I smiled back and shook my head. “I really did miss you.”
“Come on, H. G. Wells. Get digging.”
A few minutes later, as we walked back into the carriage house, Luka halfway through the story of her adventures in the future, Francine Hollerith came down the stairs, carrying the tiny burden of her dead grandchild. Until that moment, I hadn’t thought of it that way. Her grandchild.
“Give me something,” she said to me in a quiet voice.
“What?”
“Are you stupid? For the baby. It should be wrapped. I had a swaddling cloth prepared, but that’s for the other one.”
My backpack was right beside me. The first things I brought out of it were the newspaper from 1947, the one with the story about Peggy going missing, dated September 2, and an old T-shirt I had been wearing on and off for the past two months. I froze in the act of handing it to her.
My Speedy Gonzales T-shirt. That I had been wearing all those months ago when we found the baby and I felt that electric charge that came when an object was in danger of meeting itself.
She wrapped the baby in the T-shirt first, then the newspaper, three, four, five sheets crumpled tightly around it. I opened my mouth to object, but a cold, furious stare from her shut me up.
Luka and I sat transfixed as she walked back upstairs.
“What are you doing, Mother?” came Rose’s weak voice a few moments later.
“Just putting clothes away. You’re coming back to the house when we can move you.”
Liar, I wanted to shout. Liar. She was hiding him. Putting him in the wall. And as sure as I knew that, I was certain that Rose herself would put something in that same small space before her mother got a chance to seal it up. Her list, but now with a message written on it, desperately, wildly, against all sense. A plea for me to come back and make it better. And sometime soon, in another wild fit of desperation, probably forbidden by her mother from ever talking about us, she would take the drawer out of her dresser and scratch a message on it for Luka. Luka, help Kenny. Trust John Wald. Kenny says he is the auby one. Save the baby.
And we would fail.
“You have a baby to care for now,” Mrs. Hollerith was saying. “No more of your secret visitors. We’ll pack them off and that will be that.” She raised her voice. “Do you hear that, down there? I’ll have no more of you. Once you’re gone, we’re happy to see the end of you.”
Lillian, her shoulders sloped and weary, descended the stairs. We sat her down and gave her a quick recap of Prince Harming’s disappearance and our foray into the night.
“Francine says there’s a discreet doctor she can send for,” she told us, barely reacting to what we had said. “She says he’ll make the certificate out as she tells him. It’ll make life easier for Curtis, not being called Rose’s bastard. People can be horribly cruel in this time.”
Rose soon fell asleep, and Mrs. Hollerith didn’t want us upstairs, so we didn’t get any kind of last goodbye, not to her, nor to ten-year-old Curtis, who Lilly pronounced to be suffering from shock. Luka and I picked him up and carried him through the Silverlands to his own time.
Mrs. Hollerith, ten years older and not one day more pleasant, sat waiting for us on her dead daughter’s bed. “What have you done to him?” she said, standing up. I wondered how long she had been waiting. Her eyes narrowed as we brought him forward and laid him next to her. “I told you ten years ago it was to be the last I saw of you.”
“Shut up,” said Lilly. “I’ve had about enough of you. The boy’s in shock. Bundle him up and elevate his legs. Keep an eye on him for a few hours and he’ll be fine. I suspect he won’t remember much. Maybe that’s for the best.” She eyed Mrs. Hollerith a moment longer, then turned to Luka and me. “Let’s go.”
“That’s it?” said Mrs. Hollerith. “You breeze into my house once every ten years upsetting everything, carrying madmen and unconscious children, and expect me to accept it? I’m going to throw that mirror into the ravine.”
“No you won’t,” I said.
She fixed me with a glare. “Oh, and you’re going to tell me what to do?”
“No.” I returned her stare as calmly as I could. “I’m just telling you how it happens. In a couple of years you’re going to sell this place—to the Huffs—and you’ll leave this dresser here when you do. That’s how Lillian here gets to know Curtis in the first place, and that’s how we come back to save Rose and Curtis. You’ll do it because that’s the way it happens.”
We left her with her mouth hanging open.
When we stepped out of the Silverlands into 1937, Lilly’s bedroom was empty again. She told us that she and her family were probably off looking for somewhere to stay in the city.
Our next stop was the carriage house in 1947. “This is where I get off, I suppose,” said Lilly.
“You’ve got a husband and baby waiting for you, right?” said Luka.
“I do. I suppose Kenny told you. I can’t imagine what he thinks of all this, my husband I mean. The little one’s only two. Can’t expect him to have any opinions, can we, Luka?”
In the early morning light, I saw Luka do something I don’t think I’d ever witnessed before. She blushed. “Actually,” she said, “my real name’s Lucy. I just—made up that other name.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t worry about the opinion thing, though,” she said. “He’ll have a lot of them pretty soon. John, right?”
“Why, yes. How did you know?”
Luka seemed to come to some kind of decision, and she darted forward to give Lilly a quick peck on the cheek. “We better go now. Into the mirror, Kenny. Thanks for everything, Grandma. It all works out in the end.
And just like that, leaving Lilly wide-eyed and open-mouthed, Luka dragged me back into the uptime heat of the mirror and through to the Maxwells’ coal cellar. I guess I must have looked pretty shocked as well. “Have you—?”
“Known all along? Nah. A lot happened this summer, Kenny. I moved back in with my dad. First time I’ve really been with him much in years. A couple of days ago my grandma sat me down and told me how she saved a pregnant girl’s life once. With the help of a cute boy.”
I looked back at the mirror. “Lilly said I was cute?”
Luka rolled her eyes. “Well, she’s old, now. You know how the memory goes. Come on, Romeo, I promised your parents I’d get you home.”
Four
Hear the wisdom in the walls.
When we got to 1967, John Wald was already awake and making breakfast for Rick from a huge pike he had caught in the lake with a pointed stick. We ate quickly. Luka said she had to get back before her father woke up since he was a little more on the ball than her mom.
Rick hugged us all goodbye, and for the first time in two months, I headed back home to find my mother sleeping in front of the mirror.
There was a lot of crying and hugging. Mom called for Dad and my grandmother, and they came right away.
When everyone calmed down, we reached into the mirror for John Wald. He apologized to my parents for not bringing me home sooner, and that won my mom over. She said he looked like he hadn’t eaten a good meal in more than a hundred years, at which he frowned and said it was probably more like sixty.
Luka had to go but promised she’d come back. Wald said he wanted to go with her, but with him it would be my last goodbye.
He stood at the mirror with Luka and turned to face me. “Fare thee well, Kennit,” he said. “A twisty path thou didst thread in the glass, and did what good thou couldst. You learned to float above. Stay thee here, now. Cross not the glass again.”