One Good Thing

by Rebecca Hendry

  IT’S SEVEN-THIRTY AT NIGHT, and the sky is black and whirling white flakes around the truck as Maggie drives Delilah up the hill to the hospital to see Mac. Delilah stares out at the snow, watches it settling on the drifts by the road, on people’s roofs. She thinks of her dad being lost out there in it, and then being found. She thinks of Will. She thinks of how her dad could still be lost too, and the feeling makes the earth below her feel cavernous and dark. Does her mother know? She forgot to ask Maggie and Red.

  Uptown looks like a scene from a science-fiction movie. There are people everywhere, some dressed in military clothes. Headlights glaring, news reporters standing in arctic parkas talking into microphones in front of cameras by the fluorescent-lit windows of the Kentucky Fried Chicken.

  Maggie has chattered the whole way to the hospital, told Delilah her father would be so happy to see her, that Will is probably fine, that he’ll probably waltz back into town any minute now. She said the reporters would go home soon, that this satellite was no big deal, it was far from town, nobody could be hurt by the radiation.

  Maggie’s arm hooks in Delilah’s as she guides her down the mint-painted hallway. Delilah walks in a daze, tiny pieces of ice sliding from the fur trim of her parka and dripping to the hard, shiny floor. Her boots leave instant puddles.

  “Two-oh-five . . .” Maggie murmurs, craning her neck to look at the room numbers as they pass. A nurse walks by studying a clipboard, a pen stuck in her swinging blond ponytail.

  Maggie hugs Delilah’s arm to her. She smells sweet and spicy, like pumpkin pie. Her dark curls are escaping from under her hand-knit purple hat, a pompom dangling from the top. Her skirts graze the floor, moving over her boots. She stops in front of one of the doors. “Here,” she says. She knocks lightly.

  “Yeah?” a voice croaks from inside.

  Maggie pushes the door open and guides Delilah in. “Hello, stranger,” she says. “Look who I brought. Look who’s here.”

  Mac is lying on the bed, an IV trailing from his arm. Delilah stays near the door. She looks at her dad’s face. His eyes are sunken and dark, his face sickly white. He lifts his hand from the blue hospital blanket and smiles weakly. “Hi, Lila.”

  “Hi,” she says, staying where she is.

  She doesn’t know why she doesn’t just run over to his bed like a normal person would. The whole night he was gone she thought he was dead. She had imagined him out there frozen in the snow, frost in his beard. But here he is. And she doesn’t move closer.

  Maggie is fussing around his bed, folding a towel, straightening his cups and water jug. “Red brought you the soup, yes? You must eat it all up. I will tell the nurses. Did they put it in the fridge?”

  He nods. “Yeah. Thanks, Maggie.” He’s still looking at Delilah, a puzzled wrinkle between his eyes.

  Maggie leaves the room, resting her hand on Delilah’s arm for a moment before she goes.

  “What is it?” he says. “What’s wrong?”

  She shakes her head. She can’t move. She feels broken, like a glass vase that shattered and was glued back together.

  “What?” He tries to sit up. “Are you okay?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Come here,” he says gently.

  “I thought you were dead,” she says. She doesn’t move. She’s afraid a dam might burst inside her if she does.

  “Delilah, come over here.”

  “I thought you were gone.”

  He reaches out a hand for her. “Delilah.”

  She takes a few shaky steps until she is within a couple of feet of the bed, then takes his hand.

  “I’m sorry I scared you,” he says. His lips are chapped, windburned. They look sore. He looks like he hasn’t slept in months. His long hair is tangled in knots around his face. “Scared myself too. But I’m okay.”

  She nods, tears forming.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “But I’m fine now. I’m fine.” He squeezes her hand. “Okay?”

  She nods, hugs him tight, lets herself feel the relief that he’s still alive. Rests her head on his chest for a moment before taking a breath and straightening up. Outside his window the lights of town are twinkling. “Dad?”

  He reaches for her hand again. “Yes?”

  “Where’s Will?”

  There is a long, terrible silence. He lets go of her hand and puts his head back on the pillow. The light above his head buzzes softly.

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  SHE SPENDS THE NIGHT at Red and Maggie’s playing checkers with Jones and watching TV. Red fiddles with the small black and white TV for an hour, swearing while he jiggles with the antenna and moves the set all over the living room until he gets a signal. When he’s done, he leaves to join a search party and Delilah sits with Jones and Maggie eating popcorn and watching The Beachcombers. Nobody mentions Mac as they sit there on the couch under blankets. Nobody mentions Will. But every time the phone rings Maggie jumps from the couch to answer it.

  Delilah is lying under a heavy pile of blankets on the couch when Red comes in at 3:00 am. He is quiet, tiptoeing past her, but she’s wide awake. She hadn’t slept at all. She got up twice to rebuild the fire, but mostly she just lay there in the silence, thinking. A sad, sick feeling in her belly when she thought of the cold outside. Or cracks in the ice and the deadly black water below.

  In the morning, they all eat porridge, and Red tells her he’ll drive her up to see her dad. He seems exhausted, his eyes puffy, his bright, scruffy hair jammed under a toque. He tells her they searched twenty miles up the lake on Ski-Doos before the snow drove them back.

  He drops her outside the hospital and tells her he’ll be back for her in an hour. “He won’t be in here long,” he says. “Just needs a couple of days to recover. He’ll be home burning your Kraft Dinner again before you know it.”

  Delilah walks the long halls until she finds his room. She is holding a basket of blueberry bran muffins Maggie made that morning. Her dad’s door is ajar, and she hears an unfamiliar male voice booming from inside. She hesitates, her hand on the silver door handle.

  “Feeling better, Mr. MacIntyre? Tough haul, hypothermia. I had a cousin had it very bad once. Fell through a lake skating. Hockey. He would have made Junior, probably, but knocked a girl up at seventeen and things went sideways.”

  Delilah lets go of the door handle and slides back against the wall, the open door beside her. Her father says something but his voice is not as strong and she can’t make it out. She hugs the basket of muffins to her and tilts her head to hear.

  “Let’s not go that far,” the other man says. “You’re not a suspect or anything, if that’s what you mean. You gotta have a crime before you start going out there looking for suspects.”

  An rcmp officer? Delilah doesn’t like the man’s tone. He sounds like he’s being nice, but there’s a layer of unkindness beneath it. A layer of sneakiness. She slides down to the floor and rests her back against the wall. She sets the muffins beside her.

  “I’m sorry,” her dad says. “It’s just . . . I don’t know, did they tell you I can’t remember much?”

  “Mmm hmm. I was told that, but you did manage to recall a few things. My notes here say you went out at approximately one-thirty AM on January 4 on the Ski-Doo about ten kilometres and that the Ski-Doo broke through the ice. Goddamned things, am I right? Might as well take dogs. Dogs are still more reliable than those goddamned things.”

  “Yes,” says Mac. “We would have taken dogs, but Will’s brother didn’t want them to go out.”

  “Okay, Mr. MacIntyre. Now, it’s been thirty-nine hours since your friend has been missing. So if he came back to Yellowknife, and he’s passed out at the Explorer after a nice bender with some hot chick he picked up at the Gold Range, praise Jesus. Right? Or maybe he hitched a ride out of town and he’s on his way to Vancouver to go sailing and eat some salmon. Great. But the thing is, if he’s still out there, it’s not good.”

  He didn’t, Delilah wants to s
hout. He didn’t pass out after a bender. He didn’t do that. She hates this man, wants to stand and turn and throw the basket of muffins right in his face.

  “The cold,” Mac says.

  “That’s right, the cold. Been thirty below for two days and snowing like a goddamn. Also, it’s a simple matter of geography. We’re on the edge of so much nothing here. All those folks out there looking for the satellite, plus a few of our guys, so that’s good. People have been searching out by Wool Bay and that, but beyond there there’s . . . nothing, really. Can’t see why he’d wander out past there.”

  “But there’s still a chance he made it out, though,” Mac says. “You’re still looking.”

  A pair of white shoes stop in front of Delilah. She looks up and sees the nurse from earlier. “Are you okay?” the nurse says.

  Delilah nods, afraid her dad will hear her voice and know she’s listening.

  The nurse doesn’t look convinced. “Is that your dad in there?” she says, quieter now.

  Delilah nods again.

  “Well, honey, you can’t sit on the floor all day. If you want to wait until he’s done talking just go sit in the waiting room. There’s a TV in there. Might be cartoons on.”

  Cartoons? What is she, five? “It’s okay, I’ll just wait a few more minutes,” she whispers politely.

  The nurse holds up her hands in defeat and walks away. Delilah sits back against the wall.

  “How well are you acquainted with William Charles Bilodeau?” the officer asks.

  “We work together.”

  “At the mine?”

  “Yes. And we did some staking when I first got to town.”

  “I see. Made a few trips out to the Barrens then?”

  “Yes. Williams Lake area.”

  The Barrens. Delilah has a flash of walking in the bursting undergrowth, a flash of her first taste of the charred trout that had been swimming in that lake only an hour before Will caught it.

  “Okay. And you know each other outside of work? You’re friends?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good friends?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like, you go for beer after a shift? Shoot the shit? Tell each other your lady problems and whatnot?”

  “Yes, we’re friends, like I said.”

  Delilah thinks about her dad’s bloody nose, how it leaked down his shirt that night Will had punched him. The spots never came out. They didn’t rinse it fast enough.

  “Were you aware Mr. Bilodeau has a criminal record?”

  “Yes,” Mac says.

  Delilah looks at the dark swirling pattern in the linoleum. She feels dizzy. And hot. She unzips her coat carefully so they don’t hear it.

  “Did he tell you what for?”

  “No, he just told me he can’t cross the border.”

  “It was for aggravated assault. Almost killed a man in Fort Mac. Did you know about that?”

  Delilah can’t breathe. Her breath is knocked from her. She focusses on bringing air in. She waits for her father to answer.

  “No,” her dad says.

  No, Delilah thinks. It isn’t true.

  There is a brief pause, then the officer says, “So I know you say you don’t remember much, but maybe you can tell me what you do remember.”

  “Okay, well, about one-thirty Will came banging on our door. Woke us up.”

  “This is your cabin on Old Stope?” the officer asks.

  The nurse stops in front of Delilah again. “Honey,” she says. “You cannot sit on the floor of the hall. You’re going to have to move or go in.”

  Delilah nods. “Okay,” she whispers. She picks up the muffin basket and stands slowly.

  The nurse is looking at her with her head tilted sideways.

  Delilah clears her throat. “I was just . . . waiting. Until they’re done. My dad is . . . he’s talking to the police.”

  “I see,” the nurse says, looking at the room number. “Your dad is Mac MacIntyre?”

  “James MacIntyre. People call him Mac.”

  The nurse seems to be thinking. “Okay,” she whispers. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

  Delilah slides closer to the door so she can hear again.

  “He wanted to go out by Wool Bay,” Mac says. “Figured it had crashed out there somewhere. We got out about ten miles, and it started snowing. Hard. Couldn’t see, so I headed in close to shore. We were a couple miles past Dettah near Horseshoe Island.”

  “And then you went through?”

  “Yes. It was shallow. Must have been a bubble or a strong current there under the ice. The skis went through, and I pitched forward a bit, but the windshield caught me. The whole front end went in, and I got a bit wet through my ski pants. Will pulled me out. Gear got wet. He saved the rifles, I think. I had one on me when I got to Andrew’s. Don’t know about the other one. Maybe some of the gear.”

  The officer says, “We recovered some gear at the site. Some could have been swept out by the current. Not sure what all you took out with you, so it’s hard to say what’s missing. You can confirm that at a later date. So he didn’t get wet?”

  “No, like I said, he was on the sled. Front end broke through and sank to the bottom, but it was only about four feet deep. Only part of the sled went in. It tilted, and the gear tumbled down because of the angle. That was while Will was pulling me out.”

  “Here you go, honey,” the nurse says, startling Delilah. She has brought a chair, and she’s holding a Styrofoam cup in the other hand. She props the chair against the wall. “Have a seat,” she whispers.

  Delilah sits, and the nurse hands her the cup. “Ginger ale.”

  “Thank you,” Delilah whispers.

  “. . . It was snowing like anything,” her dad is saying. “Couldn’t see a foot in front of you. Will had a flashlight, though. I remember . . . I remember sitting on the snow on the shore of the island and seeing the beam. He was standing by the sled, and he was shining that light around him in a circle like he was looking for something. Then he shone it on me, and I could see the snow swirling around all caught in the light. Would have been pretty if it weren’t for the circumstances.”

  “So the Ski-Doo is useless,” the officer says. “You’re a couple miles from Dettah. You decide to walk?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I don’t remember much after the flashlight. After he shone the light on my face.”

  “So you have no recollection of how you got to Andrew Bell’s house?”

  “None.”

  “What’s the first thing you remember after this . . . blackout?”

  “Andrew carrying me to their truck.”

  “Carrying you? Strong guy.”

  “Yes. He’s a big man. Six foot five. He told me they were taking me to the hospital. He said they tried to warm me up but they were worried about my heart. Apparently they made me drink tea. Warmed some towels on the wood stove and put them on my belly. But my heart, he said.”

  “You don’t remember the tea and the towels.”

  “They say it’s normal. To have these black spots. It’s because of the hypothermia.”

  “That’s what they say, yes. Here’s the thing,” says the officer. “We’ve spoken to Madeline, and she says Will never showed up there. She says you were there on her doorstep thumping on the door. Sitting there when she opened it.”

  “Yes,” says Mac. “That’s what I hear.”

  “No sign of Mr. Bilodeau.”

  “Apparently not.”

  Delilah takes a sip of ginger ale. The bubbles tickle the tip of her nose. Her heart, she realizes, is tripping in her throat. She has trouble swallowing. She leans over and sets the cup on the linoleum.

  “Do you have a theory, Mr. MacIntyre, about why he wouldn’t have come back with you? It seems suicide that he would have stayed out there in those conditions.”

  “Suicide.”


  “Yes. He was a bushman. Knew the land. Knew not to misread it.”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “So any theories?”

  “Maybe he kept going. Got disoriented.”

  “Kept going,” says the officer. “Looking for the meteor, you mean.”

  “Well, he was . . . like I say, he was agitated. And determined. He wanted to find it. He wasn’t acting right. There was something about finding that meteor. It was like he had to or something bad would happen.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t mean something bad would happen. You know what I mean.”

  “So you say he was agitated, okay. Wanted to find this thing, thought maybe he’d get some fame, some notoriety or something. A bit of cash, maybe.”

  “Maybe. I don’t think that’s what he cared about.”

  “Ah, okay. And what did he care about? I’m guessing you know.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’m going to be straight with you, Mr. MacIntyre. I haven’t been a hundred per cent honest with you. There’s some things that didn’t make it onto the little file here. Things I’ve heard around town. It’s a small town, and things get around, am I right?”

  Delilah sits back against the wall. She doesn’t like this. She isn’t sure she wants to hear any more.

  “I guess so,” her dad says.

  “Like I said, there’s no crime here. Everyone wants the same thing. We’re all working together here to find your buddy.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “So what I’ve heard is your friendship with Mr. Bilodeau, there, has had its ups and downs. Hills and valleys.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as a fight at the Range a couple months ago. Bloody nose for you. Did you take a punch from your buddy?”

  “I did.”

  “And why was that?”

  “Just some . . . business problems.”

  “Business problems out at the mine? Business problems to do with working the ball mill?”

  “No, no. I . . . sorry, I guess I forgot to mention we were thinking of starting a business together. Maybe prospecting a bit in the summer for extra cash.”

  “Sure, fair enough. So you’re having some differences of opinion about something to do with the prospecting business.”