imagined their future child slip-sliding around in its uterine paradise, enlarging week by week through a progression of supermarket fruit benchmarks by feeding on precisely whatever it was inside Emma that used to make her different and unique. Since the onset of the baby weather, she had written three songs, all of them terrible. More than drifting, these days she worried she was actually lost. She wished she was at least carrying her purse.
At the departure gate, their tour manager Craig was sweating after rummaging in his briefcase for their medical certificates. Four all-clears, plus a waiver from Emma about the baby. Canada had no reported cases of ARAMIS to date and wasn’t going to be held accountable for any lost babies.
“I had them last night,” Craig was saying, glancing around as though hoping someone would chime in to say, You did. They’re in there. Keep looking. Not that long ago, Emma would have been that person. Now she ignored Craig’s public flailing.
Her phone buzzed with a message from Dom: Freaky. But what I really want to see is a picture of your belly.
Your wish is my command, Emma typed to her sister, then handed her phone to Stu, who had her pose sideways against a face mask dispenser.
“This isn’t a mugshot,” he said. “Smile, babe.”
Emma made a face.
Then a security guard stepped out from behind him and snapped an identical pic, striding away before Emma could even blink or hold up a hand. She shivered.
* * *
Their first full day in Vancouver, there was a rehearsal scheduled for the afternoon. Gertie Colewick was pacing around backstage as another band played through their set, her hand jumping to her throat when one of the stage managers tapped her on the shoulder to ask for an autograph. She was wearing something that looked like a canvas mailbag, but her face was tranquil, her hair arranged into a precise and intricate wreath of braids.
Before she’d contacted Stu, Gertie was a forgotten treasure of the folk music scene who had been in the national missing persons database since 1975. She’d gotten in touch after she read an article in NME mentioning that “Tiny Hands,” a song Stu had penned for their second album, was written about her. She’d mailed a letter to Stu, and folded within its pages were two tapes she’d recorded. Stu had called a band meeting to play them his favourites out of the thirty-odd songs that Gertie claimed were only about half of what she’d written since dropping out of the folk scene and, for all intents and purposes, off the planet.
“If you guys aren’t behind it, I can go solo on this,” he said. “I’m just really into her sound.”
Emma had been surprised by the declaration. As long as she’d known him, Stu had avoided anything that required expending energy that he could be putting into his music instead. She used to joke that if she weren’t there to make a plan for dinner, he’d end up starving until breakfast.
“I love her, too,” she’d said. “So pure and unique.” To Emma, Gertie still sounded exactly like she had in the summer of ’73, when she’d recorded her one and only album in her parents’ kitchen with the help of her younger brother. Back then, she’d seemed much older than twenty-two, singing about death and sagebrush and valley towns in California. “What if we do some orchestral arrangements?” Emma went on. “Or maybe ask her to collaborate on ‘Bless Us’ or ‘The Moon’?” They were songs she’d written for Beads that hadn’t made the cut. For the first time since they’d started making records, two-thirds of the songs on the new album were by Stu.
“If you don’t mind, Em, I have a few ideas of my own for this one.” Stu looked sheepish, proud, and—was it possible?—a little star-struck. “She wrote to me, after all,” he said. Emma shrugged. In the first fog of the pregnancy weather, she hadn’t felt much like pushing it. But it stung all the same.
Stu had gone on to produce the album, and Gertie had re-recorded twelve of the songs in their home studio. Her new breakthrough song was “Curious Fellow,” which was generally assumed to be about her affair with a now-legendary folk singer who’d followed her from Greenwich Village to San Francisco. Stu had procured for Gertie something resembling her old homemade harp, and with Ben and Jesse, he had practised the arrangements they’d come up with in the studio so they