by Ann Hood
“I’m sorry,” their mother said. “I just… I mean… where is she?”
The nurse shook her head in wonder. “It’s the darnedest thing,” she said. “For weeks now she’s been slipping again. Not as bad as she was when she first came in here. But you know, getting more and more frail. Then last night, she comes walking down the hall without her walker! I jumped up, thinking maybe she was sleepwalking or worse, but she says, ‘I’m just stretching my legs,’ and when I tried to help her, she actually pushed me away. It was so great to see her being so feisty!”
Although their mother looked surprised, Felix knew for certain what he had suspected was true: Every time they time traveled, it made Great-Aunt Maisie stronger.
“And where is she now?” their mother was asking.
“She insisted on going out to the garden,” the nurse said. “By herself.”
“But she’ll catch pneumonia out there,” their mother said. “It’s cold outside.”
The nurse shrugged. “You try telling Maisie Pickworth what to do,” she said.
“We’ll go get her, Mom,” Felix offered. “You can make her some tea for when she comes inside. She’ll like that.”
“Good idea,” their mother said, already reaching for the kettle. “She does like her Earl Grey.”
Maisie and Felix found Great-Aunt Maisie sitting on one of the stone benches in the garden behind the Island Retirement Center. The garden looked out over Narragansett Bay, but Great-Aunt Maisie had her eyes closed and her face tilted up toward the sun. She wore her usual face powder and rouged cheeks and red lipstick, and she had on a big, reddish fur coat with long, black gloves that had tiny pearl buttons up their sides.
Maisie and Felix stood uncertainly in front of her, not wanting to disturb her.
“I know you’re here,” Great-Aunt Maisie said without opening her eyes. “I’m not that dotty.”
“You just looked so…” Felix searched for the word.
“Content,” Maisie finished for him.
Great-Aunt Maisie opened her eyes then.
“That’s because I am content,” she said in a strong voice. She had a rich person’s accent, slightly British sounding and very confident.
Her eyes twinkled. “You two had an adventure, I think?”
“Oh, Great-Aunt Maisie,” Maisie said. “We went to China!”
Great-Aunt Maisie clapped her hands together gleefully. “China! How marvelous.” She pointed one of her slender fingers at them. “Confucius?”
They looked at her, confused.
“Mao Tse-tung?”
When they didn’t answer, she said sharply, “Who did you meet there?”
“Oh!” Felix said. “Pearl Sydenstricker.”
“Pearl Sydenstricker,” Great-Aunt Maisie said with a laugh. “Do you know who she is?”
Felix shook his head.
“Pearl Sydenstricker grew up to be Pearl Buck,” Great-Aunt Maisie said as if the name Pearl Buck meant anything to them.
When she saw that it didn’t, she shook her head in disgust.
“What do they teach children in school these days?” she said. “Haven’t you read The Good Earth?”
“No,” Maisie said.
“But you’ve heard of it, of course,” Great-Aunt Maisie said.
“No,” Felix admitted.
“You poor, ignorant things,” Great-Aunt Maisie said. “The Good Earth is a novel by Pearl S. Buck that was published in 1931 and won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1932.”
“Pearl won the Pulitzer Prize?” Felix said.
“And the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938,” Great-Aunt Maisie said. “The first American woman to do that,” she added.
“She does love to tell stories,” Maisie said.
“What’s it about?” Felix asked.
“I shouldn’t tell you, should I?” Great-Aunt Maisie said. “You should both read it, I daresay.”
“Please tell us,” Felix asked.
“It’s about life in a village in China before the revolution,” Great-Aunt Maisie said. “And that’s all I’ll say. You need to read it to really understand it.”
“I read a lot,” Felix said softly.
“What do you read? Comic books?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “Well, now you’ll have to read your friend Pearl Buck’s books, won’t you?” she said with a slight smile on her face.
“Yes,” Felix said.
Even though he felt scolded, he didn’t care. Pearl had become a famous writer! A prizewinning novelist! This made him so happy, he could ignore Great-Aunt Maisie’s comments.
“Great-Aunt Maisie?” Maisie was asking.
“What is it?” Great-Aunt Maisie said, pulling the collar of her coat tighter around her against the wind that was picking up.
“We can’t figure out how to get home when we’re… away,” Maisie said.
The wind whistled around them.
“You need to use your brain,” Great-Aunt Maisie said. “How do you think you get home?”
“We don’t know,” Maisie said, clearly disturbed by Great-Aunt Maisie’s curtness today.
“At first we thought we just needed to give the object to the right person,” Felix explained. “Like we gave Pearl a jade box filled with dirt.”
“And?” Great-Aunt Maisie said.
“That isn’t how it works,” Maisie said. “We figured that out.”
“This time, we were sitting up in bed, talking with Pearl and all of a sudden we were on the floor of The Treasure Chest,” Felix said.
“Mmmm,” Great-Aunt Maisie said. “Sitting up in bed. Talking.”
“Right,” Maisie said.
Great-Aunt Maisie looked at them as if she were waiting for something.
“Sitting?” Maisie guessed.
But Felix was already shaking his head.
“No,” he said. “We were standing with Alexander in the cemetery.”
“Well, talking then?” Maisie asked impatiently.
Great-Aunt Maisie didn’t answer. She just sat there, waiting. The wind grew louder still, and now gray clouds raced across the sky, blocking the bright sun.
“Just tell us!” Maisie said.
“Why should I tell you what’s as clear as the nose on your face?” Great-Aunt Maisie said.
“Wait,” Felix said thoughtfully. “Pearl was telling us about her sisters and brothers who died. And Alexander was telling us about being an orphan.”
“So?” Maisie said. “And Clara was telling us about her own aunt, the nurse.”
A small smile crept across Great-Aunt Maisie’s face.
“And?” she said.
Felix smiled, too. “They need to give us something as well, don’t they?” he said. “We give them an object from The Treasure Chest, and they give us advice or a lesson of some kind. Something we need back home.”
Maisie did not understand. “They didn’t give us anything at all,” she said.
But the more Felix thought about it, the clearer it became.
“But they did, Maisie,” he said. “You were furious with me in China, and Pearl told us how important and precious siblings are. No sooner did she say that and we made up, then we were home.”
“And Alexander told us how lucky we were to have our parents, even if they weren’t together,” Maisie remembered.
Felix nodded. “It was Clara who told us we should listen to you, Great-Aunt Maisie,” he said.
“Ha!” Great-Aunt Maisie said. “I’m glad someone has some sense.”
The trees began to practically bow in the increasing wind.
Great-Aunt Maisie shivered in her fur coat.
“I don’t like this wind,” she said, looking out toward the bay.
The water had turned from blue-green to gray, and whitecaps now danced across it.
“Maybe we should go inside,” Felix suggested.
“Something’s coming,” Great-Aunt Maisie said. “Something bad.”
“No, no,” Maisie said. “I
think it’s just a winter storm.”
Great-Aunt Maisie stood. Her posture was perfect: her head held high, her back as straight as a ruler.
“We shall see,” she said. “We shall see.”
“Mom?” Felix asked their mother in the car on the way back from visiting Great-Aunt Maisie. “How old is Great-Aunt Maisie, anyway?”
“Hmmm,” their mother said. “Funny, but I don’t really know.”
“Do you think she’s a hundred?” Maisie asked.
“No,” their mother said. But then she said, “Well, maybe.”
Their mother grew thoughtful.
“She has so much spunk, doesn’t she?” she said with a small smile. “Hey! I just had a great idea.”
“Uh-oh,” Maisie said.
“She’s feeling so well,” their mother continued, “we should have her come home for Christmas.”
The very idea made Felix uneasy. If Great-Aunt Maisie got anywhere near The Treasure Chest, who knew what she would do? Of course, she didn’t have a shard from the Ming vase, and they had learned that they needed that to time travel. But what if she got a hold of theirs? Was it possible to go back in time alone? Felix thought he needed Maisie in order to do it, but who knew what Great-Aunt Maisie was capable of?
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said, elbowing his sister.
“Me neither. Where would she sleep?” Maisie asked. “How would she get up all those stairs? What if she got sick or something?”
“I’m going to call her doctor as soon as we get home and see if he’ll approve it,” their mother said as if they hadn’t protested. “You know, when I was a very little girl, I had one Christmas at Elm Medona. I’ll never forget eating at that enormous table in the dining room on the Pickworth china, those two Ps looping together. It took four butlers to even move the chair so that I could climb onto it.”
Their mother’s eyes had grown dreamy as she talked.
“I’ll never forget that Christmas. We had goose for dinner. And oysters and cheese soufflé.”
“Great-Aunt Maisie won’t want to come to Elm Medona,” Maisie said. “It will make her sad.”
“I know!” their mother said, still ignoring anything they offered. “I’ll re-create that dinner for her.”
“Goose?” Felix said miserably. “You’re going to cook a goose?”
“And mincemeat pies and, oh! That’s right, a plum pudding. The cook baked a ring into it, and whoever got the slice with that ring was going to have good luck.”
Felix thought about flying the kite with Mr. Kung and Pearl, how it had lifted and dipped before it floated upward.
Their mother smiled at them in the rearview mirror.
“This is going to be a good Christmas after all,” she said.
Over the next week, while Maisie and Felix fretted over how to keep Great-Aunt Maisie out of Elm Medona and The Treasure Chest, their mother studied cookbooks and made elaborate lists and menu ideas. Whenever they wandered past her, she looked up, happily dazed, and said things like, “I think that goose I had here as a child was stuffed with apples and prunes and chestnuts,” or “Did you know that the secret to a good soufflé is to resist the temptation to open the oven door while it’s baking?”
On the last day of school before Christmas vacation, Maisie and Felix came home from school to find their mother sitting at the kitchen table with the Blond Woman.
“We haven’t done anything wrong!” Maisie blurted as soon as she saw her.
The Blond Woman glared.
“Maisie, Felix,” their mother said. “I invited Barbara here to discuss the possibility of actually having Christmas dinner in Elm Medona’s dining room.”
“It seems that if your great-aunt is in attendance, this can be arranged,” the Blond Woman said, clearly unhappy about the rule.
Her double chin rested on the top of her light-blue turtleneck, quivering ever so slightly when she spoke. A navy-blue cardigan was tied jauntily around her shoulders. Maisie wondered if she had a closet full of sweaters, the sleeves already looped together, waiting for her.
“Barbara was just explaining all the rules to me,” their mother said with false cheerfulness.
“Great,” Felix said with his own false cheerfulness.
Their mother sighed. “This will make Great-Aunt Maisie so happy,” she said.
“Well, we must keep Miss Pickworth happy,” the Blond Woman said.
She rose, smoothing her khaki skirt as she did.
“So,” their mother said, leading her to the door, “on Christmas Eve, we’ll have hors d’oeuvres and wine at six, serve dinner at seven sharp, dessert by eight thirty, and finish up by nine or nine thirty.”
“At the latest,” the Blond Woman said firmly.
“At the very latest,” their mother said agreeably.
From the window, Maisie and Felix watched as the Blond woman got into her fancy, foreign car and drove off. As soon as the sound of the engine disappeared into the distance, their mother let out a huge sigh.
“What an awful woman,” she said. “Smug and bossy and obnoxious. But,” she added, a smile spreading on her lips, “like all women like that, if you let her feel superior, she gives you exactly what you want.”
“Mom,” Felix said tentatively, “I know you have your heart set on this, but—”
She didn’t hear him, though. She was humming some song Maisie and Felix didn’t recognize and making notes in the notebook she’d dedicated to Christmas Eve dinner.
On Christmas Eve morning, Maisie woke up to the sound of something so familiar, and so wonderful, that instead of groaning at the sun or burrowing deeper under her covers, she lay in bed with her eyes open and listened closely to whatever was making her feel so good this early.
From the kitchen down the hall came the smell of strong coffee and the murmur of voices.
Maisie’s bedroom door opened, and Felix practically bounded into her room. His cowlick stuck up sharply and his glasses were perched on the tip of his nose, both indications that he, too, had been awakened.
“He’s here,” Felix said.
Maisie nodded.
But Felix was taking her hands now and tugging her up and out of bed.
“I almost feel,” she said, running her fingers through her tangle of hair, “that if we walk in that kitchen he’ll disappear.”
Felix understood. He, too, was overcome by the feeling that these moments before they went down the hall to the kitchen were precious and practically magical.
But he assured his sister, “He won’t disappear.”
Together they walked slowly down the hall, the voices growing louder as they neared the kitchen.
At the sound of their footsteps, the voices stopped. Maisie and Felix stepped over the threshold into the kitchen, right into the waiting arms of their father. He scooped them both up at once and hugged them to him so tightly that for an instant they couldn’t catch their breaths. Or was it being in his arms at last that caused that?
“You have both grown a mile,” he murmured into the tops of their heads.
Maisie took a deep breath, inhaling their father’s smells of Old Spice and turpentine and that unnamable scent that was just his alone.
Gently, he put them both down.
With his feet back on the floor, Felix gazed up the length of their father, all six feet four inches of him. Starting with those familiar hiking boots he wore every winter, scuffed and laced with bright-red laces, past his favorite worn jeans that seemed about to tear in places but managed to hold out year after year, to the slight swell of his stomach pushing against his denim shirt, to his five o’clock shadow sprinkled across his chin and cheeks, and then taking in his green eyes and tumble of dark curls just flecked with silver. Maybe there was a little more silver than the last time he’d seen him, Felix decided. But otherwise he was 100 percent their father, Jake Robbins.
He reached his long arm across to the counter and held up a Dunkin’ Donuts bag.
“Plain with chocolate sprinkles for you,” he said, handing a doughnut to Felix. “And a chocolate-glazed chocolate for you,” he told Maisie.
Felix bit into his doughnut and wondered if anything had ever tasted sweeter.
“Jake,” their mother said, and her voice startled both Maisie and Felix because they had forgotten all about her. “Napkins.”
“Ah, yes,” he said, winking at them. “The crumb patrol.”
A bit of awkwardness settled between their mother and father as he rooted around for napkins and distributed them. That was when Maisie and Felix remembered that their parents were no longer married or in love. In fact, they didn’t even like each other very much anymore.
“So,” their father said, “I couldn’t wait to see you guys, but I have to go check into the hotel and maybe catch a little shut-eye. I understand there’s quite a shindig here tonight.”
“But you can’t go already!” Maisie said, spilling chocolate doughnut from her mouth.
“You just arrived,” Felix said.
Their father turned toward their mother, who was standing in her old, green bathrobe, her arms folded tightly across her chest and her favorite doughnut—a plain cruller—left untouched on a napkin beside her.
“I could take them with me,” he said carefully. “They could show me around town a bit.”
“Please, Mom,” Maisie pleaded.
“Well,” their mother said, and they could see her trying to decide what to do. “I suppose I can handle all the dinner preparations.”
“We’ll even pick up Great-Aunt Maisie,” their father said. “Deliver her here safe and sound.”
“No later than six,” their mother said sternly. “We have to start at six sharp or—”
“Six sharp,” their father said gently.
“Well then,” their mother said to Maisie and Felix. “What are you waiting for? Go and get dressed.”
A day with their father, just the three of them, was better than any Christmas present Maisie or Felix could imagine. They bounced on the bed in his room at the Viking Hotel, and Maisie used all the free body lotion in the bathroom while Felix channel surfed on the flat-screen TV. Then they got in his rental car and led him past their school and Bannister’s Wharf and First Beach, trying in a few hours to fill in all the weeks and months they’d lived without him. They had lunch at The Fisherman’s Catch, big bowls of creamy clam chowder and stuffed quahogs, the two of them chattering the entire time and basking in having their father so near.
