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I return to Alba. “Let’s continue.”

Alba: We are standing on the grass near the shore of Lily Lake, just where the sand begins. I turn my head and see the lake house exactly where I expect it to be. The woods smell of pine, rotting leaves, something boggy and something that might be motor oil. It’s an overcast day. I turn to Beck and she is young again: Beck as I first knew her when I was a child. Her face is unlined, she seems taller, more fearless; I might have said that she has reverted to this previous self but when I look more closely I see that the older and wiser Beck is in there; now she is her avatar. She’s dressed for traveling in a long dark coat, gloves and boots, Ray-Ban sunglasses hooked into the neckline of her shirt, black jeans. She has nothing in her hands and no bag or backpack, and I realize that in this domain Beck is the magician queen; all her wants and needs will be tended to by loving algorithms.

Beck: I hear the screen door of the lake house open, that unmistakable sound the spring makes, a metallic thrum and snap that I’ve always found slightly thrilling, and it thrills me now—Clare walks out of our house, my long-ago Clare with her lovely heart-shaped face and her long red hair, no longer hesitant with arthritis but walking freely across the front porch and running down the steps in her blue dress with the big pockets that was always a favorite of mine. We wait for her. When she gets to us she embraces Alba, then me.

“Have you been waiting long?” I ask her.

“I don’t know,” Clare says. “I just woke up.”

Alba regards her mother with fearful affection. She glances at me as if to say, Too convincing, Beck; too weird. But I don’t find this Clare uncanny at all. She’s my memory, not Clare herself, but I am comforted by her presence anyway. Clare looks puzzled, as though she isn’t sure why we’re here or what might happen next.

“Alba,” I say, “do you want to come in?”

“I think I should get going,” Alba says. “Can you point me in the right direction?”

“The place you’re looking for is over there.” I point across the lake. “You can walk around or you can swim.” I pause and try to remember anything I’ve left out, any appropriate last words, a trail of digital breadcrumbs . . . but my mind is racing ahead and it’s difficult to focus. Alba will be fine. She always is.

“If you ever need us, we’ll be here,” I tell her. “Just leave the servers on. I left instructions, they’re on my desk.”

“You’re sure? I feel funny, leaving you here.”

Clare says, “You can come and visit any time, we always love to see you, sweetie.” Alba is visibly unsettled by this. It’s time for her to go. I take Clare’s hand. She squeezes mine.

Alba hugs me. “Goodbye, Beck,” she says. “Thank you, for everything.” She walks slowly to the edge of the water. I can tell that she’s worried about hitting the wall in the basement. “Remember what I told you,” I call to her. “There are no boundaries here.” Alba turns and waves. We wave back. She wades into the water. Clare says, “Why is she wearing shoes and socks in the lake?” Alba comes even with the end of the pier, where there’s an abrupt drop off in the lake bed, launches herself fully clothed into the deep water and begins to swim. Clare says, “She was always afraid to swim as a little girl. I wonder when she learned?”

“I don’t know,” I say, and then I wonder where this knowledge came from; Clare and I never had this conversation. Alba is doing the breaststroke, making good progress. “Have you had lunch yet?”

“I can’t remember,” Clare says. “I’ve been in such a deep sleep, I must have slept around the clock.”

“Let’s go in and have some lunch,” I suggest. I start to walk up the steps, and Clare walks beside me. “I have so much to tell you.”

Alba: Almost as soon as I set out I find myself in the middle of a huge body of fresh water. Lily Lake is tiny: it takes twenty minutes to row across it and you can see where the trees meet the water all around. This is a Great Lake, boundless, shoreless. I panic a little, but then remind myself that I am actually standing in our basement. I try to concentrate on swimming across this nonexistent inland sea. Then I think, I’m ready to stop swimming, there’s no need for it to be this difficult, and I come to land. I crawl onto the shore, heave myself up and stand there, panting and perfectly dry. I catch my breath and begin to walk. As soon as the sand gives way to dune grass I see the Yellow House amid the dunes. There is nothing around it, really nothing: Beck has surrounded the house with fog that gives way to blankness, but the house itself seems to be in late-afternoon sunlight, in a golden hour of its own. As I come closer I see that there is a chain and padlock on the front door. I walk up the front steps and stare at the padlock, which seems excessive but also familiar; then I remember the locked closet in the music room and Beck shouting after me, remember, there are no boundaries here. I walk through the door like a ghost and feel no resistance at all.

The first floor is cool and shadowy, as though the outside and the inside of the house exist in different times. I walk around touching things: Oliver’s piano, his cigarette lighter, our little cache of opera and symphony tickets, a leather jacket that Zach gave me for my birthday in 2026. I open the fridge and find a pan of Beck’s vegan lasagna and three lemon bars in a Tupperware container I recognize as my mother’s. Curious, I take a bite out of a lemon bar. The taste is exactly right, but the bite dissolves in my mouth like fizz, insubstantial and unsatisfying. I can see the lake through the kitchen windows, and this is confusing until I realize that the house sits on an island. The next time I see Beck, I must ask her why she felt I needed such isolation; it seems like overkill to me.

I walk upstairs. The bedroom is oddly tidy, as though Beck made the bed and neatened the room before she recorded it. In the bathroom three toothbrushes sit side by side in the glass. It’s strange to see my reflection in the mirror, to know that I am not time traveling, that the house has been sent ahead in time to meet me in my present.

In the music room I find everything as it should be. I tune my violin, replace it in its case. The closet is open and empty, the file cabinet gone. I sit down and wait.

Everything goes dark. When I can see again, I am in the middle of an enormous murmuration of starlings. It is my mother’s art, a room full of still, silent black birds—and then they begin to fly. The ceiling becomes sky—the birds surround me and fly through me without touching me—they change their patterns like a huge black kaleidoscope, describing all the possible combinations of air and birds. My mother’s low voice says, “Don’t be afraid.” Wings brush my hands and face. I hear the voices of the starlings and music I half recognize, music I might be about to compose. Just as this becomes overwhelming the starlings fly through the walls, ceiling, roof of the house—and vanish.

In the abrupt silence I hear footsteps. A child hesitates in the doorway. It’s my nine-year-old self, from that first day when I played for Isadora. Other Alba runs to me and I embrace her. She says, “What took you so long to get here?”

A table has appeared in the room, heaped with file folders. Every folder is full of my music. Beck has kept her promise.

I select a folder at random. It’s a violin sonata in A minor that I began years ago, a piece I’ve never known how to finish. Other Alba is holding my violin, watching me expectantly. I will be my own muse, now. And suddenly I know how the music wants to go—it seems so inevitable and obvious that I feel joyously certain, and I begin, at last, to write without fear.

An hour later, I stand up, stretch; it’s time to go back to Beck. I dread this, but she trusted me to do it. I tell Other Alba goodbye and take off the headset.

The Yellow House disappears, and I am in Beck’s studio again. Beck’s body is crumpled on the floor, lying on her side, one arm shielding her face, like a bird tucking its head under a wing. I sit next to her, press my fingers to her neck to find her pulse, but she is dead, as she told me she would be. I close her eyes, I gather her up and place her on the sofa, carefully arranging her limbs so she looks comfortable, natural. The servers hum and glow; somewhere in there Beck and her approximation of my mother are having dinner, swimming in the lake, lingering over their coffee. Beck’s prayer book sits closed on her desk, a single bookmark in the place she asked me to find. I read softly, as though I’m reading her to sleep: “‘. . . And Life is eternal and Love is immortal, and death is only an horizon, and an horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight . . .’”

Ever After

Tuesday, June 23, 2082 (Zach is 81, Alba is 80, Oliver is 60)

Zach: Alba and I are alone together again.

Oliver said goodbye a few days ago. Alba went downstairs, to let us have our time together, the last time we’ll have. There was a question I wanted to ask Oliver. I wasn’t sure he would tell me what I needed to know, but he did. After he finished telling me, I said, “I wish I could be there, with you.”