Now I was crying as well.
Harriet Maxwell looked from her son whose head was cradled in her lap back to me. She smiled through her tears. “You know, it’s funny. Maybe every mother does this. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be a grandma. I don’t want it right away, but I think about it. What will I knit for them? What stories will I tell? I thought of NogNog years ago. Are they good stories?”
“The best.”
“Is he really going to be okay?” she said, looking down at Brian.
“He’ll be awake before you get to the hospital.”
Her back straightened. “What do you need, Kenny?”
I closed my eyes and thought about it for a second. “The mirror in your coal cellar. Leave it there for a couple of days.” I rooted through my backpack, brought out the newspaper I had picked up in 1947, and tore off the front page. “There’s a house mentioned in this article. Can you take the mirror there? They’ve got a carriage house surrounded by a hedgerow. Sneak it in there if you can.”
She frowned, but nodded. “Is there anything else?”
“Yes.” I handed her the envelope. “But it’s complicated. I put an address on this. You have to wait until the summer of 1967 and send it to my friend Rick. He has to get it—then he can save my life. Then—this is even crazier—in 1987, you have to get a letter to my friend Luka. I don’t even know how, but she’ll get it to me. You have to tell me—”
Then I stopped for a moment. Couldn’t I just tell her to tell me that the man with the yellow tie was okay? Couldn’t I tell her to let me know his real name? Wouldn’t that stop all this running around? But in my heart, I knew it couldn’t. I had already gotten the letter. The path it led me on was the one where I discovered how keys worked. And that got me back to Rose. Lilly said she would have died.
My shoulders slumped. “You have to tell me that I’m the little hobo boy in the story you’ve been telling for years. You have to tell me to come here, because there’s a man wearing a yellow tie, and the second I get that letter, I have to run from him.”
She looked at me for the longest time before answering. “Okay, Kenny. I’ll do that.”
I remembered one more thing and smiled to myself, knowing that it would cause trouble for Luka. Your parents know everything. “Oh, and twenty years from now? I’m going to go missing. You’ve got to show my mom and dad that mirror in the carriage house. You’ve got to prove it to them.”
She frowned. “And how am I to do that? Do I have to go into it?”
“No. Just help them catch Luka coming out of it. Eleven at night, every even-numbered day after I go missing. She’ll come through. She’ll be mad at first, but she’ll explain everything.”
I wanted to stay longer, but I couldn’t ignore the fact that I had sent the Curtis and his wife into the Silverlands where Wald was waiting. There was too much to sort out.
A green DeSoto pulled up. “I have to go,” I said to my grandmother. “Thank you.”
I tore into the house and leaped down the stairs. Nobody in the coal cellar. I held my breath and stepped into the mirror, bracing against the uptime heat. As soon as I was in, shouts from both sides assaulted my ears.
“Let him go! I won’t ask again.”
“Hold thy troubling. Thou know’st not how scrambled are his wits.”
Wald was to my right, ten or fifteen feet away and half obscured with two intervening clouds of swimming images. He had Prince Harming with him, squirming and held like a shield in front. Immediately to my left were Curtis and his wife, easier to make out because they were so close.
My presence was doing nothing to calm the situation. Prince Harming, the mad older one, began screaming, then stopped and tried to talk. “He’s going to—” Then he interrupted himself and screamed again in frustration. “That’s what I said last time. No. I have to do it different. But I can’t, because—No!”
Curtis grabbed my shoulder and turned me to face him. “Are you in on this? Is that John Wald? What’s he doing to that man? I can’t—this is making me—”
“Kennit,” said Wald, “what means this?”
“Wait,” I said. “John, hold on. This is Curtis. And so is that. I just want to sort things out.”
Prince Harming screamed again. “No! Don’t trust him. He’s tricking. He’s—killer. No! That’s what I said. It’s me!” Every half sentence he seemed to need to interrupt himself, as though he couldn’t get anything out without realizing the words weren’t right.
The younger Curtis strengthened his grip on my shoulder. “What’s he talking about? Look, Kenny, I’ve been trying to remember. What did you do? That day when I was born?”
Wald must have loosened his grip on Prince Harming, who now surged back, smashing the back of his head into Wald’s face.
I’ve gone over those next two minutes a thousand times since then. I’ve asked myself if there was anything I could have done differently, any movement, any decision, any word. I think about all I did wrong. Out of some crazy sense of shame that I didn’t even understand, I never told anyone why it was that Prince Harming shot me. I had this idea that I was the person who could fix everything even though I knew nothing could be fixed, nothing changed. I wanted to be the main guy who the whole adventure was about, the boy at the center of the universe.
Instead of just one more kid who got it all wrong.
Wald fell down and halfway through a mirror. Prince Harming, unbalanced and bound, stumbled, then started frantically hopping away from us, looking from side to side as he retreated into the distances of the Silverlands, trying to find a specific mirror.
“Hold onto him,” said Curtis to his wife. “If that’s me, I should help.” He shoved me into her hands and started off.
“You don’t understand,” I said. “There’s—something wrong with you—with him.”
The woman put her hands on my shoulders. “Kenny, let him go. He’s been needing to do something. He’s been having these horrible dreams, trying to remember what happened. That’s why we came. That’s why we’ve been looking for you. We never got a chance to find out what happened.”
I only half paid attention, more interested in what was going on ahead. Most of what you see in the Silverlands is blackness, like you’re floating in space. So what I saw as I looked at Curtis retreating was not easy to figure out: a collection of Wald-fragments sluggishly pulling back from a mirror; the twisted face of Prince Harming looking over his shoulder as he struggled away; the retreating back of Curtis, looking like he was running into a stiff wind.
When Curtis got to Wald, he leaned down to help the older man up. In the jumble of images, Wald must have mistaken him for Prince Harming and gave him a powerful shot in the face. Instantly, the two of them were rolling on the featureless floor of the Silverlands.
This was it. Bad things were going to happen. I had to change them. I was in the moment. I forgot all about Wald’s advice to float above “accidents and happenstance.” I wrenched out of the woman’s grasp and propelled myself forward through the buzzing pain. The Silverlands muffled our voices. By the time words reached me, they were a jumble.
Leave him a—get thee back—Kenny, don’t—don’t, Marg—curst and laggard air—kill you.
As I pushed forward past two, three, four sets of mirrors, images resolved themselves in the floating silver. Curtis and Wald were struggling as best anyone could in that place. They were between two mirrors. Curtis had an arm around Wald’s throat, and Wald had Curtis by the middle, trying to lift him up. Three mirrors past them, Prince Harming hobbled on. As he reached each mirror, he looked to the right and left into the cloud of swimming shards as though searching for something.