This time they didn’t send me away. Even Mrs. Hollerith was too frantic to object to my presence. My only job was to sit and comfort Rose, who had already endured more than anyone should. It was amazing to me that someone deprived of food for so long could push as hard as they were telling her she must or crush someone’s hand as hard as she did mine. Her other hand, curled around the dead baby that I was already thinking of as Clive, petted him with feathery caresses.
Less than five minutes after his brother’s death, Curtis Hollerith made his first appearance in the world, yelling and screaming the way his brother never did.
Not long after the second baby was born, Mrs. Hollerith remembered my existence and sent me downstairs. Luka had managed to heft little Curtis onto the couch and was staring glumly into the mirror. The boy’s breathing was regular, and his hands showed no damage from the blue fire. Lying there, he could be any ten-year-old kid. I wondered how much of this night he would remember. Enough that it would trouble him later, I was sure. Half-remembered images that would bring him and Peggy back to look for me, that would bring her to her death.
“I thought we could save him,” Luka said.
Something strange was happening upstairs. I could hear coos and sighs from Lilly and Mrs. Hollerith, and from Rose sobs that were turning from despair to joy. “We did in a way. If I hadn’t gotten Lilly back here, I don’t even think baby Curtis would have lived.”
Luka groaned. “Time travel gives me a headache.” I suddenly realized that older Curtis wasn’t there. “Out the door,” said Luka, reading my expression. “He got up a couple of minutes ago. I was ready to take him on again, but he backed off. Said nothing matters because as soon as it all gets fixed, he won’t exist anymore.”
“Did you tell him—” I nodded my head upstairs.
“No. What if he tried again?”
“So where is he now?”
She shrugged. “I watched him run to the woods. I wasn’t about to follow.”
I looked toward the door. It was a cool night in 1917. I tried to imagine the pain of running in those woods with bare, burned feet.
“Come on,” I said.
“Kenny, no,” Luka said. “Are you crazy? Look, I came here to bring you home. Your family is waiting for you.”
I stood for a long moment in tortured indecision, looking between the girl I had been pining for all this time and the door out into the dark, where this man was, this man who was the boy sleeping there on the couch and who was also the baby upstairs. I thought of the tiny hands I had seen for just a moment at his birth, dark and bloody in the lantern light, each tiny finger a perfect new miracle. Just a few hours ago, I had seen those hands, so much older, shoved into fire and crippled forever.
“Just down to the creek,” I said. “He’ll be there. He’ll be in his cave.”
Reluctantly, Luka went with me. I called up to Lilly that we were going out for a breath of fresh air, but I didn’t even know if she heard. Luka had come with a backpack stuffed with supplies, and we lit our way with modern flashlights. We followed a few bloody footprints at first, and Luka spotted a handprint on the bark of a silver birch, but soon we lost his trail, and by the time we reached the creek, he could have been anywhere.
Ready to run at a moment’s notice, I shone my flashlight beam inside the narrow, hand-dug cave, but the man I had destroyed was nowhere to be seen. He had been there, though; on the ground outside the cave was the strings-and-spoon key he had stolen from me. I picked it up.
Luka and I made a tiny island of light in a deep, star-filled, creek-babbling, chirping, and tweeting night. A mosquito bit me.
Luka put a hand on my shoulder. “You’ll never find him. Not if he doesn’t want to be found. You have to let this go, Kenny. Your mom and dad are waiting for you. You did it. You came back for Rose. She’s got her baby.”
I sighed. “Okay. Let’s go back.”
She held up her hand. “Actually. A couple of things first.” She made me hold her flashlight while she took out a pocketknife. “What?” she said at my expression. “You thought I was going to forget to carve my initials? This is fifty-four years before I was born. You better believe I’m giving them something to remember me by.”
She disappeared into the cave for a moment, and when she emerged, she took a small and familiar wooden box out of her backpack. “Now for this,” she said.
I reached out to touch it lightly. “That’s got my grandmother’s letter inside?” She nodded. “You ever wonder what would happen if you didn’t bury it? What if you just threw it in the creek?”
Luka rolled her eyes. “We know it ends up there. Come on. Your dad gave me these collapsible shovels.”
“You’ve been hanging out with my dad?” I asked as we waded across the creek.
“A lot. And your mom. They’re pretty cool. Your grandmother, too. They miss you. I told them I’d bring you.” She sighed. “That’ll end it. Won’t it?”
“Yeah. They’re not letting me into that thing again. Sorry.” We reached the far bank and headed up to the thicket of trees.
“What are you sorry for? I’m the one who abandoned you. I let him force me into the mirror, Kenny. I couldn’t stop him from throwing it in the lake. I went uptime to save Rick and Jimmy from him, but he had a gun and he forced me back in, up to your time. I stood in the Silverlands and watched as he ran to the lake and threw it in.”
Here was a point I had been confused on when Rick first explained it to me. “Why did he do that? Why did he make you go back uptime?”
“Said he didn’t want to kill me. He just wanted to trap you. He wanted to make sure you couldn’t get into the mirror again. It was—I don’t know—confusing. He had just shot you, and that seemed to take some of the crazy away. I don’t think he knew what time he was in anymore.”
I nodded. “That makes sense. It’s kind of the same as now. When he thinks he’s changed things, all he has to do is sit around and wait for the world to change around him. It must have been a couple of weeks before he realized he had trapped me in 1957, the exact time he was trying to keep me from. That must have been when he stole the wetsuit and started trying to find the mirror again.”
“Who cares about that?” said Luka, her voice a knife-edge of regret. “I let you down. I should have stayed with you. I stood in the Silverlands and saw the mirror fly over the bluffs and crash into the lake.”
I tried to imagine the kind of worry and guilt that must have been eating at her all these weeks.
“You did what you had to do. Everything worked out. That’s just the way it all happens. What matters is you always wanted to do right.” We found the thicket of trees, and as we passed between two dark shapes, we temporarily brushed each other’s arms. Emboldened by the darkness, and maybe by the deeper darkness of everything I had just gone through, I did the scariest thing I had done all year: I put my hand on Luka’s shoulder. “What matters is you were the captain of your soul. Always.”
She stopped. I stopped with her. What was I supposed to do next? Kiss her? Drop my flashlight and grab her with my other hand? What if I lost my flashlight?
The moment passed. Luka let out a long breath. “Come on,” she said. “It’s over here.”
I let my hand drop and followed her to the correct tree. “Anyway,” I said, deflated, “I’m sorry you had such a boring time the last couple of months. This was supposed to be our year.”
Luka pointed her flashlight at her own face so I could see her raised eyebrow. “Boring? Are you kidding? I got to save a drowning kid in 2017. Twenty years further up, I watched the second mission land on Mars. I found the evidence that got my daughter out of a murder charge. This was the best summer of my life.” She grinned at my open-mouthed expression. “What, did you think I’d just sit on my hands and wait for you?”