Margaret

2014

I RODE HOME FROM THE COURTHOUSE in what I guess was a state of shock, my brain numb and slow, my senses dulled, my eyelids heavy as lead. It wasn’t so bad really, to feel so cut off and out of it, kind of like being a turtle dozing on a rock in a terrarium. But as soon as we turned into our driveway and I saw our house, the one my dad would never be coming back to, the glass walls of my terrarium fell right down.

Once we were inside, Dr. AJ led my mom upstairs, got her to lie down, and tried to give her a pill to help her relax and sleep.

“I can’t,” my mom said, shaking her head. “Margaret needs me.”

Dr. AJ and I exchanged a look.

“You know what would help me, Mom?” I said gently. “If I could lie here next to you while you fell asleep. That would be perfect.”

I could see my mom trying to muster up the energy to protest again, but finally, she sighed, nodded, and held out her palm for the pill.

My mom wasn’t a weak woman, but we all hit our breaking points, and my mom had hit hers kind of gradually. The first cracks appeared right after my dad’s arrest—little hair-thin things, hardly cracks at all—and she got more and more broken as the weeks dragged on. By the time he was convicted, she wasn’t eating enough to keep a bird alive and was sleeping so little that she’d gotten to a weird place in her mind, a twitchy, broken, manic place where she cried all the time and couldn’t put thoughts together right. I’d been more or less mothering her for weeks, which felt strange, but I really didn’t mind. It gave me a reason to stay steady, and anyway, after all those years of her taking care of me, I guessed it was the least I could do.

She went to sleep fast after her pill, and, after a few minutes of shifty restlessness, she looked as peaceful as she had in way too long. I almost cried then, at the sight of her, because she’d have to wake up sometime and everything would still be awful, but Dr. AJ was right beside me, and I knew that if I broke down, she’d insist on staying. What I wanted more than anything was to be alone, to sit in my own pocket of space and just breathe and feel, feel whatever there was to feel without worrying about anyone seeing me.

Dr. AJ seemed to get it. She called Mr. Wise and asked if he could postpone his visit until the following day. She reminded me of her cell and home numbers, even though she knew I knew them as well as I knew my own, and reminded me that she was just around the corner, which I also knew, having been to her house a bazillion times, at least. Then she wrapped me in one of her good, big-woman hugs (Dr. AJ was six feet tall and hugged like a linebacker, or like I imagined linebackers hugged), and for a few seconds I just plain clung.

“You will get through this, my girl,” she said. “I have no doubt of that. Just keep the faith, you hear me?”

I nodded, even though I didn’t have one scrap of faith left to keep.

As soon as she left, I realized I was starving. I opened the refrigerator, which was busting at the seams with casseroles; there must have been five or six of them, foil-covered, labeled, and stacked—and these were just from today. For months, when we weren’t home, people had taken to dropping food off with our neighbor Mrs. Darley, who had a key to our house and would periodically stick them in her red wagon and wheel them on over. They gave us way more than two people could ever eat, but I knew what the casseroles meant. Every dish was someone saying, “We’ve got your back.”

I got as far as carving out and heating up a slab of Mrs. Alexandropoulos’s famous pastitsio, which is this awesome Greek lasagna, pouring myself a glass of milk, and sitting down at the kitchen table. But as I chewed the first bite, I remembered the first time I’d eaten Mrs. Alexandropoulos’s pastitsio. I was six and had just gone to my first funeral. I’m not even sure whose it was. It’s what people do in Victory: there’s a wedding or a funeral and the whole town shows up. Anyway, I was at the lunch afterward—there’s always a lunch afterward—and I was eating the pastitsio and thinking that it was the best food ever invented, and I heard what I thought was this booming laughter. It turned out to be crying. The woman’s back quaked and heaved inside the black fabric of her dress. Bobby Fitzgerald, who was sitting next to me, whispered, “It’s because she’s a widow. Her husband is never coming home because he’s dead.”

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.”

“Maybe so. I’m not so sure about through and through, even now, but maybe. The thing is, he wasn’t always this way. As a matter of fact, he used to be one of my favorite people in the world.”

My heart stopped whirring. My heart just plain stopped.

“Wait!” Charlie squawked. “You know him?”

“When I was your age,” said Grandpa Joshua quietly, “Lucas Biggs was my best friend.”

Charlie and I just stared at him.

“Are you maybe confusing him with someone else?” I asked, finally, in a small voice. What if Grandpa Joshua’s memory was going? He was old, after all. If his mind was getting foggy with old age, how would he possibly help me?

But his answer was steady as a rock: “No.”

“But how could somebody like Judge Biggs be friends with somebody like you?” I asked.

“The history of our town,” said Grandpa Joshua, “is full of twists like that.”

Charlie, who was almost never rude, especially to adults, burst out with “Oh, come on! A history lesson? We don’t have time! And anyway, we all know the history of Victory. The Canvasburg Uprising, that miner—I forget his name—who sold everyone out and killed that guy, the—”

“Maybe you know some of the story,” interrupted Grandpa Joshua, as heated up as I’d ever seen him. “Maybe you learned a version of it in history class. But there’s more to it, so much more that you might want to reconsider everything you ever believed about Victory, Arizona.”

Fine. But how in the wide world did this have anything to do with my dad? I itched with impatience, but then I happened to get a look at Grandpa Joshua’s face. His usually kind brown eyes were fierce and sad and full of something I couldn’t name, maybe with his version of history, the one he’d carried around all this time, maybe with the truth that would set my dad free. I did my best to shove my impatience away.

“Okay,” I said. “Tell us. Please.”

“There are a lot of ways to break a person,” began Grandpa Joshua. “And Victory Fuels had a pretty good handle on all of them. People’s spirits they broke in the cruelest way: by first lifting them up, by making their workers, folks who’d traveled hundreds of miles for a new life, at first believe that they’d found one. But at some point, usually pretty early on, those families, mine included, would wake up and realize that while they’d been enjoying their decent house and their three meals a day, a trap had fallen smack down around them.

“The Victory Mine broke bodies, too,” he continued.

There was a tiny, sorrowful catch in his voice, and that’s when Grandpa Joshua’s story stopped being a history lesson and started being a story about real people, and even though I was dying for him to get to the part in it where my dad gets saved, I knew I had to listen to every word of what came next.