Backward Glass (23 page)

“Known what?” The question came from Curtis, who stood now and looked at Luka. “What?” He held his hands out, and for the first time I saw how horribly they had healed. His fingers were thick masses of scar tissue, the palms cracked. “Known what?”

“Oh, sure,” said Luka. “You’ll talk to him about it. What I’ve been telling you for the past two hours, that’s what.”

“That you didn’t kill him,” I said. “You didn’t kill him because your brother was already dead. He wasn’t still, Curtis. He was stillborn.” And before he could say anything else, I turned to Luka. “But that’s not all, is it? You didn’t just come to tell him that. You’ve figured out how to save Peggy, haven’t you?”

S
i
x

Let me pass. Save the lass.

We all stood still for a long moment after I said it, Curtis moving his lips silently over the words.

“Stillborn?” he said at last. “The brother? Didn’t get killed?”

“No,” I said. “Didn’t get killed. Curtis, I think that’s right. It didn’t move, did it? I mean he. He didn’t move. Sometimes a baby is born that way. It’s nobody’s fault.”

“Didn’t get killed.” Then he shook his head. “But died.”

“I know,” I said. “And that was sad. Really sad. But not anybody’s fault. All you were trying to do was save your Peggy.”

He wiped tears away from his cheeks with his ruined hands. “Didn’t kill it. And the Rose mother sad, but said no, not your fault. A bad man did it. But who was the bad man?” He looked at the diary still in my hands. “Tried to find out. And down and down the backward glass. Tried to be strong. A soldier. Met the nurse. And fell in love, Kenny. But the nightmares. A bad man killed a baby. Kenny’s our friend. He knows. He’ll find the bad man. He’ll know. Who’s the bad man?”

“Nobody,” I said. “Nobody’s the bad man, Curtis. Curtis is a good man.” I looked at Luka. “How does this fit together? How did this Dana, Connor’s sister, how did she know to take him to his great-grandmother?”

Luka shrugged and looked away. There was something she was hiding from me. “Kenny, that was Lilly. She’s old when Connor meets her. It took me a bit to work out what she meant. But you’ve got it, haven’t you?”

“Yeah. Get there before her.” I stepped forward, and though Curtis shied away, I put my hand on his shoulder. “Lilly sent us with a message for you. You can save Peggy. But you’ll have to go the long path.”

I don’t know how, but with the help of Connor and Luka I managed to convince him. Less than an hour after I left my home time, the four of us stood in the Silverlands between 1957 and 1967 and prepared to say goodbye to Curtis for the last time.

When we took him at first to the mirror, far past our own, where Peggy had been lost, I thought we might need to restrain him again the way John Wald and I had done four months ago, but he slumped at the sight of its swimming image-fragments. “Lost her,” he said. “Brought her and lost her.” His sunken eyes were wide with the need to confess as he looked at me. “Think how that feels. Brought her here. Because of the nightmares. About the baby. Then lost her. And blamed you.”

“But maybe you didn’t lose her,” I said. I put a hand on his shoulder and turned him around to face the 1957 end of the same mirror. “This is ten years before.” Just as it had been back in September, the mirror was on a beach. I wondered how it got there, what crazy series of events had brought it to this sandy beach lit by a noon-day sun. It must be, I realized, some other place in the world, someplace warm in another time zone.

“To save her?” said Curtis. “And how? Going through here—no way back.”

“Look at it,” I said. “That mirror is on the beach, out of the water. That’s in 1957. But in 1967 it’s in the water. So go through to 1957 and—and then you have to wait. Wait until September 1967.”

Curtis grinned, almost cackled. “And not let it go in. Not let it go in the water.”

“No,” said Luka, her patience wearing thin. It was the third time we had explained it. “No. We know it goes in the water. We can see it’s still in there. You’ve got to go with the way things are, but just—make them better than we thought they were.”

“Not … to change?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “That’s not the way to do it with the mirrors. If you try to make sure it doesn’t go in the water, we know it will anyway, so maybe that means you’ll lose the mirror or not be there or something. There’s a way to—float above the events we know are going to happen. Think. You can wait with the mirror for ten years and guard it. Then the day before—before I push her through—then you put it in the water.” Curtis recoiled, but I continued quickly before he could object. “A little water. A few feet deep. And you wait for her. You know the date. One day before your birthday. About six o’clock our time. Just wait. Have a life jacket there.”

Luka interrupted. “A doctor, even. You could have anything. If you do this, you’ve got ten years to get a whole team together. Everything you do can be to save her. Look at the 1967 mirror. As long as you try to make it look just like that, dark and in the water—there’s no reason this shouldn’t work.”

“And save her?” said Curtis, his eyes wide and wondering.

“And save her,” I said. “And live again. And be Curtis. Because you didn’t kill anyone, and if you do it right, you can save her. Nobody has to be sad. Nobody has to lose anyone.”

Curtis turned to the cloud of images that showed the sunlit beach. “I have to go now, don’t I?”

And without another word, he did. Just turned and pushed his way out of the mirror, a rag-covered, scarred, and ruined man, stepping onto a beach in an unknown part of the world. When he was out, he turned back as though to say something to us, but his face fell when he saw only himself. Something must have caught his attention, because he turned his head and his face broke into a broad smile. He raised his scar-covered hand to wave and stepped out of the range of the mirror.

We watched for a while, but he didn’t come back. All we could see were sun-sparkled waves lapping the shore.

“Hard to go back to winter after that,” said Connor.

“We’d better, though,” said Luka. “Come on, Kenny. I don’t want you in too much trouble.”

I grinned and shook my head. “Sure you don’t.”

We returned to our own mirror and slipped into Granny Miller’s junk house, then back home.

“Go upstairs and pretend to be asleep,” said Luka. “Then if you’ve missed a phone call, that’s your excuse.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think I better just come clean.”

“When there’s a perfectly good lie to tell?”

“I lied a lot to them already. There’s something—I don’t know—something Rick said about the mirror. I might not be the master of my fate—”

“But I can still be the captain of my soul,” Connor finished. He shrugged when I looked at him inquiringly. “My dad used to say it all the time.”

I turned back to Luka. “Maybe they’ll understand. We did good tonight.”

“Did we?” said Connor. “Think about how weird it’s going to be for them. He’s, what, forty now? He’ll wait ten years. When she comes out of that mirror and he rescues her, what does she see? Her husband’s aged twenty years, gotten all burned up, gone crazy.”

I shrugged. “They fell in love once when they were just a couple of years apart. Maybe that still counts. Maybe he’ll straighten out in the ten years he’s waiting.”

Connor and Luka stuck around for a few minutes more and helped me rehang the closet door. It slipped a little at one point and bumped my nose, which hurt like hell. Connor held the door away with one hand and, in an oddly tender gesture, reached out with his other to move away my own hand covering my nose. “It got broken,” he said. “Didn’t set right. You should get that taken care of.” He slipped a bolt into the hinge. “Seriously. It causes this thing called a deviated septum. Makes you snore a lot when you get older.”

“When I get older?” I said. “Who are you?”

Suddenly there was a kind of electricity in the air, like when an object met itself. Connor rubbed his messy curls and stepped back toward the closet. “Time travel’s funny, isn’t it? You got to do a lot of stuff this year. You even found out what your dad once wanted to be. What his dreams were.”

I hadn’t told anybody about that, not even Luka. “Who are you?”

“He would have been good, too. As an architect. When I was twelve, we built a tree house in the backyard. And not just some crappy platform with a roof. It had two different ladders, three levels, and five rooms. We even tried making an elevator with a bag full of rocks as a counterweight.”

We all jumped when we heard the door open downstairs and my mother announce that they were home.

“We should go,” hissed Luka.

“Who are you?” I said.

Connor looked toward the bedroom door as though he wanted nothing more than to go down there and meet them. Luka must have read his expression, because she grabbed his shoulders and turned him to face her. “No,” she whispered. “It didn’t happen, so it won’t happen.”

His shoulders slumped and he gave a defeated smile. “Okay.”

From downstairs, my mother called again. I called back that I’d be right down, but I didn’t take my eyes off Connor. Off you. “Are you my … ?” I said at last.

“Don’t say it,” said Luka. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

Your gaze flicked to her. “Hey, I didn’t tell him,” you said with a grin. “I can’t stop him figuring things out. I’m not used to him when he isn’t old and slow.” You straightened up and held out your hand. “Connor Maxwell,” you said. “Born in 2000. Seventeen years old.”

“Kenny?” my mom called. “Who’s up there?”

“It was great to meet you,” you said. “I wish we could have had more time. Get that nose fixed, will you?”

You pulled me into a quick hug, then broke it off, held my shoulders for a second, and backed into the mirror. Luka promised to come back again and followed.

Moments after she disappeared into the mirror, my mother came into the room.

“Oh, Kenny, you didn’t,” she said.

I tried my best to meet her eyes. “I did.”

“What could have made you do that again?”

I scratched my head. “I think it was my son.”

Seven

You’ll go down the backward glass.

My parents were angry, but they still let me have a proper goodbye, and I’ll bet you know what happened. New Year’s Eve, our last day in the glass forever. My dad moved the mirror to the living room, because it wasn’t just my goodbye. Grandma and my parents had come to love Luka during the summer of my disappearance, so they all wanted to say their tearful farewells. Grandma said she hoped she’d get to see Luka again, and Luka said not to be silly, of course she would.

My mom gave her a few last-minute presents—some fresh-baked cookies and a handful of family photographs.

After a long hug, they all found excuses to leave the room, so Luka and I had a few minutes alone, though Mom stayed in the kitchen, clattering dishes to both tell us where she was and cover the sounds of our conversation.

“I can’t believe this is over,” I said.

“It’s never over, though, is it?” said Luka.

“How do you mean?”

She reached behind her and touched the mirror lightly. “It wasn’t over for Curtis when his year ended. It wasn’t over for Lilly or Peggy. It’s not like the story of your life is over.”

“But ours is,” I said. “Yours and mine together. If I go see you now, you’ll be a little kid. We had a good time, though, didn’t we?”

“The best.”

“I wish you could stay.”

“I wish you could come.”

“Would you just kiss her already?” shouted Grandma from upstairs.

I wanted to. But Luka was almost two years older than me. And she was beautiful. Was that the first time I was thinking this? Maybe it was. And she was my friend.

“Funny about that Connor guy, though,” I said, trying to change the subject.

“What was?”

“Him as my kid. He didn’t exactly say that, did he? I mean, I know you always say the mirror kids are all connected, but I don’t know.”

“Why not?”

I shrugged. “The names. His name was Connor. He said his sister and brother were Dana and Eric. I just don’t know if I’d ever pick those names, that’s all.”

Luka got a huge grin on her face and came to a decision. She stepped forward, grabbed my shoulders, and kissed me square on the mouth.

It was awkward, and it wasn’t a long kiss like you see in the movies, and maybe that’s all I’m going to tell you about it, because maybe it’s none of your business.

It was good, though.

When she let me go, she stepped back and pushed partway into the mirror. “Maybe you wouldn’t,” she said, and then paused for effect the way she loved to do. “But I would. Bye, Kenny. Come and find me. It was the best year of my life.”

And she was gone.

You know, after all that happened, I still don’t really know much about the future. And I guess that’s okay by me.

I’m glad I met you. And your mother.

Acknowledgments

Though I have already dedicated this book to her, I would be remiss in not beginning by thanking my wife, my first and best reader. Others who have been very influential in the development of
Backward Glass
are my agent, the absolutely incredible Katie Grimm, and my editor at Flux, the absolutely merciless Brian Farrey-Latz. Their insight, wisdom, and good sense have been of immeasurable help. My copy editor, Rhiannon Nelson, was instrumental in both rescuing me from a few embarrassing mistakes and giving some very clever last-minute suggestions. I also want to thank my parents, Ed and Margaret Lomax, whose reading to me in my formative years shaped my whole world; Regan Devine, my tenth-grade creative writing teacher, for instilling in me the sense that writing is rewriting; and Lister Mathieson and the whole crew (students and teachers) of the Clarion 98 workshop, who pushed me ahead on a particularly long path. Finally, my kids were a great inspiration; I wanted to write a fun adventure for them. I even hid their names inside.