Felix squinted at the shirt but could only vaguely make out the man’s arms and legs there.
“And, yes,” his father said, “da Vinci lived during the Renaissance.”
“We’re studying the Renaissance in school,” Felix explained.
“My favorite period,” his father said.
He had polished off both halves of his eggs Benedict as he spoke, and now turned his attention to Felix’s pancakes.
“Are you going to finish those?”
Felix sighed. It was easy to only think of the good things about a person when they were far away. But here was his real father, right beside him, and Felix remembered how he always ate off everyone’s plate. Insatiable, his mother used to say, only half-kidding.
“You can have some,” Felix relented, because it had been so good to be able to walk to his father for advice.
His father grinned at him, stuck his fork in one of the pancakes, and put it on his plate. Obviously, big chunks of pancake did not bother him, Felix thought as he watched his father roughly cut the pancake into fourths and begin to eat it.
“Since you’ve given yourself a holiday from school today,” his father said, “you can come with me to take that monstrosity of a dog you and your sister brought home to the vet.”
“He’s going to need surgery,” Felix said.
His father looked at him, surprised.
Felix shrugged. “Just a guess,” he said.
Felix and Maisie’s mother came home from work and a visit to Great-Uncle Thorne in the ICU looking more tired and more rumpled than usual.
“He’s not getting any better,” she told them as she sunk into the pink pouf in Maisie’s room.
“I wish we could do something,” Felix said.
“Me too,” his mother said. “It’s so hard to see him hooked up to all those machines, just lying there like that.”
Maisie thought about how today Mrs. Witherspoon had explained that the Renaissance was a rebirth in the arts in Europe after the Dark Ages, a period that lacked, as Mrs. Witherspoon said, Light. Intellectual, artistic, and political light. Maybe Great-Uncle Thorne was in his own personal Dark Ages, and then he would be reborn.
“It’s been a rough day,” her mother said, pulling herself off the pouf. “I think I’ll take a cup of tea and get in bed.”
She kissed them both on the top of the head and left the room.
Felix looked at Maisie.
“You know what we have to do,” he said.
“Maybe he’ll be reborn,” she offered.
“He will if we go up to The Treasure Chest,” Felix said.
“I don’t know if we should do that until we find out what happened when Hadley and Rayne found Amy Pickworth.”
“What does that matter?” Felix asked. “We can’t let Great-Uncle Thorne die.”
Maisie frowned, considering. Then she got an idea.
“You know how we were doing the unit on aviation and we tried to find Lindbergh?” she said, her eyes twinkling.
“So?” Felix said. He always felt a little nervous about Maisie’s bright ideas.
“Well, Mrs. Witherspoon said that the Renaissance started in Florence, Italy.”
“So?” Felix said again.
“Maybe we could go there. See for ourselves what it was like.”
She was already heading toward the door.
Felix sighed. He knew better than to argue with Maisie. And besides, they had to save Great-Uncle Thorne, didn’t they?
“We don’t even have to go to The Treasure Chest,” he said, reaching into his pocket.
Maisie paused, her hand on the doorknob.
“What do you mean?”
Felix reached into his pocket and pulled out the gold seal.
“I think this will get us there,” he said, opening his palm for Maisie to see. “Great-Uncle Thorne always told us we should think more about where we’re going,” he added.
“But . . .” Maisie hesitated.
“I thought this was what you wanted,” Felix said, frustrated.
“Don’t they speak Italian or Latin or something? How will we understand anybody? At least we had Pearl to translate for us in China.”
Felix nodded slowly. “That’s a good point,” he said.
They both gazed at the gold seal with the giglio at the end until Felix said, “Maisie, back at the World’s Fair in St. Louis, remember the Philippine village?”
“What about it?”
“Remember how all I heard was that woman speaking Tagalog, but you understood her completely? And she understood you, too?”
“That’s right,” Maisie said. “I wonder why.”
“Did you do anything different that day before we went up to The Treasure Chest with Great-Uncle Thorne and the Ziff twins? Anything that you hadn’t done before?”
Maisie shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
Absently, she moved the shard back and forth on its string around her neck.
“We always do it the same way,” she said.
Felix pointed to the shard.
“What’s that?”
“You know. The shard from the Ming vase,” Maisie said. “I put it on a string so I wouldn’t lose it.”
“When did you do that?” Felix asked her. “Usually it’s in your pocket.”