“The music is great,” Annie says. “Makes me want to dance.” Her body moves gently from side to side. “You know the musicians?”
“I know everyone,” he says.
Go away, Delilah urges her mother silently. Don’t do this.
The drums are louder now, pounding across the yard. Annie stands. “I have to go. The beat is calling me.” She reaches her hands out toward Will and Delilah and swings her hips. “Come join me?”
“No,” Delilah says, panicking. No in so many ways. Don’t ask me to dance. Don’t ask him to dance. Don’t dance.
Why couldn’t she leave people alone? Men especially. Why couldn’t she just go sit with her husband? Mac never said anything when Annie draped herself across men’s laps at parties, danced next to them like a slinky cat. When Delilah would look at him to gauge his reaction, it always seemed like he was shrugging it off, putting on a show of laughing at his wild, untameable artist wife, but she could see the hurt under the surface.
Delilah’s glance flickers across to where Jones is sitting eating his corn, free from his mother’s embrace.
“Not much of a dancer,” Will says to Annie. “Got a bit of that . . . what’s the expression? Bull in a china shop thing going on.”
Annie turns, swaying, her arms raised above her head. “Too bad,” she calls over her shoulder.
Delilah lets out her breath slowly, her pulse racing, fire in her veins. She tracks her mother to see who she will move on to next, but Annie disappears into a group of people beside Red and Maggie’s shack.
Will looks over at her. She can’t tell what he’s thinking. Laska is still sitting at her feet. The dog looks up at Delilah with those crystalline blue eyes. People eyes. Her ears are cocked like she’s listening to something carefully. Delilah reaches out her hand tentatively so the dog can smell her. Laska leans forward and licks the remnants of the barbecue sauce from Delilah’s fingers.
Delilah smiles. “She likes the meat.”
“Yup.” Will saws at his steak and offers a small morsel to Laska with his big fingers. She takes it gently between her teeth.
“Why is her name Laska?”
He doesn’t answer right away, placing his plate on the ground by his feet, taking a small leather pouch out of his jacket pocket and rolling a cigarette. Someone offers him a beer, and he takes it, settling it between his thighs while he lights his smoke.
“Little girl named her. Name was Alaska but the kid couldn’t say it.”
“Whose little girl?”
Will exhales a long stream of smoke and pulls a thread of tobacco off his tongue. In the firelight his face is softened, the scars barely noticeable. He watches the sparks dance.
“Mine.”
Delilah looks over to where the small gang of children is playing. A couple of them are wrestling, rolling in the dust, and two girls are playing a clapping game. Mary Ellen stands by them and claps along. “Is she here?”
“No,” he says. “She’s gone.”
Delilah feels the sadness of this small word. It nestles in her belly like a stone. “Oh,” she says. “Gone away?”
“That’s right.”
“Where?”
He takes a swig of beer. “Seattle, last I heard.”
Delilah is confused. How can you not know where your own child is? “Is she coming back?”
“That’s the plan, kid.”
Delilah considers this. That it would be “the plan” that your child was coming back to you, but not a certainty. That you wouldn’t know for sure.
“How long has it been since you saw her?” she asks. “How old is she?” She wonders if they could have been friends here. Or still could.
Will smiles. “You like the questions, don’t you? You might wanna talk to City Jane about being a reporter.”
He grinds his beer bottle into the dirt by his chair. “Been about two years now. Left here in the summertime two years back with her mom. She’s eight. Birthday last week. Taurus. Stubborn as hell, just like her dad.”
Delilah can feel something like pride in the way he talks about her. Something full, like he’s brimming up with the thought of her. But then a hollowness because she’s not there. Delilah knows about loving something—someone—that’s not there. She felt it when she thought of her dad while she was in Vancouver. Wishing he’d walk in the door and surprise them like they did to him when they came to Yellowknife.
“I’m a Leo,” Delilah says.
“That so?” he says, glancing at her. “Then you’re stubborn as hell too.”
It warms her up inside, thinking she has something in common with Will’s lost girl.
Across the way the musicians are multiplying. Someone is playing a silver flute, and Muddy taps spoons on his knee. A man with wild black dreadlocks is pounding on the big wooden bongos. They play faster and faster as the sun finally sinks below the back of the house. Annie is dancing all alone by the fire, eyes closed, her long skirts flying.
JUNE
AFTER TWO WEEKS AT Mildred Hall Elementary School, it becomes clear to Delilah that there is some sort of dividing line between Old Town and uptown, and she is on the wrong side of it.
After vague interest from several groups of girls on the first day, they seem to all have decided she is boring. She isn’t good at sports, she’s quiet, she doesn’t have stylish clothes, and she isn’t from anywhere interesting like Irish Jimmy.
Sometimes when she is weaving through unfamiliar children, she feels as though she isn’t there at all. As though if someone reached out a hand, it would go right through her. This sense of invisibility has always made her panic. It makes her want to do something ridiculous so people see her. A handstand in the crowded hallway. A spontaneous performance of the national anthem.
Delilah always hated playing hide-and-seek for this exact reason. When she was little it terrified her, or at least once she had finally figured out how to play. She used to stand in the middle of the room while her mother counted. One, two, three, four, five, six . . . ready or not, here I come! And there Delilah would be, standing not five feet from Annie, her hands over her own eyes. She still remembers believing that nobody could see her if she couldn’t see them. Believing that she was safe as long as she didn’t look.
Annie would play along, saying, “Where could that Delilah be . . . where on earth could she be? Is she under the couch? No. Is she on the bookshelf? No . . .”
Delilah would stand like a tiny volcano ready to erupt with glee until finally she would open her eyes and shout, “I’m here! I’m right here!”
But Annie would continue the game. Pretend she couldn’t see her. “I still don’t see that silly girl,” she would say, looking over Delilah’s head. The glee would vanish, and terror would take its place. How could her mother not see her if she was standing right in front of her?
Later, when she would play with whatever tie-dyed, long-haired children they lived with, Delilah would only hide places that were obvious. She would hide behind a chair but stick her foot out where it could be seen, or hide in a closet and cough when the seeker ran by. They would tease her and tell her how terrible she was at the game, but Delilah couldn’t explain to them that she had no interest in being lost. The only part of the game she liked was when they finally found her.
Today she is approached on the field at the end of lunch hour as her classmates gather for gym. Jones is nowhere to be seen. He is in her class, thank God, but most lunch hours he disappears behind the school to the woods. He seems to be considered weird and untouchable. He isn’t bullied exactly but, like her, is utterly and completely ignored. That he chooses to disappear at every opportunity is no surprise to Delilah.
Three uptown girls walk over to her, all children of Giant Mine executives, one of them a horsey girl named Misty, the other two chubby, pink-cheeked, and named Tammy and Heather. She feels a rush of hope that maybe they have decided to give her a chance. Maybe they’re going to invite her to Mr. Mike’s for fries after school.
>
Misty looks Delilah up and down. “Delores, right?”
Delilah looks down at her blue cotton dress, her thick wool tights, her heavy rubber boots.
“No,” she says. “Delilah.”
She steels herself, looking beyond the girls and their long, wavy hair, their tube tops and short skirts under winter jackets, scanning the field for an ally or even a teacher.
“Nice tights,” Heather says. “Do you always wear your long johns to school?”
Delilah says nothing, a red flush creeping up from her chest, the blood in her own body betraying her. She knows now there will be no Mr. Mike’s invitation.
“Did you hear her, Delores?” Misty says, aggressive now.
The bell rings, and the gym teacher starts putting out the bases for a softball game. More kids are milling in groups, but no one comes near them.
“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you, little mousie. Can you hear her, Heather?”
Misty grabs Delilah’s thin wrist and comes close, leans in to whisper something savage in Delilah’s ear. Her silver hoop earring grazes Delilah’s cheek and suddenly Jones is there and grabbing Misty’s wrist, the hand holding Delilah’s, and twisting it until she lets go.
She gives an outraged shriek. “You little penis,” she shouts, breaking free. “You can’t do that. You can’t hit a girl.”
“I didn’t hit you.”
“It’s practically the same thing, you retard!”
The teacher has heard them. She strides toward them, her giant thigh muscles working under her gym shorts, a stack of orange cones in her hands. “Hey! What’s going on over here?”
Jones, with his mussed hair and the rumpled Atari shirt he has been wearing for four days, says, “Nothing.”
A torrent of accusations come from Misty’s frosted lips. They are all sent to the office, where Delilah says nothing and Jones admits freely to twisting Misty’s wrist. Misty bursts into tears, cradling her hand as though it were a fragile broken bird. Jones receives detention; the girls are all released back to class. On the way down the hall Misty closes in on Delilah. “You and your dirty little weirdo boyfriend are so dead,” she hisses before joining the other two girls.
Delilah lingers in the hall on the shiny polished floors, listening to the low and steady hum of teachers in the classrooms. Her skin feels translucent, like rice paper. It could crack and split open at any moment. She holds her own sore wrist, touches the place that was pressed into. Feels that small knot of pain.
DESPITE MISTY, DELILAH DOESN’T miss Vancouver. Sometimes she would miss places when they left, like Toronto with the wood floors she could glide on with her socks, twirling like a figure skater down the long hall. And the butterfly stained glass taking flight above the doorway. Or Winnipeg with the teacher who let the kids call him Andrew and played Rolling Stones tapes in the classroom and gave them Smarties if they got good marks on their Friday spelling tests. They had lived in a house there with a single mother and her two daughters. One of them had been the same age as Delilah, the other a year younger. Franny and Alice. They had all shared a room and called themselves triplets. At night, by flashlight under their blanket forts, they made pinky swears to live in that creaky old house together for the rest of their lives. Delilah and her parents were there for five months before they moved again, Delilah crying all the way to the airport.
But Vancouver had meant her dad was gone away to work in Yellowknife, and it meant being left alone for hours on weekends and evenings while Annie was at art school. Vancouver was Annie and the roommates drinking and debating in the kitchen with candles stuck in wine bottles till all hours, smoking pot and spilling their drinks on Delilah’s homework. Vancouver, worst of all, was Marcel. It was Annie slowly spiralling and nobody for Delilah to talk to about it.
Once, before it got really bad, Annie took Delilah out late on a Tuesday night to a little underground café with wine served in coffee mugs and plants hanging from the roof. Marcel and Jackie came with them, and Delilah remembers Marcel complaining to the waitress about their wine list. A woman came out and stood on the stage in a simple dress that looked like the one Alice wore on The Brady Bunch, with a little scalloped apron. She looked like she was about to cook a roast beef dinner, except she had bare feet and her hair hung loose around her face. But after everyone waited for what seemed like forever to Delilah, the woman opened her pretty mouth and screamed. For a long, long time without stopping.
At first, horrified, Delilah had watched, thinking that surely it would end soon, that the woman was pretending to see something that scared her, and the play would carry on from there. But soon she realized this was the play. There was nothing but the screaming.
Delilah had covered her ears and pressed her forehead to the table, but the sound bounced off every hard surface, every tabletop and coffee mug, every plate and fork that people casually continued eating with, taking bites of brownie, homemade apple crisp. When it was over, Delilah looked up and the woman was smiling pleasantly, as though she had just taken the perfect roast out of the oven and was so glad she could share it with everyone.
People murmured and applauded, and the adults at Delilah’s table said things like, “Wow, man. Yeah.” Marcel clapped, too loud and somehow offbeat. Jackie was whistling her approval.
Annie was looking off into space and nodding. Then she patted Delilah’s hand. “You’ll understand that someday, little bird. You’ll be glad you saw that. Art is not always comfortable.”
But now women who wore black dresses with black tights and chain-smoked Indian cigarettes and used words like chiaroscuro have been replaced with women who wear coveralls and thick sweaters and have long, shining hair and bright eyes. They run dog teams, chop their own wood, butcher caribou in their front yards in Old Town, the bowls of dripping meat scattered across makeshift plywood tables.
Here the evenings are filled with big dinners with the Old Towners and trips out in Red’s fishing boat to see the islands. Here she has Jones, and on weekends, they walk uptown and wander around the drugstore, buy takeout egg-rolls from the Gold Range, and drink Cokes at Mr. Mike’s, avoiding the other kids.
This is the first time in a long time she hasn’t wished she was somewhere else.
DELILAH HAS PICKED UP some sort of undercurrent she doesn’t understand since she and Annie settled into the shack. She sensed it first in Annie’s almost aggressive takeover of the house, the way she started rearranging things the minute they moved in. She pronounced the sagging living room sofa “mangy” and the next day found a couple of strong guys to haul it out to the side of the road, where it disappeared within hours. She hung batik on the walls, unpacked her art and photography books onto the one long shelf in the cramped living room, and transferred flour and oats into large glass jars that she displayed on the listing kitchen counter.
Annie walks through Old Town taking photos and then drops the film off to be developed. When she gets the photos back, she leaves them spread across the coffee table, on the kitchen table, on the floor. There are photos of fireweed, shrubs, a whole series of the grey rock taken behind their house at the pilots’ monument. She flips through them absently, a cigarette in her mouth, mugs of thick black coffee beside her. She flips and flips, as though she’s looking for something she can’t find.
At breakfast one morning, Delilah watches her mother play with a camera lens, cleaning it, taking it apart, cleaning it again. Mac is leafing through a geology book. Delilah eats her blackened toast, cooked on a wire camping toaster that sits over the element and never toasts evenly. She spreads more marmalade over the cold margarine.
Annie looks through the lens at Delilah, takes it down, blows on it delicately, and wipes it again. “I think I’ll go get a job today,” Annie says, setting her lens on the table.
Mac looks up, his finger holding the place in his book. “A job? Why?”
“I want to.” Annie rubs her temples, then folds her hands together on the table. “I’m bored.”
Delilah puts down her toast, leaving it with the singed crusts on her plate. Bored isn’t good. Bored is what happens right before Annie starts making crazy plans. Getting a job might make her settle in, but what job can she get? Flower photographer? Lake sketcher? Delilah knew they had lived on student loans and art grants from the government the whole time they were in Vancouver, plus whatever her dad could send them. Mac has always been the one with the jobs.
Mac laughs, but nervously, Delilah notes. “Bored already?”
“It’s a big change from the city, James, you have to admit.” She sweeps her arm around the room, past the snowshoes mounted on the wall, the milk crate bookshelves, the rickety tin airtight stove with a half-rusted pipe.
“True enough,” Mac concedes. “Where do you want to work?”
Annie shrugs. “Anywhere.” She brushes a stray strand of hair off her face and takes a sip of coffee.
Mac’s hand is still resting on a page of his book that features photographs of rock samples. Delilah wonders how that could possibly be interesting to him. There’s so much rock here in Yellowknife, every step you take it’s underneath you. Their shack is built right into it.
“All right,” Mac says with a tinge of wariness that doesn’t go unnoticed by Delilah. “But you don’t have to. We’re doing okay. I’m working more shifts. I don’t want you to think you have to. And I’m going away in a few weeks, remember?”
He is working more. Heading off to the mine at all different times of the day and night. He told them he’s saving up. For what, she’s not sure.
“So?” Annie takes another sip of coffee, then turns the mug to inspect it. She wipes something from the rim with her sleeve.
“So . . . Delilah. That’s all I was thinking.”
“She’ll be fine. She’s almost thirteen. I’m not going to take a night job as a janitor.”
“Right, I just thought . . . you said anything.”
“Anything within reason.” Annie stands and dumps her cup in the sink. She clicks a fingernail on the counter as she looks out the small, grubby window. “How long are you gone?”
One Good Thing Page 4