Will has been quiet, he and Jethro playing their cards without the usual ribbing and bad jokes: Hey Delilah, what do you call a man with no arms and no legs in the water? (I don’t know, what?) Bob.
“See Venus?” Will says now.
She sees it instantly, twice as bright as any other star up there. “Yes. There.”
“That’s right. Big Dipper?”
“There.”
“Yes.”
“Cassiopeia?”
This one is trickier. She points toward Willow Flats. “There?”
“Nope.”
She studies the sky. She should know it. He showed it to her a few weeks ago. She can’t find it in the tangle of stars.
“She’s right there. See that W shape? That’s her.”
“Oh. I see it now.”
Delilah flexes her fingers inside her mittens to make sure they are still working. It hurts, the cold. It’s been a shock to her system after the long sunny days. But Will doesn’t seem cold. She imagines his blood a different temperature than hers. In the winter hers is thin, has a sheen of ice on the surface, and is always dangerously close to freezing over completely into a solid, useless block. His is thick, like syrup when you heat it. It rolls along like a warm lazy river.
The aurora has disappeared again, faded into nothing.
“My dad says you punched him.” She says it just how she had rehearsed on her way there earlier that evening. She says it matter-of-factly. Not a question, not a judgment. Just a fact.
Will scans the sky. His breath is a cloud of white. He takes his tobacco out of his pocket, pulls one glove off, then the other, and rolls a smoke. Delilah’s teeth are chattering so hard she’s afraid they will shatter in her mouth. She waits an impossibly long time for him to respond.
“Yes,” he finally says, then takes a long drag. “Yes, I did.”
“Why?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he points and she follows his finger to five glinting stars, a jagged crooked line above them. “She was a vain one, Cassiopeia. Sacrificed her girl, left her to die. That’s why she’s up there, tied up there forever for what she did to her own girl. You know that story?”
“You told me,” Delilah says. He had. When he first showed her the constellation. She remembers thinking, What kind of mother would give up her daughter?
“That Perseus guy got there just in time. He saved Andromeda, he killed the sea monster, and he married the girl.” Will pauses to take another drag. The end of his smoke burns like a small red planet. “But she’s just stuck up there now. Can’t ever get away.”
“Will?”
“I didn’t mean to hurt him,” he says.
“Then why did—”
“It’s between us. Me and him. It’s not your business.”
“He’s my dad,” she says, flaring like a lit match.
Will looks down at her. “I know. But it’s not your business.”
“He came home all bloody,” she says, accusingly, angry, not that he punched Mac but that he won’t tell her why. That she has to live every day not knowing why anyone in her life is doing what they’re doing. Not knowing why her mother left, not knowing why her father works a million hours a week and they somehow still don’t have money for new running shoes for gym class.
“I know,” he says.
“And you did that. You made him bloody.”
He just looks at her.
“Why don’t you say sorry?” she says, embarrassingly close to tears. “Just say sorry.”
“I’m not,” he says quietly.
“You punched him! In the face! How can you not be sorry? Any normal person would be sorry.”
He puts a hand on her shoulder. “Kid. What happens between me and your dad, that’s between him and me. That’s adult stuff. Has not a thing in the world to do with you. I’m not sorry. Only thing I’m sorry for is you’re upset by it.”
She goes limp under his hand, her legs like jelly, the anger drained out of her through her cold toes and into the snow and ice below her.
“I don’t want you to be fighting.”
He squeezes her shoulder and lets her go. “I know,” he says. “Wish I could say we had some control over what people do and don’t do, but if I was gonna tell you one thing, kid, it’s that you can’t change a person. You are what you are. Good or bad.”
“No. People change,” Delilah says. “I think people change.”
“If you say so. Let me ask you something now.”
There is ice forming on his knitted hat, clinging to the unravelling wool. Will had told her once that it had been his father’s hat. Will’s mother had knitted it for him. Will said Mary Ellen kept trying to fix it, but he wouldn’t let her. He even rescued it once from her sewing basket before she could get to work on it.
“Okay,” she says, still thinking about that hat.
“Your mom coming back to see you soon?”
Delilah flinches. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“I don’t know,” she says.
“Thought I heard she wanted to come see you.”
“She said only if I start speaking to her first.”
“Ah,” Will says. He starts to roll another smoke. “When is that going to be?”
It hurts to breathe, tiny ice crystals sticking to the side of her throat with every breath. She doesn’t like that Will has changed the subject, that he is making her think of Annie, of that tiny vase of wilting flowers. The empty hooks where her clothes had been. All the lies and then the leaving. Her dad bloody and crying like a lost child without her.
“Never,” she says.
NOVEMBER
DELILAH CAN SEE HER breath as she walks out into the colourless morning. If summer in Yellowknife was a thousand shades of blue and green, November is more shades of white than she knew existed. It won’t be fully light for another fifteen minutes, but she can see the sky is heavy with cloud, the stairs in front of her and the road down to Weaver’s dusted with a fine sheen of frost.
She walks down Old Stope with careful steps, boots sliding on the surface of an opaque icy slick frozen overnight from the melting snow of yesterday afternoon. To her right there is a rim of ice around Back Bay ten feet wide, following the curve of shore where there had been nothing but open water the day before.
Through the dusky morning, Jones ambles toward her from Willow Flats. He waves and hitches his pack up higher on his shoulder as she reaches the bottom of the hill.
“Nice mittens,” she says, teeth chattering. She has forgotten her scarf, still not used to the ritual of dressing that has to happen before she leaves the house. She misses bare legs and arms, even with the price of mosquito bites. She misses pulling on her Keds and just running off, slamming the door behind her.
Now she has to hunt for matching socks in the dark every morning, wash her face by candlelight over the plastic basin in the kitchen, brush her hair while she shivers by the wood stove. Find long underwear and somehow pull her jeans over them without them riding up, wear two shirts under her sweater, tie boots, zip up her parka, pull on a hat. She feels like she’s putting on armour before a battle.
Jones inspects his left mitten. A thin red string hangs from the thumb. “My mom’s started knitting again. She knits in the winter. I think she wants everyone to be warm. She’ll probably make you some too, so watch out.”
Delilah points over his shoulder at the government dock. There is a narrow circle of ice there as well, shining under the street light, and a thin ridge of it around the rocky shore of Joliffe. “The lake is freezing.”
“Yup. Freeze-up.”
“Freeze-up?”
“Yeah. That’s what they call it. Breakup in the spring, freeze-up in the winter.”
They start walking toward Franklin. “I thought it would do it all at once,” she says.
He laughs. “What, like you wake up one morning and it’s all frozen solid?”
She feels stupid. “Kinda.”
; He shakes his head. “No, it takes a while. A week, maybe, sometimes more before the whole lake freezes.”
As they pass the dock, Delilah watches the ice. It seems thicker close to shore, becoming nothing more than a thin film farther out. The lake lies open, rippling black in the slight wind. There are still a few large fishboats moored near the dock, some tilted at odd angles as the ice has frozen them in place.
After school, she walks alone to the edge of the government dock, Jones stranded in the principal’s office for skipping PE to go read magazines at the pharmacy. The ice has retreated back toward land during the mild afternoon, only two feet of crust left there now instead of ten. She thinks about the effort it takes, how it starts off with those tangling crystals forming where they can hold on to something before slowly weaving together into something massive and strong that covers the entire lake.
The next morning, she points out at the grey water to a thin sheen of ice that has broken free from the shore of Back Bay and drifted off. “Look,” she says.
“Yeah,” Jones says, munching on an apple he has dug out of the bottom of his bag. “It’ll melt. The water out there is warmer.”
“It keeps freezing and melting.” It bothers her somehow. She can’t put her finger on why. It bothers her that every morning when she leaves the shack the lake is different.
She sits in the frozen reeds after school every day that week, watching the progress, listening to the gurgling water trapped under the creamy, rippled ice close to shore. Sometimes she puts her head close until she hears a faint tinkling, the small crystals singing as they form and the ebb and flow of the lake’s currents brushing against them.
One morning, after a night of violent wind rattling the heavy plastic Mac has nailed to the windows to keep out the drafts, Delilah sees a mosaic of broken pieces that had been swept out into open water only to return when the temperature dropped. They are frozen into the smooth surface of the lake like scattered puzzle pieces, hard and jagged and unmoving.
Finally, five days later, Jones and Delilah stop on the dock on their way to school. The ice reaches all the way to Joliffe now, creeping around to the far side before thinning out again farther out in the bay. Overnight a bridge has formed.
“A few more days and we can walk on it,” Jones says.
“How do you know it’s safe?” Since Delilah arrived she has heard countless stories of men falling through, dogs falling through, trucks falling through. Some made it, some were never recovered.
He shrugs. “You just do. We can take the canoe the first time.”
She looks at him like he’s nuts. “What?”
He smiles. “You’ll see.”
SATURDAY MORNING, THEY ARE gliding clumsily toward Joliffe, each with one foot in the blue canoe, the other on the frozen lake. They slide the canoe beside them awkwardly with every step and every time Jones yells “Push!” Delilah laughs, her parka unzipped and flapping around her, hair sweaty under her yellow wool hat, mittens long ago thrown into the canoe with the sandwiches and Thermos of Maggie’s ginger tea.
“We look crazy!” she yells ahead to Jones, whose foot slips inside the canoe, sending him lurching forward until he rights himself.
“Push!” he says over his shoulder in response.
In the sunshine, closer to the shore, there are people out on the snow-covered bay, some skating, some walking with dogs. Kids have cleared a patch near the government dock for hockey.
Jones has explained to her how people use canoes to travel across to Joliffe in that brief, delicate time between seasons when they can’t trust the ice yet. If the ice cracks, all they have to do is jump in the canoe and they’ll be floating. Keeping one foot on something solid makes perfect sense to Delilah.
CHRISTMAS EVE, 1977
IT’S FOUR-THIRTY IN THE afternoon, and Delilah is making her way down Old Stope in the dark. The street lights show only a world of white in front of her. Snow settles on her hair, drifts in graceful slow motion around her as she crunches through the shin-deep drifts in the middle of the road.
She suggested to Mac that they borrow the sugar they need from Martha since she’s right next door, but he shook his head as he stirred the huge canning pot full of boiling potatoes. “Nope. City Jane’s. Who knows what shape Martha’s in on Christmas Eve.”
Delilah hears sad, twangy country music coming from inside Martha’s shack as she passes the front porch. There’s a yellow-haired cloth angel hanging in the window between two tattered curtains. Delilah wonders what Martha and Charlie are doing inside. If they have a tree. A turkey. Or if they’re just sitting there drinking and smoking cigarettes, Martha humming along with the music as she flips through Delilah’s comic books. Maybe Charlie is tinkering with a wobbly bookshelf, pulling a loose nail in the floor.
Jones told her they had kids at one point, but they were taken away. He told her that once, years later, Martha stormed the social worker’s office demanding they give her babies back, although by then they would have been full grown. She trashed the office, threw staplers, cleared desks with one sweep of her arm, howling for her long-lost children.
Delilah passes Weaver’s, closed now, and rounds the corner. Back Bay is a long expanse of snow-covered ice as far as she can see. Giant Mine glitters like Christmas lights off in the distance.
She’s tired from a long day of helping Mac get ready for the party. It started early when he shook her awake and took her out on the snowmobile to find a tree. Mac had to use a headlamp and it felt like it took hours for him to saw down the straggly pine with his handsaw while Delilah stood in the dark, shivering and yawning, knee-deep in snow. Finally, they dragged it home on the sled, and she decorated it with tinsel and popcorn strands while Mac made them scrambled eggs. They didn’t know where the proper Christmas decorations were, the expensive hand-me-downs from Annie’s parents. They figured Annie must have left them in Vancouver.
As it was getting light around ten o’clock, they set up a plywood table on sawhorses in the living room. It stretched almost all the way from the wood stove to the front door, leaving only a few feet for people to get in. Every chair they could scrounge from neighbours was set around the table, including Ernie Gall’s outdoor weight bench. Delilah covered the table with Mac’s spare king-sized bed sheet. Even though it was blue and yellow plaid and made of flannel, it was the only thing big enough to cover it. She had laid out the plastic plates and knives and forks and the plastic cups. She had folded the red paper Christmas napkins with the silver bells on them and placed them above each plate. There were tall red candles stuck to saucers in the centre of the table. They hadn’t talked much, she and Mac, but he had played his Beatles records and some Patti Smith, and they sang along to “Gloria” while he baked a rum cake and swore about the uneven temperature of the oven.
Delilah doesn’t understand why he wants them to have the dinner, but she can see that, somehow, it’s important to him. Maggie had offered to have it, which would have made way more sense since she has a normal-sized house with a normal kitchen and a proper stove with more than two burners. But no, he wanted to have the whole thing himself, host Red and Maggie and Jones, Jethro and Mary Ellen, City Jane, Louise, Bear, Chris and the twins, and whoever else happened to come by. It wouldn’t be Christmas without friends, he said. Will said maybe he would come too. He’s come around a couple of times to talk to her dad, hushed conversations on the back porch, and he stayed true to his promise of taking Delilah and Jones out with the dogs the week before.
“Your dad’s overcompensating,” Jones had said as they walked the aisles of the Super Mart the day before. They were searching for stuffing ingredients while Mac tried to find a turkey big enough to feed them all.
“He’s what?” Delilah stuck a large bunch of celery in a plastic bag.
“Like, because your mom’s not here. He’s trying to show he can do it all anyway. That’s what my mom said. She said holidays are hard when you lose someone you love.” Jones stole a grape and che
wed it slowly.
Delilah felt something squeeze her heart, pressing it like a sponge and then releasing it. She took a deep breath and tossed the bag in the cart. “We need onions,” she said, and steered the cart away.
Now she’s on her way to get sugar because Mac used it all to make the rum cake, and he’s worried someone will want it in their coffee after dinner. Delilah has seen the two cases of beer and the box of red wine and the bottles of gin and Jack Daniels by the back door. She doubts anyone will be drinking coffee.
City Jane lives around the corner by the Wildcat. Delilah passes her house when she walks to work. It’s a little peach-coloured dollhouse with peeling white trim and the empty shell of a pickup in the front yard. If Delilah could live in any house in Old Town, it would be this one. It looks like one of the little houses on the east coast she imagines from the Anne books, but smaller. She wades through the drifting snow to the front door and knocks. The door is covered in stickers that say things like “Arms are for hugging” and “Nuke the gay whales for Christ.” A crazy hippie used to live there before Jane, or that’s what Will had told her. A couple of years ago, the man would stand in the middle of Franklin holding signs protesting the Vietnam War even though it was over. Nobody knows where he is now.
City Jane is wearing tight bell-bottoms and a big grey men’s sweater. Her hair is feathered and soft around her face. She looks like Stevie Nicks on the cover of the Fleetwood Mac album. Maggie says City Jane came from Boston where she had a fancy job in a big newsroom. She used to wear dresses and heels every day. Delilah can imagine it. Lipstick, too.
“Hi, sweetie,” Jane says. “Here for your sugar? I told your dad I might swing by later. You didn’t have to walk all the way down here in the cold.”
Delilah comes in and closes the door behind her. “Dad said you might not come, and he wanted to make sure he had it. He thinks people might want coffee.”
One Good Thing Page 13