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“I just hate being the last to know.”

“Well, now you know,” Alba says.

“Yeah. I guess so.” Alba walks over to me, bow in one hand, violin in the other. I bend to her, we kiss briefly, then she resumes tuning. Alba is playing something spiky and repetitive by Alban Berg, a desolate violin concerto in memory of a young dead girl. She’s been working on it for weeks. I retreat to our bedroom and sit on the bed. I take out my notebook and begin to write, trying to make my life make sense.

The Yellow House

Tuesday, May 2, 2034 (Alba is 32), and

Tuesday, February 27, 2007 (Alba is 5, Clare is 35)

Alba: In my present the Yellow House is half hidden inside a glum forest of neglected maple trees; it is always in shade. It is a very ordinary Chicago house, Victorian, wooden-sided, with modest gingerbread and a dark green asphalt-shingled roof. It is almost underneath the Ravenswood El, and the Metra train tracks are across the street. Nothing about it is quite straight. The white trim is peeling, the porch sags. It is a house that keeps to itself. Junk mail piles up under the slot in the front door. The lights are on timers. The garden has run wild; climbing roses and morning glory have obscured the chain-link fence.

In earlier years it’s different. The house looks stronger, straighter, less like a lost boat and more like a home. It is sparsely furnished at first, in the 1940s. All the walls are painted white, all the floors are oak or pine. There are four bedrooms; the largest, sunniest bedroom has a double bed, a shabby wing chair, a dresser, a rug. There is a closet full of my clothing, different sizes for various ages. The house was built in 1907. I think it will stand until the end of time, until after I am dead.

It is my safe house. It is not home; I do not long for it. It is a place between places—it stretches across enough time for me to depend on it. When I was a child, at first I didn’t know who owned it, or why the back door was never locked. I am always running toward it, scrambling across the too-tall grass, groping in the dark for the doorknob.

The house is a kind of calendar: I can gauge the date from the presence or absence of certain coffee mugs, sneakers, blue jeans, tables, chairs, appliances, food. Things appear in the house in the years after they’ve been invented. The absence of computers means pre-1987, no TV means pre-1958. The black-and-white set moves to one of the bedrooms in 1969, and the color set takes its place in the living room. In 2002 a list of phone numbers is taped to the side of the refrigerator, next to the wall-mounted phone; before that I didn’t have anyone I could call.

The house came to me in an odd way, as an address jotted on a scrap of paper that was stapled without explanation to my dad’s will. When my mother tried to find out about the house she discovered that I was the owner. She wondered if my dad had bought the house and put it in my name. When she looked up the deed at City Hall she found that I had been the owner of the Yellow House since 1947.

Years later Mama said, “It gave me a chill, looking at your name on that crumbling piece of paper.” At the time, though, she didn’t say much, just loaded me into the car to go look at it.

We parked right in front. Although it was a bright morning in February, the house seemed sad to me. Or maybe I was the sad one. We crunched along the snow-covered walk under the menacing overhang of icicles and onto the porch. Mama rang the bell.

I looked back at our boot prints. No one else had disturbed the snow. Mama waited a few minutes and then walked around to the back door. I was nervous; I didn’t know this was my house, and I thought whoever did own it would be angry at us for snooping. Mama opened the screen door and tried the back door handle. It was open.

I hung back. “Come on,” she said. “It’s okay.”

There was a small back porch full of empty liquor bottles and cereal boxes waiting to be recycled. Then another door, also unlocked. We walked through it and into the kitchen.

The kitchen was white and red, everything gleaming with chrome like a 1950s diner. In the middle of the kitchen table was a cake, white icing with shaky red letters on top. The cake said, Welcome, Alba!

“Wow,” said Mama. “See, the house wants you to visit.” She smiled; she seemed a little teary. We were both often on the verge of tears in those days just after my dad died.

“Like in a fairy tale,” I said. I was more afraid now. I felt like the house was trying too hard, like it was hoping to lure me in. I knew that in fairy tales you should never eat anything the fairies give you or you’d have to stay with them forever.

(Oliver baked that cake and I frosted it. We were pretty drunk by the time the cake was done and I wanted to go to bed. But Oliver, ever meticulous and sensitive, said, “We have to clean up now in case we aren’t here in the morning. You don’t want little Alba to see this mess as her first impression of the house?” No, I didn’t, so we cleaned up. Oliver spent ten minutes drunkenly centering the cake on the kitchen table and we went to bed at three. The next morning we were both still there, so I made coffee and sat staring at the cake feeling all hung-over and headache-stricken while Oliver played Brahms on the piano, very softly and interrupted by trains.)

A train went by and Mama and I both jumped; it was abrupt and loud, a blow to the ears.

Mama said, “Let’s have a look around.” She walked out of the kitchen. I turned back to look at the cake again. There was a thin layer of dust on it.

The house was dim. All the windows had those thick old-fashioned metal venetian blinds, and they were all folded against the light. Because of my later intimacy with the house I can say with certainty that the furniture was mostly 1940s vintage and heavy: a gray velvet Chesterfield sofa and chair in the living room, floor lamps with brass fittings and fringed ivory silk shades that would tear at the touch of a finger, a massive dining table and six chairs with bird-claw feet, a glass ashtray on an ornate little stand waiting on the mantelpiece next to a badger skull, a silver cigarette lighter, and a package of Lucky Strike. A piano dominated the room, a hulking glossy black Bösendorfer grand.

Mama moved quietly through the house. Not as though she thought anyone would hear her, she was just kind of—reverential. In the largest bedroom she sat on the bed and closed her eyes. She wandered into another bedroom that was crowded with stuff and stood in front of a closet full of men’s clothing, leaned in close and sniffed the shirts, stepped back, puzzled.

“Who lives here?” I asked her.

Mama smiled. “I think maybe you live here, sometimes, in the future.”

“But this isn’t the future,” I said. “This is now.”

Mama shook her head. “In your future, when you’re a grown-up, this will be your past. Perhaps this is a place to come, when you need it.”

“Why would I need to come here?”

“This house belongs to you, Alba. It belonged to you even before you were born.”