One Good Thing Read online

  For my father, David,

  who always came back

  We are, each of us, a multitude.

  Within us is a little universe.

  — CARL SAGAN

  CONTENTS

  May 1977

  June

  July

  August

  September

  October

  November

  Christmas Eve, 1977

  January 1978

  February

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  MAY 1977

  WHEN DELILAH FIRST LAYS eyes on the great white north, she isn’t thrilled about it. As she stands on the banks of the Mackenzie River in her hand-knit rainbow-striped sweater, her mother, Annie, sits in Bessie, their VW van with the little checked curtains, head back, eyes closed. There’s no one else in the muddy parking lot of the Fort Providence ferry. Annie and Delilah have already been told what everyone else must know. A guy had pulled over in his pickup and asked them what they were waiting for. He told them they couldn’t cross. The winter road had closed weeks before, and the river was now a soup of open water and small, deadly icebergs the ferry would not navigate for days. He said they’d probably get a deal on a weekly rate at the motel if they explained their situation. For now, they’re trapped.

  Delilah doesn’t want to get a room in some motel and eat trail mix and her mother’s homemade seed bread with peanut butter for another week. She wants a cheeseburger, tacos. Something cooked. They hadn’t stopped at a single restaurant the whole drive up from Vancouver. Annie said the last of her student loans had dried up and they only had enough for gas.

  Delilah needs to see her dad. She imagines him on the other side, shouting above the cracking ice, “Come on! I’m waiting.”

  Of course, this isn’t true. He isn’t there. He’s probably in his little cabin having a beer or playing some Zeppelin or snoring away. How could he know his family was stranded across the river in the van loaded to the roof with boxes and houseplants and garbage bags full of clothes? He doesn’t even know they’re coming.

  As Delilah watches that strange horizontal avalanche of ice roll and crack its way toward shore, she is aware of the power of nature in a way she has never been before. There’s something angry about the way the ice gathers, rises, and then crashes in a jagged heap of snowy crust and aqua-tinted chunks. It’s as if a giant hand were ripping it from the surface of the water and shoving it aside, uprooting everything it touches. When she closes her eyes, she hears an amplified tinkling like hard rain turned to glass.

  It isn’t exactly welcoming.

  FOUR DAYS LATER, BESSIE sputters into Yellowknife, low on gas and leaking some sort of fluid that Annie doesn’t seem interested in investigating. Seven of their nine plants are dead, frozen overnight when they hadn’t thought to bring them into the motel room with them. The one surviving spider plant is wilted at Delilah’s feet, the leaves gone transparent from freezing and thawing. She rests her legs on either side of it, gently, to keep it warm.

  To her, this new town looks like any other town in Canada. Aside from Vancouver, they have lived in Toronto, Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, Victoria, and, for about six months, Regina before Annie insisted they leave. Cold was bad enough, she had said, but she was not going to be slapped around by the Saskatchewan wind.

  Now Delilah can feel her mother’s tension like a thin, humming wire. Snappable. They drive slowly through the streets, Delilah scanning the unfamiliar low buildings of downtown. There are small piles of grey snow on the sidewalks, people still wearing heavy boots, some even wearing parkas.

  They stop and Annie cranks her window down. “Hey,” she shouts to a group of men coming out of the Gold Range Hotel, a three-storey building with a faded yellow awning. “You guys know where Old Town is?”

  One of them steps forward, lighting a cigarette. He’s well over six feet, his thick black hair fastened into a ponytail with a strip of leather. He comes so close to the van window Delilah thinks he’s going to open her mother’s door and hop in. He peers in, his head and wide shoulders taking up the whole window.

  Delilah is used to men staring at her mother, but he isn’t looking at her like that. His eyes are like those sparklers Annie puts on birthday cakes, bright and crackling.

  “Old Town?” he says.

  Annie smiles. “Yeah. Do you know where I can find it?”

  He steps back, takes a drag of his hand-rolled cigarette and points toward the main road they were travelling on before they turned down a side street. “Back that ways. Turn right and keep driving down the hill till you hit the bay.”

  “Thanks,” Annie says. “Any chance you know where James MacIntyre lives?”

  The address they have for him is just a mailbox number, so Annie’s master plan had been to ask around until they found him. Delilah shrinks down in her seat a little, embarrassed at their overstuffed, rusty van, Annie’s thrift store fur coat that still reeks like some rich old lady’s mothballs.

  “Mac?” the man says. He seems amused. “Sure do. Green shack on Old Stope Hill. Can’t miss it.”

  “Great, thanks. We’ve had quite the adventure. Looking forward to being on solid ground. Although I’m not sure how I feel about the snow here. Don’t you people know it’s spring?” Annie is watching him languidly, one fur-clad elbow resting on the windowsill.

  “Mom,” Delilah says.

  The man grins. “Well, like I say, can’t miss it. Green shack on Old Stope.” He steps back and salutes Annie before shifting his eyes to Delilah. “See you around, kid.”

  She raises her fingers in return.

  They drive in silence, passing unremarkable houses and small businesses. A laundromat. A Chinese restaurant. “Everything looks so dead,” Annie says. “So white and cold. It reminds me of Ontario.”

  She rests a hand on Delilah’s leg. Delilah shifts away slightly.

  “Come on, little bird, enough of the silent treatment.” Annie squeezes Delilah’s thin knee. The spring sun has come out. It’s streaming in on Annie’s side of the van, lighting her long hair into fiery wisps.

  “Okay,” Delilah says.

  “Okay what?”

  “Okay, I’ll talk to you?”

  “Good. Otherwise I would get pretty damn lonely. You’re the only one I know here so far.”

  Her mother’s amethyst ring has snagged Delilah’s tights, pulling a tiny thread loose.

  THEY FINALLY STOP BESIDE a lopsided, peeling green shack on a hill between two half-frozen bays. There are wind chimes hanging under the eaves by the front door, what seem like hundreds to Delilah, some made of metal, some of coloured plastic, some of carved bone.

  “We made it,” Annie says. “We’re here.”

  Delilah opens the door and hops down, her body flooding with relief.

  “I’ll meet you in there,” Annie says.

  She’s still staring at the cabin, and Delilah isn’t interested in what she might be thinking. She shuts the van door and walks past an old red pickup with a Ski-Doo parked beside it. There’s a small, crooked porch with beer bottles lined up against the side of the house. She can hear the faintest shimmer of sound from the wind chimes though there’s no wind she can feel. She thinks of dogs, how they can hear sounds humans can’t.

  She pulls opens the creaking screen. Should she knock on her own father’s door? She steps inside. Music is playing. Led Zeppelin’s “Ramble On.” She’s heard it a million times before. He appears through a dark doorway at the back of the cabin.

  “Holy shit!” His hair is wet, shaggy, and he has a beard that reaches almost to his chest.

  He takes the room in three strides and wraps Delilah in his arms. Tears sting her eyes as she lets her weight sink into the fam
iliar muscle and warmth of her father. She can finally relax.

  “Lila,” he says as she buries her face in his shoulder, inhaling the clean-shirt smell, the Ivory soap, the minty toothpaste on his breath. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  THERE IS ONLY A yellow wool blanket for a door on the closet-like alcove she will sleep in. Her bed is a lumpy, shiny green couch. She lies on it, taking in her new surroundings. She feels the springs under her back, coiled like hard snakes. Her dad says he will get her a bed as soon as he can. He knows a guy who’s moving away, and he can get it for cheap. There are only two bedrooms in the shack, and this one is filled with junk her father says was abandoned by the last guy who lived there. He left in a hurry, flew home to Alabama when his father had a heart attack. There is mining gear stacked in the corner, heavy boots, a wooden blasting box that Mac assures her is not dangerous anymore. She still eyes it suspiciously.

  Her parents are laughing in the kitchen as they clean up from supper, a thick stew that Mac made from caribou meat. He told them his friend Will had killed the caribou. He said he had been there and tried to shoot it but lost his nerve at the last minute. Will had been the one to pull the trigger.

  Delilah lets the sound from the kitchen absorb into her cells, soothe the aching exhaustion she has been feeling since Vancouver. She hadn’t slept well at the motel with the strange northern sun blazing until after eleven each night. She listens to her parents tell each other stories, tease each other, her mother light and bubbly as though nothing had happened at all. Look how fun I am, she seems to be saying. How spontaneous. We just up and decided to come see you. When Delilah breathes in, there is a faint wheezing rattle in her chest. She reaches for her inhaler, which is stuffed in her jeans’ pocket, and takes a deep puff of the metallic spray. Waits until the kindling fire in her chest subsides to embers.

  When Delilah comes out, Annie has started unpacking their boxes in the tiny living room and is sorting through a carton of black and white photographs. She sits on the floor, holding up the prints and squinting at them in the dimming light. There’s no electricity in the shack, which her dad has pointed out almost proudly. Something to do with ancient, faulty wiring he hasn’t bothered to fix. They’ll light kerosene lamps when it gets too dark to see.

  Mac walks over and kisses the top of Annie’s head, then beckons to Delilah. “Come on,” he says.

  They put on boots and walk out into the early twilight, climb the steep stairs up the clump of grey rock beside the house. At the top is a pillar made of concrete with a propeller resting on it.

  “It’s a memorial to all the bush pilots. They’ve been flying planes here since before there were even any roads,” he says. “Transporting bushworkers, bringing supplies to mining camps. Dangerous job, flying through bad weather in the middle of nowhere.”

  They sit on the rock. There is a street below them with buildings and old warehouses facing the open lake. Her dad points out to the water.

  “That’s Great Slave Lake,” he says. “This side is Yellowknife Bay. That small island out there in front of us is Joliffe. You can walk to it when the lake is frozen. It’s mostly thawed now.” On the silver horizon, she sees small sheets of thin ice drifting free like rafts on the water. He twists and points behind them to the smaller bay. “That’s Back Bay. Leads out to Giant Mine.”

  He leans against the base of the monument and lights a cigarette. His long hair and big beard make him almost unrecognizable. Only his soft blue eyes seem familiar. She shivers in the breeze. He’s looking far off down the long arm of lake. “We’ll have to get you a proper jacket. That sweater might be good for Vancouver, but you’ll freeze to death here.” He takes a drag and lets it out. “What happened?” he asks.

  She shrugs. The rock is hard and cold under her cotton pants. She can’t tell him about the night her mother woke her to tell her they were leaving Vancouver. How when she opened her eyes, startled, Annie was kneeling by the bed in the glow from the street light. “Come on, little bird,” she had said, shaking Delilah’s shoulder gently. “Wake up. Let’s go.” She was whispering, breathless, like she was saving Delilah from some delicious emergency.

  “Go where?” Delilah had asked.

  “Yellowknife. Tonight. Let’s pack up our clothes and go.” Annie was crackling, her eyes snapping and restless.

  “What? Why?”

  “What do you mean, why? You’re the one who kept saying you wanted to go up there. Don’t you miss your dad? We can surprise him. Just get in the van and drive. It takes three days. We’ll show up at his doorstep. Knock knock, it’s your family.”

  She had wanted to go, it was true. For months she had asked Annie if they could join Mac, but her mother kept saying they had roots in Vancouver, that she needed to finish art school but they would all be together soon. Delilah had finally resigned herself to the big, rundown house with its revolving door of drifters and roommates, people sleeping on camping mattresses on the living room floor. But that night she thought about the school talent show on Friday. She’d been working out a routine to “Jive Talkin’” by the Bee Gees with Dana and the two Jennifers. And her Grade 7 grad was in three weeks. She had already bought her dress at the Bay with money her father sent. Blond Jennifer helped her pick it out. It was candy-striped with little white hearts for buttons.

  Delilah knew better than to try and reason with her mother. And she had seen it coming. All that shouting the night before. Annie slamming a pottery dish on the counter so hard it exploded into shards while Delilah hid in the hallway, peeking through a beaded curtain as Marcel raged, sneered, called Annie names. Witch. Liar. Spoiled rich girl slumming it in Kitsilano with the little people . . .

  He was Delilah’s least favourite of their roommates, even before then. She didn’t like the stupid wine-coloured beret he wore all the time, even when he first woke up in the morning. All he talked about was jazz, and he used big words Delilah didn’t understand. He had been drifting coolly through the house for days leading up to the fight and had stopped taking any interest in Delilah whatsoever. His girlfriend, Jackie, had barely come out of her room lately. Things had changed in the house. Nobody set up watercolours in the living room or sang Carole King at the piano. Annie no longer hosted parties, twirled boas around people’s necks, and urged the women to wear the men’s jackets as she staged elaborate photographs or cooked five-course vegetarian meals for twelve. She was spending her days curled up on the sofa, staring out at the overgrown garden, and her nights as a ball of frenetic energy, pacing the hall outside Delilah’s bedroom on the phone, having whispered, urgent conversations with someone and staying up all night drawing in her room. She would emerge almost catatonic with fatigue in the mornings, a home-rolled cigarette in her mouth, to get Delilah her breakfast before school.

  After Annie went to pack the night they left, Delilah had watched the dark arms of the cherry tree outside her window wave to her in the night breeze. She had raised a hand to wave back. She remembers feeling something small break inside her, scattering like the blossoms.

  “DON’T GET ME WRONG,” her dad says now. “I’m happy as hell to have you. I missed you both like crazy.”

  She nods, watching a raven dip above the rocky ledge.

  “Did she . . . was everything okay when you left? I sent money for rent.”

  Delilah thinks carefully before she speaks. She thinks of tiptoeing through the kitchen to get her favourite owl mug the night they left, sidestepping a shattered bottle of red wine leaking blood-red pools onto the linoleum floor.

  “She said maybe it was time for a change. She said maybe things were going good for you up here. And the air would be better for my asthma. They had a little going-away party for us. Jackie made a cake.” She’s lying. Nobody, not a single person, was there to see them off when they left that misty grey morning. Marcel and Jackie were still asleep, and nobody else even knew they were leaving.

  The raven lands and hops twice, turning to stare at Delilah with its
unreadable black eyes. It’s huge, at least twice as big as any crow she’s ever seen. She waves her finger at it.

  “Well, she’s right.” He shifts his weight. “About all those things. It was a rough year for you. Lots of trips to Emergency. It’s drier up here. Less pollen. And things are going good for me. She’s right about that.” He’s watching the raven too. “They’re smart, ravens. Did you know that? Smarter than crows. They can mimic other animals, even human voices. Sometimes, if they find a dead animal, they’ll call the wolves, entice them to come so they rip it open. Then the ravens can swoop in for the leftovers.”

  The raven cocks its head and lifts off in a sudden rush of black.

  “I kept telling her it would be better for you guys up here,” he says. “But she wanted to stay. All those art school friends and her parents. We put the application in for the housing in Vancouver and everything. Jeez, she can’t sit still, can she?” He laughs. “But now we’re together. We’re all together. Like it’s supposed to be.” He brushes some long hair from his face, and Delilah notices he has marks on his hands. Probably from working. They look like scars, only fresher.

  “So I guess you’ll start school in a few days,” he says. “I can take you in, get you registered. You think you’ll be okay at a new school? The kids are pretty nice here. Ones I’ve met, anyway.”

  “I guess,” she says.

  She has switched schools eight times in seven years. In her experience, kids are often interested in making friends with the new girl. Sometimes rival groups will even fight over her. She usually has a friend or two within a few days. Not the popular girls or the outcasts, but the ones people don’t pay much attention to either way.

  She wonders how the Bee Gees routine went in Vancouver. The girls would have done it last night. They must have had to get someone to fill in for her. She left without saying goodbye, and she doesn’t know their addresses. She has a collection of addresses from left-behind friends. She keeps the scraps of paper in a purple envelope she decorated with glitter when she was six. She has never written to a single one. She isn’t sure why. It’s funny how easy it can be to let people go. Leaving isn’t so hard, Annie told her once. It just takes practice.