Backward Glass Page 16

  Rose didn’t stay much longer. Grimacing in discomfort, she told me she ought to get home and rest. “There’s room enough in the carriage house,” she said, “though you’ll have to continue the indignity of hiding like a gothic suitor every time Mother comes calling.” Curtis barely acknowledged her going, though he did thank her for bringing me through.

  Curtis had been raised on tales of how his father and other courageous men had served their country well, so he responded eagerly to my half-remembered accounts of D-day, the freeing of concentration camps, and the Battle of Britain, as well as the fiction I supplemented them with, mostly composed of various war movies all cobbled together in my mind—Where Eagles Dare, The Guns of Navarone, and Sands of Iwo Jima combining to make some kind of whole narrative.

  Eventually, Curtis was too tired to ask questions anymore. “Will you tuck me into bed?” he said, then turned away, embarrassed. “I mean—just—will you say good night? And will you come back?”

  I promised I would. “Good night,” I said. “Sleep tight.”

  I closed his door and skulked back around the corner to Rose’s old room where the mirror waited.

  Back at the mirror, I took a moment before stepping through, and quietly slid out its top drawer. There, underneath, was the message to Luka: Luka, help Kenny. Trust John Wald. Kenny says he is the auby one. Save the baby. Even here. Even now.

  I had a decision to make. I could go back up to 1957 where a coal cellar was waiting for me, along with the possibility of a hot breakfast in the morning and another conversation with my future dad. Or I could take my spoons-and-string key and go back to Rose. Further from home, it was true, but all year something had been pulling me back there. Save the baby.

  I clutched the spoons and went backward. Rose was fast asleep. Again, I slid out the drawer, and for the first time saw it without the message.

  Well, at least I knew I was in the right place.

  I spent the next three uncomfortable nights on the main floor of the carriage house with only a couple of blankets to protect me from the bare floorboards. Each morning, after a brief stint under Rose’s bed, I gobbled half of a hot breakfast, and spent the morning helping her with the walls of what she called her “Monte Cristo mansion.”

  In the afternoons, Rose asked me to go through and spend time with Curtis. “He’s lonely,” she said. “I know you came charging in to rescue me, but he’s the one who needs you, I think. Mother keeps him shut up at home for the most part. He is her shame.”

  What else was there to do? I could go as far downtime as I liked, but my own time was still closed to me. On my first day with Curtis, I went with him down to the creek, where he showed me his cave. “It was Clive’s,” he said. “He was my sister’s sweetheart, but he died in the war. He and my sister used to come here to be alone.”

  I could see he had done a good job. The desktops and chair legs that seemed haphazardly embedded in the mud in other decades were now set up with a clear plan in mind, like struts in a mine. Holding up the slight vault of the widest part of the cave was the table with the initials carved in it.

  Rose, Clive, Curtis.

  And Luka.

  I blinked a couple of times at it and shook my head with wonder.

  “I put mine there, too,” said Curtis. “I wanted to be part of it. You should put yours, too. You’re one of us as well, the mirror children. We’re like a family.”

  It’s always going to come down to just you and me, she had said. But where was she? Why weren’t we rescuing the baby together?

  I carved my initials next to hers like I was cosigning a promise.

  In the evenings I went all the way uptime past the coal cellar, just to check that 1967 was still inaccessible. It always was.

  On the third day, Curtis and I passed a lazy afternoon by the creek. I entertained him with stories about submarine warfare, illustrating with my diving and surfacing hands stories that I knew from comic books and movies. We got bogged down slightly when he asked me to explain the mechanics of submarines.

  “How do they float up?”

  “They have stuff in them that floats. Air and stuff.”

  “So why didn’t they float before? How did they sink in the first place?”

  “It’s—I don’t know. It’s like hot-air balloons, but in reverse. They must have to drop stuff so they can rise up.”

  “Oh. So they must have to carry heavy stuff to sink. It would be better if they could have light stuff that made them float and they could just bring that out from somewhere.”

  “But if they had it somewhere, it would make them float up, wouldn’t it?”

  It was cool being the person with answers, even if not all of them were entirely accurate. I got to play the older brother for a while.

  “Is war stupid?” he asked at one point. “Rose says it is. She says that’s how father died and Clive as well, and it was all for nothing because this other war is coming. They called it the war to end all wars, but they were wrong.”

  “Somebody telling you to go kill some other guys because the people in charge can’t agree?” I said. “Yeah, that’s pretty stupid.”

  “But you said the Germans were killing people in those camps. Jews and everyone.”

  “That was stupid, too.”

  “And the men who went and saved the people in the camps. They were good, weren’t they?”

  “Yeah, that’s true.”

  “That’s going to be me, then. I’ll do that. You can tell me what army division to get into, and I’ll go over there when it’s my turn and free people from the camps.”

  “It’s not that simple,” I said, trying to sound grown-up. “Sure, some people saved prisoners and stuff, but a lot of people died. There’s lots of … other jobs you can do that would help with the war.”

  He raised his eyebrows at my lame finish. “Other jobs? I’ll be twenty-two when that war starts. That’s the age when you should be a soldier. It’s okay to do other things if you’re an old man.”

  Suddenly being a big brother got a lot more complicated. Rose had asked me to be good to her son. Had I just talked him into going to war?

  Six

  On my third morning of plastering, we finished the second short wall, and started preparation for the long back one, the one Mr. Hollerith had abandoned when he enlisted. I had been avoiding that part of the task; a third of the way along that wall was the dark place out of which that baby had been drawn. I knew there was nothing there yet, just a shadowy hole filled with newspaper insulation.

  I spent half an hour after breakfast bringing up the lath strips, and then an hour mixing plaster. Rose had done the mixing on previous days, but today she was tired.

  She got up when I was done to inspect the result, but gasped and fell back to the bed.

  My heart almost battered through my rib cage. “Is it—are you—?”

  She held one hand over her stomach, and the other up like a traffic cop. “No—no, Kenny,” she said in between another couple of gasps. “I don’t think so. He’s moving and it’s sore, that’s all. It hurts. My back hurts, my feet hurt, and I cannot get a breath just right.”

  I had an urge to march over to the main house and give her mother a good talking to. She needed a hospital, a doctor.

  She needed her mother.

  I said as much, but she made me promise not to interfere. “Just stay here,” she said. “Hold my hand. I don’t need my mother. All I need is something for the pain.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Wait.” I hurried downstairs to fetch my backpack.

  When I brought out the small leather pouch, she gave a weak smile before even seeing its contents. “He kept his promise,” she said. “I said I didn’t know how he could, but he did.”

  “Who?” I said.

  “John Wald, of course.”

  I remembered Wald’s pr
omise that I would find a use for the partridge berries he had helped me pick. A way to float above the stony world. “Wow. He really is our Obi-Wan.”

  As the tea brewed, she told about her time with John. Traveling uptime, he reached 1907 just before the new year, and had to travel his “long path” to get to 1917. He worked as a hired hand in the area, never straying far from Hollerith land. As an able-bodied man, he felt pressure to sign up for the war, finding that none of the farmers in the area had work for him anymore, even in the harvest of 1915.

  “If he hadn’t been wounded last summer,” said Rose, taking her first sip of the foul-smelling concoction we had managed to make, “he never would have made it back.”

  Shot in the leg at the Battle of the Somme, then left for dead in no-man’s land while the wound grew septic, he had been rescued and spent four months in a field hospital, then more time convalescing in England before he was able to find transportation home.

  “That man has an eye for secrets,” Rose said. “He remembered Clive and knew my condition at once. It took my own mother longer.”

  Despite Wald’s impatience to move on, he stayed a few weeks to help. “He must have stripped every bush for miles around for those berries. ‘I’ll get thee more,’ he said to me. ‘Trouble not.’ And will you look at this? He did. How did he know, Kenny?”

  I shook my head and watched her sip the tea. For just a moment, I felt something relax in me, a thing that had been twitching and grinding like a bag filled with rocks and frogs.

  I had done some good. Maybe Wald had known things would work out this way, and maybe he hadn’t. But everything ended up fitting together. Rose needed someone to tell her the future worked out, or maybe she just needed partridge berry tea for the pain. Curtis needed a friend.

  But the feeling didn’t last. I hadn’t come back to plaster a wall or babysit a lonely kid. Where was Prince Harming? Where was the thing that needed doing? Up in 1977, I was due for school in a week. Curtis had a birthday in three days, and a newspaper with tomorrow’s date in 1947 was going to be found in fifty-nine years wrapped around a blackened package I could barely think about.

  In the afternoon, Curtis helped me sneak a shovel from the carriage house, and we forded the creek so that I could bury my August box for Luka. In it, I had told her about my time with my dad in the fifties, my encounters with Curtis and Rose, and my discovery of keys.

  Curtis was in an odd mood. He didn’t ask questions as we buried the box. A light rain started, and we retreated to his hiding place under the creek bank. Again, I ran my fingers over the initials carved in the tabletop.

  I tried to interest Curtis in the plot of Star Wars, but I guess it was too far crazy for him. He didn’t interrupt, but he was barely listening.

  “I should go into the past tonight,” he said after I had given up and just sat with him for a while watching the rain. “I know it would be strange, but I should.”

  I frowned. “I thought you didn’t like visiting Rose much anymore.”

  “Not to see Rose. She’s not so bad anymore, though. She’s been nicer. I meant to see my mother.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because this is when I was born.”

  Part Five

  Shatterdate

  One

  Leave tomorrow when you’re called.

  I stared at Curtis as he continued. “When I started, anyway. My birthday’s in three days, but Mother says I was hard coming. That’s what she says. ‘The boy was so hard coming, the girl almost died.’ That’s a silly way to say it, though. She wasn’t a girl when she had me.”

  I half stood, bumping my head on the low ceiling. “You’re coming this soon? I mean you came … this soon? I thought she wasn’t due … I mean, she didn’t look … Oh, man, I gotta go.”

  “Why?” said Curtis. “You don’t even know my mother. And it doesn’t matter. I was born. Why do anything?”

  In a sense, that was true, wasn’t it? I was going to get home. Curtis was going to be born. Was there anything I could do to change anything?

  The boy was so hard coming, the girl almost died.

  What was her mother’s stupid plan, anyway, to just let her daughter have a baby all by herself in that half-converted barn? And me, a kid, what was I going to do? I didn’t even want to be near the birth of a baby.

  I clutched my hands into fists to stop the shaking. Things weren’t supposed to sneak up on me like this. I was from the future. I could travel in time.

  I wasn’t supposed to deliver a baby. Professionals were supposed to do that.

  Doctors.

  Nurses.

  “Curtis, I need a piece of paper and a pen, and I need you to sneak me back into the house, to the mirror. Can you do it?”

  He frowned, but nodded.

  Five minutes later, we were in Rose’s old room. “I’ve got this figured out,” I said to him. “I’m going into the future for a few minutes. When I come back, I’ll bring help.”

  My first stop was ten years up, 1937. Empty as it had been for days. I looked at my watch and left a note:

  Lilly,

  If you’re really a nurse by 1947, meet me at 2:12 PM at the mirror on August 30. Rose is giving birth, and she needs your help. Please.

  Kenny

  Crossing my fingers, I went into 1947.

  And for the first time that year, things started working the way I thought they should.

  She was there. Ten years older and eyes filled with wonder, she was there.

  She wore a plain blue dress, and her hair was shorter, a little darker. She carried a tightly packed leather bag.

  “You got older,” I said.

  She smiled, that same warm smile from … well, last month, but ten years ago as well. “You stayed the same.”

  “You came.”

  She shrugged. “How could I not? You know, I never saw you again? After Peg and I—” There was a noise outside. Lilly’s head whipped around. “Kenny, that might be Peg’s father. He’s been prowling all around the whole day. I think he’s getting desperate to find her. They’ll report her missing in a day or two. We’d best go.”

  I had a million questions to ask her, but she was right. Thirty years ago, Rose needed help.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get going.”

  “How can this work?” Lilly said. “It’s only supposed to open up for Peggy, isn’t it?”

  I grinned, happy to be the one who knew. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve got a key.”

  The door to the carriage house banged open. I thrust my hand into my pocket to get the key and grabbed Lilly’s elbow.

  “Wait,” she said.

  I looked down the stairs. There, carrying another man over his shoulder, was John Wald. He grinned up at me.

  “Well-timed, lad. I have him here, though a more tricksy rabbit has never bethump’d my wits.” He half turned and let me see the face of the man he was carrying, all tied up, the man who had shot me two months ago, still in what was left of his raincoat. He was, if anything, wilder now, but I knew at once it was him. Thick ropes bound him and a gag stopped his mouth, but he glared at me with silent, fiery hatred. It was, I was sure now, the same face as the man with the yellow tie. But there was something else. What was it?

  “You caught him,” I said. “But how are you here? How did you know the right time?”

  Wald smiled and touched his nose. “Auld John Wald knows many a hidden thing, Kennit. Where pass we that our tales may be expounded?”

  “But wait. How is Prince Harming here? He put that mirror in water. How did he come through it? Never mind. I can’t deal with this now. We’re going back to 1917 to save Rose and the baby.”

  Wald looked for the first time at Lilly. He grunted and smiled. “Lillian Huff, thou art a woman now, and fair with time indeed.”

  She blush
ed. “Thank you, John. But it’s not Huff. I’m married now.”

  “’Tis well and good. ’Tis how the world enblooms anew.” He started up the stairs, and for all his age, you would hardly know he was carrying a man on his back. “I know not how this fool fits in along this path, but hereabouts Peg’s father searches wild. I feel clasped to thy purpose, lad. I’ve bound him tight and must, I think me, bring this doom along.”

  I didn’t particularly like the idea, but I couldn’t disagree. The idea of having Wald come along was comforting, and at least this way I would know where the crazy man was. For now I shoved aside the question of how he could be here.

  At least he was tied up.

  John seemed mildly surprised at my downtime access, but there was no time for questions. I let Lilly in first to see if the coast was clear. John needed my help to wrestle the wild man inside. As soon as he realized where we were going, he began to strain against his bonds. John grabbed him by his torn shirt-front and pulled him close. “Peace. Thou must be bound. We’ll help that girl to birth her child and then turn back to riddling thee.”

  He went in first carrying the man’s shoulders while I, with my string and spoons, followed trying to help, but mostly just avoiding kicks in the face.

  Lilly was waiting in the Silverlands. “I can hear talking downstairs. We’ll have to just go out and in again.”

  As soon as he emerged into 1937, the wild man began to scream into his gag, the frantic shriek of a desperate animal. We carried him out, Wald almost tripping on Lilly’s bed, Lilly herself shutting the door to give us a few seconds extra. “Hurry,” she whispered.

  I held onto his feet by the rope and went right back into the mirror as soon as I was all the way out. The Silverlands widened by the day, and the pain of that long, cold passage was distracting.

  As I stepped down from the low dresser, the man kicked me with all his strength. His feet caught me in the chest and I was flung back, tumbling over Rose’s bed and falling between it and the dresser.