The Unsinkable Greta James(36)

The blank page stares up at her.

It’s not that this part is ever easy. But she’s never second-guessed herself the way she’s been doing the last few months.

She tries to remember the last good writing day she had, and realizes it was back in February, a few weeks before her trip to Germany. She and Luke had rented an old farmhouse upstate for a long weekend. They explored the little towns along the Hudson, poking around thrift shops and hiking to half-frozen waterfalls. The last night, they cooked in the ramshackle kitchen, a feast of roast chicken from the butcher, fresh vegetables from the general store, and a growler of beer from a local brewery. Afterward, they turned on a movie and curled up in front of the fire together, but Greta found she couldn’t concentrate.

“Go ahead,” Luke said as he watched her fidget, tapping her fingers against the remote, bobbing her leg.

“What?” she asked, and he laughed.

“I know you want to write.”

She didn’t bother to deny it, just gave him a kiss on the cheek before heading upstairs. It was something about the coziness of the house, the frost outside on the fields, the deep contentment of a weekend away. It should’ve relaxed her; instead it only made her eager to write.

Later, when Luke came upstairs, he crawled into the creaky bed beside her, resting his chin on her shoulder to read what she’d written.

“Beautiful,” he murmured, his eyes fixed on hers, and she didn’t know if he was talking about her or the lyrics, but it didn’t matter, because he kissed her then, and they fell back on the pillows, and the notebook went tumbling onto the floor with a gentle thud.

Her phone dings, and she sets down her pen, grateful for the distraction. She sees it’s a text from Howie: I got you the week off. But in exchange, you need to sit down with the Times after your set. And they’ll want to ask about what happened. It’s time to get it over with. Okay?

Greta hesitates, then writes, Okay.

Also, Cleo says they want approval over the set list.

Greta frowns at her phone. Cleo is her A&R person at the label, a tiny but formidable Black woman from Quebec who has a habit of breaking into French whenever she’s annoyed or upset. Even if she hadn’t been the one to discover Greta during a bar set in Red Hook one snowy night, she still would’ve been one of the coolest people Greta has ever met. But in the whole time they’ve worked together, she’s never requested anything like this before.

Howie answers her question before she can ask it: They’re livestreaming the set, remember?

Yeah, but why? she asks.

Because of everything, he writes, which of course means: all those months of delaying the album, all those weeks of lost publicity. This had been the solution. A live recording of her return to the stage. A way to break out the new single. And a path back for her, assuming she can stick the landing.

No, she writes. Why do they want approval?

I think they’re afraid you might take another swing at “Astronomy.” There’s a pause, and then he adds: Don’t shoot the messenger.

Greta closes her eyes for a second. It hadn’t even occurred to her to try the song again. There’s too much at stake. She knows this, and clearly Cleo and everyone else at the label does too. They want her to move on. To stick to a script. And that’s fine with Greta. She’s as anxious as anyone to leave this all behind her.

Fine, she writes back to Howie.

You’ll be ready, he replies, right?

She looks out at the water, which is dotted with floating chunks of ice, each one reflected back on itself in the stillness. Around them, the water looks like glass. When she glances back down at her phone, she’s not sure what to say.

She’s always felt ready. Every single time she’s stepped onstage. Every time she’s held a guitar and closed her eyes and played that first note. That was the reward for pushing through thousands of hours of practice, and for all the rest of it too, the small indignities and constant rejections that piled up along the way: playing to near-empty rooms and waiting for calls that never came; being dismissed by agents and managers and execs; being told by pretty much everyone that it was too much of a long shot, this dream of hers, as if dreams were meant to be reasonable.

None of that had ever mattered. Not really. Because at her core, she had an unshakable faith in herself—and, even more than that, in her music.

But then, on an unseasonably cold night in March—exactly one week after her mom died and one day after she broke up with Luke—everything fell apart.

Six minutes. That’s how long she was onstage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

As it turns out, it takes a lot less time to derail a career than it does to build one.

The performance had been planned long before the bottom fell out of her life, a single song as part of a charity concert to raise money for arts education. If she’d been in a frame of mind to do anything at the time, she might’ve tried to bow out. But she wasn’t. And so she didn’t.

It was a risk to play something so new. The whole of “Astronomy” was written on three crumpled notebook pages, notes and lyrics she’d scribbled blearily on that long flight home from Germany, then practiced only a handful of times since.

She knew it wasn’t right yet. Not just because it had been written so hastily. But because it was a song about love and hope and memory, a wish more than anything else. There was nothing in there—nothing at all—about the grief that had opened up beneath her like a black hole the moment the plane had landed. And in some ways that made the song feel like a lie. But it was a lie she still wanted to live inside for as long as she could.