Chapter 1 #2
I went down barefoot. The carpet on the stairs was old and soft and remembered me.
I knew, before I'd reached the door, that it would be him.
There is a kind of knowing the body does before the brain catches up, and my body had been doing it for the better part of an hour, ever since I'd heard the distant rumble of a motorcycle slow on Maple Street and stop.
I opened the door.
He stood there in a jacket that had seen weather.
The light from the porch fell across one side of his face, and the other side was dark, and the unevenness of his face in that light was a thing I would think about later in the way I thought about chiaroscuro paintings in art books — about how a face is more itself when it isn't fully seen.
He held the journal out.
He said, You left this at my shop.
I reached. My fingers closed on the leather.
He held on for a half-second longer than was correct.
I felt the resistance and then the release, and the release was the worst of the two, because the release meant he had let me have it back, and the having it back meant he had had it long enough to read it.
He said, You're a hell of a writer, preacher's girl.
I felt my face go up in flame. I felt the flame in my throat and my chest and the soft skin behind my ears. I felt it the way you feel a sunburn six hours late, all at once, in a room with no warning.
I said — and my voice was steadier than it should have been, which made me proud of myself in a way that would later embarrass me — How much did you read?
He said, Enough to know you don't belong in this building.
I shut the door.
I want to be specific about how I shut it.
I did not slam it. I have never slammed a door in my life.
My father had spent twenty-five years training me out of slamming doors, and the training had taken.
I shut it with the careful, controlled push of a hand that had been taught that volume was a kind of sin.
I locked the chain.
I turned the deadbolt.
I leaned my back against the wood and I slid down until I was sitting on the cold hardwood of the foyer, and I held the journal against my chest, and I breathed.
He had said I didn't belong in this building.
I want to be clear about why that sentence broke me.
It wasn't because he was wrong. It was because nobody — not my mother, not the choir director, not the women in the Bible study who had sometimes looked at me with the soft pity reserved for caged things — had ever said it out loud.
They had all colluded with me. They had all helped me pretend.
They had all stood inside the building of my life and admired the joinery and praised the floors, and not one of them had ever leaned in and said: Delilah, this is not your house.
A stranger had said it. A man whose name my father refused to speak. A man who had earned a road name as a joke. A man who had read nine pages of my soul without permission and looked at me on a doorstep at eleven p.m. and told me the truth in eight words.
I sat on the floor for a long time. I do not know how long.
Long enough to hear the engine start, far down the street.
Long enough to hear it grow loud and fade.
Long enough for the house to settle back into its small ticking silences, and for my mother to turn over upstairs, and for the heater to come on in the basement with its familiar sigh.
When I finally stood up, my legs hurt.
I went up to my room. I closed my door. I did not turn on the overhead. I crossed to the window seat where my mother had once let me build a fort and where, now, I sometimes read by the light of a single lamp. I sat. I opened the journal.
I leafed through. The pages were as I'd left them — my handwriting, my ink, my looped careful script. Nothing had been torn out. Nothing had been marked.
I almost let myself believe he hadn't read it.
Then I turned to the last page.
The handwriting there was not mine. It was a broad, slanted, almost careless hand — the writing of a man who didn't fuss over letters, who didn't slow down for them, who had probably been writing on tilted surfaces for so long that his hand had stopped expecting a level field.
The ink was the same blue I'd seen on his wrist. He'd written it with a fountain pen, and the line was wet enough at the end of words that one or two of them had blurred where his hand had dragged.
The poem about the rider — you got the engine sound wrong. It's a rumble, not a roar. Come by the shop. I'll teach you the difference.
I read it twice.
I read it three times.
The window seat under me was suddenly the only solid thing in the house.
The journal was light in my lap. The town outside the window was a small spread of lights, and one of those lights, I knew, was a corrugated steel building on the gravel lot at the edge of Ember Falls, and inside that building was a man who had decided, for reasons I did not yet know, to write in the back of my private heart and dare me to come find out why.
I closed the journal.
I did not cry. I did not call anyone. I did not write.
I sat in the window seat with my knees drawn up and my forehead against the cold glass, and I watched the dark, and I thought — for the first time in twenty-five years of good — about what it might cost to be otherwise.
The cost, I suspected, would be everything.
The first thing it was going to cost was Thursday.
Because I was already going. I knew that, sitting in the dark, the way I had known he would be at the door.
The body knows. And what my body knew, on the night Ezra Dorsey returned my journal, was that I had carried a key inside my chest for twenty-five years without realizing it was a key, and the man who'd just ridden away on a Shovelhead at eleven-thirty p.m. had reached into my hand and turned it, and the door had opened, and the door had opened, and the door had opened.
I would go.
I would tell myself I was going to retrieve my dignity. I would tell myself I was going to make him promise not to tell my father. I would tell myself a dozen good and reasonable things to give the trip a shape that fit inside the life I'd lived so far.
I would not believe a single one of them.
But I would go.
I sat in the window until my legs went numb and the sky began to pale at the edges, and I watched the town come up out of the dark like something rising from water, and I understood, with the small clear certainty that visits a person exactly once or twice in a lifetime, that whatever happened next would be the first thing I had ever chosen for myself.
And I let it be.