Backward Glass (21 page)

Three

Holler loud, holler proud,
you shall wear a coffin shroud.

Lilly touched the baby, even snatched a locket from her neck and held it before the tiny face to see if it was breathing, but when she turned to me and shook her head, she was only confirming what I already knew. “Move them apart, Kenny,” she said, pointing to the two Curtises exchanging blue sparks on the floor, then picked up that tiny, sad weight and headed toward the stairs.

Luka groaned and sat up as I grabbed younger Curtis by his shirt and dragged him a safe distance from his older self. Just then, as though sounds were coming back into the world one by one, I heard Rose’s wail.

“Let me hold him,” she cried. “Why did he do that? Why did you let him? Let me hold my baby.”

“I have to go there,” I said. “Are you okay?” She nodded and waved me upstairs.

When I got there, Rose was holding her baby. Her mother and Lilly knelt on either side.

I didn’t understand it. I had been so sure. So had she. Curtis was her baby. Who was he then? Who was the burned man downstairs, and the boy he once was?

“Why didn’t you stop him?” she said, looking from Lilly to me. “That’s why you came here wasn’t it?”

Lilly opened her mouth, then closed it. What could she say? What could I say? Rose was right. We had come all this way, gotten lost, gotten found, met each other at different times, different ages, solved mysteries—but for what?

“Well,” said her mother at long last. “Rose, it’s terrible, but … perhaps this is for the best. Everything happens for a reason. With no father … and you unmarried … ”

Rose’s face twisted and she took a breath as though to speak, but whatever she would have said to her mother was cut off by a convulsion and a cry of pain. Her hands clutched and trembled against the baby she was cradling. When she could speak again, she beat a weak fist against the bed in frustration. “Why can’t it be done?” she said. With a worried look, Lilly left Rose’s side and went back to the bottom of the bed.

I took that moment to approach Rose. “I—I think Curtis is okay,” I said. “I mean—downstairs. My friend Luka is with him. I think he’s going to be okay.”

Another shudder of pain took her. When it was gone, her mouth was twisted in a grimace. “What does that matter to me? I was wrong about him. He’s not mine. Why should I care? All this time I thought he was mine. I thought I had been given this gift of the lonely little boy I wouldn’t get to see.” She sniffled and looked at the dead baby again. “But that wasn’t him. My baby is dead.”

She drew a ragged breath and closed her eyes. Lilly, looking more worried than ever, ran her hands over Rose’s stomach and asked Mrs. Hollerith to come to her.

“I can’t hate him, though,” said Rose to me. “He was being brave. I should—I should forgive him. He didn’t want to do anything wrong. He’s a dear little boy. But—oh, Kenny, why couldn’t you stop it? Why couldn’t you—” Another convulsion took her words away, and the hand that clutched mine almost drew blood. “It’s—it’s funny,” she said around her gasps and sobs. “Remember I said I was going to call him Clive? I suppose I will after all. Clive after his father.” She shut her eyes against the pain. “I suppose I’ll never even know where Curtis comes from.”

“Don’t be too sure about that,” said Lilly from the foot of the bed. Her eyes were bright again with new tears. “You’re not done yet, girl. Oh, Rose, you’re not done. It’s twins. That’s what your mother tried to tell us. Curtis is a twin.”

This time they didn’t send me away. Even Mrs. Hollerith was too frantic to object to my presence. My only job was to sit and comfort Rose, who had already endured more than anyone should. It was amazing to me that someone deprived of food for so long could push as hard as they were telling her she must or crush someone’s hand as hard as she did mine. Her other hand, curled around the dead baby that I was already thinking of as Clive, petted him with feathery caresses.

Less than five minutes after his brother’s death, Curtis Hollerith made his first appearance in the world, yelling and screaming the way his brother never did.

Not long after the second baby was born, Mrs. Hollerith remembered my existence and sent me downstairs. Luka had managed to heft little Curtis onto the couch and was staring glumly into the mirror. The boy’s breathing was regular, and his hands showed no damage from the blue fire. Lying there, he could be any ten-year-old kid. I wondered how much of this night he would remember. Enough that it would trouble him later, I was sure. Half-remembered images that would bring him and Peggy back to look for me, that would bring her to her death.

“I thought we could save him,” Luka said.

Something strange was happening upstairs. I could hear coos and sighs from Lilly and Mrs. Hollerith, and from Rose sobs that were turning from despair to joy. “We did in a way. If I hadn’t gotten Lilly back here, I don’t even think baby Curtis would have lived.”

Luka groaned. “Time travel gives me a headache.” I suddenly realized that older Curtis wasn’t there. “Out the door,” said Luka, reading my expression. “He got up a couple of minutes ago. I was ready to take him on again, but he backed off. Said nothing matters because as soon as it all gets fixed, he won’t exist anymore.”

“Did you tell him—” I nodded my head upstairs.

“No. What if he tried again?”

“So where is he now?”

She shrugged. “I watched him run to the woods. I wasn’t about to follow.”

I looked toward the door. It was a cool night in 1917. I tried to imagine the pain of running in those woods with bare, burned feet.

“Come on,” I said.

“Kenny, no,” Luka said. “Are you crazy? Look, I came here to bring you home. Your family is waiting for you.”

I stood for a long moment in tortured indecision, looking between the girl I had been pining for all this time and the door out into the dark, where this man was, this man who was the boy sleeping there on the couch and who was also the baby upstairs. I thought of the tiny hands I had seen for just a moment at his birth, dark and bloody in the lantern light, each tiny finger a perfect new miracle. Just a few hours ago, I had seen those hands, so much older, shoved into fire and crippled forever.

“Just down to the creek,” I said. “He’ll be there. He’ll be in his cave.”

Reluctantly, Luka went with me. I called up to Lilly that we were going out for a breath of fresh air, but I didn’t even know if she heard. Luka had come with a backpack stuffed with supplies, and we lit our way with modern flashlights. We followed a few bloody footprints at first, and Luka spotted a handprint on the bark of a silver birch, but soon we lost his trail, and by the time we reached the creek, he could have been anywhere.

Ready to run at a moment’s notice, I shone my flashlight beam inside the narrow, hand-dug cave, but the man I had destroyed was nowhere to be seen. He had been there, though; on the ground outside the cave was the strings-and-spoon key he had stolen from me. I picked it up.

Luka and I made a tiny island of light in a deep, star-filled, creek-babbling, chirping, and tweeting night. A mosquito bit me.

Luka put a hand on my shoulder. “You’ll never find him. Not if he doesn’t want to be found. You have to let this go, Kenny. Your mom and dad are waiting for you. You did it. You came back for Rose. She’s got her baby.”

I sighed. “Okay. Let’s go back.”

She held up her hand. “Actually. A couple of things first.” She made me hold her flashlight while she took out a pocketknife. “What?” she said at my expression. “You thought I was going to forget to carve my initials? This is fifty-four years before I was born. You better believe I’m giving them something to remember me by.”

She disappeared into the cave for a moment, and when she emerged, she took a small and familiar wooden box out of her backpack. “Now for this,” she said.

I reached out to touch it lightly. “That’s got my grandmother’s letter inside?” She nodded. “You ever wonder what would happen if you didn’t bury it? What if you just threw it in the creek?”

Luka rolled her eyes. “We know it ends up there. Come on. Your dad gave me these collapsible shovels.”

“You’ve been hanging out with my dad?” I asked as we waded across the creek.

“A lot. And your mom. They’re pretty cool. Your grandmother, too. They miss you. I told them I’d bring you.” She sighed. “That’ll end it. Won’t it?”

“Yeah. They’re not letting me into that thing again. Sorry.” We reached the far bank and headed up to the thicket of trees.

“What are you sorry for? I’m the one who abandoned you. I let him force me into the mirror, Kenny. I couldn’t stop him from throwing it in the lake. I went uptime to save Rick and Jimmy from him, but he had a gun and he forced me back in, up to your time. I stood in the Silverlands and watched as he ran to the lake and threw it in.”

Here was a point I had been confused on when Rick first explained it to me. “Why did he do that? Why did he make you go back uptime?”

“Said he didn’t want to kill me. He just wanted to trap you. He wanted to make sure you couldn’t get into the mirror again. It was—I don’t know—confusing. He had just shot you, and that seemed to take some of the crazy away. I don’t think he knew what time he was in anymore.”

I nodded. “That makes sense. It’s kind of the same as now. When he thinks he’s changed things, all he has to do is sit around and wait for the world to change around him. It must have been a couple of weeks before he realized he had trapped me in 1957, the exact time he was trying to keep me from. That must have been when he stole the wetsuit and started trying to find the mirror again.”

“Who cares about that?” said Luka, her voice a knife-edge of regret. “I let you down. I should have stayed with you. I stood in the Silverlands and saw the mirror fly over the bluffs and crash into the lake.”

I tried to imagine the kind of worry and guilt that must have been eating at her all these weeks.

“You did what you had to do. Everything worked out. That’s just the way it all happens. What matters is you always wanted to do right.” We found the thicket of trees, and as we passed between two dark shapes, we temporarily brushed each other’s arms. Emboldened by the darkness, and maybe by the deeper darkness of everything I had just gone through, I did the scariest thing I had done all year: I put my hand on Luka’s shoulder. “What matters is you were the captain of your soul. Always.”

She stopped. I stopped with her. What was I supposed to do next? Kiss her? Drop my flashlight and grab her with my other hand? What if I lost my flashlight?

The moment passed. Luka let out a long breath. “Come on,” she said. “It’s over here.”

I let my hand drop and followed her to the correct tree. “Anyway,” I said, deflated, “I’m sorry you had such a boring time the last couple of months. This was supposed to be our year.”

Luka pointed her flashlight at her own face so I could see her raised eyebrow. “Boring? Are you kidding? I got to save a drowning kid in 2017. Twenty years further up, I watched the second mission land on Mars. I found the evidence that got my daughter out of a murder charge. This was the best summer of my life.” She grinned at my open-mouthed expression. “What, did you think I’d just sit on my hands and wait for you?”

I smiled back and shook my head. “I really did miss you.”

“Come on, H. G. Wells. Get digging.”

A few minutes later, as we walked back into the carriage house, Luka halfway through the story of her adventures in the future, Francine Hollerith came down the stairs, carrying the tiny burden of her dead grandchild. Until that moment, I hadn’t thought of it that way. Her grandchild.

“Give me something,” she said to me in a quiet voice.

“What?”

“Are you stupid? For the baby. It should be wrapped. I had a swaddling cloth prepared, but that’s for the other one.”

My backpack was right beside me. The first things I brought out of it were the newspaper from 1947, the one with the story about Peggy going missing, dated September 2, and an old T-shirt I had been wearing on and off for the past two months. I froze in the act of handing it to her.

My Speedy Gonzales T-shirt. That I had been wearing all those months ago when we found the baby and I felt that electric charge that came when an object was in danger of meeting itself.

She wrapped the baby in the T-shirt first, then the newspaper, three, four, five sheets crumpled tightly around it. I opened my mouth to object, but a cold, furious stare from her shut me up.

Luka and I sat transfixed as she walked back upstairs.

“What are you doing, Mother?” came Rose’s weak voice a few moments later.

“Just putting clothes away. You’re coming back to the house when we can move you.”

Liar, I wanted to shout. Liar. She was hiding him. Putting him in the wall. And as sure as I knew that, I was certain that Rose herself would put something in that same small space before her mother got a chance to seal it up. Her list, but now with a message written on it, desperately, wildly, against all sense. A plea for me to come back and make it better. And sometime soon, in another wild fit of desperation, probably forbidden by her mother from ever talking about us, she would take the drawer out of her dresser and scratch a message on it for Luka.
Luka, help Kenny. Trust John Wald. Kenny says he is the
auby
one. Save the baby.

And we would fail.

“You have a baby to care for now,” Mrs. Hollerith was saying. “No more of your secret visitors. We’ll pack them off and that will be that.” She raised her voice. “Do you hear that, down there? I’ll have no more of you. Once you’re gone, we’re happy to see the end of you.”

Lillian, her shoulders sloped and weary, descended the stairs. We sat her down and gave her a quick recap of Prince Harming’s disappearance and our foray into the night.

“Francine says there’s a discreet doctor she can send for,” she told us, barely reacting to what we had said. “She says he’ll make the certificate out as she tells him. It’ll make life easier for Curtis, not being called Rose’s bastard. People can be horribly cruel in this time.”