Chapter 1:
1973

Mary and Ross were in Rome on a junior-year-abroad program when they had their baby, Natassia, who was conceived on a dare: “Do it with no birth control,” another couple challenged. “We’ll do it if you do it.” The guys dropped acid, the girls said they didn’t need to, then both couples went to bed, in Ross’s dorm room, on single cots pushed right up next to each other. It was 1973, September, their first month in Rome. Italy was still as hot as summer, and the semester felt more like a vacation than school. The dorm they were living in was a run-down palazzo with windows too huge for screens, so, during their first days in Rome, Ross had hung mosquito netting above the beds. Now, for privacy, the two couples pulled that sheerness between them, the only thing dividing them. Mary got pregnant, the other girl did not. Every morning that hot October, Mary threw up in the cracked marble toilet before leaving for dance class. Ross, awed by her as always and now a little afraid of her, too, watched and felt helpless. Years would pass before either of them would even begin to understand why they had done this.

Mary’s power as a dancer was her ability to fly. Most of her action happened a few inches off the ground. Beautiful, this flying, but it gave Ross the unsteady sensation that Mary would one day get away from him.

“I want you to have this baby,” he told her. It was a chilly late-October night. They were shuffling through Piazza della Rotonda, past the Pantheon, kicking street trash back and forth between them. They’d been in Rome almost two months and Ross still had no desire to explore the place. He said it smelled just like home, like New York. He’d pretty much stopped going to classes. Lazy in the extravagant way of the very brightest college students, Ross spent his days in bed getting high on hash from Piazza Navona and...