Page 54

Oliver blushes, deeply and instantly.

“Or, you know, don’t tell me,” I say. “If it’s that personal.”

“No, it’s not that . . . Okay. You have to imagine me, at sixteen, I was so alone. This happened in London, at the Royal Academy. My parents had sent me to London, by myself, when I was thirteen, to study piano. I didn’t have any real friends. I had an uncle who lived in Bristol, but he was and is insane. I was afraid of him. I wanted to go home, but my parents were in prison.”

“Prison?”

“They were poets. They wanted . . . a better world. They wrote about the weather.”

“They went to prison for writing about rain and snow?”

Oliver looks severe. “Alba, how far forward have you ever traveled?”

I have to think about it. “I’m not sure. Forty or fifty years from my present?”

“And what was the weather like then?”

“Strange. Wet.”

“In my lifetime the weather is all anybody talks about. Hurricanes, tropical storms, tornados, floods, famines—that’s what I mean when I say my parents wrote about the weather.”

“Climate change.”

“We just call it the weather. But yes, that’s what it was called.”

“Are they still in prison? Your parents?”

Oliver shakes his head. “No. They died. In prison.”

“Oh, no.” We stare at each other. “I’m so sorry.”

“It happened a long time ago, Alba. When I was eighteen. But it meant I couldn’t go home.”

“Where was home?”

“You would know it as Shanghai. But home for me is pretty portable now.” He indicates the room with a slight gesture. “This is home. London is home, too.” He smiles. “Anywhere we’re together, that’s home.”

It’s my turn to blush. “So . . . What did I say to you? When we met?”

“I was standing by myself in the hall outside the audition room, thinking about how thrown off I was, knowing I’d just played a jumble. You came out of the room and stopped, you leaned close and spoke into my ear.” Oliver scoots over to where I’m sitting and whispers something I can’t quite make sense of.

“What?”

“That’s my name. In Mandarin.”

“Say it again, please.”

“Yang Qing.”

“Anything else?”

“You said, ‘Yang Qing, come to the Yellow House on May 12, 1999.’ Then you kissed me on the cheek and walked away. It was like a spy movie. I was very frightened.”

“Frightened? Why?”

“You knew my name, so you must have come either from my parents or from the Chinese government. Time travel is banned in China. So if you knew I could go to 1999 you were a person to be feared.”

“I didn’t mean to frighten you. I won’t mean to, that is.”