Extended excerpt from Chapter 3

   When I look back on this Romey of a different time, I remember every beat of his heart, my heart, and every thought in his mind. My mind. It has been several years since I lived with Violet and Brownie and the other runaways in that New York warehouse, and retrieving the past is nothing more than rewinding a favorite song, or feeling once more the warmth of a lover. 
     Time is a trick, you see. The frame of the moment is cubed, as in a Picasso painting where the same perspective shows past, present and future. Time can feel unbearably slow or regrettably fast. As Einstein taught us, one twin can stay on earth to grow old and die, while the other twin travels at the speed of light and goes on forever. At about 300,000,000 meters per second, in fact, matter becomes energy. Time and space disappear.
     According to contemporary scientific knowledge, when two atoms collide, energy is released. New particles are created as photons, leptons, quarks and other names that mean nothing to ninety-nine percent of humanity. Past, present and future are trajectories that come together as an exchange of tiny particles. This is the complexity of physics, or simplicity. It tells us that time is a function of motion, and motion depends on energy, which is equivalent to matter. Nothing to it, really. So why should we fear something that stretches so easily and contracts with the mood of math?
     We shouldn't. We can choose, you and me. One timeframe is as valid as any other one. I prefer remembering the past in the present tense. Not so much because it's any more real, but because the past and future are detached in my mind, just as you must be from the words in this book. How could you understand the life of another, when your own past, present and future are colliding and separating in the roiling froth of physics?
     Fortunately, we have a way to solve this mathematical problem. In our case, just as Picasso tied together and froze the frames of a cubist moment, something happens in my future that connects my past with the present. In a few short weeks, the trajectories of time will collide. I will find in a London archive a stack of letters written over nineteen years before by my mother, Maria Elana Argasti, the beautiful and talented daughter of Tuscany in all its glory and shame.
     I know little about her, and less about her lover, American physicist Justin Albert Bishop. After I was born and Maria and Justin died, their former business manager, Frank Whirlpool, adopted me out of civic duty. There was little contact with the Bishop or Argasti families. That's why the letters Maria wrote her twin brother Alberto have become so important to me. With the same sense of confession that close siblings whisper into each other's ear, Maria revealed in these letters to her twin how she felt about music, and my father, and a life without tradition to guide her.
     The letter gave few details. When the two siblings finished school, Maria and brother Alberto had left their home in Mariano and gone separate ways. While Alberto followed his father's urging and pledged to become a priest at the Holy Father Seminary in Florence, Maria fled from their time-frozen village and dedicated herself to music. With a talent and passion for the cello, she won a full scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London, and it was there in the spring of 1985 that she met Justin, a Masters student in physics at Royal Holloway College. To the horror of Maria's family, the two unmarried students moved into a small flat in Bloomsbury at the center of London.
     The result was me, a singular event in time. Yet as I have come to find, it was more than the birth of a bastard. According to Justin's waveform theory, it was the constructive interference of waves, a superposition of energetic frequencies, the combination of two forms of courage that had potential to conquer life's fear. Or it could have, if not for my parent’s untimely deaths.

September 17, 1985
     It was just as you said, dear brother, only far worse. Papà stayed with us for three long days and I begged the clock to keep striking until it was time for him to leave. His garlic and tobacco are still thick on the chairs and I know Justin thinks they will never come clean.
     When I finally took Papà to the train, I told him I loved him and that he would always be welcome. How could I say such lies, Alberto? How can you look at him without thinking of how he treats me, how he sees me as sin? Why should I care what an old man thinks? I have Justin and music, and you for listening.
     I wish I could forget all about Mariano and the endless grapevines on the hills and the bronze steeple that jabs the sky. Papà could only talk of the priesthood and you, but I do not hold this against you. I am glad you are getting what you want. Do the priests at Holy Father know they are gaining more than they bargained for? You as a dutiful pledge, dressed in black and so silent with devotion to God! What about those nights when we whispered and risked our souls?
     Devotion should not be so lifeless, Alberto. I have found a different kind of devotion and, for me, it is life. I am a disciple of Justin Bishop. It is not only his beauty, though he stops my breath with his blond curls and spotted blue eyes, but also his ideas that make this dull world vibrate like crystal. That is devotion! This is religion, brother.
     Papà could never understand what is between Justin and me. On the way back from the station, Justin and I took a long walk in Bloomsbury Square. I tried to tell him the truth about Papà, and the black nights in Mariano. The park at Bloomsbury is one of the few places in these cold streets of London that remind me of the wooded slopes and green fields of home. How we laughed as innocents and sang by the creek behind the barn. Glory to our Savior! The Kingdom of the Lord is come!
     I can't wait until you meet him, my twin. Justin will change the world. His ideas are like those in the books you read at night when I pestered you with gossip. Justin's thoughts are for those who know the heart speaks a deeper language. I only wish you could come to know him as I do. He makes my knees weak and my heart so happy.
     You should tell them! I taunted him as we walked in the park. You should shout it, Justin! I took his arm and pulled him along the path. People on green benches read crumpled papers and fed the begging birds. Justin shushed me and kissed my forehead so sweetly that I felt a rumble deep in my chest. Stop running, he scolded me. You make me dizzy, he said. Only Justin does not know that I am already so turned around by him, that front seems back and the past fades from my head.
     You come back, Papà had the nerve to say before he boarded the train. You can imagine the way he talked to me, Alberto. He took me aside and said it many times. Venuto a Mariano, Maria, Venuto a Mariano. Ma su! He was fuming, so angry that his eyes bulged. It was as though he believed the power he holds under the skies of Tuscany could follow him to the streets of London.
     He is worried about his daughter, Justin tried to convince me. Any father would be worried, he said, but I laughed. Justin thinks Papà is a tiny man, but his arms still look to me as though they could burst through his shirt. Papà thinks I am so mystified by Justin that I can no longer reason, but I am deeply in love and that is something a stubborn man from Mariano, especially Sergio Argasti, will never understand.
     In the park, I pointed to the people on the benches. They will listen, I said to Justin. Everyone should know about this physics, the waves that make us vibrate with energy. This is the most brilliant physicist in the world! I yelled, but a woman on the bench shushed me. She pulled her red cloak around her so tightly that the book she was reading fell to the ground. I ran to pick it up, but she growled at me. You're scaring the bloody pigeons! she said and it shocked me because these Londoners are usually so silent. It is as if they have already lived and know what will come.
     I did not mean to bother you, I assured the woman, but she sniffed and I noticed her wrinkled face, how it looked like Mamma's. Not only the white wrinkles of skin and crow's feet around the eyes, but the way she clutches her purse and gathers the folds of her dress into a space that seems to hold such secrets.
     I stooped and kissed her red cheek, Alberto. It was a rush of feeling for Mamma, I am sorry to admit, and Papà. Justin pulled me away and we drifted by more benches with strangers and their threadbare gloves. Such a pigeon you are, I told him. Afraid these people will not understand, but they will. You have found something beautiful, Justin, that makes sense of the world, even the bad.
     The sun went behind the trees and I took the purple hat you bought me, Alberto. I pulled it tight against the cold. My stomach did not feel so good. We had not eaten since lunch. I should not have let Papà come. We had no money to feed him. He should have stayed in Mariano with Mamma, but he always goes where he is not wanted.
     I rested my head on Justin’s shoulder. He put his arm tight around me. The trees along the avenue are just beginning to lose their leaves and the pavement was slick from rain, but the black and white cabs roared along the street as if there is no danger. Our apartment was cold inside. Justin shut the window and you can imagine after so many days with Papà, how Justin was looking forward to being alone. He kissed my lips, but I felt a thought buzzing in my head. How I tried to be rid of it, Alberto, that Justin's hands are not so unlike Papà's.
     I pushed him away. I made an excuse. I said if we made love, he would not be able to hear my new music, and that I should play for him. I ran to the bedroom to get my cello. I sat on the bed and pulled the bow slowly across the strings. Papà's tobacco was clogging the air. I wrapped my legs and arms around the cello and the notes trailed across the floor and seeped out the window and down to the people who sit on the cold benches.
     I am so happy with this new music, dear brother. You would like it, too. It sounds like wind in some places and storms in others. Now Justin sleeps with his eyelids closed over beautiful eyes and I sit near the lamp and write this letter, which you must never show anyone, or even confess. No one can understand the shame I feel for Papà, or my anger for Mamma. Memories are never forgotten, but forgiven, and I know in my heart that Justin's hands are not like Papà’s, but rather like God's. And for this, I give Justin my love.