Track 4 Delilah
Delilah
I genuinely believe that the only good treatment for queer heartache is to make at least one terrible, impractical, inadvisable decision that has nothing to do with sex.
Get a horrible haircut. Make a dish that’s way more complicated than anything you’ve ever tried before and invite all your friends to come eat it.
Go on a road trip without a map. Do something that scares you, that freaks you out, that rips the floor out from underneath you and leaves you reeling and looking for solid ground.
Why? Because whoever broke your heart already fucked you up, baby, and you can’t change what they did. The least you can do is make sure the next thing that makes you feel out of control is all because of you.
By the time they arrive in Philadelphia, Delilah has determined that there’s just the slightest possibility that she didn’t think this through.
It’s a realization as familiar as a well-worn pair of house slippers, but not nearly as comfortable.
Until Delilah hit college, her anxiety manifested not so much in thinking things through as it did in thinking things to death.
Once she’d found herself surrounded by alcohol and took a head-spinning slip-and-slide into her first full manic episode, she swung as far the other way as she could, going with whatever felt good or right in the moment.
After all, consequences were a problem for Future Delilah, and there was always the chance that if she went just wild enough, there wouldn’t be a Future Delilah to worry about things at all.
Thanks to a combination of intense therapy and carefully calibrated medication, the extreme peaks and valleys of her moods have mostly settled into an even landscape of stability.
And sure, maybe sometimes she misses the dizzying heights of mania, sometimes even misses the comforting dark of depression, but she’s safe now, and that’s what she’s supposed to remember.
She has a therapist she likes and a safety plan that lives on her phone, copies shared with Alex and her mom and Iris and even Sam—a clear set of instructions for what she’s supposed to do when she finds herself making the kind of withdrawal and darkness that could signal a dangerous downward swing, or the impulsive decisions and wild bursts of energy that signal an upward one.
Such as—and this is just a random example, obviously—inviting a perfect stranger into her car twenty-four hours after being dumped on her wedding day.
Delilah casts a sidelong look at Emmett’s profile as Roscoe cruises down Route 1 toward Philly, looking for any indications of secret ax-murderer tendencies and trying not to notice the way the sun breaking through the October clouds catches the angles of his face and brings out the lighter strands in his dark hair, or the way his long fingers absently braid the fringes of his tzitzit as he listens to Delilah ramble on and on about—God, what is she rambling about?
“What am I rambling about?”
Emmett cocks his head in amusement. “Your friend Iris. At least, I think it was your friend Iris? That’s where it started. I’m not really sure how it ended up in Berlin.”
“Oh. The podcast, probably.” Delilah reaches for the coffee cup in the center console, then makes a face when it’s lighter than she expects it to be.
She peers ahead to the next exit, does some mental math, and decides she can justify pulling off for another cup.
She’s going to expense everything back to Alex anyway.
If she’s writing an album on this trip, she can claim it all under “professional travel.” Flipping on her signal light and sliding into the exit lane, she says, “We started it together back in college, but it’s mostly hers now—I just help her with the research sometimes, because I’m a huge nerd about it.
She was going to do a whole season on queer culture pre–World War II, and Germany was apparently one of the hubs, so we took a trip together…
oh, three years ago? Something like that.
It was no Paris, obviously, but they had drag clubs and burlesque shows and this massive underground of queer politics—did you ever see Cabaret? ”
Emmett shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”
Delilah snorts. “You’d remember. I’m sure it’s streaming somewhere. I’ll show it to you at some point before we hit California.”
She gets off the highway and starts hunting for a drive-through coffee option.
“Anyway, it was queer as hell. There were something like a hundred gay bars there before the Nazis showed up and ruined everything for everyone. Like they do.” She pauses.
“Sorry. Are we at the if we can’t laugh at our intergenerational trauma, the Nazis won level of Jewish road trip companions yet? ”
The sound Emmett makes borders on a wheeze, and Delilah has half a moment to be alarmed before she glances over and finds him all but choking on laughter. “I’ll take that as a yes,” she says, and gets a breathless thumbs-up in return.
As Delilah merges back onto the highway ten minutes later, a new supply of sweet, sweet caffeine in her hand—God, sometimes she really misses the old party drug days; no matter how much she likes her coffees, they really just don’t do the same job—Emmett says, “No GPS?”
“Nope.” Delilah reluctantly keeps Roscoe in the right lane, not quite trusting the old van’s acceleration enough to go more than five miles over the speed limit. She reaches behind Emmett’s seat for her backpack, tugging the folder of maps and directions free. “All analog, buddy.”
Emmett takes the folder and looks through it curiously. “I didn’t think people really did this anymore.”
“They don’t, really.”
She hates herself a little for wondering if Emmett will give her the same distrustful looks Sam did, like she didn’t believe Delilah when she said she could navigate their way across the country without a tiny computer telling them what to do.
“This is how I used to take road trips with my mom growing up. That was pre-GPS anyway, obviously, but she had the best sense of direction of anyone I’ve ever met.
Still does, honestly. I’ve driven all over the country with her and we’ve never gotten lost once. ”
“It sounds like you two are close.”
“We are.” Not that the closeness will stop her mom from being absolutely fucking furious when she finds out what Delilah is doing, which is why she’s been unsubtly ignoring the text messages flooding her phone.
“It was just the two of us when I was growing up. Us and my grandma—my mom’s mom.
My dad died when I was really little, and his family didn’t really want anything to do with us. ”
“Oh?”
Delilah considers how much to say, then decides she might as well share. Emmett’s probably already wondering what would make someone the kind of adult who invites strangers along on cross-country road trips, despite all common sense indicating that that’s a really fucking terrible idea.
“My dad’s parents were old-money people,” she says, keeping her eyes on the road.
“They had all these plans for him—you know, graduate law school, senior partner at a big firm, go into politics, yadda yadda yadda. Which feels wild to me, in this century, but whatever. He met my mom when she was working at this coffee shop in Cambridge that he used to study at when he wanted to ditch the ritzy friends his parents kept trying to get him to hang out with. She thought he was a huge dweeb, but I guess she turned out to be into that, because when he asked her out, she said yes.”
She remembers asking her mom to tell her this story over and over when she was little, back when she was too young to really understand that it broke her mother’s heart to tell it.
They’d been happy together, was the thing, despite everything.
Dad had gone into legal aid instead of corporate law, spent his weekends playing guitar in a Springsteen cover band (“He loved dad rock way before he was actually your dad,” her mom liked to say, fond and wistful and just a little judgy) and reading terrible sci-fi novels, while Delilah’s mom worked on her dissertation and filled their tiny apartment with a thousand different kinds of fiber crafts as she tried to find a hobby she liked enough to stick with it for more than a month.
They’d been happy, all the way to the end.
Delilah wishes she’d gotten to know him.
He died when she was barely three, too young to have real memories of him.
But sometimes she thinks her body still remembers his presence in her life—when she recognizes a scent but can’t quite figure out why her chest flushes with a feeling of safety; when her mom presses a kiss to her temple and she senses the whisper of absence on the other side of her face; when she wakes up in the middle of the night at a phantom shift of her mattress, as if someone has come in late to check on her, just to make sure she’s sleeping safely, breathing and dreaming.
Her eyes sting, and she’s grateful for her sunglasses. Clearing her throat, she says, “Anyway, after he died, my grandparents on his side basically cut off contact with my mom, except to put a bunch of money in a college fund for me, but I didn’t take it when I got into school.”
“Did you ever take it? Even if you didn’t use it for college?”
Delilah snorts. “No. Partially as a fuck you, but also because they probably would have put some strings on it. I was not cut out for law school.” She catches sight of the first sign for Philadelphia, takes note of the exit number, and turns off the cruise control.
“Anyway, I had my mom and my grandma, and that was enough.” She inclines her head toward the back of the van without taking her eyes off the road.
“That’s his guitar back there—one of them, anyway.
But that one was his favorite. He had my mom paint flowers on it when they found out I was going to be a girl.
My mom says he used to play me lullabies on it. ”
Emmett is quiet for a moment, and then says, “It sounds like he loved you very much.”
“Yeah.” She swallows. “Anyway. That’s my tragic backstory. What about you?”
“What about me?”
She gestures between them without looking away from the windshield. “I’ve told you why I’m messed up enough to ask you to come on this trip. Who messed you up enough that you said yes?”
Emmett laughs. “Is being messed up a prerequisite?”
“Unless you really are a serial killer? Probably.”
“Good to know.” Emmett still sounds amused. Delilah risks a glance over and finds him looking more thoughtful than anything else, like he’s not quite sure how he wants to answer her question.
“I don’t know if I have a good answer,” he says finally.
“I wanted to do something that—that I wouldn’t have been allowed to do, before Jacob died.
He was very…” Emmett hesitates. Jacob must be the guy who died, Delilah thinks.
The one who raised him. Emmett’s probably trying to avoid speaking ill of the dead.
That’s nice of him. She doesn’t speak ill of her dad because he was, by all accounts, a total mensch of a human being, but she’d happily desecrate her paternal grandfather’s grave if given half a chance.
Emmett seems like a nicer person than she is, but then, given how they met, that’s not really surprising.
“He liked to know what I was doing, and he had very strong opinions about what I did and who I did it with.”
“Doesn’t sound like a very relaxed way to grow up.”
Another moment of hesitation. “No,” he says at last. “He had a son who died, before me. It made him very cautious.”
That much Delilah can understand. Her mom hadn’t dated much after her dad died, and when Delilah had asked her if she ever wanted to get married again, she admitted that she wasn’t sure her heart could take it.
Still, there was a difference between choosing not to take on a new relationship and messing up a kid because your own issues made you hypercontrolling. Probably. “So this is your independence road trip too?”
Emmett is quiet for so long that Delilah chances another look across at him.
His eyes are fixed on the road, but his lips are parted, tugged just barely upward at the corners, as if he’s experiencing something that’s as unexpected as it is welcome.
When he turns to look at her, his smile is real, filled with a surprised sort of delight that spills all the way across his face.
“Yes,” he says, with a decisive firmness that makes it impossible for Delilah not to smile back. “Yes, it is.”
“Well, here’s to that,” Delilah says, and gets into the exit lane.