Prince of Air

by Ann Hood

  Unlike Great-Aunt Maisie, who kept her blue eyes focused straight ahead as they moved down the central aisle of folding chairs, Great-Uncle Thorne made eye contact with just about everyone who dared make eye contact with him. His bushy white eyebrows wiggled, and his head bobbed back and forth.

  Felix felt embarrassed to have everyone watching them. He was nervous enough about his magic act. Now he had to have just about the entire audience whispering about the Pickworths and wondering how old these two must possibly be and where they’d been for so many years. He glanced up at Maisie, but she had a bemused, almost happy look on her face as if she enjoyed all the attention.

  Finally they reached the front row where three pieces of printer paper with RESERVED PICKWORTHS written on them in black marker sat on the three center seats.

  “Reserved?” their mother asked, confused.

  She walked last in their little group, following Great-Aunt Maisie’s lead.

  “Of course,” Great-Aunt Maisie said haughtily. “The Pickworths always have their seats reserved.”

  “In the front row,” Great-Uncle Thorne added.

  That was probably the first thing those two had agreed on since he’d shown up at Christmas.

  “Center,” Great-Aunt Maisie said, sitting in the center seat of the three reserved ones as if to finalize her point.

  “Well, it’s just a middle school show,” Felix and Maisie’s mother said dismissively. “Honestly. No need to put people to so much trouble.”

  Great-Aunt Maisie shifted in her seat and held up the printer paper she’d sat on.

  “Jennifer,” she said, her voice icy, “I hardly think anyone was put out by taking some paper, scribbling on it, and tossing it on some rickety folding chairs.”

  She shifted again. “Chairs that feel like they were retrieved from a trash heap,” she added. “Pickworths always went to the Field School.”

  “The Field School closed in 1969,” their mother said.

  “We have to get backstage,” Felix said.

  “Break a leg, you two,” his mother said.

  Great-Aunt Maisie nodded in their general direction, and Great-Uncle Thorne ignored them completely as they left the auditorium to get ready.

  Despite her earlier reluctance, Maisie seized on her role as magician’s assistant to Felix. She slipped on her black-ruffled tulle skirt, tights decorated with silver stars, and her mother’s old high black platform shoes. On top, she wore a faded leotard, but she threw a dramatic cape over her shoulders. The cape was also black, but the lining was an iridescent blue. Maisie made Felix sprinkle almost an entire tube of glitter on her.

  “Don’t forget the hair,” she told him, scrunching her eyes shut.

  “You sparkle everywhere,” Felix said when he’d finished, stepping back to examine his handiwork.

  He wore the tuxedo that almost fit him and Great-Uncle Thorne’s top hat. From behind the curtain, Maisie and Felix watched Lily Goldberg play her cello. Felix wished he could have asked Lily to be his assistant, especially for the handcuff trick that Great-Aunt Maisie had shown him. Though she didn’t want magic in the house for a reason Felix didn’t understand, she seemed very interested in the handcuff trick and that he do it just right.

  “Remember,” she’d advised, “it is not the trick that is to be considered, but the style and manner in which it is presented.”

  Then Great-Aunt Maisie had explained to him that all he had to do was have his assistant give him a kiss for luck, handcuff him so that his hands were behind the chair he sat in and away from the audience, give the handcuff key to a member of the audience, then distract everyone by swirling her cape dramatically and leaping around like a crazy person.

  “And I get out of these handcuffs how?” Felix said.

  He had no desire to get stuck handcuffed to a chair and have to get the dumb things sawed off him.

  “I’m satisfied with the disappearing handkerchief, you know,” he’d said.

  But Great-Aunt Maisie was practically jumping with excitement. “Here’s the thing,” she said excitedly, clapping her hands together. “The key Maisie gives to someone in the audience isn’t the real key.”

  “Okay,” Felix said. “So where is the real key?” His wrists itched just thinking about this trick going badly wrong.

  Great-Aunt Maisie opened her mouth and pointed.

  “In my mouth?” Felix said.

  “Not your mouth, you dolt. In your assistant’s mouth. When she kisses you good-bye, she slips it into your mouth—”

  “Gross! I’m not having a key that was in Maisie’s mouth slipped into mine. By my sister? No way.”

  Great-Aunt Maisie shook her head, disgusted. “Of course not. You choose the most beautiful girl you know and ask her to do it.”

  Felix thought about Lily Goldberg and blushed. Thankfully, Great-Aunt Maisie didn’t notice. She just kept on explaining.

  “And while your beautiful assistant is twirling and spinning like Isadora Duncan, you—”

  “Who?” Felix asked.

  “Don’t you know anything?” Great-Aunt Maisie said. “Isadora Duncan is only one of the most famous dancers who ever lived. Poor thing. Such a tragic end.” She sighed. “Why am I even bothering to teach you this trick?”

  “Exactly,” Felix told her. “I’ve got the card trick and the disappearing—”

  “Two tricks?” she bellowed. “You call that a magic act?”

  “It’s just the school Talent Show,” Felix mumbled.

  “While she’s cavorting around the stage, you take that key and unlock the handcuffs. Abracadabra! You are a handcuff escapist.”

  Felix pondered the trick. Lily Goldberg slipped the key into his mouth. He removed it and hid it in his hand until the handcuffs were locked. She cavorted as Great-Aunt Maisie called it, and abracadabra, he was free. And he got a chance to have Lily Goldberg’s mouth on his mouth for a second or two.

  Watching Lily now, he couldn’t help but wonder what it would feel like to have her kiss him for luck and slip him the key.

  Then he caught sight of Maisie standing in the wings waiting, glittering like crazy and chewing her bottom lip.

  Lily finished.

  The audience gave her a standing ovation, then the lights went dark for five seconds and Maisie and Felix took the stage.

  The card trick went without a hitch.

  The disappearing handkerchief, thanks to the distance from the front row to the stage, also got big applause.

  Then Felix announced his final trick.

  “That’s right, ladies and gentlemen,” he said in his best magician-sounding voice, “my assistant here will handcuff me to this chair, and I will free myself before you can count down from ten.”

  Maisie stood in the spotlight. She handcuffed him to the chair.

  “And now, my assistant Lily Goldberg will join us.”

  “What?” Maisie said.

  Lily Goldberg came on the stage.

  “Felix?” she said. “May I give you a kiss for luck?”

  “Well,” he said reluctantly, “I guess so.”

  The audience laughed.

  Felix tried not to look at his sister, whose face had filled with betrayal and disappointment.

  Lily made her way to him, walking on exaggerated tiptoes. She bent primly at the waist and slipped the key from her mouth to his. Felix thought he might faint from the brief contact her lips made on his, almost like a butterfly landing on them.

  Maisie stood awkwardly onstage, feeling yet again like a third wheel. She might never talk to her brother again. From the stage, she could see her mother and Great-Aunt Maisie and Great-Uncle Thorne perfectly. Her mother beamed up at her, but the other two sat unmoving and seemingly unmoved. Even as Maisie dramatically threw the fake key in
to the audience and handcuffed Felix to the chair, their expressions didn’t change.

  “Let’s start the countdown,” Maisie said. “Ten . . .” Let Lily Goldberg feel like the outsider, she decided.

  The audience joined in, and Maisie leaped and twirled her cape.

  At three, Felix’s hands shot into the air, the handcuffs swinging, unlocked.

  Maisie thought she saw Great-Aunt Maisie give the smallest smile then, but she couldn’t be sure. People jumped to their feet, clapping like crazy, and her family got lost in a blur of faces.

  While their mother went to get the car, Felix and Maisie stood by the entrance to the stage door with Great-Aunt Maisie and Great-Uncle Thorne.

  “It was great, wasn’t it?” Maisie asked them.

  “Entertaining,” Great-Uncle Thorne said.

  “Felix is actually getting good at magic tricks, isn’t he?” Maisie persisted, taking off her cape.

  “Oh,” Great-Aunt Maisie said, “I’ve seen better.”

  Felix scowled at her.

  “Here’s the handcuffs you loaned me,” he said.

  Suddenly, Great-Uncle Thorne grew animated.

  “You loaned him those?” he roared.

  The handcuffs dangled between the four of them.

  “That’s right,” Great-Aunt Maisie said. “They’re mine.”

  “Don’t give them back to her,” Maisie said, grabbing the handcuff that Felix wasn’t holding.

  “Felix!” Great-Uncle Thorne said. “Put them away!”

  “No!” Great-Aunt Maisie said. “You know they’re mine, Thorne.”

  She tried to yank them free from Maisie’s and Felix’s grasps, but Great-Uncle-Thorne was yanking them in the other direction.

  The smell of Christmas trees filled the air. And vanilla. And salt water.

  Felix and Maisie felt themselves being lifted and tossed and pulled. Their eyes opened wide in disbelief. What was happening? Great-Uncle Thorne somersaulted beside them, his face bewildered. Then Great-Aunt Maisie shot past them, her mouth opened into a happy O of surprise and delight.

  They tumbled and rolled, faster and faster.

  But where were they going? And how?

  There was no time for answers. Like that, Great-Aunt Maisie, Great-Uncle Thorne, Felix, and Maisie were gone.

  Even though Felix landed hard, his back crashing onto a wooden floor, he still oddly had the sensation of moving. Moving slowly. Upward.

  He opened his eyes and saw a sea of high-button boots, long skirts, and stiff trousers.

  “Little boy,” a woman with a feathered hat scolded, “get back up here or you’ll fly off.”

  Felix pulled his aching self up to a sitting position. He was facing about a dozen people sitting on a wooden bench, staring down at him.

  He grinned up at them and took the hand of a man with a mustache even bigger than Great-Uncle Thorne’s, letting the man help him to his feet. Everyone scrunched over so that he could squeeze in.

  In the distance, Felix saw the ocean glittering bright blue. Combined with the sky, equally as blue and sprinkled with perfect white fluffy clouds, he felt as if he had landed smack in the middle of a postcard. A postcard that was definitely going up a hill along a creaky track. The people around him looked like they had stepped out of a postcard, too, with their big hats and suits and funny shoes.

  A few of the women were holding hands tightly and staring all wide-eyed and scared.

  “It’s my first time,” one of them said. She had hair in big, bouncy banana curls, and the tip of her nose was sunburned.

  “Mine too,” the dark-haired one beside her said in a quivering voice.

  Felix nodded at them as if he understood. Shifting his gaze in the other direction, away from the ocean, he saw a giant fake elephant. There appeared to be people standing on top of it.

  The car reached the top, paused, then coasted down the track.

  Everyone except Felix screamed or gasped or laughed nervously.

  Felix smiled. Wherever he had landed, this was a roller coaster. The slowest roller coaster he’d ever been on.

  From between the banana-curled girl and the dark-haired girl’s legs, Maisie’s head popped out.

  “What was that?” she said, laughing.

  The man with the giant mustache glared at her.

  “Young lady,” he said. “You have just taken a ride on the Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railroad.”

  “I have?” she said, scrambling to her feet.

  The roller coaster had come to a stop, and everyone was getting out. But instead of leaving the ride, they were getting into another car.

  The girl with the banana curls fanned herself wildly. “I thought I was going to faint,” she said. “Didn’t you?”

  Her dark-haired friend nodded and wiped her forehead with a small white handkerchief.

  Maisie and Felix tried not to laugh as they followed them out of the car and onto another one.

  “Now what?” Maisie asked.

  “We’re switching tracks,” a woman explained. “So that we can go up that hill.”

  Once again, the car crept up a hill along a wooden track, going slower than the speed limit on Thames Street back in Newport. Once again, it paused at the top, then made its rickety way down. As the people around them screamed and closed their eyes, Maisie and Felix laughed.

  A few summers ago, their father had taken them to Coney Island, where they’d ridden an old wooden roller coaster called The Cyclone. Felix, terrified, could only do it once. But Maisie and their father rode it over and over again, her squeals filling the salty amusement park air. Their father had told them that at the turn of the twentieth century, amusement parks were built at seaside resorts like Coney Island and Atlantic City and all along the coast of New England. Most of those parks were long gone now, he’d said. A lot of them got destroyed by fires because everything in them was made of wood. Others had closed due to neglect. Surely they were in one of them right now.

  Felix studied the clothes of the people sitting on the bench with them. Yes, they looked like people from the turn of the century. And there was the ocean in the distance. He even heard the sound of the music that played on merry-go-rounds.

  The car came to a halt, and everyone stood to disembark.

  Maisie grabbed Felix’s arm and pointed to the words written in lights across an arch.

  “How did we get so lucky?” she said.

  Felix read the words out loud.

  “Coney Island,” he said.

  To time travel and land in an amusement park—and not just any amusement park but an amusement park in New York—made Maisie about as happy as she could be. Not only could they ride rides all day (although she hoped the other rides were better than that lame roller coaster), eat hot dogs, and walk on the beach, but she could pretend she lived back here and at the end of the day get on the F train and head home. Almost a perfect day. Except for one thing: Where were Great-Aunt Maisie and Great-Uncle Thorne?

  If she asked Felix, he would get all worried, and there would go their day of fun. He would want to find them, and instead of getting on . . . Maisie tried to take in everything she was seeing and decide what to do next . . . there! That Ferris wheel over there. Instead of riding that, they would have to walk up and down looking for two cranky old people.

  “Look!” she said to her brother. “Let’s go on the Ferris wheel.”

  The sign in front of it said: WORLD’S LARGEST FERRIS WHEEL. Which it wasn’t. The thing had only twelve cars and moved excruciatingly slow.

  Still, she grabbed Felix’s arm and pulled him toward it. Her plan, she decided, was to keep him too busy to wonder about Great-Aunt Maisie and Great-Uncle Thorne. Eventually they would find whomever they needed to find, give him or her the handcuffs, t
hen go back home. For all they knew, Great-Aunt Maisie and Great-Uncle Thorne were still standing in the auditorium at Anne Hutchinson Elementary School, fighting over the handcuffs.

  Maisie stopped suddenly.

  The handcuffs. Who had the handcuffs? She didn’t. She lifted her hands in front of her face just to be sure. Her black, tulle magician’s assistant skirt didn’t have any pockets, and neither did the old leotard she had on from her misguided efforts at a ballet class last year. The thing had small pils all over it and was just tight enough to be uncomfortable and ride up her butt. No pockets there.

  She glanced at Felix, who was staring at the Ferris wheel with a worried expression. Maybe he had the handcuffs in his pocket? But if she asked him that, and he didn’t have them, then he would get worried about how they were ever going to get home and their day would be ruined. Maisie sighed over all the things she had to keep quiet about so that Felix would stay calm.

  “World’s largest Ferris wheel!” she said, continuing toward it.

  This time, Felix took her arm and stopped her.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “We have to pay for a ride.”

  He pointed to a sign.

  “Five cents, to be exact,” he said.

  Of course they had to pay, Maisie scolded herself. How could she be so dumb? Somehow they had to find some money. She wasn’t going to be at Coney Island on a beautiful day and not ride the rides.

  Maisie’s face brightened.

  “Uh-oh,” Felix said. Clearly she’d come up with a scheme that he would no doubt not want to be part of.

  “Do you have your cards with you?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said carefully.

  “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 the 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 . . .”