Instrumental Emmett
Instrumental
Emmett
As soon as they’re far enough out of the canyon for cell service, Delilah pulls off onto the shoulder and kills the engine.
Emmett looks through the windshield, too weary to move, too tired to even marvel at the fact that they’re here, seeing the sky as it slowly shifts from starry blacks to deep, dark purples, when they’d been so sure they’d never see it again.
Delilah had told them to talk as they made their way out of the caves together, one stiff, halting step at a time, Delilah almost limping under Emmett’s stone-heavy weight.
“I need to know you’re still with me,” she’d said, clearly trying to keep her voice level and calm.
“Okay? I don’t care what you say, or how loud you say it, but talk to me. ”
Emmett’s instinctive response had been to give her a lecture about the dangers of amateur spelunking, the risks of getting lost or trapped or stuck or hurt or some horrible combination of all of the above.
Delilah’s protests that she’d looked up as much as she could and studied Jacob’s map like a sacred text hadn’t changed Emmett’s opinion that she was out of her mind.
“For the record, I wasn’t trying to kill myself by dying in a cave,” Delilah said. “I was trying to save your life.”
“And if you’d taken one wrong turn and gotten lost, you’d be dead either way,” Emmett retorted. “So does it really matter?”
Delilah had been so delighted that they’d summoned enough energy to bitch at her that she didn’t do anything but beam at them, the flash of her teeth just barely visible in the dark.
Now she unbuckles her seat belt, twisting in her seat to look at them.
Emmett turns their head as much as they can to meet her eyes.
They catch their own reflection in the rearview mirror as they move, but they’re too exhausted to wince at the grayish, clammy-looking appearance of their skin—what little skin is even visible amid the spreading stone.
They ache, too, a heavy throbbing in their joints that only worsens the farther they get from the cave. They can still hear the tempting call of the darkness, the yearning to just obey, the knowledge that if they went back, the pain would stop and they could rest.
But Delilah came for them. She had woven their stories together, hers and Emmett’s, to make something beautiful, and she’d risked her own life to share it with them.
So Emmett does their best to keep smiling at her, even if it’s weak and tiny and almost painful. Delilah smiles back, reaching over to fit a gentle hand against their cheek, her thumb stroking from skin to stone to skin again.
“You ready to do this?”
Emmett takes a breath. It makes their chest hurt. “Yes.”
Delilah picks up Emmett’s phone, retrieved from their backpack and plugged in to charge before they started driving, and unlocks it with the code Emmett gave her. She blinks at the screen. “You have eight missed calls from Ruth already.”
Emmett remembers, dimly, making a call before they got close enough to the caves to lose signal. Remembers getting Ruth’s voicemail, and stumbling through saying…something. It’s blurry now, but they recall enough to feel a twinge of guilt. “Oh.”
Delilah raises her eyebrows. “ ‘Oh’?”
It takes effort, but Emmett shakes their head. The motion makes black spots dance in their vision. “It doesn’t matter.”
“If you say so.” Delilah taps the screen a few times. “Okay, moment of truth. Ready?”
Emmett nods.
Delilah hits the call button.
It rings once, twice, three times. The sound is startlingly loud in the confines of the car. Delilah must have put the phone on speaker. Emmett wonders what time it is in New York.
There’s a click, and the call connects.
“Emmett?”
Ruth’s voice is high with a combination of youth and shock, an incredulous edge to that single word, as if she’d never expected to hear from Emmett again. She probably hadn’t. All the same, just hearing her makes Emmett smile, the joy of it more than worth the ache.
“Ruthie.”
“Don’t Ruthie me, are you kidding me? After that voicemail you left me?”
Delilah gives them a confused look and mouths, Voicemail?
Emmett winces and shakes their head.
“I’ve been trying to get you back on the phone for hours, you absolute asshole!” Ruth sounds close to tears, and Emmett’s heart clenches in their chest. “I’ve been calling all night. Why didn’t you pick up?”
“I…didn’t have signal,” Emmett manages.
“Oh my God, I could reach through the phone and murder you,” Ruth says. “I’ve been freaking the fuck out! You sounded like you were walking to your literal death, and then you didn’t answer when I called you—I was about to get Mom to try calling you because I thought I was losing my mind!”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’d better be—wait, no, switch to video, I want to lecture you face-to-face. Mom taught me that eye contact is very important when you’re going to guilt-trip the hell out of someone.”
Delilah snickers. “I like her.”
“Wait, who is that? Emmett—” A shocked gasp. “Oh my God, are you with a girl? Who even are you?”
Emmett closes their eyes, exhaustion warring with a swell of affection so strong it makes them dizzy. They hope, desperately, that Delilah is right about this. That they’re not going to break their almost-sister’s heart all over again.
It’s harder to open their eyes this time, but they manage it. They lift one hand enough to wave at the phone, and Delilah takes the hint and pokes at Emmett’s phone again.
Their signal still isn’t great, but it goes through.
Ruth’s face fills the screen, all wild dark curls and huge brown eyes and lingering softness of baby fat, so familiar and loved that Emmett almost wishes they were able to cry.
She’s leaning close to her phone camera, her brows drawn together in worry, but her eyes are alight with curiosity.
The curiosity vanishes when she sees Emmett, all color draining from her face. “Oh my G—Emmett, what happened to you?”
She sounds horrified. Emmett can only imagine what she’s thinking. The one glance Emmett had taken in the rearview mirror was enough to see that they look more dead than alive, their skin pale and patches of stone stretching up toward their cheekbones like grasping fingers.
Emmett is lucky to still have the mobility to speak, but that doesn’t make this any easier. “Well,” they say, trying—and probably failing—to put some of Delilah’s practiced ease into their voice, “remember how it sounded like I was walking to my death?”
Ruth narrows her eyes. “You’re not funny.”
“I’m not joking.”
Ruth opens her mouth, then shuts it with a snap.
She looks even younger suddenly, her expression fearful, and Emmett abruptly remembers that she lost her father less than a month ago.
Emmett may have finally started to accept Delilah’s insistence that Jacob wasn’t kind to them, but Ruth’s just a kid, and he was her dad, and the last thing Emmett wants to do is see her grieve again.
“What’s going on?” she says. “Are you okay? Tell me the truth.”
A command, not a request, and Emmett feels it snap through them like an elastic band springing back into shape. Something loosens in their chest, in their tongue, energy running through them in such a shocking rush it makes them gasp.
It brings with it a breathless flood of relief—at the realization that they feel the same compulsion to answer Ruth that they would have felt about answering Jacob, that deep-seated need to obey.
Maybe Delilah is right. Maybe this will work after all.
“I’m not okay,” Emmett says, and it’s such a gift, to be able to tell her the truth. Ruth makes a panicked sound, and Emmett wishes they could reach for her, even lean toward her, but they don’t have the strength to move. “But I think…I think I can be. If you help.”
“Of course,” Ruth says immediately. “What do I have to do?”
Emmett tenses, using what’s left of that brief swell of energy to raise their head, just a fraction, focusing more fully on Ruth’s face.
“You don’t have to do anything,” they say.
“Ruthie—I mean it. You don’t have to. It’s only if you want to, okay?
You don’t owe me anything, and if you’d—I know how much your father meant to you, and you know what he thought about me.
You know he wanted me away from you. I don’t want you to do anything you don’t—”
“Shut up,” Ruth says. She sounds furious.
“Are you kidding me? The way Daddy treated you was horrible, Emmett. We all thought so. Do you think we just automatically thought it was okay when we found out what—what you are? Just because he made you—even if he regretted it—none of that means he got a free pass to be cruel to you, or to make it your fault that you couldn’t replace Isaac, or to act like you weren’t as important to the rest of us as he was.
You’re my family. My sibling. You taught me to walk.
You learned how to do French braids because I thought they made me look like a princess.
You walked me to the library almost every weekend for a year so I could win the reading award for my class in sixth grade. ”
She sniffs, wipes her eyes, and jabs a finger at the phone.
“So I don’t care what Daddy would have done.
He’s gone. You’re not. And if I can keep it that way, then I’m going to.
” Ruth lifts her chin. “If he didn’t want me to be loyal and stubborn, he shouldn’t have named me after a woman whose entire biblical legacy is being loyal and stubborn. So there.”
Emmett bites their lip. If they could cry, they think, they’d be weeping. “Ruth,” they say, and then cut themself off, letting out a damp, breathless laugh. “I’m so proud of you, you know that?”
“Good,” she says, lifting her chin in the way only an eighteen-year-old can, obstinate and determined and too caught up in being right to realize that she’s already won her argument. “So what do I do? How do I help you stay?”
“You tell me to.”
Ruth looks taken aback. “What?”