“Oh.” Delilah is trying to wrap her head around Jones having a friend. At least, aside from her. It’s hard to imagine. She places a hand on her stomach to try to quell the rising pain. What is it? She closes her eyes and tries to focus on what Jones is saying.
“That’s too bad.”
“Yeah.” He hesitates, and Delilah knows that Al not being his friend isn’t the whole story. “So last fall at the beginning of Grade 7 I was down by the water in Peace River Flats, throwing rocks and stuff. And Al comes by on his bike with Damian and George. Damian, he never liked me. Not since Grade 3. He’s always calling me, like, faggot. And loser.”
Delilah opens her eyes. The room has become dim in the flickering light of the kerosene lantern. She tries to breathe around the cramps. This is the most Jones has ever talked about himself, ever. She is afraid to even make a sound in case he stops.
“I’m standing there by the shore. Just . . . I don’t even know what I was doing, just standing there. And Damian says, ‘Hey, maybe Jonesy needs to go for a swim.’ And George goes, ‘Yeah, I think he does.’ Al didn’t say anything, I could tell he wasn’t into it at first. He looked kinda nervous and stuff.”
Delilah listens with every cell.
“So they . . . they made me go in.”
“Into the water?”
“Yeah.”
“Wasn’t it cold?”
“Yeah. It was late September.”
“Jones?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you mean, they made you go in?”
Silence. It’s getting cold now. Delilah shivers on that hard floor. She wants her parka, but she doesn’t want to move. She wants to hear Jones’s story. She wants the room to stop spinning. She wants the pain to stop. It is creeping up to her chest now and her head is aching.
“They pushed me in from the shore. Held my head down.”
She turns toward him, all her pains forgotten. “They held you under?”
Laska stirs between them. She shifts her body and rests her head on Jones’s chest, looking up at him. He lays a hand on her head.
“Yes,” he says.
“For how long?”
“Too long.”
Delilah imagines the scene, the tumble of bodies jostling in the cold water, rough hands on Jones’s skinny arms, the shock of the water on his face, a hand pressing on the back of his head, the boys shouting at him, saying terrible things. Laughing as he tries to turn his face to get air.
“How’d you get away?”
“Johnny Cole came down to the shore. Heard the yelling, I guess. He broke it up.”
She’s still watching Jones. A terrible thought grips her. “Do you think they would have . . . ?”
“I don’t know.”
She flips onto her back again. The ache in her stomach has crept around to her lower back. What would it be like? she wonders. To think someone wanted you dead. Wanted to kill you, even for a minute, for nothing but the fleeting thrill of it. To know that you were that insignificant to someone, like a little kid who lets an ant burst into flames under a magnifying glass on a hot day just to see it burn.
The room sways and lurches, and Delilah sees fragments, images of Jones, his Atari shirt soaked with September lake water, her father stumbling through the snow toward Dettah, Annie smiling at her at the Wildcat, her long hair smelling like roses. And suddenly Delilah feels nothing but the sadness ripping through her. She curls into a fetal position and tries to catch her breath, to breathe past it.
Jones sits up. “Delilah? What’s wrong?”
She says nothing; all she can do is cry.
“Delilah?” He has a tentative hand on her arm. He sounds terrified.
She stops and tries to get some words out. “I have to leave.”
“Here? You want to go back? Okay, I can . . .”
She shakes her head clumsily against the rough floor. “No, I have to leave. Yellowknife. My dad is making me go.”
His face is swimming above hers, bobbing in and out of her line of vision. She can’t tell if he is moving or if the room is just wavering around him.
“What? Like, move?” Now he sounds confused.
She nods. She can hardly hear him anymore, and her stomach is starting to hurt again.
“When?” His voice is disembodied.
“Soon. Really soon.” As soon as she says this, she feels a thick, unfamiliar wetness spread between her legs, soaking through the front of her jeans, she finally knows why her stomach is trying to kill her, and she wishes the dirty floor of that cabin would open like a black hole and suck her through so she never had to see Jones or her dad or Annie or anyone ever again.
DELILAH OPENS ONE EYE, the other still pressed into the pillow. Cold light bleeds under the grey army blanket nailed to Jones’s bedroom window. She is trembling, and her feet, even in their thick socks, are brittle ice. She pulls the layers of rough wool blankets and sleeping bag up over her head.
Her body feels empty, like all that’s left of her is aching bone. Her throat is paper that cracks and tears when she breathes. When she moves even slightly, her stomach lurches to her chest, and the terrible, searing cramps still ricochet through her thighs and abdomen despite the dose of Tylenol Maggie gave her a few hours ago when Jones brought her back.
Jones. She could die. She wants to die. The blood and that terrible, ripping pain. Why had no one told her it could be like that? How could her mother not have warned her it would feel like someone was trying to tear you open from the inside? Maggie had to calm her down on the bathroom floor, show her how to use the pad, convince her she wasn’t bleeding to death. With all the school nurse speeches, all the talks from Annie, Delilah never would have thought she would act like such a stupid, crying child when it happened.
She hears Red down the hall. Maybe getting ready for work. He laughs a short seal-bark laugh, and then Delilah hears another voice trickle down toward the bedroom. There are a few people out there. They sound loud, excited. She blinks at the alarm clock by Jones’s bed. The glow-in-the-dark hands read 8:15.
It dawns on her that she’s in Jones’s bed, in Jones’s room. That on top of all the other humiliations of the night before she has also taken his room and forced him to sleep somewhere else in the house, most likely on one of the lumpy couches. What does he think of her now? Drunk and sloppy, crying like a baby. Take me home. Take me home . . . and then . . . oh God. He had run for Old Tom, who took Delilah back on his snowmobile. She had clung to his filthy parka, smelling the kerosene and smoke in his hair the whole way back to Jones’s.
She hears Red talking again, Maggie laughing. What is going on? She was expecting a stern talking-to about safety. She thought she and Jones would be roasted over the coals. She rolls over gingerly and tries to sit up, just as Jones bursts into the room wearing only his sweatpant bottoms, his hair standing on end like he just bolted out of bed.
“It’s Will,” he says, his face breaking open with joy. “Are you awake yet? It’s Will. I just woke up and he’s here in the house.”
Sure enough, there is Will’s unmistakable laugh filling up every crack in the house around Delilah. Everything in her line of vision tilts at an impossible angle, and she covers her mouth, sure she’s going to throw up. She notices Maggie’s soup pot on the floor, surrounded by socks and jeans and comic books. “Come on,” he tells her.
She stumbles to her feet, shivering. She’s wearing a pair of soft pink sweatpants that must be Maggie’s, and Jones’s blue hooded sweatshirt with the white zipper. She pulls the sleeping bag off the bed and wraps it around her, then turns toward the door. Is it really him?
She opens the door, and the smell of toast and coffee and fried meat accosts her. She grabs the jamb to steady herself. She wonders if this is how animals feel, forced to smell every smell so keenly, against their will.
Maggie is chirping away in French, probably on the phone, and when Delilah finally emerges from the dark hallway, she can see her father and Red sitting
on the couch holding coffee cups. Jones is huddled in a chair by the fire, his back to Delilah. And there is Will. Sitting in a chair at the table, a cigarette in his hand. Looking like he has been there all along.
He grins at her as she stands there wrapped in her sleeping bag, her hair a mess, her skin probably blotchy from crying.
“Rough night, kid?”
Everyone laughs, and she feels her knees buckle as she slowly crumples to the floor, the light dimming until it’s gone entirely.
WHEN SHE COMES TO, she is lying on the couch. Mac is shaking her awake. “Lila. Lila! You okay?”
She struggles to clear her head and sits bolt upright when she remembers Will. He’s still there, sitting at the table. She looks back at her dad, who is wearing his work coveralls.
“You okay?” he asks again.
She nods and looks back at Will. Jones is showing him the Swiss Army knife he got for Christmas.
Red comes in the room with two steaming mugs. He hands one to Delilah and one to her dad, who sits beside her on the couch. She looks into the cup and sees blackness.
“Coffee,” Red says, settling down across from Will at the table. “Old enough for a hangover, you’re old enough for coffee.”
He laughs, and Delilah wants to disappear into the couch.
“Where were you?” she croaks in Will’s direction. He doesn’t hear her, turning Jones’s knife in his hands. “Where were you?” she says louder. It comes out like a bark, like an angry demand.
He looks up at her. “That’s right, you missed the big homecoming this morning.”
She’s confused.
“He came in around five,” Red says. “Been catching up since then. You need something to eat?” he asks, the faintest twinkle in his eye as he takes a swig of coffee.
She shakes her head.
From the kitchen, Maggie chirps on, banging dishes as she talks.
“Jesus, Delilah. You could have died out there,” Mac says to her.
“I’m fine.” Died? How could she have died? She was ten minutes from Jones’s house.
“Where did you go?” she asks Will again.
“Here and there,” Will says. “Stayed at some old trapper’s cabin out there. Kinda holed up looking for the meteor. Turns out . . .” He laughs. “Turns out it wasn’t a meteor at all. Guess you guys know that, eh? Found out before I did. I was the chump out there trekking through the snow looking for a hunk of metal. Never even found that. Hear some other guy did, though.”
Delilah shakes her head. “It’s not funny.”
He quiets down. Everyone does. Mac even stops his cup halfway to his mouth.
“I thought you were dead,” she says, tears pricking her eyes.
He looks down at his hands. “I know.”
“Delilah,” Mac says. “Let’s be grateful Will is—”
“I thought you were dead.” She stands, the sleeping bag falling away from her and pooling at her feet.
He looks back up at her. Nods. “I know.”
She has to get out of this room. Everyone is staring at her. They already all know what happened, they have had time to get used to Will sitting there like he’s a normal, living man. To her, he’s still a ghost.
She steps over the sleeping bag and runs down the hall and into Jones’s room, slamming the door as hard as she can behind her. She burrows back under the blankets on Jones’s bed, her heart slamming under her ribs. A few minutes later the door opens, and Will comes in. She covers her face with the blanket. He sits beside her on the bed and places her mug of coffee on the small table.
“Hey, kid?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Drink that coffee,” he says. “You don’t look so good. Don’t think partying agrees with you.”
“You’re not funny,” she mumbles under the blanket. But then she sits up, avoiding his large body as she pulls her knees up to her chest. She picks up the mug and takes a small sip of the strong, lukewarm coffee.
Will scratches behind his ear.
He looks exactly the same, she thinks. He doesn’t look skinny or malnourished or frostbitten or like he almost died of hypothermia. He doesn’t look like he was lost at all.
“So what, you mad at me or something?”
Mad? Is she mad? She tries to untangle the ball of many-coloured wool that is her feelings. She shakes her head. “I don’t think so. Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Didn’t mean to make you worry, kid. I was just . . . I had to do some thinking. I thought I had to find that thing, you know.”
“The meteor?”
He nods, his gaze fixed on Jones’s Millennium Falcon poster on the back of the door. “Yeah. Guess I thought it was something it wasn’t.”
She sets her coffee down again. Her guts are churning from the alcohol and all the Tylenol Maggie gave her. “The meteor, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Why couldn’t anyone find you? They looked for you.”
He shrugged. “Don’t know. Lots of snow, for one. Stayed the first night out at Wool Bay in a fishing cabin. Then I headed inland and stayed at some trapper’s cabins here and there. Had some gear with me. My .22. Not hard to live out there if you have what you need. Most of the cabins leave wood and a bit of food. Shot some rabbits. I guess I didn’t want to be found is why nobody found me. Didn’t spend much time out during the day. I could see signs folks were out there. Saw the helicopters too when the sky cleared. They were looking for that satellite.”
She takes a shaky breath, afraid to ask him what she wants to ask. He is coming more alive in front of her. She’s starting to believe he’s really there. He smells like tobacco and wet wool.
“I thought you gave up. Because of Clementine.”
His eyes are tinged with sadness. “Yeah,” he says. “Guess I almost did.”
“But . . . you came back.”
“Yeah, I did. Got too cold out there.” He smiles at her. “Just joking. No, came back because I gotta get back to work. Save up for some fancy lawyer, I guess.”
“Lawyer?” She brightens. “You’re fighting back?”
“Oh yeah, kid.” He laughs that laugh she’s missed so much. “You met me? I’m fighting back. Ain’t gonna win, but I ain’t going down without trying.”
“JONESY KNOWS BETTER,” RED says, lighting a cigarette. “You don’t fuck around when it’s fifteen below. Good way to get yourself killed.”
Mac nods his agreement, looking pissed right off at Delilah and Jones, who are on the couch, facing the music. The excitement has died down, and Will has gone back home with Jethro and Mary Ellen. Delilah had missed their reunion when she was in the shower, but she had heard Mary Ellen’s joyful singsong from the bathroom.
“We had a fire,” Jones says. “We weren’t cold.”
“Sure, everything was fine until the plan went to hell,” Mac says. “And the plan went to hell because you guys got shit-faced, and then one of you got sick. That’s how people die. Making stupid mistakes like that. You’re lucky you lived to tell us about it.”
Jones’s eyes flicker to Delilah and she looks away. He’s reminding her it was her idea. She knows.
“Dad,” she says. “He brought me back. It’s not a big deal.”
Mac looks exhausted. He was working a night shift, so he hasn’t slept since the previous morning. “Okay. Okay, guys. Just don’t do it again. I mean . . .” He smiles. “I guess you won’t really have a chance to. Delilah won’t, anyway. Not like you can freeze to death in California.”
There’s a crackle in the air as Delilah stares at her dad. Red is looking at his lap and Jones shifts uncomfortably beside Delilah. She stands.
“Can we go home? I’m tired.”
DELILAH SLEEPS STRAIGHT THROUGH until the next morning. When she wakes up, she wraps herself in a blanket and finds Mac sitting at the kitchen table reading, the lamp beside him.
“Hey Lila,” he says. “You hungry? I can heat up some stew.”
“It’s okay,” she sa
ys. There is a frailty between them, like china with a hairline crack.
It’s warm, the wood stove roaring. “Dad?”
“Yeah?” He arranges some papers beside his coffee cup, stacking them neatly and placing them in the book.
“Why do you have Will’s gloves?” It comes out before she even has a chance to think about it.
He stops, his hand still gripping the cover of the book. “What?”
“You had Will’s gloves in that bag from the hospital. Why?”
“What are you talking about? What bag from the hospital?” He looks so genuinely confused that Delilah instantly knows he doesn’t have a clue what she’s talking about.
“The white plastic one. You . . . it was in the back room. And then it was gone. It wasn’t there anymore.”
He runs his hands through his hair. “His gloves were in there? I never even looked in that bag after I got home.”
He goes into the living room and she hears him rustling in his room. She waits for him to return, but he doesn’t. She stands and heads tentatively into his room. He’s sitting on his bed, just a dark shadow lit by a single candle flickering from the bookshelf in the living room. He’s holding Will’s gloves in his hands. He doesn’t look up at her.
She sits beside him.
He turns the gloves over in his hands. “I didn’t look in the bag. I didn’t want to. I thought it was just . . . my clothes. From that night. I didn’t want to see them again. Andrew and his wife had taken off all my wet clothes to warm me up. I was wrapped in blankets. They must have put these in a bag and brought them to the hospital. Never even saw them.”
“Oh. I thought you hid them.”
He turns to her. “Hid them? Why?”
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