small.
Choose a lead single.
Have a baby.
Find a nanny.
Change the light bulb in the guest linen closet.
The list is now sitting on the corner of the dining room table, a rustic affair in hickory with chairs for fourteen. Emma has not touched it in weeks.
Like the dazzlingly bright apartment, the baby is ablaze, too; it hurts to look at her. They’d decided on her name together before she was born: Blaze Aslet-Jenkins.
Stu balked when she first suggested it—he said Blaze was a name for a stripper, or a horse. But that objection became technical, as they both liked it, loved it even, in spite of their better judgment. It had come to Emma in her third trimester, in a dream from which she had woken up happy. It was precisely because she was not the kind of person to traffic in dream revelations that the name had come to seem important.
Blaze is a gorgeous, gleaming baby with large, watchful eyes, and everyone who has ever seen her says she looks like Stu. But then, of course they would say that.
Their apartment is a haven that she and Stu have taken pains to make their own. The old posters from their first apartment have been framed and restored to hide the tack holes and crumpled corners. A beautiful commissioned collage of gig flyers from their first college shows is hanging in the front hallway. Besides the studio with its own mixing booth, there is a home theatre with surround sound and reclining leather couches, and a gleaming deluxe chef’s kitchen because it is basically impossible to buy a new condo without one.
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