time out with the baby,” she says. Her voice is rough and croaky.
The barista has a narrow face, with shockingly crooked teeth, and he gives her a tentative smile—or is it a smirk? Either his features are too odd and inscrutable or she is still too unsuited for the weirdness of fame. He isn’t wearing a face mask and Emma wonders if he has removed it for her sake, in some misguided attempt at connection. She is among the fraction of the population who ignore the official municipal infection precautions: face masks, curfew, no large gatherings. Most people don’t go outside when they don’t need to, let alone with a baby. But Emma isn’t afraid. She has already been through it all.
He produces her latte with its perfect crema pattern that is nowadays so common that no one even comments on it anymore. Emma remembers when she used to compliment the baristas on their patterns (their latte art? wasn’t it called that?) at this very coffee shop. How quickly everything changes. How fast luxuries become commonplace. Her own life has taken wing into proportions her old self would scarcely recognize. This is partially why she comes to this same coffee shop with its adoring or hateful baristas, its sameness, its physical solidity—to remind her of who she was/is and will be/will be/will be.
She keeps her eyes on her coffee as she carries it to the closest table and sits down, one hand on the back of the baby carrier strapped to her chest. The baby is asleep, so she feels alone. Emma is not afraid, as some new mothers are, of a baby who never sleeps. She thinks, on the contrary, it would be companionable. She has already been awake for hours and hours—for days and days, really—thinking about this coffee or something like it. Something to get her through to the next day, and the next.
There is almost no one here. ARAMIS has been ravaging Austin, although it is possible the worst is over. But the authorities won’t roll back the restrictions until the morgues are emptied, the dead buried. The mayor made that mistake before, lifting the state of emergency prematurely, which led to a new spike in infections. A grieving mothers’ group burnt his figure in effigy, and he gave a tearful apology on television. He tried to resign, but the city council wouldn’t let him. MAYOR MUST STAY AND FACE THE MUSIC, MOTHERS SAY. Across the café, a young man in a face mask and a Dove Suite T-shirt gives her a small wave, and by long instinct her mouth twists up into a momentary smile until, just then, the baby stirs. She looks down at her, relieved for an excuse to turn away. The baby is still sleeping, only restless. Emma tugs at the muslin blanket covering her daughter’s face. It is too porous to function as a mask, but it should keep people from pointing fingers. You almost never see children outside anymore, let alone babies.
The baby makes a small cry then. Pressing a hand to the table, Emma gets to her feet but feels the ground tilting, the floor turning to quicksand. A head rush. She closes her eyes, but when she opens them again the room is still swaying, as though the whole café has pushed off to sea on the swollen waters of the Colorado River. She drops back into her chair, back into her childhood mal de débarquement, when the earth itself became hostile, churning, anything other than a safe place to land.
It’s only fatigue. It will pass—it is already passing. But Emma is afraid of becoming someone she doesn’t recognize. So maybe it is better to remain so unsure, so unsettled, so full of the feeling of never arriving, never being comfortable, never having a home except with Stu. Stu is home.
If she is always a little bit adrift, then at least she will still be herself.
* * *
—
At home, the apartment is ablaze with morning light. They have three sides of the building, a full half-floor of the tallest property in Austin. The east wall of windows has been fitted with automatic curtains for which the button still needs to be repaired. Emma remembers Stu jabbing at it one morning, pre-coffee, hair askew, the hoarseness of sleep still in his voice.
“Add it to the list,” he said.
The list was real and ongoing, and it worked. A spiral notebook comprising pages and pages of tasks and goals, great and