Charlie laughed, and I joined in. The whole thing was so serious and so crazy at the same time.
“Something like that,” said Charlie.
“It’s true. I need to have as small an impact on the past as possible.”
“So you should probably stay out of sight as much as you can, not talk to a lot of people, and be there for as short a time as possible. The bare minimum.”
“Supposedly, you can’t stay that long anyway.”
“How long is ‘that long’?”
“Um, I’m not sure.”
“Oh. Well, what happens if you stay too long?”
“Also not sure. Something not good, I guess?”
“Oh.”
And all the possible “not good” things that could happen were suddenly all around us, creeping, closing in, casting ugly shadows across us. You think thoughts like that, about the unknown “not good” for too long, they can suck you down like quicksand, but it’s also really hard to stop.
“I wish I could go instead of you,” Charlie said in a low, dead-serious voice.
“Thanks,” I said lightly. “I’ll be fine, though. I’m tough.”
The light tone was meant to make things better, relieve the tension, drive the “not good” back to wherever it came from, but like most things that are sort of faked, it backfired.
“You’re tough?” said Charlie, angrily. “Seriously? You know what? Just because we aren’t talking about how dangerous this is doesn’t mean it’s not. It’s insanely dangerous. You could go through the wrong blinking hole and get lost in some random time. You could get stuck in 1938. And even if the time travel works, you’re headed straight for a very messed-up situation. Guns, armored cars, a guy getting stabbed, another guy getting bashed over the head.”
“Charlie—”
“No!”
He jumped to his feet, started to pace The Octagon.
“Forget it. This is wrong. Dead wrong!”
“Calm down,” I said.
He stopped pacing and looked hard at me.
“You can’t do it.”
My jaw tightened the way it always does when someone tells me this.
“You can’t stop me.”
Charlie made a disgusted sound and shook his head. At this point, if I had been Charlie, I might have brought up my mom. I might have pointed out that the last thing she needed was to have her husband sentenced to death and then have her daughter disappear off the face of the earth—or at least earth circa 2014. Not that he needed to because I had already tortured myself with this thought enough, but he could have done it anyway, twisted the knife, gone for the low blow. Most people would have.
But Charlie said, wearily, “Look, I know you need to go and do this. I just wish you didn’t have to do it alone.”
“But I won’t be alone,” I said.
Charlie looked at me, puzzled.
“I’ll be with Grandpa Joshua,” I said. “The first thing I’ll do is find him. And he’s a pretty great guy.”
Charlie let this sink in, smiled a ghost of a smile, and sat down.
“Okay,” he said. “When?”
“I need a day,” I said. “Just to hang out with my mom. So I guess tomorrow night at midnight.”
“Where?”
“It’s supposed to be a place where you feel relaxed and at home. So, here.”
“How? And wait, why do you even know how? If no one is supposed to do it, why would your dad even tell you?”
“Because even though it’s something you usually have to do on purpose, it’s possible to do it by accident. Which would be terrible.”
“Oh wow. Yeah, it would. Okay, how?”
So I told him. I started this way: “The first thing you do is give yourself to the universe. . . .”
My day with my mom was one of those things so through-and-through fine, so every-second sweet, that you mostly need to keep it to yourself, but I want you to know that it started with her coming downstairs after her shower, looking pale as a lily but clear-eyed and fresh, like someone who’s just gone out walking in the cleanest rain ever and steps through the door and is home.
Some moms might have said “sorry” for having been out of commission for so long, but she didn’t. This made me happy, because what did she have to be sorry about? Loving my dad so much? Hating injustice so much? Being worn out and sad? She might as well have apologized for being a human being, and no one should ever apologize for that.
Instead she said, “Here’s the deal: you’re my girl, I’m your mom, and we are going to bake.”
It was a cinnamon-scented day, the kind you slip into your pocket, carry with you when you leave, and never lose.
My dad told me to begin outside, in the middle of the night when the sky is black and the stars are out, in a place that feels yours, where you feel safe and at home. He told me how you relax every muscle, letting go of anything that might hold you back, keep you tied to the Now—memories, fear, whatever song is on a replay loop inside your head, your itchy mosquito bite, thoughts of revenge, hope, hate, love (although he said love is supposed to be hardest of all)—and giving yourself, every little bit, to the universe, dropping yourself, body, heart, soul, mind, into the Everything like you’d drop a coin into an open palm.
He told me about the stars, how you watch them and only them, as they wheel in their ancient, complicated patterns, marking the seasons, the years, until you feel their wheelings and their cold, blue beauty inside you. He told me how they teach you about time, even though you’re not aware of learning or even what you’ve learned. You’re like a piece of paper the stars write the workings of time on in a language you don’t know (or don’t know you know) how to read. And he told me about how the one thought you hold in your mind so hard and repeat to yourself so many times that you begin to breathe it in and out and your heart begins to beat it is a date, the day you want to travel to.
When I walked out my door at 11:30 that night to make my shaky, sweaty-palmed way to The Octagon, Charlie was sitting on my porch with a bag.
“I Googled girls’ clothes in 1938 and found some stuff in Jane’s closet that might work.”
Jane was Charlie’s sixteen-year-old sister who had so many clothes that her room was more like a clothes museum than like a bedroom, if there are such things as clothes museums. She shopped everywhere, from thrift stores to fancy boutiques; half the stuff hanging in her closet (and sitting in boxes and thrown around her room) still had tags on it.
“Oh, wow, I didn’t even think about what I’d wear!” I said.
Charlie tapped his head and winked in a way that meant, Luckily, your best friend is a genius who thinks of everything. I rolled my eyes and grabbed the bag out of his hand. Inside was a green-flowered cotton dress with a Peter Pan collar that buttoned up the front and a pair of brown-and-white saddle shoes that were two sizes too big for me.
“I’ll look like an oversized baby with gigantic feet,” I protested.
“Yeah, you’re right. It’ll be a lot better for you to show up in a hoodie, purple jeans, and neon-yellow running shoes,” said Charlie.
I stuck my tongue out at him, snatched the clothes, and turned to go inside to change.
“Wait,” said Charlie. “You’re going to late October, right?”
“October 26, 1938,” I said dutifully.
We’d decided that I’d go the day before the meeting in the hunting lodge, which we hoped would give me time to find Grandpa Joshua, convince him I wasn’t a psycho, just a perfectly ordinary girl time traveling from 2014 to save Luke Agrippa from becoming Judge Biggs; to stop the murder; and to figure out how to get home before my time ran out. I had no idea how I’d know when my time was almost out, but I figured there would be some kind of sign. I sure hoped so.
“Man, are you lucky I’m around to remember stuff like it’s cold in late October,” said Charlie. “I couldn’t find a coat that looked right, but I found this.”
He tossed me a thick brown cardigan s
weater, Irish looking, with leather-covered buttons. It reeked of mothballs.
“Well, at least I can cross ‘killer moth attacks’ off my list of concerns,” I said.
“You’re welcome,” said Charlie.
As we walked to The Octagon, Charlie asked me if I wanted him to stay, just sort of hang out on The Octagon until I vanished and came back or whatever I was going to do, which was a nice thing to ask, and even though I really, really, really wanted him to, I said no.
“I’m supposed to let go of everything but the stars and the date and not think about anything that might tie me to the here and now. If you were right there, well, I might think about— I mean, I might have trouble— It might make me want to—”
Good grief. I told myself that I had to be pretty darn nervous to be suddenly getting all awkward and girlie about Charlie. Stammering? Blushing?
“I get it,” Charlie said, quickly. “It’s cool. But you come find me the second you get back and tell me what happened. Or else. By the way, how long do you think you’ll be gone? And will you, like, disappear?”
“I don’t think so, because the way I understand it, it’ll take no time at all,” I said. “None of our time, that is. I mean, I guess it’ll take a while for me to get into the trance or whatever and go through the portal into 1938, but once I’m there, I’ll be using up 1938 time, not our time.”
“So no matter how long you’re in the past, you’ll come back to the exact same moment in 2014 that you left?”
“Yeah. Does that sound right?”
Charlie grinned. “Well, except for the fact that all of this sounds totally insane, sure! Exactly right.”
When we got to The Octagon, there was no big, serious good-bye. Charlie held out his fist, and we bumped knuckles.
“Good luck,” he said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
“Thanks for the advice,” I said. “Very helpful.”
He grinned an evil grin and walked backward a few steps, his hands shoved into his pockets then he turned around and jogged across the grass. When I couldn’t see him anymore, I lay down on The Octagon, pulled the smelly sweater tightly around me, and began.
“October 26, 1938,” I whispered.
I don’t know how long it took, maybe hours, maybe minutes. All I know is that the boards of The Octagon stopped pressing against my back, and I stopped feeling chilly and became very light—weightless and floating—and the date I was going to stopped being a chant—October 26, 1938; October 26, 1938—and became a song I sang effortlessly and with my entire self, and it was beautiful.
And then I was in this pearly-light-soaked place, if you could call it a place since it didn’t somehow feel located anywhere, and so was maybe more like a state, a sort of perfect, suspended balance of peace and shine, and then the portals started quietly blooming around me, shimmering and opening, shimmering and shutting, and I wasn’t nervous about finding the right one, even though you would think I might have been. And then one opened in front of me and just a little to the left, and I knew it was the one, and I didn’t step into it, just leaned toward it, so slightly, and was—through.
Then: pain and noise and images. Pain that was like being squeezed one second and yanked by every limb the next. Noise that was the October 26-song turned into a tornado roar and a drawn-out scream. Images that were ordinary and horrible and heartbreaking and pretty: a dying horse, its eyes full of terror; clothes flapping on a line; a boy no older than Charlie shooting someone; a man in a black suit sobbing with his head in his hands; a girl in a skirt, spinning; a house on fire; a boy playing a violin; a mother rocking her baby; something dead, covered in flies. Everything whirling faster and faster, the song a bright knife through my head, pain and more pain.
I swear I could feel it: history resisting.
Then: wooden boards pressing into my shoulder blades, my body one long ache. I opened my eyes to darkness that became a whitish sky that became a white ceiling that became the white-painted inside of a peaked roof, eight triangles leaning in toward each other. Eight, I thought, eight. A gazebo roof. The Octagon, back before it was mine and Charlie’s.
I lay there, staring at that ceiling, breathing hard, too scared to move, and then, after a while, because I didn’t know what else to do, I sat up, stood up, and started walking.
Josh
1938
THE PRESIDENT, OWNER, AND chief executive officer of Victory Fuels, the great Theodore K. Ratliff, saw that picture of Preston in the Times. And I’ve always believed Preston’s picture is what turned the tide in our favor. Aristotle had already gotten old Mr. Ratliff to take note of our plight, to answer a few of our letters, to start asking questions about how Biggs treated us, and to think about us as people, not just mine machinery. As soon as Ratliff came across my little brother playing taps in the paper, he ordered his personal railroad car attached to the Desert Zephyr, and he sent a telegram to Aristotle saying he was headed for Victory with a contract in his briefcase, an agreement guaranteeing fair wages and safe working conditions. The citizens of Canvasburg unanimously elected Aristotle to sign it for us all when Mr. Ratliff arrived.
We’d won.
The morning of the day Mr. Ratliff’s train was scheduled to arrive, I made breakfast as usual. I wasn’t too good at it, but I was the only one in the family whose body parts all worked. I was excited because I had a half dozen oranges for Preston. I’d earned them by hiking three miles south to an orange grove and working half a day digging irrigation ditches. People were starting to claim oranges had a magic ingredient called vitamin C. Made you healthy. I figured even though Doc O’Malley had sprung Preston from the infirmary and he was on the mend again, he still needed all the vitamin C he could get.
And I baked biscuits with flour mailed from Salt Lake City. Baked them for, I don’t know, a good half hour at least.
Not much later, as I sat in the doorway of our tent scraping the ashes off the biscuits—or, as Preston liked to call them, meteorites—I watched the first sunlight of the day boiling over the desert like a tide of red rolling up to drown me. I held my breath, as if that would save me, but I couldn’t go without air forever, and as I breathed again, a ruby crescent peeked over the rim of the world. In seconds, it had grown into a scarlet crown; then it was half an orange globe, and then a yellow ball, huge, glued to the horizon, and thwock, the ball pulled itself loose and floated up into the blue sky, burning whiter as it rose.
Suddenly, I spied a girl. I’d never seen this girl before. I’d never seen a girl like this girl before, flitting from tent shadow to tent shadow. She had hair as red as the sunlight that’d just singed my retinas. She had eyes so green, I could see them fifty yards away, and her feet were really large.
“You gonna bring those meteorites in or write a poem about ’em?” demanded Preston, sticking his head out of the tent.
I jumped a foot. And just like that, the girl was gone.
As I set the biscuits on the kitchen table, I heard Aristotle sing out “Ta-daaa!” like a Ringling Brothers ringmaster. Luke followed him into our tent. Some kind of optical illusion made it appear that their hair was short, neat, and slicked down on top of their skulls. Aristotle wore a jacket he must’ve managed to borrow from another miner—the sleeves were only a few inches too short. In his pocket was a neatly folded black-and-red handkerchief.
“Sharp—right down to the pocket square!” commented Mom.
Aristotle adjusted it slightly. “My talisman,” he said proudly.
“What happened to your heads?” asked Preston.
“Wait—” gasped my dad. “You got haircuts?”
“I thought I heard a chainsaw,” threw in Preston.
“For the big day,” said Aristotle, patting him on the shoulder. “For the big meeting with Mr. Ratliff! We gonna get a safety inspector and a new elevator and time off when we hurt and a nine-hour workday and only five hours on Saturday and—”
Luke interrupted, caught up in the excitement. “And they say Big
gs is gonna get it when Mr. Ratliff gets here! And US marshals are gonna track down those guys from the tank! And oh, brother, when they do!” Luke smacked his fist into his palm enthusiastically. And then he seemed to realize how worked up he’d let himself get and narrowed his eyes doubtfully. “Unless this is all one big joke and Mr. Ratliff and Biggs are just pulling our legs for a gas.” He shot a level stare at Aristotle as if they’d discussed this angle already, but his father didn’t seem to notice.
It wasn’t easy being Luke. Proud of his dad and angry at him all at the same time.
“Hey—you guys—come look! The detectives are gone!” shouted Preston from the door of the tent.
“Great day in the morning!” said my dad, rolling my mom outside. “Let’s have a look.” Before I could follow, Aristotle grabbed my shoulder.
“Josh,” he said quietly, “I think this is gonna go good. But”—and for a second, his optimism, his hope, his confidence, the things he wore like armor every day of his life, dropped away—“you never know.”
“Aristotle—” I said.
“However it happens—you’re Luke’s friend. And that boy, he love two things. He love what is right. And he love to win. And I don’t know which he love more. If I’m not around, you help him choose, Josh.”
“If you’re not around? Are you planning a trip? Are you headed for Hawaii?” I asked, taking a wild stab at a joke because Aristotle sounded so serious, it scared me.
But Aristotle had already stepped into the sunshine. I followed.
Down by Honey Brook, there was the girl again.
“Who is that?” I muttered.
“Who is what?” asked Aristotle.
“That girl,” I said, pointing.
“What girl?” asked Aristotle.
She was gone.
“You getting too worked up, Josh,” said Aristotle. “You seeing things.”
The crowd began gathering three hours before Mr. Ratliff arrived. Preston had put together a combo with a few kids from school, and they kicked off on the platform of the railroad station sometime around two. My parents sat in the front row to listen, and Luke was already there with his dad. I’d told them all to go on without me—I’d lost something and needed to find it. I didn’t tell them I was searching for a girl, possibly imaginary, who disappeared whenever anybody besides me looked at her.
Saving Lucas Biggs Page 9