Backward Glass (12 page)

“What is this?” I said again, looking from one to the other. Lilly pursed her lips worriedly and looked to Peggy.

“What do you think it is?” said Peggy, fixing me with a stare. “Aren’t you the one who told me I’m disappearing?”

“But it’s not … it’s not until … ”

“Not until September, right? The hell it isn’t. You think I’m going to wait around for that? I’m not disappearing, I’m escaping.”

“But where will you … ?”

Lilly cleared her throat and gave me a shy smile. “She’s coming to stay with me, Kenny. We’ve talked about it and made a decision. Her parents are horrible, you know? They can’t make peace and they won’t stay apart. They insist on using Peg as a sort of cattle prod to stick each other with. If she’s going to disappear anyway, I’d rather take her with me.”

“But it’s not September,” I said.

“I have an idea about that,” said Peggy. “Mother went off again last night. Might not come back for a month. All it takes is for Father to not report me gone for a few weeks. Maybe he’ll think I’ve gone with her.” Her mouth twisted bitterly. “Maybe he won’t even notice.”

“Kenny!” came a shout from outside. “I just want to talk.”

Peggy narrowed her eyes at me. “Do you know who this man is?”

I shook my head. “He’s using the name of someone who died thirty years ago.”

“Come with us,” Lilly said. “I don’t know what we’ll
do, Kenny, but it turns out Peg’s thought this through. She’s found a few investments my parents can make that will bring them some money. We both want to be nurses, and what with the war coming as Peg knows it is, she says there’ll be work for us. I don’t know how we’ll fit you in, but we must.”

“No.”

It’s funny about yes and no. I think I figured out that day that you make yourself who you are by what you choose to say those two words to, and maybe no is the one that really makes you. I had been saying yes just about all year long. Yes to going into the mirror. Yes to other kids’ plans.

Peggy had already begun her migration. She got Lilly to shove her hand in, opening the mirror up, and began moving the large suitcases inside. “Come on, kid, there’s no time for this. I guess Lilly’s right.”

“No,” I said. “What if he sinks this mirror in the lake? Then I won’t just be cut off from 1967, I won’t even be able to get back to now. I’m not going any further back. I’ll go see Anthony and at least be closer to home. Just go. There’s no time.”

Lilly opened her mouth to say something, but Peggy cut her off. “He’s right, Lil. Say goodbye.”

Lilly closed her eyes and nodded. “Goodbye, Kenny. We’ll watch for you. We’ll miss you.”

“Me, too,” I said. “But you have to go.”

I was practically pushing them through. At our best forward thrust, it took a good six seconds to make it through the slowly expanding Silverlands and out the other side, and that was without heavy suitcases. Just as Lilly’s trailing foot went through, the door to the carriage house opened.

The thin man stepped forward, staring right up the stairs as though he had known I would be there. “Please stop running,” he said. His neat clothing was mud-splattered from his trip through the creek. He held up his hands as though to show he was harmless. “I’m not chasing you. I just want to make sense of it. You’re the boy from the future, aren’t you?”

I didn’t say anything. It was all I could do not to run into the mirror after the girls.

“I have so many questions,” said the man. He sounded so reasonable, I started to have doubts. Was I wrong about him? He stepped farther into the dusty light, but tentatively.

“Don’t come any closer,” I said. “What’s your real name? What are you doing here?”

He raised a hand and ran it through his hair. “It’s all real, isn’t it?” he said. “I know it is, but it’s hard to keep that in my head sometimes. I can’t remember it all. Ten years this way and that, right? Kenny, it’s me. It’s so strange to see you after all this time. It’s bringing back memories. Was—there a baby?” He reached a trembling hand up and wiped his brow. “I have so many questions. So much happened. What don’t I remember, Kenny? You know it’s me, right? Look at me. Kenny, don’t go away this time. Everything worked out okay. You always seemed so sad, but it worked out okay.”

I grabbed my backpack and tensed myself to climb up onto the dresser and push into the mirror. Would I get through in time? Six seconds. Was he a mirror kid? Could he follow me?

Clive Beckett. CB. Rose Hollerith’s boyfriend? Clive Beckett was Prince Harming? How old must he be? When was he born?

He took a step forward. That was all the encouragement I needed. I almost threw myself at the mirror. “No, Kenny!” he shouted. “Wait. I want to tell you how it all turns—”

His words were muffled by the Silverlands. I pushed in harder than ever, ignoring the pain. It wasn’t like I’d be stopping to check if anyone was in Anthony’s basement before I stumbled in. I strained against the hot molasses of uptime travel, expecting any second to feel a hand on my collar or the punch of a bullet against my back.

My plan was to jump out in 1957 and head for the stairs. Halfway up, I could assess whether or not I needed to make an escape.

What I didn’t think about was falling.

Three

I didn’t fall far, but it hurt like hell and taught me a lesson I had somehow gone seven months without learning: just because the mirror has up and down the right way when you go in, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be the same on the other side.

I cried out with the shock, but my yell was quickly cut short as I thumped sideways into rocky mud and then rolled down to splash face-first into water. I got up, choking and soaked.

I was in a rainstorm. In a river. No, it was too shallow for that.

I looked around and saw the mirror, perched halfway down a familiar turn in Manse Creek a quarter of a mile from the Hollerith place. Fat raindrops drummed the water around me. I felt like I had swallowed half the creek.

I grabbed my sodden backpack before it floated down the creek, stood in a half crouch and watched the mirror, wedged into the mud of the bank above me.

No one came out.

Was he standing there in the Silverlands, waiting until I came closer? I edged to the side, sloshing my way through the creek and up onto the muddy bank and continued to watch the mirror.

Anthony had really done it. He hadn’t taken the mirror out of its frame, but had instead ripped the frame itself off the dresser. I wondered if he had actually tried breaking it, and just thinking that made me angry. I would never do that to him.

The rain showed no signs of abating, and no one seemed to be coming out, so I trudged forward, picked up the mirror, and headed upstream. It was harder to carry than the cold night Luka and I had taken it to the junk house, but I found as long as I kept my hands on the edges and the nontraveling back, I could struggle it along.

By the time I got to the old hand-excavated cave, I was scratched all over and soaked to the bone. The frame around the mirror hadn’t fared well on the trip, but the glass itself was as flawless as ever.

The collapse of the hand-dug cave had begun, but there was enough left to provide me shelter from the rain. I guess it’s okay for me to admit that right after I got in there, propped the mirror over the entrance, facing outward, and moved my backpack to the driest extreme I could find, I leaned against the feathery roots that made up the side of the cave and began to cry.

I was twenty years from home. No Anthony and no doorstop, so I wasn’t going back, and without someone fishing the mirror out of the lake in 1967, I wasn’t going forward either. I had no friend in this time. How would I get by? Thirty dollars remained in the bottom of my backpack, some in coins not yet minted. My other possessions included two changes of clothing, five wooden boxes, a map of the city, a penknife, a so-called Dead Man’s Penny, and a Coke in a green glass bottle.

That last item was about the most useful at that point, and so I spent a good half hour crying into my Coke the way some people cry into their beer. I cried about my mother and father, teenagers right now, not even aware they would get together someday and have a kid who would disappear. I cried about a lost life I never appreciated. I cried about the way the whole world of time travel had receded from me. I wasn’t a mirror kid anymore. I was a stranger, unknown to anyone, more odd and out of place than anyone on the planet.

Crying that way in front of anyone is embarrassing, but if you do it all alone, no chance of being seen, it does some good. Once the last sobs and tears had worked their way out, I was exhausted, but at least it was done.

For a while afterward, I didn’t move, just let my cheek rest against the dirt and roots, and my mind wander the labyrinth of my problems.

Rules of time travel. Ways of getting around them. Clive Beckett. Prince Harming. Dead wife. Me a murderer. Luka’s box, buried in the past, further back even than 1947. Mirror kids getting concussions. The mirror itself, an unanswerable mystery that just stared stupidly back at you.

Eventually the rain slowed enough that I could move to the mouth of the hole and read Luka’s letter again.

I liked the closing.
Good luck. I miss you. I’m coming to get you.
Because she knew, didn’t she? If that thing was buried further in the past, she knew she was coming to get me. Somehow, in the next few weeks, or maybe months, Luka was going to get further back than now and leave that box.

She was coming for me. Shivering, muddy, soaked to the bone, I held on to that thought. What was the first thing I would say when I saw her. Would I kiss her? Could I do that?

Sometime in the late afternoon, the rain stopped. I stood and stretched. A lot of time had passed since I tumbled out of the mirror Anthony threw away. It would be dinner time at the Currah household. That was good for what I wanted. I left my backpack inside the hole in the creek bank, propped the mirror over the entrance, and headed back to the Hollerith place.

The old house was looking better than it would in the future. The lawns were cut, the hedges trimmed, and every bit of exposed wood stained or painted. I gave three hard knocks and waited.

“Hi, Mrs. Currah,” I said when Anthony’s mother opened the door. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I really need to see Anthony.”

She gave me a
Do I know you?
frown, then said, “I’m sorry, dear, Anthony’s—well, he’s not ready for visitors right now. Maybe you could call tomorrow.”

I found it difficult to be disrespectful to someone’s parent, but I had to. “I know he’s upset about his girlfriend,” I said, loud enough that I hoped Anthony would hear. “But I’m sure he doesn’t want to let down his friends.”

Surprise, annoyance, and maybe a little suspicion crossed Mrs. Currah’s face before it lapsed into an impassive expression. “I think you must be mistaken, dear,” she said. “Anthony doesn’t have a girlfriend. Maybe—are you thinking Anthony Chuff over on Bennett? I’ve never seen you before.”

“No, I mean Anthony Currah,” I said, getting even louder. “He’s got a girlfriend, all right. I could tell you all about her if you like. We’re good friends.”

Before I could say anything else, Anthony shoved his mother aside, burst through the door, and grabbed my arm.

“I’ll take care of this, Ma,” he said. “Kenny’s a kid from school is all.”

“Anthony, what’s all this about?”

“It’s okay, Ma,” he said, guiding me away from the house as he spoke. “Kenny and me, we like to joke around, don’t we, Ken?”

“I don’t know about joking,” I said. “Sometimes your friends really count on you, and they end up getting covered in mud, you know? Hey, do you think your mom knows about those magazines under your mattress?”

My voice was still loud, but his was a hiss. “Hey, cool it, man. That’s against the code. You don’t talk about girls to a guy’s mom.”

“Oh?” I said. I let him drag me off. “And is trying to drown someone in mud cool with the code? Is leaving John Wald stuck in the past cool with the code?”

“I told you I was done,” said Anthony. “I wanted that thing out of my house.”

But I wasn’t finished. “Is leaving us by ourselves when Prince Harming comes back cool with the code?”

“What?” he said. “Prince Harming came back?” All the anger drained out of him in an instant.

“Not through the mirror. I don’t think so, anyway. It was a younger him. He wasn’t the same, but he was. Look, I’ll tell you everything. Sneak out tonight and meet me by the cave.”

“No,” he said. “I’m done. I’m not coming back. This is crazy, and if we don’t stop, you won’t be the only one who can’t get back home. We’re lucky it hasn’t happened lots of times before now.”

“You’re not done,” I said. “You can do whatever you like after tonight, but you’re going in one last time, to put a doorstop in for John. I’ll even take the mirror away. You’ll never see it again.”

Anthony bit his lip. “Is Peg okay?”

I almost answered him, but then I set my face in as hard an expression as I could. “Bring some food. I’m starving.”

He came. Sometime in the evening my water-logged watch quit working, so I sat in the dark, getting bitten by mosquitoes and convincing myself that it hadn’t worked and midnight must have passed, and what was I going to do now? But he came.

I called to him when I heard him blundering through the undergrowth, and he turned on his flashlight. “All right, fine, here I am. I don’t know why I bothered.”

“Do you have a doorstop?”

He held out a long piece of string with a dessert spoon tied at each end.

I showed him where I had leaned the mirror against the bank of the creek. “Let’s set it,” I said. “I’m leaving it for John Wald so he has a way to come forward. Then I’ll tell you everything.”

I went in with him, just in case anybody was waiting on the other side, but the carriage house in 1947 was empty and still. We set each spoon in the lower corner of the mirror, figuring it would have a better chance of being unnoticed that way.

When we came back, we sat down on a fallen log and I explained everything. When I got to the part about Peggy going through to Lilly’s time, I took a glance at him, and I was pretty sure there were tears running down his cheeks.

“I really am done with it,” he said after a long while. “I’m sorry about where I put the mirror. That was rotten. But I don’t want to do it anymore.”

“Okay,” I said. I got up and slung my backpack onto my shoulder.

“You’re going?” said Anthony. “Don’t you wanna—I can probably get you into the little house for the night.”

I shook my head. “I spent the day doing nothing. It’s time I got going.”

“But where? What is there around here you can go to?”

I picked up the mirror. It wasn’t easy to carry by myself, but at least I didn’t have to worry about breaking it. “You said it yourself,” I said. “What else can a little hobo boy do? I’m going to find my dad.”