Go somewhere else, Susannah said, with no hope at all. Hail a cab, go to a hospital. We’ll have it together, Mia. Maybe we can even raise it toge—

If I have it anywhere but here, it will die and we’ll die with it. She spoke with utter certainty. And I will have it. I’ve been cheated of all but my chap, and I will have it. But … Susannah … before we go in … you spoke of your mother.

I lied. It was me in Oxford. Lying was easier than trying to explain time travel and parallel worlds.

Show me the truth. Show me your mother. Show me, I beg!

There was no time to debate this request pro and con; it was either do it or refuse on the spur of the moment. Susannah decided to do it.

Look, she said.

THIRTEEN

In the Land of Memory, the time is always Now.

There is an Unfound Door

(O lost)

and when Susannah found it and opened it, Mia saw a woman with her dark hair pulled back from her face and startling gray eyes. There is a cameo brooch at the woman’s throat. She’s sitting at the kitchen table, this woman, in an eternal shaft of sun. In this memory it is always ten minutes past two on an afternoon in October of 1946, the Big War is over, Irene Daye is on the radio, and the smell is always gingerbread.

“Odetta, come and sit with me,” says the woman at the table, she who is mother. “Have something sweet. You look good, girl.”

And she smiles.

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again!

FOURTEEN

Prosaic enough, you would say, so you would. A young girl comes home from school with her book-bag in one hand and her gym-bag in the other, wearing her white blouse and her pleated St. Ann’s tartan skirt and the knee-socks with the bows on the side (orange and black, the school colors). Her mother, sitting at the kitchen table, looks up and offers her daughter a piece of the gingerbread that just came out of the oven. It is only one moment in an unmarked million, a single atom of event in a lifetime of them. But it stole Mia’s breath

(you look good, girl)

and showed her in a concrete way she had previously not understood how rich motherhood could be … if, that was, it was allowed to run its course uninterrupted.

The rewards?

Immeasurable.

In the end you could be the woman sitting in the shaft of sun. You could be the one looking at the child sailing bravely out of childhood’s harbor. You could be the wind in that child’s unfurled sails.

You.

Odetta, come and sit with me.

Mia’s breath began to hitch in her chest.

Have something sweet.

Her eyes fogged over, the smiling cartoon pig on the awning first doubling, then quadrupling.

You look good, girl.

Some time was better than no time at all. Even five years—or three—was better than no time at all. She couldn’t read, hadn’t been to Morehouse, hadn’t been to no house, but she could do that much math with no trouble: three = better than none. Even one = better than none.