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Madeline dozes. The fire snaps, and bouquets of sparks fly up the chimney. I add wood to the fire and light another lamp. I bring a blanket down from Madeline’s bedroom, add it to the three we already have, make sure she’s well tucked in.

“Oliver,” she says, rasping, barely audible, “play—”

“Play what?”

“Something—new.” Her eyes are bright, she smiles encouragingly.

I sit at the piano and wonder: What do I know that is new? Madeline’s repertoire is encyclopedic, so she means something from the future, something she won’t have heard. But past present future are all one to me and I think I might have played everything I’ve ever known for Madeline. What’s new? She is watching me, waiting. She is my best listener; she hears everything. What am I? My musical self is constructed of parts loaned to me by Madeline and Alba, with a few humble grace notes that are only mine. But I’ve been here for months: I’ve played all the music I can remember, every piece in Madeline’s sheet music collection, tunes gleaned from twentieth-century radio, lullabies my mother once sang to me, jingles, fragments. I’ve played everything Alba has written. What is left to play?

I remember our first lesson, so long ago. Here is middle C. You will play the white keys and I will play the black keys . . . I play middle C. It rings out in the room and decays. I play an arpeggio: C, E, G and then together: the C-major triad. I play CC, GG, AA G. I glance over at Madeline, engulfed by blankets, so still, waiting. I want more than anything to play the music she wants to hear. The room is so quiet, London might have dissolved while we have been sitting here watching the fire burn. Madeline coughs.

Her cough reminds me of a concert Alba and I attended together a very long time ago, when I was a teenager. Alba was in her fifties, and I found her intimidating. It was winter in the 1980s, and the concert was in someone’s loft, a dreary, draughty, ramshackle place. We arrived almost late and sat in the back row of folding chairs. Everyone in the tiny audience had a cold, so I spent the time before the concert worrying that I would catch some nasty obsolete twentieth-century influenza no one in my own time had thought to immunize me against. When the string quartet walked onto the makeshift stage there was an extravaganza of coughs and nose blowing and then perfect silence while the musicians tuned up and began to play. The piece they played was so extraordinary that when it was over I felt that I had been in a trance, as though somehow I had been transported at great speed over vast landscapes, experienced lifetimes in an hour. Full of enthusiasm, I turned to Alba and discovered her clothes empty and crumpled on her seat. I never found out what I had heard or who was playing—I was too shy to speak to anyone. I left the building and wandered Chicago’s frozen streets until dawn, when I finally reverted to my own warm bedroom in Madeline’s house.

The music I heard that evening has always hovered at the edge of my memory’s reach, like a dream badly described at breakfast. I didn’t have the vocabulary to capture it then, and I barely remember it now; all that remains are fragments and a residue of emotion. Madeline is waiting. I place my hands over the keys and begin to play for her.

I take the chords and progressions I think I remember and build new music: shimmering, turning upon itself, a journey of stops and switchbacks, a long dark road, a meteor shower in the night sky, winding, winding: torquing tension, surrender; sweetness; ambivalent release, diminution, arrival.

I turn to Madeline. Her eyes are closed, her hands rest in her lap, palms open. I get up and go to her, sit by her. The fire is very low, and I can see my breath. I try to see Madeline’s breath, but I can’t. I place the backs of my fingers gently against her cheek; she is cool, and I am afraid.

“Madeline?” My voice catches in my throat.

I gather her to me. She does not wake. I tell her how much she has meant to me, what a wonderful teacher she was and how much I love her—but she doesn’t hear.

It must be getting late. I look out the window toward central London and see a few lights glowing down in the city and a star-splashed sky above that blurs through my tears. I extricate myself from Madeline, I stand up and the room vanishes, I am nothing and nowhere, she is gone, I am gone.

Tuesday, October 15, 2041 (Oliver is 40, Zach is 40, Clare is 70, Beck is 65)

Oliver: I find myself on the floor of Alba’s bedroom in the Yellow House, in the dark. I feel dizzy and nauseous, so I crawl to the bathroom and manage to vomit into the toilet. Then I curl up like a fetus on the bathroom floor, but the tile is too cold, and I stand up shivering and make my way down the hall to my own room. I get into bed. The sheets are unwelcoming and clammy. There are beautiful frost patterns on the window, fernlike, delicate, illuminated by passing train headlights. As I wait to fall asleep I wonder where I am in time, and if Madeline is alive now. If I went to London now, and found her, what would I say to her? Thank you, over and over. Thank you, Madeline. You saved me. You gave me music. If there is a heaven, perhaps it consists of just this, the opportunity to tell dead people the things you need them to know.

Zach: I’ve been sleeping badly again. I haven’t spoken to anyone in five days, and I wonder if I will lose my mind from loneliness. Now that Alba is gone I feel absolutely isolated, as though I’ve been made to stand in an existential corner in an endless time-out. As soon as it is light outside I get up, get dressed and drive over to Clare and Beck’s. I park down the block and force myself to wait until a reasonable hour—eight thirty seems not-desperate—before I ring their bell. Clare answers the door. She seems surprised to see me, but invites me in.

“Is Alba here?” I ask, as I take off my boots.

“Who is it?” Beck calls from upstairs.

“Zach!” Clare yells to her. “Um, no, she isn’t, Zach. Did you expect her to be?”

I follow Clare into the kitchen. She’s in the middle of making breakfast. I decline when she asks if I’d like any. “I hoped she’d be here,” I say. “When did you last see her?”

“Yesterday. She stopped by for dinner.”

“Stopped by? I thought maybe she was living here?”

Clare frowns. “Why would she be living here? Are you guys in trouble?”

“Yeah. Yeah, we are. Alba hasn’t been living at home since September.”

Clare turns away from me to take something from the fridge. As she turns I catch a glimpse of her face: she looks panicked. Beck walks into the kitchen and Clare says, as though in warning, “Zach was just telling me that Alba isn’t living at home lately and he thought she was here with us.”

“Hmm. That’s awkward,” Beck replies. “We wondered why we hadn’t seen both of you in so long.” She and Clare have a silent conversation via eye contact which seems to go nowhere. “Do you need her right away? Is it an emergency?”

“I guess not. I just—I’m kind of losing it, and I thought if I could talk to her . . . I don’t understand what happened. I thought we would talk things over, maybe reconcile by now.”

“Oh, no.” Clare puts a container of cottage cheese on the counter and leans against the sink. Beck watches Clare. They fall silent, but I’m sure they would have a lot to say if I left the room.

“So where is Alba?” I ask.

Beck replies, “We don’t know, Zach.”