The text message said only: “Irene Cara.”
“No!” I typed, fast-cut images of Flashdance flooding my head.
Emily sent a crying emoji in reply.
This was how Emily and I marked history. It was how we could talk to each other across the time and space before we met in A.A. meetings. The nostalgia made no sense, our teen years having been filled with bullies and aborted love affairs. But we both had thrilled at the juddering image of the MTV rocket launch and felt the rumble of the ignition flame burning hot in our loins. In our very souls, it had seemed to us.
The musicians felt like people we knew. We’d spent so much time in their company through the pages of Melody Maker or Rolling Stone, through the Holy Saint Martha Quinn’s adoring interviews and David Letterman’s mocking interrogations. But mostly through dim basement parties and cars where we grappled with adulthood to the sounds of their voices.
2016 was the worst. There was the shock of Bowie, and then a few months later, Prince. She couldn’t get out of bed for two days. I wandered the grocery aisles in a daze. In between had come George Michael, Glenn Fry, Vanity. Later that year, she lost a Beastie Boy; I lost Leonard Cohen. Each of these deaths was a strike against the immortality of music and fame. It was a reminder that time never stopped moving forward, but human bodies did. We measured our impending ends against theirs, rehashing music videos and celebrity scandals over matcha lattes and TMZ notifications.
But the truth was we weren’t strangers to loss. She had lost her husband to another woman; I had lost a breast to cancer. Both of us had lost parents. The year Casey Kasem died, she had almost lost her brother in a drunk driving accident. The year of Tom Petty, I had almost lost a son to suicide.
With each passing, we held a private memorial. We honored our rock ‘n roll gods by mixing the cocktails of that past: Sex on the Beach, Slow Comfortable Screws Against the Wall, Slippery Nipples. When Donna Summer died, we played disco all night, yelling “Hot Stuff!” and doing the Hustle. For Eddie Van Halen, we pulled our Day-Glo suspenders from the backs of our closets and did Kamikaze shots. While we queued up the soundtracks of our youths on Spotify, we told stories of where we’d been then, the ideas we’d lived by, the very act of telling weaving the details into a thread to bind us. Sometimes this led to a moment of compassion for our younger selves, but mostly to admiration for how far we’d come.
The hip replacement was supposed to be a breeze. At least, the surgery was. Emily couldn’t wait to dance again. We mapped out the recovery timeline. She made me swear not to let her take more than one week of oxycontin, no matter the pain. I froze her favorite meals for her. And, of course, we put together playlists for her recovery. Thumping rap anthems for P.T. workouts. Soaring pop songs for days she needed an emotional boost. Because Emily was a realist, she insisted on making one of gloomy Cure songs, too. Mostly, though, we anticipated it would be a breeze: she walked four miles a day and ate lots of vegetables.
Then she stroked on the table.
Her heart monitor had a rhythm all its own. I caught myself making up a tune to the beat, knowing Emily would have done the same. The doctors said the anecdotal evidence suggested talking to coma patients seemed to help. I didn’t bother. I sat by her bedside and played her music, my fingertips tapping out the bass lines against the inside of her pale arm.
I made a playlist of songs by the ones we’d lost over the years, the ones whose beats we’d marked time by. As I scrolled, I thought of the game we’d sometimes played. “Where Were You When?”
When Kurt Cobain shot himself.
When Michael Jackson never woke up.
When Whitney Houston drowned in her bathtub.
The idea that I might have to add Emily’s name to that list was unbearable.
At the hospital, I placed my phone on the pillow next to her ear and turned it on. In my mind, I saw the girl Emily told me she’d once been, the one wearing fingerless gloves and lace crop tops, the one doing “The Safety Dance.” I pictured her wearing a Walkman and walking like an Egyptian. I braided my fingers between hers and held tight.
“Stay,” I whispered to her. “Who will keep time with me if you go?”
I squeezed her hand to the beat of the drums, slapped the crescendos onto her mattress. I traced the singers’ highs and lows in a line up and down the unresponsive calf lolling under the hospital sheet. Her kids thought I was crazy, but I knew it was a language that, if she was still in there, she would understand.
That she would come toward. If she could.