“Children collecting for the poor,” Leonardo explained, steering Felix down one alley and then quickly down another. “A few years ago these boys stood on the street corners throwing stones at the Carnival revelers. So this is an improvement.”
They had reached the piazza where everyone was meeting for the procession. There, at the edge of the crowd, stood Maisie and Sandro. In her red velvet dress and white-and-gold mask, her curls spilling down, Maisie looked so beautiful that Felix almost forgot how angry he was at her.
He opened his mouth to call to her, but Leonardo pulled him away.
“Before we join the others,” Leonardo said seriously, “I want to talk with you.”
“Okay,” Felix said, trying to keep an eye on Maisie before she vanished again.
“About the future,” Leonardo said. “About going there with you.”
“I would take you if I could,” Felix said. “But it doesn’t work that way.”
Leonardo nodded enthusiastically.
“Exactly,” he said. “If I must stay here, then please tell me how it does work. What makes it possible? How do you get here? How do you get back?”
“I don’t really know,” Felix admitted. “Maisie and I touch an object that our great-great-grandfather collected a hundred years ago, and we start to lift off the ground—”
“Wait!” Leonardo said.
He took one of his notebooks from a pocket and began to scribble in it.
“Then what?” he asked.
“Well, it’s hard to explain. But we kind of tumble . . . you know . . . do somersaults, and everything is black all around us. It’s windy, and the wind smells . . . it smells wonderful. Like all of our favorite things.”
Leonardo’s brow furrowed with concentration.
“And then, without warning, it all stops.”
Leonardo looked up from his notebook.
“It stops and—?”
“And for a second . . . no, less than a second . . . we are suspended, kind of.”
Felix paused.
“It’s hard to describe,” he said finally.
“Is it thrilling?”
Felix shook his head. “It’s scary. I don’t know, maybe Maisie thinks it’s thrilling.”
“And then what?”
“Then we drop and land, hard. In the ocean or in a barn or, well, in your studio.”
Leonardo looked wistful. “And then you have traveled backward in time.”
Felix nodded.
Leonardo didn’t say anything for what seemed a long while. Behind them, musicians had begun to play, and music filled the air.
“In rivers,” Leonardo said thoughtfully, “the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes. So it is with present time. I suppose I must be satisfied with this.”
Back when Maisie and Felix were little, their parents used to take them to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Maisie could remember getting up early on Thanksgiving morning, her father standing at the stove making Mexican hot chocolate for them, which was super rich and spicy. Her mother made the homemade whipped cream to put on top, adding just the right amount of vanilla as she whipped it. They’d have croissants from the French bakery down the street that her father had gone to get as soon as the bakery opened so that they were still a little warm by the time they sat down to eat. Felix and their mother liked the plain ones; but Maisie and her father liked almond.
Then, with the streets of their neighborhood still asleep, they walked the twenty blocks to find a good spot to watch the parade. Maisie could still remember how it felt to sit on her father’s shoulders as the first float rounded the corner. If she closed her eyes, she could almost feel her fingers in his curly hair, feel the cold November air.
Those memories wrapped themselves around her now as the first float entered the piazza.
“I love this,” she said softly, to no one in particular.
But Sandro heard her and smiled.
“Let’s join the procession now, shall we?”
Maisie hesitated. She should wait for Felix, but once again he had gone off somewhere with Leonardo, even though they’d agreed to meet here. She didn’t understand him at all.
“Yes,” Maisie said firmly. “Let’s.”
They walked along the edge of the piazza to the point where they could enter the parade.
“Hello, Sandro,” a woman’s voice said.
Sandro halted.
“Simonetta,” he said in a hushed voice.
Maisie immediately recognized the name. Here was the woman whose window they had stood under the other night, Sandro hoping for a glimpse of her. Although it was hard to tell what she looked like beneath the silver-and-feathered mask she wore, Maisie saw Simonetta’s long blond hair and smooth alabaster skin.
“Happy Carnival,” Simonetta said, brushing close past Sandro as she hurried off.
Sandro stood, frozen in place, watching her.
“Come on,” Maisie said, tugging his sleeve.
With a sad sigh, he slowly moved forward again.
But he quickly looked less distracted as they were swept into the joyous procession, lost among the musicians, jesters, fellow participants, and floats, all moving out of the piazza and into the streets of Florence.