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Authors: Marisa de Los Santos

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BOOK: Saving Lucas Biggs
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Josh

1938

“THAT CAN’T BE ALL,” MARGARET insisted, gazing desperately at the night sky above us, but the sky wasn’t listening. She turned her eyes to me. I don’t know how much it hurt her to stay as long as she had, but I know history took a dim view of every single move she was making, growing more and more indignant. She was supposed to be long gone—of course, she wasn’t supposed to have come at all—and every second she stayed was a battle. She slowly sank to the ground, hidden with me in the brush in the vacant lot across from the infirmary, and she dropped her head between her knees, her fists clenched. “There must be something else. Something we haven’t thought of.”

The clock in city hall gave us eight minutes until midnight. Margaret was already so beat, she had a fever of, I don’t know, about a hundred and nineteen. I had no idea how it’d gotten so late. My mind had been nothing but confetti in a whirlwind since we’d sneaked out of Aristotle’s room. “You have to get to the gazebo,” I said. “All we can do now is get you home.”

“Aristotle,” she pleaded.

Seven minutes.

“Aristotle.”

The first time I’d ever laid eyes on him, he’d been doing something kind—kicking my dad’s yellow helmet down C Street in the dark to make him laugh, to ease his fear of the mine, to make friends. All Aristotle Agrippa had ever done, his whole life, was help. All those letters, all those nights climbing back and forth over the mountain to keep Canvasburg alive. He’d stood up in front of bullets. He’d gotten Preston a trumpet. He’d done everything a human being could do for his friends. He’d sat in a room with one of the most powerful men in the world and convinced him to do what was right. Aristotle had nearly seen his dream come true. And now he lay, broken and weak, in an infirmary bed with no one to stand up for him, while, somewhere nearby, death made its way toward him.

“We c-could stay,” I stammered. “I could watch the door . . .” I knew it was ridiculous. The people who came for Aristotle would be killers, hard and cold, as bad or worse than the men who’d shot at us from the safety of their tank. I’d be about as much of a nuisance to them as a swarm of fruit flies. But—if I could slow them down. Make noise. Kick up a fuss. Set a trap—a blasting cap—use the rope for a trip wire—yeah—

Five minutes to midnight. Margaret slumped against me, and only at the last second did I gather my wits enough to catch her before she slid to the ground. She was barely breathing. She’d overstayed, badly. She wouldn’t last another day. If I didn’t get her to the mountainside by midnight, if she wasn’t awake enough to do whatever she needed to do or see whatever she needed to see, she’d end up trapped for eternity in some forgotten eddy of time. Or maybe she wouldn’t even be able to begin her journey. Maybe she’d end up stuck with me in 1938 and die here before another midnight. But maybe I could get her to the mountainside, and safely on her way, and make it back down to the front door of the infirmary before the thugs came for Aristotle.

I picked up Margaret like a sack of feed and took off running for the white gazebo.

As I turned the first corner, I nearly came face-to-face with them. Three men like bulls, breathing hard in the night air, stamping and shifting their feet as they got ready to do what they were going to do. Luckily, they were so intent on the crime they were about to commit, they didn’t see Margaret and me, and I managed to duck into an alleyway as the leader punched one of his buddies in the arm and spat on the ground.

The sight of them brought Margaret to life again. It was like she was a hundred-pound house cat and my task was to drop her in a bathtub. A wild strength radiated from inside her, desperation, something that felt not very different from what I’d felt in Elijah Biggs.

“No!” cried Margaret, shoving me, pummeling me, scratching at my face. “Stop them! Get Aristotle—I’ll take him away with me where they can’t find him—I can’t—I can’t—I can’t—”

I clamped my hand over her mouth and hoped to high heaven the murderers hadn’t heard. But they hadn’t. Maybe history didn’t want them to. They crunched down the gravel street toward the infirmary.

I had to decide. Save Aristotle or save Margaret. Not that I was sure I’d be able to do either one.

I chose Margaret O’Malley.

She wilted in my arms as the footsteps died away in the street. And I ran faster than I had ever run in my life. Uphill. In the dark.

I got her there. With seconds to spare. I helped her sit, and shook her awake, because I knew she had to be conscious for this to work, awake enough to see her way back home. “I’m going to miss you, Margaret,” I told her. “I’ve never had a friend like you.”

“I’ve never had a friend like you, either,” whispered Margaret.

She began slipping into some sort of trance, but she fought her way out of it to tell me something else: “Take care of Luke. Whatever happens. Do your best. Don’t give up on him.”

“I won’t,” I said.

“Ever,” she said.

“Ever,” I replied.

“Promise,” she said.

“I promise,” I promised.

“And don’t forget, I’ll see you again one day,” Margaret reminded me.

“I can’t wait,” I said.

“Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.”

She unclenched her right fist, and in her palm lay a piece of cloth and black fountain pen, Aristotle’s belongings from the hunting lodge floor.

“I can’t carry anything with me,” she whispered.

I took them from her and shoved them into my pocket. Then Margaret looked up at the stars, and I did, too, and when I looked back, she was gone.

Margaret

2014

THIS TIME, THE TRIP WAS WORSE. The peaceful part was just a few heartbeats long, and when the pain came, hammering me from every side, including and especially from the inside, I didn’t have the heart to fight it. For the first time in all my thirteen years, I honestly did not give a flying plate of squirrel scat what happened to me. I gave up, gave in. I was like the sea lion I’d seen once on a nature show, and time was a pod of orcas tossing me around like a toy, flinging me into the air in a game of torture hacky sack until time decided to chomp me, once and for all, in its big, mean, grinning jaws.

But the chomp never came. Instead, I was thrown, with a bone-shuddering thud, flat onto my back, into the kind of ordinary quiet that is really made up of small night sounds and, even before I could muster enough energy to wrench open my eyes, I knew I was home. It
smelled
like 2014, although until that moment, I hadn’t known that 2014 had a smell. And if I was smelling it, then that meant I was
breathing
, which dead people never do, a fact that should’ve made me happy, but I was beyond caring, beyond hope. Alive, maybe, but alive like a moth is alive after someone’s ripped off its wings.

But remember “equilibrium”? My favorite word? My little habit of searching for any ragtag piece of good to balance out the bad? What I found out right then is that sometimes you don’t find equilibrium. It finds you. Sometimes the good you need puts its hands on your shoulders in the nick of time and says your name, twice—”Margaret! Margaret!”—and not just in any old voice, but a voice you know, one you can’t remember ever not knowing. Charlie’s voice.

And this wasn’t just some ragtag piece of good; this was good with all its flags flying and its trumpets blowing, because I opened my eyes and saw his face, looking just exactly the way it always had, and that’s when it hit me, clear as starlight through my fog of pain, that there is a flip side, a blessed side to history resisting. Maybe the bad things you wanted to change were still there, but so were the good things, the things you loved best and wouldn’t want changed for anything in the world.

“You’re here,” I croaked.

Charlie gave a sheepish grin and said, “Yeah, I know you told me to leave, but I couldn’t do it. So I sat over there under a tree, just kind of keeping watch. But you’re right; it took almost no time at all. None of our time, I mean.”

“No,” I said, “you’re
here
. You’re you.”

I reached up and touched his hair, still weirdly tidy from when he’d cut it for the trial.

“You even have the same stupid haircut.”

I hadn’t disappeared Charlie. I hadn’t tripped off some chain of events that caused him not to be or to be somebody else. The thought that I could have was like an icy hand at my throat—how had I not even thought of that before?
Because you couldn’t let yourself
, I thought,
because if you had, you wouldn’t have been able to go try to save your dad.

“For your information, a lot of people like this haircut,” he said, with his same old usual voice.

And for that tiny space of time, there was no room for Aristotle or failure or grief. There was only room for: thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Then Charlie’s face blurred and doubled before my eyes, and I thought for a second I was passing out or dying or getting pulled back through time again. But I was only crying, tears of sweet relief to cool my burning cheeks.

My mother thought I had the flu, and I thought it best not to tell her that actually I was suffering from acute overstaying complicated by a brutal bout of time travel compounded by my total failure to save Aristotle Agrippa or Luke Agrippa or my father or anyone or anything at all.

After my sudden and glorious realization that Charlie was Charlie, the rest of that night is hazy. But somehow, I ended up on my living room sofa, still in my mothball sweater but out of my giant shoes, covered with the Hudson Bay blanket from the cedar chest, and sweating like a rain forest. My mom found me there the next morning and carried me to my room, where I began my recovery, although things got a lot worse before they got better.

For days, my whole body throbbed with something like a migraine, including my bones and my internal organs. I’m not sure where my spleen is, but I’m pretty sure it was throbbing. The worst part, though, was the places my poor mind wandered to when I slept. Dark places, places so grim, empty, and sad that I’d wake up crying and calling for my mother every time.

The good news is that my mother came, every time. She brought me tea and sat in the armchair next to my bed with her tiny book light, and softly read and read, for hours, all my favorite books, and even when I was too exhausted to really listen, just the sound of my mom’s voice was enough. Even when my skin hurt so that I couldn’t stand to be touched, my mother’s voice, all the familiar ups and downs of it, wrapped all the way around me and
held
.

Then one day, I woke up hungry as a stray cat, starving for sunlight and food, in that order, so I threw off my covers and jumped out of bed. Since I basically hadn’t eaten for six days, I got instantly light-headed and had to sit down and put my head between my knees until the paparazzi flashbulbs stopped going off in front of my eyes. But somehow I not only made it to the window and opened the shade but also managed to drag the armchair across the room, so that I could curl up on it and let the tangerine-colored light wash over me.

That’s where my mom found me. Anyone who comes into a room with a plate of brioche and sliced peaches would look good to a person as hungry as I was, but I swear my mother was glowing.

“Look at you!” she said, smiling. “I knew you’d feel better today.”

“How’d you know?” I asked, taking a shark-sized bite of the brioche.

“I came in and sat with you for a while last night. You were sleeping so peacefully, none of that tossing and turning.”

“Have I been tossing and turning?”

“Like a fish out of water, flop, flop, flop. And then there was the groaning. And the teeth grinding.”

“Nice,” I said. I bared my teeth at her. “They still seem to work.”

“So I see,” she said, eyeing the crumbs on my plate. “Let me get you some more food, and then I have some news.”

By the way her eyes were sparkling, I knew it was good news. I thought fleetingly about telling her to forget the food and just tell me, but my stomach was calling the shots. When I had inhaled another warm brioche and had my hands firmly wrapped around a mug of lemony tea, my mother told me the news. She’d gotten a call the morning after I’d fallen ill from a professor at a law school in Tempe. He was part of a group of lawyers and law students who worked to free the wrongly convicted.

“They’re a national organization called Team Exoneration. Their success rate is amazing,” said my mom. “And they want to work on your dad’s case! They think there’s a good chance they can get him released!”

I felt dazzled, like she’d just handed me the moon. For almost a minute, I couldn’t even speak.

Finally, I squeaked, “When?”

“They met with Roland Wise three days ago! They’ve already started!”

“So he could be out soon! Like before the summer! We can have a party and invite everyone and maybe go to the beach like we always talk about! Maybe Charlie and his family can all come, too, and maybe . . .”

That’s when I noticed that a cloud, just a little one, was scudding across the sunny landscape of my mother’s face.

“Or maybe we can just keep him to ourselves,” I amended. “Just stay home and cook out and go on desert walks and be normal? That would be nice, right?”

BOOK: Saving Lucas Biggs
13.73Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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