The large living room—with its flat-screen television that is now always on and its giant grey L-shaped couch and its panoramic view of the Hill Country—has fulfilled the destiny of its name and become the room where they do most of their living. She deposits the baby in the bassinet by the couch and empties her pockets onto the coffee table. Her cellphone is flashing with a message.
“Call me, Em,” says Ben’s voice when she hits Play. “I can’t keep talking to your voicemail. We really, really, really want to see you.” Emma deletes the message along with several others she knows she won’t bother answering. She unmutes the TV when a news anchor reports that ARAMIS Girl has been found in a hospital in Boston.
“Aha,” says Emma, her pulse quickening. She had imagined ARAMIS Girl holed up in a basement apartment somewhere, ducking reporters like another plague and guarding her privacy before it could be stripped away by force. Stu never thought she would be found alive. The baby makes a small, almost inquisitive gurgle when Emma mutes the television and opens her laptop to a screen full of unopened emails. She considers deleting them, but decides instead to leave them there, unread. She shuts the laptop with one finger.
The baby is happy in her bassinet. Emma has made a place for herself on the couch alongside her. In spite of the broken curtain button and the excess of light, she cannot make herself go into the bedroom. But whether or not the baby is sleeping is immaterial. The baby is doing well. And the album is still doing well, too. After the concert disaster, there had been rumours their label might drop the band, but nothing came of it. Stu didn’t seem to care either way. He seemed to want to be punished for what had happened in Vancouver. He’d disappeared for a while into his own grief, and Emma, felled by her own suffering and by her anxiety over the impending birth, had left him to it. And now, in spite of all of Emma’s failures, or maybe even because of them, everything with the music is going well.
The letter has been lying on the rug under the coffee table since she flayed it open last week with a butter knife. Forwarded from the record label, the creased envelope arrived with the smeared ink of multiple redirection notices. She’d picked it up again once or twice to reread the invitation from her grandfather to a millionaires’ bunker, paired with his comparison shopper’s probing questions. Initially, she had crumpled the letter, then smoothed it to show to Domenica, before returning it to its envelope, handling it as one might an artifact in a museum, with a cool curiosity and an eye to the historical record. She felt tainted even though she knew blood was perhaps not so different from water, after all.
Across the room, sunlight glints off the open lid of the grand piano, a furnishing recommended by the designer even before she learned they were musicians. Steinway, ebony black, high gloss. Another luxury-deemed-necessity for an oversized space. Emma gets up and circles it as she does every so often, remembering the day it arrived and the detailed measurements taken by the piano movers to ensure it would be neither warped by the sun nor chilled by a draft, and how she and Stu had rolled it back and forth by inches for nearly an hour to find the precise angle for maximum visual impact upon entering the room. The fallboard is open, but the keys are dust-free. She touches one, stopping just short of the pressure needed to strike the hammer. Everywhere she looks, things are bright and pristine.
The apartment is clean because Susannah comes once a week to clean it. Emma is an atheist but prays on a daily basis for the health of Susannah and Susannah’s family. Except for fresh, perfect lattes, Emma has everything she could need at her fingertips. She ordered groceries and toiletries on the internet even before ARAMIS, in order to avoid running into fans with a box of tampons in her hands. Now her lettuce, oranges, toilet paper, tampons, and diapers are brought to her door by delivery men who accept her generous tips with discreet, gloved fingers. In their eyes, visible above the face masks, she sees alarm and distrust, but this is the kind of thing that no longer unnerves her. In other buildings, she has heard, the delivery men simply knock and leave the boxes at the door. This is the usual practice and the one recommended by health authorities. But here in this extravagant building there is a hope of greater reward, and so she does not disappoint. Hope springs eternal.
* * *
The thing about the sickness when it came was its relentlessness. It didn’t stop for a googling, a rundown of symptoms. There was barely time to get over your surprise—your totally irrational surprise that it could be happening to you. There was no time at all to feel the sudden wrenching fear, or for the flicker of hope that you might be wrong. No, it was like getting walloped with a hammer, and before the clanging in your head could subside, you were beside yourself: one moment of seeing it happen, the last moment where you were really there, and then you were gone into the pain and mostly into the fever. It was a blessing you didn’t know what was happening—not really. There was never that recognition of hopelessness. Although, what would be worse? Knowing you’re going to die, or not knowing? They both strike Emma as horrible.
If the baby died, she thinks she would want to die, too.
* * *
Blaze has been fed and burped but is still fussing. Emma remembers there is an unopened package of pacifiers in the baby’s room. She hesitates for a minute—pacifiers are disputed territory in a war in which she hasn’t yet bothered to take sides. But Stu would tell her to do whatever feels right. She picks up the baby and makes her way down the back hallway. Between the decorated but still-unused nursery and the bedroom they expected to be occupied by a nanny, she pauses in front of the framed family photo she always used to bring on tour. She squints at Harold, standing a bit apart, still sunburned under his large hat. He might already have been broke by then, and lying about it to everyone. Fathers are different now. They are allowed to love, to communicate, to be soft. Blaze would be as comfortable in Stu’s arms as in her own. Her own father had always kept her at arm’s length.
The phone rings—the loud jangling of the landline with extensions in the kitchen, the bedroom, and the control room of their home recording studio. She makes a note to unplug all of them. Stu poked fun at her when she had them installed: “More retro chic for the retro babe? What’s next, a fax machine?” But she’d liked the idea of a phone that didn’t move, like an anchor keeping her in place, even just for a few minutes. Then Stu had laughed when she ended up buying the cordless for the living room a few weeks later.
Now the baby is squirming in her arms. Emma can’t open the pacifiers without a pair of scissors. Impossible plastic packaging. The phone is still ringing. The virtual voicemail service once offered by their telephone provider seems to have ended without warning. She keeps meaning to check whether they are still being charged. Another thing for the list.
* * *
The last thing they crossed off the list together was hanging a mobile of hot-air balloons from the ceiling of the nursery when she was eight months pregnant. Made in France, the mobile featured real woven basketry and hand-dyed cloth stretched over delicate wiring. They’d both agreed they didn’t want any plastic crap or cartoon tie-in stuff in the room for their baby-on-the-way.
Emma had signed for the package and ripped open the box, then waited in the control room of the studio while Stu finished working on a new song. Music was the only thing that seemed to take him out of the funk he’d fallen into after the concert. He kept saying he wished he had a time machine, to take it back. As though it really was all their fault. He even said it to a Canadian reporter who called. But the plunge into songwriting brought him little peace outside of the studio.
“The mobile came,” she said, pressing the intercom button when he stopped to retune his E string.
He finally looked up with a distracted smile, still half bobbing his head in time with the chords he’d been strumming. “What?”
“The mobile for the nursery. I want to hang it, but I’m nervous about climbing the ladder.”
“Okay, five minutes.
I want to get this done first.”
Emma sighed, her legs twitching with impatience. “That’ll take forever. This will only take five minutes.”
Stu gave her a momentary grin through the glass. “Cool your jets, toots,” he said, before returning his attention to the fretboard and whatever melody was in the process of making itself known.
Emma waited six minutes, but Stu remained bent over his guitar, oblivious to her glare. She was cranky and peevish. She hated relying on someone else. It was infantilizing, just at the moment when she was supposed to be learning how to take responsibility for someone else.
She stalked to the hall closet and dragged out the ladder. She was making a racket, but Stu wouldn’t be able to hear anyway.
Tucking a hammer into one pocket of her maternity jeans and some nails into the other, she took a tentative step onto the ladder, already feeling unsteady. The pregnancy had shifted her centre of gravity. She had to step sideways to accommodate her belly. Then she heard a sudden noise at the doorway and almost slipped, grabbing on to the wall to steady herself.
It was Stu. He was shaking his head, a gritted set to his jaw, but his eyes were full of concern.
“When I realized you were gone,” he said, moving to ease her down off the ladder, “I figured you were doing something stupid like this.” He cupped his palm to her face.
Whenever they made up after a fight, Stu always fingered the curve of her cheek, as if tracing the path of an imaginary tear, before kissing her on the chin and then her lips. It was a ritual that began after their first real fight. She’d found herself resenting the gesture because it reminded her of how bitterly she’d cried then—not over whatever trivial thing they’d argued about, but for how the fight itself had shattered her silly notion of perfect happiness. But for Stu she knew it meant something else: the depth of her forgiveness and an ability to believe in a love that was bigger—a love that staked and meant and worked towards something more. So she let him do it. She had come to realize that a gesture, like a phrase, like a song, could mean different things to different people. What mattered was the exchange itself: the link, however tenuous, stretching out between one soul and another.
* * *
Another thing for the list: she wants to create rituals for Blaze with intention. She wants to create them with purpose and design before time passes and they end up mourning something else that has slipped away—the songs they sing, the games they play, even the food they eat. This is what people remember about their childhoods. But Emma is so tired, so very tired, and she sings whatever comes to mind. For games, she can think of Peekaboo and “This Little Piggy” and nothing else. She eats any old thing, usually raw. For now, Blaze is tiny, so it doesn’t matter; but soon, sooner than Emma can imagine, it will all matter. Blaze will begin storing memories, and maybe this hodgepodge of a life will become the thing they wish they could get back to, the time when things were simpler, when they didn’t even know how good they had it. There is no telling what the future might hold. This, too, is what keeps Emma awake. At four in the morning, she opens the computer and types into the search bar: How long can a human being stay awake without dying? The answer, it turns out, is still unknown. Sleepless, TV-bleary, half-incoherent, she wonders if she is somehow at the forefront of research. Maybe there is a purpose to surviving all these empty, torturous hours spent treading back and forth across the living room.
She imagines one day looking back at this time and longing for a bright, silent apartment and a sleeping baby. A coffee shop where someone waves at her. Hours and hours of effortless, delirious wakefulness. She wants to cling to every moment before it passes. Before she is carried off into the unknown future. She wants to hold on almost as much as she hates that unreachable feeling, that restlessness of soul.
It’s a childish impulse. Children hate change for change’s sake. And yet at some point, Blaze will look back on everything from her childhood and hate that she can’t get back to it all. The world is cruel, Emma thinks, to make children happy by default.
Just then, Blaze makes a cry Emma has never heard before—it sounds like a question. As if Blaze can sense the sleepless circularity of her mother’s thoughts. Emma stops pacing the room and sits down; she doesn’t trust her own balance at these times.
“Sorry, baby,” she says, adjusting her hold. Blaze leans back her head ever so slightly to look at her.
In some ways she’d like to share their baby with the whole world, but she doesn’t know how. There are a few old friends whom Emma misses, but she can’t imagine actually getting together with them. With her bandmates, everything is still too fraught. It is only with her sister that all frankness has persevered. With everyone else, intimacy has been like a patio door sliding shut in increments, so slowly she couldn’t track it, or even take notice. She was so busy. Too preoccupied. It was her own fault. After every album, the door was a little more closed. But as it shut on her old friends, any number of potential new friends presented themselves, ushered in by fame and fortune. But where could you start with people like that? Who would believe or understand her life, its ordinariness? There was no possibility of complaint. And she is afraid of the internet. Of rumours. Things getting out. So it is to Dom, and Dom alone, that she confides.
* * *
A few weeks before her due date, she’d called Dom in the middle of the night in Abu Dhabi.
“I’m not sure I want to go through with this,” she said. Stu was out at a show and Emma felt alone and huge and singularly burdened.
“It’s a little late,” said Dom, who’d picked up on the first ring.
“I’m serious,” said Emma. “I might be okay with everything changing, but I’m not ready to start living for someone else. I still want to live for me.”
“You will. You’ll get a nanny. You’ll take the time you need. You’ll stop feeling so bad once you realize that you’re going to feel bad no matter what you do.”
“That’s your pep talk?”
“That’s my pep talk.”
Now Dom says, “You should talk to the boys. They need you.”
“Mmmm,” says Emma. “I can’t.”
Dom and Emma have been on the phone for seven hours. The bill must be in the thousands. When her sister answered, Emma said, “If you hang up, I’ll die.” She’d meant it as a joke, but her voice broke and Dom is now taking her at her word. Emma carries the cordless from room to room. Dom’s breathing, husky and impatient, is more familiar to her than her own. The impatience is lifelong, not specific, and is audible only to Emma, who hears it in her sister’s quick, restive inhalations. Dom has always taken things in quickly, only to let them spool out at leisure in long, elaborate dramas. Like with Ahmad, her husband, whom she married after knowing for only ten months and to whom she is still married, though the convolutions of their union could fill a trilogy. Whereas Emma has moved forward in short spurts and small, spinning increments.
“I hate that we can’t turn on the same channel,” says Emma, “and watch the same thing the way we used to before you moved.”
“Why don’t you tell me what’s on?”
“The news, as usual.” Emma scans the closed captioning. “They’re playing that same old clip of the professor they’ve had on since Owen Grant went to sea.”
“The one who looks like a wizard? I’ve seen him. What’s he saying?”
“The usual. We’d better be careful or the human race is done for.”
“Better safe than sorry,” says Domenica. “That used to be Mum’s motto, more or less.”
Emma murmurs an acknowledgement. Her mother’s fears overshadowed so much of their voyage: storms, pirates, Y2K. And yet she’d kept them moving forward in spite of all the unknowns.
“Do you remember those stories I used to tell you on the boat at night?” says Dom. “Those nights I was so sick?”
“Yes. Stories about home,�
� says Emma. A home that stayed in one place, that endured. It seemed impossible at the time, and it turned out it was. “Our old house that I couldn’t remember.” But she could still picture all the rooms as Dom had described them on those stormy nights. “It’s hard to imagine why Mum and Dad ever wanted to leave.”
“Is it? There are a lot of different ways to be happy.” Domenica recently took her daughters away with her to London, but returned home after only six weeks. She’d said she needed the space to choose her own life again. Or at least to try.
“I didn’t mean they shouldn’t have done it.” Emma imagines strapping Blaze to her chest in her carrier and venturing further than the coffee shop. The idea is frightening, even destabilizing, but there is a pull there, too.
“Never mind. What do you think about now,” Dom asks, “when you can’t sleep?”
“Nothing,” says Emma. “Anything.” Anything other than what happened, she thinks but doesn’t say. “Nothing or anything or Blaze.”
Dom’s daughters, Aliya and Leila, can be heard occasionally in the background as the nanny gets them their dinner and herds them through their nighttime rituals. She tells them to put their pyjamas on, to brush their teeth, to not complain. Talking and giggling, the girls’ voices are indistinguishable to Emma.
“Your girls are closer than we were,” she says. “Closer in age, I mean.”
Dom ignores this. “You’re not the only one who feels alone, Em,” she says.
“I know,” says Emma, her voice catching. “It’s the human condition.”
“No, I mean, pick up the phone once in a while. And not just to call me.”
Songs for the End of the World Page 33
