Backward Glass (15 page)

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.

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.”