by Ann Hood
They were not at all prepared for what they found.
The kitchen looked exactly as they had left it. Even the dirty dinner dishes with the orange remnants of mac and cheese had not been cleared.
Before they had a chance to comment on any of it, their mother stumbled into the kitchen, yawning, her hair all tangled from sleeping on it, and her face creased from lying on her pillow.
When she saw them standing there, she frowned.
“You’re up already?”
Maisie and Felix glanced at each other.
“Why are you just standing there like that?” she said suspiciously.
Once again, they glanced at each other.
“Okay, fess up. What have you done?” she demanded.
When they didn’t answer, she muttered, “I don’t like surprises before I’ve even had my first cup of coffee.”
With that, she went over to the coffeemaker and busied herself measuring grounds and filling it with water. She pressed the BREW button and turned back to them.
“Mom,” Felix finally managed to say, “what day is it?”
“Thursday,” she said.
“Thursday, September . . . ?”
“Fifth,” she said, narrowing her eyes.
Now Maisie and Felix exchanged stunned looks. They had traveled to 1836, spent a night at Captain Stephen Barton’s farm in Oxford, Massachusetts, and spent another half day with Clara there, yet apparently no time had passed at all.
“Amazing,” Maisie whispered.
“It’s like we didn’t leave at all,” Felix said.
Their mother poured coffee into her SAIL NEWPORT mug that had come in the preservation society’s gift basket when they moved in. She studied both of them as she took a big swallow.
Then she pointed her finger and said, “September fifth. You know what today is.”
Felix groaned. “School.”
Their mother smiled. “School. I’m going to shower, and you two need to get ready.”
“Mom?” Maisie called to her back.
Their mother poked her head around the doorway.
“Could we go visit Great-Aunt Maisie after school?”
With that, their mother came all the way back into the kitchen.
“You want to visit Great-Aunt Maisie?”
Maisie nodded.
Their mother dramatically placed the back of her hand onto Maisie’s forehead, then Felix’s. “No fever,” she said. “Maybe heat exhaustion?” Shaking her head, she walked back out.
In no time, they heard the sound of the shower and their mother humming some show tune.
In a way, everything was perfectly normal. And in another way, nothing at all was the same.
The First Day of School
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Robbins,” Vice Principal Gale said, “but it’s school policy to separate twins.”
Vice Principal Gale looked like a tank. Short and stout, she seemed as tall as she was wide, and her skirt and her matching jacket were army green. Adding to the overall military impression she made, her voice rat-a-tatted like a machine gun. She didn’t sound at all sorry that Maisie and Felix had been placed in different fifth-grade classrooms.
“Mrs. Gale,” their mother said, speaking in a hushed tone. “I understand the policy, I do. But Maisie and Felix have had such a disruptive year, with their father and I divorcing and him taking a job far away, and then being uprooted, leaving our home, and moving here to Newport.” Her voice cracked. All of this upheaval had taken its toll on her, too.
Mrs. Gale nodded with a sharp bend of her chin. “I understand. That is a lot of disruption, you’re absolutely right.”
Maisie and Felix sighed with relief.
“However, a policy is a policy. And I have found children to be remarkably resilient.”
“What?” their mother said.
“So Maisie here will be in Mrs. Witherspoon’s class,” Mrs. Gale said, placing a firm hand on Maisie’s shoulder, “and Felix will be in Miss Landers’s.” She placed her other hand squarely on Felix’s shoulder.
“But, Mrs. Gale—” their mother began.
Mrs. Gale had already begun to move them down the corridor, her hands on their shoulders, keeping a tight grip.
“Kids?” their mother called after them.
But so firm was Mrs. Gale’s grip that they couldn’t turn their heads or even lift their arms to wave good-bye.
P.S. 3, their school in New York, had been a low, modern building built in the early 1960s. It had scuffed linoleum floors in varying patterns of faded green and gold, faded yellow and green, and faded brown and gold. The walls were painted a dingy mustard, and the fluorescent lights emitted a constant hum throughout the day.
But this school was old and well-kempt, with polished wooden floors and metal pegs to hang coats and fancy molding around the tops of the walls. The walls themselves were half paneled, then painted a buttery yellow all the way up to those fancy moldings. The school smelled as if someone had just gone through it and polished every inch of it with lemon furniture wax and then added a hint of wool and some chalk dust.
Despite himself, Felix fell in love with the school as Mrs. Gale propelled him toward Miss Landers’s classroom. Maisie, however, looked miserable. She’d spent way too much time trying to figure out what to wear. Jeans or a skirt? Sneakers or flip-flops? A T-shirt or a button-down shirt? Finally, exasperated, Felix had told her to dress however she would dress back at P.S. 3. But now she wondered if her pink Converse high tops, the jean skirt she’d made herself from an old pair of her mother’s Levi’s, and the faded green T-shirt that said STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER were the right choice.
“Maisie,” Mrs. Gale said, stopping them from going any farther, “this is Mrs. Witherspoon’s classroom.”
Mrs. Gale dropped her hand from Felix’s shoulder and ordered him to wait in the corridor. Felix watched as his sister, shoulders slumped, scuffled in behind the vice principal.
With a quick handover of permanent records and grade transcripts, Mrs. Gale was gone, and Maisie was left standing awkwardly in front of a classroom of twenty-eight students, all of them staring at her. The meeting with the vice principal had taken longer than expected, and Felix and Maisie would be walking into their classrooms after they had already started.
Mrs. Witherspoon was old and wrinkly with a gray bun and glasses that made her eyes look huge and buggy.
“So . . . ,” she said, scanning the folders. “Maisie?”
Maisie nodded.
“Like the department store?” someone in the back heckled.
“No,” Maisie said at the exact time that Mrs. Witherspoon said, “Yes.”
“No,” Maisie said again, louder this time. “That’s Ma-cy.”
“Well, excuse me,” the heckler said. He was a tall boy with a sweep of bangs over his forehead and a jersey with a number on it.
The class laughed.
“All right, Maisie,” Mrs. Witherspoon continued. “There’s a seat for you right up front.” She handed Maisie a stack of textbooks and then seemed to forget all about her.
“Back to our math review,” Mrs. Witherspoon said.
She went up to the blackboard and began to write problems on the board. Maisie glanced around. Some kids were copying the problems into notebooks, some were whispering to one another, and some were simply daydreaming. It seemed like Maisie was already forgotten.
She took a pencil and a notebook from her backpack and sighed. Now she knew which kind of new kid she was: the kind who simply disappeared.
Miss Landers was beautiful. She had long, dark hair and big, blue eyes, like Snow White come to life. She gushed over Felix, telling him how she had lived in New York City during college.
“Boys and girls,” she said, �
��isn’t New York City an exciting place? What do we know about it?”
She pulled a map down over the blackboard. First she pointed out Newport, then New York state, then New York City.
Kids shouted out things they knew about it, like Broadway and the ball dropping in Times Square on New Year’s Eve and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Yes! Yes!” Miss Landers cried after each new thing, which she then wrote on the blackboard in lovely, curly penmanship. “We’ll add From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler to our reading list this year. The story takes place in New York City,” she said as she wrote the book’s title on the board, too.
“Aren’t we lucky to have Felix in our classroom? He can tell us so many things about New York City. Maybe we’ll do a project on New York City.”
Excitement bubbled up in the room as Miss Landers went on and on about New York City, and kids asked Felix if he’d ever been to the Thanksgiving Day parade and if he’d lived in an apartment and if he took the subway alone.
“Now,” Miss Landers said after a good, long while, “who can find a seat for Felix?”
Children stood and reshuffled themselves, calling, “Sit here, Felix, sit here!”
Grinning, Felix made his way down the aisle to a seat smack in the middle of everybody and sat down.
In Mrs. Witherspoon’s classroom, things weren’t going as well.
“For your first homework assignment, you must write a report on someone who changed the world,” Mrs. Witherspoon said.
“Like Lance Armstrong?” Ginger Beatty said.
Mrs. Witherspoon frowned. “Lance Armstrong . . . Lance Armstrong . . .”
“Come on, Mrs. W,” Patrick Sullivan groaned. “He’s like the most famous cyclist ever.”
“And he survived cancer,” Ginger added primly.
“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Witherspoon said. “The yellow rubber bands.”
“Livestrong bracelets,” Ginger corrected.
Mrs. Witherspoon nodded. “Well, actually, Mr. Armstrong does not qualify for this report. You’ll need to pick a person who isn’t widely known, yet changed history.”
The class waited for her to say more, but Mrs. Witherspoon just sighed and glanced at the clock.
“Shall we line up for dismissal?” she said.
“But how many pages do we have to write?” Molly Tapper cried. All day long Molly had whined and gotten nervous about almost everything. “And when is it due?”
“The report is going to be oral. You’ll stand right up here in the front of the classroom and give the report. On Monday.”
The whole class seemed to groan at once.
“Is Abraham Lincoln okay?” Thad Brown asked. Thad was taller and older than everyone else. Maisie wondered if he’d already started to shave or if he just had kind of a grimy chin.
“No, no,” Mrs. Witherspoon said. “Everyone in this classroom has heard of Abraham Lincoln.”
Maisie wanted to ask if they had to give a report on somebody no one had ever heard of, how were they supposed to pick someone to write about. But she didn’t want to draw attention to herself. She’d managed to pass the whole day without one person talking to her. On her way to recess, she’d passed Felix, and he was so busy talking to a bunch of kids, he didn’t even notice her.
She waited until it was her row’s turn to get in line. Then she collected her things from her cubby and stood in the dismissal line. Molly Tapper stood next to her.
“I don’t know who to write this report on,” Molly said to her in a trembling voice.
“You’ll think of somebody,” Maisie said.
“How?”
Maisie shrugged.
Mrs. Witherspoon clapped her hands to get the class’s attention.
“By the way, you are not allowed to use the computer for this assignment. No Google or Wahoo.”
The class tittered.
“Yahoo,” someone said.
“Or that,” Mrs. Witherspoon said.
“But how will we get our information?” Molly said.
“Go to the library,” Mrs. Witherspoon said.
“The library?” Molly whined.
“Yes,” Mrs. Witherspoon said, clearly finished with the discussion and the kids. “The library.”
The dismissal bell rang.
“And I don’t know if my mother will even take me to the library . . .”
Molly’s voice droned on and on, high-pitched and shrill. Slowly, the line began to inch forward.
The weight of all the things in her life made Maisie move heavily. How would she ever survive the school year? How would she ever even write this report? Then, as clear as anything, a brilliant idea came to her. The most brilliant idea. She practically smiled at poor Molly Tapper . . . she practically smiled at old Mrs. Witherspoon, standing there all flustered as the class filed out. . . she practically smiled at Newport, Rhode Island, waiting right out the big double doors.
Because Maisie knew absolutely who she would write about.
Angel of the Battlefield
“I have the worst teacher ever!” Maisie told Felix outside the school. “She’s ancient.”
“Oooh,” Felix said. “Sorry.”
They walked along the broad street, past the small shops and cafés that lined it. The cool air already hinted at autumn, and Felix could see splashes of color as the leaves on the trees were just beginning to turn red and gold. If they turned right onto Thames Street, they could walk along the harbor. It wasn’t the direct way home, but Felix wanted to look at the boats there, the sleek yachts with exotic locations and the sailboats with their mysterious names. The sailors intrigued him, too. They had weathered faces and strong arms, and a look about them like they’d led interesting lives. Felix liked to try and imagine what it might be like to sail across the ocean.
Just when he was about to suggest going that way, Maisie grabbed his arm and tugged him in the opposite direction.
“But Mrs. Witherspoon gave us the most wonderful assignment ever,” Maisie said.
“Since when does homework make you happy?” Felix said.
“The assignment is on someone who changed history, someone most people haven’t heard of.”
Felix nodded. “Like Clara Barton?” he said.
“Who knows? Maybe that letter from Dorence Atwater influenced history,” Maisie said.
“And in there is the answer,” Maisie said, pointing to the library.
They climbed the stairs and walked inside. Maisie marched right up to the information desk.
“I’m looking for information on someone named Clara Barton, please. And my teacher said we couldn’t use the Internet.”
The librarian smiled. “Oh, you have Mrs. Witherspoon, I see.” The librarian tapped on her computer keyboard, then said, “Right this way.”
Maisie and Felix followed the librarian up the stairs and through a maze of rows and rows of books, until she finally stopped, scanned the shelves, and then pointed.
“This row,” she said with a sweep of her hand.
“You mean the book’s on this shelf?” asked Maisie.
“No,” answered the librarian with a grin. “All the books on that shelf are about Clara Barton.”
“Wow,” Felix said under his breath.
Felix and Maisie lifted their gaze to take in all the books with the name CLARA BARTON on their spines.
“If you need anything else, come get me,” the librarian said.
When she walked away, Maisie and Felix looked from the books on the shelf to each other and then back to the books.
“I guess,” Maisie said finally, “she did something important. Maybe she became the first woman doctor.” Her voice sounded hushed and awed as if just the sight of these books had great signi
ficance. “Or the first woman general in the army.”
“She would have liked that,” Felix said.
“I guess there’s enough here for my report,” Maisie said, still staring up at the books without taking even one of them down from its place on the shelf.
“I guess,” Felix said.
Maisie slowly reached a hand up and took one of the books. The picture on the cover showed a stern-faced woman with dark hair beneath a cap.
“Is that Clara?” Felix asked, surprised.
Maisie nodded.
Once on television he’d seen some device that could take a picture of a baby and age it so that you could see that person as a child and then a teenager and then older and older, all the way through old age. That’s what he felt he was looking at. No matter how hard he stared, he could not find the teenage Clara in this middle-aged woman’s face.
Maisie flipped the book open and randomly stopped on a page.
“‘On April 20, 1862, after the First Battle of Bull Run, General William Hammond gave Clara Barton permission to ride in army ambulances. There, she provided comfort and nursing to the soldiers,’” she read. “‘She petitioned to bring her own medical supplies . . . in July 1862, she traveled behind the lines to some of the grimmest battlefields of the war, including the Siege of Petersburg and Richmond, Virginia.’”
“She did it,” Felix said. “She went to war, in a way.”
“In the best way a woman could back in 1862, I guess,” Maisie said thoughtfully. “‘Eventually,’” Maisie read, “‘she was put in charge of all the hospitals.’”
Now Felix took one of the books from the shelf. He went to the index in the back and looked for Dorence Atwater. When he found it, he turned to that page and read to himself about the very list he and Maisie had held in their hands.
“Listen to this,” Felix said. “Abraham Lincoln put her in charge of finding out all of the names of the men from the Union Army who were missing and contacting those families!”
Maisie had now filled her arms with Clara Barton books. She held one up for Felix to see.