David Lomax: Backward Glass

“Fine.” Rick didn’t even look at him, just kept his gaze fixed on me. I realized I had gotten it wrong. There was still baby fat in his face, still a kid in there. “Get out of here, then. Leave the kid’s stuff here.”

Jimmy hesitated briefly at the door to give me a look that might have been an apology. Then he was gone.

Rick let another long moment of silence follow the click of the carriage house door. “How old are you, kid?” he said at last.

“Fifteen.” He looked at me dubiously, and I amended, “In a couple of months.” Still a lie. My birthday wasn’t for half a year.

“You can take your backpack,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. Wondering if he might change his mind, I got up and went to pick it up.

“Can you believe it?” he said. “Eight years ago, I found a diary. Most of it makes no sense. But it talked about the mirror. About when the guy was a kid and he went through it and met his own mother before she was his mother. Crazy stuff. He said how the mirror was unbreakable, how it chose one kid every ten years to get to go back in time.”

“And you waited,” I said.

“Not at first. Didn’t believe it. But the idea was cool.” I nodded. I had felt the same way about my list. “Last year Jimmy tells me about this mirror. He’s up here one day fooling around, and he throws a baseball right at it. For kicks. Doesn’t break. He brings me in to see it. Man, I couldn’t lay a scratch on that thing.” Rick scratched his chin and looked at me.

“You’re too old, aren’t you?”

His eyes narrowed. “Is that it? The diary didn’t say anything about age. There’s a rule?”

“I got a note,” I said. “I mean—I sent it, I think. To the girl twenty years later. It says the mirror never takes anyone older than sixteen.”

Rick closed his eyes and shook his head. “Found that goddamn diary when I was nine years old underneath an old floorboard. Too old.”

“But not Jimmy.”

His eyes were still screwed shut. “Jimmy goddamn Hayes,” he said. “Kid’s got the guts of a bed-wetting chipmunk. January second.” He shook his head. “I let him stick around while I was going to go in, right? I didn’t even tell him about the diary. I just wanted to amaze him. Stole some smokes from my dad, brought Jimmy in here, and just casually leaned against the mirror. Nothing. I got so mad, I pushed him into it.” He opened his eyes for the first time in a couple of minutes and looked right at me. “Took him three hours to come back. He ended up in some basement. Thought it was me playing a joke, and started yelling for me. Someone came, and he ran out of there. Spent all that time wandering around, then snuck back in a window. Course, at the time, he didn’t even know what was going on. I had to explain when he got back.” Rick dropped his cigarette and ground it into the floor. “So you think it’s all about this dead baby? Some kind of mission in the past?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean—I think so. The girl from 1987, Luka. She found a message as well. It told her to help me.”

“But how can you save the kid if you’ve already found its body?”

I held up my hands. “I don’t know. I don’t get it. But somebody asked for my help.”

Rick closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath, then let it out through his teeth in a long sigh. “You’re a weird kid, you know that? Okay, H. G. Wells.” He stuck his hand in the inside pocket of his jean jacket and brought out a squat leather-bound book with pages sticking out of it.

“What is it?” I said, looking at his outstretched hand.

“The diary. I can’t make much sense of it. There’s the mirror stuff, and some stuff about jobs he had, but the rest? Guy thinks he’s two different people or something. Take a look anyway.”

“Why are you giving this to me?”

He looked away. The light of the Coleman stove caught a bitter twist in his face. “Comic books. That was my big idea, you know that? I mean, I thought about stock market and crap like that as well, but I figured who wants to figure out how to invest in stocks. I figured I’d get all the other kids who could go into the mirror—we’d pass stuff up and down the line and make some money.” He shook his head. “Christ. Time travel—and I wanted to sell comic books. Go on, H. G. Wells. Take it. Save the baby. Maybe there’s a reason the damn mirror didn’t open up for me.”

The Rules

6. You can’t ever really change anything.

Luka, when she next made it to my time more than a week later, was astonished by my story, which I told her over some microwaved lasagnas she had swiped from her mother’s fridge and “nuked” just before coming through. The cold of backward time travel didn’t affect inanimate objects. Your clothes and your possessions didn’t freeze, just your skin and everything underneath.

She felt sympathetic at Rick’s disappointment. “Can you imagine? He knows all about it, and then he has to watch some wimp go instead?” As a card-carrying member of the wimp party myself, I didn’t like this judgment, but then I didn’t like what I had seen of Jimmy Hayes either. “So what’s with this diary he gave you?”

I brought it out from hiding. “It’s not just one diary. This crazy guy must have somehow got a hold of old diaries from two other people—I think it’s Rose and Curtis from the list. So he cut them all up and pasted them in here, but the paper’s old. Anyway, listen.”

I read her the first two entries, which I had puzzled out in the last week.

January 18, 1917

Dear Diary,

Am I a fool to love Clive Beckett?

Should I run through my mirror into the past and warn my six-year-old self never to smile at him or think him fine? I have given him everything, and now all he can give me is the role of the faithful girl keeping the home fires burning.

But, Diary, oh what news I have! I have already told you not to suspect me of madness when I wrote to you about my magic mirror. Now I have found it is not mine alone. Two days ago, as I was combing my hair for bed, a little boy stumbled through.

This boy’s name is Curtis, and he is a glum little thing, just nine years old. The mirror is so much more than I thought. This Curtis is from ten years onward. I asked him what he is doing in my house, in 1927, and what do you think he said? He is my brother, not even born in this year. Further, he said that another child, someone called Lillian, comes and visits him from ten years further. Am I, I asked him, Mrs. Clive Beckett in your time?

I think I am a shrewd enough judge of character to sense that there was something this little boy wasn’t telling me. He told me that, yes, I am married to Clive Beckett and we have three children and live nearby. But each answer was preceded by such stammering and looking off that I wonder if he is my brother at all.

He said that he would come again in two days and bring more news from ten years on.

How vast the world is, and strange.

That entry, along with all those pasted onto the left-hand pages of the book, was in the same hand that had written the list I had found weeks ago. The right-hand pages were in a more childish style and quite often from ten years to the day after the ones they faced.

January 18, 1927

Rose is the girl in the past. That’s my sister who died when I was two. She said I should keep a diary of what happens, but I won’t let her see it. Seems nice so I don’t want to tell her the truth. Lillian came through again. She is nicer than Rose and doesn’t ask lots of questions. I wonder if I will meet her when I am older in her time.