Anyway, Billy was doing the talking, chatting away like some overenthusiastic tourist-academy graduate about the Mapparium over on Mass Ave. Mrs. Bowen, as Billy called her, was listening politely. Hector put his head down and tried to get back to work, but two minutes later he got up and left. Truth was, he was a bit rude in his departure and regretted it the minute he’d left. He wasn’t really that kind of guy.

He was a last-minute kind. That night he would be performing one of his own compositions in a concert at Titus Sparrow Park and he still hadn’t completed the final riff, and he was already late for his students over at Berklee College of Music. (For the past ten summers he’d been teaching a class there and staying with his friend Grace whenever he came from his home in California.)

Grace and Hector went back to the days when he was a college music student at Berklee two and half decades ago. She’d been his landlady then. Grace had inherited her grandparents’ home on West Newton. He’d met her by answering a “room for rent” ad, and ever since then her redbrick town house had been his home away from home. He was so sorry for her when Bob died. In fact, it was he who’d convinced her to open her house to the occasional paying guest. He was pleased she’d gone with his suggestion and was now considering going into the hospitality business full-time. (“Good God, Grace. What a great idea,” he’d said when she starting planning, forgetting he himself had planted the seed.)

The piece unfinished and the students waiting, Hector left Grace’s and crossed Huntington. Something has happened, he thought. Something. Out of nowhere there was a new rhythm shaping in his head and the image of the lady in the blue dress was spread out against the sky. But it was the last thing he needed today. He needed to finish his piece. He needed to get to his waiting class. He stood at the intersection of Mass Ave. and he tried to concentrate on hearing Sparrow in Summer in his head. But there she was. She was like some walking bass line. A blue note. A blue flower. Suddenly, in the middle of his piece, the Bowen lady was an improv all her own.

What was it about her? Her hair—that was like, like what?

Cinnamon.

He raced up the stairs ten minutes late. The students were all there. They were used to seeing him a bit tangled, and used to him going into the wrong classroom, getting their names mixed up, calling them “Clarinet One” and “Sax Two.” It didn’t diminish their respect. He was Hector Sherr.

“Okay,” he said, and pushed his hands along his thighs. “So. You know I’ve played the park before, right? In ’99 and ’04, both times as part of a trio: sax, bass, and me on piano. And it was cool both times. But this is the first time I’ve decided to invite two students to join me on stage.” He watched a little flicker of nervousness run through them.

“But it’s improv, guys. So don’t sweat it.” He relaxed now, getting into his role as the offbeat professor. “The way I see it, there are three groups of people in the world. Those who rein in their creativity because they’re afraid to express themselves, those who just express themselves without thought or form, and those who follow their creativity and listen to it, without restricting it, allowing it … personal feeling. And that, that’s jazz, baby. That’s what I’m looking for. Can you guys deliver?”

He broke his students into groups, gave instructions, the major chords and key signature, and sent them to work on their improvs in practice rooms. Alone in the studio then, he sat down at the piano, a Boston upright, and worked on the final chord progression for Sparrow in Summer. (Turned out allowing personal feeling wasn’t so easy.) He worked until one, taking breaks to check on the students, and coming back with a kind of punchy electric urgency. Just before lunch he cracked the tune.

“Got it! That’s it,” he said under his breath. “Yes yes yes,” and he played the piece again to secure it. “Thank you. Mrs. Bowen!”

After a quick lunch of an apple and a yogurt he’d taken from Grace’s refrigerator, he went to audition the students. He had an extra bounce in him now. The students could see it. They knew his piece must have come together. He chose Casey and Belletti for the concert that evening, told them they’d be sensational and told the others he wished they could all be on stage, that he was that proud of them all.

When he came out into the sunlight, he had the elation of completing the composition and the brief glory of thinking it was great. He was light-headed and his heart was jumping. If you saw him coming, then you’d say he almost shone.

He crossed Mass Ave. and continued along and before he knew it, or before he’d admitted it to himself, he was heading for the massive doors of the Mary Baker Eddy Library and the Mapparium to see if, maybe, she, Mrs. Bowen, had taken Billy’s suggestion and gone there. It was unlikely, but so was the world. He’d dip in anyway. The Mapparium was one of the old haunts of all the students at Berklee.

The fact was, she had helped with the piece. He wanted to find her to thank her for that. Maybe he could even thank her and apologize for his brusqueness that morning.

That was what he told himself. That was the reason. It was nothing to do with the fact that she was beautiful and he just wanted to see her again. See that red hair, those cinnamon curls.

He found the entrance to the Mapparium and walked in through the Indian Ocean. Two boys in green-and-white soccer jerseys with the numbers 6 and 8 were whispering.

“Hey Colin, look! The North Po—” whispered the younger boy of the family. He stopped suddenly, startled by the sound of his own voice so loud, so bright, so booming around the world.

“Yeah! Brilliant! Can ye hear me?” the older boy whispered. Their laughter bubbled, like a cascading waterfall, like the sound of Art Tatum’s fingers running the keyboard playing “Tea for Two.”

“Shh … Robert!” said the father, trying to keep his voice quiet without success, then he, too, was laughing, and so, too, was their pink, sun-flushed mother.

And at the end of the glass bridge, nearly thirty feet away, blue on blue, was Iris. Her back was turned and she was busy with her handbag. She didn’t see Hector. As she fussed, the contents of her handbag spilled out. The pink soccer mom stooped to help her and from the opposite side of the world Hector heard them whisper—a soft murmur that was a loud murmur in the whispering gallery.

“Here, love. Let me help.”

They gathered the contents and the soccer mom feather-touched Iris’s shoulder. But as she rose, her left foot moved a last piece of note paper or something that had lain on the bridge. The paper was moved to the edge, and as the woman stepped away it slipped though the gap off the glass walkway. Iris gasped, her hands outstretched to it. And then she, like Hector, watched the falling note drift like a tumbleweed, down Central America, past Costa Rica, past Peru, then Chile, riffing along the curve of the blue Pacific, until it stopped thirty feet below, somewhere west of the South Pole.

When Hector looked up, Iris was hurrying out.

*   *   *

Outside in the blinding sunlight he stood scanning the crowds for her. The pavement scorched the rubber of his shoes. She was gone. After the blue cool, the heat was a shock and he went across the plaza straight to the splash fountain. The water was rising and falling in arcs from its flat concrete base, and into it Hector stepped, triggering an eruption of whoops and glees in the children as he crossed through the fountain in his own kind of cool, and coming out the far side.

Something was happening, something was definitely happening, but he hadn’t the words for it yet. Shaking the water from his hair he suddenly remembered. “Jesus, Hector,” and from the back pocket of his shorts he pulled the envelope she had dropped. (He’d had the attendant retrieve it from the bottom of the glass world.) It hadn’t got wet in the fountain. He shook it in the air a moment just in case. Although it was just an empty envelope, yellowing, with a handwritten address on the front, he wanted to deliver it back to Iris intact. He took off, heading over Huntington and back to Grace’s, and without needing to pause he plucked a daisy that poked through the park railings. He had a sense of propulsion, of things moving forward without his wishing or planning, and he was just going to go with it. He hadn’t felt this way since … since … He wasn’t going to think about that.