Queen Liliuokalani: Royal Prisoner (4 page)

The door opened again, and this time a girl about their own age, with curly hair and a face full of freckles, walked out. Maisie and Felix knew who lived in all three apartments on all four floors. This girl was a stranger. Which meant she lived in
their
apartment.

“Hey!” Maisie said, taking a step toward the girl.

The girl studied her closely, probably trying to decide whether the rule of never talking to strangers included strangers her own age.

“You live in there?” Maisie asked.

The girl nodded. She was skinny, and even though the weather was mild, she shivered in her
T-shirt without a jacket on. Felix saw that she even had freckles on her arms.

“In 1C?” Maisie demanded.

The girl narrowed her eyes. “Who wants to know?” she said with a southern twang.

Felix decided to intervene. “We used to live there,” he said.

“When?” she said.

“Only our whole lives,” Maisie said.

“Well, I wish you still lived in that dumb apartment. I wish you lived there instead of me,” the girl said, surprising them by bursting into tears.

The crying, however, surprised them less than the idea that someone wouldn’t want to live at 10 Bethune Street.

The girl flopped onto the stoop, and Maisie and Felix joined her, one on each side.

“I just want to go home,” she said through her sniffles.

“Us too,” Felix said.

At that, the girl managed to smile. “I’m Delila. Delila Monroe,” she said, pronouncing Monroe with the accent on the first syllable:
Mon
-roe. “And you’re Maisie and Felix Robbins, the famous twins everyone
in the building loves,” she added.

“So you moved here from…,” Maisie began.

“Charleston, South Carolina,” she said dreamily.

“And you wish you were back there,” Maisie continued.

“And you moved to…?” Delila said.

“Newport, Rhode Island,” Felix told her.

“And you wish you were back here,” Delila finished. She shook her head. “Isn’t life a puzzlement?”

“Do you think…?” Felix began cautiously.

Delila got to her feet and wiped at her jeans. “Absolutely,” she said. “Come on in.”

As soon as they entered the building, the familiar smells swept over them. Felix took a deep breath, trying to fill his lungs with the wonderful scents.

“Wait a minute,” he said, taking Maisie’s arm. “Take a deep breath,” he said.

She did. “So? It smells the same as always.” She added, “Nice.”

Felix walked to 1A. “Cinnamon,” he said. “From all the baking Mr. Soucy does.”

“Okay,” Maisie said, not sure what her brother was getting at.

She watched him continue on to 1B.

“Flowers,” he said, pointing to the wreath on the door.

At 1C he paused and took an exaggerated breath. “Christmas trees,” he said. “From the wood Dad always cut and left by the door for the fireplace.”

A look of understanding crossed Maisie’s face.

“Those are the things we smell when—” She glanced at Delila and stopped herself from finishing.

“When we travel,” Felix said.

“When we travel,” Maisie added, “it smells like home.”

A
s soon as Felix and Maisie walked into their old apartment, they both wished they hadn’t come in after all. Even though the hallway of the first floor of 10 Bethune Street had smelled exactly the same, nothing inside the apartment was the same. Apparently, Delila’s mother liked for things to match. The window that looked out on Greenwich Street and the D’Agostino supermarket used to have a bamboo shade on it. Now, heavy olive-green draperies hung over it. The living room wall was also green—“Celery!” Delila’s mother told them—and all of the furniture was green, too: a green-striped sofa and a green floral overstuffed chair and just green, green, green everywhere they
looked. “Green is soothing,” Delila’s mother said.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Maisie and Felix’s old bedroom, with their twin beds separated by a scrim from one of their mother’s plays, had been converted into a frilly white concoction.

“It’s like we walked into a giant meringue,” Maisie whispered to Felix.

She was right. Everywhere Felix looked, he saw more white, more lace, more ruffles.

Delila flopped onto her white bedspread, and for a second she seemed to disappear into all that white. But then everything settled around her, and she stared out unhappily at Maisie and Felix.

“My room at home had a magnolia tree right out the window,” she said with a sigh.

Felix’s eyes drifted toward the windowless brick wall, which had been painted white, too.

“Around now,” Delila continued sadly, “that big old tree would be in full bloom.”

“Thanks for letting us look around,” Felix said, looking like he might actually run out of the apartment any second.

“Yeah,” Maisie mumbled. “Thanks.”

They declined Delila’s mother’s offer of pound
cake and made their exit. To Felix’s surprise, once they got outside, Maisie burst into laughter.

“What’s so funny?” he asked her. He felt so sad about the loss of their beautiful home that he couldn’t believe Maisie had found anything to laugh about.

“Wait until we tell Dad what they’ve done in there,” Maisie said.

Their father had painted their old kitchen with cartoon images of food—smiling broccoli and dancing salt and pepper shakers, fat toast popping out of a toaster, and a percolator coffeepot. Delila’s mother had painted right over them in a green she called avocado.

“He’ll be furious,” Felix said.

Maisie shook her head, still laughing. “I think he’s going to laugh as hard as I am,” she said. “I mean, it’s so awful.”

Not sure why that was funny, Felix glumly took a seat on the uptown C train beside his sister. How could she not feel as terrible as he did about the fact that their home was really, completely gone?

When they opened the door to the apartment on
West Eighty-Sixth Street, the smells of sausage cooking and chicken baking and fresh rosemary greeted them.

“No vegetarians here, right?” a woman wearing an apron said to them brightly. The apron had a statue on it so that the woman’s head looked like the head of the statue. The woman had long auburn hair that fell in perfect waves past her shoulders, green eyes like a cat, and a smile of dazzling white teeth. Agatha, Maisie and Felix realized with a sinking feeling, was gorgeous.

“I’m making the chicken I love from Orso. Do you know it? On West Forty-Sixth Street?” Agatha said. “It has sausage and olives and all sorts of yummy things in it.”

“Smells good,” Maisie admitted.

“It’s not good, Maisie,” Agatha said, flashing her shiny teeth. “It’s fantastic. Just wait.”

“Um,” Felix said, “where’s Dad?”

“Out somewhere,” Agatha said, stirring some tomatoes into the pan. “Oh, Felix, I saw that your coat’s buttons were hanging literally by a thread, so I sewed them for you.”

“Thanks,” Felix said through gritted teeth. Was
there anything Agatha
couldn’t
do?

“I thought after dinner we could play Pictionary,” Agatha said in her cheerful, can-do voice. “Don’t you just love Pictionary?”

“Well,” Felix began, but Agatha had started to hum. Beautifully, of course.

“What’s that song you’re humming?” Maisie asked her.

“‘Crazy’? By Patsy Cline? I played her in a show a couple years ago. So tragic,” Agatha said.

“You’re an actress?” Felix said, feeling very possessive. Their mother had spent most of their childhood auditioning for plays and getting just walk-on parts, or—mostly—no parts at all.

“For a few years I acted, but then I went back to school for my PhD in art history, and that’s how I ended up at the museum in Doha, and that’s where I—”

“Met Dad,” Felix said. He noticed that Maisie was watching Agatha with something like wonder. He glared at his sister, but she didn’t seem to notice.

Agatha grated cheese from a hunk of Parmesan into the pan. “That’s right,” she said.

“Were you on Broadway?” Maisie asked.

Agatha waved her hand dismissively. “I had a few small roles. You know,
Rent
and—”

“You were in
Rent
?” Maisie asked, and the awe in her voice made Felix glare harder. Their mother had tried out for
Rent
. Three times.

“In daylights, in sunsets,” Agatha sang in her beautiful voice.

Unbelievably, Maisie joined in with her.

“In midnights, in cups of coffee,” they sang, Agatha holding a wooden spoon like a microphone.

From behind Felix, their father’s voice rang out. “In inches, in miles,” all three sang.

By the time they finished with a rousing, loud “Seasoooons of love!” Felix was ready to scream.

“Isn’t she great?” their father said, grinning at Agatha.

He unwrapped a thick eggplant-colored cable-knit scarf from around his neck. “She knit this for me on the plane ride over,” he said in a stage whisper.

Maisie
oohed
and
aahed
over the scarf, but all Felix could think of was their mother in her rumpled suits, lugging her heavy briefcase with papers overflowing from it.

The dinner was, of course, delicious. So was the dessert, something called tiramisu, which was Italian, too. Afterward, Maisie and Agatha beat Felix and his father at Pictionary. Then Agatha brought out a tray of chocolate truffles she’d whipped up, and took a ukulele off a shelf and played while they sang along. Felix joined in reluctantly on “Over the Rainbow,” but deep down he felt melancholy. Their mother was with the boisterous Bruce Fishbaum, and their father had ended up with a goddess.
How traitorous to be won over by her charms,
Felix thought.

Finally, Maisie and Felix got to go to bed. Agatha was staying the night with her best friend Lulu in Brooklyn, but before she left she brought them water and a book of poems by Shel Silverstein.

“These are such fun,” she said, placing the book on the night table between them.

As soon as she closed the door behind her, Felix said, “How can you be so nice to her?”

“What?” Maisie said through a yawn. “She’s great.”

“Too great,” Felix mumbled.

“And I told you Dad would laugh when I told him how awful the apartment looked,” Maisie said.

He had laughed.
Celery?
he’d said.
Avocado?

“Well, I’m glad you two find it so funny,” Felix said, rolling on his side away from Maisie. “I think it’s terrible.”

Maisie didn’t answer him. Instead, she chuckled.

Felix turned back over and there his sister sat, reading those Shel Silverstein poems and chuckling to herself. Of course Agatha would choose the perfect book for them, Felix thought miserably as he faced the wall again.

The next time he rolled over, Maisie had fallen asleep with the book open across her chest. She was so hard to figure out, Felix thought. He had been certain that Maisie wouldn’t like anybody their father went out with, especially someone as perfect as Agatha. Instead, she thought Agatha was great. Why, she seemed almost happy that their father had a girlfriend.

Felix sighed, wishing they were back in Newport. If they were at Elm Medona, he would try to figure out how to get into The Treasure Chest. Nothing like a little adventure to make the fact that your father has met the woman of everyone’s dreams seem not so bad. He closed his eyes. The next time they went into The Treasure Chest and picked up an item, Felix thought as he drifted off, they should choose more carefully.
Obviously that hawk feather would bring them to the Old West. And if they’d looked more closely at that coin and seen the date, they would have known where they were headed. Or at least
when
.