He raised his eyebrows. “Eight years older one way, two years younger the other way.” He held up his hand to hold off whatever dumb thing I would have said. “All I’m saying, Kenny, is there’s always a way if you want a way.”
I let out a heavy sigh, blowing away with it whatever useless denial I had been about to make. “How?” I said.
Rick grinned. “No idea. We’ll figure it out, though. It’s what we call a summer project. Now go on. She’ll be waiting for you. Nobody goes alone anymore, remember?”
When Luka and I got back to the carriage house, she never asked what had delayed me. She insisted on walking to within sight of my front door and watching me go in. She wouldn’t say why, but we were both creeped out by the Prince Harming rhymes. You’ll go down the backward glass. A dead man’s sentence should be curt. Bloody feet. Silver street. Crack your head. Knock you dead. I shuddered as I climbed into bed. Here it was the end of June, and yet September seemed far too close.
Three
I spent part of my fifteenth birthday in the same year and on the same day that, about twelve miles away, I was celebrating my fifth.
Luka had put in a doorstop the night before so she could be waiting for me the next day, a bulky present filling up her backpack. She wouldn’t show it to me until we had crossed to the far side of the creek.
“These trees are still here in my time,” she said, leaning her back against the outside cedar in a small thicket, and patting the ground for me to sit as well. “That’s why they’re perfect for this. Happy birthday.” She took out a large box, carefully wrapped, and motioned for me to open it.
Inside were seven small decorative wooden boxes. I had seen her looking at them on one of our downtown comic-selling trips. The curbside vendor claimed they were handmade in the Tatra Mountains in Poland. Their lids were inlaid with metal designs and colored glass. To the front of each one, she had affixed a small plaque with the engraved name of a month, June to December. Inside each was a small golf pencil and a few pieces of paper she had cut to fit in.
My mother raised me well; I said thank you right away.
“I know,” she said, “you have no idea what they’re for. But, look, I made them for me, too.” She took out another set of the same boxes, engraved in just the same way. “I wanted to do a set for Keisha and Melissa, but maybe it’s too late now.”
“I still don’t—”
“Here,” she said. She picked up one of my boxes, August, and handed it to me. “Take it and walk around these trees. Keep it low to the ground.”
I felt stupid, but she insisted. I walked around the outside of the thicket, looking like I was feeding chickens. “Now, inside,” Luka said, guiding me into the cooler confines of the thicket. “Keep it low.”
Near the knuckled roots of an old maple, my hand tingled and I instinctively withdrew it. “Hey!” Then I turned to Luka. “What—”
“So that’s the August tree,” she said. “Come on. I’ll explain.” She took me out and sat me in the sunlight again. “Look, we’re kind of on our own in this, right? No Melissa, no Keisha. Jimmy’s not much good, and Rick can’t go along. That leaves you and me. So I started thinking. What if one of us gets lost or something? What if we need help? I mean if that kid Anthony had something like this, maybe we’d know what was going on.”
Her idea was that whenever we went into the past, we’d take the boxes with us. If we were separated, one of us in the past and one in the present, we’d use them to communicate. Write a note, bury it around here, and the other person would come looking for it years later.
“Did you make these for Jimmy as well?” I asked. Jealousy is a crazy thing. In my head I knew Luka’s only interest in Jimmy Hayes came from his access to 1957, and I had a strong suspicion that any talking they had done recently probably involved my birthday that night, but even the smallest sentence that might pass between Luka and Jimmy or more wincingly between Luka and Rick made me squirm like a stepped-on earthworm.
Luka rolled her eyes. “Please. Can you imagine trying to explain these things to Jimmy?”
The logic of it made even my head want to explode, so I just went along with her, and we established some rules. Each box was to be buried, at the latest, on the last day of every month, even if there was nothing to tell. If we were in our own year, then fine, we would bury it in our own year. We took each of our boxes around and mapped out where its future-past counterpart was.
Most of them weren’t there. All we could find was a July and an August from each of us, and a December from me.
“What does that mean?” I asked, but Luka had no good answer.
“We better get going,” she said. “Your mom will be home soon. I’ll catch up with you later.”
For my birthday dinner, I got taken to the Old Spaghetti Factory downtown. All three of my grandparents came. My dad sat himself next to my grandfather so they could argue about baseball, while his own mother made sure she pulled her seat up right next to me. Grown-up conversation was boring, she said.
Mostly she wanted to tell stories. My dad, the only son born to her before her husband went off and died in the war, was her favorite thing in the world, and she never tired of telling us about him. She told me the one about him breaking John Timson’s nose, the one about him throwing Mrs. Bonder’s vicious chihuahua at Victor Pike who was beating up Aunt Judy, and even the one about him deliberately losing a race to his best friend Lester Charles, because he thought that might get him in good with Chuck’s sister. My mother didn’t like that one.
The more we laughed, the more she told. How he got accidentally hypnotized at a show when he was eleven, how he hid a full-to-bursting water balloon on Mr. Verturer’s chair in grade six so that when the teacher sat, it burst and made it seem as though he had peed his pants.
Just as dessert was being served, she came back to her favorite, the little hobo boy story. “This city in the fifties,” she told me. “Nothing like it is now. It wasn’t the Great Depression, but it wasn’t a picnic either. Children had been orphaned in the war, you know, some of them brought over here when their parents were murdered. There weren’t a lot of them, poor children, but they were here. Running from the orphanages. Asking for jobs or food when none of us had much to spare.”
This was all a kind of rationalization, I realized, to explain why no one was doing anything to help the homeless boy that they had all seen hiding around the neighborhood. As the story went, my father finally took pity on the kid and hid him in the coal cellar for a few weeks.
What I always wondered was what had happened to the kid. After the crazy dad came and knocked my dad out, did he get the kid? Did my grandmother fight him off? That would be hard to imagine.
She smiled and shook her head when I asked this, then glanced over at my father, still deep in conversation. “Well, Kenneth. Maybe your father doesn’t quite know everything about that story. There might be secrets an old lady takes to her grave. Or at least keeps for a while longer. Do you know what the last words I read from your grandfather were before he died? His last letter? ‘Keep Brian safe,’ he said. ‘You and he are the only things in my world.’ I never told anyone that, you know. Not fair to Aunt Judy, is it? Daughters are important, too.”
It was late enough when we got home that, after waiting for my parents to settle into bed, I only just made the mirror before midnight.
Luka put a blindfold around my eyes and had me step in and pull her along. In 1967, Jimmy and Rick were waiting with the coolest present anyone ever had. They had cleared a space and set up a mattress and some pillows, all facing an old TV hooked up to a VCR from 1987.
“Okay,” said Luka, “just to be clear, the birthday present is you get to see it before anyone else around. Well, not anyone. Keisha looked it up. It actually got released in May or something, but not everywhere. It goes out in wide release in about three weeks, your time.” She turned to Rick and Jimmy. “For you guys it’s another ten years. If you talk about it, people are gonna think you’re crazy.”
“Talk about what?” I said. “What is this anyway?”
She held up a cardboard case and slipped a bulky cassette out of it. “I told you when we first met; I saw it on my sixth birthday, and it was the most amazing thing ever.”
