One Good Thing

by Rebecca Hendry

  He’s quiet for a minute. She knows he doesn’t feel like talking, about Clem or about anything. But she just wants to hear his voice until she knows he’s okay.

  “I don’t know. It’s just a storm. Wind, lightning. Been raging for hundreds of years. Two times the size of Earth, at least. Usually a storm is created by weather systems colliding, interacting. They blow themselves out eventually. That storm sits there. Just keeps going.” He stubs out his cigarette.

  “Can you see it in a telescope?”

  “Yeah. I’ve seen it. Looks like a dark spot.”

  She thinks of the last storm they had back in August. The lightning sheets across the lake, the swirling rain, the booming thunder rolling across Yellowknife Bay. She had lain in her bed rigid, counting between thunderclaps until she knew the storm was passing, certain the lightning was going to strike the house and burn it to the ground or that somehow the sound of the thunder could crack the ground beneath her and swallow her whole.

  “It’d be terrible to live in a storm like that,” she says. “You’d be scared all the time.”

  He gets slowly to his feet, yawns and stretches his long arms above his head. Surveys the sky.

  “Nah,” he says. “You get used to anything if you live with it long enough.”

  JANUARY 1978

  WILL COMES BANGING ON the door of the shack at one-thirty in the morning. He bangs so hard the windows rattle in their old wooden frames. Delilah wakes with that banging like a fist on her chest. She can hear her dad’s feet on the plywood floor, hear him pull the door open, say, “Jesus, Will.”

  By then she has wrapped her itchy Hudson’s Bay blanket around herself and moved through the kitchen. She stands in the living room, rubbing her feet together against the cold. The wood stove has died down to embers.

  Mac is in his grey long johns, his hair a mess. He’s carrying the kerosene lantern, and light flickers against the walls. Will has burst in wearing a thick sweater and his fringed jacket, his wool hat on his head. The door is wide open behind him, moonlight glittering on the ice crystals painting the small porch.

  “What is it?” Mac says. “What is it?”

  “Gotta get out there and find it,” Will says. He’s pointing back toward the open door, the fringe of his jacket hanging like the wing of a large bird. “Ski-Doo’s broken down, and Jethro won’t come with the dogs. Let’s go.”

  “Find what?” Delilah says. Mac is shaking his head like he’s trying to understand.

  Will notices Delilah and lowers his arm. “Hi kid,” he says. Mac sets the lantern down on the bookshelf.

  She raises her hand in a wave. “Find what, Will?”

  “Get some warm clothes on,” Will tells her. “Come with us. You can ride on the sled.”

  “She’s not going anywhere.” Mac pulls the front door shut. “She has school tomorrow. Are you drunk or what?”

  Will doesn’t answer.

  “He isn’t drunk, Dad,” Delilah says. “Find what, Will?”

  “A meteor,” Will says. “I saw it fall over the lake. Like the ones I told you about. You’ll never see this again. Never. This is once in a lifetime. Once every five lifetimes. Come with us.” Snow is melting in his hair, running in fine rivers down his scarred cheek. Small clumps of ice cling to his ponytail.

  Delilah nods, but she doesn’t move. A meteor? She feels a prickling fear that Will is going crazy. “Maybe it was a falling star. Sometimes they seem big when they’re close to Earth. Right? You told me that.”

  “No, kid. Not a falling star. It was burning red, big.” He traces an arc with his hands through the dim light of the room. “I saw it. If we leave now we might find it before anyone else gets out there.”

  “Will,” Mac says. “Come on. This is nuts. A meteor?”

  “I know what I saw.”

  Mac runs a hand through his hair. “Why do you need me? Can’t you go on your own? I have to go to work in a few hours.”

  “No, I need help if we find it. Getting pieces into the sled.”

  “Listen, man,” Mac says, his voice calmer now. “Let’s all get a good night’s sleep and then maybe I’ll take you out tomorrow after work. Whatever it was will still be there.”

  Will shakes his head. “No, we’re going tonight.” He starts walking toward the door. “Get your gear on. We’re going tonight.”

  “No. Not now. We’ll go later.”

  Will reaches the door and turns. “You my friend or not?” he says.

  Delilah sees the two men look at each other for what seems like a full minute. Her father nods. He picks up his jeans from the back of a chair where they have been drying by the wood stove. “Delilah stays,” he says on his way to his room to change.

  Delilah hasn’t moved. Will stands by the door, looking out the window through the thick plastic film covering the glass. “Shoulda seen it,” he says. “Wish you had seen it.”

  “Will?”

  He doesn’t answer, his neck craned to see something out of his line of vision.

  “Will, are you okay?”

  No answer.

  Her dad appears fully dressed and pulls on his boots, zips up his blue parka. He grabs his rifle and duffel bag of emergency supplies from the room near the back door. “Back in a couple hours, Delilah. Get some more sleep. Put wood on the fire before you go back to bed, or you’ll freeze your ass off when you get up.” He shakes his head and laughs. “Okay, you crazy bastard, let’s go find this fucking thing.”

  Will follows Mac out the door. He turns back to Delilah and gives her a little salute. “See you, kid,” he says.

  She runs to the window, her blanket falling to her feet. She wants to go now, she doesn’t want to let either of them out of her sight. She watches them hook up the sled to the back of the Ski-Doo. Will stands on the sled and holds on as Mac pulls out, his headlamp lighting the way. She sees the snow peel away from the skis as they start down the road.

  Will had told her once that sometimes, when you think you’re looking for one thing, it’s not what you’re looking for at all. He was talking about hunting for ptarmigan and secretly hoping for a fox. Or fishing for pike and wishing for a twenty-pound whitefish. But don’t kid yourself, kid, he had said. Life is short. Might as well be honest about what you want.

  She doesn’t know why, but she feels like they are pulling part of her into the night, dragging her behind them as they ride away.

  DELILAH WAITS AND WAITS. She should go back to bed, but she waits. She sits on the sofa and watches the blackness outside, waiting for the whine of the Ski-Doo, the sudden glow of headlights coming up the hill. There’s nothing out there but dark. She checks her watch: 5:17. They left at 1:35.

  At quarter to six, Charlie’s headlights send a flash of light through the living room as he starts his truck. Delilah, wrapped in her blanket, rises to add wood to the fire. She pulls on a pair of her dad’s wool work socks from the drying rack by the stove. They feel stiff and itchy, and the orange bands around the top come up to her knees over her long johns.

  She drags a cushion off the couch and goes to the window by the door so she can see the road outside their house. She pushes aside the boots and shoes and kneels on the cushion on the floor. She puts her elbows on the windowsill and rests her chin in her hands.

  Cold radiates out from the window, despite the plastic sheeting stretched tight across the frames. She watches, her blanket around her shoulders. At six-fifteen Martha turns on her porch light and stands on her crumbling front step. She is huge in her cut-off white T-shirt, the sleeves cut jagged around her armpits. Her skirt comes to her knees, her plump round calves shining in the glow of the porch light. Her hair is in black tangles to her waist.

  “Charrrlie!” Martha bellows, loud enough for Delilah to hear through the thin windows. “Charlie, you come on home! Where you at, Charlie Boy?”

  Charlie is long gone. Delilah’s eyes feel heavy. She rests her forehead against the taut plastic, although she’s not supposed to in case it
breaks or stretches. She closes her eyes for a second. She feels the heaviness beckoning her and sinks into it.

  “Charrrlie!”

  When she opens her eyes, it’s snowing. Hard. Swirling snow that will stick and drift against the side of the shack, pile all the way to the roof on the low side. Delilah checks her watch: 6:22. They should have been back by now. Mac expects her to go to school, but she won’t go. Not unless they come back first.

  Martha is still standing there on her porch, her hair a wild mass. She stares right at Delilah, right through the window. Delilah’s heart hammers in her throat. She glances at the door, knows if Martha wanted to, she could charge across the yard and open it, come right in. But she doesn’t move. Just looks at Delilah. Then she calls something, cups her meaty hand to her mouth to help the sound travel through the snow that is now so thick Martha almost seems like a mirage, a form in a pool of light with paper cuttings, confetti, whirling around her.

  Delilah wants to know what she’s saying. “What?” she whispers. “I can’t hear you.” She presses her ear to the plastic, covers her other ear.

  “Where your dad at, girl?” she hears. Martha is yelling, the sound travelling the short distance between them, muffled by the storm of white. “Where he gone to on that Ski-Doo?”

  Delilah presses her hand to the plastic and for one crazy moment considers going over to Martha’s house. Asking her to make tea. She wants company, she wants to be in the same house as another person. But Martha turns and goes into her shack, slamming the door behind her.

  Delilah thinks of the snow, the cold. Will’s suede jacket versus Mac’s parka. The rifle. She didn’t see Mac pack a single scrap of food, although it would have been insane of him not to after all the stories he has told her of people freezing to death a mile from home in the winter because they ran out of energy and sat in a snowbank and died.

  At 7:20 she stands and goes to her bedroom. She finds her jeans in a crumpled heap on the floor and puts them on over her long johns and her dad’s socks. She pulls on her grey lambswool sweater and grabs her thick toque. Her parka is hanging by the door. She zips it up, flips the hood over her hat. Her mitts from Mary Ellen are on the drying rack, and she slips them on and leaves the house.

  Outside the cold is needles pressing up against her skin, stabbing her eyes and her cheeks and her forehead, every inch of exposed skin feels instantly numb. She starts walking down the hill through the piling snow.

  When she turns left toward the Flats, she knows she is tracing the same path Mac and Will took, but their tracks are gone. She walks past shacks showing signs of morning life. She smells thick, burnt coffee, hears a dog barking from its pen. A truck sits idling in front of a three-storey house with new siding. Light shines from every window, and Delilah can see the silhouette of a woman downstairs in the kitchen.

  She trudges along, her breath white in front of her. The snow has stopped, and she can see better now. She gets to Jones’s street. There’s a single light burning in the living room window, but the rest of the house is dark.

  Delilah watches the house for a minute, but she’s getting too cold standing still. She has to go in, but instead she turns toward the lake. She walks to the edge where the ice starts. It looks no different than the land, coated with fresh snow and stretching out as far as she can see. She follows the shore, looking for tracks. She wants to see where they left from, the exact spot they started out on the lake. But the snow has covered everything. She gives up and turns back to Jones’s.

  When she knocks on the door, she isn’t sure what she’s going to say when they open it. She isn’t sure if this is an emergency or not. But she feels surprisingly calm and cool. It isn’t until Red opens the door, a puzzled look on his face, and puts his hand on her shoulder and says, “Oh hey there, it’s okay. It’s okay, Delilah,” and leads her into the warm house that she realizes she’s crying, tears frozen in icy trails on her cheeks.

  Red feeds her porridge from a big pot on the stove in the kitchen. He pours maple syrup on the top and mixes in some evaporated milk.

  She eats the whole bowl in silence, Jones eating his own across the table. He came in while she was on the couch telling Red what happened. She couldn’t explain it, why she was so worried. She tried to tell them Will was acting funny, but she couldn’t explain how. Jones sat on the couch an arm’s length away and listened while Red tried to reassure her that they were seasoned bushmen and would be absolutely fine.

  “No,” she reminded him. “My dad grew up in Toronto.” He had only known the bush for a year, only from a few times with Will. He had only known this kind of cold for two winters.

  “Well,” Red said. “Will is bushman enough for both of them.” But there was an uneasiness in his voice that Delilah didn’t miss. “What time did they leave?” he asked, checking his watch.

  “Around one-thirty.”

  He nodded. “It’s only eight-forty-five. They could be gone for hours yet. No need to panic. Let’s eat. You kids have to get to school. You’re already going to be late.”

  “I’m not going,” she said.

  “Is that right?” He sounded amused. “Well, I guess your dad going off on an arctic adventure might be reason enough to stay home. Jones can stay too. You can wait here. But you guys will have to keep busy. I got some errands to do in town. I ain’t gonna entertain you.”

  After the oatmeal, Jones and Delilah sit on either end of the couch with comic books. Red comes out in his work clothes and then leaves to start the truck. When he returns he says, “Getting light.”

  Delilah can see the fiery pink streaks over the lake from where she lies, her head resting on the arm of the couch. She wonders if her dad and Will are watching the sunrise too. How far have they gone? How much gas was in the tank? How far can you go on a tank of gas? She opens her mouth to ask Red, but no sound comes out and she closes it again. She watches that sky waking up, the wash of weak golden sun weaving into the fading pink. It’s beautiful, but she can’t keep her eyes open. Colours blur and go dark as she hears Red say, “Jonesy, I think we’re losing her.”

  RED IS SHAKING HER, but she can’t open her eyes. Her head burrows farther into the pillow. “Delilah. They found him. Your dad turned up at Dettah.”

  Her eyes fly open. Red’s face is inches from her own. He stands. “He’s okay. He’s gonna be okay. He’s just cold. Hypothermia. The Ski-Doo broke down. They took him to the hospital for observation.”

  She tries to process this information, but her mind is fuzzy and heavy, like wet socks. She can’t think through it. The terror she has been carrying lifts as she grasps that her father is safe. But she is also thinking, What about Will?

  Maggie gives Delilah a scalding cup of tea with milk and honey. She tells Delilah that she can’t visit her dad until later that day, that the hospital had said he’s finally sleeping. “He’s going to be fine, chérie,” Maggie says, stroking her hair.

  “Will wasn’t with him,” Red says. “But once you’re up, I’ll take you and Jones to Jethro’s to see if he turned up there. Probably just wandered home.”

  Jones is sitting on the arm of the couch, hovering nervously next to Delilah.

  “Okay,” she says.

  “WHOLE FUCKING TOWN HAS gone insane,” he tells them on the way. He cranks up the news broadcast on cbc on the truck radio. “That meteor of Will’s? Turns out it was a Russian satellite that spun out of orbit and crashed outside of town. It had some sort of small nuclear reactor core on it that was supposed to separate into space if the satellite failed but didn’t. They’re looking for it. rcmp everywhere, media crews flying in. The whole world knows about it. The goddamned us Army is walking down Franklin right now.”

  So it’s a satellite, not a meteor. Will is going to be disappointed when he finds out. Delilah thinks of Will telling her the story of the Russian satellite that crashed so many years ago, the dog that didn’t make it back alive.

  WILL’S NOT AT JETHRO’S, not at home, not anywhere. O
n Red’s instructions, Delilah and Jones sit in Jethro’s shack while Red knocks on doors, and Jethro drives all over Old Town with Mary Ellen. By afternoon they are still there and the neighbours and relatives come and go, buzzing about the satellite and speculating about Will. Someone says they saw a radiation team uptown wearing yellow suits.

  Delilah tries to untangle it all in her mind. What does it mean? If Will found this satellite, does that mean he’s in danger from the radiation? Or did he walk back to town and go to someone’s house? Is he sitting on someone’s couch watching the news?

  Someone has started a roaring fire. cbc talks non-stop about the satellite from Jethro’s small radio, but Delilah is barely listening. She imagines Will trekking through the white blizzard, hunched against the wind, snow drifting on his fringed jacket. Travelling miles through the snow only to find a pile of tangled metal instead of something precious that fell from the galaxy.

  Mary Ellen paces back and forth across the rough floors, wringing her hands and wailing softly to herself. Jethro is tracing the shore with a group of Rainbow Valley men, Laska barking at their feet, confused by the excitement. They had found her in the house. For some reason, Will left her behind when he set out the night before.

  When the young policeman comes he is too friendly, too patient and calm when he takes Delilah’s statement about when Will left, what mental state he was in. He is too slow as he tours the property, stopping at the shore as Delilah watches him through the window from her chair, wrapped in an itchy brown blanket someone pulled off Mary Ellen’s bed and gave to her. She feels nothing. She is numb through to her very core. The group of men jog up to the policeman and they stand there together, looking at the lake, gesturing their arms.

  The adults talk loudly in the cabin around her, their words colliding, dashing themselves to bits and crumbling around her ears. She hears Muddy say could live for days out there. She hears Harry Dean say just gone for a long walk.

  Still Mary Ellen wails, like the quiet fragments of a broken song. As though she knows something no one else does.