It was snowing.
This certainly wasn't a miraculous event, but when I looked out the huge windows of my condo, I was surprised to see that the sky had turned gray and that large white flakes were lazily floating down towards the street, eleven stories below. In the distance, the CN Tower was aglow in a bright teal color.
We hadn't had much snow lately. In fact, snowfall totals were lower in general. Global warming was a bitch.
My phone vibrated in my hand, drawing my eyes away from the snow-globe view, and I saw that my agent had texted a list of dates and locations.
Tour dates.
In March 2020, everything went to shit when the coronavirus pandemic struck the world. I'd been planning on releasing an album late that spring, but that went out the window along with my tour plans. For most of 2020, no one knew when concerts would resume. I was left hanging, unsure if when I'd perform again or if live concerts would be anything like they used to be. There were whispers in the music community that only outdoor shows would be allowed in the future or that we'd only be able to book a quarter of the seats in an indoor venue to accommodate social distancing. Many artists proclaimed that they were staying off stage until there was a vaccine.
I got it. I understood the science and the necessity for safety. But that didn't mean that I liked it. The pandemic was catastrophic in terms of lives lost, which saddened me and increased my anxiety tenfold. It also fucked up my entire professional and personal life.
Towards the end of 2020, things started to look up a little. My fourth album, Wonder, dropped and did better than expected. Trump was defeated in the US around the same time, and people there finally started taking the virus seriously. After 270,000 American deaths, their curve flattened. Here in Canada, things had improved much earlier, which says everything about the importance of good leadership. I'd left Los Angeles and returned to Toronto as the 2020 wildfires started raging and hadn't been back. That was changing. I was going there in two days to work on a remix for one of my songs and I could not wait.
In Europe and on several other continents, a vaccine had been approved in November 2020 and had shown to be very successful. The US and Canada were still in the clinical trial stages, but it looked like North America would start mass vaccinations in the spring.
This meant I was finally going on tour.
From LA, I was flying to Australia and New Zealand, two of the safest places in terms of covid-19. They'd handled the pandemic beautifully, so I had no reservations about traveling there. I'd get home February 10th and would have several months off until the European leg of my tour started in late April.
My band and I hadn't had a lot of time to practice, so the Oceania leg of the tour was a warm-up of sorts, and our hope was to have a polished act by the time we got to Europe. This wasn't how I usually did things; I was a bit of a perfectionist by nature. The dates had been scheduled at what felt like the last minute to me, and I'd had to learn to be a bit more flexible.
I perused the dates Andrew Gertler had forwarded. These were for the North American tour, which was currently being scheduled. He'd set it up so that I'd kick off the tour here in Toronto in September, and then hit most of the major cities in Canada and the US. This was all tentative at the moment, since it was dependent on a viable vaccine. Concerts had not resumed in the United States yet, so we had no idea what my tour would look like in terms of crowd numbers. I didn't give a fuck if my revenue was cut drastically; I just wanted to perform.
In Oceania and Europe, I'd only be playing outdoor venues, but the North American leg was in the fall and winter so that wasn't a possibility once the temps dropped in October. It was likely that masks would still be required indoors. I couldn't imagine standing in front of thousands of masked faces, unable to see them smiling or singing along.
I sighed as I looked back out at the snow. Life had changed so much in the last year.
A knock at the door made me jump. I set my phone down and walked between the kitchen and dining room to the entry hall. Peeking through the peephole, I saw a very familiar face.
Cecilia Burroughs; Ceci (pronounced CC), for short. I'd known her my entire life, but she wasn't one to just pop by my place unannounced. That was usually my move.
"Hey, Ceci. What brings you by on this snowy Saturday?" I asked with a smile as I opened the door.
"We need to talk," she said brusquely as she pushed past me. She hung her coat up and took off her duck boots, setting them neatly on a rubber mat my mom had placed on the closet floor many years ago.
"Can I get you a drink? I've got beer and wine. There's also some weird flavored seltzer that Aaliyah left here."
"No need for formalities," she responded with a dismissive wave before sitting down on my white sectional sofa, tucking her feet under her. She was wearing black leggings and a large sky blue sweatshirt. Her light brown hair was piled on her head in a messy bun, and she wore glasses instead of her contacts.
I grabbed a beer for myself and sat on the couch with my back to the window, propping my legs up on the coffee table. "So, what's up?"
She didn't answer immediately and was wringing her hands nervously, which made me uneasy. I had to restrain myself from jumping up and pulling them apart.
"Ceci?"
"Did you tell anyone about New Years?" she asked.
"Um. No. Isn't our rule that we never tell anyone?"
"Yes, but sometimes you let shit slip."
I opened my mouth to protest and then snapped it shut again. She was right. I did have a big mouth at times. I had kept it closed about this, though.
"I swear to god I didn't tell a soul," I assured her before taking a long swig of my beer.
"Good. That's good," she muttered to herself.
If you knew Ceci like I do, you'd know that this was weird behavior. She's usually all breezy smiles and tinkling laughter or she's full of fire, screaming and yelling. Sometimes she cries uncontrollably. My point is that her emotions are always very very clear. This guarded nervous side of her was unfamiliar to me.
"For fuck's sake. What's going on?" I asked as I set my feet on the floor with a thud and leaned towards her.
She pursed her lips and stared at me for a long moment before speaking. "I'm pregnant."
My beer dropped from my hand and hit the coffee table, causing the amber liquid to form a foamy puddle. "What?!" I choked out, as I scrambled to set the bottle upright.
"You heard me."
I gawked are her, waiting for her to tell me whose baby she was having, though the fact that she'd come to tell me (and was profoundly rattled by having to do so), pointed a neon sign in one distinct direction.
"It's mine?" I asked, feeling oddly numb.
She let out a breath she must have been holding. "Yes, Shawn. It's yours."
I watched as she stood up, calmly walked to the kitchen, grabbed some paper towels, and cleaned up the spilled beer.
"You're sure?" I questioned after she sat back down.
"You are the only person I've had sex with in forever, so yeah, I'm positive."
New Year's Eve had been quite a night. Had we been so wasted that we'd forgotten to use a condom, though?
Ceci read my mind, as she was prone to do. "The only thing that makes sense is that the condom broke and you didn't notice because you were drunk. We've always been careful, so I doubt we chose not to use one."
"Fuck."
"Indeed," she said wryly.
"Are you...are you keeping it?" I asked.
Ceci stood up and walked around me so that she could look out the window. "I am. I never thought I would when I imagined this kind of thing, but now that it's happened, there's no question."
I wasn't sure how I felt about this choice, but it was a hundred percent hers to make. "What now?"
She turned so that she was facing me. "I guess you have to decide how involved you're going to be. I'm not going to force you to be a full-time father, but I think you should be a part of our child's life."
Our child who was forming inside the woman standing a few feet away from me. How was that even possible?
"I, um, I need some time to process this and think," I told her, my mind reeling.
"I'm not due until September 24th, so you've got nine months to figure it out. No one knows yet. Until I'm showing, we can keep it between us."