wider. ‘Well, you’ll be the one, then,’ she says. She looks at Dana and says, ‘Don’t feel bad it isn’t you, dear. It’s a lot of trouble in there.’
“I was just going to put it down to, old people are weird. Then she stares right at me. You know, one of those laser-beam stares? And she says, ‘Connor, I have a message for you to carry, but I’m old and I can’t remember which one of them it’s for. I can’t remember which one does it. Maybe it’s you. Here’s the message. Remember it as well as you can. He can still save her. He’ll just have to get there before her and wait. Curtis can still save Peggy.’”
I felt like I was wearing my Speedy Gonzales T-shirt. “She said Curtis and Peggy?”
“Yeah. Didn’t mean a thing to me. I asked Dana about it, and all she would say is that I’d understand it someday. Then last week, Eric—that’s my older brother—he gives me this pile of old journals. I mean, really old, like forty years. They had been caught in a fire we had a while ago, and there was a lot of stuff I couldn’t make out, but I could definitely see those two names. That got me remembering that visit to the retirement home. I asked Dana about it, and she says it was just something that—something my dad asked her to do.”
“So you asked Luka about it.”
“So I asked Luka about it. She got crazy excited.”
“And?”
“And … ” He found the spot he was looking for, slid down the creek bank, and gestured for me to come along. “That led us to this mess.”
I slid down and followed his pointing finger with my gaze. We were back at Clive Beckett’s tiny hand-dug cave, and outside of it, sitting on an upturned crate, was the most ruined and lost Prince Harming I had seen yet.
Four months had not been kind. His cheeks were sunken and his arms, under layers of rags, were twig- thin. “Don’t look,” he said to me, and his eyes still burned with a manic fire. “Don’t look at me. No one looks at me. If no one looks at you, you don’t exist. Brother killer. Shouldn’t exist. Wiped away. Shouldn’t exist. Nobody look.”
He didn’t seem like much of a danger anymore. “Curtis, you didn’t mean to—”
He stood up and screamed, causing us both to step back. “Don’t use the name! Doesn’t deserve it. Killed a brother. A baby.” After a moment of standing there twitching, he sat back down again. “A little baby. Stood outside the door and heard them talking about it. A little baby. Clive. The better one. Named after the father. So just the bad one lived. Killed a baby.”
Behind him, someone unfolded from the tiny entrance to the cave. “No, you didn’t,” said Luka. “I’ve been trying to tell you that. Hi, Kenny. Sorry I got you into all this again, but maybe you can help me talk some sense into him. I’ve been trying, but he won’t listen. We need the diary. The shatterdate book. Did you bring it?”
I took it out of my pocket. When he saw it, Curtis cocked his head to one side. “I did that,” he said. “Long ago.”
“I know,” said Luka. “You were trying to make sense of it, weren’t you? When you were ten. Did you steal your mother’s diary to do it?”
He nodded, his eyes still fixed on the beaten-up old book. “Wanted to know what—couldn’t remember. After hurting the little girl. Whose boy? Kept—waking up from the nightmare where—killed the little boy that was—was me—and then no more me. Used the mirror to visit Rose, she told that it was all a bad dream. She showed me the little boy that was me. She said everything was all right now. But—didn’t believe her. Thought she was lying. Bad man was going to come and get me.”
Luka stepped out from behind Curtis and took the book from Connor’s outstretched hand. “You started trying to find out about the bad man, didn’t you? You wrote down the little skipping rhymes.”
His eyes stayed on the book as he mumbled out the version of the rhyme I had always found hardest to understand. “Treacle sweet, bloody feet, loudly yelling down the street. Holler loud, holler proud, you shall wear a coffin shroud.” He bit his lip for a moment, remembering, then said the next one. “Trick your feet down the street, then the years will vanish fleet. Head will hurt, death’s a cert, a dead man’s sentence should be curt. Let me pass, leave the lass, don’t go down the backward glass.”
When he said the bit about leaving the lass, his voice trembled and his eyes filled up with tears.
“That one’s about you, isn’t it?” said Luka. “‘A dead man’s sentence should be curt.’ You’re Curt. And the other one. Holler loud. As in Hollerith.”
“But how?” I said. “How is that old skipping rhyme about him? It goes back further than this.”
Luka shrugged. “Rose, probably. She only saw the kid from 1907 a few times, but all it would take was once, right? She teaches the kid the rhyme, that kid teaches other people … ”
“Oh, wow,” I said. “Then someone else teaches it to Rose when she’s little.”
“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
