“The point is,” said Luka to Curtis, “you wrote that one. Didn’t you? A dead man’s sentence should be curt. You’re saying you should be dead.”
“Killed the brother,” he said. “Led the—the girl. Loved her. Married. Then—then gone. Drowned and gone. Let me pass. Leave the lass. Don’t go down the backward glass.”
Luka handed the book to me. “You remember Kenny, right? Kenny was your friend.”
Curtis nodded. “Wanted to kill you, but wasn’t your fault. Saw you. You tried to save her.”
“So if Kenny was your friend, you should listen to him.” She looked at me. “I tried to convince him, but he won’t listen. October 27. Tell him what it says. Rose’s side.”
I flipped through the book to a page near the end that I had puzzled out just a month before.
At first, I thought I could never forgive him. Ten-year-old Curtis, that is. But it wasn’t his fault. He was trying to be good. I tried to forget about it. I tried to content myself in the baby I did have, my Curtis. As exhausted as I am in the nights, I sometimes try to stay awake just to watch him sleep. I think it is the only time I ever see him still.
I wonder what the other one would have been like. I am not supposed to. Mother says I must forget the other. Sometimes she tells me there was only one, but I know better.
I think he would have been the opposite to his brother. Probably as sweet and silent as Curtis is loud and boisterous. Mother says you cannot tell a baby from just those few minutes I had with him, but I could tell something. I never even heard him cry, and he did not struggle or kick the way Curtis did.
I knew that entry and had read it many times. It gave me some comfort. I couldn’t see Rose again, but at least I got to know how much in love with her baby she was.
It wasn’t easy for me to read the last few sentences above Curtis’s sobs. “No!” he said. “That one should have lived. The good brother.”
“You don’t get it, do you?” said Luka, and I could see she was talking both to me and to Curtis. “Think about it. ‘I never heard him cry.’ She basically said he didn’t move.”
Curtis nodded. “Didn’t move. Little, still, good brother.” He looked at me, his eyes pleading for understanding. “Didn’t want to kill the brother.”
“You didn’t,” said Luka.
“Wait,” I said, “are you saying—”
“Yes. My grandmother told me. Lilly. I went to see her, Kenny, and we talked about this. She said she never figured it out at the time. Not until years later. She wasn’t trained in delivering babies. If she was, she would have known.”
“Known what?” The question came from Curtis, who stood now and looked at Luka. “What?” He held his hands out, and for the first time I saw how horribly they had healed. His fingers were thick masses of scar tissue, the palms cracked. “Known what?”
“Oh, sure,” said Luka. “You’ll talk to him about it. What I’ve been telling you for the past two hours, that’s what.”
“That you didn’t kill him,” I said. “You didn’t kill him because your brother was already dead. He wasn’t still, Curtis. He was stillborn.” And before he could say anything else, I turned to Luka. “But that’s not all, is it? You didn’t just come to tell him that. You’ve figured out how to save Peggy, haven’t you?”
Six
Let me pass. Save the lass.
We all stood still for a long moment after I said it, Curtis moving his lips silently over the words.
“Stillborn?” he said at last. “The brother? Didn’t get killed?”
“No,” I said. “Didn’t get killed. Curtis, I think that’s right. It didn’t move, did it? I mean he. He didn’t move. Sometimes a baby is born that way. It’s nobody’s fault.”
“Didn’t get killed.” Then he shook his head. “But died.”
“I know,” I said. “And that was sad. Really sad. But not anybody’s fault. All you were trying to do was save your Peggy.”
He wiped tears away from his cheeks with his ruined hands. “Didn’t kill it. And the Rose mother sad, but said no, not your fault. A bad man did it. But who was the bad man?” He looked at the diary still in my hands. “Tried to find out. And down and down the backward glass. Tried to be strong. A soldier. Met the nurse. And fell in love, Kenny. But the nightmares. A bad man killed a baby. Kenny’s our friend. He knows. He’ll find the bad man. He’ll know. Who’s the bad man?”
“Nobody,” I said. “Nobody’s the bad man, Curtis. Curtis is a good man.” I looked at Luka. “How does this fit together? How did this Dana, Connor’s sister, how did she know to take him to his great-grandmother?”
Luka shrugged and looked away. There was something she was hiding from me. “Kenny, that was Lilly. She’s old when Connor meets her. It took me a bit to work out what she meant. But you’ve got it, haven’t you?”
“Yeah. Get there before her.” I stepped forward, and though Curtis shied away, I put my hand on his shoulder. “Lilly sent us with a message for you. You can save Peggy. But you’ll have to go the long path.”
I don’t know how, but with the help of Connor and Luka I managed to convince him. Less than an hour after I left my home time, the four of us stood in the Silverlands between 1957 and 1967 and prepared to say goodbye to Curtis for the last time.
When we took him at first to the mirror, far past our own, where Peggy had been lost, I thought we might need to restrain him again the way John Wald and I had done four months ago, but he slumped at the sight of its swimming image-fragments. “Lost her,” he said. “Brought her and lost her.” His sunken eyes were wide with the need to confess as he looked at me. “Think how that feels. Brought her here. Because of the nightmares. About the baby. Then lost her. And blamed you.”
“But maybe you didn’t lose her,” I said. I put a hand on his shoulder and turned him around to face the 1957 end of the same mirror. “This is ten years before.” Just as it had been back in September, the mirror was on a beach. I wondered how it got there, what crazy series of events had brought it to this sandy beach lit by a noon-day sun. It must be, I realized, some other place in the world, someplace warm in another time zone.
“To save her?” said Curtis. “And how? Going through here—no way back.”
“Look at it,” I said. “That mirror is on the beach, out of the water. That’s in 1957. But in 1967 it’s in the water. So go through to 1957 and—and then you have to wait. Wait until September 1967.”
Curtis grinned, almost cackled. “And not let it go in. Not let it go in the water.”
“No,” said Luka, her patience wearing thin. It was the third time we had explained it. “No. We know it goes in the water. We can see it’s still in there. You’ve got to go with the way things are, but just—make them better than we thought they were.”
“Not … to change?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “That’s not the way to do it with the mirrors. If you try to make sure it doesn’t go in the water, we know it will anyway, so maybe that means you’ll lose the mirror or not be there or something. There’s a way to—float above the events we know are going to happen. Think. You can wait with the mirror for ten years and guard it. Then the day before—before I push her through—then you put it in the water.” Curtis recoiled, but I continued quickly before he could object. “A little water. A few feet deep. And you wait for her. You know the date. One day before your birthday. About six o’clock our time. Just wait. Have a life jacket there.”
Luka interrupted. “A doctor, even. You could have anything. If you do this, you’ve got ten years to get a whole team together. Everything you do can be to save her. Look at the 1967 mirror. As long as you try to make it look just like that, dark and in the water—there’s no reason this shouldn’t work.”