One Good Thing

by Rebecca Hendry

  Mac takes two Oreo cookies out of a crinkly package and puts them down on the table in front of her. She picks one up and takes a bite. The sugar might kill her, if he keeps this up. It’s jangling her nervous system like the whine of a chainsaw. He rubs a hand over the top of his head, back, forth, and back again. He reaches for one of her hands and she offers it, tentatively.

  “I have to work nights,” he says, gripping her sticky fingers and holding her gaze for the first time in days. “A few of them overnight. I have to work, and that’s what they’re offering. I can’t say no. See, what I’m thinking, Lila, is I just need to save as much money as possible. Save up for a house. For all of us.”

  “Here?” she asks hopefully.

  He looks away.

  “I don’t want to go to California.” She licks the sugary white icing from the fingers of her free hand.

  “Well, sure, maybe. I mean, if we have a better house here, with running water. A little studio space for her. I mean, she might love that . . .” He sounds shaky, a little desperate, which turns Delilah’s stomach. She is only half listening, watching a fly do a drunken dance by the back door, trapped on the inside by the heavy screen.

  He tells her two nights a week she will stay overnight at Red and Maggie’s. Two nights a week, she can go to Will’s or Jethro and Mary Ellen’s until eleven, and he will pick her up after he gets off.

  “Sorry,” he says. “Just for now, though. I mean, there are some other things in the works, Delilah, that might turn out to be pretty interesting if we just . . . just hang in there.” He suddenly seems so thin and dried out. She wants to shake him, shake some life back into him.

  The fly lands on the inside of the screen. It’s like he’s looking out to the overgrown lawn, wondering why he can see it but can’t quite get to it.

  “I’ll be fine,” she says.

  AT WILL’S, THE BOWL of apples is still on the table from two weeks before, though now there are only two, and the dented Mountain Dew cans with the circles popped out of the tops are still there too, except now they are dusted with cigarette ashes. She’s sitting in the same old rickety chair.

  It’s seven, and she and Will have just returned to his shack after having dinner at Jethro and Mary Ellen’s. Her father is working the night shift, and she is supposed to stay at Will’s until eleven. Outside, Will is loading up the truck with scrap lumber for the lean-to Mac has been working on back home.

  Will comes in and turns on his two-burner stove. “All loaded up,” he says as he fills the enamel coffee pot with water from a jug and pours in some coffee grounds from a large can on the counter. “I can bring it up there later and drop it off for your dad.”

  “Okay,” she says. “Maybe I’ll go too. I’m not feeling good.” All evening, during Mary Ellen’s rabbit stew and the card game afterward, she had felt quiet and subdued. There’s a familiar tightness in her chest, a faint wheezing with each breath that is making her tired. She had to excuse herself twice to go take a surreptitious puff of her inhaler during dinner. She wants to go home and crawl into bed with a book.

  Will glances at her. “Sure thing. Any time. You gonna live or what?”

  She nods. “I’m fine. You can make your coffee first.”

  She sees that Will has wiped the table free of dust, except where she traced the star with her finger last week. But now there are two stars traced in the dust. She’s puzzled. She’s sure she only drew one.

  “Will?”

  “Yeah?” He takes a cup from the shelf above the counter. The fresh evening air coming in the window smells cool and clean, like melting ice.

  “Is that your star?”

  He turns around, cup in hand. “Huh?”

  She points to the two dust stars, close together by the inner edge of the table.

  “Oh. Yeah.” He sets the cup down carefully. “I guess I was thinking about binary stars when I did that.”

  “Binary stars?”

  Will comes over, drags the other chair out and sits. He leans forward, his big forearms resting on the table. He points to the stars. “Binary stars. They go in pairs. Most stars like to go in pairs, or at least some of ’em do.”

  Delilah didn’t know this. She always thought of stars as lonely things, up so high and far away and spread out. She knows that what looks close together from Earth can be millions of light years apart up there.

  “The one star . . .” He points to hers. “The one star, it’s pulled toward the other star and they spin. Orbit each other.” His hands show her the orbit. “It’s like they can’t go anywhere else. You know? They can’t pull apart. They don’t want to.”

  “Oh.”

  His orbiting hands are resting on the table now, folded peacefully. “Yeah. But once in a while, every once in a while, one of ’em gets sucked down. And then it’s all over.”

  “Sucked down by what?”

  He shrugs. “Darkness.”

  She’s skeptical. What do stars know about darkness?

  “You don’t believe me?”

  She shakes her head.

  He picks up two wrinkled apples, which leaves the brown bowl empty in the middle of the table. “Okay. This star here . . .” He holds one out. “And this star here . . .” And he holds out the other. “Are going like this . . .” He circles them around each other, crossing his hands in front of him. “That there,” he says, indicating the bowl with his chin, “is a black hole. You know what a black hole is?”

  She starts to say yes and then realizes she doesn’t. She’s heard of one, of course, but she doesn’t actually know what it is.

  “It’s a star that died. Exploded in on itself. It creates a darkness so heavy that no light can escape it. Okay? So this star here starts to get pulled in by the black hole. Pretty soon it starts falling, losing energy, getting all sucked away by the darkness. Now you understand?”

  She nods. One wrinkled apple is wobbly now, orbiting the edge of the bowl instead of the other apple, which Will holds still in his left hand. “Then . . .” Thud. The apple lands in the bowl.

  “Oh. The star . . . dies?”

  “Kinda. Yeah, it kinda does. But what happens is that the other star, because it was exchanging equal energy with that star, when the one star loses all its energy, the other gets this big rush of it. So much it goes flying.” He pulls back his arm like a big-league pitcher and tosses the apple across the room.

  She follows the apple’s flight path. It bounces off the coat hanger antenna of his TV and lands in his wood box.

  She laughs. “It does not!”

  “Oh, yes it does. Right out of the galaxy. See, they think they can’t live without each other. It makes ’em go right off course. That other star was their one good thing. They don’t want anything else. That’s the problem. That is the problem right there.”

  Behind him the pot is boiling like crazy, the smell of thick, burnt coffee tickling the back of Delilah’s throat. Will’s watching her, but she’s still looking at that one apple in the bowl. He stands and turns the coffee off, putting it aside to let the grounds settle.

  Delilah gets up and walks to the wood box. Despite her fear of spiders, which she knows for sure are lurking under the cut pine, she feels around in the dark bottom until she finds the soft, sunken apple. She looks at it carefully, its little dimples and puckers, the wrinkled yellow skin. She smells it, but it’s lost most of its fresh apple smell. It smells like tangy cider now, like something old and about to turn rotten. She presses it briefly to her cheek before putting it safely in the pocket of her sweater.

  She turns and sees he is watching her from the counter. “I’m ready to go now,” she says.

  BACK HOME LATER THAT night, Delilah wakes up drowning, her lungs filling with water, lead, useless scraps of thin paper. She sits up gasping and leans forward on her rumpled blankets to try to pull in more air. She reaches for her inhaler, knocking a cup and a pile of books off the crate beside her bed as she scrambles for it. She takes a puff, sucks the metal
lic spray deep into her chest, then takes another. She sits back against the wall waiting for it to ease, for the relief to spread though her chest, the hand to loosen its dark grip. But the inhaler does nothing. Every breath is a long, rasping wheeze. The air reaches the back of her throat but refuses to go farther.

  She gets up and stumbles to the living room, checking the clock above the stove as she goes by. Nine-fifteen. Her dad won’t be off for almost two hours. Will’s number is scrawled on a piece of paper tacked to the wall for emergencies, Maggie and Red’s beneath it. She picks up the phone and dials.

  When Will bursts through the door to the shack, she is on the floor trying to pull her shoes on, but the effort is too much for her. He slips them on her feet and pulls her up from the floor, scooping her up in his arms like a child and carrying her to the truck.

  “Don’t talk,” he orders, settling her in her seat and slamming her door shut before running around the front of the truck to the driver’s side.

  The drive to Emergency feels like it takes hours, though Will drives like a Formula One racer. No, it takes 102 breaths. She follows his order and doesn’t say a word, only breathes, in, out, in, out, counting, her chest heaving. The window is open and she leans her head out, trying to gasp any extra oxygen she can into her lungs.

  Will drives hunched over the wheel, watching the road with razor focus. She feels like she is floating away, barely there. She thinks of Annie, who would always breathe with Delilah when she was having an attack, holding both her hands, making her look at her. In, out.

  Delilah melts back in her seat, light-headed. She feels Will shake her shoulder roughly, and she knows he’s scared. He says words she doesn’t hear. She is disappearing, she is nothing but her useless lungs refusing to expand.

  In Emergency, amidst the white lights and noise and flashes of nurses in blue and green, they give her a shot of adrenaline and hook her up to the nebulizer before they lay her back against the raised hospital bed, murmuring to her as she watches them over the soft plastic mask. In, out, in, out.

  Will talks to them at her bedside, but she doesn’t hear what he’s saying. Someone sticks her with an IV needle, and she doesn’t flinch. A doctor comes back to check on her, his head huge above her, and listens to her chest. He shouts an order at a nurse. Someone takes blood from her thin white arm. Mac’s face appears above her at one point and she realizes Will must have called him. The drugs have hit her system, and her hands shake, her heart races under her flannel pyjama top.

  She still wheezes with every breath. She feels a detached amazement at her body’s stubbornness. Nothing they do can make her breathe.

  Hours later she is in a dim, twilit room on the ward in an oxygen tent, finally stabilized. Mac told her before he left that the doctor said it had been close. That if they hadn’t got to the hospital when they did, he isn’t sure what would have happened. Something about blood oxygen levels. Mac was shaky, pale. He wanted to stay in her room, but the nurses convinced him it was okay to go.

  There had been talk of putting her on a plane to Edmonton before the drugs finally kicked in. They have pumped her full of adrenaline and cortisone and she has had two more nebulizer treatments. There is only a tiny rattle now when she inhales. She has at least a few hours before it all wears off and she has to have another mask.

  Pale moonlight shines through the clear plastic tent surrounding her bed. There’s a blue jug of water sweating on the rolling side table beside her and a Styrofoam cup of cranberry juice she had two sips of to placate the sunny nurse. There are two little old ladies sleeping in the other beds. One of them looks so old and fragile that Delilah isn’t convinced she’s still alive.

  She walks her fingers up the inside of her crinkled plastic tent, following a glimmering line of light. When she was little and had to stay in the hospital, she used to lie in the tent at night and play games with her fingers to keep herself amused. She would name them. Gwendolyn and Annabelle. Clarice and Chantelle. They would have conversations about their little dogs or the dress they had bought that day.

  “Jeez, kid,” she hears from the entrance to her room. “You scared me there.”

  She lets her hand drop to her lap and turns on her side. Will is standing in the doorway. She hadn’t seen him after her dad arrived. She assumed he had left.

  “Sorry,” she says. “I’m okay now.”

  He comes closer to her bed and looks at the tent around her, reaches out to touch the plastic. “You like that boy who lived in the bubble, or what?”

  She smiles. She had seen that movie about the boy who could never leave his plastic bubble the year before on TV in Vancouver. “I guess. Except I get to come out in a couple of days.”

  “Well . . . I just wanted to say good night. Hope you can sleep okay.” He lowers his voice. His face is distorted through the plastic. “Those old ladies might keep you up with their partying.”

  She laughs. “Good night,” she says.

  He looks like he wants to say something else, but he turns to go.

  “Will?”

  He turns back. “Yeah?”

  “Thank you for taking me to the hospital.”

  “No problem, kid. Thanks for not dying on my watch.”

  She settles back on her pillows and feels her body relax, the tight muscles around her ribs and chest letting go. She’s so tired. Since she was young, whenever she was sick, she was afraid to go to sleep in case she stopped breathing in the night. It was only when she was in the hospital, surrounded by people who could save her, that she would finally feel safe enough to close her eyes.

  JULY 13, 1977

  SEASCAPE ARTIST’S COLONY, CARMEL, CALIFORNIA

  Delilah, I know you don’t understand. But people are meant for certain things, little bird. It’s hard for you to get that now because you don’t know yet what you were meant for. But listen: There’s what we think we are, what other people want us to be, and then there’s what’s real. What we’re destined for.

  I’m an artist, Delilah. I can’t apologize for that. I am an artist who hasn’t been doing art. I lost my muse up north, I couldn’t find her anywhere. She doesn’t like that bare, dead landscape.

  Try to understand that a part of me was dying there. It’s not unlike being a mother who can’t find her child but knows she exists, knows she’s out there somewhere wandering alone. I was feeling lost and empty until I came to the colony and met these people.

  I wish I hadn’t left the way I did. I wish I could take that back, but I just couldn’t fight, Delilah, I couldn’t stand the thought of arguing with your dad about what was best for me and best for you. I know what’s best. So many women artists went mad because they felt constrained . . . look at Camille Claudel. What other incredible things could she have created if she wasn’t so oppressed?

  I want to be a good example for you. I want to show you what a woman should do for herself. Ursula Le Guin has a quote: “I want young girls to explode like volcanoes.” I want that for you. But how can I model it if I’m dormant myself?

  It’s only three months. It’s not an eternity. If I had the money, I would have taken you with me, but as I said in the note it wasn’t possible. You need to settle in there, make some friends. Have some adventures. And then maybe we can talk about the best place for all of us to be together. You will forgive me someday. I know you will.

  All my love,

  Annie

  ONCE SHE HAS RECOVERED from her three-day stay at the hospital, Delilah and Jones spend every day they can out at Joliffe hauling old chairs, blankets, and crates for shelves to the old cabin. For the most part, the adults leave them alone. On nights that Mac works, Delilah eats dinner at Jones’s or with Will and Jethro and Mary Ellen. Often half of Willow Flats or Rainbow Valley is at one of those houses cooking chicken or whitefish or caribou steaks over the fire.

  Old Town never seems to rest; it’s like everyone knows to use up every moment of the daylight before the winter comes back. Delilah can’t imagine
it, this cold darkness she hears about. Now, there is no darkness at all. Some nights she wanders home at midnight alone from Jones’s, the sun barely set and the entire southern horizon awash in smouldering light as she sinks into her bed.

  Mac is drifting farther and farther away, unmoored from her world now by working all the time, turned in on himself when he’s home. Delilah tries not to think of Annie because she doesn’t like the confusion that wells up when she does. She won’t speak to her when she calls, shaking her head silently at her dad when he tries to hand her the phone. She isn’t sure why. It’s a strange thing, she thinks, to wish someone hadn’t left and to wish they would never come back at the same time. The hurt, when she probes it, is so vast it spreads out around her, touches the edges of things. In certain moments, she never wants to see her mother again. In certain moments, she wishes Annie would disappear for good, imagines her driving away down the dusty dirt road outside their shack until she becomes a tiny speck on the horizon, no bigger than an ant.

  ALTHOUGH WILL HAD LONG ago finished Clementine’s little nook in his former woodshed, she doesn’t come in July after all. When Delilah asks him about it, all he says is, “Not sure, kid. Guess her mom had a change of plans.” He doesn’t mention it again, and Delilah doesn’t press it though she can feel his disappointment. Mac tells her it’s because of Sarah’s parents.

  “What’s wrong with them?” she asks. “Why won’t they let her see him?”

  “It’s complicated,” he says. He won’t elaborate.

  Delilah is so tired of adults thinking she can’t handle the truth.

  ONE EVENING IN LATE July Jones bangs on the door while Delilah’s on her couch reading. Her dad is working the evening shift. “Hey, Will’s taking us to Star Wars,” Jones calls from the porch.

  She sits up. “Really?” Star Wars is all Jones has been talking about for the past week. He’s furious that Yellowknife got the movie months after the rest of the world has already seen it.