by Ann Hood
“Don’t worry,” Maisie continued. “I just want to see it, that’s all.”
“Really?” Felix asked, doubtful.
“Promise,” Maisie said. “Besides, it’s probably still underwater.”
Felix let himself picture their old apartment. He imagined the kitchen with the old six-burner stove their father had salvaged and repaired as a gift for their mother. And he pictured his mother at that stove, stirring spaghetti sauce and humming a song from an old Broadway show. He could see his father’s bike hung on the wall in the entryway, and the clutter of their rain boots and Rollerblades and sneakers beneath it. The way those shoes mingled, with Felix’s laces tangled in his father’s and Maisie’s rain boots tucked into their mother’s Wellies, anyone would know a family lived there.
“Okay,” Felix said.
His mouth had gone dry, and the word came out like a croak.
“Now let’s see,” Maisie said, “we just have to get to the subway at Lexington Avenue and Fifty-Third Street.”
“I don’t think so,” Felix said.
“You think we should walk over to Broadway instead?”
“Maisie, think about it.”
“You want to walk over to Eighth Avenue?” Maisie said, turning west. “Fine with me.”
“Maisie, it’s 1894,” Felix said. “There are no subways yet.”
Maisie stopped in her tracks.
She couldn’t imagine New York City without subways. One rainy Saturday, their father had taken them to the Transit Museum. They’d sat in old subway cars and saw the different ways fares had been collected, like the first paper ticket-choppers and the later turnstile designs that accepted coins and tokens. But she couldn’t remember exactly when subways had started.
“Granville T. Woods,” Felix said. “Invented the third-rail system for conducting electric power to railway cars. Without it, we wouldn’t have had subways at all.”
“Sounds vaguely familiar,” Maisie mumbled. She hated when Felix knew more than she did.
“And as it is, we don’t have subways at all right now. I think they’re about ten years away.”
“So we . . . walk? Sixty blocks?” Maisie did some fast calculating. Over three miles.
“No,” Felix said. “We take one of those.”
He pointed upward at an elevated train track with a train clacking along it.
“I suppose it’s as easy as finding one going downtown,” he said.
It was that easy. Twenty minutes later, Maisie and Felix were crossing Fourteenth Street and heading down Hudson Street. When they reached the corner of Hudson and Bethune, Maisie literally jumped with joy.
“We’re home, Felix!” she said, clapping her hands.
Felix stood still, taking in everything around them. It looked the same, but it also looked completely different. Instead of cars moving up Hudson Street, there were carriages pulled by horses. And the smell of horse manure was almost suffocating in the summer air. Felix could actually see piles of it everywhere.
“Look, Felix,” Maisie said, pointing down Hudson.
On the corner, two blocks away, stood the White Horse Tavern, right where it stood when they lived in the neighborhood. It looked exactly the same, too, just the way it looked when their father went there after work on Friday nights.
“Wow,” Felix said.
He glanced down their block. The corner where a D’Agostino’s supermarket should stand now had an apartment building on it instead.
“No D’Ag’s,” Maisie said as if she’d read his mind. “But it’s the same building!” she realized.
“You’re right,” Felix said.
He took a deep breath and started down their block, Maisie walking close beside him.
“I don’t know why, but I feel kind of creepy,” Felix said.
They stopped in front of 10 Bethune Street.
“It looks the same,” Maisie whispered.
His mouth had gone all dry again so Felix just nodded.
“If we go around the corner, and you stand on my shoulders, you can look inside our apartment,” Maisie said hopefully.
“Well,” Felix managed, “we’ve come this far. Might as well.”
They rounded the corner onto Greenwich Street. A light shone in the window of what would have been their living room.
“I guess someone’s home,” Maisie said.
“Kneel down,” Felix told her.
Maisie kneeled as close to the window as she could get, and Felix climbed onto her shoulders. The apartment seemed lower to him. But maybe he had grown in the almost year since he’d last been on Bethune Street.
Felix pressed his face to the window and peered inside.
“Do you see anything?” Maisie asked him, trying hard to stand steady.
“You won’t believe it,” Felix said.
“A family?” she asked, hoping he didn’t see that.
“Hardly,” he said, hopping off her shoulders.
She waited.
“Our apartment,” Felix announced, “is a bakery.”
“A what?”
“Yup. There’s a row of big ovens and all kinds of baking stuff. I saw giant burlap bags of flour in there, and sugar and salt.”
“No kids? No beds or—”
“It’s a bakery,” Felix said firmly.
“I like that,” Maisie decided.
A bicycle came screeching to a halt beside them, almost knocking Felix down.
“Hey!” Maisie yelled at the kid on the bike. “Watch where you’re going!”
She glared at him, but the boy gave her a giant smile.
“Aha!” he said. “I figured you’d show up here sooner or later.”
Felix studied the boy’s face.
“I know you,” he said thoughtfully.
But even as he said it, he knew it was ridiculous. How could he know a kid—or anyone—in 1894?
The kid wasn’t listening to him, though.
“I went up to the Weisses’,” he said. “But they said you’d all gone off to Pennsylvania—”
“Ohio,” Maisie corrected.
“Okay, Ohio,” the boy said. “Then I saw the sign over at Tony Pastor’s, and I knew you’d be back any day now. I thought, Where will those two end up? And then I thought, They’ll want to see their crummy little apartment over on Bethune Street. And I was right.”
That voice, Felix thought. More than that voice, that attitude. So familiar.
“Wait a minute,” Maisie said. “How do we know you?”
Before the kid could answer, that photograph on the wall going up the Grand Staircase in Elm Medona flashed through Felix’s mind. Great-Aunt Maisie posing for the camera, and Great-Uncle Thorne sticking his face in the picture.
This was that same face.
“Great-Uncle Thorne!” Felix managed.
The kid clicked his heels and bowed.
“One and the same,” he said. “One and the same.”
If there was one thing Maisie knew for certain—and right now, she did not feel certain of very much—she knew this neighborhood. She knew how the Mexican restaurant on the corner kept Christmas lights up all year and how the little café used barrels for tables; she knew that a few blocks north, where she and Felix and the somehow teenage Great-Uncle Thorne walked, fancy clothing boutiques lined the street. Except instead of fancy boutiques selling ridiculously high heels and tiny, wispy dresses, slabs of meat hung from hooks, dripping blood onto the streets. The air reeked with an irony smell combined with the odor of raw meat and sweat.
“Slaughterhouses,” Great-Uncle Thorne said when he saw the look of disgust cross her face. “This is the Gansevoort Market, home to over two hundred slaughterhouses.”
Felix gulped the
fetid air, trying not to gag.
“Also home to the best steak and eggs in the city,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, leading them past cow carcasses and pig heads and large strips of who knew what other kinds of meat.
Even when they ducked into a tiny restaurant, the smell followed them.
Felix glanced around the crowded place. Men in blood-splattered aprons shoveled huge amounts of steak and eggs into their mouths. It seemed they all knew one another, and their loud conversations made the place practically buzz.
Great-Uncle Thorne ordered three plates, then squeezed into the corner table with them.
“I don’t understand,” Maisie said as soon as he sat down.
He raised his eyebrows at her.
“How . . . ,” she began, but she stopped because there were so many things she didn’t understand, she wasn’t sure what to ask first.
“How did I get here?” Great-Uncle Thorne asked.
“That we can figure out,” Felix said. “At least, I think we can figure it out,” he added.
Great-Uncle Thorne leaned back in his chair and surveyed them.
“You don’t know very much about how all this works, do you?” he asked. He had to practically shout to be heard over the din of noise there.
Felix shook his head.
But, insulted, Maisie said, “We know how it works. We need a shard from the Ming vase. I guess we don’t actually have to be in The Treasure Chest, but we both need to touch the object.”
Satisfied, she smirked at Great-Uncle Thorne.
“Ha!” he said. “Just as I thought. You don’t know anything about it.”
“Well,” Felix said, “we don’t know how you can be here as a . . . a . . .”
“Young man?” Thorne said, smiling wickedly.
“Right,” Felix said.
Great-Uncle Thorne—it was hard to still think of him this way now that he was a teenager—leaned closer to them.
“You don’t know why The Treasure Chest exists, do you?”
Without waiting for an answer, he continued. “You don’t know why you two can do it when, for example, your parents couldn’t. Or why Maisie and I can do it, do you?”
Again, he kept talking before they could answer. Rhetorical questions, Felix thought.
“You don’t know why Maisie kept those handcuffs all these years or why she’s been trying to get back here, do you?”
“All right!” Maisie said angrily. “Fine. We don’t know any of that. So why don’t you tell us?”
Just then, a man with massive arms rippling with muscles and covered with tattoos slid three heaping plates of food onto their table. He slapped down three cups of black coffee, splashing as he did. He grunted something at them, then walked away.
Great-Uncle Thorne cut into his bloody steak with delight.
“Bon appétit!” he said.
Felix stared down at the steak, blood oozing from it. His stomach flipped.
“Excuse me,” he called to the man who had brought them the food.
The man stopped and glared at him.
“I like my steak well done,” Felix said.
“That is done well,” the man said gruffly.
“No,” Felix said. “This is rare.” He held up a bloody piece of steak as evidence.
The man threw back his head and laughed heartily. “Rare?” he managed to say. “Hardly, my boy. The streets are full of beef. It ain’t at all rare.”
“I mean, it’s cooked rare.”
“Whatever you say, son,” the man said, wiping at his eyes and walking off. “Whatever you say.”
The eggs, which Felix didn’t like, either, had blood seeping into them. He pushed the plate away and tried to focus on what Great-Uncle Thorne, who was chewing away happily, was about to tell them instead.
“So tell us,” Felix urged. “Why can we do it?”
“Why do you think?” Great-Uncle Thorne said between bites.
“Because we live in Elm Medona?” Maisie guessed.
“Irrelevant!” Great-Uncle Thorne announced.
“Because we’re related to Phinneas Pickworth?” Felix said.
“Closer,” Great-Uncle Thorne said.
“You’re just like Great-Aunt Maisie,” Maisie grumbled. “She can never tell us anything. She always makes us figure it out.”
Great-Uncle Thorne’s blue eyes glistened. “That’s how we were raised. Our father loved puzzles and games, anagrams and mysteries.”
“Well it’s not fun,” Maisie told him. “It’s frustrating.”
“Twins!” Felix said suddenly. “We’re twins. And you and Great-Aunt Maisie are twins.”
“Aha!” Great-Uncle Thorne said. “You’ve got it. You need twin power to time travel.”
Maisie and Felix waited while he wiped up some egg with a hunk of bread and took a bite, which he chewed slowly.
Finally, he patted his mouth with a napkin, took a satisfied breath, and said, “My father, Phinneas Pickworth, and his twin sister, Amy, grew up time traveling. As did their father, Thaddeus, and his twin sister, Isabel. All Pickworth twins have done it.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Maisie said, shaking her head.
Great-Uncle Thorne looked at her, surprised.
“There’s only two shards missing from the vase,” Maisie said. “You can’t do it without a shard.”
Thorne waved his hand at her like she was a fly he was shooing.
“From this vase,” he said. “The original Treasure Chest, and everything in it, was destroyed when the original Elm Medona burned down before Maisie and I were born.”
“What?” Felix said. “There was another Elm Medona?”
Great-Uncle Thorne nodded. “The cottages used to be made of wood. Many of them burned down.”
“It was in Newport, too?” Maisie asked.
Great-Uncle Thorne nodded again. “My father spent years traveling the world for objects to put in our Treasure Chest. Including replacing the Ming vases. He led an expedition through China searching for their matching twins.”
“Twins,” Felix said softly.
“Fine,” Maisie said. “But what I want to know is how you can be sitting here and only be sixteen years old? When we were standing in the auditorium at school, you were old.”
At that, Great-Uncle Thorne’s face grew worried. “Yes,” he said. “This is all my sister’s fault. If I ever see her again—”
“Then she’s not with you?” Felix said.
“I haven’t seen her,” Great-Uncle Thorne said. “I was hoping you two had.”
“But where could she be?” Felix said, panicking.
Great-Uncle Thorne sighed a deep sigh. “She’s had this plan for decades.”
“What plan?” Maisie asked.
“Many, many years ago,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, “we picked up that pair of handcuffs in The Treasure Chest and landed here. In fact, we landed at Coney Island.”
“That’s where we landed,” Felix said. “Didn’t you?”
“I did,” Great-Uncle Thorne said. “Smack on the midway. Thought I broke my hip. I lay there staring up into the face of a woman who looked quite worried. ‘Young man,’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’ I glanced left, then right, trying to see this young man of whom she spoke. She leaned closer to me. ‘Young man?’ she said, and that’s when I knew it was me to whom she referred. I was a young man.” He said this last with a sense of awe.
“But Great-Aunt Maisie?” Felix asked.
“By the time I got up and the woman inspected me and pronounced me fit to walk, Maisie was nowhere in sight.” His jaw set with determination. “Of course I hightailed it straight to that rapscallion’s show, certain I would find her there. But she seems to have vanished.”
Great-Uncle Thorne narrowed his eyes. “Harry Houdini,” he said as if it pained him to utter the name.
“But that’s where we’ve been!” Felix exclaimed. “We’ve been staying with his family, and we went with him and his brother to Ohio and—”
“Stop!” Great-Uncle Thorne shouted.
Everyone in the restaurant went silent.
Great-Uncle Thorne stood, slamming his fists on the table.
“I hate Harry Houdini!”
After they calmed Great-Uncle Thorne down and left the restaurant with him, Maisie dared to ask why he hated Harry Houdini with such a passion.
“I’m not crazy about him, either,” she said. “He thinks he’s the greatest thing ever, and he says youse and ain’t, and he’s obsessed—”
“You don’t have to tell me about Harry Houdini,” Great-Uncle Thorne said through gritted teeth. “I know all about him.”
The three of them had walked uptown for several blocks, and slowly the smells of blood and meat were replaced with the wonderful aroma of baking bread.
Felix looked at the redbrick building in front of them. He blinked to be sure he saw what he thought he saw.
Satisfied, he forgot all about Great-Uncle Thorne and Harry Houdini and grabbed his sister’s shoulder.
“Look!” he said, pointing. “We’re at the Chelsea Market!”
Maisie broke into a smile. For a moment, this felt like her New York. The Chelsea Market was where they would go with their parents to buy specialty foods like good extra virgin olive oil and fresh fish.
But her smile disappeared as she read the sign: NATIONAL BISCUIT COMPANY.
“Nothing’s the same,” she said sadly.
“Of course it isn’t,” Great-Uncle Thorne snapped at her. “You don’t travel back in time to keep everything the same.”
That reminded Felix of what they had been talking about a few minutes earlier.
“Why do you hate Harry Houdini so much?” he asked Great-Uncle Thorne.
“Because he and Maisie fell in love, that’s why. When we came here all those years ago, they fell in love, and Maisie wouldn’t come home with me. She said she was going to stay in 1894. With Harry. Even though she knew what happens if you stay . . .”