One Good Thing

by Rebecca Hendry

  THE NEXT DAY WHEN Delilah walks into the living room after school, she hears a moan of protest from the pile of blankets on the sofa. The room is dark, the sun blocked out by the heavy green drapes, the kind that rich people hang in their dining rooms, corded and swirled with shiny patterns. Annie bought them at the thrift store and nailed them above the windows in an effort to keep out the relentless light.

  The tiny alarm goes off in Delilah’s chest when she sees her mother under the blankets on the couch. “Sorry, Mom.”

  Her mother tosses a cushion to the floor as she stirs, burying her face under a pillow. The cushion just misses Delilah as she goes by.

  “Do you need something?” Delilah whispers.

  “No,” her mother mumbles. “Just let me rest.”

  Delilah knows that once Annie goes down like this, she could stay down for at least another week or so. She saw it coming, long before last night’s fight. Annie’s wave of lit-up happiness always crashes eventually.

  There is an untouched plate of bacon and eggs on the chest that Mac had made her mother that morning, the fork and knife lying neatly beside it on a paper towel. Delilah considers going to her room and crawling into her own bed with a book, but she’s hungry. She wants macaroni and cheese, but she can’t clatter around in the kitchen, so she heads to the door and backs out, closing it silently.

  She sits on the crooked porch, wondering how long until Mac comes home from work. At least if he cooks he’ll be the one who has to deal with Annie yelling that he’s being too loud. She considers heading down to Jones’s, but he might think that’s weird since she was just with him at school. She checks her shorts’ pocket for change, thinking maybe she could get a bag of chips at Weaver’s. Sixteen cents.

  Her stomach shrieks at her. Shut up, she tells it. She could go in and make some macaroni. Her mother wouldn’t kill her. But instead she walks to the top of the road and looks down the hill toward Latham Island. A dog is wandering the brush beside Martha’s shack. The Van der Meers’ five-year-old twin girls are climbing, shirtless, on the old washing machine in the vacant lot. The lake is shining, and the breeze lifts Delilah’s hair from her eyes. The chimes sing behind her.

  She starts down the hill, something breaking free in her as she walks away from her house. She walks faster, liking the slap slap slap of her sandals on the road. By the time she reaches the bottom, she’s running, hurtling down at top speed, legs flying, her arms open wide to catch the wind.

  She slows when she reaches the little bridge to Latham Island and walks down the quiet road along the shore until she gets to Rainbow Valley. She passes the colourful shacks, groups of children staring at her curiously, three men bent over a truck engine who don’t notice her go by. At the end of the street is Will’s pink shack. His truck is parked beside it. There’s a canoe lying across two sawhorses with old rusty cans of paint or varnish and a stained canvas beneath it.

  Jethro’s dogs bark at her from their pen next door, and Laska comes trotting out of Will’s open door and runs toward her. The dog licks her hand and sits on its haunches, looking up at Delilah as though to say, What are you doing here?

  Will ambles out of his shack, a cigarette tucked in his mouth. He sees Delilah and stops. He has paintbrushes and some other tool in his hand and he sets them down on the canvas. He takes a drag and squints at her. “What’s up, kid?”

  “Hi,” she says.

  “You just in the neighbourhood or what?”

  Laska licks her hand again. Delilah pets her bristly head. “I guess.”

  He points at the canoe. “You wanna give me a hand? This is important work I’m doing here. Time sensitive, as they say. Gotta get this thing in the water while the pike are biting.”

  “Sure.”

  He shows her the hairline fracture on the bottom of the fibreglass canoe. “See that? We need to patch it up. It’s a slow leak, but those will catch up with you, and soon the water’s up to your knees.”

  He gets her scrubbing down the canoe with a bristled brush while he mixes some sort of sealant. She can feel herself relax as she scours the winter grime off, back and forth, back and forth. The sun sizzles down on her forehead, and before she knows it she’s sweating. He shows her how to lay the strip of fabric across the fracture and paint on a coat of sealant.

  “You hot?” he asks after a while.

  “Yeah,” she says, stepping away from the canoe. She feels dizzy and then she remembers how hungry she was. She looks up the hazy road toward home, wondering if she’ll make it back without collapsing.

  “Come on,” he says. He puts his brushes in a tin can and walks to the house. She follows, Laska at her heels. Will leaves the door open wide, probably to let in the breeze off the lake.

  Inside it is dark and cool, the windows facing the lake covered in thick canvas. It’s one big room with a stove, a rough counter, a fridge, and a table with two chairs. His bed is built high and into the wall. Across from his bed is a cubbyhole of a room with no door. Delilah sees a pile of wood on the floor and a half-built frame of some sort taking up the whole space.

  He points to the table. “Have a seat.”

  “What are you building?” she asks, sitting down. She’s been in here before, briefly, while her dad picked something up, but she’s never stayed before. Will doesn’t host dinners at his house. The gatherings are always next door at Jethro’s.

  He’s rummaging in a cupboard and setting things on the counter. He turns, a tub of margarine in his hand. Glances over at the frame and smiles. “Bed for Clem. She’s coming in July. Used to be a woodshed but I knocked out the wall and framed it in a few years back.”

  “She’s coming? For how long?”

  “A month, maybe,” he says, returning to his task. “Her mom is going to fly her up.”

  “You haven’t seen her for a long time, right?”

  “That’s right,” he says, pulling a butter knife out of an old mug where he keeps his cutlery. “But a month is a good long time to get reacquainted. She’s gonna love you. Used to love the big girls. Followed them around like a puppy.”

  Delilah imagines playing with her, giving her piggybacks along the shore, hunting for pretty stones.

  There’s a large piece of paper tacked to the wall beside the table, tiny dots and lines scattered across it. There are staple marks where he must have pulled it from a magazine. She peers closer and realizes the dots are constellations. Andromeda. Canis Minor.

  “What is this?” she asks.

  He sets a Mountain Dew in front of her, then returns to the fridge where he rustles around. “Star atlas,” he says.

  She pushes down the round tab of her drink and takes a long sip. Nothing has ever tasted so good and so sweet. Her head is throbbing from the sun and the lack of food. There is a bowl of apples on the table, but she’s too shy to ask for one.

  She surveys the star atlas. There are a few photos stuck to the edge with tape. There’s one of a red-haired, delicate woman holding a baby wrapped in blankets in a canoe with the rocks and trees of the shore behind them. She’s beautiful and pale, somehow out of place in the wild landscape. In another there’s a little girl in a tiny parka on Will’s shoulders, maybe about three, her mouth wide with laughter, her dark eyes shining. Will is all teeth, grinning wide, wearing his fringed jacket and his grey wool cap.

  “Is that Clementine?” Delilah asks, although she knows it is. Outside, the dogs at Jethro’s start barking.

  “Yup,” he says. She watches him pull bread from a plastic bag, assembling a sandwich on his dirty counter. The table is dusty, and Delilah traces a star on the surface with her finger.

  “And that was your wife?”

  Will is silent as he pulls a plate from the basin of dirty dishes. Delilah has a thousand questions about that child in the tiny parka, but she doesn’t ask them. He pours water from a jug onto the plate and rubs it roughly with a paper towel. He puts the sandwich on it and plunks the plate down in front of Delilah.

 
“Eat up.” He sits across from her and lights a cigarette.

  She looks down at the sandwich. It’s bologna and mustard on white bread with a slice of processed cheese. She has never eaten a bologna sandwich in her life. She picks it up and takes a bite. It’s tangy and salty and delicious. She closes her eyes as she chews.

  “Good?” Will asks.

  She nods and takes another bite.

  “That’s Sarah,” he says, pointing his chin at the red-haired woman. “She wasn’t my wife. She’s Clementine’s mother.”

  “Why did she leave?” Delilah asks.

  She knows she’s maybe being rude, but she can’t help herself. In one of the photos, the red-haired woman is laughing, her hair drifting around her face in the breeze, as she sits beside Will at a picnic table, Clementine between them eating a banana, cheeks bulging. Will looks younger in the photo, but it probably wasn’t too long ago. They were a family. What happened? Delilah wonders.

  “Why did she take Clementine?”

  Will just takes a drag of his smoke and points to Delilah’s plate. “Eat up,” he says.

  Delilah picks up the second half of her sandwich, knowing to stop asking questions now.

  “You were hungry,” he says.

  Delilah nods. Her mouth is full.

  “Why’d you come down here?” He doesn’t say it meanly. He flicks his ashes into an empty creamed corn can.

  Delilah thinks carefully before she speaks. “I don’t know. My mom wasn’t feeling well.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  She shrugs. “She gets . . . I don’t know. Bored, maybe. Doesn’t get out of bed sometimes.”

  “Ah,” Will says, and it makes her think maybe this isn’t such a strange thing, to have a mother who doesn’t get out of bed.

  There’s a long silence as Will watches her calmly, maybe waiting for her to say more. She looks over at the wall to escape his gaze.

  “Why do you have a star atlas?” she asks.

  “When I was growing up I wanted to work for nasa.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really.” He takes a drag of his smoke. “When I was a teenager, they launched that Russian satellite into space. First one to go up there. Sent a dog up with it, but the dog didn’t make it. Space is no place for a dog, isn’t that right, Laska?” She is curled on the floor by his feet and her ear perks when she hears her name.

  Delilah finishes the last of her sandwich and wonders if it would be rude to ask for more. She licks mustard from her finger. “So why didn’t you?”

  “Turns out you need to be good at science.” He laughs. “Hadn’t thought that through. By then I was almost out of school. It was . . . how do you say that? . . . out of my skill set. Mostly I was good at skipping school and drinking hooch behind the bar with my friends. Then my parents died, and Jethro was looking after us. Had to work.”

  “Oh.” Delilah thinks about this. About Will’s parents dying and him and Jethro and Mary Ellen being on their own. She thinks about how, if that happened to her, she would be completely alone because she has no brothers or sisters. It strikes her suddenly, how alone she would be.

  “Too bad,” she says. “You could have been the first man on the moon.”

  “I could have been a lot of things.” He puts out his smoke in the can. “Anyway, doesn’t matter. I learned about it all later. Still learning. Hey, I got a riddle for you.”

  “Okay.”

  “In 1908 an explosion hits a remote part of Siberia. Flattens some eighty million trees over eight hundred square miles.”

  “Eighty million? Really?”

  “Really. But not a single person is killed because it happens so far from the nearest city. What do you figure it was?”

  Delilah thinks for a second. “I was going to say it was a bomb. But why would they set it off so far away from people?”

  He shakes his head. “This was no bomb. The energy of the explosion was about a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb they dropped on Hiroshima. They don’t make bombs that big.”

  “So it was like an asteroid or a meteor or something? Did it leave a big hole?”

  He smiles and sits back in his chair. “You’re getting warm. But no, it left nothing. No crater whatsoever. Just the flattened trees.” He makes a motion with his hand, flattening the trees with it.

  “What? That makes no sense.”

  “No? Take a wild guess.”

  “I don’t know. What is it?”

  “You give up already? You sure?”

  She takes a sip of her pop. “A bomb is the only thing I can think of.”

  Will seems like he’s enjoying this. “Ever heard that thing about how killing someone with an icicle is the perfect crime?”

  “Like stabbing them with it? Why?”

  “Think about it, kid. You stab someone with an icicle, then the weapon melts. No evidence.”

  “Does that happen a lot in Yellowknife?” She has been warned of the cold more times than she can count. Her father tells her icicles hang three, four feet long from the eaves of the shacks, as thick as elephant trunks.

  He laughs. “Nah. But think of this thing in Siberia. You got a major impact . . .” The heel of his big hand hits the table and rattles her pop can against her plate. “But you got no crater. So what could do that?”

  “Ice? What kind of ice? From where?”

  “What’s a comet made of?”

  “Ice. But space dirt and rock and stuff, too.” They had done comets at school last year. She had made one out of papier-mâché and got a B-plus on it.

  “Ice.”

  “So it was a comet?”

  He shrugs, his eyes twinkling. “Who knows? Still a mystery. Thousands of scientists and nobody’s been able to prove anything.”

  “Wait, you don’t know? You don’t know the answer?” She feels tricked.

  “Nobody knows for sure. Some say comet, some say a meteor hit the atmosphere and exploded on impact, made debris so small it’s unnoticeable.”

  “Does that happen, though? Do meteors and stuff land on earth?”

  “Oh, yeah. All the time. Most of ’em are tiny, just particles of rock and iron. But some are bigger. They’ve recovered thousands over the years. People go looking for them.”

  “Go looking for them? Why?”

  “Valuable. Those pieces can make you a small fortune if you find them.” He’s all lit up now, talking about those hunks of rock.

  She thinks she understands why. “Not just the money, though.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Like, it’s a piece of space. Right? Something that’s not from Earth. That’s pretty cool.”

  “It sure as hell is, kid.”

  “But they don’t know for sure what happened in Siberia? Doesn’t it bug you that they don’t know?”

  “Does it bug you?”

  “Yeah.” It does. It makes her feel unsafe, like the sky could fall on them at any time. How can all those scientists not know what caused something so destructive?

  “What’s life without a bit of mystery?” He points to her empty plate. “You still hungry?”

  “A little.”

  He gets up. “I’ll make you another one. Then you better get out there and help me finish up that canoe. You gotta earn your keep if you’re gonna eat all my food.”

  “Will?”

  He’s rustling in the fridge again. “Yeah?”

  “I just like to know why things happen. Don’t you?”

  He sets the cheese on the counter and turns to her. “Not always, kid,” he says. “What happened is what happened. Knowing why doesn’t change a thing.”

  SUNDAY MORNING DELILAH TRAILS Jones down a path to the edge of Yellowknife Bay where his family’s canoe is tied to a rock. He has piled some lumber by the shore, mostly broken sheets of plywood and two-by-fours. He overturns the canoe and starts loading the wood into it. She helps him, careful to not catch the old nails on her pink peasant blouse. The sun is hot
, but there’s a cool wind off the water that flutters the thin fabric near her waist.

  He throws the canvas over the mound of tools and wood in the canoe and pushes it off the sand. “Hop in,” he says over his shoulder.

  She does, wobbling as the boat tilts under her weight. Jones tells her to move to the front and she sits facing away from land. She feels Jones shove off and then scramble into the boat. He sits at the back and starts paddling. Delilah can see small fish swimming in the dappled shallows, an old tin can, a length of rusted chain, and then it’s too deep to see the bottom.

  They glide across the rippled surface, Delilah’s eyes almost drifting shut with the rhythmic movement of the canoe.

  She likes the feeling of freedom out here on the water. Only five more days of school and then they can do this every day if they want to. She and Jones haven’t discussed the Misty situation, but there isn’t much to discuss. When Delilah passes her and Tammy and Heather in the hallways they call out “Delorrres” and laugh when she flinches and keeps walking, head down. But aside from that, there have been no further attacks. Soon they will get bored and move on to someone else. Delilah has seen it happen before.

  When the rocky edge of Joliffe Island is ten feet from the boat, Jones turns the canoe to the right and edges along sideways until they come to a small beach. He hops out and drags the rope to a pine tree near the shore to tie it. Delilah gets out.

  “We gotta walk a bit with the stuff,” Jones says.

  “Where’s the cabin?” she asks.

  He has started stacking the lumber and the gear on the beach. “Just up through the trees a little.”

  “Who lives there?” she asks, pointing to a strange structure just off the shore to their left. It’s a home of some sort, made of what looks like aluminum siding and a patchwork of old wood. There are plastic lawn chairs and piles of rusty machinery scattered across the rock around it.

  “Old Tom. He’s okay. Kinda weird. He talks about the army a lot. Doesn’t go over to the other side very much. He won’t bug us.”

  Across the lake, Delilah can see Willow Flats, Jones’s house, and the long tail of Rainbow Valley. She can see the road that leads uptown. From here it all looks like a child’s Lego village. She could crush it with her hand or step on it with her shoe. She likes being so far away, separated by water from everything else.