“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.