Authors: Lila Felix
“My father’s name is blank.”
He pulled me tighter against his large frame and I sunk into his chest.
“You didn’t know?”
“No.”
“Look at me, Delilah.”
The meaning of it all was crashing down on me, but I needed to hear the words. The small detail that would explain all the heartache and pain that was my life until Porter. It took a few moments before I was able to face him. Deep down, I knew what he was going to say.
I gathered my bravery and met his gray eyes, hoping that truth would set me free.
“Your father wasn’t your biological father. That’s what I was told. Your mother had an affair, early in their marriage.”
The only reason I stayed sitting was Porter’s hands on my arm and my back, holding me down.
“That’s why they hated me.”
“I don’t know. I can’t imagine a mother mistreating her child for that reason, especially when the reason points the finger right back to the one who had the affair. I can’t tell you whether or not your sisters knew, though their blatant mistreating of you tells me they did.”
I’d expected myself to cry over such a tragedy, but they never came.
“I didn’t belong there. I belong to no one. I have no father. My family hates me. I couldn’t even find a husband—at least one that wasn’t willing to pay for me.”
“Delilah Catherine Jeansonne, look at me. I’m going to say this once now and every moment until you believe it.”
Must he demand eye contact for every word?
Again, I met his gaze, though inside, I was determined
not
to believe anything he had to say.
“I knew the first moment I saw you in that wretched home that you didn’t belong there. You were like a withered magnolia among spiked weeds. You’re right. You didn’t belong with those people and you didn’t belong with people who hated you. You belong with me. You will always belong with me.”
He hadn’t said he loved me, but it was the closest thing to love I’d ever felt. His words clenched my heart. It was more than I could take.
“One day I’ll believe that.”
“I won’t stop telling you until you do.”
Together we moved to pick up the pieces of the box. Porter gathered the papers and photos and stacked them in his hands. His face told me it wasn’t something he was willing to face, but had to.
“I had to see the note. I have to know why. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I’ve carried it by myself for way too long. Maybe you can help me with that.”
He pulled out a picture and my gut instinct was jealousy. There were no pictures of me in his secret stashes. There wasn’t a single picture of me in existence, even in my family home.
Marie was a beauty, more so in life than in death. She was older in the picture.
“How old was she here?”
“Eighteen. This was the Christmas before…”
“She’s beautiful.”
“She was. But only on the outside. Her soul wasn’t beautiful—and before long, her soul was all I could see.”
He took the photo from me and put it aside.
“This was us on her eighteenth birthday. This was when we officially began courting. Her parents insisted we take pictures together. They even had a fancy photographer come down here from Baton Rouge.”
Porter looked like a different man in that picture. His shoulders were stronger. His eyes showed no signs of sleep deprivation or stress. Those gray eyes that stole my heart looked down at his then future bride with pride and devotion.
“You loved her.”
“I loved the idea of her. I wanted a wife and a family, just like any other man.”
“Do you still?”
“No.” He paused. A smile grew on his face and I knew I’d been duped. “I already have a wife. Maybe one day she’ll give me a family.”
“If the ghost doesn’t kill her first.”
Silence took over the room. Something in the picture with Porter caught my eye. It was the necklace. I knew that necklace.
“Are there more pictures of Marie?”
He dragged his bottom lip through his teeth. “Yes, there’s a box upstairs. Why?”
“I need to see them and then the letter.”
He squeezed me once and placed a kiss at my temple. “I will get them. Take these and meet me by the fire. You’ve gone cold again. I’m failing on all fronts today.”
He was failing on no fronts in my book.
I took the stack from him and we parted at the foot of the stairs. Not sure if Marie was found of the sitting room, I looked around for her presence just to make sure. I smiled to myself at the two chairs in front of the fire. One of those chairs, my chair, was the very spot that I first felt safe with Porter.
I supposed with us dragging out all of his past in the same place, it was time for him to feel safe sharing his secrets with me.
“Here’s everything I could find.”
He plopped an old box on the stool next to my chair. We thumbed through the pictures together. Since Porter was a child, most of his pictures either were with Marie or had her in the background scene. It was disturbing to say the least.
From adolescence to her teen years and beyond, Marie grew into a beautiful woman and I recognized her in some of the pictures where her appearance matched the apparition who’d tormented me.
All of those pictures, yet one thing never changed.
The locket around her neck.
The chains it was attached to changed. Once, in a picture on what Porter said was his sixteenth birthday, the locket hung from a bracelet. Nevertheless, it was always there.
“Did she always wear this?” I pointed to several pictures, highlighting the locket.
“Yes. I asked about it once. Her mother said it was given to her by a family friend when she was a baby. I always thought it was odd the way she never took it off. I asked her about it once. She threw a fit and accused me of trying to control her. I dropped the subject after that. It was just a necklace after all.”
I didn’t tell Porter that I’d seen that necklace or where I’d seen it before. I knew from the way he’d reacted this morning that Rebel’s name threw him into a fit of anger, one that I never wanted to see again.
“Maybe you’re right. Can I see the letter?”
That infamous letter was in my hands, but even more than looking for it, reading it in his presence felt wrong.
“You have it there.” His hand shook as he pointed to the papers in my hand.
“But can I read it?”
“Of course.”
I opened the letter, but before I could read anything past the word Porter, it was jerked from my hand.
“I’ll read it to you.”
“Are you sure?”
He nodded once and began. The words were clipped, almost child-like in nature. I could see the handwriting through the paper. Blots of ink dotted the I’s. It looked more like a splattered painting than Marie’s last letter.
I heard the words, but they failed to resonate with anything I knew about the man that read them. The hatred that spewed from the letter sounded more like she was addressing someone who’d attempted to murder her—or worse.
I interrupted him, not being able to handle any more. “You said you never treated her ill. You told me that despite your growing annoyance with her, you never behaved as such. You quarreled only because of her demanding more money. Isn’t that true? Isn’t that what you said to me?”
“Yes. I said that.” Porter reached behind his head and scratched the back of his neck, like the whole thing confused him as much as it did me. “She must’ve been able to tell. I tried to hide it so well. My parents wanted nothing else for me than to marry her. I was trying to make them happy.”
“And when she died?”
He shifted in his larger chair. “They seemed more relieved than I was.”
“You should’ve spoken up, Porter. What would you have done, put up with being married to someone you didn’t like just because your parents wanted you to?”
I’d sparked anger in him. His smoky eyes nearly came ablaze.
“I could say the same for you. If I hadn’t come along, would you never have taken up for yourself?”
The weight of the impasse set me back in the chair, my hands wringing on the wooden arms.
He was right, of course.
“I’m sorry again. I promise, one day to go through an entire day without having to apologize.”
He laughed, but I didn’t. I didn’t even care about myself anymore.
I didn’t know if that was healthy or not.
The violins cradled in their stands and the piano tucked into the corner seemed to grow bigger as my mind ground through all the new information which brought on more questions than answers.
“Can we get out of this house? I feel like the walls are closing in on me.”
He spoke the words that were brewing in my head.
“Please.”
“We have a fishing pier at the edge of the property near the bridge. You may have seen it coming here.”
I reddened thinking of riding behind Porter. I remembered thinking that he was the strongest man I’d ever known.
“I wasn’t paying attention to anything around me—at least, not the landscape.”
My husband reached out tentatively and then stroked my cheek with the back of his hand. “I love this color on you. If it were my choice, I’d have you blushing from morning until night.”
I changed the subject. “You said something about fishing?”
I’d never been fishing, but I’d do anything to get out of these beautiful walls—every corner hid secrets and every turn of a knob or click of a window sent terrified goose bumps down my arms.
“Yes. I’ll grab the fishing box and reels from the shed outside. Why don’t you pack us up something to eat?”
These people and all their food.
Chapter Fourteen
Porter
I could barely breathe, the air was so thick with humidity. It hovered around us like a cloud full of impending rain. Delilah, on the other hand, was content as she’d been in my tree fort. Her legs swung back and forth in the same fashion. Her eyes mirrored the smile on her face.
I loved that about her; she found joy in peace.
It had been years, maybe a full decade since I’d told anyone that I’d loved them, including my own mother. The words were tacked to the end of my tongue, but I refused to let them be spoken. The sentiment was there, even in this short time. I wasn’t one to believe in divine intervention, but Delilah coming into my life, despite the chaos, was a blessing I’d never asked for.
I was still looking at her when she slid two of her fingers down the bridge of her button nose.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing, really.”
“You touched your nose. Something is making you nervous.”
She studied me for a moment and then turned away, pretending to be readjusting her fishing pole.
“You’re still upset about your father? If you want me to ask your mother about your real father, I can do that. You don’t have to see either of them ever again if you don’t want to.”
“You’d do that for me?”
“I’d do anything for you, including telling you how you’re never going to catch anything if you keep moving your fishing pole like that.”
Her anxious swinging legs were causing her fishing pole to bounce up and down in the water, making it impossible for any fish to ever get hooked.
“I’ve never fished before.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
“My father used to bring me here under the guise of fishing when he really had something important to say to me. I knew that as soon as I caught that first fish, he was going to go into whatever he wanted to say. Sometimes, I wished a fish would never bite.”
Just as I finished my sentence, a tug at my line let me know that despite the anxious legs beside me, a fish had found my line.
After pulling it up, I let it go. I’d seen bigger fish in a sardine can.
“Don’t laugh. You haven’t gotten a single bite.”
With a shrug, Delilah attempted to suppress her smile.
“It’s your turn to tell me something profound. I caught the first fish.”
“I know, or at least I think I know, why Marie is aging. I may not know why, but it correlates directly with something else.”
She wasn’t making any sense.
“What does it correlate to?”
“I’m not good at this.”
I chuckled. “I know. You’ll never catch anything.”
In one fluid motion, she picked up the pole and tossed it, rod and bait, behind her.
“Not the fishing, Porter.”
I had tried to prove to her that she could say anything, but my explosion at breakfast had torn that all apart.
In the distance, I heard a wagon and a horse that could only be mine. Benjamin always hastened his pace when he neared home. He seemed to be the only creature around that actually enjoyed this place.
“June and Eliza are back.”
“So what? Tell me what you were thinking.”
“We should go help them.”
I grew exasperated with her unwillingness to let me in. I didn’t deserve to be let in, but I wanted to, nevertheless.
“Fine, let’s go help them. You’re not off the hook, by the way.” She bowed her head, hiding her smile from me, but I’d seen it. “And don’t think I haven’t noticed the lack of—affection, shall we say?”
“Behave, Sir. Your mother is right there.”
We were speaking to each other through clenched jaws as we walked toward the approaching wagon. My mother had stayed in the main part of the house for far longer than I’d intended. But the closer and closer Delilah and I became the more I wanted privacy more than anything.
“I won’t behave tonight. One night without you in my bed is one night too many.”
By the time we reached the house, Delilah’s face rivaled the redness of a cherry. I loved to make her blush. It was the one time I knew I was doing something right.
“Well, where have you two been off to?”
I cocked my eyebrow. “Fishing.”
“Fishing? Not really the activity I was hoping for. I do want grandchildren someday, you know.”
Delilah’s eyes grew to the size of half dollars.
“Come on, Eliza, you’ve made the girl go whiter than she already was and that’s saying a lot.”
I kept Delilah close to me the rest of the day. Whether she liked it or not, I would keep her under my watch for the foreseeable future. After retiring to the sitting room after supper, I decided to play for her. I was desperate to win her heart—to keep her heart.
“I thought I’d play something for you.”
“For me?”
“Yes, of course.”
I moved to the piano in the corner of the room and cringed at the amount of dust on the fallboard. The ivory keys had spent too much time neglected, too much time unused. But as soon as my fingers hit the keys, the feeling of the music took over and the flood of emotion that emoted through the notes expressed everything I needed to say to my new wife, but couldn’t. I supposed that was the point of music, an expression of words unspoken.
After a few songs, Delilah came to sit next to me, bringing a lone candle to sit atop the piano. That candle, plus the fire were the only lights in the room. The fire cast a light on her face that was unmatched in beauty.
The lower notes at the end of the song were dragged out on purpose, hoping that they carried meaning.
“That was beautiful. You should play more often.”
“I will, if you like it.”
“I love it.”
“You want to play something?”
She ticked her eyes at the floor. “You know I can’t play.”
“Sit here.” I scooted back and patted the space between my legs. It wasn’t a big space, but even with my mother’s prodding and pigging encouragement, she was tiny. Her breath hitched at my proposal.
“I don’t know.”
“My love, are you afraid of me?” I reached behind her head and threaded my hands in her hair at the base of her neck. The hair there held a softness that was incomparable.
“No. I’m not. I’m afraid of me.”
My eyebrows showed her the question I couldn’t express.
“I’m not good at this. This—intimacy.”
Despite the coldness in the room, heated energy throbbed between us. My heart arrested with impatience. Her breaths, delicate yet bold, skittered across my skin, raising goose bumps.
“That’s the whole point of marriage—to learn things together.”
She ground her lips between her teeth. I would trade everything I owned to know what she was thinking at just that minute.
“It’s just me, my love.” I pushed every ounce of comfort I could into those words.
She scooted over and sat between my legs, her hands balled into fists, refusing to touch the keys.
Every time I exhaled, two ringlets at the base of her neck would waiver like Spanish moss hanging in a storm. Complete enamor trickled down my being as she turned her head to show me an innocent smile over her shoulder.
“I’m going to put my hands over yours and we’ll play together.”
I took my time, of course. Beginning at her shoulders, I skimmed my fingers along her arms leaving shivers in their wake. By the time my fingers overlapped hers, we were both holding our breaths, waiting for the complete connection.
We played the same song as I’d played before, but much slower. We fumbled through most of the piece until she withdrew her hands from mine and encouraged me to continue on my own.
With my chin rested on her shoulder, I played at her beckoning. Every once in a while, she would quiver in my hold while a playful grin encouraged me on.
Finally, as the moon rose higher in the sky and the candle’s melted wax pooled around it, I finished my serenade to her.
“Those were the most beautiful sounds I’ve ever heard.”
I took the opportunity to nuzzle her neck. I didn’t stop there. My lips made a path along the base of her neck. I pulled down the curve of her shawl and continued my exploration along her shoulder blades and the space between.
She swayed with her back against my chest. I made my hands stay on her waist, not trusting them to move an inch in either direction.
“I would never hurt you, you know that, don’t you?”
She nodded.
“Are you tired?”
No. She wasn’t tired.
“What do you want?”
I was asking so much more than what she wanted to do for entertainment. I wanted to know what my wife wanted from me this night. What she would allow me to do.
“I just want you. I—I want you to love me.”
She broke me with those words. I did love her. I loved how she’d melded into my life and I couldn’t remember what I’d done with myself before she was here.
“Let’s go to bed. You’re shivering.”
“It’s not from the cold, husband.”
We walked upstairs together, but trepidation filled me. We’d had no honeymoon concrete with expectations. We had just been strangers.
Except, she was part of me now.
“I can go to my room…”
She’d gathered her shawl back around herself on the walk to the bedroom. It was almost a force holding her together. Finally, she met my eyes.
“I don’t want to sleep alone anymore. But it’s your choice, Porter.”
She turned and left, going through the bedroom door but leaving it open behind her. There was no choice.