Track 28 Delilah
Delilah
She doesn’t know how long she stays there, numb with grief and exhaustion and the weight of failure, before something inside her finally tips into acceptance.
“Okay,” Delilah whispers. “Okay, love.”
She sits down on the ground next to them, her back to the wall, and then, with careful hands, coaxes Emmett closer.
When she touches their shoulder, she feels solid stone through the fabric of the tallit and the shirt underneath it, not the soft give of muscle and skin.
She doesn’t know how far it goes, how much of Emmett is still flesh and blood, but they have enough animation left in them to go where she guides them, tilting onto their side until their head rests in her lap.
They’re heavier than she remembers, so much stiffer, and when they settle their head against her thigh she sees the stone stretching up to their jaw.
She brushes her fingers over it, finding it cold, and swallows around the tightness in her throat, gently tugging at the tallit to arrange it over their shoulders so that it falls like a blanket.
It’s silk, and won’t do much to keep out the chill of the cavern, but she doesn’t want them to be cold.
“I’ll sit with you,” she says. She doesn’t know if they can hear her, but she says it anyway, because after everything she did, making sure they’re not alone is the least she can do. “Okay? I’ll stay. I’ll stay until it’s over.”
Emmett doesn’t reply, but then, she hadn’t expected them to.
Delilah takes a shaking breath and slips her fingers into their hair again, still soft and tousled and real.
She closes her eyes, remembering what those dark curls had looked like windswept from the air blowing through Roscoe’s window as they drove down the highway, or pinned messily under Delilah’s rainbow sunglasses, or mussed and tangled by her own hands in bed.
She thinks of their eyes too—bright and shining when she made them laugh, cool and thoughtful when they were curious, the way they never seemed to look the same, always reflecting something, the sky or the stars or their own emotions.
“I saw Sam,” she says. She’d read somewhere that talking to a coma patient can be comforting, that hearing a loved one’s voice can make a difference, even if there’s no outward sign.
“We talked.” She snorts, even though it’s not really funny.
“I took her car. I didn’t steal it, but I needed to get out here, and she owed me.
I’m gonna be real, I’ve never been so glad I talked her into getting something with all-wheel drive.
I wouldn’t have wanted to drive some of those roads in her old Barbie convertible.
” She wraps one of Emmett’s curls around her finger, then lets it go.
Soothing herself, as much as anything else.
“She apologized. Kind of.” Delilah makes a face, tilting her head back to look up at the ceiling.
The cool rock is unresponsive. “Well—barely. I don’t know.
She did that thing where she talks around an apology until she almost had me apologizing, which is sort of typical, I guess.
I never really realized it before. But I held my ground.
Mostly.” She shifts to get more comfortable.
Emmett’s head is heavy in her lap. “I showed her the songs. Not—not everything else,” she adds quickly.
“Not Jacob’s journals. She thought it was just a story.
” The laugh that bubbles out of her feels hollow and tastes like salt. “She thought it was about me.”
Is she imagining it, or does Emmett twitch slightly at that?
Delilah pauses, looking down, but they’re as still as ever.
Only the soft strands of hair still twined around her fingers let her know they’re not fully gone.
“The worst part,” she goes on, as smoothly as she can, like she hadn’t had that popped balloon moment of hope at all, “is that I think she might have been right. Which—listen, people talk a lot about artists knowing themselves, but most of the ones I know are just six different diagnoses in a trench coat. People are either doing autobiography on purpose or avoiding it like the plague. People don’t do it by accident.
At least, I never have.” She takes a breath.
“But I was playing all my samples back while I drove out here, listening to everything I recorded when I was telling myself I was writing about you, and…
“Honestly, it’s obnoxious. I spent the last week trying to convince myself that she never really knew me, and I never really knew her, and everything between us was just a messed-up, convoluted lie, because then maybe I’d feel better about the fact that she threw it all away.
But…but the thing is, she does know me. She did see me.
She saw how much I didn’t really think she and I were going to be permanent, because she saw how much I didn’t want to be permanent.
How much I never expected to live this long, and now that I have, I never really bothered actually trying to figure out what I wanted my life to look like, instead of just going along with whatever seemed—seemed like what I should be doing. ”
Delilah closes her eyes. “And then I met you. And you were lovely and intelligent and secretly funny and so incredibly hurt inside from all the ways people didn’t love you the way they should have, and you found ways to love them back anyway.
You were so sweet, and so sad, and you were going to die because some asshole who never deserved you decided he was going to take you with him on his way out the door, and it wasn’t fair.
” She runs her thumb over the curve of Emmett’s cheekbone.
“That was why I didn’t know how to end the story.
The one I was writing, the one I thought was about you but was really about me.
Because if it was about you, then of course I should want the narrator to live at the end, right?
Happily ever after. But if it was about me…
well. You can probably guess how I’d end it if it was about me. ”
Emmett still says nothing, but she thinks maybe they shift against her, just the tiniest movement, the barest press of their head into her abdomen.
Delilah strokes their hair, keeps her own breathing even, doesn’t dare to stop.
“But I wrote the ending,” she says. “I mean, as much as anyone can write a song while driving. God knows if it’s any good.
But for once I guess I didn’t really care if it was good. I just wanted it to be—”
Mine, she almost says, but then, that’s not true, is it?
“Ours,” she admits. “I wanted it to be ours.”
And because she doesn’t know what else to do, what else to say, she starts to sing.
She starts from the beginning, with the first song she’d written.
Delilah has always hated that classic advice to start the story in the middle, maybe because she resents the idea of anyone getting to just start somewhere, in the middle of a journey or an adventure or a conversation, without doing the work of getting there in the first place.
So she sings the story through from beginning to end.
That doesn’t make it linear, though, because how could it be?
When so much of who she is, of who they are, is an endless loop of one step forward followed by two steps back.
She sings the smell of the highway and the bitter taste of gas station coffee, of a stubborn tan line on her ring finger, of the thousand shades of gray she’s learned in a week of watching Emmett’s eyes, of secondhand books and firsthand history, of glitter and club lights and the sweet temptation of oblivion, both metaphorical and not.
She weaves it all together, puts her story and Emmett’s on a loom and cracks her heart open for thread, takes all of the guiltiest and most insecure parts of herself and finds the color and pattern and wholeness inside them until she’s made something beautiful out of it all.
She sings a story worth living for, worth holding on to, even in the moments when it feels like there’s no reason left to try. A story to keep her from turning herself to stone.
The cavern’s acoustics are stunning, and she thinks that if she could, she’d record in a place like this—not in the clear, sterile, controlled environment of the studio but a place where every note blends and blurs into the next, echoing over and under and through one another, until it feels almost like she’s harmonizing with herself.
It makes the sweet songs sweeter, the haunting ones darker, threads beauty and uncertainty and love into a delicate canon that reverberates through the small space, the sound lingering even after Delilah has let the last note leave her throat.
She feels lightheaded and floaty, the way she often does when she’s spent a long time singing. Delilah blinks her eyes open without dropping her gaze from the ceiling, unsurprised to feel tears drying on her cheeks. She takes a breath.
Tucked against her lap, Emmett does the same.
Delilah slams back into her body so fast it makes her head spin.
She snaps her eyes down, scrambling with her free hand for the flashlight she’d abandoned on the ground.
By the time she grabs it, Emmett is blinking up at her, eyelashes fluttering slowly, but their eyes are clear and bright when they finally open them, and Delilah breathes, “Oh my God, oh my God,” and kisses them.
Emmett makes a startled sound, and Delilah jerks back automatically, an apology on her lips, but it’s cut off abruptly when Emmett catches her shirt—clumsily, stiffly, but with a strength that makes it clear they mean it—and pulls her back down.
Delilah hears herself make a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob as she curls her hand over Emmett’s, rough stone against her skin.
“I’m sorry,” she says, the words nearly lost between them. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“You said that,” Emmett mumbles against her mouth. Their voice is hoarse. “You wrote me a song.”
“I wrote you an album. Oh, my God, I thought you were—” Delilah kisses them again, then draws back just enough to rest their foreheads together.
“Are you here? Actually here? I didn’t breathe too much cave air?
” Emmett’s lips part under hers, and she shakes her head quickly.
“I know that’s not how it works, I’m rambling, I’m—wait.
” She pulls away again, because she needs to see their face. “Emmett. Did you hear everything?”
They blink at her again, alert but still a little sluggish, brow furrowing in confusion.
“Emmett,” Delilah says, brushing their hair off their forehead so she can press her lips against it. “I found you a way out.”
For most of us, the earliest stories we’re told start with once upon a time and end with happily ever after.
It’s simpler that way, isn’t it? Fairy tales have a sweetness to them, and that’s why we love them.
And then we get older, and the world becomes less simple, and so do the stories.
We look for the twists, for the dark origins.
Cinderella’s stepsisters cutting off their toes and heels, the Little Mermaid turning to foam.
Or we turn to other stories, looking for ways to see ourselves—our wants, our fears, our desires.
Was Persephone captured, or did she greet the darkness like a lover?
Was Medusa always a monster, or was she made into one by violence and fury and time?
Here is the truth: There are no simple stories. Because behind every fairy tale, every myth, there are people, and people are complicated, and messy, and full of grief and love and pain and wanting.
And here is more truth: No matter what anyone tells you, my love, there is no one who can tell your story but you. And you are the one who decides how it ends.
—Always Here with Delilah Cohen and Iris Gold, season 2, episode 1: “Every Story Is a Love Story”