by Ann Hood
Water dripped down his face, making him look even more pathetic. But at least his cheeks now had two hot pink spots, one on each, which looked even pinker against the ghastly white.
“Well,” Hadley said, “there’s a first time for everything, then. Because you fainted as soon as I said—”
Rayne shushed her sister.
“Let the man recover,” she said.
Then she turned to Felix. “FYI, damp does not mean dripping wet.”
“What did you say?” Maisie asked Hadley.
Hadley leaned in close to Maisie and whispered, “We found her.”
“Her who?”
“Amy Pickworth.”
And even though they were whispering, Great-Uncle Thorne’s eyes grew wide and his face lost the pink spots. He lifted his head as if to speak, but instead, once again, his eyes rolled back in his head, and his head dropped with a thud to the floor. Just like that, he fainted for the second time in his life.
With two soggy facecloths on his forehead, Great-Uncle Thorne’s eyelids fluttered open.
“Where?” he asked. “What?”
Then his eyes closed again, and this time a strange release of air escaped from his lungs, like the bellows he used to stoke the fire in the Library fireplace.
From the doorway, James Ferocious began to bark and pace back and forth.
Hadley put her ear to Great-Uncle Thorne’s chest, and Rayne placed her fingers beneath his nose.
A clock somewhere in The Treasure Chest ticked noisily and then grew quiet.
“His heart,” Hadley said without lifting her head. “It’s . . . muffled.”
“I’m not sure he’s breathing,” Rayne said. “It might be time to start CPR.”
This last she said with a voice so panicked that James Ferocious barked louder and paced more frantically.
Felix took stock of what he was seeing: Maisie’s mouth opened in fear; Hadley’s ear pressed against what Great-Uncle Thorne called his dressing gown, a ridiculous moss-green silk thing; Rayne desperately searching for a puff of air from his nostrils; James Ferocious barking and pacing; and Great-Uncle Thorne as white as marble.
That was enough for Felix.
He ran out of The Treasure Chest, down the stairway, down the long carpeted hallway, past the tapestries from the Middle Ages, down the Grand Staircase, past the photo of Great-Aunt Maisie as a young girl with Great-Uncle Thorne poking his head into the picture, slipping and sliding across the shiny polished floor of the foyer, and into the Library, where the ridiculous old-fashioned phone sat.
With trembling fingers, Felix put his finger first into the nine on the dial, and swept it slowly all the way across and back. Then, into the one, which at least was faster, and then swept the one again.
He waited what seemed like forever, but really was no time at all, until a nasally female voice said, “Nine-one-one.”
Felix shouted into the heavy receiver.
He shouted the address of Elm Medona.
He shouted, “I think my great-uncle has had a heart attack or something.”
He shouted, “Come fast!”
From the Cigar Room his mother called, “What’s all the shouting?”
The 911 lady said, “Calm down, son. You’re doing fine. An ambulance is on its way. Stay on the line until they get there.”
Felix could not calm down.
He kept repeating the address.
“Elm Medona,” he shouted into the heavy receiver. “Maybe you know it?”
“I do,” the 911 lady said.
“What’s all the shouting, Felix?” his mother called again.
Now he heard her coming toward the Library, and way off in the distance, a siren.
“I hear it,” he told the 911 lady. “The ambulance.”
“Stay on the line, son,” she said. “You’re doing fine.”
The sound of the siren grew closer.
His mother appeared in the doorway, irritated.
“Enough surprises,” she said. “A dog. Your father. I’m trying to get some work done.”
“It’s here, I think,” Felix shouted to the 911 lady.
The 911 lady said, “Go open the door, son. Let them in.”
Felix dropped the receiver and pushed past his mother.
“Hey!” his mother said.
But Felix didn’t pause.
By now, Great-Uncle Thorne could be dead.
Don’t cry, he told himself. He had too much to do.
Even from all the way down here, he could hear James Ferocious barking incessantly. Felix thought about how dogs—or maybe cats?—could predict earthquakes and deaths in hospitals and all sorts of catastrophes. The word catastrophe almost made him cry again, since, like, an hour ago Great-Uncle Thorne had used it.
But now Felix was at the door, and now he was opening it, and now four men with a stretcher and all kinds of medical equipment were storming into the Grand Foyer.
“Where is he?” one of them asked.
Without answering, Felix began the reverse run up the Grand Staircase, past the photo of young Maisie and Thorne, past the Middle Ages tapestries, down the corridor to the spot where the wall gaped open, up the stairway, past a barking James Ferocious, and into The Treasure Chest.
“I can’t hear his heartbeat,” Hadley said through her tears.
“Sir,” Rayne said, standing as soon as she saw the first EMT, “I did the ABC’s of CPR.”
Her voice quivered. “Airway. Breathing—”
“Out of the way, sweetheart,” the EMT said.
The other three EMTs pushed quickly through the door of The Treasure Chest.
One of them knocked into the desk with the big machine he was carrying.
Phinneas Pickworth’s treasures that were there flew to the floor.
Something shattered.
“Pulse!” an EMT shouted, and then said a bunch of numbers.
“Oxygen!” another one shouted. More numbers.
Great-Uncle Thorne looked worse than before. Not only was his face as white as marble, it seemed like marble—cold and stony and still.
“Get these kids out of here,” an EMT shouted.
Felix, Hadley, and Rayne skittered out, lingering with James Ferocious in the doorway.
Only Maisie couldn’t move. She could only stare as they clapped something onto Great-Uncle Thorne’s arm and something else onto his finger.
“Get that dog out of here,” the same EMT shouted.
Felix grabbed James Ferocious’s collar and tried to pull him away, but the dog wouldn’t budge. Or stop barking.
“On my three,” an EMT said.
The children watched as the EMTs rolled Great-Uncle Thorne onto the stretcher, then lifted the stretcher high.
“What is going on?” Maisie and Felix’s mother said, out of breath.
“Out of our way, ma’am,” the EMTs ordered.
Everyone stepped aside as they carried Great-Uncle Thorne out of The Treasure Chest.
“Uncle Thorne,” their mother cried.
She looked from Great-Uncle Thorne to the EMT vanishing down the staircase to the children and the dog huddled in the doorway of The Treasure Chest.
“What is going on?” she said again, but softly, as if she were asking herself.
“I have a merit badge in first aid,” a tearful Rayne explained. “I even got a perfect score giving CPR to the Annie doll.”
“He fainted,” Hadley said, her voice full of wonder.
He had fainted, she told herself. The first time anyway, as soon as he heard her say that she met Amy Pickworth. So if Great-Uncle Thorne died, then it was all her fault. With this realization, Hadley, too, began to cry.
At the sight of his mother standing in the doorway, Felix also burst into tears.
His mother patted Rayne on the back, touched Hadley’s shoulder, and smoothed Felix’s hair as she moved across the threshold and into The Treasure Chest, where Maisie sat sobbing on the floor in the same spot Great-Uncle Thorne had lain. Behind her, broken glass glittered like diamonds in the dying light.
“Mom,” Maisie said, but that was all, because what was there to say?
Her mother looked at Maisie.
Then she looked up at the stained-glass window sending the day’s last breath of light across the room. She looked at the window with the same expression she wore when she did a jigsaw puzzle. The expression seemed to say, Ah! I see now how it all fits together.
Her gaze drifted from the window to The Treasure Chest itself.
Like everybody who walks into The Treasure Chest for the first time, she could not take it all in. Her eyes flitted from test tubes to talismans to hunks of quartz and amethyst to the shelves groaning with objects; the cluttered desk; the tabletops obscured by stuff.
“What?” she began. But she couldn’t articulate what she wanted to say.
She swallowed, took a breath, looked at Maisie.
“What is this room?” she finally managed to ask.
Maisie lifted her tearstained face to her mother.
“The Treasure Chest,” she said.
CHAPTER 4
RENAISSANCE MEANS REBIRTH
“Renaissance means rebirth,” Miss Landers said.
Except she wasn’t saying it to Felix’s class. She was saying it to the entire sixth grade. A special assembly had been called, and all of the sixth-graders were sitting in the auditorium where The Crucible would be performed in a few weeks.
“We are about to begin an exciting unit,” Miss Landers continued. “It involves art, science . . .”
But Felix couldn’t listen to what Miss Landers was saying.
Renaissance means rebirth.
Would Great-Uncle Thorne, lying in a coma at Newport General Hospital, be reborn?
Would his parents’ marriage, despite Bruce Fishbaum, finally be reborn?
Would Amy Pickworth, whose story still remained untold, be reborn?
How could he possibly listen to Miss Landers talk about something that happened centuries ago when right now his whole world needed to be reborn?
While Felix considered all of this, somehow the art teacher, Ms. Silva, had appeared at the microphone.
Ms. Silva wore long flowing caftans. Her hair, long and wavy, was streaked with gray. A large woman, she somehow managed to move gracefully, as if she were floating. Even when Felix, who did not take art, saw her in the hallways, she seemed to float in her colorful clothes, her multitude of bangle bracelets and bells around her ankles making a sound track to Ms. Silva.
“Oh, sixth-graders!” she crooned, clapping her hands together in front of the microphone and releasing more jingles and jangles than usual. “Oh, sixth-graders! The Renaissance! I will be your guide through Florence. I will show you art. And artists. And”—here she paused dramatically and took a breath so deep that the sound of it magnified through the microphone made everyone titter.
“And! Sixth-graders! You will learn the names of artists, like my personal favorite, Piero della Francesca. Artists so magnificent that . . .”
Ms. Silva became overcome by the magnificence of the Renaissance artists, and without finishing her talk, was led from the stage.
Miss Landers recovered quickly.
“Together, we will have a Renaissance fair, to which all of your parents will be invited. Jennifer Twill will play the lira da braccio, which is a Renaissance violin she has mastered.”
The class snickered. Jennifer Twill did only odd things.
“Now, class, I want to remind you of Jennifer’s hammered dulcimer performance at last year’s Christmas party, and her wonderful contra dancing at the end-of-the-year talent show.”
This only led to more snickering, but Miss Landers continued.
“This year, at the end of the unit, we will hold our own Renaissance fair. Ms. Silva will do workshops on masks, and Mrs. Witherspoon will hold cooking classes so that you can prepare a feast for the fair.”
Miss Landers sighed happily.
“The Renaissance,” she said.
Dear Lily,
A lot has been going on at Anne Hutchinson Elementary School. For one thing, there are new kids. Twins! For another thing, Maisie got the lead in the play, which is The Crucible. (Maybe you are also reading this play? I like to think that sixth grades everywhere are doing the exact same thing, even in Cleveland.)
And now we are beginning a unit on the Renaissance. We have to make masks with Ms. Silva and food with Mrs. Witherspoon and put on an entire fair. To tell you the truth, I kind of stopped listening during the assembly because so much is going on at Elm Medona. The biggest thing, the worst thing, is that Great-Uncle Thorne is in the intensive care unit of the hospital. My mother said it doesn’t look good.
I know I have not been a good friend. I haven’t stayed in touch the way I promised. Because I don’t have an e-mail address, I couldn’t e-mail you. But I could have written a real letter, like I’m doing now. Still, I think about you at least once every day. Sometimes even more.
Lily, Renaissance means rebirth. So now I am trying to be reborn as a better friend.
Felix Robbins
PS Did you notice the red seal on the back of this envelope???????
PPS I hope you write back.
“Once,” Jim Duncan said as he and Maisie and Felix walked to school the next day, “my family went to Florence. We spent three weeks in Italy. One in Rome. One in Venice. One in Florence.”
“That’s nice,” Felix said, but he couldn’t really listen. He could only think about the letter he mailed to Lily Goldberg in Cleveland last night. Part of him wished he hadn’t mailed it. The other part wished she’d answer back as soon as she got it.
“Our father studied art in Florence when he was in college,” Maisie said to Jim Duncan.
She wasn’t really listening, either. She was thinking about how yesterday their father came to Elm Medona after they finished their homework and brought them out to the Thai place on Thames Street for dinner. She was thinking about how much she liked having her father so near.
Maybe Mom would like some Thai food, too? she’d suggested as they walked down Memorial Boulevard.
She has to work late, he’d said, and Maisie couldn’t figure out if he was sad about that or not.
And of course, underneath these thoughts, Maisie and Felix both couldn’t stop thinking about Great-Uncle Thorne.
“I was only seven,” Jim Duncan said. “But I remember some things. Like how hot it was in the Uffizi and how big the David is.”
“Uh-huh,” Felix said, to be polite. He knew the David was a sculpture by Michelangelo, because his father had a big book about Michelangelo with the David on the cover.
“The Uffizi’s a huge museum,” Jim Duncan said. He sighed. “It took practically forever to go through the thing.”
Felix smiled, despite how heavy his heart felt. Jim Duncan had a way of telling him things without sounding like a know-it-all.
“Hey,” Jim Duncan said, “I forgot to tell you. Guess who was in Newport this weekend?”
Felix shrugged.
“Lily Goldberg!” Jim Duncan said. “I saw her and her mother on Bowen’s Wharf at the chowder place. I guess they had to finish up something about selling their house.”
“What?” Felix said. “She was here?”
Jim Duncan immediately realized his mistake. “Well, maybe it wasn’t her.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“Well, maybe.”
“I can’t believe she was in Newport and didn’t even tell me. I mean, us,” Felix said, images of that letter crowding his brain.
He thought about how carefully he’d written out her address, how he’d melted the red sealing wax on the back and pressed the seal into it.
Felix groaned. “I can’t believe it,” he said again.
Anne Hutchinson Elementary School appeared up ahead. Felix didn’t think he could make it through the whole day at school. How could he listen to Ms. Silva and Miss Landers and everybody talking about the Renaissance while that stupid letter was on its way to Cleveland?
“I . . . I think I’m going to turn around,” Felix said.
“What does that mean?” Maisie asked him.
“It means I think I’m going to go home. I think I’m sick.”
“You can’t just go home,” Maisie said. “You at least have to go to the nurse and have her call Mom.”
“I’ll walk you to the nurse,” Jim Duncan offered. By the look on his face, Felix could tell how awful he felt.
“No, it’s okay. Thanks,” Felix stammered. “I’m just going to go home.”
Maisie and Jim looked at each other.
“Well . . . ,” Jim said, because he didn’t know what to say.
“Are you going to throw up or something?” Maisie asked.
“Yes,” Felix lied, and clutched his stomach to be convincing.
“Then let us walk you to the nurse,” Maisie insisted. “She’ll take your temperature and let you lie down.”
Of course that was the sensible thing to do. But Felix could not walk another step toward school. Without saying anything more, he turned around and began to run in the opposite direction. He wondered if that letter was already in some post office in Cleveland. Once, when he was in first grade, they’d gone on a field trip to the main post office on Eighth Avenue, and they’d seen all the thousands of letters in a giant bag, waiting to get sorted and delivered. Was his letter to Lily Goldberg already waiting in Cleveland? Maybe he could call the main post office there and have someone find it and rip it up. He knew that was preposterous, but the idea made him feel a little better.
Felix kept running.
But he didn’t run home.
Instead he ran to the Hotel Viking, where his father was in Room 208, probably still asleep.