Backward Glass Page 11

  “So you—decided not to go into the past to find its maker? You’re going into the future?”

  He put a gentle hand on my shoulder and started me walking again. “Nowt for me there, a plague-burned world. I’ve used my days in climbing up the years. Three times I’ve had to take the slow road. I almost missed the glass in Rose’s year, for they made me go to that long war in Europe, the one they said would end all wars. Then that mad fool got me coppered by the guard for grasping Peg as then they thought. Madness.” He rubbed his thick-bearded chin. “To think that even now I’m clapped in irons ten miles off, yet talking to ye here and ten years older.”

  When we got back to the carriage house, he pressed the leather pouch of berries into my hand. “Tingle tree it’s also called,” he said. “For pain.”

  “But I don’t—I thought this was for you. My wound’s almost healed.”

  “Not for thee, Kennit. You’ll find use for it in time.” He rubbed his brow with one dirt-covered hand. “We cannot change what’s been, Kennit. We know that, aye?” I nodded. “But there is a way to—to make what is. Yesterdays or tomorrows. There is a way to float above the—the stony world of minutes and hours. I cannot say it other ways. Keep the tingle tree. Find use for it in time.”

  And with no more explanation than that, he was gone, off to his forest shelter.

  In my first few weeks there, I pressed my hosts—Lilly, Peg, and Anthony—about details regarding Prince Harming, but they didn’t know much more than I had already learned from them. None of them had believed the local legends meant anything at all, though they had all heard variations on the rhyme. Peg wouldn’t talk about it at all, and Lilly said she hoped it was all done with now. They had seen the dresser drawer with its message carved for Kenny and Luka, and in some way, it seemed like they thought this must make anything about Kenny and Luka none of their business. Anthony was the least useful of all. Despite his terrifying encounter with the madman who had shot me, he barely seemed to believe in all of it. Peg was all he was interested in, not that she treated him with all that much tenderness.

  Still, I spent a lot of my nights in the carriage house staring at that mirror, wondering if someone was coming through again to kill me.

  On days when Wald was hunting alone, I took out the July box Luka had given me and wrote a long account of my time in 1947. Though I hadn’t yet admitted to my hosts in this time why Prince Harming had shot me, I mused about it in my letter to Luka. I also told her about Peggy and Lilly, the one so snappish and mean, the other so kind.

  “Am I that bad?” said Peggy one afternoon, surprising me as I wrote. I had just described a conversation I had seen with Anthony the night before. It was sad sometimes to watch them talk. Anthony was fattening up again after his ordeal in the cave, but if he had ever been brash and confident the way Jimmy described, that part of him was not rebounding. His eyes still darted furtively about any room, and he constantly pulled at his fingers while he spoke. Half of what Peggy said to him was composed of commands to “ease up” and “cool down.”

  I folded my paper over quickly, but was at a loss for what to say. How much had she read?

  “Don’t fret yourself, kid,” she said. “I guess I’m a little hard on him. Here, I brought you lunch.”

  I took the sandwich plate and glass of milk she offered, and studied her as she slumped on the couch near the mirror and took out a cigarette. She was a good-looking girl, though I guess I didn’t notice it that much. Her sharp words and thin-lipped disapproval of almost everything distracted me from her deep, heavy-lidded eyes. From the carriage house, on the few days when her mother was around, I could hear little but yelling between her parents; then, when her mother left, the place was like a graveyard.

  You never think about how your own parents are until you start paying attention to other families. Mine didn’t see eye-to-eye on everything, particularly the constant house-hopping, and I went through long periods in my life wondering if they wished they hadn’t bothered having a kid, but I’d take a year of the worst days in my house over a week in the Garroway place.

  “You’re going to disappear,” I said. Just like that, it came out of me.

  She flashed a thin smile and drew lightly on her cigarette. “Been carrying that one around for a while?”

  “It’s true,” I said. “In September. It’s—everyone in the neighborhood knows by my time. It was in the newspapers and everything. September first. They never found you.”

  “Never did, eh?”

  A long moment passed. She smoked. I looked at my sandwich.

  I tried another way. “Jimmy Hayes said Anthony said he talked to you about it already, and you didn’t want to talk about it.”

  She waved a hand. “It’s 1947, kid. Anthony’s just ten years up. That was the first thing he talked to me about. His folks bought the place from my dad.”

  “So … what’s going to happen?”

  She shrugged. “Whatever it is, it’s going to happen.” She turned and looked right at me. “Kid, some things aren’t for you to worry about. If I’m going missing, that’s my bees-wax. I know you and the Nancy Drews up in the future think we’re some kind of charity case in the past, some sort of adventure mystery for you to come and solve, but we’re not, okay? We have our own lives, our own ideas, and our own plans.” She reached forward and stubbed her cigarette out on my sandwich plate. “I’m not your summer project, Kenny. Think about your own problems.”

  With that, she got up and walked down the stairs and out of the carriage house.

  Even with my new determination not to end up like Wald, my burning need to just get out of that time, I don’t know how I would have got moving if Peggy hadn’t chosen the next day to break up with Anthony. Lilly said later that the signs were all there if you knew how to look. I hadn’t even, I figured, been within hand-holding distance of my first girlfriend yet, so I didn’t know what the signs were, much less how to look for them. I wasn’t on the same road as those signs.

  Lilly used a doorstop to come forward that night, then took it out in time for Anthony to come backward from his time. Peggy’s mother had come back home that day, and her parents were loudly drunk, so it was no problem for her to sneak a feast out to us in the carriage house.

  After dinner, Wald took Lilly and me out to instruct us on the making of owl calls, though I guess his real purpose was to give Peg some time with Anthony. None of it came as a surprise to Wald. I guess he must have seen his share of through-the-mirror first loves over his uptime centuries.

  Our first clue that something was wrong came in the form of sobs as we approached the carriage house. In the noisy summer dark, Anthony’s crying rang out above the crickets and the nightjars, inconsolable and, well, embarrassing.

  I tensed at first, fearing a return of the crazy gunman, but Wald put a reassuring hand on my shoulder and told me it was only the “cracking a’ that confracted heart.”

  We waited a few minutes in the dark, but when we saw a light in the main house, we hurried in and Lilly broke the news that Anthony would have to be quieter or else duck through to another time. We turned Peggy’s kerosene lamp low and stood in an uncomfortable silence.

  “Fine then,” Anthony said, his voice dripping with bitterness. “I’ll just go back into that mirror and never come out again. I’ll stay in my year. I won’t ever come back. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? That’s what you want.”

  Peggy murmured that she wanted no such thing. She just thought they ought to “cool it a little.”

  “Look,” she said, in as gentle a tone as I had heard her use. “In your time I’m in my twenties. Probably married. I’ll be thirty when you’re done school. Ask John if he ever sees anything like this work out. I … I just don’t want you to get hurt. Is that so bad?”

  Anthony looked up at the rest of us. “What about you? Were you just laughing at me, is that
it?”

  “Nobody’s laughing at you, Anthony,” said Lilly.

  Wald ran a hand through his hair. “Mayhaps, ’twere best to bide this pair alone. I wouldnay—”

  He was interrupted by a call from the main house. By now we all knew Peggy’s father’s voice.

  “Hush now, all of you,” she said, and doused the lamp the rest of the way. “I’ll duck around and come up from the creek, but there’s going to be words for me in there.” In the thin moonlight, I could see her turn to Anthony. “Buck up, AC. This was going to happen sooner or later.”

  We stood and waited, silent and uncomfortable, until Peggy made her way around to the far side of the house and apologized to her furious father. When the door slammed, Wald spoke up. “I’ll hie out,” he said. “’Tis a fine night for walking. Goodnight to all.”

  Lilly relit the lamp, but kept it shrouded.

  “Did you know about this?” said Anthony, more to her, I guess, than me.

  Lilly sat down. I couldn’t see her face from this angle, but I could imagine her sympathetic expression. She was always the one who wanted to make things okay. “Peg never told me anything,” she said. “But that’s not what you mean, is it? Oh, Anthony, didn’t you know there was something coming? She was getting cool, wasn’t she? I haven’t seen her let you hold her hand in weeks.”

  “I thought … I thought it was just her dad and mom and all that,” he said.

  “Maybe she’ll change her mind,” I put in. “Maybe if you … give her time.” The words sounded stupid the moment they came out of my mouth. I don’t know what I had been thinking. I didn’t know about how girls made up their minds in the first place, much less about how they changed them.

  He stood up. “Forget it,” he said. “I’m finished. Why should I keep sneaking out for you people? You know how much trouble I got in when I came back muddy and half starved from a week in that madman’s stupid cave? But did any of you ask? Time? I’m taking some time, all right,” he said. “I’m taking it all. I’m going home and getting rid of that stupid mirror.” He turned to me. “Better figure out something to do, pal, because you’ve been hanging around long enough.”

  “That’s hardly fair,” said Lilly. “Kenny is trapped with us. You can’t—”

  “You’re right, he’s trapped.” He turned to me. “You’re trapped, Kenny. Might as well face it. They’re not saying it, but they’re tired of nursemaiding you here and there. If I were you, I’d just pick a decade. You’re an orphan boy now, kid, a hobo. Better get used to it.”

  He stomped upstairs and thrust himself into the mirror.

  “Oh, Kenny,” said Lilly after a few breaths of stunned silence. “It’s not true, what he said. We feel for you very much, Peg and I. And Anthony. He just isn’t himself right now.”

  “He’s kind of right, though,” I said. “I can’t go on this way. I have to get home or—something.”

  She didn’t have much to say to that, and just stood for a moment pursing her lips. “I suppose I’d better be going. It’s late. You should sleep, Kenny. Everything will seem different in the morning.”

  Despite her advice, I didn’t get much sleep, but she was right. In the morning, everything was different.

  Two

  That night, I stayed up late and killed two sets of flashlight batteries finishing my letter to Luka.

  At five in the morning in the predawn light, I wrote my last line and began to pack up. I don’t know where I thought I was going. Wald’s lean-to? Ten years on? Ten years back? As I folded up the few extra clothes I had come with, and which I had been rotating through as Peggy sneaked them into her laundry, I tried to run through my choices. Lilly’s family sounded the nicest. In the middle of the Great Depression, they didn’t have much, but of all the mirror kids, she seemed the happiest. She was an only child whose parents had always wanted another. Maybe they’d adopt me.

  Stupid. Never work. And I didn’t think I could keep going without television.

  Staying with Peggy was out. Even without Anthony’s blow-up I had sensed my welcome wearing thin. Her mother and father had been in a constant battle ever since the war, each skirmish usually resulting in her mother taking off for her sister’s place for a week, leaving her father to drink, shout, and punch the wall.

  Hanging out in Anthony’s time was the least appealing idea of all, but at least I’d be closest to home. I could keep checking out the mirror and hope that it would end up on dry land before my year was over.

  My watch showed almost six by the time I had erased all signs of my presence. I had twenty minutes before Lilly poked her head through the mirror to see me on her way to her morning chores. I headed out across Manse Creek with a shovel borrowed from the carriage house and found the place where I was supposed to bury the box. Maybe when Luka found it in 1987, she could look up my parents and tell them. Not that they’d believe her. Hi, remember your son that disappeared ten years ago? He and I used to time travel through a mirror in your old house. He’s not dead, but he’s in his forties or fifties by now.

  I lay the box in its hole next to a midsized tree that would be a gnarled giant in thirty years, and looked at it for a long time before covering it up.

  It was only when I had patted down the loose dirt on top that I realized I wasn’t finished digging yet. It’s funny when I look back at this now, just a year later, and think about all the things I didn’t realize then, the questions I didn’t ask. Why didn’t I find out more about Lilly? Why didn’t I try to figure out how Peggy was going to disappear, or how a newspaper from 1947 was going to end up wrapping a dead baby that might be from many years before? Why didn’t I wonder how Luka’s initials were already carved into a piece of wood that I found not long after arriving in this time?

  That last one I did finally start wondering about. Took me long enough.

  The initials. She had carved them. We saw them when we dug the tabletop up in 1977. I saw them again in this year. So she had been back further.

  Trembling with anticipation, I walked to where I remembered her July box was supposed to be, next to a large, half-buried rock, and without another moment’s thought, began to dig with mad energy. It was impossible that the box would be there. Wasn’t it? But I knew it was there in 1977, which meant she had buried it further in the past than my home time. Surely that meant that sooner or later, sometime before the year was over, she was going to travel again. And if she was traveling back, why stop at 1967? Why not go back far enough that I could actually use whatever it was she had to tell me?

  “Hi.”

  Startled, I almost dropped the shovel.

  A tall, slim man in neat clothing had climbed up from the creek bed. I didn’t recognize him, but that wasn’t saying much. The area was a lot less populated than it would be in my time, and I had tried to avoid the few farmhands and landowners I saw. Kingston Road wasn’t far, and there were a lot more houses and people there, but in the forties Manse Valley had more cornfields than commuters.

  “I, ah … ” The man gestured behind him. “I thought I’d take a walk. It’s nice around here. Not a lot of people.” He looked down at the hole I had been digging. “Treasure hunt?” His clothes didn’t look like what you’d wear if you were going to take a walk along a creek. White shirt, pressed grey suit, jacket slung across his arm, yellow tie, and a fedora.

  “Kind of a time capsule,” I said, hoping they had such things back in the forties.

  He grinned. “Oh, like at the World’s Fair? That’s keen. When did you bury it?”

  “A couple of years ago.” I dug my shovel into the dirt again. Its weight felt reassuring.

  “Oh, yeah? Isn’t it a little early to dig it up? Don’t you want to wait a few years?” He held up his jacket and took out a cigarette case and a lighter.

  I continued digging, but kept my eyes on him. What was he doing here? “We’re moving soon,�
�� I said. “My dad bought a house in the city. I don’t want to leave it here.”

  The thin man nodded. Did I know him? He was clean shaven. Younger than my parents. “Sure. So you live around here?”

  “Just past those trees,” I said. “You?”

  “Used to. Moved away for a while. War, you know?”

  My shovel struck the top of Luka’s box. The man must have heard the sound or read my expression. “Well, there’s your time capsule. What’s inside? Photographs? School essays?”

  “A letter,” I said.

  He lit his cigarette and smiled. “Well, don’t let me stop you. Go ahead.”

  Watchfully, I edged around the shape of the box, then reached in and struggled it out. The thin man smoked his cigarette and leaned against a tree, looking off at the creek. “Place hasn’t changed,” he said. “Same old neighbors. Mostly. Not sure if I remember your family, though. What did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t,” I said. He seemed taken aback. It was useful to be a couple of generations ahead of everyone on smart-ass movie lines. I relented as I stood up with the dirt-covered box. “Bond. James Bond.” Something clattered to one end of the box.

  The man smiled. “Beckett,” he said, and stepped forward, holding out his hand. He must have seen my eyes go wide, because he stopped, hand outstretched. “Sounds like more than a letter. Your name’s not familiar. What about mine?” He seemed more sure of himself now than when he had first climbed up from the creek bed.

  I gulped, trying to think fast. “Sure. Beckett. My grandpa knew a Clive, but he died in the war.”

  The thin man nodded, let his hand drop. “Aren’t you going to look? At the box.”

  I had put it protectively under my arm. “I guess. I better head back home. I told my dad I was just coming for a few minutes. He’ll come out to find me if I don’t.”

  “Aw, come on. Satisfy an old soldier’s curiosity. Maybe that box ain’t even yours.”