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