I opened and sat there with the thing clamped firmly under my tongue as the doc took my pulse and shone his flashlight into first one eye, then the other.
“Foolish girl,” he said, angrily, “foolish, foolish girl. Don’t you know you’re playing with fire?”
The first thing I thought of was the blasting caps, which Josh might have been planting in the milk crate even as I lay there, helpless. I started to speak, to tell the doc something like “Who, me? I hate explosions. I don’t even like to be in the same room with matches, sweet little girl that I am,” but Doc O’Malley gestured to the thermometer and gave one sharp shake of his head to shut me up.
“I hear you’re staying with my sister,” he said, grimly, “who is no doubt aiding and abetting in whatever desperately misguided scheme you’ve undertaken.”
He slid out the thermometer. Whatever he read on it made him make a tsk sound and look madder than ever, so it took me a second to realize what he’d just said.
“Your sister?” But of course Aunt Bridey was his sister. “But that makes you—”
“Don’t!” he barked. “Don’t tell me who you are. I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”
He was my great-grandfather. I’d known that, of course. The information had been rattling around inside my crowded brain for some time, but it was one thing to know a fact and a totally other thing to have it standing in the same room, taking your temperature and glaring at you.
“Look at your eyes, glowing like lanterns,” he said with disgust. “I saw my sister in this state often enough. You’ll feel even worse after your return home, and it will serve you right.”
He smacked the bedside table with his hand, making me jump.
“Good God, child! What is it? Are you just a fool? Or does no one in your time take the forswearing to heart?”
Before I could answer, he said, “No. Don’t answer that. I can’t know anything about who you are or where you’re from. All I know is that you must go back there, now. Tonight. This second, if possible.”
“But I can’t!” I cried. “I have to save my . . .”
The look on his face stopped me.
“Please,” I said, “I do take the forswearing to heart. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t a matter of life and death.”
Doc O’Malley gave a harsh laugh.
“Life and death. By traveling, you may be endangering more lives than you can comprehend. You are flying in the face of history!”
Maybe I was callous, but I couldn’t think about the lives I might be endangering. There just wasn’t room in my head. I could only think of my beautiful father in his bare cell facing certain death. And Aristotle doing the same thing a few doors down.
Aristotle! If anyone could help us free him, it was the doc. He was a doctor. Hadn’t he taken some kind of oath to keep people alive?
I took hold of the doctor’s coat sleeve and said, as fast as I could before he could stop me, “I need to free Aristotle Agrippa. Will you help me?”
The doc flew back like I’d bitten him. He clamped his hands over his ears.
“For God’s sake, child, don’t speak another word. Just go back to wherever you came from. I beg you. From this moment on, as soon as I exit this room, you do not exist for me.”
Without another glance in my direction, he switched off the light, walked out the door, and closed it soundlessly behind him.
I lay in the dark, shivering with fever and fear, cocooned inside the smelly blanket, waiting for whatever awful thing would happen next, but what happened was . . . exactly nothing. The hours dragged by, until I knew that the time for the next part of our plan must be drawing near. The overstaying had turned my fingers clumsy, but I managed to put on my shoes, pulled the heavy coil of rope out from where I’d hidden it under the bed, and clutched it to my chest, waiting, waiting.
Then—BOOM BOOM BOOM! The noise was thunderous, way louder and longer lasting than I’d expected. Josh said there’d be a small explosion, enough to get people running to discover the cause, but to me, it sounded like he’d just blown the back door off the place and the milk crate to smithereens.
Fueled by a burst of adrenaline, I slipped out into the hallway in time to see the orderly disappear at a run down the stairs; then I threw the rope in the wheelchair and tugged it—a big, brown, unwieldy wicker number—out of my room, ran with it down the hallway, and burst through Aristotle’s door.
He lay handcuffed to the bed, conscious but groggy, confused, and only slightly more lively than when I’d seen him last, bleeding on the parquet floor of the cigar parlor.
“Hello, Mr. Agrippa.” I said, “it’s an honor to meet you.”
“Who are you?” he asked, weakly, his hand pressed to the bandage on his head.
“We’re saving you,” I told him.
I had the urge to hug him, but there wasn’t time. There wasn’t a moment to lose. I whirled around, looking for a place to tie the rope, and found that, as Aunt Bridey had predicted, Aristotle’s metal bed was bolted to the floor. I tied the rope to one of its posts, using the knot Aunt Bridey had shown me. Then I unlatched and pushed open the casement window, and mourning doved at the top of my lungs.
For a terrible second, nothing happened, and then there was Josh, Aunt Bridey’s bolt cutters strapped to his back. He didn’t waste time waving up at me, just seized the bottom of the rope and started to climb. I held my breath, since this was the most uncertain part of the plan, relying as it did on the strength of one extremely scrawny, spaghetti-armed kid. Maybe it was adrenaline again, maybe it was because Josh had been a jewel thief or a spider in another life, but whatever it took to scramble up that wall, Josh must’ve had it, because in a surprisingly short time I was helping him over the sill and he was in!
I could hear voices outside the building and smell smoke, and I figured that we still had some time to work with, although not much. But we were almost there! All we needed to do was cut Aristotle’s handcuffs, help him into the wheelchair, and get him down the elevator, out the front door, and into the woods where the donkey waited to carry him to Aunt Bridey’s and then, as soon as possible, over the mountains to New Mexico, where we would reunite him with his son.
And that’s when we hit Bump Two.
Aristotle wouldn’t go.
As Josh began to wrangle with the bolt cutters, and I feverishly whispered a nutshell version of our plan into Aristotle’s one bandage-free ear, he reached over and took Josh gently by the wrist.
“No, Josh. I cannot go. Please leave before you are caught,” he said.
We stared at him.
“But you have to go!” Josh whispered. “They’ll kill you if you stay.”
“I don’t think so,” said Aristotle.
“No!” I said. “They will. We know they will!”
“The miners must not believe I would run. They will lose heart, and that must not happen. They must know I stood by them. Please, you go!”
Before I knew it was happening, I was crying. I grabbed Aristotle’s hand.
“Please, please, please come! You don’t know how much depends upon it.”
That’s when we heard the footsteps on the stairs.
“You’ll die!” cried Josh.
I’ve never seen anything as at peace as Aristotle’s face when he said, “Better to die than to run. Now, go.”
We went. What else was there to do? If we were caught, I might die in 1938. Josh might be sent to prison himself. At least if we were free, there was still a chance. Josh went first so that he could help me when I got to the end of the rope. My body throbbed, my head seethed with what felt like lava, and a few yards from the bottom, my arms just gave out. Josh didn’t so much catch me as break my fall, but he got up and was helping me half crawl, half stagger into the trees when I remembered the rope still tied to the bed. They’d probably already found it! And then they would come after us for sure.
“The rope!” I whispered. “It’ll give us away!”
“Oh
no! Maybe I can go back for it.”
Josh and I spun wildly around—and froze.
The rope wasn’t dangling from the window anymore. Instead, someone was standing there, holding it bundled in his arms. I could see the man’s face clear as day because he was looking right at me. Doc O’Malley. Without a word, he dropped the bundle. It landed with a soft thud on the grass, and Josh ran and picked it up. I never took my eyes off the doc, my great-grandfather, taking care of me despite his better judgment. He made a sweeping gesture with his arm, one that meant, “Go!” Then he pulled the window shut and vanished into the room.
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.