I had a decision to make. I could go back up to 1957 where a coal cellar was waiting for me, along with the possibility of a hot breakfast in the morning and another conversation with my future dad. Or I could take my spoons-and-string key and go back to Rose. Further from home, it was true, but all year something had been pulling me back there.
I clutched the spoons and went backward. Rose was fast asleep. Again, I slid out the drawer, and for the first time saw it without the message.
Well, at least I knew I was in the right place.
I spent the next three uncomfortable nights on the main floor of the carriage house with only a couple of blankets to protect me from the bare floorboards. Each morning, after a brief stint under Rose’s bed, I gobbled half of a hot breakfast, and spent the morning helping her with the walls of what she called her “Monte Cristo mansion.”
In the afternoons, Rose asked me to go through and spend time with Curtis. “He’s lonely,” she said. “I know you came charging in to rescue me, but he’s the one who needs you, I think. Mother keeps him shut up at home for the most part. He is her shame.”
What else was there to do? I could go as far downtime as I liked, but my own time was still closed to me. On my first day with Curtis, I went with him down to the creek, where he showed me his cave. “It was Clive’s,” he said. “He was my sister’s sweetheart, but he died in the war. He and my sister used to come here to be alone.”
I could see he had done a good job. The desktops and chair legs that seemed haphazardly embedded in the mud in other decades were now set up with a clear plan in mind, like struts in a mine. Holding up the slight vault of the widest part of the cave was the table with the initials carved in it.
Rose, Clive, Curtis.
And Luka.
I blinked a couple of times at it and shook my head with wonder.
“I put mine there, too,” said Curtis. “I wanted to be part of it. You should put yours, too. You’re one of us as well, the mirror children. We’re like a family.”
It’s always going to come down to just you and me, she had said. But where was she? Why weren’t we rescuing the baby together?
I carved my initials next to hers like I was cosigning a promise.
In the evenings I went all the way uptime past the coal cellar, just to check that 1967 was still inaccessible. It always was.
On the third day, Curtis and I passed a lazy afternoon by the creek. I entertained him with stories about submarine warfare, illustrating with my diving and surfacing hands stories that I knew from comic books and movies. We got bogged down slightly when he asked me to explain the mechanics of submarines.
“How do they float up?”
“They have stuff in them that floats. Air and stuff.”
“So why didn’t they float before? How did they sink in the first place?”
“It’s—I don’t know. It’s like hot-air balloons, but in reverse. They must have to drop stuff so they can rise up.”
“Oh. So they must have to carry heavy stuff to sink. It would be better if they could have light stuff that made them float and they could just bring that out from somewhere.”
“But if they had it somewhere, it would make them float up, wouldn’t it?”
It was cool being the person with answers, even if not all of them were entirely accurate. I got to play the older brother for a while.
“Is war stupid?” he asked at one point. “Rose says it is. She says that’s how father died and Clive as well, and it was all for nothing because this other war is coming. They called it the war to end all wars, but they were wrong.”
“Somebody telling you to go kill some other guys because the people in charge can’t agree?” I said. “Yeah, that’s pretty stupid.”
“But you said the Germans were killing people in those camps. Jews and everyone.”
“That was stupid, too.”
“And the men who went and saved the people in the camps. They were good, weren’t they?”
“Yeah, that’s true.”
“That’s going to be me, then. I’ll do that. You can tell me what army division to get into, and I’ll go over there when it’s my turn and free people from the camps.”
“It’s not that simple,” I said, trying to sound grown-up. “Sure, some people saved prisoners and stuff, but a lot of people died. There’s lots of … other jobs you can do that would help with the war.”
He raised his eyebrows at my lame finish. “Other jobs? I’ll be twenty-two when that war starts. That’s the age when you should be a soldier. It’s okay to do other things if you’re an old man.”
Suddenly being a big brother got a lot more complicated. Rose had asked me to be good to her son. Had I just talked him into going to war?
Six
On my third morning of plastering, we finished the second short wall, and started preparation for the long back one, the one Mr. Hollerith had abandoned when he enlisted. I had been avoiding that part of the task; a third of the way along that wall was the dark place out of which that baby had been drawn. I knew there was nothing there yet, just a shadowy hole filled with newspaper insulation.
I spent half an hour after breakfast bringing up the lath strips, and then an hour mixing plaster. Rose had done the mixing on previous days, but today she was tired.
She got up when I was done to inspect the result, but gasped and fell back to the bed.
My heart almost battered through my rib cage. “Is it—are you—?”
She held one hand over her stomach, and the other up like a traffic cop. “No—no, Kenny,” she said in between another couple of gasps. “I don’t think so. He’s moving and it’s sore, that’s all. It hurts. My back hurts, my feet hurt, and I cannot get a breath just right.”
I had an urge to march over to the main house and give her mother a good talking to. She needed a hospital, a doctor.
She needed her mother.
I said as much, but she made me promise not to interfere. “Just stay here,” she said. “Hold my hand. I don’t need my mother. All I need is something for the pain.”
“Oh,” I said. “Wait.” I hurried downstairs to fetch my backpack.
When I brought out the small leather pouch, she gave a weak smile before even seeing its contents. “He kept his promise,” she said. “I said I didn’t know how he could, but he did.”
“Who?” I said.
“John Wald, of course.”
I remembered Wald’s promise that I would find a use for the partridge berries he had helped me pick.
As the tea brewed, she told about her time with John. Traveling uptime, he reached 1907 just before the new year, and had to travel his “long path” to get to 1917. He worked as a hired hand in the area, never straying far from Hollerith land. As an able-bodied man, he felt pressure to sign up for the war, finding that none of the farmers in the area had work for him anymore, even in the harvest of 1915.
“If he hadn’t been wounded last summer,” said Rose, taking her first sip of the foul-smelling concoction we had managed to make, “he never would have made it back.”
Shot in the leg at the Battle of the Somme, then left for dead in no-man’s land while the wound grew septic, he had been rescued and spent four months in a field hospital, then more time convalescing in England before he was able to find transportation home.
“That man has an eye for secrets,” Rose said. “He remembered Clive and knew my condition at once. It
