by Ruth White
As I enter the room, I find a man perched on one of the couches, and Jennifer has disappeared. My tutor is middle-aged, has sandy-colored hair, and is not particularly large or scary, as Tom said he would be. Still, I’ll be the best girl in the world for him.
“Good afternoon, sir,” I say as politely as I can.
“Call me Mr. Baum,” he says grumpily. “Now, Meggie, what’s the problem?”
“Problem? There’s no problem, Mr. Baum. I was a bit bored, that’s all, so I didn’t do my lesson yesterday. But I’m very sorry, and I’ll work twice as hard today, and I promise you won’t ever have to come here again.”
He looks at me funny but says nothing. I sit down on the couch and turn on the TV. My class is already under way. We’re doing fractions today.
“So you’re bored with fractions?” Mr. Baum asks.
“Yes, sir, but I totally know my fractions. I’ll show you.”
“Totally?”
“Uh … just an expression. But I do know them.”
I spend the next few minutes following my television teacher, doing everything she tells me to do, and at the same time, I illustrate fractions with a pie chart on another sheet of paper.
“No wonder you’re bored,” Mr. Baum says at last. “You do know this stuff.”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“I understand you’re new in our city, so you must have taken a placement test.”
“Yes, sir, I did, but maybe I didn’t feel good that day, and my mind wandered. I guess I was daydreaming.”
Uh-oh. That was the wrong thing to say, because “The daydreamer is discontented,” according to the Fathers.
I try to explain. “I mean, sometimes I start to think of other things. I have this whole other world in my head, you know?”
Wrong thing to say again. Mr. Baum is frowning at me.
“What I mean is my mind goes somewhere over the rainbow, to another land.” Yeah, I’ve got this pretty well bungled, but I manage to smile.
“I know what you mean,” Mr. Baum says, and I’m so surprised I drop my pencil. “My wife, Maud, said to me the other day, ‘Frank,’ she said, ‘are you unconscious or what?’
“And I say back to her, ‘Whatever do you mean, my dear?’ And she tells me that sometimes she has to speak to me three or four times to jog me out of my fantasies.”
Frank? Frank Baum? No, this couldn’t be the L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, could it?
“Anyway,” he goes on, and laughs a little nervously, “no need to repeat what we say here today, right?”
“Right!” I agree with all my heart.
He settles back on the couch and looks out the sliding glass doors at the sky. Right now it seems he couldn’t care less about tutoring. Maybe he sees his own other world out there—maybe the land of Oz.
“Uh, Mr. Baum, sir,” I say to him. “Can I ask you what your first name is?”
“It’s Lyman, but I don’t like it. Why do you ask?”
So it must really be L. Frank Baum. Come to think of it, he looks like photos I’ve seen on Wikipedia, except that in those pictures he has a big mustache, and today his face is shaved clean. Maybe it’s because in Fashion City, hair on the face is considered grossly unique?
“Just curious,” I tell him. “Have you ever written a book?”
He looks at me sideways. “A book? I should say not. Why do you ask me that?”
“I like reading way better than arithmetic, Mr. Baum.”
He hesitates for a long moment, then whispers, “I’ve read a few books.”
“I bet you could write a real good one yourself,” I tell him.
“Well, I’ve never tried such a thing,” he says with a chuckle, and I get the feeling he is not telling the truth. “Why, I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“Can I tell you a story?” I ask him.
He fidgets around a bit but says nothing. I take that as a yes.
“It’s about a little girl from Kansas, a scarecrow, a tin man, and a cowardly lion.”
I can almost see his ears prick up and his eyes begin to sparkle. I start the story. Mr. Baum sits on the edge of his seat the whole time, hangs on every word, and never takes his eyes from my face. I talk for I don’t know how long. I relate every detail I can remember from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. When I’m finished, he asks me a thousand questions about the story. Then he sits there staring at me.
“I’ve dreamed such a dream as that,” he says at last.
“Dreamed it?”
“Yes, I have very vivid and detailed dreams. I have seen that land many times, and I know those characters very well. I didn’t have a name for Dorothy, but now I do.”
“That’s amazing,” I say.
“It’s a magnificent story,” he says dreamily. “If I were going to write a book—mind you, I said if—it would be something like this one.”
“If you want to write it—and mind you, I said if too—then you should use that idea, because I don’t believe anybody in this world has put it on paper.”
He doesn’t say anything, but I can almost hear his mind spinning.
“You could even add your own ideas and make it better,” I tell him.
“I’m not sure it could be any better,” he says, “except for one thing.”
“And what’s that?”
“I would name the girl Meggie instead of Dorothy. It’s a more lively name. I mean, with your permission, of course.”
Now I can’t stop grinning. “Totally.”
He walks to the sliding glass doors and once again looks dreamily into the sky. If only there were a rainbow out there right now. Wouldn’t that be perfect? But there’s nothing except haze. L. Frank Baum turns back to me.
“I do find the land of Oz interesting,” he says, “very interesting indeed. But you know what is more fascinating to me? Kansas. Now, there’s a place I would love to see. It seems like paradise.”
Kansas? Paradise? Yeah, coming from a Fashion City person, I can see that.
Suddenly the bedroom door flies open and David comes charging down the hallway and into the living room, rubbing his eyes.
“I fell asleep,” he says. “How did it go with your tutor?”
He stops dead when he sees said tutor by the glass doors. Mr. Baum is gaping in the direction of the bedroom, where David apparently has left the door standing open, giving a clear view of the Carriage.
“What is that thing?” Mr. Baum gasps. Nobody answers, and he asks, “Does it fly?”
David comes to his senses and hurriedly runs to close the bedroom door.
“The Wizard of Oz has a flying machine,” Mr. Baum says. “Is that …?”
David comes back and says, “It’s nearly three o’clock, Meggie. I thought your lesson was over long ago.”
“I guess we lost track of time,” I say.
Mr. Baum is unable to contain his excitement. “I must say this has been the most fascinating tutorial I’ve ever had.”
I turn to my brother. “David, this is Mr. L. Frank Baum.”
David is rendered speechless, but it’s okay, because Mr. Baum doesn’t seem to notice that an introduction has been made.
“How I wish my family could meet you!” he says to me.
“Uh, well …” I don’t know how to respond.
“The L. Frank Baum?” David manages to speak at last.
But nobody answers him.
“I mentioned my lovely wife, Maud, to you,” Mr. Baum is saying to me, “and we have four handsome boys.”
“That’s cool,” I say.
He rubs his big hands together gleefully. “But my, oh, my, this is splendid!”
“Mr. Baum,” David says. “I hope you can keep a secret.”
Mr. Baum finally notices David. “Of course, my boy, I understand. I know what would be done to you and to your—your flying apparatus, and Meggie with her delightful imagination. Believe me, I totally know.” He turns to give me a smile before going on. “And you
r secret is safe with me.”
Still smiling, he walks back and forth across the floor several times before stopping in front of me, where I remain seated on the couch.
“I hope you’ll let me come and tutor you again, Meggie, dear.”
I nod, because I don’t have the heart to say no.
“Wonderful, delightful, splendid,” he says. “Now I must go. I have to get started.”
“Started on what?” David asks.
L. Frank Baum looks from David to me and smiles. “A secret project. Right, Meggie?”
“Right,” I say.
Mr. Baum walks to the door, then turns back to me and makes a long, low, exaggerated bow, the kind you might see people doing on a stage. When he comes up again, his words somehow sound like they come from a play as well.
“O brave new world, that has such people in ’t.”
Have I heard that before? I’m pretty sure I have.
“That’s a quote I picked up in one of my dreams,” he explains.
Then he’s gone, and David and I stand there for the longest time just staring at the door.
Finally, David turns to me and says, “Girl, L. Frank Baum thinks you’re awesome.”
• 34 •
Mom gets home shortly after five, and I’m right in the middle of telling her about L. Frank Baum when Gil and Jennifer come in.
“Do finish telling me later,” Mom says to me. Then she turns anxiously to Gil. “How did it go?”
A slow smile spreads over Gil’s face. “Good.”
“And you got the room number?”
“Yes, it was easy.”
Relief is written all over Mom’s features. “Tell us what happened.”
“Well, I was able to talk to Lewis this time, and he was glad to hear from me. Said he missed his old friends in Fashion City. Again, I pretended I was working on a TV special. He was impressed with that and agreed to help. So I said I’d get back in touch with more details. Then I cut to the chase.
“Lucky for me, I remembered Lewis always loved a good joke better than anything. So I told him that a man from my building was there for Vacation 65.
“I said, ‘This old guy is quite a character, and he told me the best joke I ever heard. He had me and the kids rolling on the floor. You should look him up and get him to tell it to you.’
“So Lewis got Gramps’s name, and I said, ‘Tell the old man you want to hear that joke called Make Room for the Carriage!’ ”
“Cool!” I squeal. “Gramps will know it’s a message from us.”
“Yeah, Lewis even repeated it back to me. ‘Make Room for the Carriage!’ And guess what else? He just happened to have on him a roster of current residents! I guess it’s necessary in his job. And he said to me, ‘Yeah, here he is. Sam Lane. Room 204.’ I didn’t even have to ask.”
Mom is so pleased with Gil, she throws her arms around him and kisses his cheek.
“So, we can leave now, right?” I say, then turn to Gil. “Where’s Colin?”
“Don’t worry, Meggie B., we won’t forget Colin,” Gil says with a chuckle.
I feel my face go hot. Does everybody know?
“Just give me time,” Mom says, “to take this new information and work out the coordinates for the Carriage. Then we’re out of here.”
I follow Mom to the Carriage and watch as she figures the coordinates for Farlands, and then for the Western Province. Yeah, that’s exactly the way I would do it. I’m so pleased with myself, I almost tell her what I’ve been up to, but I decide that can wait until there’s not so much going on.
“I guess we’re ready to go,” Mom says, and gives me a hug. “Can you believe it?”
At that moment we hear a loud noise from the living room and a booming voice.
“Police!”
Mom and I clutch each other. Is it the military police looking for Colin, or the regular police here to arrest us? We make ourselves tiny and slip out the bedroom door so that we don’t reveal the Carriage. We find four military police officers in the living room. Gil, Jennifer, and David seem petrified.
“And he told you he was going to keep switching trains and buses?” one of the officers is saying to Jennifer in a very gruff voice.
Jennifer nods, apparently too scared to speak.
“Well, he’s done a good job of it,” the same officer says. “This is the second day, and nobody can find him.”
“Well, I’m sure that’s where he is,” Jennifer manages to say. Her voice trembles.
“Can you describe what he’s wearing?” A second officer speaks up.
Jennifer and Gil look at each other and slowly shake their heads.
“No, sorry,” Jennifer says. “I didn’t pay any attention.”
“Okay,” MP #1 says in a less harsh voice. “Not to worry. He’s going to run out of food and water and money. He’ll be easy enough to apprehend then.”
Gil finds his voice at last. “Can you believe these kids today?”
“Ain’t it the truth?” MP #1 agrees, almost friendly now.
“We just need to search your apartment,” MP #2 says.
“I’d tell you if he was there,” Gil says.
“But we have to search, just so we can say we did it. A mere formality, you know?”
“Absolutely,” Gil says. “Let’s go.”
Gil and Jennifer leave our apartment with the officers. Mom, David, and I breathe a sigh of relief. If they should decide to search here … Well, I can’t think about that.
“How did they know to come here?” Mom asks David.
“Tom,” David says. “The spy.”
“Well, all we have to do now is wait for the police to finish up,” Mom says. “We can fly as soon as they leave the building.”
“What about Colin?” I ask.
“Not to worry,” Mom says. “He’s close by.”
“How close?”
Mom just smiles and turns on the TV. We sit in silence while a sitcom plays out. I have no idea what it’s about, but I’m sure we’re not missing anything. In a little while Mom gets up and nukes enough frozen dinners for everybody. Then she sits back down and we wait some more. At seven-thirty the Gilmores still haven’t come back. We try to eat our food, but most of it goes into the garbage disposal. Then Mom begins to pace. David and I go out on the balcony to see if we can hear anything from upstairs. Nothing.
Ten past eight. I’m frantic. After lockdown, Jennifer and Gil can come through the trapdoor, but what about Colin? Wherever he is, he’ll be locked out.
Eight-fifteen. I can’t be still. “Where is he, Mom? Do you know?”
“Yes, and I’m going for him right now,” Mom says with sudden resolve. “It’s a huge risk with police in the building, but I have no choice.”
“You have only fifteen minutes!” David tells her.
Mom opens the front door and peeps into the hallway. “All clear,” she says. “You two stand right here and hold the door ajar until I return.”
She leaves, and David and I stand silently waiting for her return. I can hear David’s ragged breath, and my heart is thundering. Hurry, Mom, hurry.
In only a matter of seconds Mom is back again, and Colin is by her side.
“Nobody in sight,” she says as they come in.
Mom closes the door and locks it.
“Go to David’s bathroom,” she says to Colin. “And stay there until we call you.”
He nods and obeys.
“Was he at Bonnie’s?” I ask Mom.
“Yes. Gil and I asked her before work yesterday morning if Colin could hide in her apartment for the day. We didn’t know then that it would be two days.”
“Weren’t you afraid she would vacillate and spill the beans?” I ask.
“We were a bit nervous,” Mom admits, “but we reasoned that she had three brothers killed in the wars. So we told her we had a plan to save Colin and all of our children from the military. We told her we had found a way to leave here, and that she could come with us if sh
e wished.”
“And what did she say to that?”
“She said no,” Mom says. “So we gave her the book and she was very excited. She said she could do more good by staying here and joining the Resistance, as Gil’s wife did. It’s almost like she’s been waiting for somebody to tell her what to do. Now she seems filled with resolve and new purpose.”
“Wasn’t she curious about how we’re getting away?” I ask.
“Yes, she was, and Gil told her we’re leaving in a glass rocket,” Mom says.
“What did she say?”
“She just chuckled and said, ‘Okay, don’t tell me, then.’ ”
I’m glad that telling the incredible truth worked better for Mom and Gil than it did for Gramps in the barbershop.
“It’s time for curfew,” Mom whispers to me and David, and I can see that she’s nervous. “I hope all is well upstairs.”
In a few moments Tom is at our door counting heads.
“The police have been at the Gilmores’ apartment all evening,” he tells us in his gossipy voice.
“Are they still there?” Mom asks.
“No, they just left, but I think …”
Tom doesn’t finish his sentence. It seems that something has just occurred to him. He gives each one of us a funny look, then actually pokes his bony head inside the door of our apartment and looks around.
“You think what?” Mom says coldly to him.
“Maybe I should call them to come back and search here,” Tom says, then watches Mom’s face closely.
“Why don’t you do that?” Mom snaps at him.
Tom abruptly slams and locks the door. We fall against it.
“Do you think he’ll do it?” David says.
“I don’t know,” Mom says, “but we’ve got to get out of here ASAP.”
• 35 •
The Family Hour has just come on when Jennifer and Gil sneak in through the glass doors.
“Please tell me Colin’s here,” Gil says.
“Of course he is,” Mom replies. “Now we’ve got to hurry.”
The six of us gather quickly in the bedroom, where the Carriage is standing tall and as straight as an arrow before us. We get in, and Colin, Jennifer, David, and I settle on the floor along the back wall. Gil stands beside Mom. Mom quickly locks the Carriage door and lights up the control panel. Her fingers begin to move over the keyboard.
