Backward Glass Read online

  That mirror wasn’t supposed to be for them. It was for us kids.

  I had to wait three hours. It was a miracle I wasn’t discovered. The man whose shed I was on came out around seven to pick tomatoes, and I had to freeze in place for long, cramped minutes. An hour after that, my two came slinking out the back door. I saw the man first, peering out, but I was low on the shed roof and he didn’t see me. A moment later, he and the woman slipped out and around the side of the house. They shared a few quick words in the space between that house and its neighbor, too quiet for me to hear, then he kissed her quickly and they headed in separate directions.

  The man seemed agitated and poorly rested. He was definitely the same man with the yellow tie I had seen a month ago, nervous despite his quick smile.

  The woman was different. She was worried too, but it was all focused on him. Before they parted, she fixed his collar and neatened his hair.

  I let ten minutes go by before coming down. This was too important to mess up. I hopped the fence and approached the back door. Unlocked. Once inside, I saw that they had been trying to be smarter. Something was in the mirror’s place, a sheet covering it, but the real mirror, my spoons-and-string told me, was upstairs. I guessed the decoy was to lure me in, maybe give me a sense of safety.

  Thanks to the weak-then-strong buzzing of the doorstop-turned-key in my hand, I found the mirror easily. They had kept the ruined frame on it, and just tilted it against one wall. The first thing I did was test my key. It worked exactly as it had in 1947; when I held it, the mirror was downtime cold, but if I put it in my pocket, the glass turned hot.

  From the evidence, this was the room they had been squatting in. Though they had made the bed before leaving, I could see signs of their presence. They had come through with suitcases and changes of clothing.

  I wrote them a note:

  “Once I’m done with the mirror, it’s going back where it belongs. You know where that is. Who are you, and why are you following me? I’d stick around, but I don’t trust you. Please stay away. I’m going back to 1917 to save the baby. Then home. Leave me alone and let me do this. Kenny.”

  I left it on the bed, hefted the mirror, and went downstairs.

  There was no way I was going to hop fences in broad daylight carrying a four-foot-tall mirror, so I took my chances out the front way.

  What I didn’t count on was Boyd Fenton and John Timson stepping out from behind the Tarkington fence just as I reached the sidewalk. “Well, look here, Johnny,” said Fenton, “we got some kind of burglary going on.”

  “Look,” I said, “I just want to go my way in peace. I’m not hurting you—or anyone, really. Mind your own business.”

  Fenton snorted. “Pal, you are my business. I’m getting five bucks a day to watch this place, and a twenty-dollar bonus if I catch you.”

  “And how are you going to do that?”

  Timson’s hands had been behind his back. Now he took out the baseball bat he was hiding. “Threats, probably,” he said. “But anything’s possible.”

  “You’d be surprised,” I said. I took the spoons and string from my pocket and wrapped them around my hand.

  Fenton laughed. “Look, Johnny, the little nosebleed’s got silver-spoon knuckles. What are you gonna do, reject, tap us to death?”

  When you’ve dealt with bullies a lot, you fight twenty different battles in your head for every one you concede in the real world. You come up with a million fool-proof strategies you never have the guts to try out in person. And if you have a time-travel mirror whose rules you’ve figured out, you can add about ten more to that million.

  I snaked my hand out as quickly as I could and tugged the end of the bat toward the mirror. It sunk inside.

  Fenton took a half step back and made a tiny, quiet choking sound. I think Timson would have fallen back as well, but he was holding onto the bat. My arm went into the mirror up to my elbow, and though he got tense and almost began to tug back, he didn’t let go.

  I did, and quickly pulled my arm out of the mirror, closing it.

  As I had hoped it would, the part of the bat that was outside of the mirror pulled away, its top half lopped off in the Silverlands.

  “Now,” I said, “want me to try that with your hands, or do you want to get lost?”

  Timson’s face turned dark and he twisted to look at Fenton. “That was a two-dollar Louisville Slugger.”

  Fenton, still staring at the mirror, said nothing.

  Timson shook his head and turned to me. “I better be getting all the reward money for this,” he said, and launched himself at me.

  I shoved the mirror toward the onrushing Timson, smashing it into his face, then grabbed it back, tucked it under my arm, turned, and ran to the backyard.

  Next to the Tarkingtons was someone with a real love for berry bushes, and I held the mirror high as I thrashed my way through. Their fence was low. I tossed the mirror over and took a flying leap.

  Almost made it, too.

  Timson caught my ankle as I went over. I kicked him free, then tumbled sideways over the fence.

  I went in so fast I was halfway to 1947 before the Silverlands slowed me down. I steadied myself against the cold, then stepped back uptime, to warm it out of me. When I turned to the swimming images in the 1957 exit, I could make out a patch of petunias the mirror had fallen into, and above them, sky. It was strange to be standing in the Silverlands, looking out and up at the same time.

  John Timson’s face appeared in front of me, above the mirror. Without stopping to think about it, I pushed my hand out of the mirror and punched him in the face.

  Then I wondered all over again what Luka would do. I had never seen her shy away from a fight, but I’d never seen her actually beat someone up. She found other ways of doing things. She talked to people. She cajoled. Sometimes she lied.

  Maybe there was a way to be like Luka.

  I reached for Timson’s shirt. He jerked back, but not fast enough. I grabbed a fistful, and dragged it back into the mirror. It was easy, since in the world of 1957, he was leaning over and gravity was on my side. As I pulled him closer, I pushed my face out.

  “Come into the mirror, John Timson,” I said. “Come in and be with us forever. We’ve been waiting for you, John Timson. And we’re hungry.”

  Timson cried out, a strangled kind of scream, and pulled away.

  From my vantage point in the Silverlands, all I could see were his feet as he jumped the fence. I waited a moment, not wanting to take the chance of Timson or Fenton having a change of heart, then pulled myself out. With the different up-down orientation, I had to put out my two arms, brace myself against the dirt and petunias, and heave with all my might, gritting my teeth against the uptime heat.

  Once out, I shook myself off, picked up the mirror, and clambered two fences to Brian’s house.

  I checked my watch. The Maxwells would have left for work. I took the mirror down to the coal cellar, and planned for what was next. A quick check uptime told me the 1967 mirror was still submerged.

  I steeled myself against the pain that came when you mixed mirror-heat and water, and stuck my hand through to feel around. Sand and mud. I felt a slimy bit of weed and yanked it through, but what good was that? In the last couple of months, I had come up with a hundred schemes for getting back out of that mirror, but none was any good. I could have put a scuba suit on and gone through, but what if John Wald was right, and it wasn’t a breathing thing, just the shock of the water mixing with the mirror-heat?

  So there was still no hope of getting through into the future. Not yet.

  I had an appointment in the past.

  I went back into the coal cellar and left a note for Brian, asking him to leave the mirror and promising I’d be back. Then, making sure I had everything, I held my key and headed into the mirror.

  It was the longest, coldes
t downtime journey I had taken. Out into the carriage house, turn around, hold out the key, and back in. Out into what must have been Lilly’s room in 1937, turn around, hold the key, and back in. Out into the same room in 1927, nobody around in the midmorning, but I could hear sounds from the hallway, so back in again.

  Hold on, I said in my head to the baby my father had taken out of the wall, here I come.

  I stopped in the Silverlands and watched 1917 before bursting out into it. Just as I had expected from Rose’s diary, the mirror was back in the carriage house where her mother had sent her to live. Half-finished lath on the wall. A neatly made single bed. A pile of books.

  A crying girl huddled in a corner.

  Time to be like Luka again.

  Without another thought, I stepped out of the mirror.

  Rose’s head sprang up and her eyes grew round with surprise. “Who on earth are you?” she said as I stepped down off her dresser.

  “I’m Kenny Maxwell,” I said, trying to channel my inner Skywalker. “I’m here to rescue you.”

  Five

  Rescuing, it turns out, is a lot harder than in the movies.

  As soon as Rose got over the shock of seeing me, she went right back to sobbing. I had no idea what to do. I stood on the low dresser the mirror was mounted on, and felt like an idiot way out of his league.

  “You might as well come in,” she said after a long while in between choked sobs. “What do you mean? I’ve never met you before in my life, Kenny Maxwell.” She pushed herself up, feet braced against the floor, back sliding up the wall, and I saw just how right Luka was about Rose Hollerith’s “condition.”

  She had the condition all right. Big. Seeing the direction of my gaze, she sniffed and looked away. “Am I a sideshow attraction, then? No wonder Mother keeps me shut up here. I remember your name now. Past Margaret Garroway and Anthony Currah, am I right? I’ve been making a list of you all. What are you here to rescue me from, Kenny Maxwell?” She looked down at her stomach. “I haven’t exactly been captured by the enemy, have I?”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but couldn’t think of anything. She motioned again and I stepped down from the dresser.

  “It’s … Prince Harming, I think. There’s … something bad is going to happen. Didn’t anybody tell you? A baby dies.” We were on the second floor of the carriage house, just as I had been in 1947. I looked at the place where one day my father would draw out that tiny blackened parcel. Someone had left it half built in just about the state my dad would leave it half destroyed.

  “Oh,” said Rose. “Yes, I’ve heard about that.” She gave me a look that was half pitying, half impossible to interpret. “Lilly told Curtis. Curtis told me.” She touched her stomach and suddenly looked exhausted. She pushed past me to sit on her unmade bed. “But that’s nothing to do with me, Kenny Maxwell from the future. It’s not mine.” She stared at me when she said this. I could see something desperate in her denial, but hard, too, as though she were daring me to disagree.

  How do you know? I wanted to ask. But you can’t ask that of a pregnant girl. How do you know your baby will live? All babies have to live, don’t they? But then whose baby was it? When did it come from?

  I guess she must have read the question in my face. She shook her head. “You’re just a little bit of a ninny, aren’t you? He can’t die because he’s alive. I’ve known it for months. Don’t you see? I see my son all the time. Every second day, through the mirror.”

  “Every—? But that’s Curtis. Your brother.”

  She smiled and spat out a bitter laugh. “And isn’t that just like Mother? She knows, you know, but she won’t acknowledge it. In a secret part of her mind, I think she’s planned this all along. Father joined up for service. Two months ago, just as he was starting to fix this place up. He’s German, and it’s never been a bit of a problem to our neighbors until the war began. He finally couldn’t stand it, the looks, the pointed comments, and he went and signed up. Mother didn’t fight him about it, and after that, she’s hardly been out. She has one of the local boys run errands. She’s going to tell them it’s hers. She’s going to tell them all, and my Clive must be dead.”

  At that, she collapsed again into tears.

  I sat awkwardly beside her on her bed for a moment. “I don’t—I don’t know what to do.”

  “You don’t do anything,” she sniffled. “When someone cries and there’s noth—nothing to be done, you just put an arm around their shoulders and shut up.”

  So I did that for a while, wondering how long it had been since someone had just sat with her.

  How could she be right about Curtis? His age was right. Her diary described him as eight or nine back in January. But if he lived, who died? Who was the baby whose head would be smashed in, and why had Rose written a note asking me to save him?

  And who was the Beckett who was chasing me?

  Eventually Rose straightened up and brushed the hair out of her eyes. “Well, nothing to do but do, as Mother says. Would you like to help, Kenny?”

  The tears I had seen when I first came through the mirror were of frustration more than anything else. Rose had finally set to finishing the walls, but it had turned out to be at least a two-person job. She assigned me to holding the thin strips of lath against the wall as she nailed them up, making the very wall I had torn apart half a year before.

  “Curtis tried to help,” she said, “but the dear isn’t much use, and he found it so dull. I can’t blame him. He wanted traveling the years to be an adventure, and here he ended up surrounded by girls.”

  “So you’ve known for a while?” I said. “About him?”

  She tapped at a nail a few times before answering. “I can’t even tell quite when I realized. It’s as though the knowledge had been building in me, like a little ghost house, assembling itself in my mind until one day there it was. That pouting, whining little boy I’d been tolerating for months had transformed into this lonely little … son.”

  I didn’t know what to say, but she was the one, not facing me, getting out another nail and measuring its place with her fingers, who said what was on my mind.

  “I know I’m going to die.” Tap, tap as she firmed up the nail’s position, then a larger whack to drive it into place. She glanced at me briefly and took another one. “Did you think I didn’t know? I go and read things in Curtis’s time. Old newspapers, mostly. Mother keeps them in the attic. I expect it’s Spanish flu, but I haven’t the heart to ask. He looks at me sometimes with the most haunted eyes, and I know he wants to tell me, just as I have something I want to tell him, but how can I?” She looked at her stomach. “I, who wasn’t there to raise him, who couldn’t even pick a father to be there to raise him. How can I tell him that my mother isn’t his?”

  I thought she was going to start crying again, but she took it out on the nails instead, hammering five or six in quick succession, bending and ruining half of them.

  I stayed until evening with Rose. Her mother delivered a delicious roast beef dinner, necessitating my hiding under the bed while Rose answered some curt questions about how she was and was she keeping indoors, because it wouldn’t do for her to be out when she was so clearly unwell. I felt guilty sharing her meal, but she said Mother always brought too much, and would be glad to see it eaten. It was the best I’d had in weeks. By lantern light, she showed me her lists. There were two, it turned out, a separate page showing the names of mirror kids reaching seventy years into the past. I was more interested in the almost-new version of the one I had seen six decades up. I helped her add names. She knew everyone up to Luka, so I gave her Melissa and Keisha, but all I knew about the kid from 2017 was that his initials were C. M. I had overheard Melissa and Luka talking about him once, but they clammed up when they saw I was listening. I ran my fingers over the bottom corner of her list, the place where someday soon she would write a message for me.

 
Later, when there was no chance of her mother coming, Rose threw on heavier clothes to hide her stomach, then asked me to take her uptime so she could introduce me to Curtis. This wasn’t easy; the dresser in 1927 had been moved back to Rose’s old room in the house, but after Mrs. Hollerith had gone downstairs, we ghosted down the hall and slipped into Curtis’s room.

  He was playing listlessly with some tin soldiers when we came in. “Look, Curtis,” Rose whispered, “it’s Kenny Maxwell from the future. The one we’ve been hearing about from Lilly.”

  He perked up right away, dropped his tin soldiers, and motioned for us to come in. “I’ve heard about you,” he said. “You have to get that mirror out of the water.”

  “I just wish I knew how.”

  He frowned. “If you had a submarine, you could do it.”

  I nodded. “That would be good. But I don’t think I could fit one through the mirror.”

  “Oh.” His shoulders slumped.

  It was the question of wars that most interested Curtis, specifically the big one that would come when he was of age. Grandparents on both sides had told me enough about the World War II, and I had seen enough movies, that I kept him entertained for more than three hours with stories. We were interrupted once when Rose and I had to hide from her mother coming in to wish Curtis goodnight.

  When her mother was in the room, I watched Rose’s face in the gaslight let in through the sides of the ill-fitting closet door. Stoic, I suppose, would be the word. I had seen all kinds of parent-and-kid relationships in my travels through the glass, but this one was maybe the worst, harsher even than the slaps Luka got from her mother, more hurtful than the way Peggy’s parents paid more attention to their own battles than their daughter’s well-being. Here was the woman who had known that her daughter was pregnant and decided to hide that condition from the world.