When my son was small he had a playmate who could read
auras. She could read personalities and
moods simply by reading the colors that surrounded a person. Her mother told me that when this little girl
was only three, she told her mother that the baby in her tummy wasn’t there any
longer. Indeed, the mother told me, a
day later a miscarriage was confirmed. I
asked the girl, she was about seven by then, to read a visitor in our
home. The girl came to me later when she
could find me alone to tell me that the woman’s whole abdomen seemed to be
filled with darting black balls. She
said she’d never seen that before, but I assured her that she had described our
guest perfectly. A very difficult
person, she was plagued with anger and old hurts.
This child was the inspiration for Lizzy’s gift of seeing
colors in A Twist of Light. Lizzy and her older sister Ellie suddenly
find themselves orphaned and have one goal; to stay together. Set in California’s Central Valley, but
narrated in part by the adult Lizzy, who is now happily ensconced in coastal
Sussex, the story is one of survival, adaptation and finally transformation.
I knew from the moment I put Lizzy to paper that she was
special. Apart from her gift for seeing
colors she presented herself to me as someone very familiar, almost someone I
knew or had known. Characters can do
that when things are going well and Lizzy never hesitated to take over the
manuscript. I would get up in the
morning and my first thought was usually about what Lizzy was going to do that
day. I knew there was a lot of me in
Lizzy, but Lizzy was braver than I’d ever been and she was so strong that I had
to love her. Once the book was published
I finally realized who this child had been all along.
I was living in England at the time and my mother in
California would call me every week at a particular time. When I picked up the telephone and heard her
voice I thought something must be wrong since it wasn’t her day to call and
when she started crying, my fears were confirmed.
“How did you know?” She kept repeating to me, her voice
trembling. Finally, she told me she’d
just finished A Twist of Light. “I’m Lizzy, that’s me, but how did you
know?” Then I started crying and her
story came out, all the sadness, pain and all the confusion of a child living
with a mother who was drinking herself to death. She told me all the things about my
grandmother that she’d never been able to share and it turned into one of the
longest telephone calls I’ve ever had.
This was years before free long distance calls, so it must have cost her
a fortune, but it was money very well spent.
I’d always been close to my mother, but this drew us even closer for the
rest of her life.
I still don’t know how Lizzy came to me, but now I knew who
she was. Perhaps I’d overheard something
or maybe the information was so much a part of my mother that it was part of
the DNA that was passed onto me. Like my
little friend who saw the colors of other people, some things simply can’t be
explained. By the way, my little friend
is now an attorney out in California and she must be a very good one since she
just made partner. Maybe she is still
able to read people’s colors.
