Instrumental Emmett #3
Delilah’s expression softens. “Do you want to talk about it?” Emmett shakes their head, and Delilah sits down next to them on the bed and takes their hand, threading their fingers together.
The pulse in her palm is a warm, reassuring metronome against Emmett’s cold skin.
She shifts a little closer, then reaches with her free hand to nudge Emmett’s head down onto her shoulder.
Emmett lets her, turning their head just enough to be able to smell her hair, faintly floral conditioner and Roscoe’s leather seats and motel air fresheners and the crisp fresh evening breeze, still clinging to her like a second skin. “What did you find out about the stars?”
Delilah runs her fingers through their hair, mussing her way over their scalp in smooth strokes that don’t get caught on the fabric or pins of a kippah because Emmett took theirs off yesterday and hasn’t put it back on since.
They don’t know if they ever will. “If we drive about twenty-five, thirty minutes up the road, there’s a perfect place to park and see them—about a mile away from the nearest ranch, no streetlights or anything, just stars and sky.
What do you think? Worth getting back in the car? ”
She could have been asking them to fly her to the moon. The answer would have been the same.
“Yes.”
Delilah insists on driving, even though Emmett tries to tell her that they feel practically back to normal. She holds on to their hand, though, their interlaced fingers resting loosely in her lap as they follow the directions Delilah wrote out on a page of hotel stationery.
Eventually, Delilah turns off the highway and onto a dirt road, then follows it until they pass the lights of a ranch house.
She takes another turn, drives until the lights disappear over the crest of a hill, and then, finally, parks and turns off the engine.
“Wait here for a sec?” Emmett nods agreement.
Delilah unbuckles her seat belt, but instead of opening her door she climbs back between the seats, into the back of the van.
She rummages around for a bit and then opens the sliding door to climb out that way.
Emmett closes their eyes, tipping their head back, and lets themself float for a few moments until Delilah’s knuckles rap on their window.
“All set,” she says when Emmett opens it. “Come on.”
Feeling steadier on their feet than they expected, Emmett follows her around the front of the van. Delilah has spread out one of their blankets on the grass, and as they sit down she unfolds another, wrapping it around both their shoulders and tucking herself against Emmett’s side.
“These clouds better fuck off,” Delilah says, looking up at the hazy sky. “I’m going to be so cranky if we came all the way out here for clouds. I could see clouds in LA.”
Emmett smiles, and starts to tell her that at least these are natural clouds, not just pollution clouds. But then the clouds do part, as if by some divine gift, and Delilah grabs their hand with a gasp.
“Oh my God,” she breathes. “Look at it.”
Emmett looks up.
The last time Emmett had seen the Milky Way was the day Jacob made them.
They had walked out of the caves where Jacob found the rest of their forming clay like a baby fawn finding its legs for the first time.
They’d stopped at the sight of stars, very nearly the first lights they ever saw, other than the tiny flashlight Jacob had used to guide them out.
It was a moonless night, and the impossible ocean of constellations seemed to stretch out in infinite waves.
But then they had made their way across the desert to Los Angeles, and then across the country to Brooklyn, and that was the last they saw of real stars until Delilah opened the door to her van and told Emmett to get in the seat beside her.
More than two decades later, the starry sky still takes their breath away.
It doesn’t look like the photos in the brochure, enhanced and brightened and clarified and colored.
But even to the naked eye, it’s endless and ancient, swirls of gray and blue and silver tracing their way across the sky, blacks that look blacker in some areas than others, stars that seem to come from farther away than Emmett can see.
“God,” Delilah says. “It’s beautiful.”
Emmett looks at her. Her gaze is fixed on the sky above them, her dark eyes reflecting the endless stars. The wonder on her face is so close to the way she looks when Emmett kisses her.
She’s all but shining, and all Emmett can think is: She could be doing anything in the world. She could be writing the greatest songs of her life, the way she’s supposed to be. And instead, she’s helping me. Using the time she’s supposed to be writing to try to find a way for me to stay.
Not so that I can follow her orders. Not because of what I could do for her.
Just for me.
No one has ever done anything just for Emmett before. No one has ever seen them as someone worth helping.
But here she is. And here they are. And Emmett, against all their experience to the contrary, hopes.
It would be too obvious, they think, to agree with her. To say, Yes, it’s beautiful. To say it looking at her, while she looks at the stars. If she glanced up in time to hear them, she’d probably laugh.
Emmett laces their fingers through hers, and says it anyway.