Track 14 Delilah #3
Her first thought is that nothing special clearly means something different where Emmett comes from.
The notebook is more of a sketchbook than a journal, filled with page after page of pencil drawings, each one delicate and exquisite.
The majority are portraits of people Delilah assumes must be Emmett’s family members, and she almost recognizes some of them.
A young woman with large eyes and a cloud of dark ringlets around her head must be Ruth; a stern-faced bearded man can’t be anyone but Jacob, the sadness in his eyes and brows drawn with a tenderness that belies everything Emmett has said about him; an older woman with a kind face and deep laugh lines around her mouth has to be Miriam, Jacob’s second wife.
There’s a sketch of a young man who bears a strong resemblance to Ruth and is probably her brother Noah.
And there are sketches of another young man, too, scattered through the pages, a young man who looks so much like Emmett that Delilah almost thinks they’re self-portraits, until she starts to see the differences: a different slope to the nose, a wider set to the eyes.
“Isaac,” Emmett says quietly when Delilah lingers on one for a few moments too long. “Jacob’s son.”
“The one who died,” Delilah says.
“Yes.”
Delilah stares at the picture for a few more seconds. “He looks…”
“I know,” Emmett says.
“That’s…kind of messed up, isn’t it?” The question comes out before she can stop it, and she winces. “Sorry.”
Emmett shakes their head. “It’s okay.”
It’s absolutely not okay. It’s actually weird as all hell. But Delilah knows avoidance when she sees it. She nods, and starts turning pages again.
The next few drawings seem to mostly be of places in Brooklyn—skylines and streetscapes and a few storefronts she thinks she recognizes from her own time in the city.
There’s a perfectly rendered sketch of the Brooklyn Bridge, and another of the view from halfway across the High Line.
Mixed throughout are a few notations in what she thinks is Hebrew, or maybe Yiddish, as well as some smaller doodles of random objects and body parts—a stack of books, a braided loaf of challah, a pair of hands with skin shaded so delicately that Delilah can feel their papery thinness.
“These are amazing,” she says, running her fingertips over a drawing of what she realizes belatedly must be their previous campsite—she recognizes, of all things, the pattern of the stones around their firepit.
In Emmett’s version, abstract shapes dance within the flames—until you look at them at just the right angle and see something like the fairies or devils from a Fantasia story.
“Have you ever done anything with these?”
“What would I do with them?” Emmett sounds genuinely puzzled. “They’re just pictures.”
“I don’t know. Sell them? Have a gallery show?”
Emmett snorts. “I don’t think so,” they say. “I don’t do it for money anyway. It’s just something to do with my hands.”
Delilah rolls her eyes. The only thing worse than a cocky artist, she thinks, is one with too much humility. It just makes everyone else look bad. “Okay, modest mouse,” she says. “If you say so. I’m just saying—”
She turns to the next page, and freezes.
The last drawing is of her.
She’s sitting in Roscoe’s open doorway, framed by fairy lights that somehow seem to glow, even in shaded graphite.
Her fingers are curved around the strings of the guitar, D major done in perfect detail, and her expression isn’t like anything she’s ever seen on her own face, not even in professional photographs that Alex has paid thousands of dollars for people to take when she’s not looking.
She looks soft, and reverent, and utterly absorbed in the music, no room for anything else.
Looking at it, Delilah doesn’t see the pudgy curve of her stomach, or the size of her upper arms, or the way her glasses slide down her nose when she’s concentrating and make her face look warped, or any of the other dozens of features she picks on every time she sees herself captured on film.
She doesn’t see anything other than a woman, entranced and utterly focused, the position of her fingers and the parting of her lips so carefully drawn that Delilah can almost hear the song, can almost feel what she was feeling: longing and weariness and self-deprecation and always, when she’s writing, that vindicating touch of grace.
“Sorry,” Emmett says, and she glances up at them. They look embarrassed, and they’re rubbing at their left forearm with their right hand again, a nervous tic she’s noticed more and more frequently over the past day. “I should have asked.”
“No,” Delilah says. It comes out a little hoarse, and she swallows around an unexpected lump in her throat. “No, it’s—it’s okay. It’s beautiful. Thank you, I…I don’t think anyone has ever seen me like that.”
She closes the notebook and hands it back to them. Emmett takes it, and then, after a moment, says softly, without meeting her eyes, “Then no one else has ever really looked at you.”
Just for that, Delilah thinks, if she hadn’t been so horribly stung by last night’s rejection, she would have tried to kiss them again.
How fair you are, how beautiful!
Oh love, with all its rapture!
—Song of Songs 7:7