“But like Charlotte said, he did send her birthday cards, every year,” said Charlie.
“That she had to dig out of the trash because her mom threw them away before she could look at them.”
“Well, she still dug them out,” Charlie said. “And even when she moved to a new house, even when she went away to college, he found out her address and kept on sending her cards. Birthday cards, Christmas cards, graduation cards.”
“I don’t remember that she said anything about graduation cards, but yeah. I guess he was—being nice? I mean, they were cards, right? Not letter bombs.”
Charlie scoffed, “Cards signed Lucas Biggs. No ‘love,’ no ‘Grandpa’, no gift certificate to the ice-cream shop.”
I sat up and stared at Charlie.
“What? How would you know that? Charlotte didn’t say how they were signed.”
Charlie winced. “Oh man.”
He told me all about his plot to create a diversion and break into Judge Biggs’s office. Even in the midst of being furious that he hadn’t bothered to include me in it or even tell me about it afterward, I couldn’t help but be impressed that his plan had worked.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m pretty sure attempting to detonate an explosive device outside a state building and breaking into a judge’s office are major criminal offenses. I still don’t know why the judge didn’t turn me in. I guess he just wanted to get rid of me. But I thought it would be better if you stayed out of it, better for you and for your mom and dad.”
Maybe because he had a point or because he truly did sound sorry or because I’m just really bad at being mad at Charlie, I decided to forgive him.
“All right,” I said, “but I still don’t see how you know how Judge Biggs signs his birthday cards.”
“Graduation, actually grad school graduation,” said Charlie. “Which brings me to the possible mail tampering part of my story. On Judge Biggs’s desk, I found a graduation card to Charlotte signed by the judge and an envelope with her address. So—”
“You stole it?”
“Uh, yeah. I mailed it, though! But not before I’d addressed my own envelope and sent her a copy of your letter, and a couple of other articles about the trial, along with a note that just said ‘FYI.’ I didn’t sign it or anything. Honestly, I didn’t even know who she was to Judge Biggs, but I figured if there was anybody out there in the world who cared about him, they might want to know what he’s been up to.”
“Wow,” I said. “Well, thanks for committing all those federal offenses on my behalf.”
“No problem,” said Charlie. “But even though right now, Charlotte’s our best bet, even if she can get us into his office, that doesn’t mean he’ll look at the Quaker star.”
“I was just thinking the same thing. He might look at it if we stick it in front of his face, but that doesn’t mean he’ll see it. Or that he’ll give a monkey’s rear end what we have to say about it.”
We fell silent, the immense night shining around us.
Finally, Charlie said, “We need a hook, one really good line.”
“What do you mean?”
“You saw the judge back in the parking lot the other day. He can slam the door in someone’s face in record time, even when there’s no door in sight. Even if Charlotte gets his attention, we won’t have it for long before he goes into shutdown mode. We need a good first line, one that grabs him so hard, he has to keep listening.”
“How about: your dad wasn’t a coward, you giant bonehead?”
“Okay, but maybe we should give it a little more thought,” said Charlie, dryly.
So we did. We stayed so quiet and stared at those stars for so long that it was like The Octagon broke loose from the field, from everything familiar, and became a raft on a huge black ocean, and we were drifting on its surface, cut off from everything and everyone, starlight pouring down.
And that’s when I decided to do it. No, that’s wrong. I didn’t decide. I believed. I knew. Without knowing why or caring why, I knew I had to do it, and before I fully realized that I had begun, I had begun.
October 28, 1938; October 28, 1938; October 28, 1938. It was the date when I’d left the past and come back, the date of Aristotle’s hanging, the date that marked the end of the life of Luke Agrippa and the beginning of the long, twisted journey of Lucas Biggs.
Everything was the same as the first time I’d traveled, except familiar. I floated inside the in-between space, the glowing, peaceful, endlessly long corridor between times, music in my ears, and all around me, the portals blinking open and shut, beckoning. But then I did something I hadn’t done the last time. I began to think more carefully and clearly than I’d ever thought before, to contemplate.
The universe is big, I thought. Time is long. Passing through is hard.
I thought this, and I understood how I had been able to do it, the only thing that had made me be able to stand it. It wasn’t that I was gifted or clever or brave. Those things by themselves would never have been enough. It was just this: I wasn’t alone. Even when I was by myself, moving through time, I wasn’t alone. There was Joshua Garrett on one end and Charlie Garrett on the other. There was my mother at home and my father who could be locked away miles from me and still be with me all the same.
Then I thought about what it would be like to travel through all that time the long way around, along all its loops and turns, experiencing every bit of it, more than seventy years’ worth of days, one after the other, alone. Alone and believing you’d been abandoned by the person you’d loved most in all the world. I thought about this and right there, in that peaceful place, sadness blew through me like a desolate wind, the same sadness that had been blowing through Lucas Bigg’s soul since October 28, 1938.
October 28, 1938. The portal bloomed open before me. It was right there, an arm’s length away, waiting. I moved toward it.
Then I did what I was meant to do all along. I stepped back. I went home to the people I loved.
When I got there, one of those people was yelling at the top of his lungs and shaking me by the shoulders until my teeth rattled, at least until he dropped me, with a yelp like he’d just grabbed an electric fence. My head hit the boards of The Octagon with a thunk, but I hardly noticed.
“Charlie! Listen! I have it! The hook! Our opening line!”
“Listen? Listen? Are you insane?”
Charlie was so mad sparks were practically flying off him.
“You don’t understand—” I began.
“You were going to travel? Without telling me? And don’t even deny it. You were in that weird trance like before. I saw you! Then, when I touched you, there was this jolt. Jolts like that just don’t happen, Margaret!”
I sat up and rubbed the back of my head.
“Would you shut up and listen?” I said.
Charlie shut up, but he was still furious. If he had been a slightly different kind of person, he might’ve hit me or at least called me a really mean name.
“It wasn’t that Luke thought his father was a coward,” I said.
Charlie shook his head in confusion.
“What?”
“That’s what we thought all along, right? And, sure, Luke probably did think that, and he didn’t like it, but that wasn’t his main problem. That’s not what turned him into Lucas Biggs.”
Charlie’s breathing slowed down, and he looked down at the boards of The Octagon with his thinking face on, the one I’d seen more times than I could count.
“I wasn’t going to travel,” I said, softly. “I just needed to go a little way in order to understand the real message of the Quaker star. To see. To look down time and really understand it. It was all part of figuring out how to save Lucas Biggs. In the here and now. With you.”
Charlie’s eyes met mine and held. After a couple of seconds, he gave a very small nod.
“So if it wasn’t that he was ashamed of Aristotle because he thought he was a coward, what was it? What turned him into Lu
cas Biggs?” he asked.
It was so simple. Why hadn’t we seen it before? But I knew why. Charlie and I hadn’t spent one second of our lives without parents who loved us. We lived inside that love the way we lived inside our own bodies, without thinking about it, and definitely without thinking what it would be like to live without it.
“He thought his dad had left him,” I said. “And not just once. Twice! First by trying to get Ratliff to help him run away, then, when that didn’t work, by killing himself. He thought his dad cared about him so little that he could just ditch him and leave.”
Charlie pulled in his eyebrows again, pondering.
“So the message of the Quaker star isn’t ‘I really was brave and the peaceful way really was going to win out in the end’?” said Charlie.
“Maybe that was the message to Luke back then, but the message to him now is: ‘I was coming back to you all along.’”
Charlie
2014
WHEN MARGARET TOLD GRANDPA JOSHUA that the Quaker star was Aristotle’s way of saying he never meant to leave Luke, his face slowly lit up.
“You’re right,” he said. “I only heard the things Luke said about his dad being a coward and a loser. I never listened to what he didn’t say, that he thought Aristotle had chosen to abandon him. I—” He stopped. His eyes widened at the sight of something behind Margaret and me. “You’re her!” he exclaimed.
We spun around to see Charlotte walking toward us.
“I only saw her once, when I was home for a visit, but you are the spitting image of your grandmother,” Grandpa Joshua went on.
Charlotte laughed.
“Grandpa Josh, this is Charlotte. We told you about her,” put in Margaret.
“Those blue eyes and that dancing hair,” said Grandpa Joshua.
“Everybody comments on it,” Charlotte replied. “But my grandmother was much more beautiful. Still is, as a matter of fact.” She frowned. “Do you think it’s a good thing, how much I look like her? Do you think it’ll help?”
“She was walking down the street with Luke that day,” remembered Grandpa Joshua. “It must’ve been right after they met. He looked at her like there was no one else in the world.”
“There was, though,” said Charlotte. “Elijah Biggs and his whole crooked corporation, expecting Lucas Biggs to do their dirty work without batting an eye. My grandmother ended up hating him for it.”
“So it could go either way, that face of yours. It could melt his heart,” said Grandpa Joshua.
“Or turn it to stone,” finished Margaret.
“But we have to try,” I said.
“So what we’ll do,” Charlotte went on, “is march into his office and tell the secretary who I am and demand to see him. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll wait till he comes out and pounce. I’m a pretty good pouncer.”
But Grandpa Joshua shook his head.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Aristotle’s message has to reach a place buried so deep in Luke’s soul, he’s forgotten it exists,” said Grandpa Joshua.
“How can we make him remember?” Margaret asked.
“You can’t make him. He has to want to remember,” said Grandpa Joshua. “He has to come to you.”
“Lucas Biggs doesn’t want anything,” I said, “except to be left alone.”
“He wants to see his granddaughter,” Margaret reminded us. “Call him, Charlotte,” she urged. “Ask him to meet you, away from the courthouse and the Victory Corporation.”
“I may know a place,” added Grandpa Joshua, staring distantly toward the edge of town.
“Just tell me where,” said Charlotte, pulling out her cell phone.
But something about the plan bothered me. I guess Grandpa Joshua could see it in my face. “What’s wrong, Charlie?” he asked.
“It’s just—what if he doesn’t come? What if he wants to see Charlotte, but not enough? He’s been alone for so long. What if he just wants to keep going the way he always has?”
“But there are the birthday cards he sent me,” said Charlotte.
“There’s also the way he looked at you the other day, Charlie,” Margaret reminded me. “For like two seconds there, he seemed almost human. I bet it was because you look so much like his old friend Josh.”
“That didn’t buy me much slack in his office,” I reminded her.
“You might be right, Charlie,” said Grandpa Joshua. “Even if the real Luke Agrippa is still in there somewhere, Lucas Biggs might figure change is too hard. We’re old, the judge and I. Sometimes being old can make you want to give yourself one last chance to be better, but sometimes it can make you bone-deep scared of anything new. So he might not come. But you know what?”
“What?” we all three asked.
What Grandpa Joshua said next wasn’t exactly comforting, but not one of us could deny it. “If he doesn’t show up, he was never going to listen to his father’s message, not in this lifetime. If he doesn’t come, none of this was ever going to work anyway.”
Margaret
2014
THE PLACE GRANDPA JOSHUA chose for the meeting with Lucas Biggs was a park on the edge of town, a rectangle of green and trees, redwood picnic tables and benches, a swing set, a few barbecue grills and volleyball nets, everything painted and kept up, but nothing fancy.
Charlie and I had been there when we were smaller, had played hide-and-seek among those very trees, without having any idea of what used to be there. How could we? There was no bronze statue, no historical marker commemorating the four Martinelli children’s beautiful black eyes or Preston Garrett’s fingers flying over a piano keyboard. No one ever took an educational field trip there to hear a guide tell the story of bullets tearing apart the lives of innocents or of a man who wouldn’t stop talking about fair play and peace.
But as I walked across the grass with Grandpa Joshua and Charlie, it occurred to me that someone somewhere had cared enough to make sure it hadn’t been paved over, turned into a strip mall or a parking lot. Someone had planted trees.
Canvasburg.
Canvasburg, now full of kids’ games and family cookouts, cupcake icing melting in the sun; some of the adults banging around a volleyball with the kids; some of them sitting at picnic tables or under trees, talking, with babies against their shoulders or with little ones asleep in their laps. A safe place. A family place. Maybe this was okay after all. Maybe it was even a kind of justice.
We didn’t hide. The place was so busy that we didn’t have to. Grandpa Joshua, Charlie, and I were just another family under a tree, soaking up the sound of laughter and the late-spring sun. Charlotte sat at a picnic table by herself, reading a book, waiting for Lucas Biggs. We were all waiting for him, with our hearts in our throats, waiting for Lucas Biggs, inside whom there was at least a tiny bit of Luke Agrippa, shining like a light, or so we hoped.
Charlotte had told him five o’clock. He hadn’t said yes or no or much of anything at all. Five o’clock came and went. So did 5:10. Then 5:15 crept up and slipped past. By 5:30, Charlie, Grandpa Joshua, and I had given up on our forced conversation. By 5:40, I was fighting back tears.
Then, at 5:41, there he was, wearing a suit and tie in the evening, making his way across the grass. He moved slowly but steadily, with long strides, and for a second, I could glimpse the athlete he used to be. I saw Charlotte stand up. I saw him walk toward her and stop, a few feet away. I started to walk, too, the quilt square in my hand, but Grandpa Joshua caught me gently by the elbow, pulling me back.
“Wait,” he said. “Let’s give them a little more time.”
They didn’t hug, but I saw Judge Biggs lift his hand toward Charlotte’s hair, like he was thinking about touching it, and then he changed his mind. They talked.
“Now,” said Grandpa Joshua.
I walked quickly across the grass, keeping Charlotte between me and the judge, and at the last second, I stepped out from behind her, holding the Quaker star. I saw Judge Biggs’s face begi
n to go from open to shut, but before he could actually slam the door and hang a Closed sign in the window, I was stretching out my arm, handing him the cloth square.
“Your father was always going to come back to you,” I said, as fast as I could get the words out.
Lucas Biggs took a step back, and my heart sank, but then he reached out his broad hand, the hand that had thrown a football almost to the moon, that had pounded the gavel to quiet the courtroom at my father’s trial, and he took the Quaker star.
Then Charlie was handing him my dad’s magnifying glass, and the two of us were talking at once, pointing out the star shape, the initials, the date.
“‘For Luke,’” read the judge. Then again, “‘For Luke.’”
A change came over Lucas Biggs. He crumpled, got smaller inside his gray business suit, and then Charlotte moved so that she was next to him, her arm steadying him, leading him to the picnic bench, where he sat down, put his father’s talisman on the table in front of him, and stared at it, his fingers pressing down the four corners so he could see the whole thing.
When he looked up, it wasn’t at me or at his granddaughter, but at Grandpa Joshua.
“Josh?” he said. “It’s true?”
“It’s true, Luke,” said Grandpa Joshua. “He loved you. Even when he was up in that hunting lodge trying to make history and change the world, he was thinking mostly about you and what he’d bring back to you.”
Luke stared back down at the Quaker star, and to my amazement, there was the ghost of a smile on his face, not a sneer or a smirk, but a real smile.
“My mother and I made this. I must’ve been about four. The big, zigzag stitches in this corner are mine. It was going to be a whole quilt for my father, but my mother died before we could finish.”
Luke folded his hands into two fists, set them down on top of the square, and rested his forehead against them. He sat like that, his shoulders shaking with silent sobs, as kids ran past and the smell of barbecue filled the air. Grandpa Joshua, Charlotte, Charlie, and I stood by, not talking, not comforting him or even looking at him, just staying, for as long as it took.