Backward Glass

by David Lomax

  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.”

  Rose soon fell asleep, and Mrs. Hollerith didn’t want us upstairs, so we didn’t get any kind of last goodbye, not to her, nor to ten-year-old Curtis, who Lilly pronounced to be suffering from shock. Luka and I picked him up and carried him through the Silverlands to his own time.

  Mrs. Hollerith, ten years older and not one day more pleasant, sat waiting for us on her dead daughter’s bed. “What have you done to him?” she said, standing up. I wondered how long she had been waiting. Her eyes narrowed as we brought him forward and laid him next to her. “I told you ten years ago it was to be the last I saw of you.”

  “Shut up,” said Lilly. “I’ve had about enough of you. The boy’s in shock. Bundle him up and elevate his legs. Keep an eye on him for a few hours and he’ll be fine. I suspect he won’t remember much. Maybe that’s for the best.” She eyed Mrs. Hollerith a moment longer, then turned to Luka and me. “Let’s go.”

  “That’s it?” said Mrs. Hollerith. “You breeze into my house once every ten years upsetting everything, carrying madmen and unconscious children, and ex
pect me to accept it? I’m going to throw that mirror into the ravine.”

  “No you won’t,” I said.

  She fixed me with a glare. “Oh, and you’re going to tell me what to do?”

  “No.” I returned her stare as calmly as I could. “I’m just telling you how it happens. In a couple of years you’re going to sell this place—to the Huffs—and you’ll leave this dresser here when you do. That’s how Lillian here gets to know Curtis in the first place, and that’s how we come back to save Rose and Curtis. You’ll do it because that’s the way it happens.”

  We left her with her mouth hanging open.

  When we stepped out of the Silverlands into 1937, Lilly’s bedroom was empty again. She told us that she and her family were probably off looking for somewhere to stay in the city.

  Our next stop was the carriage house in 1947. “This is where I get off, I suppose,” said Lilly.

  “You’ve got a husband and baby waiting for you, right?” said Luka.

  “I do. I suppose Kenny told you. I can’t imagine what he thinks of all this, my husband I mean. The little one’s only two. Can’t expect him to have any opinions, can we, Luka?”

  In the early morning light, I saw Luka do something I don’t think I’d ever witnessed before. She blushed. “Actually,” she said, “my real name’s Lucy. I just—made up that other name.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t worry about the opinion thing, though,” she said. “He’ll have a lot of them pretty soon. John, right?”

  “Why, yes. How did you know?”

  Luka seemed to come to some kind of decision, and she darted forward to give Lilly a quick peck on the cheek. “We better go now. Into the mirror, Kenny. Thanks for everything, Grandma. It all works out in the end.

  And just like that, leaving Lilly wide-eyed and open-mouthed, Luka dragged me back into the uptime heat of the mirror and through to the Maxwells’ coal cellar. I guess I must have looked pretty shocked as well. “Have you—?”

  “Known all along? Nah. A lot happened this summer, Kenny. I moved back in with my dad. First time I’ve really been with him much in years. A couple of days ago my grandma sat me down and told me how she saved a pregnant girl’s life once. With the help of a cute boy.”

  I looked back at the mirror. “Lilly said I was cute?”

  Luka rolled her eyes. “Well, she’s old, now. You know how the memory goes. Come on, Romeo, I promised your parents I’d get you home.”

  Four

  Hear the wisdom in the walls.

  When we got to 1967, John Wald was already awake and making breakfast for Rick from a huge pike he had caught in the lake with a pointed stick. We ate quickly. Luka said she had to get back before her father woke up since he was a little more on the ball than her mom.

  Rick hugged us all goodbye, and for the first time in two months, I headed back home to find my mother sleeping in front of the mirror.

  There was a lot of crying and hugging. Mom called for Dad and my grandmother, and they came right away.

  When everyone calmed down, we reached into the mirror for John Wald. He apologized to my parents for not bringing me home sooner, and that won my mom over. She said he looked like he hadn’t eaten a good meal in more than a hundred years, at which he frowned and said it was probably more like sixty.

  Luka had to go but promised she’d come back. Wald said he wanted to go with her, but with him it would be my last goodbye.

  He stood at the mirror with Luka and turned to face me. “Fare thee well, Kennit,” he said. “A twisty path thou didst thread in the glass, and did what good thou couldst. You learned to float above. Stay thee here, now. Cross not the glass again.”

  He gave me a final embrace and Luka took him uptime.

  My parents tried their best to get me to talk and be normal. My grandmother told what should have been the very amusing story of her back-and-forth questioning of her sanity in the months and years following our encounter. She said she had written down everything I said to her, but never showed it to anyone, and kept telling the hobo boy story so she wouldn’t forget. My father then told the story of Grandma coming over just as they were growing frantic about my disappearance and considering calling the police. “I almost sent her to a home that very day,” he said, giving her a side-armed hug.

  Eventually, sensing my need to be alone, my mother pronounced a quiet time.

  My attic bedroom was, predictably, much neater than I had left it, since sometimes cleaning is the only thing that can take my mother’s mind away from worries. I lay in my bed and looked at the sea of old furniture, a lot of which I had now seen when it was much newer.

  I began to cry.

  Sixty years into the past a baby had been torn from his mother’s grasp by his own brother, then fallen in an arc like a bloody football and ended his life against a mirror that would not let him inside.

  And now I was home. Really home. I had been in this house countless times in the past weeks, but I hadn’t been home.

  Sleep, when I cried myself into it, lasted until noon the next day, and if there were any dreams, I don’t remember them.

  My only highlights in the bewildering first days of school, when I suddenly had to be a normal kid again, were visits from Luka. Those required a lot of negotiation. Conceding that the mirror was indestructible, and even that we had done some good inside it, my mother still had my dad put a lock on the closet in their bedroom, and agreed to give Luka a key provided that she respected their rules: she could visit if she asked in advance, and I was never to be allowed in the mirror.

  I wanted to object, but my dad sat me down and explained in excruciating detail just how much pain my two-month absence had caused. Since they had discovered the truth of the mirror, either my mom, my dad, or my grandmother had sat watch every minute of every day waiting for my return.

  So I contented myself with living vicariously through Luka. Using they key she had made, she started spending a lot of time in the past. The mirror was unguarded all the way to 1947, so as long as Luka’s dad wasn’t watching her too closely, she could risk trips well into the past. Sometimes she’d even go further and bring back news, some bad, some good.

  Young Curtis remembered nothing of the night he was born. Even his memories of the mirror were muddled. In early October, he made his first friend his own age, a girl from two doors down, and tried to take her into the mirror. When she couldn’t pass in, he grew angry and smashed her head repeatedly into its unbreakable surface. She never recovered completely.

  Rose did better than anyone might have expected. By the time Luka actually met her, Curtis was six weeks old and Rose was devoted to him. She never talked of the other baby.

  Of the older Curtis who had run out into the night, she could find out nothing, though there were stories of a wild man living in the woods, stealing chickens, sleeping in barns. Even fearless Luka didn’t stray far on the rare nights when she went as far back as 1917.

  For almost four months I kept to my parents’ new rules, and I guess it would have stayed that way if it hadn’t been for you and the fact that there’s always one more rule.

  Five

  Running down the silver street.

  My mother had never been crazy about keeping the mirror in the house, but I think she comforted herself with the fact that I was under pretty constant supervision. Grandma moved in with us following the madness of that summer. My dad fixed up the library for her. Between the three adults, I hardly had a moment alone in the house.

  So when Mom got an invitation to her office Christmas party on the same weekend Grandma was going to visit a sick friend, she didn’t like it one bit, but somehow my dad convinced her they should go. Two days before Christmas, a week and a half before my year was to end, I found myself alone at night for the first time in months.

  I tried to be good. I sat in my room and got an
early start on my Christmas vacation homework, willing myself to ignore the time-travel mirror downstairs. A couple of times I thought I might have heard Luka passing through one way or the other, but she had been given a stern lecture by my dad about just exactly how forbidden it was for her to stop over here tonight, and I had heard her make a solemn promise, so I knew there was no chance of company.

  After failing for a good half hour to figure out any of my math problems, I gave up and headed downstairs for some cookies and milk. I stayed down in the kitchen to eat, enjoying that room’s better lighting and the comforting sound of the fridge running. When my mother called to check on me, I just about crushed my milk glass in my hand I was so on edge. I assured her that everything was fine. No, Luka hadn’t come through. No, I hadn’t gone near their closet. Yes, I knew the number and would call if there were any problems.

  I washed my glass and cleaned up my crumbs. Nothing to do but clump back up the stairs.

  I guess that’s when you heard me.

  Just as I walked past my parents’ bedroom, I heard a knock and a muffled “Hello?”

  I froze. I didn’t know that voice. Another knock. Another “Hello?” but this time a little louder. “Listen, I need some help here. I need the diary. The one with stuff from Curtis and Rose.”

  I put my hand on the handle of my parents’ door, then jumped as the guy spoke up again.

  “It’s not even me that needs it. It’s Luka. She needs help with Prince Harming.”

  That did it. I opened the door and walked to the closet. “Who are you?”

  “Oh, man, thank you. Are you Kenny? I’m Connor. From 2017.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Look, can you open the door?”

  “It’s locked.”

  “I know that, D—Kenny. Luka sent me to get the diary.”

  I looked at the closet door. Hinges on the outside. “Give me a few minutes,” I said, and headed down to the basement for a hammer and an awl.