I said I’d be as fast as I could, and looked at my watch. They should all be home. As soon as Wald was in the mirror with Prince Harming, I wormed up the coal chute. I figured I’d just say a quick thanks. I wasn’t sure what to do about the mirror. On one hand, I knew it had to end up back in the carriage house by the nineteen sixties so Rick could discover it. But maybe I was supposed to make that happen. I could give Brian the address and ask him to deliver it, but surely that hadn’t happened. After all, when my dad bought the house in 1976, it wasn’t like he had been there before.
If it hadn’t been for the raised voices at the Maxwells’ front door, I would have had no warning that anything was wrong.
“Look, we know you’re hiding him,” said a man’s voice. “If not, why don’t you let us in?”
“Why would I let you in?” said Brian, keeping his voice low. “Who are you anyway?”
“This is the Maxwell residence, isn’t it?” said the man. “Come on, kid, let me see if he’s there.”
“Look,” said Brian, “my mother’s just up the stairs, and she don’t want weirdos hanging about.”
“If you’re threatening me with your mother,” said the man, “then why are you speaking soft so she won’t hear? Kid, if I decide I’m coming in there to look for that boy, you’re not exactly going to stop me. You think a teenage kid is going to hold back a guy who survived the Dieppe Raid?”
“Now I know you’re full of it. You’re, what, thirty? Dieppe was fifteen years ago, reject. You weren’t there.”
A woman’s voice spoke up—“Now, dear … ”—but she wasn’t enough to stop the scuffle I heard next.
I peeked around the corner. The younger Prince Harming had my father in an armlock, his cheek pressed hard against the wall. “Was I there now?” he said. “Fifteen years to you, maybe; for me it was five.”
“Let him go, darling,” said the woman.
“And then what? Let’s just take him inside—stop fighting, kid, unless you want a broken arm—and find Kenny. We can’t keep pussyfooting around. I want to know. I think he hid things from you back then. Why is he running from us? I think he even knows who the crazy man is.”
I took a deep, deep breath and stepped out from hiding.
“I do know who the crazy man is,” I said. “It’s you. Let him go.”
Their heads snapped up. Brian took the opportunity of their distraction to try to break away, but this younger Prince Harming was too quick. He twisted Brian’s arm, checking his lunge, and brought a quick fist down onto the side of his head, slamming him back against the corner of a brick. Brian slumped.
There it was. Unconscious. Head injured. The story of the hobo boy heading into its last act. Head will hurt. Death’s a cert.
The woman immediately knelt down to Brian. “We said no one was to get hurt,” she said to the man. “Here, help me lay him out.” The man obediently bent to help her, and together they laid Brian out at the bottom of his front step. The man never took his eyes off me. I stood and watched them, ready to run if I had to.
His companion tutted and fussed at Brian’s head, took a look into his eyes, then glanced at me. “He’ll be okay. It’s a bad knock, but if we get him seen to, it’ll be fine. I’m a nurse. I know these things.”
I was barely listening. There was something about the man’s eyes that I was seeing at last, some echo of the past. Maybe it was something about the way he looked at me. I thought you were my friend. I thought you were a hero. You said everything would be okay.
“What’s your name?” I said to him.
A smile, bitter and uncertain, twitched on his face. “You know. You know who I am.”
I took a step forward, and he actually rocked back.
“You said your name was Beckett. That’s not your last name, though, is it?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t—things weren’t easy for me. I got—messed up for a while. I wanted to start over. I wanted—I wanted my dad’s name.”
“Curtis?” I said.
“Kenny?” There was a shake in his voice, and suddenly I could see it, the little kid under all the layers of him. The good kid who sat on the creek bank with me and talked about the coming war. The kid who his mother never got to know. “I’ve been having these dreams, Kenny. I wanted to sort it out, ask what happened. I didn’t do anything bad, did I? There’s things I don’t remember.”
“Brian,” came a voice from inside the house. “Who’s at the door? Why are you taking so long?”
I made the decision so quickly, I barely noticed it going through my mind. “Go in and turn left at the end of the hall. The door in the kitchen leads to the coal cellar. The mirror’s down there. Go into the Silverlands and wait.”
The woman stood. “Kenny, we can’t just—”
“Go,” I said. “I’ll take care of things here.”
“Brian,” said the voice again. “Do you need me to come down there?”
“Come on,” said the woman, and that was enough. Curtis shook himself, grabbed her elbow, and steered them both inside.
I stepped up to the door and felt my hand going up to smooth my rumpled hair.
Time to meet my grandmother.
Four
Let me pass, leave the lass,don’t go down the backward glass.
When she saw her son unconscious on her front step, my grandmother got down on her knees and began to examine him.
“What happened?” she said to me, fire in her eyes.
“It was an accident,” I said. “He’ll be okay.”
“Who are you?”
I had trouble answering at first. In this decade, I had only seen my grandmother from a distance before. It was striking to look at her now in her forties, a little like what would happen if you put cut-up pictures of my dad and Aunt Judy in a jigsaw puzzle. “Look,” I said. “There isn’t much time. I have to go, but I have to explain something. I have to convince you. I’m from the future. My name is Kenny Maxwell, and I’m Brian’s son. He doesn’t know that and you can’t tell him.”
“You’re a lunatic,” she said, and went back to examining the gash on Brian’s head.
“He’ll wake up in a minute,” I said. “But he’ll have a concussion. You’ll have to take him to the hospital. Everything will be fine, but he won’t remember it all, and he’ll never know who I am.”
“Stay away from me,” she said. “I need to call an ambulance.”
“Aunt Judy can—” I stopped myself. “Judy can drive. She’s been taking lessons from her boyfriend, Mark. She’ll pull up in a minute in his DeSoto.”
She frowned at this. “I told Judy she wasn’t allowed to drive yet.”
“She went ahead and did it,” I said. “You don’t get mad at her because she gets dad—Brian—to the hospital. You have to believe me. Your name is Harriet Lenore Maxwell. You were married to John Maxwell, but he died in the war. He said you and Brian were the most important things in his world or something like that. In his last letter. You never showed that to anyone because you thought it wasn’t fair to Judy. Grandma, you have to believe. I’m Kenny. I’m Brian’s son.”
She rocked back on her heels as I spoke, and a tear began to make its way down her cheek. “Kenneth was my father’s name. That’s—impossible. You—look like him in the eyes. Who are you?”
“I know it’s impossible,” I said. “Brian marries Mary Nelson. They have just one kid. Me. I’m going to find this mirror. It’s in your coal cellar. It lets me go back in time. It’s crazy, but it’s true.” I pointed to Brian. “He has a scar on his knee. He tells everyone he got it falling off his bike, but really it was Jennifer Painter, the first girl he kissed. Ten years old, and he chased her into a scrap yard and kissed her and she tripped him. He threw a dog at a boy who was beating up Aunt Judy. Please, Grandma. Believe me. I’m your grandson. Please. You used to tell me stories about NogNog the giant and his little friend Po.”