Jewel of the East

by Ann Hood

  “Well then, we’ll have to get to work, won’t we?” Maisie told him.

  Performing card tricks on the runway of Coney Island was one of the last things Felix wanted to do. But he recognized that determination in his sister’s eyes. No matter what he said, he would never be able to convince her that this was a bad idea.

  He took the deck of cards from his jacket pocket, shuffled them, and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, what I have here is an ordinary deck of cards…”

  An hour later, Maisie and Felix had two dollars and twenty-five cents, and they were sitting in one of the wooden cars on the Ferris wheel, slowly rotating upward.

  “You promised we could go on The Roundabout,” Felix reminded Maisie.

  They were standing on top of a giant, wooden elephant called The Elephant Colossus. They’d already gone inside its legs. One had a cigar store and the other sold postcards. The body of the elephant was a hotel, and here, twelve stories up, was an observation deck where they could look down on the runway, which throbbed with people.

  Dusk had settled over Coney Island. The beach beyond the amusement park was still crowded. People splashed in the ocean beneath a reddish-orange sky.

  “I know,” Maisie said. “It’s just hard to get enthusiastic about a merry-go-round.”

  “I went on The Serpentine Railroad with you,” he said. “Three times.”

  The Serpentine Railroad was the other roller coaster. It went all of twelve miles an hour, twice as fast as The Switchback but still eternally slow. Felix had started to enjoy the slower pace of the rides, how the Ferris wheel took almost twenty minutes to go around, and how the roller coasters felt like rides in a convertible, the wind blowing on his face and the salty ocean air mixed with the smell of hot dogs roasting and the pungent oil they used to grease the tracks.

  Those hot dogs. Felix had eaten three. And two Italian ices sold by a man in a straw hat and red-and-white-striped jacket. He played a strange instrument that he told them was called a hurdy-gurdy. It had strings and a keyboard, and the man cranked it to make music that sounded almost like bagpipes. As he played it, a skinny, little monkey with big eyes danced in front of him.

  Thinking about it made Felix hungry again. He smiled to himself. What a perfect day this had been. He had been careful not to mention the fact that they had no idea where Great-Aunt Maisie or Great-Uncle Thorne might be. Maybe they were out there somewhere in that crowd waiting in line to ride the Ferris wheel or enter one of the sideshows. Maybe they were back in Newport at Anne Hutchinson Middle School. Felix knew that if he speculated as to their whereabouts with Maisie, she would get mad at him for ruining the day. He could almost hear her grumbling about those old people getting in the way of a perfect summer day at Coney Island.

  Wait a minute, Felix thought. A perfect summer day?

  “Maisie?” he said.

  “Okay, okay, we’ll go on the merry-go-round.”

  “Wasn’t the Talent Show in March?” he asked.

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “That rhetorical question is supposed to make me realize something, right?”

  Felix opened his arms wide. “It’s definitely summer here.”

  “So?” she said.

  She hated when he figured something out before she did. What did it matter that the Talent Show was in March, and it was summer here at Coney Island in 18… 18-whatever?

  “Sir?” Felix said, turning to the man beside him. “What’s today’s date?”

  The man laughed. “Why? Do you have an important engagement?”

  “As a matter-of-fact,” Felix said. “I kind of do.”

  The man furrowed his dark eyebrows. “It is June 18, 1894.”

  With slow, deliberate motions, the man pulled a very large pocket watch from his vest pocket.

  “And,” he added, “it is seven seventeen in the evening.”

  He wiggled his eyebrows and turned back to his conversation.

  “How could we have traveled to a different day?” Felix blurted.