He gave me a final embrace and Luka took him uptime.
My parents tried their best to get me to talk and be normal. My grandmother told what should have been the very amusing story of her back-and-forth questioning of her sanity in the months and years following our encounter. She said she had written down everything I said to her, but never showed it to anyone, and kept telling the hobo boy story so she wouldn’t forget. My father then told the story of Grandma coming over just as they were growing frantic about my disappearance and considering calling the police. “I almost sent her to a home that very day,” he said, giving her a side-armed hug.
Eventually, sensing my need to be alone, my mother pronounced a quiet time.
My attic bedroom was, predictably, much neater than I had left it, since sometimes cleaning is the only thing that can take my mother’s mind away from worries. I lay in my bed and looked at the sea of old furniture, a lot of which I had now seen when it was much newer.
I began to cry.
Sixty years into the past a baby had been torn from his mother’s grasp by his own brother, then fallen in an arc like a bloody football and ended his life against a mirror that would not let him inside.
And now I was home. Really home. I had been in this house countless times in the past weeks, but I hadn’t been home.
Sleep, when I cried myself into it, lasted until noon the next day, and if there were any dreams, I don’t remember them.
My only highlights in the bewildering first days of school, when I suddenly had to be a normal kid again, were visits from Luka. Those required a lot of negotiation. Conceding that the mirror was indestructible, and even that we had done some good inside it, my mother still had my dad put a lock on the closet in their bedroom, and agreed to give Luka a key provided that she respected their rules: she could visit if she asked in advance, and I was never to be allowed in the mirror.
I wanted to object, but my dad sat me down and explained in excruciating detail just how much pain my two-month absence had caused. Since they had discovered the truth of the mirror, either my mom, my dad, or my grandmother had sat watch every minute of every day waiting for my return.
So I contented myself with living vicariously through Luka. Using they key she had made, she started spending a lot of time in the past. The mirror was unguarded all the way to 1947, so as long as Luka’s dad wasn’t watching her too closely, she could risk trips well into the past. Sometimes she’d even go further and bring back news, some bad, some good.
Young Curtis remembered nothing of the night he was born. Even his memories of the mirror were muddled. In early October, he made his first friend his own age, a girl from two doors down, and tried to take her into the mirror. When she couldn’t pass in, he grew angry and smashed her head repeatedly into its unbreakable surface. She never recovered completely.
Rose did better than anyone might have expected. By the time Luka actually met her, Curtis was six weeks old and Rose was devoted to him. She never talked of the other baby.
Of the older Curtis who had run out into the night, she could find out nothing, though there were stories of a wild man living in the woods, stealing chickens, sleeping in barns. Even fearless Luka didn’t stray far on the rare nights when she went as far back as 1917.
For almost four months I kept to my parents’ new rules, and I guess it would have stayed that way if it hadn’t been for you and the fact that there’s always one more rule.
Five
Running down the silver street.
My mother had never been crazy about keeping the mirror in the house, but I think she comforted herself with the fact that I was under pretty constant supervision. Grandma moved in with us following the madness of that summer. My dad fixed up the library for her. Between the three adults, I hardly had a moment alone in the house.
So when Mom got an invitation to her office Christmas party on the same weekend Grandma was going to visit a sick friend, she didn’t like it one bit, but somehow my dad convinced her they should go. Two days before Christmas, a week and a half before my year was to end, I found myself alone at night for the first time in months.
I tried to be good. I sat in my room and got an early start on my Christmas vacation homework, willing myself to ignore the time-travel mirror downstairs. A couple of times I thought I might have heard Luka passing through one way or the other, but she had been given a stern lecture by my dad about just exactly how forbidden it was for her to stop over here tonight, and I had heard her make a solemn promise, so I knew there was no chance of company.
After failing for a good half hour to figure out any of my math problems, I gave up and headed downstairs for some cookies and milk. I stayed down in the kitchen to eat, enjoying that room’s better lighting and the comforting sound of the fridge running. When my mother called to check on me, I just about crushed my milk glass in my hand I was so on edge. I assured her that everything was fine. No, Luka hadn’t come through. No, I hadn’t gone near their closet. Yes, I knew the number and would call if there were any problems.
I washed my glass and cleaned up my crumbs. Nothing to do but clump back up the stairs.
I guess that’s when you heard me.
Just as I walked past my parents’ bedroom, I heard a knock and a muffled “Hello?”
I froze. I didn’t know that voice. Another knock. Another “Hello?” but this time a little louder. “Listen, I need some help here. I need the diary. The one with stuff from Curtis and Rose.”
I put my hand on the handle of my parents’ door, then jumped as the guy spoke up again.
“It’s not even me that needs it. It’s Luka. She needs help with Prince Harming.”
That did it. I opened the door and walked to the closet. “Who are you?”
“Oh, man, thank you. Are you Kenny? I’m Connor. From 2017.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Look, can you open the door?”
“It’s locked.”
“I know that, D—Kenny. Luka sent me to get the diary.”
I looked at the closet door. Hinges on the outside. “Give me a few minutes,” I said, and headed down to the basement for a hammer and an awl.
While I took the door off its hinges, I thought I should find out from “Connor from 2017” exactly what was going on and what kind of help Luka needed, but he kept me so busy with questions of his own that I never got to ask mine. How many channels did we have on TV? Had I ever touched a computer? How many phones did we have in the house? Had I ever heard of solar power?
Peevishly, I fired back, “What about you? Do you have a base on the moon?”
“No point. I went uptime with Luka, though, and we saw the Mars landing. That’ll be cool.”
So that was who she had been with. I guessed maybe this was Luka’s new future boy, probably her boyfriend. My feelings of inferiority were even more magnified when I got the closet door off. He was probably two years older than me, about three inches taller, and possessed a frame that was both gangly and muscular. Behind him was the mirror, removed from its dresser again and leaning against my dad’s work uniforms. It was the first time I had seen it in weeks. As wrong as it was, I was itching for the slow molasses of the Silverlands. Uptime heat or downtime cold, it didn’t matter. I wanted to be uncomfortable again.
“Aw, jeez, thanks,” the newcomer said. “I was sweating like a sonofa—” He checked himself, looked sheepish, and continued. “I was sweating bad. Look, I’m sorry about this. Luka told me to leave you out of everything because she didn’t want you getting in trouble. But—” He stopped himself and looked at a large-faced digital wristwatch with four or five buttons around its edge. “Man, she’s been alone out there for more than an hour. Look, will you come back with me?”