Track 3 Delilah
Delilah
Missed call from: Alex Stewart
Missed call from: Alex Stewart
Missed call from: Alex Stewart
New voicemail from: Alex Stewart
Text message from: Alex Stewart
PICK UP YOUR FUCKING PHONE
[read: 12:17pm]
Text message from: Alex Stewart
DO YOU WANT TO GET MURDERED???
[read: 12:18pm]
Text message from: Alex Stewart
THIS IS HOW PEOPLE GET MURDERED!!!
[read: 12:19pm]
[written on a page torn from a journal, in Delilah’s handwriting, folded and tucked into the back of her wallet]
Honeymoon B-Sides
Butterflies
Morning After
Delicate, My Darling
She Keeps Me Warm (cover)
Everything We Promised
Fly Away (Baby, We Can Run)
Tell Me, Tell Me, Tell Me
Sweethearts
Birdsong at Midnight
Oh, Multiples (Let Me Feel Everything)
Escape Tone
Delilah wasn’t really expecting Emmett to get in the van with her.
Which—fair. Knocking a girl over on the sidewalk to save her life is one thing, but following her into a refurbished camper van parked on a street in the middle of Brooklyn is another, and she wouldn’t have been surprised if he thought she was a serial killer.
She should probably be worried that he’s a serial killer. But there’s something about his eyes that makes her want to trust him. That makes her feel strangely, disorientingly, safe.
And oh, those eyes, she thinks, looking at him where he’s tucked into the passenger seat, Delilah’s backpack tossed into the back so that he can keep his own on his lap.
The part of her that was engaged yesterday feels disloyal and guilty for even looking, but she’s never seen someone with eyes like that: a clear, crystalline gray, luminous, very nearly silver.
They look like the moonstones Delilah keeps (kept, she thinks, bitter) in a cluster on her bedside table in the room she shared with Sam, catching the light and reflecting a thousand shifting shades of blue and pink and gold.
The face that goes with the eyes isn’t so bad either.
It’s a sharp-featured, androgynous face, or would be if not for the shadow of stubble along the jaw.
He could probably be anywhere between twenty-five and forty, with smooth, unlined skin.
But she keeps coming back to those eyes, so much older than the rest of his face.
They look even older than Delilah feels, and she feels like she’s aged a decade in the last thirty-six hours.
Realizing she’s been staring, Delilah clears her throat. “So,” she says. “What’s taking you out to California?”
She has her eyes on the road, but out of the corner of her eye she catches the way he glances at her, as if surprised by the question.
They come to a stop at a red light, and Delilah shoots him a grin that almost feels honest. “If I’m going to pick up a strange man and drive him around the city, I feel like I should know at least a little bit about him. ”
Emmett’s cheeks darken, the barest fraction of a blush. Delilah tones down her smile to something a little gentler, and his shoulders relax slightly. Fair enough, she thinks; she’s always been told she can come on too strong. “Sorry to be nosy. I’m a songwriter, I like stories.”
“So do I,” Emmett says. He meets her smile with one of his own.
It softens the angles of his face, takes a few years away from that mystery age.
That had happened once already, when Delilah had given him her full name—not with any recognition of her as a celebrity but of her last name.
Delilah was raised a mostly secular Jew three blocks away from an Orthodox synagogue, and she got used to the way the shy boys who skirted around her on the sidewalk to make sure they didn’t touch her softened a bit when they learned she was one of them, even if several denominations removed.
Emmett didn’t seem to have a problem grabbing her out of traffic, but the kippah pinned into his dark hair and the fringes visible beneath the hem of his shirt certainly suggest a level of observance she’s never bothered to explore.
Though maybe she would have if the boys who lived on her street looked more like that.
The light turns green, and Delilah looks back to the road. “Have you been out to California before? I grew up in Boston, so it was total culture shock for me the first time I went out there.”
“I was born there.” Emmett speaks slowly, quietly, like he’s choosing each word with care.
There’s an accent there too, something that softens his consonants and flattens his vowels.
It reminds her a bit of her downstairs neighbor growing up, a tiny Polish woman who made Delilah a batch of ko?aczki for her birthday every year until she moved away for college.
“But I haven’t been back in a long time. ”
“Hometowns can do that to you,” Delilah agrees. The driver in front of her brakes at the next light as soon as it turns yellow. She makes a face, but stops behind him. “Small world, though. I live in Los Angeles—I’m heading back there this week. Do you have family out there or something?”
“No, my…” Another hesitant moment. Delilah glances at him and finds Emmett looking down at his backpack, one hand absently coiling one set of fringes from his tzitzit around a long, slender finger. “The man who raised me passed away recently. He asked me to go back. It was important to him.”
“Oh. I’m sorry for your loss.” She means it. Membership in the Dead Dad Club sucks. “Was the cross-country bus trip part of the request?”
That gets her a laugh, a soft, almost startled sound. “Something like that,” he says. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“You’re driving back? Not flying?”
Delilah takes the green light ahead as a mercy, though it’s an effort to refrain from laying on the horn when the car in front of her takes its sweet time about pulling forward.
Tourists, she thinks, with all the half-earned bitchiness of someone who lived in this hellscape of a city for barely two years before she dropped out of college to move out west. So maybe not earned at all. “It’s kind of a long story.”
“Didn’t I say I like them?”
She gives him the shorter version.
Emmett doesn’t really seem the type to recognize Sam’s name, and he hadn’t recognized Delilah’s, but the little Alex who sits on her shoulder like a cartoon angel hisses at her not to say anything that could end up on the internet and make her life harder.
She tells him about the wedding-that-wasn’t, though, and the honeymoon she was supposed to be taking, and the album she’s meant to be writing.
Short version or not, the story takes them all the way through finding a parking spot for Roscoe and walking down the block to the closest coffee place, where Delilah buys Emmett the thanks for saving my life coffee she promised him, across the street from the corner where Emmett’s bus will pick him up.
Normally she’d be embarrassed about rambling on for so long, but there’s something about the way Emmett listens to her, quiet and thoughtful and seemingly genuinely interested, that makes her want to keep talking.
She finds herself admitting to more apprehension than she means to, not just about the album but about the trip itself.
She’s no stranger to traveling, or even to traveling alone, but she’s never taken a trip that was supposed to be special and romantic and emotional and then turned into something entirely different, and all the righteously furious confidence she’d channeled earlier seems to have deserted her now that the reality of all that open highway is just a few hours away.
When she stops talking, Emmett tilts his head to one side.
“I don’t know,” he says. “You strike me as someone who can turn anything into an adventure. If you can do that, I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to turn this trip into a good story, and then into good music. Doesn’t all that…go together?”
“You’d be surprised,” she says. “I mean, it should all go together. But no one really agrees on what makes something good music, just that good is supposed to mean sellable.”
Emmett wrinkles his nose. “I can see why that would complicate things.”
“Money always does,” she agrees. “My fiancée—ex-fiancée—grew up in the industry, so to her it’s all obvious that something’s only good if it sells.
It was one of the only things we used to fight about.
She said that if the music was good enough, it would go mainstream, no matter what was trending or who was getting studio investment or whether or not a band had the connections that actually made a difference. ”
“I didn’t know the bootstraps theory applied to music sales,” Emmett says.
“It does. Which sucks, especially when you consider that most new artists don’t even have the metaphorical boots. They’re out there in flip-flops, trying to power their way through a snowstorm.” Delilah pauses. “I swear to God, I’m usually better with words. I do this for a living.”
Emmett’s eyes crinkle at the corners. “It wasn’t that bad.”
Delilah takes a sip of her drink before she can say something like It absolutely was, or Bless your heart, or Aren’t you sweet. “Anyway. That’s my tale of woe. Not quite as woeful as yours, because I do not envy you that much time in bus seats, but still. Woe.”
“I don’t mind being on a bus that much,” Emmett says. He glances down at his watch. “Actually, I should probably…”
“Oh. Right.” Delilah tamps down a sudden rush of disappointment. She’d felt lighter and easier talking with this random man off the street than she had since she found Sam’s note yesterday.
You’re just glad to have someone to talk to who hasn’t seen you at your worst, she tells herself, and shakes off the mental pout. She gets to her feet, holding out her hand. “It was really nice meeting you, Emmett. Thanks again for—you know.”
Emmett takes her hand. His palm is cool and smooth, fingers long and slender but with strangely blocky knuckles, an unexpected imperfection on an otherwise lovely hand. “I’m glad I was there to do it,” he says. “Take care of yourself, Delilah. Good luck on your trip.”