One Good Thing

by Rebecca Hendry

  “Sorry,” she says. “I was just . . . I just wanted to come here.”

  He nods, the corners of his dark eyes crinkling as he looks out at the lake and the patch she cleared.

  “What’s the box for?” she asks.

  “Tidying up,” Jethro says. “Cousin Elizabeth is gonna move in to Will’s for a bit. Needs a place to stay. You can come along in if you like. No bother to me.”

  He turns toward the shack and goes inside. She follows him. It’s dark in there, and freezing cold. Jethro sets his box down beside Will’s small dresser and pulls the canvas sheet aside to let in the daylight.

  Delilah can see the dark outline of the star atlas on the wall by the table. The counters are clear, there are no dishes piled up. The table has been wiped clean.

  Jethro starts piling some of Will’s clothing from the dresser into the box. To make space for Cousin Elizabeth’s things, she guesses. But she doesn’t want him to. She wants every single thing in that room to stay exactly where it is.

  Jethro’s watching her, one of Will’s shirts in his hands. “You can help,” he says. “You can get those dirty dishes there.” He points to the shelf above Will’s bed. There is a Scooby-Doo mug that says “Zoinks! It’s morning!” and a plastic glass half-full of water.

  She walks numbly to the bed and climbs the short ladder. She sits on the shiny sleeping bag and looks at the books on the rough shelf lining the wall beside the bed. They are mostly about astronomy, as well as some geology texts that look like they belonged to a university. She picks up the mug and notices it has three inches of frozen coffee in it. The mug was resting on a book about the phases of the moon. There are some papers sticking out the side. She slides them out of the book, glancing up to see if Jethro is watching her. He isn’t. He’s busy stacking some wood by the airtight.

  Delilah looks at the top page. It’s wrinkled, as though it had been crumpled and then laid flat again. She holds it up to the light from the window.

  December 12, 1977

  Maitland and Associates

  Attorneys at Law

  2733 Bloor Street West

  Toronto, Ontario

  Dear Mr. Bilodeau,

  Please be advised that our clients, John and Lorraine Clark, acting on behalf of Sarah Clark, have put in a petition to become the legal guardians of Clementine Bilodeau-Clark. The Clarks are asking you to relinquish your parental privileges as of January 1, 1978, and they are prepared to take the matter to court if you do not comply.

  Once this becomes a legal issue, as you can imagine, many factors, including background and criminal history, are used in reviewing a defendant’s acceptability as a parent in the eyes of the judge.

  As a gesture of good will, and the family is aware that this might cause some hardship for you, they have offered a one-time-only payment of $10,000 to cover any emotional damages incurred. The cheque will be sent as soon as you sign the enclosed papers and return them to us. As you will see, there is also a copy of the no-contact order they have placed against you. Please read it carefully, as breaching this order is a serious offence that could result in imprisonment.

  Be advised, Mr. Bilodeau, that the family feels this is in the best interest of the child.

  Sincerely,

  Grant Maitland

  The words start swimming in front of Delilah, sliding sideways off the page.

  “Jethro,” she says.

  JONES IS OVER STUDYING with Delilah for a geometry test. She is hopeless, and even after forty-five minutes, she still doesn’t get all those strange angles and complex fractions. She can’t concentrate, not since everything that had happened. Finding the letter has cemented something inside her, some unspoken worry she hadn’t wanted to feel. The letter means things were hopeless for Will. The letter means Clementine isn’t coming back to him. And he knew that.

  She’s glad Jones is there tonight. It means she doesn’t have to talk to her father. She has not said a word to him about what she overheard at the hospital.

  She’s wearing the mood ring Jones got her on her birthday. She wears it every day now because it reminds her that he thought of her that moment in the drugstore and wanted her to have something she liked. It seems significant to her that her moods, all of them, the black ones and the blue ones and the light ones, are something he thought would be fun to keep track of.

  Mac is cooking, frying pork chops and Campbell’s mushroom soup on the stove, a pile of peeled potatoes bubbling in the pot.

  There’s a knock, and Jethro comes in and calls hello. Mary Ellen is standing behind him. Mac shuts off the potatoes and walks out to the living room. Delilah puts her pencil down and follows him, Jones close behind.

  “Come in, come in,” Mac says. “You guys eaten?” He walks toward them, smiling, but stops short when he sees Jethro’s face.

  “Seen Ezra Justice’s wife in town,” Jethro says.

  Mac has a dishcloth over his shoulder and he uses it to mop his forehead.

  Nobody says anything for a minute. Delilah doesn’t know who Ezra is or why it would matter that Jethro had seen his wife, but she can feel that it’s important. Mary Ellen rocks in place, humming to herself by the door. Normally she would have come over to Delilah right away and smiled and held her hands and patted her head.

  “What’d she have to say?” Mac asks.

  “Said Ezra saw Will out on the lake that night Andrew found you. She’s been telling everyone. Told the rcmp too. They talked to him today.”

  “Saw Will?” Mac says. “Out by Dettah?”

  Delilah sits on the arm of the couch, the ground shaky beneath her. “Why?” she says. “Why would he be out there?”

  Jethro scratches his head under his thick wool hat. He shrugs. “Don’t know. Gonna head out and talk to Ezra. Thought I’d let you all know.”

  Mac nods. Delilah sees he’s only half there, turning things around in his mind. “Guess I’ll head out too,” he says.

  “We got room for you in the truck if you want to come with us,” Jethro says.

  “I’m coming,” Delilah says. “I want to go.”

  THEY ARE ALL CRAMMED into Jethro’s Chevy crew cab, Jones and Delilah and Mary Ellen on the bench seat in the back. Delilah stares out the window the whole way. They drive through swirling snow all the way past the sci-fi city of Giant and then through nothing but darkness again. They cross the Yellowknife River, frozen on its journey out to Back Bay in the moonlight, the lights of Giant reflecting off the white lake.

  Delilah has the insane thought that they will get there and find Will sitting on Ezra’s couch, drinking a cup of tea and eating some bannock and blueberry jam. Wearing his jacket, rolling a smoke, and saying, “That so?” when Delilah tells him a story about school.

  When they reach Dettah, it’s dinnertime and the small cluster of homes is lit up, everyone inside and eating with their families. Delilah, who had been looking forward to Mac’s pork chops all afternoon, has lost her appetite completely.

  They stop in front of a waterfront shack at the farthest edge of the village and get out. It’s set apart from the other homes, resting on the edge of a small frozen bay that curves in from the lake. As Delilah walks up to the door she can see the lights of Yellowknife beyond the house, far off in the distance across the lake.

  Ezra’s wife, Rose, greets them at the door, a plump woman in her sixties, and invites them in. Ezra is making coffee, she tells them. He is a small man, barely over five feet, wearing denim overalls and a work shirt. He doesn’t look surprised to see two teenagers and Mac along with Jethro and Mary Ellen.

  “Been a big day,” he says, laughing as he pours coffee into mugs. They sit on two couches draped with white wolf-skins. There are other skins hanging from walls. Delilah sees fox, mink, muskrat. The coffee table between them is a wooden crate scattered with old newspapers and National Geographics. “Talk talk talk, that’s all I done today.”

  “Big news, I guess,” Jethro says. “Rose said you saw him out here.”<
br />
  “Yeah, yeah, I saw him. Left that morning for trapping so never heard the fuss till I got back yesterday.”

  Rose sets a plate of store-bought chocolate chip cookies on the table and nudges them toward Jones and Delilah. “Eat, eat. You had your supper yet?”

  “Yes,” Delilah mumbles. She doesn’t want Rose to heat her up some stew or soup that she won’t be able to eat. “Thank you.” They each take a cookie. Delilah sets hers in her lap.

  “What did you see?” Mac asks. “Was I there too? Was he walking with me?”

  Ezra looks at him more closely, the deep lines in the corner of his eyes crinkling. “Ohh, you the one? Yeah, you two were together, walking. He had a light, here.” He taps his forehead with a wrinkled hand. “Was about two-thirty, three in the morning. Walked up to Andrew’s. That’s the next house over. I was getting ready to go out in a couple hours, so I was loading up my gear on the sled out by the side of the house.” He points toward where the small, isolated bay sits. “You were walking together. He was talking to you, couldn’t hear what he was saying. Maybe a hundred yards away or so. He didn’t see me, neither. I didn’t think nothing of it.”

  Delilah’s heart is thudding in her throat. He was here. Right next door, right there outside that kitchen window. Here where it was warm. Where there was hot coffee and hot water and blankets and clothes and people who would bring him back home to the ones who loved him. Where did he go?

  “You saw him walk over that way?” Jethro traces the path with a finger behind him. “Over to Andrew’s?”

  Mary Ellen is playing with the fringe on her mitts, humming to herself. She hasn’t looked up once that Delilah could see. Her coffee and cookie are untouched.

  Ezra shakes his head. “No no, I seen him again. Going right back the way he come, but alone this time. Heading straight out on the lake. Still had the light.” He taps his forehead again.

  “Back the way he came?” Mac says. “Why?”

  It’s a question Delilah knows he doesn’t expect anyone to answer, that maybe he didn’t even mean to say out loud.

  “Don’t know,” Ezra says. “At the time, I thought he maybe forgot something on a sled out there or dropped something in the snow. I had to go find my Thermos, see if Rose sewed up my socks. Didn’t think another thing about it until today.”

  Mac is looking out across the room to the black windows facing the lake. “He brought me back,” he says. “He walked me back so I didn’t get lost. He must have walked me to Andrew’s and then turned around and gone back out. Why Andrew’s, though? Why not just here?”

  Jethro is working his weathered hands together in his lap. “He knew Andrew since he was a kid. Friend of his when they were young.”

  “Why wouldn’t they have gone out to get him?” Delilah says to her dad. “Why wouldn’t you have told them he was out there?”

  He shrugs slowly. “I was freezing by the time they let me in. Probably couldn’t say anything. Couldn’t think straight. I don’t remember getting to the door . . .”

  “Might be he meant to go in with you,” Ezra says. “Maybe he forgot something out there on the lake. Wanted to go get it first.”

  There is a stillness, a deadness in the room. Mary Ellen hums, running her fingers down the length of fringe, releasing it, doing it again.

  “He walked away, I guess,” Mac says. “That’s just what he did. He walked away. All that legal stuff with Sarah . . .”

  “No, but it doesn’t solve anything.” Delilah stands up. She needs to get out of here. She needs to get outside. She wants to go look again now that she knows he was here. “We still don’t know where he is. We need to . . .”

  “Yes,” Mary Ellen says firmly, looking up from her fringe. “Yes.” She points at Delilah and says, “You sit.”

  Delilah feels like she has been slapped. She sits. “Yes what?” she says. “Yes, we know?”

  Mary Ellen nods gravely. “Yes.”

  “Where is he?” Delilah knows she sounds like a child and that everything she is saying and doing is ridiculous. But she can’t seem to stop it. She’s glad she sat down. She feels like she might faint.

  Mary Ellen holds her hands apart, upturned. Lovingly, like they are carrying something invisible and precious. She just holds them like that. Weighing the emptiness.

  “Gone,” she says.

  JONES AND DELILAH ARE on the couch watching The Beachcombers, despite the intermittent reception on the old TV. Mac is at work, and Maggie had insisted Delilah join them instead of staying home alone all night in the drafty green shack. There was whitefish and boiled potatoes for dinner, and now Red and Maggie were doing the dishes and drinking wine in the kitchen. The show is funny and reminds Delilah of Vancouver’s towering trees and temperamental ocean, but while Jones seems riveted, leaning forward, his thin body swimming in one of Red’s old cable-knit sweaters, Delilah’s attention wanders toward the big window and the frozen lake.

  When the show ends, Delilah and Jones play a listless game of checkers on the floor by the wood stove. He is whittling a small piece of firewood with his Swiss Army knife between moves, a can of root beer by his knee.

  “My mom says City Jane didn’t go to work for four days after Will disappeared,” Jones says, chipping at the wood with the tip of his knife. Delilah imagines the knife closing on his finger, the blood dripping onto the chipped squares of linoleum.

  “Yeah, I heard that too,” Delilah says. She knows City Jane went out looking too, borrowing a neighbour’s Ski-Doo to join the search party. Delilah thinks of her alone in her little dollhouse with all her books, lying in her bed wondering where he went.

  “You ever know anyone else who died?” Jones asks.

  She hugs her knees closer. “He might not be dead.”

  He looks up at her. “I know.”

  She thinks about it. “I guess my Grandpa Pete. But he was pretty old. Like, seventy, I think.” She had only three real memories of him: his hand guiding hers while she held a pearl-handled steak knife and carved a crooked triangle into a pumpkin, her sitting on his feet while he tried to walk through the kitchen, and finally, the last time she saw him, in their apartment in Winnipeg when they had flown out unexpectedly, him and her Grandma Ellen. Her father’s parents. She remembers the first words they said when they walked in the door.

  “Well, we tracked you down! Our nomadic son!”

  She remembers the shock on her father’s face, then the pure joy. She remembers too how her mother raised her eyebrow and how she made ginseng tea when even Delilah knew her Grandma Ellen only drank orange pekoe.

  “Yeah, my grandpa died too,” Jones says. “Last year. I never met him, though.”

  “Why not?”

  Jones shrugs. Whittles.

  “It’s not the same,” Delilah says.

  “What isn’t?”

  “Will.” She means because they don’t know where he is. He might be dead, but where? It’s not the same at all.

  “They’re gonna burn his stuff if he’s dead,” Jones says.

  “What?”

  “The family. That’s what my dad said. They might wait a bit longer, but if they think he’s dead they’ll burn all his stuff. That’s what they do in Rainbow Valley when someone dies.”

  Delilah imagines his fringed jacket lying on a pile of charred wood, his star atlas curling in the flames. She hears a roaring in her ears like the ocean has gone wild. She stands. She’s suddenly too hot, the airtight is a howling furnace beside her. She stumbles toward the pile of shoes and boots by the door.

  “Don’t go outside. It’s too cold.” There’s a matter-of-factness in his voice that she’s grateful for. But she can’t breathe in this heat. She hauls on her boots, still damp from the walk there, and yanks open the door.

  Outside is a black, still cold that slams the heat from her body with a vicious slap. She shivers, her knees shaking violently in her thin dress and long johns, but out here she can breathe, her lungs expanding in the crystal-clear
air, her chest no longer silently heaving.

  She leans against the rough logs of the shack and looks up at the stars. And like Will says, she does feel small. She feels so small she’s barely there at all.

  The stars sit there, still and silent, as though they aren’t doing a thing. But she knows they are hot and blazing with life, impossible to contain. She imagines them in pairs, holding tightly to each other’s hands as they spin, their long hair flying like comet tails.

  LATER, DELILAH LIES WITH her head at one end of the lumpy green sofa, while Jones lies with his head at the other end, both of them curled on their sides. They were reading Archie comics, but it’s late, and they were starting to nod off when Maggie covered them with a heavy patchwork quilt. Jones could have gotten up and gone to bed in his room, but he hasn’t. Delilah notes this. They have been careful not to bump each other, and Jones has been still now for at least ten minutes, his breath deep and even. Delilah’s eyes drift shut, listening to the muted sounds of Red and Maggie talking in the kitchen.

  Delilah exhales. There’s a restlessness beneath her fatigue. Part of her wants to throw the blanket down and run out into the cold night, to run and run, fast as the dogs, flying across the moonlit lake. Her foot shifts and bumps Jones’s lightly. Without thinking, she presses the soles of her socked feet to his. He doesn’t move. She presses harder, gently pushing against him, until he’s pressing back. She can feel the roughness of Jones’s socks through her own, his toes slightly damp where snow must have gotten into his boots.

  The room glows in the flickering light of the oil lamp. They lie like that under the quilt, feet pressed together, finding solid ground.

  DELILAH EATS HER CAP’N Crunch, a book propped against the salt shaker. The cereal is ridiculously syrupy sweet. Mac’s trying to be nice by buying it. He has been trying extra hard, making real meals for dinner, sticking close to home when he isn’t working. He even asked her to play Scrabble the night before, but she had complained of a headache and gone to bed.

  Mac stirs sugar into his coffee. “You want some coffee?” he asks.