Rose, Clive, Curtis.
And Luka.
I blinked a couple of times at it and shook my head with wonder.
“I put mine there, too,” said Curtis. “I wanted to be part of it. You should put yours, too. You’re one of us as well, the mirror children. We’re like a family.”
It’s always going to come down to just you and me, she had said. But where was she? Why weren’t we rescuing the baby together?
I carved my initials next to hers like I was cosigning a promise.
In the evenings I went all the way uptime past the coal cellar, just to check that 1967 was still inaccessible. It always was.
On the third day, Curtis and I passed a lazy afternoon by the creek. I entertained him with stories about submarine warfare, illustrating with my diving and surfacing hands stories that I knew from comic books and movies. We got bogged down slightly when he asked me to explain the mechanics of submarines.
“How do they float up?”
“They have stuff in them that floats. Air and stuff.”
“So why didn’t they float before? How did they sink in the first place?”
“It’s—I don’t know. It’s like hot-air balloons, but in reverse. They must have to drop stuff so they can rise up.”
“Oh. So they must have to carry heavy stuff to sink. It would be better if they could have light stuff that made them float and they could just bring that out from somewhere.”
“But if they had it somewhere, it would make them float up, wouldn’t it?”
It was cool being the person with answers, even if not all of them were entirely accurate. I got to play the older brother for a while.
“Is war stupid?” he asked at one point. “Rose says it is. She says that’s how father died and Clive as well, and it was all for nothing because this other war is coming. They called it the war to end all wars, but they were wrong.”
“Somebody telling you to go kill some other guys because the people in charge can’t agree?” I said. “Yeah, that’s pretty stupid.”
“But you said the Germans were killing people in those camps. Jews and everyone.”
“That was stupid, too.”
“And the men who went and saved the people in the camps. They were good, weren’t they?”
“Yeah, that’s true.”
“That’s going to be me, then. I’ll do that. You can tell me what army division to get into, and I’ll go over there when it’s my turn and free people from the camps.”
“It’s not that simple,” I said, trying to sound grown-up. “Sure, some people saved prisoners and stuff, but a lot of people died. There’s lots of … other jobs you can do that would help with the war.”
He raised his eyebrows at my lame finish. “Other jobs? I’ll be twenty-two when that war starts. That’s the age when you should be a soldier. It’s okay to do other things if you’re an old man.”
Suddenly being a big brother got a lot more complicated. Rose had asked me to be good to her son. Had I just talked him into going to war?
Six
On my third morning of plastering, we finished the second short wall, and started preparation for the long back one, the one Mr. Hollerith had abandoned when he enlisted. I had been avoiding that part of the task; a third of the way along that wall was the dark place out of which that baby had been drawn. I knew there was nothing there yet, just a shadowy hole filled with newspaper insulation.
I spent half an hour after breakfast bringing up the lath strips, and then an hour mixing plaster. Rose had done the mixing on previous days, but today she was tired.
She got up when I was done to inspect the result, but gasped and fell back to the bed.
My heart almost battered through my rib cage. “Is it—are you—?”
She held one hand over her stomach, and the other up like a traffic cop. “No—no, Kenny,” she said in between another couple of gasps. “I don’t think so. He’s moving and it’s sore, that’s all. It hurts. My back hurts, my feet hurt, and I cannot get a breath just right.”
I had an urge to march over to the main house and give her mother a good talking to. She needed a hospital, a doctor.
She needed her mother.
I said as much, but she made me promise not to interfere. “Just stay here,” she said. “Hold my hand. I don’t need my mother. All I need is something for the pain.”
“Oh,” I said. “Wait.” I hurried downstairs to fetch my backpack.
When I brought out the small leather pouch, she gave a weak smile before even seeing its contents. “He kept his promise,” she said. “I said I didn’t know how he could, but he did.”
“Who?” I said.
“John Wald, of course.”
I remembered Wald’s promise that I would find a use for the partridge berries he had helped me pick. A way to float above the stony world. “Wow. He really is our Obi-Wan.”
As the tea brewed, she told about her time with John. Traveling uptime, he reached 1907 just before the new year, and had to travel his “long path” to get to 1917. He worked as a hired hand in the area, never straying far from Hollerith land. As an able-bodied man, he felt pressure to sign up for the war, finding that none of the farmers in the area had work for him anymore, even in the harvest of 1915.
“If he hadn’t been wounded last summer,” said Rose, taking her first sip of the foul-smelling concoction we had managed to make, “he never would have made it back.”
Shot in the leg at the Battle of the Somme, then left for dead in no-man’s land while the wound grew septic, he had been rescued and spent four months in a field hospital, then more time convalescing in England before he was able to find transportation home.
“That man has an eye for secrets,” Rose said. “He remembered Clive and knew my condition at once. It took my own mother longer.”
Despite Wald’s impatience to move on, he stayed a few weeks to help. “He must have stripped every bush for miles around for those berries. ‘I’ll get thee more,’ he said to me. ‘Trouble not.’ And will you look at this? He did. How did he know, Kenny?”
I shook my head and watched her sip the tea. For just a moment, I felt something relax in me, a thing that had been twitching and grinding like a bag filled with rocks and frogs.
I had done some good. Maybe Wald had known things would work out this way, and maybe he hadn’t. But everything ended up fitting together. Rose needed someone to tell her the future worked out, or maybe she just needed partridge berry tea for the pain. Curtis needed a friend.
But the feeling didn’t last. I hadn’t come back to plaster a wall or babysit a lonely kid. Where was Prince Harming? Where was the thing that needed doing? Up in 1977, I was due for school in a week. Curtis had a birthday in three days, and a newspaper with tomorrow’s date in 1947 was going to be found in fifty-nine years wrapped around a blackened package I could barely think about.
In the afternoon, Curtis helped me sneak a shovel from the carriage house, and we forded the creek so that I could bury my August box for Luka. In it, I had told her about my time with my dad in the fifties, my encounters with Curtis and Rose, and my discovery of keys.
Curtis was in an odd mood. He didn’t ask questions as we buried the box. A light rain started, and we retreated to his hiding place under the creek bank. Again, I ran my fingers over the initials carved in the tabletop.
I tried to interest Curtis in the plot of Star Wars, but I guess it was too far crazy for him. He didn’t interrupt, but he was barely listening.
“I should go into the past tonight,” he said after I had given up and just sat with him for a while watching the rain. “I know it would be strange, but I should.”