“Yes. But it was all worked out. You can ask around. We were fine after that. He was looking after my daughter while I worked night shifts. We had him over for Christmas dinner.”
“Glad you worked things out. Like I said, there’s no bad guy here yet. Just getting all the pieces of the puzzle.”
“Yet? You think there’s a bad guy? You think somebody did something to him out there?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“That’s what you think, isn’t it? That’s nuts. No offence, but that’s nuts. There was nobody out there. It was a fucking blizzard. It was freezing cold. Nobody was out there.”
“Well, the two of you were out there,” the officer says. “Despite the circumstances and all that.”
“You think I did something to him? I was fucking delirious. He has fifty pounds on me. I can’t believe this.”
“You need to calm down. Nobody’s accusing you. You were the last one to see him. That’s all. It’s important, what you think and what you say, because you were the last one. My guess? You started walking back together and you got separated. He went the wrong way.”
“I didn’t do anything to him,” Mac says.
“Sit back, you need to relax, Mr. MacIntyre. So do you figure he went the wrong way? What’s your theory?”
“My theory? My theory is yes. He just . . . he went the wrong way. He wouldn’t have left town without a word to any of us. There’s no way. He’s out there somewhere.”
“Okay. We’re on the same page there then. Unlikely that he hitched out of town. But, you know, experienced bushman goes the wrong way . . . also unlikely. Thing is, sometimes people don’t always do what you expect of them. That’s what makes these mysteries tough to solve. We think of all the things we know about the person, but we can only see what we know. We can’t figure on them doing something they would never do. But sometimes that’s exactly what happens. So we’ll keep looking. But your theory is he went the wrong way.”
“That’s my theory. Christ,” says Mac. “What else, what the hell else could have happened to him?”
The nurse is coming toward her, but Delilah is ready for her.
“It’s okay,” she says as the nurse approaches. Delilah is already standing. “You can take the chair back. I’m leaving anyhow.” She walks down the hall. She isn’t sure where she’s going, but she keeps walking.
DELILAH IS IN HER flannel pyjamas reading in the light of the kerosene lamp at the kitchen table. Mac is on the couch looking out at the icicles hanging in crooked daggers from the gutters, a forgotten cigarette in his hand, ash drifting onto the batik couch cover. He had been rifling through notebooks and maps on the coffee table a few moments before, ignoring the toast and peanut butter Delilah had set down for him.
It’s been two days since her dad got out of the hospital. He has spoken nothing about Will’s disappearance, has only murmured good morning and good night and how was school.
The first night, after Red dropped Mac at home, he had come into her room and sat at the foot of her bed in the darkness. She knew he wanted to say something, that he felt he should, but all that came out of him were a few heaving breaths and then he patted her blanketed foot and returned to the living room. Annie had phoned that night, and Mac had told her Will was still missing, quietly, in as few words as possible.
Twice Jones has knocked at the door, and both times she has retreated to her room and had Mac tell him she’s sleeping. She lies in bed, unable to put into words the cavernous loss she’s feeling. It seems like the entire community of Old Town has spent every day trying to retrace Mac’s steps on Ski-Doos, despite the almost blizzard-like conditions. Jethro even took the dogs out to Wool Bay hoping they would catch his scent.
Instead of feeling sad, whenever she thinks of Will, there is a small dark animal snarling inside her, angry and violent and dangerous. She hates the not knowing. Is he lying there hurt somewhere? Freezing to death and wishing they could find him?
She lies there for what seems like hours. When she’s almost asleep, she jolts awake and for a second she sees Will standing in whirling snow, looking at her. She sees Will’s face, the small scars that mark his cheeks like tiny moon craters, the ice clinging to his hair. She thinks of Clementine. She is filled up with the feeling of Will, down, down, all the way to the soft centre of her bones. But then he fades. She misses her mother, for the first time since she can remember. She wants Annie to be there, sitting on the bed, singing her an old folk song until she falls asleep. Why doesn’t she come back?
The emptiness grips her, opens her up. It splits her in two, her sadness for Will. Her sadness for all of them.
DELILAH IS LOOKING FOR Mac’s socks, the fancy ones Annie brought him from Vancouver. She had bought them at a Christmas craft fair on Robson Street. Hand-knit with some kind of silky thread. They are thin but warm, and he rarely wears them, so Delilah has adopted them as her own.
The socks aren’t on the rack. They aren’t on the floor of his room, or at least not that she can tell. It’s hard to say with all the clothes and papers scattered over every surface, but she has sifted through most of it in the dim light of the kerosene lamp she brings from room to room.
He’s finally back at work. Delilah walks around like a stone, feeling nothing but heaviness. She is cold all the time, even when she stands inches from the fire. Jones has been bringing them Maggie’s casseroles, French comfort dishes with meat, thick pungent sauce, and vegetables.
She checks the kitchen, the lamp swinging in her hand by the metal handle, but they aren’t there. They aren’t by the door with the boots. They aren’t in her room. She checks the dark room near the back door. Along with their snowshoes, extra boots, and Mac’s rifle, she sees the plastic bag from the hospital, the one with all his belongings from the day he checked out. She sets the lamp down, picks up the bag, reaches in and pulls out his yellow ski hat. There’s also his plaid shirt and his grey undershirt, neatly folded. A few magazines people had brought him when they visited. Two oranges. A stuffed cat holding a bunch of plastic balloons that is bewildering to Delilah until she realizes it’s probably from Louise. She lays these items neatly beside her on the dusty floor.
Her fingers brush some sort of rough material. She pulls out a glove made of caribou hide, the fingers shiny from use. Will’s glove. She stares at it, then roots around and pulls out the other one. Why would her dad have Will’s gloves? Did Will give them to him because his were wet? That seems the most likely, but still . . .
She drops them in her lap. The light in the room is getting weak. Shadows sink lower, and she knows she has to turn the key on the lamp to bring up the wick. She doesn’t move. She just sits there. Thinking about gloves and Mac’s bloody nose from two months before. All those weeks of Mac and Will not getting along. All those things that policeman said.
A while later, there’s a knock on the front door, and Jones calls to her through the darkness of the cabin. “Hey! You up? We’re gonna be late.”
Delilah stuffs the gloves back in the plastic bag, then piles the other things on top and ties it shut.
“Delilah?” Jones is in the kitchen with his flashlight. He comes in as she’s standing, the lamp hanging from her hand. “Oh. You ready?”
“Yeah. I was looking for something.”
Jones’s eyelashes are sprinkled with frost. “Did you find it?”
She brushes past him. “I don’t know.”
JANUARY 9, 1978
SEASCAPE ARTIST’S COLONY
Delilah, so much is happening, I wish you would talk to me. I’m sorry to hear about Will. It must have been so scary to see your dad in the hospital.
Do you remember why I call you little bird? Do you remember that day? You were only four or five. It was a terrible rainy, cold Ontario fall day. I was making us tea for a tea party on the living room floor, and you were setting up the blocks for your stuffed animals to sit on when you heard a bird hitting the window. Remember?
“What is
it?” you shouted, and I ran to see. There were two grey feathers on the outside of the window. I went out to the small garden outside our window and found the bird heaving in shock. You were watching the whole thing from the window, your nose pressed to the dirty glass.
I brought it in and found a shoebox. I told you it might be okay. I explained about shock and how sometimes birds just needed to catch their breath.
You sat vigil over that bird until bedtime. You didn’t say a word, just watched it. You stroked it so gently on the top of its head with your finger, and I let you, even though people say you shouldn’t touch wild birds.
Once when I came in the room I caught you whispering to it. You wouldn’t come sit at the table for your dinner, I had to bring it to you. The bird was calm by then. I told you it would probably be fine by morning.
When I said it was time for bed, you screamed, wailing from the depths of your little soul. After half an hour you finally calmed enough for me to rock you in the rocking chair, but when you were almost asleep, you said to yourself, “Little bird . . .”
But in the morning, you woke up and the box was empty. I told you I had taken the bird out in its box, and it had hopped once and lifted itself into the air.
Ever since then I have called you little bird. As a testament to your sensitivity, the love your heart is capable of feeling for such a small creature. Strange though . . . just days after the bird hit our window you had one of the worst asthma attacks of your young life. Three days in the hospital . . . a mother’s nightmare to see her baby gasping for breath.
You are at an age where you need your mother, Delilah, you need to have someone to talk to. You are thirteen. What if your period starts? What if a boy asks you to a dance? Will you talk to your father? We must mend this, little bird. You need me. I want to respect your space, even your silence, but please call me. Please write to me. Something.
All my love,
Annie
Delilah was six when the bird hit the window. She remembers because she had just started Grade 1 at a Montessori school in Toronto, three blocks from their basement suite. She remembers because it was fall, and her rubber boots were too tight and too red, and she splashed them in the dirty rainwater all the way to school that first day. Delilah didn’t like red. It reminded her of blood, of hurting. It was an angry loud colour.
She also remembers because, the night before, she dreamed that a bird flew at that very window while she watched from inside in her nightgown. In the dream, her hand rushed out to stop it and there was no glass. She reached right through thin air to the outside and caught the bird before it hit. She held it close to her, a small robin, barely filling her childish hand.
The day the bird hit their window, she was home with asthma and she was not playing with blocks. The blocks had never made it from their apartment in Winnipeg. The blocks, which her father had painted blue like the shell of a robin’s egg, had been left behind in the move. She remembers being in her white cotton nightgown, the one with the frayed pink ribbon threaded through the neckline.
She remembers it was late in the afternoon, that it had been a long and quiet day. She was looking out the window to the leaf-clogged gutters and streaming sidewalks and wishing she could run as fast as she could away from the house and down the street. She wished so hard that she could run without losing her breath, wheezing, her lungs constricting to the size of nickels in her chest.
Her mother was making tea in the kitchen when the bird hit. Delilah saw it happen, a dark shape appearing from the gloomy sky, flitting by and then abruptly turning back and heading straight for her. She had slammed her hand to the glass as though to stop it like she had in the dream, but it hit with a rattling thud and disappeared below the window ledge.
It’s true she had whispered to it. Sung to it. Told it she was sorry she hadn’t caught it like she was supposed to. Told it a small secret when her mother was out of the room. Delilah doesn’t remember what it was, only that she was sure this little ruffled bird could keep her secret. But the ending her mother told was all wrong. That little bird didn’t fly away with Delilah’s secret the next morning, change it to a song that only birds could understand, sing it from the tops of the Ontario maples.
After she was put to bed she tossed and turned. Her mother smoothed her forehead, hummed an old folk song about a ghost and a train. Later, when the house was silent except for cars passing on the rain-soaked streets outside, Delilah snuck out to the living room. The lights were out, but the lamp from her mother’s room glowed down the hallway and seeped gold into the main part of the house, and a street light outside their thin-curtained window shone down on the shoebox on the floor.
Delilah had flicked on the lamp by the couch and lifted the top of the box, steeling herself for what she knew she would find. The bird lay on its side, very still, stiller than anything Delilah had ever seen, so still she couldn’t imagine it had ever hopped, flown, chirped. Its tiny black eyes were closed, the curved feet were clenched in mid-air by its chest. Delilah pressed her finger to the soft head, felt the coolness that radiates from dead things, a coolness that only things that have been hot and full of life can hold when that life is gone.
On the folded dishcloth beneath the bird’s small beak there was a stain of dark blood. It wasn’t drops, like when Delilah pricked her finger with the sewing needle, or a pool like when her dad nicked his hand with the wood saw. It was a small, abrupt splash. It hadn’t been there before. She couldn’t see any blood in the feathers. What had broken inside the bird?
She felt her chest constrict, felt the hand squeeze her lungs, felt the air whistle as she breathed in. There was not enough room in her chest for the air. There was not enough room in Delilah to hold her sadness for this bird and its tiny flower of blood. She removed her hand from the box and pressed the lid back on as tight as she could.
DELILAH STANDS ON THE shore of Back Bay. Her breath is white like the snow, but her fingers inside Mary Ellen’s mittens are warm. Her blood is singing, and her cheeks, surrounded by the fur of her parka, are hot.
It’s been two weeks since Will went missing. One week since she found Will’s gloves. She knows there must be an explanation, but the fact that her father hasn’t given her one, hasn’t mentioned a thing about it, weighs on her like a stone.
Delilah had spent the morning reading, and by noon she was so tired of lying in bed that she got up, got dressed, and wandered down the hill toward Latham, one of the twins passing her on the snow-covered road pulling a toboggan with a doll bundled in the back.
The sky is starting to dim, the light a muted soft yellow over the frozen lake. She has to turn around and head back if she wants to make it home by dark.
The wind has picked up, brushing arctic fingers across her burning cheeks. It blows a few lonely, papery flakes in Delilah’s face and they stick to her eyelashes. She blinks them away.
Will?
She can’t see a single living thing out on the lake. Will’s shack is behind her. She can hear the dogs barking over at Jethro’s. Laska is with Jethro and Mary Ellen now, but she roams free. She’s showed up at Mac’s a few times, at Red’s too. She seems lost, like she’s looking for Will. Delilah feels lost now too.
At least the snow isn’t too high. It’s not hard to walk through. Your feet just crunch along. They don’t sink in, so you have to march like a toy soldier, like in gym class when they have to snowshoe out back of the school. Mr. Mallory yelling “Knees up! Knees up!” Will had laughed when she told him. He think you kids are in the army, or what?
She hasn’t been back since that day he went missing. There is still wood piled in the back of Will’s truck. Six inches of snow on it. It’s good wood. She’s surprised someone hasn’t taken it.
She walks out on the lake. It’s getting darker. She wonders if there will be stars. She doesn’t mind walking in the dark if it’s bright, if there’s at least a moon.
She takes twenty long strides and stops. Her toes have started to ti
ngle sharply, her fingers cramped with cold. She can see the shoreline running back all the way to Peace River Flats. She could walk home across the ice if she wanted to.
Better get on home, kid.
She knows.
But first she kneels and clears the snow from the ice. She pushes and scoops with Mary Ellen’s mittens. It isn’t hard. It’s like moving shredded paper, light and agreeable. She clears a Delilah-sized area and peers down.
The ice is opaque here, creamy. Sometimes it’s clear for a few feet and then that deep-sea green. She lets her breath out. Looks around. The pink shack is just sitting there. But there are lights on at Jethro’s. There are some kids about a mile away on the ice now, racing their dogs. There are living things out here.
She watches the dogs run like silver streaks and thinks of Jethro’s dogs pulling her and Jones on the old wooden sled while Mac and Will stood on the lake and smoked. She lies belly down, her parka flat against the ice. She presses her ear to the frozen lake and closes her eyes. Her arms and legs are spread wide, as though she were making a snow angel in reverse. She imagines Will out walking on that ice. The fringe of his jacket moving in the breeze, the red beads of the wild roses shining like quivering fish eggs in the winter sun. She tries, but she can’t see his face. Only that jacket.
Will?
She listens through her parka hood, listens for anything, even the groaning cracks of shifting ice.
Nothing.
She lies there as long as she can stand it, until the cold starts seeping into her veins, and then she sits up.
“Delilah?”
She turns. Jethro is standing by Will’s shack carrying a cardboard box. He’s hunched forward, his grey hair showing beneath his knitted cap.
“What are you doing out there?”
He waits for her to come over to him. She feels foolish as she brushes the snow from the front of her parka.
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