Jewel of the East by Ann Hood

repeated. “Like a giant turtle?”
    Once again, Felix grabbed his sister’s shoulder and turned her so that she faced him.
    “Think!” he said, hearing the desperation in his voice.
    But there was no time to think. Pearl had arrived and was tugging at their hands, pulling them across the park where a giant tortoise sat in the hot Shanghai sun, dry and brown and wrinkly, giving rides to children for a couple of yuan. Maisie and Felix had no choice but to stand in the line with Pearl and wait their turn. Then, first Felix, then Maisie, and finally Pearl, stepped through the small gate into the dirt circle where the tortoise waited.
    An olive-skinned man with a big mustache took the yuan, then motioned for them to sit on the tortoise. Its shell was as hard and brown as a horse’s saddle, its neck long and thick. The tortoise swung its head back, its small, beady eyes staring blankly. The man hit the tortoise with a switch of a green branch, and it began to move slowly around the circle.
    Felix didn’t tell Pearl that he didn’t especially enjoy sitting on that tortoise. It smelled faintly like sewage, and it was inhumane to ride a tortoise. His father had explained to him a long time ago one of those Saturday afternoons at the zoo that zoos used to be cruel to animals, caging them and even shackling them in place. What good would it do to tell Pearl that this poor tortoise belonged in a nice pond somewhere? She had been so excited to pay for their rides, he didn’t want to make her feel bad. For a moment, he found himself holding his breath, hoping that Maisie didn’t offend Pearl. But his sister stayed quiet and thoughtful during their tortoise ride and the whole way back to Bubbling Well Road.

Felix woke to a rough shaking. He opened his eyes and found Maisie kneeling beside him and trying hard to wake him up.
    “I haven’t slept at all,” she whispered.
    “How come?” he asked through a yawn.
    “Because I’ve been trying to figure out how we got back the other times,” she said.
    “And?” Felix asked. He reached for his glasses. Somehow wearing them helped make him more alert.
    “And we did nothing. Nothing at all,” Maisie said, her voice rising.
    “
Shhh
,” Felix said.
    He glanced around the small room to be surePearl was still asleep. When he saw that she was, he got out of bed and tiptoed toward the door. Maisie followed him, and together they went down the wooden stairs, through the front parlor with its worn furniture, and out into the hot Shanghai night.
    The air was sweet with the smell of flowers that neither of them could name. The black sky seemed to drip stars. Maisie and Felix stood in their cotton pants and tunics—his navy blue and hers powder blue—gazing up. Shanghai was a noisy city, always bursting with ships’ horns, carriage wheels, vendors hawking their goods, and all of the other sounds of city life. But out here, this late at night, all they could hear was the constant chirp of crickets. Standing there, they both felt the vastness of China stretching out before them. Felix almost told Maisie that he felt small, like a drop of water in history, both insignificant and somehow important.
    But Maisie was already getting agitated.
    “I’ve gone over it a million times,” she said. “At Clara’s, we were outside talking and then without any warning we were back home. And we were in the cemetery with Alexander and—same thing. All of a sudden we’re back.”
    “We’re missing something,” Felix said.
    He had thought about it, too, and he remembered it exactly as Maisie did.
    “
They
had the objects,” Maisie said.
    “Definitely.”
    “I remember Clara telling us about her aunt, the nurse, right before.”
    Felix nodded. “That’s right.”
    “And we were standing in the cemetery with Alexander and he was talking about having been orphaned so young and working for Beekman and Cruger.”
    “Okay,” Felix said, wishing he had a pen to make notes. “They had the