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,