dropped out of Bryn Mawr and moved into Stu’s studio apartment in Fishtown, where she started them on a schedule of writing songs and recording demos. It was Emma who found Ben and Jesse at a party full of students from the Curtis Institute of Music. Both studied classical guitar, but Ben had played drums in high school jazz band and missed it. Jesse landed on bass. The four of them fell to work on the band as though it was the thing that mattered most. Before long they had an easy rapport in which the thousands of tiny decisions that took forever to explain to other people became simple, silent, subsumed into the music itself.
Emma booked shows for them at all the clubs within a day’s drive, hawking their self-titled EP and keeping track of how much money was left on the inside back cover of their road atlas. And then, just before she had to figure out whether they could afford to fix the air conditioning in the van, they got picked up by Matador, released a full-length record, and watched as, one after another, the big music mags dubbed it the album of the year. Before they’d even started their first national tour with a real bus, MOJO had declared that Dove Suite might save rock and roll. No pressure.
Emma used to think she liked the pressure, the way it sharpened her nerves and reflexes. The focus it seemed to bring to all her decisions. The drive it gave her to write better songs, give more intense performances, and build the life she wanted from the ground up—brick by brick if she had to. But once she got pregnant, the pressure felt like it had no outlet, no purpose. She was like a kettle set to boil, forgotten on the element, just whistling Dixie until she burned dry.
Even before she’d started to show, Stu had summoned everyone to a band meeting to announce the pregnancy. Then he’d gone ahead and called off the tour indefinitely. Time was when he’d never make a decision about the band without checking with her first.
“You don’t know how you’re going to feel, Em,” he’d said, and Ben and Jesse had sat around and nodded, and nobody had sided with her when she’d said that maybe, just maybe, they would be fine figuring it out on tour. Being the only woman in the band was something more profound than just a drag. It was a dive, a drop. It was like falling down a well into a world where she was half her normal size. After so many years of keeping the band’s wheels turning on her own, maybe she should have been happy that Stu was finally making decisions by himself. Instead, she felt like telling him to play to his strengths and stick to the music.
But the baby had kicked her in the side and insisted she do the right thing, which she understood to be giving in without a fight. Forget about what she wanted. Forget whisky. Forget beer. Forget touring. Forget sleep, for that matter. Every night since they’d cancelled the tour, Emma had lain awake for hours, staring around their bedroom that felt cavernously large and nondescript in the dusky light filtering in through the blinds. It was only after she’d reached out to her Canadian promoter cousins and set things in motion for the benefit concert that she’d managed to get some rest at night. Her bandmates had been caught off guard by her sudden commitment to the charitable fundraiser, but they’d followed her lead. As usual. And for a few days she almost felt like things were back to normal. But then Stu had to go blabbing to reporters about the baby.
The pregnancy had made Emma feel as though she were preparing for a journey—lift-off was how she thought of it—a launch into the great beyond, where time moved differently. And yes, Stu would meet her there, on the space station or something, looking clean and well rested and wearing, for some unaccountable reason, an immaculately pressed beige suit. But he would get to teleport there unchanged, whereas she was supposed to be conditioning herself to exit the Earth’s atmosphere with the pressure of a hundred rockets. Blast off. The least he could do was wait for her to announce the pregnancy herself, when they were both ready. Preferably after the child’s safe delivery.
And just like that, all serious interest in the album and concert