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“You tell me.”

Alba considers. “G. Why aren’t there any bars?”

“Just improvise. I don’t have any firm ideas about the time signature.”

Alba frowns and goes to get her violin. Mama gives me an evil grin. “I wish Richard could hear you now.” In my present my grandfather is dead. I, too, wish he could hear me. Alba reappears holding her violin case. She hesitantly tightens the bow hair, tunes up. Grandpa usually does this for her, but I wait until she hands the violin to me. I adjust her tuning slightly and hand it back. “There’s no right or wrong way to play this,” I instruct. “Listen and respond, listen and respond.”

She makes a false start and feels impatient with herself. Mama and I keep still. I realize I’m holding my breath, and I try to breathe out silently. She begins again, feeling her way across the sequence of notes as though she’s afraid she’ll break it, plays it once through and stops. “That’s wrong,” she says.

“How do you know?” I ask.

“It sounds bad.”

“What would make it better?”

My young self wants to say, nothing, but she can see that I am asking sincerely. She stands up straighter and stares at me. She’s waiting for me to tell her the answer. My grandfather had a tendency to answer his own questions, and when I was little I knew I couldn’t come up with the answer before he supplied it, so I stopped bothering to try. I make his little circular hand gesture, play it again, and feel kind of spooky impersonating him.

Alba tries again, more fluidly. She’s attempting to organize it into 4⁄4 measures, but it won’t fit. I conduct her, marking time, accelerating, slowing; we fall into grooves, swing it, syncopate it; the music we are making sounds crazy and kind of bad, but Alba is having fun. I used to deliberately make myself dizzy sometimes, spinning around until I fell over (or time traveled, that was always a possibility) and this is like that: a tipsy, childish high. Mama is laughing, delighted—I have that sense of release that comes when I please her, and I know that my young self feels it, too. We are relieved of grief for as long as we can keep playing. We can be here, in time, in the vibrating air, and before doesn’t matter, we are not thinking about after, our whole attention is with the now—don’t stop don’t stop—Alba is laughing so hard that she does stop, her head thrown back, the violin in one hand and the bow in the other, shaking with mute laughter. Mama takes them from her and gently places them in the case, and Alba collapses into Mama’s arms, hiccuping.

Mama regards my young self with affectionate awe. “That was wonderful, Alba,” she says.

We expand, we glow, we bask in her praise, because it jibes with our own certainty: that was good. Alba holds her breath to stop the hiccups and holds my gaze, wanting, wondering—she doesn’t know how to put it into words.

“Play,” I tell her. “We work so we can play. Grandpa is trying to give you the tools, all the technical stuff. He’s not very good at communicating the why of music, but he can give you the how of it. All these pieces you are learning—somebody made them up, just like we did now. It’s not about perfection. It’s about how music makes you feel. Sometimes you play for yourself, sometimes you play to share the music with other people, and then you can all feel it together. Grandpa wants to give you everything he feels and knows about music, but first you have to learn all the basic stuff, and that’s the hardest part.”

Mama asks me, “Do you enjoy playing, Alba? I worry that your grandfather is shouting all the joy out of music.”

“I love to play. There was a tipping point, things that he’d said over and over suddenly made sense. Then it was . . . not easier, but better.”

“When?” Alba asks. I shake my head, no need for her to know. “Soon?” she persists.

“Soonish,” I concede.

“Can I do anything to speed that along?” Mama asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “Find me another teacher. Don’t stop sending me to Grandpa, and don’t tell him, but find someone who knows how to teach. They don’t have to be a genius as long as they can cultivate a talent they might not understand. Grandpa teaches the way he was taught, and it can work, I guess, but maybe not for me.”

Mama nods. “You want to give me the name, or are you going to make me figure it out on my own?” I can’t think of any reason not to tell her. Young Alba brings a yellow pad from the kitchen and I write Terryl D. Lane and his phone number because Terryl is more of a phone person than an email person.

“Okay,” Mama says. “How did you meet him? Or is this a causal loop?” Mama’s whole life is based on causal loops; she thinks causal loops are terrific. I detest them. But of course that’s how I know Terryl.

“I heard him busking on Michigan Avenue. He was playing Biber’s Passacaglia in G Minor.” It was an early autumn afternoon, but no one was around; it was that strange time in the future when the streets are almost deserted. He was surprised to see me—mask-less and wearing only a Cubs T-shirt and sweatpants that I’d stolen from a closed gift shop—and I was wary when this fierce, scarecrow-like violinist suddenly stopped playing and called out my name, demanding that I accept the face mask he dangled at me. Put that on right now, Alba, you’re scaring me. Those were the first words Terryl said to me. Of course, he doesn’t know that, because it’s in his future, and I had no idea why I should be masking, because I was only a little girl, a few weeks older than the Alba who’s staring at me right now, wondering what I’m not telling her.

“Busking?” Mama says dubiously. “Okay. I’ll call him tomorrow. Will he already know us?”

“No, he won’t. But he knows Grandpa. So he’ll understand why we can’t tell Grandpa I’m studying with him.”

“And how does this work? What am I asking him to do? Does he teach at a school?”

“He’ll come here, once a week, on Wednesdays, at five o’clock. You almost always invite him to stay for dinner. You can explain to him about the time traveling. Terryl is good at keeping secrets,” I assure her.

Mama smiles wearily. Perhaps she’s thinking of the extra work it will be, making sure the house is presentable every Wednesday afternoon, or of the cooking she’ll have to do, or just the effort of meeting a new person, someone who didn’t know Daddy and doesn’t understand our grief. I could tell her it’s good for us, to let someone new in; I could tell her that Terryl is gentle, that he’ll understand because he’s lost people, too. But as usual, I keep it to myself.

Young Alba is anxious. “What if Grandpa finds out? If I play different, he’ll wonder why.”

“It’s okay, Alba,” I assure her. “He never asked.” Mama frowns slightly: I should’ve used the present tense. But little Alba doesn’t seem to have noticed. She looks relieved. So many secrets to keep—my own and everyone else’s. I say, “He’s just happy that all of a sudden you’re practicing!” Alba giggles. Mama hugs her, and then me. Alba and I do the dishes. She changes into pajamas, brushes her teeth, and then resists going to bed because I am still here and she doesn’t want to miss anything. So I sit in the chair by her bed—my bed—and she fusses with pillows and stuffed animals, gets into bed and arranges herself carefully; I turn on the little sunflower night-light and turn out the lamp by the bed. Then we are both quiet, though I can hear her breathing raspily, and I wonder if she’s getting a cold.

“Alba,” she says, “why are there so many secrets?”