mother, though, is she? Is she, Rose? Mother isn’t my mother. You’re my mother, aren’t you?”
“Not like this,” Rose sobbed quietly. “I was going to tell you, but not like this. Not now.”
I walked slowly and quietly toward him, recognizing that this had to stop but that I was also intruding. “Hey, Curtis,” I said. “It’s me. Let’s go downstairs. We should leave Rose. She’s going to be okay.”
All the way down the stairs, I kept talking to him as gently as I could. Mrs. Hollerith came in carrying some steaming wet cloths. He stared at the sight of her. She frowned and almost stopped to speak to us, but Lilly called her from above. She dismissed us with a snort of derision and went on.
“Who’s the new one?” I heard her gruffly ask Lilly a moment later.
In the hesitation that followed, I could imagine a look passing between Lilly and Rose, a lightning flash of communication and caution. “Just another girl come through the mirror,” said Lilly. Mrs. Hollerith snorted and said something about taking the mirror to the dump as soon as she could and how Grand Central Station was no place to have a baby.
“Did you know?” Curtis said in a flat voice that betrayed no emotion.
I nodded. “It wasn’t my thing to tell you.”
“Wait,” said Curtis, everything just catching up to him at once. “So who is my father? Clive?” I nodded. Tears welled up in his eyes. “I don’t know why I care,” he said. “Why do I care? What does it matter? My father—I mean, Rose’s father—he’s dead, too. Why does it matter which dead father is mine? But I just—I grew up thinking it was this way and it’s not, it’s that way.”
Luka was awake now. She sat very still and watched me with Curtis, scooching well to the side as I sat him down.
What do you do when someone’s crying? You shut up and hold them. I took him by the shoulders and pulled him into an awkward hug. In my arms he babbled away for a bit through his tears. Why had nobody told him? Didn’t they think he could understand? How many other people knew? Did the neighbors know?
At the end of all that, his crying stopped, and the next thing he said came out in the thinnest, tiniest whisper. “Rose is dead, though, Kenny. She’s dead. I was keeping a secret, too. It was the Spanish flu. She died eight years ago. I didn’t know how to tell her. How can I tell her she’s dead?”
Instinctively I put my hand up to his head and caressed his hair. “She knows, pal. She’s not stupid, your mother. She’s smart, just like you. She knows, and she wanted to talk to you about it. She was going to tell you everything before the mirror closes at the end of the year. You know it does that, right? It only opens on the years that end in seven. All she wanted was to get some time with you. And she didn’t want to spoil it.”
“How do you know all this?” said Curtis pulling away from me, sniffling and rubbing his eyes.
“I just talked to her, that’s all,” I said. “I’ve been hearing about you two for months. I wanted to come back and help. I knew things got bad around now.”
“Did you help other people as well?”
The emerging look of admiration in his face made me uncomfortable. “I tried. But you have to be careful when you try to help. Things can go bad even if you don’t mean them to.” Then it just all came out in a rush, pushed out of me by my guilt and frustration. “Listen, Curtis, I know things that are going to happen. Some really bad things. I’ve seen them all and I know it’s going to get really bad. Some of it’s my fault. But maybe it doesn’t have to happen. When you grow up, you’re going to join the army, just like you said. You’re going to meet a girl and fall in love.”
As I continued, his eyes never strayed from my face, and his mouth hung open. I told him everything, or as much as I could put together in that crazy rush. I forgot all about Wald’s advice to float above the events of the world. Wald, me, Peggy, the tragedy in the Silverlands. I tried to tell him as many ways as I could think of to avoid Peggy’s death. Don’t go back to the mirrors as an adult. If you have to go back, don’t take her with you. Tell me everything as soon as you see me, especially your names. Any of those things, I told him, could set us on a new path.
Just as I was telling him to write all of this down, we heard renewed sobs of pain from Rose upstairs. Curtis looked up. “I shouldn’t be here,” he said.
“No,” replied a voice from behind us, “you shouldn’t. I’ll take care of that.”
I turned to see Curtis, older and in his Prince Harming appearance, one burned hand holding my strings- and-spoon key, the fire of madness in his eyes all over again. He stepped all the way through the mirror, and down off the dresser, just as we heard a voice from upstairs.
“There he is, dear. Oh, there he is. It’s a boy. Oh!”
“Just in time,” said Prince Harming, and he turned toward the stairs.
Two
Then Prince Harming’s hunger’s fed.
“Wait,” I said. “What are you here for? What are you going to do?”
He turned back and looked at me, and when he spoke it was in a quiet voice, not the fierce shouts of before. “It was never your fault, Kenny. It was always me. All I need to do is never live. I kill that baby and it’s no crime. It’s suicide.”
He started up the stairs and I ran after him. “No,” I said. “You can’t change things that way. That’s not how it works.”
I grabbed his arm, but he smashed my face with his elbow. I fell back and cracked my head on the floor. I opened my eyes again just in time to see Luka run at him and get a solid kick in the stomach. Her feet left the step they were on and she flew down to land next to me. “You can’t stop me,” he said. “This is the end. I do this and everything changes. That’s what I understand. You can only change yourself. Don’t make me hurt you. This is mine to do.”
He turned and continued up the stairs.
As soon as he got to the top, I could hear the sounds of a struggle. Lilly telling him to stay away, Mrs. Hollerith screaming at him, Rose simply screaming. There were thumps and slaps, the dull sound of punches. “Give that to me!” he screamed.
I willed myself to get up, head still spinning.
“Is that … is that … ” Curtis, little Curtis as I thought of him in my head, walked to the bottom of the stairs and looked up. “Kenny, who is that? You said I was going to burn my hands in a mirror. Who is that, Kenny?”
I gripped the handrail and started up the stairs.
The converted hayloft was a chaos of voices and bodies. Mrs. Hollerith clutched Rose, who thrashed and screamed at this burned stranger. “It’s mine,” she screamed. “He’s mine, he’s my boy. Give him to me. Put him in my arms. He’s mine, he’s my boy.” Lilly stood on unsteady feet, a fresh gash on her forehead covering her face with a sheen of blood. She held her hands out to Prince Harming, imperious and demanding.
He clutched the baby in his raw hands, a bloody and curled thing, skin blending with the hideous fingers that cradled it. Why could he hold the baby? Was he beyond pain? Something was happening here, something I should understand, but it was going too quickly.
“It’s me,” he shouted. He looked around at us all wildly. “Every one of you has been hurt by this.” He shook the baby slightly in his hands as he said that, and my heart clutched like a fist. “All of you. I’ve done—so much wrong. I can’t bear it. It was all me. I tried to control it, to stop it. I tried to hurt other people to make it stop. But it’s not outside of me, it’s in me.” He shook the baby again, but only lightly, and I could tell that somehow he couldn’t bear to be rough with it.
“That’s not the way,” I shouted. I didn’t want to shout, but I had to if I wanted to make myself heard over Rose’s wails. “You’re trying to control again. Give it up. You can’t.”
Seeing him distracted, Lilly stepped forward and brought her hands up to the baby, but she was too gentle, and that was her undoing. Curtis leaned back, braced himself against a wardrobe, and gave her a push with his foot, sending her flying back into a large chest. He paid no further attention to her, but rather began to advance on
