With that bite of pastitsio, the rock-solid knowledge that my father was never coming home ran up and punched me in the stomach, and that was it. I dropped my fork and cried like a baby, or more like a toddler in a fit, did the whole falling down and screeching thing I’d been teetering on the edge of since the jacaranda flowers had refused to turn black and fall off their branches.
After a long time, I got up and half crawled up the stairs, using my hands the way I used to do when it was summer and I was a little kid, wrung out like a sponge from playing all day in the hot sun. Then I fell down onto my bed and into despair, where I stuck like a bug in tar.
I wasn’t usually so hopeless. When I was in third grade, I discovered the word “equilibrium” in some book my parents left lying around. I happen to be a person who collects words the way other people collect rocks or Beanie Babies. I keep the words in notebooks, the black marbled kind, and keep the notebooks, years’ and years’ worth, stacked inside my closet.
“Equilibrium” got a page all to itself. It’s really just a fancy way of saying “balance,” but I loved how long and ripply it was and how it did what it meant, how that “eek” at the front was balanced out by the soft humming “um” of the end. I guess it became a kind of motto for me. I am not necessarily a balanced person by nature, but I try. When I think a bad thought, I try to balance it out with a happy one. It doesn’t work all the time, but if I do say so myself, over the years, I’ve gotten good at it. My mom would never let me have a tattoo, but if I ever got one, it would be that one word, “equilibrium.”
What happened the evening of my dad’s sentencing is that I lost equilibrium. All my life boiled down to one fact: my dad was never coming home because they were going to kill him. I knew in my bones there was nothing else, no other fact or thought or feeling to offset it, no shot at equilibrium. I guess that’s my version of hitting rock bottom: being so low that even your favorite word can’t save you.
I just lay there on my green flowered quilt, helpless, letting everything that had happened, all those events that had driven me to this rock-bottom spot, rumble and roar through my head and over my broken heart like a freight train.
It started with my dad becoming a whistle-blower.
“Whistle-blower” is a tricky word. On its face, it means a person who uncovers secret wrongdoing in an organization and lets the public know. But depending on your point of view and your tone of voice, it can also mean either “traitor” or “hero.” When it came to my dad, a lot of the people in our town subscribed to the second definition, which was great, except that none of them were people with the power to make what they wanted to have happen happen. All those people, the ones with power, the ones who didn’t just work for but were Victory Fuels—including Judge Biggs—grabbed the first definition, “traitor,” with two hands, like a baseball bat, and used it to beat my family down.
Before he was a whistle-blower, my dad was a geologist, and man, did he love it. He studied rocks, which might sound boring, except that our planet happens to be made of them. So he was really studying the earth, the ground under our feet, which gives us almost everything: food, water, a place to build our houses, and a nifty little thing called fossil fuel. Coal, petroleum, natural gas. It’s sort of cool to think of actually, that fossil fuels are really made of fossils, mostly plant fossils; that we’re all heating our houses with old swamp grass and algae and maybe the occasional dinosaur.
Anyway, fossil fuels were Victory Fuels’s bread and butter—which meant they were the bread and butter of almost everyone who lived in my town, my dad included. The company had been digging or blasting or pumping up different types of fuel from under the desert for over a century, and they were always coming up with new ways to do it. The newest way was called “hydrofracking” (often just “fracking”).” In a nutshell, hydrofracking (or “induced hydraulic fracturing”) is the process of injecting highly pressurized, chemical-laced fluid into a rock layer far below the surface of the earth in order to make cracks in it, and then to use the cracks to get to fossil fuels that you couldn’t get to before because they were so deeply buried.
My dad’s job was to find the safest places to make these fractures in the earth and to keep a close eye on the whole operation because there’s a risk that hydrofracking can lead to a lot of dangerous stuff, like poisonous chemicals leaking into the water that people drink and water their crops with. Which happened. And the Biggs family, who owned the company, along with some other Victory Fuels insiders, knew it had happened, but they decided to keep it a secret because they didn’t want to stop hydrofracking. Unfortunately for the town of Victory and its citizens, this secret put us in grave danger. Fortunately for most of the Victory Fuels bigwigs, they didn’t live in the town of Victory, so they didn’t care when my dad went to them, telling them that they had to alert the town, clean up their mess, and stop the hydrofracking. Their answer? A big fat no.
So he blew the whistle and kept blowing it. He went to the newspapers, was interviewed on TV, even created a website. He got fired, of course. But that wasn’t enough for Victory Fuels. My dad got death threats; someone nearly ran my mom down one night as she walked home from her bakery; our house was vandalized. I wanted to leave, to just move away, but my parents wouldn’t do it. Then, one night, a Victory Fuels lab building burned down. Inside was a night watchman, Ezra Faulkner, church deacon and father of three. He died what had to be a terrible death.
All the so-called evidence led to my father, despite the fact that he was at home with my mom and me at the time of the fire, despite the fact that my dad wouldn’t harm another human being for all the money in the Biggses’ bank account, despite the fact that everyone who knew anything about Victory Fuels would’ve bet their last dollar that the company burned that building down themselves. Whether they knew the guard was in there, well, I don’t even want to guess.
Roland Wise did his best, even tried to get them to switch the trial to another town or to at least get a judge other than a member of the Biggs family to preside over it, but he hit a brick wall at every turn. Of course he did. Victory Fuels had my dad right where they wanted him. What the company wanted, it got, and what it got, it kept. That was the way of the world in Victory, Arizona. They should’ve put it on the town seal.
Lie upon lie upon lie piled up. Fire marshals, forensic scientists, officers of the law, officers of the court, and even a few regular citizens who we’d thought were friends—they were all in the pocket or on the payroll of Victory Fuels. The company wasn’t just punishing my father. It was making sure people knew that if you defied the great and powerful Victory Fuels, it would squash you like a grape.
Who could fight power like that? Lying on my bed in the dark, with the taste of that funeral casserole still in my mouth and the sound of Judge Biggs’s voice saying “death” still in my ears, I knew the answer: no one, least of all me.
Coo, coo.
It was half past midnight when I heard the mourning dove on the lawn outside my window. Of course, like all the other mourning doves I’d heard outside my window in the middle of the night, this one wasn’t a mourning dove at all. It was Charlie. In movies, when people imitate a birdcall to signal each other, it usually sounds so much like the real thing that it takes the audience, as well as the person being called, a few seconds to realize what’s really going on. I wish I could say this was true of my and Charlie’s signal, but our mourning dove calls were quite possibly the worst in the entire history of bird calling.
This time, Charlie’s call didn’t wake me up for the simple reason that I had never gone to sleep. It was like once I turned myself over to that black hopelessness, there was no escaping it and nothing to do but lie there and stew in it, maybe forever. Even so, when Charlie coo-cooed, I went on automatic pilot, dragged myself out of bed, grabbed a hoodie off the hook on my room door, and went downstairs.
When I got outside, Charlie was already at The Octagon. We called it an octagon because it was an octagon,
about ten feet across, slightly raised, and made of weather-beaten wooden boards; we called it “The Octagon,” first letters capitalized, because it was our place. We’d discovered it when we were in kindergarten and had had lots of wild theories, many involving aliens, about how it came to be sitting in the middle of the field behind my backyard. But even later, when we realized it was the floor of an old fallen-down gazebo, we still thought of it as special, even semimagical. And ours.
By the milky light of the moon, Charlie was drawing in his sketchbook. When I sat down at the other side of The Octagon, my knees tucked under my chin, Charlie didn’t look up, just said, “Hey.”
“Hey.” My voice was a croak.
“I’m almost finished with the flag,” he said, his pencil working away.
He meant the flag of AstraZeneca, the country we’d been working on before my dad got convicted. It was something we did, make up countries together. This had started back in second grade, when we had to give a report on the country of our choice. I had chosen France and gotten an A. He had chosen Iceland and gotten a B. Charlie still maintained that this was because my mother had baked chocolate croissants for the class, including the teacher, and had brought them in when they were still warm. He might have been right.
“Iceland’s traditional dish is fermented shark meat,” he had pointed out. “I was doomed.”
But something about the project caught our imaginations, and before long, we were making up our own countries, giving them names that weren’t country names but sounded like they should have been. Granola. Acacia. Corduroy. The Pajamas. The Grocery Isles. Calpurnia, after the housekeeper in To Kill a Mockingbird. We were thirteen and still playing the country game, which might have been weird, but wasn’t weird to us. AstraZeneca was the name of some drug company our friend Mark’s dad had gone to work for on the East Coast, but now it was the name of our latest country. And Charlie was almost finished with its flag.
“Oh,” I said. I couldn’t really bring myself to care.
We sat without saying anything. After a few minutes, I stretched out on my back and stared at the sky. There was too much moon for stargazing, but the bats were out, little black shapes doing their crazy, flippity swoops and crisscrossings. An owl hooted, faraway and regretful. I could hear Charlie’s pencil gently swish-swishing against the page and knew he must be shading.
It’s not unusual for Charlie or me to “mourning dove” each other for no other reason than to sit together under the dark sky without talking, but I got the distinct feeling that this time, Charlie had something to say. I was right. After a while, in a very quiet voice with just a hint of chuckle in it, Charlie said this: “Who else would make pet rock cupcakes?”
For a second, I stopped breathing. Then I shut my eyes and slipped back in time to my seventh birthday. My pastry-chef mother was away in Tucson visiting her childhood friend Marta, who had just had twins—the only birthday of mine she’d ever not been there for—so my dad made the cupcakes, and, to put it mildly, there is a reason my dad is not a pastry chef. He did his best, though, and everything seemed to be going surprisingly well. Then, for some reason, right before he took them out of the oven, the cupcakes caved in on themselves so that each one had a pit in its center. I remember gasping at the sight of them, feeling like my own center had just sunk, and saying, “There’s not time to make more, is there?”
My dad didn’t miss a beat. “Make more? No way, José! These are even better than I expected. We can fill up those holes with icing. The icing’s everyone’s favorite part, right? They’ll be great!”
And probably they would’ve been, except that he’d done something wrong to the icing so that, by the time the kids came, it was hard as a rock.
The first kid who bit into his cupcake yelled, “Hey, there’s a rock in here!”
Again, without missing a beat, my dad said, “You bet there is. You guys are in the home of a geologist, remember? What you’ve got in there is known as a pet rock. Everyone gets to dig theirs out and name it!”
We played with those icing rocks for the rest of the party.
I thought for a second and then said, “Who else would put rocks in my Christmas stocking because I’d been good?”
“Who else would paint a baseball with phosphorescent paint so we could play catch in the dark?”
“Who else’s favorite food would be lima beans?”
“Who else would lose his glasses on top of his head—at least once a week?”
“Who else would sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ every time he washed the dishes?”
“Who else would own six T-shirts that said Rock Star?”
We went on like that, back-and-forth, a Ping-Pong match with my dad as the ball. Charlie never tried to talk me into going to his house the next day to talk to Grandpa Joshua the way I’d thought he would. But after he left, when I was up in my room again, I realized that that was what he’d been doing all along.
Now I had something to balance out the horrible, impossible, seemingly undeniable fact that my dad would be executed, and it wasn’t a fact or a feeling or an ideal like justice, but my dad himself, the real, true human person. John O’Malley, the one and only. While there was John O’Malley, there was hope. How could I have ever thought anything else? While there was John O’Malley, there was a reason to fight.
The next morning, as soon as I was up, I got on my bike and rode toward Charlie’s house. With the sky still pink-streaked and shining, with the two thin tires spinning under me, I was perfectly steady, not tilting to the left or right, nowhere close to falling.
Equilibrium. I breathed the word into the morning air.
I swooped left onto Charlie’s long driveway, stopped, got off, leaned my bike against the usual tree, and started walking across Charlie’s yard. I was full of hope, hope so desperate and electric, it buzzed inside my head and quaked inside my chest almost exactly like fear.
Grandpa Joshua had to know of a way to save my dad. He just had to.
I stepped onto the Garretts’ porch with its sky-blue-painted boards, its wind chimes made of old silver spoons, and its white screen door, but before I could knock or yell or just barge in (my usual means of arrival), the door creaked open, and there was Mrs. Garrett putting her arms around me and planting a kiss on the top of my head like she’d done forever and ever. She didn’t say anything about my dad’s sentencing, thank goodness, just swiped at her eyes, marched me into the kitchen, and said, “They’re out back, waiting for you.
“Take these,” she said, and handed me a batch of cinnamon rolls so fresh, I could feel their warmth through the thick stoneware plate.
“My favorite,” I said, even though it didn’t need to be said. I had been known to eat four in one sitting. Five, even. Okay, six, but that was just the one time, and I’d regretted it for hours afterward.
“Really?” Mrs. Garrett teased, wrinkling her nose. “You like these?”
Charlie and Grandpa Joshua sat at the wooden picnic table, which was so old it was silver-gray and smooth as glass. The picnic table, in turn, sat under the oak tree, which was so old it had a personality—crotchety and protective at the same time, like a cranky grandma. It was one of the things I loved best about Charlie’s house: everything seemed to have been there forever, and nothing ever changed. When Charlie and Grandpa Joshua saw me, both of them stood up. They looked so much alike with their plaid shirts and old-fashioned politeness that I came as close to laughing as I had in days.
“Hey,” I said, and slid in next to Charlie on the picnic bench.
“Hey,” they both said back.
All unexpectedly, I felt shy. I’d met Grandpa Joshua lots of times before, of course, at holiday dinners and stuff, and after his wife, Grandma May, died a couple of years ago, he’d come for extended visits to Charlie’s house. But I realized right then, sitting across the table from him, that we’d always been together in the hustle and bustle, the laughing, goofing, and storytelling of Charlie’s family and mine. We
’d talked but never talk-talked, and I was pretty sure we were about to have one very serious conversation.
Just when the awkwardness was getting unbearable, Charlie cleared his throat and said, “So. You’re probably wondering why I brought you all here today. . . .” His voice was fake-deep and fake-serious, and he made a triangular tent with his fingers like a CEO in a movie.
Grandpa Joshua and I looked at each other and shrugged.
“Not really,” I said, grabbing a cinnamon roll, opening my mouth hippo wide, and taking a bite.
“Nope,” said Grandpa Joshua, doing the same.
It was a good way to begin. I’ve found that almost everything is better when it starts with a joke and a mouthful of really great food.
But before long, Charlie and I were sitting, serious-faced and broomstick-straight, looking at Grandpa Joshua expectantly, with our hearts in our throats. At least, my heart was in my throat, stuck there and whirring like a cicada. And if I knew Charlie—and I did—his was, too. We were all set for Grandpa Joshua to unveil a grand plan to save my dad.
Instead, he told us a story, one that he introduced by saying, “Judge Biggs has it in for your dad, Margaret. Just as he’s always had it in for anyone who threatens the Victory Corporation’s interests. He’s bad, no doubt about it.”
“He’s evil,” I spat. “Heartless and evil through and through.”
Saving Lucas Biggs Page 3
