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I was confused. I was five years old. This was a grown-up’s house. “Can’t I just go home?”
Mama held out her arms and I leaned against her. She said, “Home is only about a mile from here. You can walk there, I’ll show you the way. But sometimes you might be in a part of time before Daddy and I bought our house, and if that happens you can come here.”
“Does Daddy come here?”
“I don’t know, Alba. Those aren’t his clothes. I don’t see anything here of his. But maybe he does. He knew about this place.”
In another bedroom we found a closet full of girl’s clothing. When I was little I had a thing for purple, and this trove had lots of purple dresses, shoes, even purple jeans. “Somebody knows what you like,” Mama said. I found a stuffed bear who looked like a brother to my Blue Teddy. “Can I take him home?” I asked Mama.
She started to say yes and then changed her mind. “Leave him here,” she said. “You can bring Blue Teddy to visit him. He’s sweet, isn’t he?”
I put the bear back in the closet. Mama said, “Oh, don’t—go ahead and love him.”
I shook my head.
The bear’s name was Other Teddy. He became a kind of doorway into the house; I would think of him when I felt a bout of time travel coming on and often that was enough to send me traveling to that bedroom, conveniently landing on the rug in front of that closet. Other Teddy saved me from being lost and cold and naked in random places, again and again.
We found a violin in the last bedroom. This room seemed bare, uncomfortable. There was an upright piano in a corner, a music stand next to a sagging chintz-covered armchair. A wineglass stained with vestiges of red wine stood on a small round table with a few notebooks and sheets of empty staff paper. A cigar box full of chewed-up pencils, dry fountain pens, ballpoints and ink bottles was half hidden under the chair. The violin case rested on the floor. Mama opened it and lifted the violin out, handed it to me.
“It’s too big,” I said. I struggled to bring the violin into position, to bow it. It was out of tune, but even so we could hear that it was a good instrument. The discordant notes reverberated in the bare room.
The closet door in this room was shut. A large, ominous-looking padlock had been installed above the doorknob. “What do you suppose is in there?” Mama asked.
“That’s where they keep all the monsters,” I said.
She flipped through one of the notebooks. It was full of musical notation; someone was writing music. She smiled. “What do you think?” she asked.
I liked the bear, he was the only thing in the house that felt familiar. Everything else seemed too strange, too large, not safe at all.
“It’s okay,” I said.
“What could we do to make it better?” she asked.
“I don’t want to be here by myself.”
“I don’t think you will be, at least not all the time.”
“Can’t you be here, too?”
She shook her head. “I can’t sit around here waiting for you, if that’s what you mean. But we could spend some time together here; that kitchen needs some attention. There’s nothing in there but rice and some tomato soup.”
We went back downstairs. Mama found a notepad by the phone and wrote a note; she folded it and wrote my name on it.
“Can I read it?” I asked.
“Later,” she said. She placed the note next to the cake. “Do you want a piece?” I shook my head. There was something unpleasant about that cake.
As we were about to go Mama said, “Leave something here.”
“What?”
Mama said, “How about your mittens?” My mittens were raspberry-colored thick wool. I suddenly loved them—I didn’t want to leave them there.
“Come on,” she said. “It’s almost time for your violin lesson.”
“’Kay.” I pulled off the mittens and carefully arranged them by her note, one on top of the other so they would take up as little space as possible. Mama gave me her leather gloves. They were fur-lined and too big for me, of course. I waggled the limp ends of the fingers and felt better about sacrificing the mittens.
We left the house, making sure the doors remained unlocked. Mama looked at her phone to check the date. “It’s February 27, 2007, Alba. Okay?”
