empty cattle trailer attached to it. Tater was a small, slope-shouldered guy with sandy hair and a tight, unsmiling mouth. He barely thanked us for keeping his emus, and immediately started complaining about those stupid birds, what a trouble they were, worst deal he ever made. Some guy up in Culpeper County sold them to him as a breeding pair after convincing him that emu meat and emu eggs would be the next big thing, but this pair wouldn’t breed or even lay eggs. He’d have barbecued them a long time ago, only he’d learned that the meat was gamier than hell—tasted like shoe leather—so all the damn birds did now was walk around scaring the cattle and shitting those big emu piles everywhere. Good for nothing but bear bait.
With Uncle Tinsley directing, Tater backed the trailer up to the pasture gate. We all trooped into the field, though Mom hung back, complaining that she wasn’t wearing the right shoes. Besides, she didn’t trust those emus—they could turn on us in an instant.
Liz had brought some bread along and tried luring the emus into the trailer, but when they got near the ramp, they peered into the dark, confining interior, gave Liz one of their funny cross-eyed looks, and scurried off. We spent over an hour hollering and waving our arms, trying to shoo the emus toward the trailer. It didn’t work. Whenever we got them close, the emus screamed and flapped their stunted little wings and dodged away. Once Tater managed to get a hand on Eugene’s neck, but the bird kicked out with one of his huge taloned feet, and Tater had to jump back. “Goddamn birds,” he said. “They’re so stupid. I should just shoot them.”
“They’re not stupid,” Liz told him. “They just don’t want to do what you want them to do. And why would they?”
“Well, I hate the ugly buggers,” he said.
“You hate them?” Liz asked. “I love them.”
Tater stopped and looked at Liz. “You love them?” he asked. “You can have them.”
“Oh my God,” Liz said. And she actually fell to her knees and held her arms out. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”
>
Tater looked at Liz like she was insane.
“Wait a minute,” Uncle Tinsley said. “We can’t just take these emus. Who’s going to look after them?”
“Me,” Liz said.
“I’ll help,” I said.
“Please,” Liz said.
“We’re talking about a serious long-term commitment here,” Uncle Tinsley said.
“That’s right,” Mom said. “Anyway, we’re not staying in Byler. We’re moving. To the Catskills. Or wherever.”
“We can’t just leave these emus,” Liz said.
Mom got a puzzled expression. “You’re telling me you want to stay in Byler because you fell in love with a couple of big, disgusting birds that happened to walk up the driveway?”
“They need me. There’s no one else to look after them.”
“We don’t belong here,” Mom said.
“The emus don’t belong here, either,” Liz said, “but they’re here.”
Mom started to say something and then stopped.
“We’ll keep the darn birds,” Uncle Tinsley told Tater. Then he looked at Liz. “But only if you go back to school.”
“All right,” Liz said. “I’ll go back to school.”
“What about you, Mom?” I asked. “What are you going to do?” I watched Mom. She studied the sun setting behind the distant blue mountains.
“I can’t stay here,” she finally said. “I just can’t.”
The next day, Liz went back to school and Mom packed to return to New York. Everything was going to turn out for the best, she said. When she got to New York, she would find a publisher for Liz’s emu poetry. She was also going to find a rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side where we could all live real cheap, and then she would get us into one of those special public schools for gifted kids. She also talked about how maybe we could all spend the summer in the Catskills.
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