Backward Glass (8 page)

Three

I spent part of my fifteenth birthday in the same year and on the same day that, about twelve miles away, I was celebrating my fifth.

Luka had put in a doorstop the night before so she could be waiting for me the next day, a bulky present filling up her backpack. She wouldn’t show it to me until we had crossed to the far side of the creek.

“These trees are still here in my time,” she said, leaning her back against the outside cedar in a small thicket, and patting the ground for me to sit as well. “That’s why they’re perfect for this. Happy birthday.” She took out a large box, carefully wrapped, and motioned for me to open it.

Inside were seven small decorative wooden boxes. I had seen her looking at them on one of our downtown comic-selling trips. The curbside vendor claimed they were handmade in the Tatra Mountains in Poland. Their lids were inlaid with metal designs and colored glass. To the front of each one, she had affixed a small plaque with the engraved name of a month, June to December. Inside each was a small golf pencil and a few pieces of paper she had cut to fit in.

My mother raised me well; I said thank you right away.

“I know,” she said, “you have no idea what they’re for. But, look, I made them for me, too.” She took out another set of the same boxes, engraved in just the same way. “I wanted to do a set for Keisha and Melissa, but maybe it’s too late now.”

“I still don’t—”

“Here,” she said. She picked up one of my boxes, August, and handed it to me. “Take it and walk around these trees. Keep it low to the ground.”

I
felt stupid, but she insisted. I walked around the outside of the thicket, looking like I was feeding chickens. “Now, inside,” Luka said, guiding me into the cooler confines of the thicket. “Keep it low.”

Near the knuckled roots of an old maple, my hand tingled and I instinctively withdrew it. “Hey!” Then I turned to Luka. “What—”

“So that’s the August tree,” she said. “Come on. I’ll explain.” She took me out and sat me in the sunlight again. “Look, we’re kind of on our own in this, right? No Melissa, no Keisha. Jimmy’s not much good, and Rick can’t go along. That leaves you and me. So I started thinking. What if one of us gets lost or something? What if we need help? I mean if that kid Anthony had something like this, maybe we’d know what was going on.”

Her idea was that whenever we went into the past, we’d take the boxes with us. If we were separated, one of us in the past and one in the present, we’d use them to communicate. Write a note, bury it around here, and the other person would come looking for it years later.

“Did you make these for Jimmy as well?” I asked. Jealousy is a crazy thing. In my head I knew Luka’s only interest in Jimmy Hayes came from his access to 1957, and I had a strong suspicion that any talking they had done recently probably involved my birthday that night, but even the smallest sentence that might pass between Luka and Jimmy or more wincingly between Luka and Rick made me squirm like a stepped-on earthworm.

Luka rolled her eyes. “Please. Can you imagine trying to explain these things to Jimmy?”

The logic of it made even my head want to explode, so I just went along with her, and we established some rules. Each box was to be buried, at the latest, on the last day of every month, even if there was nothing to tell. If we were in our own year, then fine, we would bury it in our own year. We took each of our boxes around and mapped out where its future-past counterpart was.

Most of them weren’t there. All we could find was a July and an August from each of us, and a December from me.

“What does that mean?” I asked, but Luka had no good answer.

“We better get going,” she said. “Your mom will be home soon. I’ll catch up with you later.”

For my birthday dinner, I got taken to the Old Spaghetti Factory downtown. All three of my grandparents came. My dad sat himself next to my grandfather so they could argue about baseball, while his own mother made sure she pulled her seat up right next to me. Grown-up conversation was boring, she said.

Mostly she wanted to tell stories. My dad, the only son born to her before her husband went off and died in the war, was her favorite thing in the world, and she never tired of telling us about him. She told me the one about him breaking John Timson’s nose, the one about him throwing Mrs. Bonder’s vicious chihuahua at Victor Pike who was beating up Aunt Judy, and even the one about him deliberately losing a race to his best friend Lester Charles, because he thought that might get him in good with Chuck’s sister. My mother didn’t like that one.

The more we laughed, the more she told. How he got accidentally hypnotized at a show when he was eleven, how he hid a full-to-bursting water balloon on Mr. Verturer’s chair in grade six so that when the teacher sat, it burst and made it seem as though he had peed his pants.

Just as dessert was being served, she came back to her favorite, the little hobo boy story. “This city in the fifties,” she told me. “Nothing like it is now. It wasn’t the Great Depression, but it wasn’t a picnic either. Children had been orphaned in the war, you know, some of them brought over here when their parents were murdered. There weren’t a lot of them, poor children, but they were here. Running from the orphanages. Asking for jobs or food when none of us had much to spare.”

This was all a kind of rationalization, I realized, to explain why no one was doing anything to help the homeless boy that they had all seen hiding around the neighborhood. As the story went, my father finally took pity on the kid and hid him in the coal cellar for a few weeks.

What I always wondered was what had happened to the kid. After the crazy dad came and knocked my dad out, did he get the kid? Did my grandmother fight him of
f
? That would be hard to imagine.

She smiled and shook her head when I asked this, then glanced over at my father, still deep in conversation. “Well, Kenneth. Maybe your father doesn’t quite know everything about that story. There might be secrets an old lady takes to her grave. Or at least keeps for a while longer. Do you know what the last words I read from your grandfather were before he died? His last letter? ‘Keep Brian safe,’ he said. ‘You and he are the only things in my world.’ I never told anyone that, you know. Not fair to Aunt Judy, is it? Daughters are important, too.”

It was late enough when we got home that, after waiting for my parents to settle into bed, I only just made the mirror before midnight.

Luka put a blindfold around my eyes and had me step in and pull her along. In 1967, Jimmy and Rick were waiting with the coolest present anyone ever had. They had cleared a space and set up a mattress and some pillows, all facing an old TV hooked up to a VCR from 1987.

“Okay,” said Luka, “just to be clear, the birthday present is you get to see it before anyone else around. Well, not anyone. Keisha looked it up. It actually got released in May or something, but not everywhere. It goes out in wide release in about three weeks, your time.” She turned to Rick and Jimmy. “For you guys it’s another ten years. If you talk about it, people are gonna think you’re crazy.”

“Talk about what?” I said. “What is this anyway?”

She held up a cardboard case and slipped a bulky cassette out of it. “I told you when we first met; I saw it on my sixth birthday, and it was the most amazing thing ever.”

Rick groaned. “So this is a kiddie movie?
Cinderella
or something?”

“Bite your tongue,” said Luka. “This is the best movie ever made. My mother didn’t do Disney.” She looked at us in exasperation. “It’s—oh, I might as well just play it.”

She had already fast-forwarded a little so that as soon as she pressed play, words started scrolling up the screen: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.”

They say you never forget your first time with
Star Wars
, and that sure is right for me. What I recall most about that night was my worry that I might forget some of it. That scene when Artoo and Threepio are on the surface of Tatooine and you can see the giant bones of some terrible desert creature in the background, I was only half there in the moment. The rest of me was trying to catalogue it, make sure it would never slip away.

I guess I succeeded, as did Jimmy and Rick, who were silent throughout the whole thing. About half an hour in, when Luka’s running stream of commentary had extended to such trivia as pointing out when a storm trooper’s helmet bumped against an opening door, the three of us begged her to shut up and let us watch the movie. She pretended to sulk for a few minutes, but I could tell she was enjoying our excitement.

When the end credits rolled, we sat like three patients recovering from electroshock therapy. Luka finally brought us out of it simply by getting up and pressing the eject button. “No,” said Rick. “Show it again.”

Jimmy stirred from his torpor and agreed, but Luka said no way. “It’s past two in the morning. Kenny has to get home.” She started disconnecting the VCR. “So do I. I have to sneak this thing downstairs before my mother wakes up. Anyway, you have to rest.” She stood up, holding the tape like it was orders from rebel command. “Remember, we’re on summer vacation now. It’s time to get going. There’s some kind of mission waiting for us in the past, and we’re going for it. Tomorrow’s mine and Jimmy’s day to go back. Here’s how we do it: Right now, I go all the way uptime, then Kenny goes up to his own time and leaves a doorstop between here and 1977. Tomorrow, at eleven, Kenny comes downtime here to 1967 and takes it out. Then I can go back to Kenny’s time, and Jimmy in the meantime goes back to 1957. Jimmy, you have to be alone there for a few minutes. It can’t be helped. Kenny then goes up to 1977 where I’ll be waiting, keeps the mirror open, and pulls me back to now. Then all Jimmy has to do is stick a hand out and pull us back to 1957. Jimmy, you can take off then if you want.”

The three of us just sat and blinked at her. We were still recovering from the explosion of the Death Star. Jimmy was the first to speak. “You know what’s wrong with this? I just figured it out.” He pointed at us each in turn as he spoke. “Kenny’s Luke, Luka’s that princess girl, Rick’s Han Solo—and I get it—fine, I’m the gold robot guy. But you know what’s wrong with this? We don’t got no little trash-can robot guy or no Obi-Wan Kenobi. We don’t got nobody who actually knows what’s going on. You think they could have done all that without the little robot guy or the Obi-Wan guy? We need an Obi-Wan.”

Luka just shook her head. “We don’t need an Obi-Wan. We’re going back, we’re finding out what’s going on, and we’re saving Margaret Garroway and Anthony Currah. If we can get up to the future, we’re finding out what’s happened with Melissa and Keisha, and maybe we’re saving them, too. If we have to, we’re stopping Prince Harming. This is our mirror. It’s our year. And we’re not letting anyone take it away from us.”

I actually saluted.

Fo
u
r

Luka’s plan worked perfectly. I later found out she had pages and pages of diagrams in a notebook, but well before that I just learned to trust her about when we could travel in which direction. That night was a Thursday for me, a Friday for Jimmy, and a Tuesday for Luka. By a minute after midnight, we were in 1957, five years before I was born.

Jimmy took off as soon as he had pulled us through, promising to wait with Rick in 1967.

The Currah basement was the same as mine from twenty years up, but unfinished and dark. A metal shelving unit held all sorts of tools, paint cans, and cardboard boxes. Crates lined another wall. It was damp and dark. A tap dripped into a large sink.

Luka had come with her hand over her flashlight so we’d have the tiniest bit of light, and we stayed that way for a couple of minutes, listening.

Nothing.

The windows were set high on the walls, but you could see out of them. Once our eyes adjusted, we risked stepping away from the mirror and looked out into the darkness of 1957. No cars in the driveway. No streetlights.

After another couple of minutes, during which she examined the view outside every window, Luka pronounced it flashlight-safe. She found an open photograph album, and we flipped through some pictures of Anthony.

Was he still missing
?

After a few minutes of snooping around, Luka began to shine her flashlight around the area in front of the dresser. “The thing is,” she whispered, “of anybody here, we’re the ones who probably know where he’s gone. Into the mirror.”

But what were we going to find, footprints in the concrete dust of the basement? Our own shoes would have scuffed any evidence there.

Luka took the top drawer out and turned it over. The words were still scratched into it, a little newer in 1957:
Luka, help Kenny. Trust John Wald. Kenny says he is the
auby
one. Save the baby.

“I’ve still got no idea what I’m supposed to help you with,” Luka said. “Doesn’t sound like anyone’s home. I think we should go upstairs.”

I was getting less fearful as time went on. It was true that if we were discovered, all we had to do was escape to the mirror. Blood rushing with the thrill of the forbidden, I walked behind her.

I had never traveled through time to my own house before. The few times I had been to 1967 were late at night, and Jimmy didn’t want to risk taking us inside, so as nervous as I was about where we were, I was equally fascinated by the opportunity to see the new wallpaper that my mother had pronounced hideous two decades from now, and the light fixtures that she had demanded my father replace before allowing family visitors.

Our flashlight beams didn’t show much color, and I had seen many of these same views in the pictures I had found in my attic bedroom when we moved in, so the effect was of walking through a black-and-white photograph album emptied of people.

We padded quietly past the kitchen and the living room. In the hall, sitting directly in front of a much nicer front door than we had in my time, we found a large-lettered note: “Anthony, we have gone to Auntie Ellen’s. Nobody is angry, just worried. Call us.” They listed phone numbers to call, including the police.

We looked glumly at each other. “Maybe he’s given up on everything here,” said Luka. “Just wants to be with Margaret before she goes missing.”

Anthony’s bedroom was torn apart, every drawer turned out, the whole closet emptied. “This wasn’t planned,” said Luka. “Him going missing, I mean. Look at all the
Weird Science
and
Tales from the Crypt
comics. They don’t even look read. He was bringing these to Jimmy.”

From the angle of his mattress, I could tell it had been disturbed, but I looked under it anyway, finding nothing but two well-thumbed
Playboys
.

After a few more minutes of searching, we agreed we weren’t going to find anything. I asked Luka what she had expected. “I don’t know. Something about Margaret’s disappearance? I thought we might find some newspaper from ten years ago about it. Can you imagine what this has been like for him, knowing it’s coming? Maybe he went back to stop it.”

“Yeah, but would he think—”

A ferocious banging from the front door interrupted me. Halfway down the stairs, we both jumped. “Is that him?” I said when I had my breath back.

“I don’t think so. I don’t think he’s that—”

The banging continued, heavy and desperate. We chanced a look down, and could see a large figure through the glass of the door, throwing himself against it time and time again. Then a voice, shouting, strangely accented, “Come out! Come out, ye twisted fool. I’ll no be snared in years again.”

“Time for us to go,” said Luka. She grabbed my hand and pulled me the rest of the way down. My last sight of the door before she pulled me around the corner to the basement stairs was of it buckling and splintering under the onslaught, and of a wild and desperate face.

“Turn!” shouted that voice again, but we didn’t. Luka kept a tight grip on me as we clattered down the basement stairs. “Turn. Who is it there? ’Tis old John. List to me. I am the obie one.”

I was too scared to react, too scared to listen. By the time we had reached the basement, I could already hear heavy footsteps on the first floor.

“Wait,” said Luka as I was about to go into the mirror. She pulled out the string Jimmy had left in. “We don’t want that to let anyone in behind us.”

“Come, fool!” shouted that voice from upstairs. “I’ve waited ten long years while ye blinked in silver. Come and clash with me again.”

“In,” said Luka. She pushed me forward.

I steeled myself for it, and— “No, wait, something’s wrong. It’s cold. The mirror’s cold.”

Feet thudded down the basement stairs. Behind me, from within the mirror, a hand reached out blindly and impacted my shoulder, pushing me aside and off the dresser. Luka fell with me, her knee sinking into my stomach and her forearm almost breaking my nose. Both our flashlights dropped to the concrete floor. One of them shut off.

The room was a mix of cries. “Jimmy Hayes!” a new voice cried, much easier to understand than the hoarse gibberish of the one who had broken in upstairs. “Which one here is Jimmy Hayes?”

The door-pounder shouted something about having “found the twistit fool.”

Luka crawled over me and managed to snare the flashlight, playing it around the room. Two tall, thin men faced each other in the almost-dark, one backing up, both screaming and impossible to make out.

Luka got up and moved toward me. In the swinging of her flashlight, I lost track of which man was which.

The gunshot shut everyone up.

One sharp crack, then a hundred echoes, and our eyes blinded by the muzzle-flash. The large basement filled with the itchy smell of gunpowder.

“That’s better,” said a ragged voice. “Someone turn on the lights.”

I didn’t move, the shot still ringing in my ears, but Luka stepped over and pulled a string that hung from a bare bulb. I flinched from the sudden glare.

A man in a soaked and torn black raincoat stood, backed up to the storage shelves, holding in one hand a gun and in the other the shirt-front of another man. Both looked like they had spent weeks in the woods. The gun-holder was maybe a little older than my parents, receding hair leaving a sharp widow’s peak on his forehead. Days of stubble covered his face. His hooded, haunted eyes stared the other man down with a wild fire.

I couldn’t tell the other man’s age. A thick beard covered his face, and long, unruly hair hung past his shoulders. His shirt and jeans were torn and ragged.

The two men both spoke at once, but the gun-holder spoke louder and shook the gun. “No! Listen to me! You know what this is, don’t you? Bang bang!” He narrowed his eyes and pulled back as though trying to see something under the man’s dirty beard. “Went the long way, did you? Couldn’t catch me? Good. Too bad you waited all that time for this. Now, what’s here?” His gaze flicked over to Luka and me, then his eyes focused more tightly on me, and his jaw hung for a moment in surprise. “It’s you. It’s you again. You’re Kenny Maxwell.”

And who was he? Was one of these men Prince Harming?
Neither looked anything remotely like royalty, though the
bearded man certainly talked like he was from a foreign country.

The man in the raincoat began to shake all over, and the other took advantage of the moment. He surged forward, grasped the man’s gun-hand in his own, and forced it upward. Though I was still rooted to the spot with indecision, Luka darted forward, having apparently made her own decision. The nature of that decision, however, was unclear. She reached for the gun, now pointed toward the ceiling, and covered both of the men’s hands in her own, but from one of them—I couldn’t tell which—came a sharp kick to her midsection that sent her flying to crack her head on the cement floor of the basement.

I scurried toward her, trying at the same time to make out the voices of the struggling and cursing men in front of the mirror. One called the other a fool, while the other kept shouting, “This can end it. Leave me be.”

Luka was blinking when I got to her, and had raised her head. She tried to sit up all the way, but fell back. I caught her. “Don’t try to get up,” I said.

“We have to do something, Kenny,” she said. “We have to stop this before someone gets shot.”

I looked at the two men. They were evenly matched, like opponents who had fought each other more than once before, each well aware of the other’s strengths. When the better-spoken man who had first fired the gun tried to shove his knee at the other, or hook his foot around the wild man’s leg, the other man would shift or turn just enough to avoid the trick. For his part, the long-haired man kept straining at the gun, trying and failing twice to smash his forehead into the other man’s face.

It was the gunman who turned to me first. “Help me, Kenny,” he said. “This man wants to kill us all. Pull him off me and I can get us away. It’s me. I’m your friend.”

“Nay, hark not,” said the wilder man, shaking his greasy grey hair out of his face. “Hear me, Kennit. Here is where thy troubles begin. Help me.”

I looked back to Luka, but for all that she had seemed certain a moment before, she now shook her head. Two struggling madmen blocked us from the mirror that led home. What were we to do?

As my indecision stretched out, the gun-holder with the widow’s peak seemed to be winning. “This is all it takes,” he said between clenched teeth. “I can change everything back.”

“Fool,” gasped the long-haired man. “Nothing can change.” Then his eyes darted back to me. “Kennit, help me. He’ll shoot you. Help me. I’m the obie one. That’s what she said. Rose. Said you’d know what it meant. I’m your obie one. Me, old John Wald.”

It must have made sense to Luka at the same time as it did to me. She grasped my arm and I turned to her. The scratched note on the underside of the dresser drawer.
Trust John Wald. Kenny says he is the
auby
one.
And the rhyme, “truth and wisdom deeply walled.” Or deeply Wald? And Jimmy’s words just last night, which Luka mouthed now. “We need an Obi-Wan.” I finished the sentence with her.

Not obie one. Not
auby
one. Obi-Wan.

That was enough. I wrenched away from her, her own feeble strength shoving me on my way, though I had made my decision too late. I got to the struggling pair just as, with a ferocious rush of strength, the gun-wielder spun John Wald around and threw him at me. We collapsed back in a clutter of limbs and landed on Luka. By the time we had all struggled out from the tangle of our own bodies, the man with the widow’s peak was standing directly above us, his gun leveled.

“Stay where you are,” he said to John Wald, who eyed the gun warily. “This is him. Don’t you see? This is him. If I kill him, none of it ever happens. I live, she lives, everyone lives! It’s all his fault.”

“What’s his fault?” said Luka, struggling to put some part of herself between me and that gun.

The gun-wielder’s eyes narrowed on her. “You’re his accomplice. But you don’t matter. It’s him who did it.”

“Wait it,” pleaded Wald, sitting up as much as he dared. “Will ye hear no reason?”

“Shut up,” said the other. He turned to me. “This is it,” he said. “If I kill you, it’s all over. Do you see that? You started it all.” He took his left hand from the gun and roughly wiped tears from his dirt-streaked face. “You were there. Every time. Always you. Pretending to be my friend.”

“Kenny wouldn’t do that,” said Luka. “He’s never even met you before, right Kenny?”

“Never met me?” said the man with a snort. “Wouldn’t do that? When I was little, Kenny was, for just a while, my only friend.” His hand grew firmer on the gun and he stood straighter. “Weren’t you, Kenny? He said he’d help me. But you know all he did? Or had you done it already? Did you know, even then, that you had done it?”

“What?” said Luka. “Done what?”

He looked at her disdainfully. “Kenny Maxwell killed my wife,” he said, and fired his gun.