For Now: A Novel

by Kat Savage

  I swung the door open all the way, surprising Samuel in the exact way I meant to.

  “Hello, Samuel,” I said.

  “Hello, Delilah.” He smiled, though I couldn’t figure out why.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “I brought food,” he said, holding up the brown paper bag of Chinese.

  “I’m not hungry,” I lied. Even now after all that had happened, the man was still trying to feed me.

  “Can we talk?” he asked, putting the bag back down by his side.

  I gestured toward the living room and stepped aside to let him in.

  He looked around, eyes fixed on the boxes half packed on the floor, and whirled around at me. “Are you moving?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Why?” he asked.

  And here it was. The moment where everything was going to spill out all over the floor and make a mess no one was prepared to clean up. “I should think that it’s pretty obvious,” I stated.

  “Not to me,” he urged.

  “Tell me the truth,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked, confusion all over his face.

  “Don’t play me, Samuel. I saw it,” I snapped.

  “Saw what?” he said, eyes searching mine.

  “When you saw Jeff. When you saw him here in my house. Tell me. Tell me it was the first time you’d ever seen him. Tell me I didn’t see recognition across your face when you whirled him around and looked him in the eyes. Tell me I’m wrong,” I said firmly.

  Samuel’s eyes were discs. His jaw dropped, and he turned his face to the floor. He let out a deep sigh. The grip on his bag tightened. After a few seconds, he looked up at me. If I didn’t know better, I would have sworn his eyes were glossy the way they are just before someone cries.

  “You’re not wrong.” His voice trembled.

  “All you men are the same,” I said. I felt a tear escape down my cheek.

  “That’s not fair. Please let me explain,” he said.

  “Fair? Don’t talk to me about fair. Just start explaining,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest.

  “He’s the man I saw in the photos with my wife, the ones the private investigator brought back after he found her. I was so shocked to see him here, Delilah. So shocked to see him standing in your living room, cornering you. When you said it was your ex-husband, I panicked. I didn’t know what to do, what to say. I just decided saying nothing in the moment was better,” he said.

  “Were you ever going to tell me? Or were you just going to wait until your ex-wife tried to kill me?” I asked.

  “I swear to you, I tried. I did. When we were walking around the trail at the cabin. But you told me not to,” he said.

  “Oh, so it’s my fault?! For all I know, you could have been plotting with the both of them the entire time!” I snapped.

  Samuel’s eyebrow crinkled. Pain swept him. “Delilah, how could you think that? How could you even imagine I would ever do that to you?”

  “It’s not hard for me, Samuel. You know what I’ve been through, you know what Jeff did to me. It’s not a far leap at this point. If I’ve learned one thing, it is that life can be infinitely crueler than you or I could ever imagine,” I said.

  “Delilah, I love you. Okay? I am in love with you. And I’m sorry. God, I am so sorry that I didn’t tell you as soon as I saw him. If I had it to do all over again, I would. I am so sorry you have been through so much and if I had met you in time to prevent any of it, I would have. I would have protected you, Delilah. I would have done everything in my power to make sure you never felt any of it. Please believe me,” he said, desperation in his voice.

  “I wish I could, Samuel. I wish I could,” I said.

  “Don’t do this, Delilah,” he pleaded.

  “I have to,” I said.

  He shifted. He sat the bag down on the table next to him and shoved his hands in his pockets. His body rocked back and forth as his eyes darted around, tears brimming. I could tell he was trying to think of something to say but it was clear he couldn’t find the words he wanted, the words that would save this. I was between him and the door. He stepped toward me, stopping at my side. He leaned his head into my shoulder for a moment. I didn’t move my body but I turned my head away. I bit my bottom lip and closed my eyes, trying to keep it all in.

  “You deserve all the happiness in the world, Delilah. Truly. I wish I could have been the one to give it to you. I wish I didn’t let you down,” he spoke softly. He pulled back and walked out my door without another word.

  I waited until I heard the door shut, and then I fell to my knees and sobbed.

  I was done packing for the night. I was done with everything for the night. I stood up after a few minutes and much to my surprise walked over to the bag of Chinese food he left. I opened the bag. Inside was a Styrofoam container of food, two fortune cookies, and an envelope with my name on it. Perhaps he thought he wasn’t going to get to speak to me and had written a note just in case. I pulled the letter out of the bag but I didn’t open it. I turned it over in my hands and then sat it aside. I pulled the food out to find that it was exactly what I always ordered.

  I ate the food. I sat the two fortune cookies on my coffee table next to his unopened note. I curled myself into a ball on the couch, pulled the throw blanket off the back, and lay here staring at the note and the cookies. I thought for a long time about opening it but I wasn’t ready. I didn’t want to know what it said just yet. My eyelids grew heavy and I fell asleep just like that, staring at my name written across the envelope. I dreamt of nothing at all.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  I slept all the way through the night and woke up the next morning to a voicemail from the moving company that said it would be three days until they could get a truck and a team to me. That was three days too long but there wasn’t really anything I could do about it. I would have to make the best of it.

  I drank coffee and stared at the letter again. I decided a nice, hot shower in a dark bathroom might help my body. It felt tense and rigid. I needed to relax my shoulders, melt a little. I walked down the hallway, shedding layers onto the floor. I didn’t really care. I’d pick it all up later. I started the water and looked at myself in the mirror as the room around me began to steam up. I pushed my fingers through my knotted hair, tugging at the tangles as I went. I looked at myself for a few long minutes, examining the tiny freckles across the bridge of my nose. If you didn’t lean in closely, you couldn’t even see them. I turned to the side and lifted my arm up. I ran my hand over the ridges of my ribs. I turned back around and cupped my breasts. Not in a sexual way. I did so as if I were holding myself together. I examined myself until I couldn’t anymore and I stepped into the heat of the shower. The water ran over my spine like it was trying to carry all the pain away with it. I would probably never understand the healing power of a hot shower, but I would always appreciate it.

  As always, my mind ran away from this place, from this reality. I thought about somewhere else, a nameless place where I could go and be alone and not feel bad about the fact that I was alone. No one would know where it was or how to get there. I could disappear forever and just exist without the fear of being wounded. I felt like an animal. I was a stray dog with no control over what happened to her. Men could come and cage me, men could come and hurt me, put me on a leash, walk me. I had no place in this world.

  I could feel the anger then. It was rising up in my chest. Finally, something that didn’t hurt. If I stayed like this, I could survive. I was in the nameless place in my head, lying on the ground. Although it wasn’t really the ground. All around me was just a gray expanse, like storm clouds. I was looking up where the sky should be, making shapes out of nothing at all.

  “What are you doing here?” a familiar voice asked.

  “Trying to get away from you,” I said to him. I looked over to see what my imagination had put together for Samuel. He was blurry, but it was him.


  “Why?” he asked.

  “Why am I even talking to you? You’re not real,” I said.

  “Beats me. It’s your head.” He laughed as he shrugged his shoulders.

  I really did love his laugh. My imagination had gotten it right. “I want you to go now,” I said.

  “So send me away, love. Just snap your fingers and make me gone,” he said.

  I wasn’t sure what the look on his face was. I felt like I should know because I put it there, but I didn’t quite understand. I sighed.

  “Delilah?” He made my name a question.

  “Yes, Samuel?” I answered.

  “Do you think maybe if you hadn’t been who you were and I hadn’t been who I was, we could have been together?” he asked.

  “That’s hard to say. I don’t know who we’d be if we weren’t us. Maybe we wouldn’t work out as other people either. Maybe we were never meant to work out,” I said.

  “I don’t think I believe you,” he said.

  “I don’t think I believe me either,” I said.

  I snapped back to the shower, back to reality, and found myself staring at the shower curtain, water running over me. I was pruned. How long was I in the nameless place?

  I stepped out of the shower and wrapped a towel around me. I didn’t really dry off. Most of me was still dripping. I walked into my bedroom and lay on my bed. When I got up, there’d be a wet print but I didn’t care. I liked the way the cool bedding felt against my warm wet skin. I stared at my ceiling, counting my fingertips with my thumb back and forth. I reached up and put my dripping hair into a top knot. I drifted back to sleep thinking of nothing but Samuel’s face, trying to catalog every detail. I’d never see it again, but it was worth remembering.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  I didn’t wake up until 1 p.m. the next day. My top knot was now a saggy knotted mess of hair on the side of my head. At some point, I had retreated under the covers and was burrito-wrapped in both a towel and sheets now. It took me a solid five minutes to untangle myself from the bed. I didn’t bother fixing my hair. Oh, great, Delilah. We are back to sleeping more than we are awake. This was so fun the first time around.

  I stumbled down the hall in the direction of coffee and heard my phone ding behind me. I didn’t care. My phone didn’t have the coffee. I poured water into the chamber, added a cup, and waited while the machine made the bubbly steaming coffee-maker noise. I leaned way over on the counter, so close I might as well have been lying on it. I had no idea how I was going to fill my day. I was only sure Emma would be part of it. If I had to wait for the movers, I would at least make the most of it and see her as much as I could.

  I heard my phone ding again just as the coffee finished dripping into my cup and I walked slowly back to my room. I pulled my phone from the mess of blankets and saw a text from Emma. Speak of the devil.

  Emma: I’ll be by in 10 minutes.

  Emma: Don’t be asleep.

  I managed to send back a “k”. She always hated that so I kept doing it. By this point, getting dressed seemed necessary. I doubted Emma wanted to hang out with this train wreck who had been wearing nothing but a towel for an entire twenty-four hours.

  I was barely dressed when I heard her knock at the door. I walked down the hall, past the couch, and unlocked the door. I twisted the door knob and pulled the door wide open to see her standing there bright eyed and smiling. I immediately began to sob.

  You know the kind of cry you have where you can’t catch your breath and it feels almost like a panic attack? The kind you feel in your bones? The kind you have to sit down for because there’s no way your legs are going to hold you up through it? That was me. Emma immediately held me to her and we both slowly collapsed to the floor. She rocked me back and forth, pushing my hair behind my ear.

  “It will be okay, Delilah. It will,” she whispered.

  “Everything is wrong,” I said, sniffling and rubbing my already puffy eyes.

  “You’ll be away from here soon. You’ll feel better,” she said.

  “I don’t know that I will ever feel better, Emma. You can only have your heart broken so many times before you just stop picking up the pieces,” I said.

  Emma looked at me in the kind way she did when she was thinking something she wasn’t sure she should say.

  “What?” I asked as I always do when I see her doing this.

  “I just…I think this is more about Samuel than you want it to be,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I just mean I don’t think you’re crying because he betrayed you. I think you’re crying because you don’t want to let him go but feel like you have to,” she said, shrugging her shoulders slowly.

  “Since when did you become a therapist?” I asked, laughing a little.

  “Am I wrong?” she asked.

  I didn’t answer immediately. Because I didn’t know if she was or not. Instead I just sighed the type of audible sigh that let her know I didn’t know.

  “Well, what did he have to say for himself anyway?” she asked.

  “He just apologized. He said he didn’t know. He had Chinese food with him. And a note. But I haven’t read it,” I said.

  “Why haven’t you read it?” she urged.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think it will change anything.”

  “Or are you afraid it will change everything?” she asked.

  “I hate you,” I said.

  “I know,” she said.

  We picked ourselves up off the floor in unison and made our way over to the couch. Even with all that sleep, I still felt so tired. I was trying to keep going for Emma. I really did want this time with her.

  “Is that it?” she asked, pointing at Samuel’s note.

  “Yeah,” I said, not really looking directly at it.

  “Looks like a little more than just a note,” she said, examining it.

  And she was right. In reality, it was a pretty thick little envelope. It definitely felt like more than one page. He’d underlined my name twice on the front. “Yeah,” I said, refusing to make eye contact with her.

  “I think you should read it, Delilah. I think you’ll regret it if you don’t,” she said.

  “Let’s go shopping,” I said. I hated shopping and Emma knew that but I wanted to do anything other than sit here and talk about his letter. Besides, I hear people talk about retail therapy all the time.

  “Okay, D. Okay,” she said, knowing full well if I was suggesting shopping, I was definitely done with this topic. She knew better than to push any further.

  So we went off to shop. For five long hours.

  We got back to my house just after dinner time. The sun had all but set on this day, and I couldn’t be happier for it. The crisp evening air nipped at us as we hurried from the car to the front porch. I purchased a bunch of unnecessary things so my arms were full. Emma took my key and opened the door. I essentially fell inside, dropping the bags just beyond the swing of the door, and turned to see Emma still outside the door.

  “You’re not coming in?” I asked.

  “No, I’ve gotta get home. I’m so tired and David is waiting for me,” she said.

  I remembered the early days of pregnancy. You have all the energy and then you have no energy at all. “Okay, I understand. Get some solid rest, okay? You and the babe need it,” I said, leaning in to give my friend a much-needed tight squeeze.

  “I’ll see you in the morning, okay?” she asked.

  “Sure thing,” I said. Emma turned toward her car and began to walk away.

  I watched her take a few steps and then she whirled back around.

  “Oh, and, Delilah? Do me a favor and read the damn letter,” she stated. This wasn’t a request even though she called it a favor. Her tone definitely implied a demand.

  I didn’t respond with anything other than a small nod.

  Sometimes I really wanted to dislike her but I never managed to accomplish that. In all the years I knew Emma, she never did
anything to make me doubt her love and friendship. And she never steered me toward bad choices or led me down the wrong path in any way. I was having a particularly hard time with this considering her persistence in reading Samuel’s note. It meant she was probably right. It meant I probably needed to read it. And I really hated that.

  I walked over to my couch and sat down in front of the coffee table again. I reached for a fortune cookie. It read:

  Nothing is ever as it seems.

  Stupid fortune cookie. This is why you always need two. I reached for the second fortune cookie and ripped it open faster. It read:

  Forgiveness is strength.

  Fuck this cookie, too. No, really. Fuck this cookie. Perhaps my fortune cookie days were over. Or perhaps I hated that they felt so right in all their infinite cookie wisdom. I leaned back into the couch and propped my feet up. I stared at my name on the white envelope for all of ten minutes. I studied the arch in the way he wrote the “D”. I looked at the small, light lines connecting letter to letter. I tilted my head at the way he dotted the “i”. He had pretty nice handwriting for a guy. This is stupid, Delilah. I huffed and pushed myself up off the couch to collect my bags near the door. I made it halfway down the hallway with them before I dropped them all and ran back to the couch. I took the envelope in my hand and ripped the seal open.

  This would be the best or worst decision I ever made.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Dear Delilah,

  I’ve never written a love letter before. This will be the first. Then again, I’m not entirely sure if it would be considered a love letter. I suppose you’ll have to be the judge of that.

  I wanted to start by apologizing. The day I came in and found your ex there, I kept something from you. I had seen him before. Given how long I’ve been carrying those images around in my mind, it wasn’t hard to recall his face. Jeff is the man in the photos from the private investigator who tracked down my ex-wife. Marilyn had apparently met him online and traveled down there to be with him. When I saw him there in your home, pushing you against the wall, I freaked out. I didn’t know what to do or what to think. I didn’t know what to say. I did everything I could to hold all of the anger from before in and just focus on getting him away from you. The point is, I’m sorry for that. I should’ve told you. It should have been the first thing I did after I made sure you were safe. I knew I should have then but like I said, it was just so much at once. I’m really so sorry.