about it that way.
And it’s not like the job was easy. Not even close. So much online gossip and jealous rumours. And worst of all was the blowback from the benefit concert in Canada. One of the features published on Stu last month by a snarky online rag was subtitled Instant karma?
Blaze cries and Emma sits up. Cradling her, she goes to look for her laptop.
* * *
A day after the phone call, Emma came down with a fever. The thermometer gave a tinny beep to announce its reading, and Stu said, “A hundred and four.” A hundred and four was bad.
Emma had her hands on her belly. She couldn’t think of anything to say besides I’m sorry, so she didn’t say it.
“I can’t tell,” said Stu, “if my legs are shaking out of fear, or if I’m sick, too.”
It was after midnight when they agreed Emma should go to the hospital. She was starting to cough and was too dizzy to even sit up. But Stu said he felt too shaky to drive, so he called them an ambulance.
In triage, they were both admitted to the hospital as presenting with ARAMIS. Emma saw a nurse fastening Stu’s hospital bracelet to his arm before her eyes fluttered closed. She was on a gurney being followed by several medical residents who were checking online databases for case histories of ARAMIS in women with full-term pregnancies.
Her lung capacity was already reduced from the pregnancy, so she was ventilated, pumped with antivirals and antibiotics. Then a week and a half went by, her only memory a series of strange dreams. Blaze was delivered by C-section and isolated in quarantine for two days before Emma regained consciousness. The baby’s blood tested positive for antibodies to the virus.
In another room in the same ward, it might have been the same for Stu—the fever, the weakness, the coma, the dreams—except that his body weakened irrevocably and both lungs were compromised and failed within four days of his being admitted. Eventually, the ventilator was removed and assigned to another patient with a better prognosis. Emma wasn’t there when it happened. She doesn’t know if he was afraid. She never got to say goodbye.
* * *
Via the grainy video feed, Ben and Jesse look like they could use some sleep. They almost look old. Or not old, just nearly middle-aged. Old compared to the kids coming up. The little prodigies on YouTube. Just a few months ago, Ben had shown her and Stu a clip of a five-year-old singing “Nessun Dorma.” He was superb.
“Why do we even bother?” Stu had joked. “Let the next generation take over already.” Ben had laughed and said he was already selling his drum kit on Craigslist.
These boys, as she calls them. These men. Ben in his faded U2 shirt, half a week’s stubble sprouted unevenly over his neck and chin. Jesse’s usually perfect hair lying flat and dark with grease, the hollows around his eyes nearly purple. Whether they’re her family or her colleagues or both, Emma knows, seeing them, that they’re hurting, too.
She can tell from the Lone Star flag and the Dixie Chicks poster that Ben and Jesse are together at Jesse’s place. They all live in Texas now, most of the year, but Jesse is the only one of them who can call it his home state.
“Don’t shut us out, Em,” says Ben.
“I’m not,” she says. Seeing their anxious faces, she feels a sudden responsibility for making everyone feel better. “How’s your Canadian girlfriend? The long-distance thing going okay?” Ben had started dating Emma’s Vancouver tattoo artist after the benefit concert.
“Marisol’s good. She’s pretty funny, actually. We Skype a lot.”
Jesse cuts in. “So the next album, Em. We need to decide what we’re doing.”
“Do we?”
“There are all those tracks we’ve already recorded. Hell, some of them are even mixed.”
Jesse means all the extra songs that didn’t quite make the cut for the fourth album, the one they released before ARAMIS. Not all that long ago, though it feels like an eternity now.
“They’ll keep,” she says.
“Maybe. But right now we have momentum.”
Emma leaves that alone. The band is her and Stu’s band, really. They were never in charge, technically—just actually, factually. Artistically, acoustically. They started it and generated the material, even if they all share the credit. With Stu gone, it should be her band. Her songs. But here they are, crowding her.
Jesse pulls a scrap of paper out of his back pocket and begins reading out a list of