“It’s closed,” she says.
“You want the Explorer? You can get a nice steak, one of those virgin margaritas.”
“No,” she says. “Just Nettie’s.”
They get in the truck, and she expects him to drive straight up the hill but he swerves at Willow Flats and stops at Red’s. He parks and tells her to give him a minute and then goes and bangs on the door. Delilah watches a canoe glide past the southern tip of Joliffe, disappearing into a white wash of sunlight.
Mac returns with Jones trailing behind him looking recently scrubbed, his hair still wet from a shower. “Look who I found, about to eat a plate of Kraft Dinner. Hop in, Jonesy.”
Jones is wearing his Atari T-shirt and cut-offs, his knobby knees protruding. His sneakers are filthy. “Happy birthday. I was gonna come see you after dinner.” He thrusts two Mars bars and a small brown bag at her through the open window. “These are for you.”
Delilah takes them, surprised. She opens the bag and takes out a silver mood ring like they have at the pharmacy uptown. They had been there one day after school, and she had tried one on and inspected the stone. She asked Jones what black meant. He had looked at the small chart on the box and said, “Angry,” and they had both laughed.
She feels a warmth in her chest thinking of him going back there and getting it later, of making any effort for her at all. “Thanks,” she says.
Her dad is in the driver’s seat, but instead of shifting over so Jones can get in she asks if they can ride in the back. Mac shrugs.
“Sure. And Red and Maggie are coming up to meet us as soon as Red showers off the fish smell. Short day on the lake, eh, Jones?”
“Yeah. The motor was acting up, so we came back in.”
Delilah climbs out. Clambering over the back of the truck with her dress and her clogs isn’t exactly ladylike. She perches on the wheel well, gathering her skirt underneath her so it doesn’t blow up in the wind. This dressing like a girl is more work than she thought it would be.
Jones sits across from her. As her dad navigates the bumps heading out of the Flats, Delilah twists Jones’s mood ring back and forth on her finger and thinks about a big plate of perogies swimming in butter and fried onions and sour cream.
She can feel the wind blowing off the disappointment of the morning as they fly up the hill. Yellowknife is a blur of colour around them, and Mac is going so fast she starts to laugh, and then Jones does too as they hold on to the side of that truck for dear life.
SEPTEMBER
ON THE FIRST DAY of high school, Delilah and Jones manoeuvre through Farrah Fawcett-haired seniors with real breasts and combs in the back pockets of their jeans, young men with beards and long hair and army jackets who look like they should be teaching instead of carrying books to biology.
Nobody notices them. If anything, Delilah would guess that nobody here cares about them at all. They pass some former classmates from Mildred Hall, a group of boys, and Jones tenses, his jaw tightening. But no words are exchanged. It’s as though the summer has neutralized them somehow. The students are all spread out, dispersed in the classes, making the clique combinations less potent.
Delilah has saved $120 working with Esther and can still work on the weekends until the Wildcat closes in the winter for a few months. Even though she knows she shouldn’t have, she used half of the money and bought herself two pairs of bell-bottom jeans, a blouse with tiny bluebells stitched around the neck, and tennis socks with different-coloured balls at the heels. She also bought mascara for the first time, and a five-pack of Bonne Bell Lip Smackers. The rest of the money is shoved in a sock under her mattress.
Mac has been working almost every day and retreats to prospecting books in the evenings. Delilah spends some evenings with Will, Jethro, and Mary Ellen or over at Jones’s, but she is starting to stay home alone many nights too. She’s old enough now, after all. Annie still calls on Sundays, and inexplicably, Mac answers, often looking away from Delilah when he does, as if he’s ashamed. He tells Annie about work and their trip to the Point and how Red and Maggie are doing while Delilah pretends she isn’t listening. Mac doesn’t talk about them going down and meeting Annie in California—or at least, not when Delilah is there.
At lunch, Jones finds Delilah by her locker, and they venture out to the yard to eat their sandwiches. He doesn’t seem to feel the need to escape the yard like he did at Mildred Hall. She’s glad for the company. Some new girls have chatted with her already today, and Sammy, a girl from Old Town, waved at her in the hall. She can see the possibility of friends in the future.
Misty is in her science class, along with a couple of her sidekicks. When Delilah walks by them to the back of the class, Misty looks her up and down and smirks. Delilah is wearing her peasant blouse and her new jeans. “Goody-two-shoes much?” Misty says.
Delilah lets it go, the words sliding off her instead of penetrating through her skin and shrivelling her like some toxic poison. It’s like she suddenly has an invisible shield, a barrier between her and everything ugly around her. She doesn’t know where it came from.
She sits in the back row and takes out her root beer Lip Smacker and applies it, licking the sweetness from her lips as she watches the leaves dance in the light outside the window. She relaxes into a strange peace; visions of the cabin on Joliffe, swimming in the lake, and sitting on the bow of Red’s boat drift through her mind. The teacher, Mr. Grady, outlines what they will be learning that year. The elements. Cell division. Genes.
Just before the end of class, he settles into his chair, leans back, and asks them, “Can anyone tell me what carbon is?” He scans the class, his eyes landing on Delilah.
“You. What’s your name?”
“Delilah,” she says.
“Delilah. Any guesses on the carbon question?”
“It’s an element.”
“Yes, an element. Correct, although not what I was looking for. I think we’ve established that we are, indeed, studying the elements.”
Misty snickers.
“Any other revelations to share with us?”
Delilah shakes her head.
“Anyone? No? Carbon, children, is present in all life forms. All of them. It is the chemical basis of all known life.”
Delilah shifts her gaze back to the window. There is a small bird hopping outside. It stops and looks at her.
“Is anyone here wearing a diamond?”
“Me,” Misty says, and everyone turns to look at her. Delilah watches the bird. It hops once more, then flies away.
Mr. Grady walks down the aisle and stops by Misty. “May I?” He returns to the front of the class and holds up a delicate gold chain with a small pendant. “Anyone know what this diamond is made of?”
George, an oversized boy with a red face and huge feet, calls out “Rock?”
“Rock, George? Hmm.” Mr. Grady swings the chain. “I’m looking for an element here. Let’s all try to focus. Put our thinking caps on, as they say in preschool.”
“Uhh . . . carbon?” George looks around at his friends and they grin and snicker.
Mr. Grady points at him. “Correct! Carbon it is. This diamond this young lady has so graciously lent me to illustrate my point is indeed made of carbon. Does anyone here know anything about how diamonds are formed?”
Delilah does. Will told her everything about how diamonds are formed one afternoon in July when she and Jones had gone to his cabin. He was going to take them out in his canoe to fish for trout, but they got distracted and sat with their cans of pop on his back porch instead. He showed them his mother’s wedding ring, the small perfect stone glinting in the light off the lake. It had been hot, no breeze to cool them. Delilah’s shorts stuck to the inside of her legs, her T-shirt was damp where her back touched the nylon lawn chair.
“Anyone? Come on now, you children of miners! Show your parents proud.”
Delilah remembers Will’s big, scarred hand holding that tiny gold ring, the band so delicate it looked like it c
ould snap in his fingers.
“Yes, Misty?”
“Um, are they, like, compressed a lot? Like, the carbon?”
“Correct! Yes, they are, like, compressed a lot indeed. Diamonds are formed at incredibly high temperatures and pressures deep in the earth’s mantle. Does anyone know how long it takes for them to grow?”
Billions of years, Delilah thinks.
“A long time!” George calls out.
“A long time. That is very true, George, though not as specific as I’d hoped for.” Mr. Grady sets the necklace on his desk and turns to the board. He picks up chalk and scrawls one to three billion years.
“Why do you think they’re so precious?” Will had said when Delilah laughed at him. She didn’t believe they took so long to grow. “Why do you think people go crazy trying to find them?”
Mr. Grady walks down the aisle and returns the necklace to Misty. “So now you can all go home and impress your parents with your extensive, sweeping diamond knowledge. Time for one more question, then I want you to gather your things. Please read chapter one in your text by Thursday so we can attempt an intelligent conversation next class.”
He sits at his desk and smooths his hair over his balding head. “Can anyone tell me what the word ‘diamond’ means? I’ll give you a hint. It comes from the Greek word adámas.”
There is a shuffling of papers and the snap of binders closing as everyone prepares to go. “Anyone?”
Delilah can’t believe Mr. Grady left out the best part. She wants to stand and tell him, to tell everyone the best part.
“Diamonds can be formed where meteorites land,” Will had said, lighting a smoke and shading his eyes from the sun. Jones was sitting on the small porch with his back to them, facing the lake and swinging his bare legs. Laska was at Delilah’s feet, gnawing on a caribou bone Will had given her.
“Some meteorites have star dust in ’em from dying stars,” he said. “That dust sometimes has diamond crystals in it. Meteor makes its way to Earth, crashes down, and there you go. Couple of billion years later, you got your diamond ring.”
Delilah thought about the diamond studs Annie had been given by her own mother when she was a kid. Those diamonds her mother hated and thought stood for everything that was bad in the world. How could she be so stupid?
“We have the same stuff in us that’s in diamonds too, right?” Jones asked.
“That’s right,” Will said. “It comes from the same place. We all got star dust in us.” He grinned. “Want me to play that song for you again?”
“No!” they had both shouted.
“Nobody knows what the word diamond means?” Mr. Grady asks now, sounding tired. “Anyone want to take a wild stab in the dark, at least?”
Delilah won’t get up and tell everyone what she knows. About the meteors and how they are all, every single one of them, the jerks like Misty and the good ones like Jones, made up of remnants of stars that had fallen to Earth billions of years ago. But still. She raises her hand.
“Delilah! Care to venture a guess?”
Heads swing. She ignores them, stares straight ahead at Mr. Grady. He nods encouragement.
“Unbreakable,” she says.
THE TEMPERATURE OUTSIDE THE shack is almost at freezing, the little bird thermometer dipping below ten degrees for the first time in months. Delilah is at home rereading To Kill a Mockingbird for English. She’s wearing her dad’s quilted plaid work jacket, too lazy to build a fire. As she reads, she is trying to formulate a subject for the required book report due Monday morning, but her mind is wandering. She’s thinking about winter. She can feel it, like a sudden shake or a slap. Her asthma has been worse with the change of season, and she has had to get a steroid inhaler to take with the regular one to help get it under control.
Will hasn’t been coming by the house much, and she hasn’t been going for dinner there, but when she’d seen him at Red’s the other night, he had talked about taking her and Jones out with Jethro’s dog team after the lake freezes.
By nine it is dark, and Delilah has to light all the lamps in the house. She is in the kitchen refilling her fruit punch from the can when she hears the truck pull up. Her dad stumbles in the front door as she’s returning to the living room, her punch and a small stack of Oreos in hand. She stops when she sees him. He doesn’t say a word, just walks past her to the kitchen. He’s wearing his mine clothes and has his head tipped back, a bloody cloth held to his nose.
“Dad?” She follows him into the kitchen where he’s pouring water into the basin. “What happened?”
He swishes a clean dishcloth in the water. “Had an accident. Nothing to worry about.”
Acshident.
She puts her punch and cookies on the kitchen table. “Are you drunk? Where were you?”
He holds the wet cloth to his nose and looks at her sideways. He shakes his head awkwardly.
“Yes, you are. Let me see.” She tries to take the soaking wet cloth but he shrugs her away. “Dad. Let me see. You’re bleeding all over your shirt.”
He relents and lets her lead him to the table where he sits heavily in a chair.
She peels the cloth back. His nose is red and swollen, leaking blood from both nostrils.
“Did you fall?”
She imagines him stumbling around outside the Yellowknife Inn and falling into the street. Is he the town drunk now? She has never seen him like this, clumsy and reeking of beer.
“No, the fucker punched me. Punched me in the face.”
Fashe.
Delilah tosses the bloody dishcloth onto the counter and takes a dry one off the shelf. She holds it to her dad’s nose and he lets her. His head feels warm, like a child with a temperature, burning up under his skin.
“Who punched you?”
Mac shakes his head and closes his eyes. “Ow!” He flinches as she presses harder.
Delilah puts his own hand on the cloth. “You do it then.” She sits across from him. “Who punched you?”
She has never known her dad to be in a fight. In fact, when they lived in Vancouver he was going through a Gandhi phase, and for a few weeks, he made her read to him from Gandhi’s teachings on non-violence every night before she went to sleep. It just made sense, he had told her. “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.”
He shrugs, holds the cloth clumsily.
“You don’t know?”
What should she do? Yell? Comfort him? What should she do?
He looks at her sadly with his bloodshot eyes. “We’re so close, Lila,” he says, muffled by the cloth hanging over his mouth. “So close. He just won’t listen to me. He’s on fucking . . . radio silence or something. Won’t listen. So close. Why don’t people ever do the right fucking things?”
“Dad. Who punched you?”
“Fucking Will. That’s who.”
“Will?” Her heart thuds to her feet and the room tilts. “Will did this?” She tries to imagine Will punching him, punching anyone, but she can’t.
He doesn’t answer, just leans his head back again.
“Why did he punch you?”
He pulls off the cloth. “I’m there having a beer at the Gold Range after work, and I try to talk to the guy, and he won’t say a fucking word to me. I just wanna buy a guy a beer, that’s all. And he won’t say a word to me. Like a fucking . . . kid or something. A sulky kid. So he’s ignoring me, and I give him a little shove, whatever, no big deal, and then this.” He stares down at the bloody cloth in his hand.
Delilah stands. He shoved Will? For ignoring him? It makes no sense. She can feel the lie simmering under his words.
“You not talking to me now either?” Mac sounds plaintive.
She can’t think of a good reason why Will would have wanted to punch her father, even if Mac had shoved him, which means there are other things going on that she doesn’t know. Things that would make him and Muddy and Will argue out on the rocks at Lonesome Point. Things that would make Will not want to drop
by anymore.
Mac starts weeping quietly.
“I miss her, Lila,” he whispers, and it takes a moment for her mind to switch gears and realize he is talking about Annie. “I miss her so much.”
He uses his bloody cloth to wipe his eyes and Delilah picks up her punch and cookies, her heart a hard throbbing pulse in her throat.
“Go to bed,” she tells her father.
She collects her book from the living room and heads to her room. Mac is still sitting in the kitchen, blood leaking onto his chest, staring off into space like there might be an answer out there.
OCTOBER
ON THE SHORE OF the bay the cold is almost unbearable, the faint dusting of snow crunching beneath Delilah’s boots like crushed glass.
“There,” Will says.
She follows his finger up to the white-hot stars. The ghostly green of the northern lights flickers across the sky, as though she had blinked slowly, blurring her vision for a split second. Delilah watches as the luminescent lights grow stronger, forming and falling in long, sweeping lines above them, dripping down from the sky like a child’s painting that has suddenly become electric.
Will drops his hand to his side and puts his glove back on. The flicker grows into a wide, shifting arc above them, its edges bleeding down, a paintbrush dripping paint. It snaps and bucks, spreading over the sky.
She is breathless. They watch for what seems like an hour, just standing there. She has had bad luck since it got dark enough for the lights to appear, often going to bed before they show up or looking for them on cloudy nights. Mac told her she should never work for the little tour company that takes tourists out to see the lights. They would go out of business with her around.
Her toes burn, her cheeks are numb. She can no longer feel her nose. She looks back toward the houses. Woodsmoke curls from Will’s chimney, and light shines warmth from the windows of the Rainbow Valley cabins. She can see Mary Ellen sitting at the table in the kitchen of the shack she shares with Jethro. They’re probably drinking Ovaltine now, settling into another game of cards. The milk had been on the stove when Will went out for a smoke and Delilah followed him onto the lake. She is so glad to be back with them, so grateful for the quiet comfort she feels with Mary Ellen fussing over her, making her wear extra socks, smoothing her hair, clucking over her like a mother hen.
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