Backward Glass (20 page)

Part Six

The Baby in the Wall,
September and
Everything After

O
ne

Crack your head, knock you dead.

1957 coal cellar, empty. 1947 carriage house, empty. 1937 Lilly’s bedroom, empty. 1927 Rose’s bedroom, empty and preserved. 1917 carriage house—screams and cries. That was our one-minute journey fifty years into the past.

The sound of Rose’s wails made their way into the Silverlands, so by the time we stepped out, we had a good idea of what we were going into.

The mirror and its dresser were still downstairs, but close enough that I emerged within Lilly’s field of vision as she stood at Rose’s bedside. She saw me, then Luka, and gave a slight frown. Mrs. Hollerith had her back to me, and I retreated to the couch before she saw me.

“Another breath, dear,” said Lilly. “Just keep it up.”

In whispers, I told Luka everything of the summer. Everything. I confessed to how I hadn’t told Lilly and Peggy of Prince Harming’s accusation, how I had asked my grandmother to send the note warning me of the man in the yellow tie even though I knew by then he didn’t mean me harm.

“You were trying for the best,” said Luka.

“But none of it mattered,” I said. “He said I was going to kill his wife and I did.”

“You didn’t mean to.”

I gave up thinking and talking for a while and just listened to the noises above. About an hour after we got there, Lilly started sounding increasingly worried. I heard the term “breech” again, along with “prolapsed umbilical” and “oxygen starvation.”

There was a brief upset when Mrs. Hollerith found out we were there, but Lilly sent me to fetch clean sheets and Luka to pump water, so she let it go.

After that, it was more of what Lilly called hurry-up-and-hold-your-breath.

I was an anthill of emotions, every feeling inside me running in a different direction. Here was Luka next to me, warm and real and somehow outshining every other thing in the world. And there was Rose upstairs, moaning and crying. And Peggy, bitter, sharp-edged Peggy, who had seemed, in the few moments I had seen her, so tender with Curtis—lost now, forever. Sleep, when it came while I rested on Luka’s shoulder, was the shallow kind, where dreams come as fragmented and rearranged memories. Me pushing Peggy. Her grabbing and taking me along to her watery death. Curtis burning his hands in the fiery mirror, then reaching out to me, touching my face with his charred fingers.

Then I was woken by a scream, one more urgent, more filled with heartbreak than I had ever heard. “Get him out. He can’t be here. He can’t see this. Not like this. Get him out.”

I shot awake to a tiny moment of silence followed by, “Rose? What’s going on? I took care of Mother like Lilly said. She’s been awfully upset. I knew I should stay away—but what’s happening?”

I stood up. Luka was still asleep. I realized with a guilty thrill that we had fallen asleep with our arms around each other.

“Curtis,” came Lilly’s voice, “Rose is ill. I’m helping her. You should just let her be. It’s a trying time for her.”

“Why is there all that blood?” said Curtis. “Where is Mother? Mother now, I mean. I took care of her in my time. But where is she now?”

“She went to the house to get some things, Curtis. Please, dear, give Rose some privacy. Her mother will be back soon, and you’ve done such a good job this year of making sure she didn’t see you.”

I got to the middle of the stairs just in time to see everything dawn on Curtis’s face at once. “She’s not my mother, though, is she? Is she, Rose? Mother isn’t my mother. You’re my mother, aren’t you?”

“Not like this,” Rose sobbed quietly. “I was going to tell you, but not like this. Not now.”

I walked slowly and quietly toward him, recognizing that this had to stop but that I was also intruding. “Hey, Curtis,” I said. “It’s me. Let’s go downstairs. We should leave Rose. She’s going to be okay.”

All the way down the stairs, I kept talking to him as gently as I could. Mrs. Hollerith came in carrying some steaming wet cloths. He stared at the sight of her. She frowned and almost stopped to speak to us, but Lilly called her from above. She dismissed us with a snort of derision and went on.

“Who’s the new one?” I heard her gruffly ask Lilly a moment later.

In the hesitation that followed, I could imagine a look passing between Lilly and Rose, a lightning flash of communication and caution. “Just another girl come through the mirror,” said Lilly. Mrs. Hollerith snorted and said something about taking the mirror to the dump as soon as she could and how Grand Central Station was no place to have a baby.

“Did you know?” Curtis said in a flat voice that betrayed no emotion.

I nodded. “It wasn’t my thing to tell you.”

“Wait,” said Curtis, everything just catching up to him at once. “So who is my father? Clive?” I nodded. Tears welled up in his eyes. “I don’t know why I care,” he said. “Why do I care? What does it matter? My father—I mean, Rose’s father—he’s dead, too. Why does it matter which dead father is mine? But I just—I grew up thinking it was this way and it’s not, it’s that way.”

Luka was awake now. She sat very still and watched me with Curtis, scooching well to the side as I sat him down.

What do you do when someone’s crying? You shut up and hold them. I took him by the shoulders and pulled him into an awkward hug. In my arms he babbled away for a bit through his tears. Why had nobody told him? Didn’t they think he could understand? How many other people knew? Did the neighbors know?

At the end of all that, his crying stopped, and the next thing he said came out in the thinnest, tiniest whisper. “Rose is dead, though, Kenny. She’s dead. I was keeping a secret, too. It was the Spanish flu. She died eight years ago. I didn’t know how to tell her. How can I tell her she’s dead?”

Instinctively I put my hand up to his head and caressed his hair. “She knows, pal. She’s not stupid, your mother. She’s smart, just like you. She knows, and she wanted to talk to you about it. She was going to tell you everything before the mirror closes at the end of the year. You know it does that, right? It only opens on the years that end in seven. All she wanted was to get some time with you. And she didn’t want to spoil it.”

“How do you know all this?” said Curtis pulling away from me, sniffling and rubbing his eyes.

“I just talked to her, that’s all,” I said. “I’ve been hearing about you two for months. I wanted to come back and help. I knew things got bad around now.”

“Did you help other people as well?”

The emerging look of admiration in his face made me uncomfortable. “I tried. But you have to be careful when you try to help. Things can go bad even if you don’t mean them to.” Then it just all came out in a rush, pushed out of me by my guilt and frustration. “Listen, Curtis, I know things that are going to happen. Some really bad things. I’ve seen them all and I know it’s going to get really bad. Some of it’s my fault. But maybe it doesn’t have to happen. When you grow up, you’re going to join the army, just like you said. You’re going to meet a girl and fall in love.”

As I continued, his eyes never strayed from my face, and his mouth hung open. I told him everything, or as much as I could put together in that crazy rush. I forgot all about Wald’s advice to float above the events of the world. Wald, me, Peggy, the tragedy in the Silverlands. I tried to tell him as many ways as I could think of to avoid Peggy’s death. Don’t go back to the mirrors as an adult. If you have to go back, don’t take her with you. Tell me everything as soon as you see me, especially your names. Any of those things, I told him, could set us on a new path.

Just as I was telling him to write all of this down, we heard renewed sobs of pain from Rose upstairs. Curtis looked up. “I shouldn’t be here,” he said.

“No,” replied a voice from behind us, “you shouldn’t. I’ll take care of that.”

I turned to see Curtis, older and in his Prince Harming appearance, one burned hand holding my strings-and-spoon key, the fire of madness in his eyes all over again. He stepped all the way through the mirror, and down off the dresser, just as we heard a voice from upstairs.

“There he is, dear. Oh, there he is. It’s a boy. Oh!”

“Just in time,” said Prince Harming, and he turned toward the stairs.

T
w
o

Then Prince Harming’s hunger’s fed.

“Wait,” I said. “What are you here for? What are you going to do?”

He turned back and looked at me, and when he spoke it was in a quiet voice, not the fierce shouts of before. “It was never your fault, Kenny. It was always me. All I need to do is never live. I kill that baby and it’s no crime. It’s suicide.”

He started up the stairs and I ran after him. “No,” I said. “You can’t change things that way. That’s not how it works.”

I grabbed his arm, but he smashed my face with his elbow. I fell back and cracked my head on the floor. I opened my eyes again just in time to see Luka run at him and get a solid kick in the stomach. Her feet left the step they were on and she flew down to land next to me. “You can’t stop me,” he said. “This is the end. I do this and everything changes. That’s what I understand. You can only change yourself. Don’t make me hurt you. This is mine to do.”

He turned and continued up the stairs.

As soon as he got to the top, I could hear the sounds of a struggle. Lilly telling him to stay away, Mrs. Hollerith screaming at him, Rose simply screaming. There were thumps and slaps, the dull sound of punches. “Give that to me!” he screamed.

I willed myself to get up, head still spinning.

“Is that … is that … ” Curtis, little Curtis as I thought of him in my head, walked to the bottom of the stairs and looked up. “Kenny, who is that? You said I was going to burn my hands in a mirror. Who is that, Kenny?”

What happened on the day I was born?
the older Curtis had asked me. “Curtis, it’s—it’s not safe here. Let me take care of this.” Whatever was about to happen, I didn’t want him to see it. Be a friend to him, she had asked. His tenth birthday was tomorrow.

I gripped the handrail and started up the stairs.

The converted hayloft was a chaos of voices and bodies. Mrs. Hollerith clutched Rose, who thrashed and screamed at this burned stranger. “It’s mine,” she screamed. “He’s mine, he’s my boy. Give him to me. Put him in my arms. He’s mine, he’s my boy.” Lilly stood on unsteady feet, a fresh gash on her forehead covering her face with a sheen of blood. She held her hands out to Prince Harming, imperious and demanding.

He clutched the baby in his raw hands, a bloody and curled thing, skin blending with the hideous fingers that cradled it. Why could he hold the baby? Was he beyond pain? Something was happening here, something I should understand, but it was going too quickly.

“It’s me,” he shouted. He looked around at us all wildly. “Every one of you has been hurt by this.” He shook the baby slightly in his hands as he said that, and my heart clutched like a fist. “All of you. I’ve done—so much wrong. I can’t bear it. It was all me. I tried to control it, to stop it. I tried to hurt other people to make it stop. But it’s not outside of me, it’s in me.” He shook the baby again, but only lightly, and I could tell that somehow he couldn’t bear to be rough with it.

“That’s not the way,” I shouted. I didn’t want to shout, but I had to if I wanted to make myself heard over Rose’s wails. “You’re trying to control again. Give it up. You can’t.”

Seeing him distracted, Lilly stepped forward and brought her hands up to the baby, but she was too gentle, and that was her undoing. Curtis leaned back, braced himself against a wardrobe, and gave her a push with his foot, sending her flying back into a large chest. He paid no further attention to her, but rather began to advance on me. “Get out of my way,” he said. “I’ll kill you if I have to, because it won’t matter. If I kill myself, none of it will have happened. I can do anything right now because in a few moments this will all be gone.”

I fell back before his fury, but I kept talking. “That’s not it,” I said. “You’ve got it wrong.”

“How else is there a dead baby?” he said, then grinned savagely at my reaction. “Oh, yes. I know about it. I talked to your friends in the future, Keisha and Melissa, before I—I didn’t mean to hurt them, though. I just wanted to make them let me back in the mirror. I got lost and I had to get you before—but I didn’t. I can’t.” His expression turned pleading and he looked from me to the baby. “Don’t you see? It’s better if I just end this thing. I remember everything now. Almost everything.”

He had backed me into the room now, and had his own back to the stairs, as if preparing for a quick escape. Behind and below him, I could see the mirror.

Older Curtis shook the baby again for emphasis. “He’s the problem,” he said. “This one here. All this year, you’ve been living in two times at once, one with the baby dead, one with him living. Now I get to choose. Dead baby or mad Curtis.”

“That’s crazy,” I said, and immediately regretted my choice of words. “You’re not thinking about it. Both things can’t be true. You live. You have to live. If you kill that baby—but you can’t. You don’t want to. If you wanted to, you would have done it. You’re not the bad guy.” I pointed at the red-and-purple burden in his hands. “How can you go from being that to killing that?”

“But it hurts,” he said to me, his eyes full of tears. “I thought I could stop you, and I couldn’t. Nothing stops it and it—hurts.”

“Hurts?” said the ten-year-old’s voice from behind his future self. “Hurts like when I touched you before? Did that hurt too? Let’s try it. Get away from my friend.”

And with that, he touched Prince Harming’s scarred and bloody hands.

I jumped forward. So did Lilly. Blue fire erupted from the place where the Curtises met. Both screamed. Older Curtis began to topple back, and I swear I saw him in my memory cradling that baby, instinctively bringing it close as he fell into his younger self and sent them both down the stairs in a tumble of sparks and limbs.

I didn’t see the baby die.

Lilly and I got to the top of the stairs at the same time and scrambled down together, but what we saw on the floor made me stop in horror while she pushed on. Little Curtis and his older self lay spread out on the floor, their hands close enough to exchange bright flashes. Both were convulsing slightly.

But it wasn’t the sight of them that stopped me, and it wasn’t either of them that Lilly rushed to.

Rose’s baby must have been flung clear of those maimed hands at the apex of his tumble. Maybe the blue fire had done it, making his hands and arms convulse even as he tried to protect the baby.

It had fallen in an odd path. Older Curtis must have grasped for it, sending it tumbling to one side, and now it lay on the low dresser, directly against the mirror, unmoving. Horrifically and impossibly dead.