“You’ll meet her again,” I said. “University. You’ll fall in love.”
“Hey, how about me?” said Chuck. “I mean, while we’re telling the future and all? Who’m I gonna fall in love with?”
I shook my head. “Lots of people.”
That got them both laughing. “He’s got you all right,” said Brian. “Come on, give the kid a Coke, Chuck, and let’s figure out what’s next.”
Just like that, I had become their problem. They agreed I couldn’t keep staying in the abandoned house. Either Fenton’s guys would tell an adult or they’d come back for me.
“I heard there was some kid hiding out in this house,” Brian said as he tried to straighten my nose.
“I heard that, too,” said Chuck. “Everybody says he’s an orphan whose dad died in the war. That true, kid?”
“A lot of kids’ dads died in the war,” I said.
Chuck looked quickly over at Brian. “You got that right, kid. So?”
I wanted to phrase what I said carefully. I was off-script now, since my grandmother’s stories had never filled me in on exactly what conversation had gone on between the vagrant boy and my dad, just general impressions Brian had picked up and later related to his mother. I didn’t want to lie, not exactly. “So some people picked themselves right up,” I said, not looking directly at my dad. “Some people’s mothers were real strong, and worked two or three jobs to keep it together. They took in washing from the richies up on the Bridle Path, and they got some crappy factory jobs, and they kept right on providing for the families they had.” I closed my eyes, not wanting to give anything away. Everything I had just said was true of his mother. Everything that came next was the short life story of the little orphan boy as told to me years from now. “And some people’s mothers just quit. Didn’t get no job, they didn’t take in no work. Just sat in the kitchen and drank until they keeled over one day when their kid was ten, long after the war was done.”
I knew I was a lousy actor, so I kept my head down when I said all this so they couldn’t see the lies written all over my face.
They didn’t say anything for the longest time, and even though I knew they were going to buy it because that was how my grandmother always said it happened, I started having doubts.
When I finally looked up, Brian was already standing. “I’ve got an idea,” he said.
“Uh-oh,” said Chuck. “That means trouble.”
Two
Brian’s big idea was his coal cellar. He and Chuck drilled me on how to get in and out through the narrow chute that led in from the side of the house. The two of them had done it for years in war games and hide-and-seek, so they knew how to wedge yourself in the chute in order to reach up and close the hatch. It was a tight fit. I found myself thankful that it had been more than a month since I had been fed on anything more than table scraps.
I left the mirror in the Tarkington house, and visited whenever it was safe in order to check the 1967 mirror. As the Silverlands continued to expand, it was becoming impossible to ignore the other clouds of image-fragments to either side of our own. I got into the habit of checking carefully to the right and left as I went in, but though I thought once or twice that I might have heard someone’s distant voice, I never saw any other mirror kid. Just as well; I had enough trouble with my own set of mirrors without getting caught up in anyone else’s story.
With my doorstop left in, I figured any former mirror kid could come through from 1947, and if anyone did, I wanted to know about it, so I scattered flour, and checked often for footprints. No luck. Had Wald been arrested in connection with Peggy’s disappearance? No, she wouldn’t be reported missing until September. Had Prince Harming made trouble for him? It was hard to imagine that younger, overly friendly Beckett I had last seen in 1947 being any match for wily old John Wald.
Brian always made sure he was first up in the morning. He’d sneak down to where I’d been sleeping in the throat-clogging cellar, toss me a set of hand-me-downs, and two sandwiches wrapped in brown paper, then head off to wake his mother and sister. I was lucky, I figured, that my grandmother, like so many of those who had lived through the Great Depression, never threw anything away. A shelving unit in the garage held at least a decade’s worth of clothes her children had outgrown.
After the neighborhood had quieted down, I would sneak out and hop a few fences so as not to be coming out of the same yard every day, and head to the public library to wait until it opened. In a study carrel at the back, I’d take out the letters from Luka and my grandmother, and pore over them for answers.
Over a lunch eaten out on the library steps, I would chat with the librarian, Mr. Weston. He was a veteran of the first World War, a guy who had been a farmer before he went off to fight in a trench in France, and came back wanting to be a librarian. “They shoot bullets at you long enough,” he once told me, “you figure out what you want in life.” As far as he knew, I was a kid who had messed up in school last year and been assigned a couple of summer research projects. He showed me the newspaper archives in the basement, and left me there for two or three hours reading and looking.
Pretty soon, I trusted him enough to show the strange, large coin from Luka’s box. “I’m supposed to find out what happened to this guy,” I said, showing him the name “Clive Beckett” stamped into it.
“He’s dead is what happened to him,” said Mr. Weston.
“How do you know that?”
He took the outsized coin from my hand. “Dead Man’s Penny. They used to send these out to the families. More like a plaque really. Grim. People used to put them on the walls. My mother got one of these for my brother, Steven. Sure, I’ll help you look into it.”
In the mid-afternoon, I would pack everything up, drop my backpack down the coal chute, hop a few more fences to the Tarkington house, and check my scattered flour for footprints.
On a Friday near the end of August, I made a chilling discovery: two sets of footprints. They hadn’t even tried to cover their tracks. I could follow them all the way to the front door, and when I peeked out a window, I could even see a few white marks down the front path.
I felt I needed a wall at my back. Better yet, Luka. She wouldn’t be scared by this. Neither would I if I could only have her with me. I shivered. It was January all over again. Someone had come through the mirror, two someones, and I had no idea who. My heart hammering, I told myself to calm down. I went back to the living room where I had left the mirror and took a closer look at the footprints. One was definitely bigger than mine, the other about the same size. No patterns in the treads. There were a lot of scuffed prints, but that didn’t tell me anything. I too would have spent a little time shuffling my feet and looking around if I came out into this abandoned house.
Anthony’s doorstop, the string joining a spoon on this side to another in 1947, was still there.
Someone had come through the mirror.
The enormity of it stayed with me the rest of that day and all through the weekend.
On Sunday, as soon as everyone left for church, I slipped out, dusted myself off, slung my backpack onto my shoulder, and started hunting for an unobtrusive place to spend the morning. After some deliberation, I settled on the space between two of Brian’s across-the-street neighbors, both of whom were on vacation. An azalea bush shielded me from the street, but enough light got in that I was able to sit back and read some genealogy books Mr. Weston had recommended. I wasn’t satisfied with the story so far regarding the death of Clive Beckett in his teens during the first World War, and these books contained lists and diagrams with details about marriages, births, and deaths. Could Beckett have had a kid brother? He would have had to be a lot younger, but maybe it was possible.