Late Nights on Air (23 page)

The air crackled whenever she and Eddy passed in the hall or were in the same room. As far as anyone could tell, Dido did not avoid him and he did not seek her out.

It was a source of considerable interest, this new pairing
of Dido and Harry, even as the man she’d left for Harry continued to work in master control. Eleanor and Teresa talked about it more than once, Eleanor struck by the apparent civility amongst the three: Eddy’s and Dido’s work didn’t appear to suffer from their proximity, and their proximity continued without incident, day after day. Harry, she said, looked ten years younger.

“You mean,” laughed Teresa, “that instead of looking as old as I do, he finally looks his age. The man tells me he’s only forty- two.”

Another time, Eleanor said, “I underestimated Eddy. I never imagined he’d let Dido go so easily.”

“Just wait,” Teresa said. “They haven’t reached shore yet.”

Teresa had some experience in this line, she said, having watched her sister leave her husband several times. Audrey had come to her during their separations and Teresa could almost time the stages. Her sister would have a short period of determination and peace of mind, followed by a bout of waiting for the phone to ring, followed by a third phase when she tried not to phone her husband, but did. Audrey was addicted to him, perhaps they were addicted to each other, and there was nothing she could do except be there to pick up the pieces. “I wonder how long Dido will hold out against Eddy.”

Eleanor cocked her head. “Eddy’s manipulative. I’ve known that for quite a while.”

“She might be too,” Teresa said.

On the shortest day of the year, a mother of young children told Dido on the air that she was able to see the sun rise and
set outside her small kitchen window. Her window faced south, she said, the sun came up on the left and went down on the right, staying well within the window view all the while, and taking four hours to complete its journey. The poor woman was trying to set up a mothers’ co-op in a church basement to give kids a place to run around screaming and mothers a place to talk with someone over the age of six. Dido listened with sympathy. She recognized fraught nerves when she heard them. Her own life was calmer now, but only on the surface. Underneath, everything that mattered was unresolved. Eddy had closed himself off. He ignored her as completely as he had in the very beginning after she’d spurned his invitation to go with him to Prosperous Lake. She admired his steely self-assurance, of which he seemed to have an unlimited supply, but she felt sure he was hurting inside. One afternoon, moments after congratulating herself on having stayed away from him for three weeks, she walked into master control and touched his shoulder. How are you, Eddy? He turned around and looked at her—a look that told her everything she needed to know. He’d been suffering too. And so they were right back where they’d started, except that now Harry was in the picture.

Harry was so amazed to have Dido in his life that he’d stopped drinking in order to savour every moment. Last winter’s habit of emerging on his nights off from overheated bars into temperatures that were thirty below Celsius, of standing drunkenly under a ravishing sky as his eyelashes froze together and the insides of his nose got seared by the desiccating air, of thump-thumping home in a van whose tires had frozen flat—all that
belonged to the past. Now he stayed home every night to be with Dido, who was frequently pensive and restless, but also companionable and sometimes caressing. He left her only to take his dog for a walk on the frozen bay. Outside, the air had a certain smell, sweet, from wood smoke, and pure, from the cold. The snow, so dry and brittle underfoot, sounded like fingernails screeching on a blackboard, but rhythmic, evocative, fascinating: the most northern of sounds.
You’re breaking my back, you’re breaking my back
squealed the snow as he trod upon it. His parka hood rustled against his ears, the fur trim extended several inches beyond his head like a woman’s hair blown forward in the wind.

One particular night would stay in his mind, for its eerie and unnerving quality. He and Ella were on the bay, and Ella had bounded ahead full of rapturous doggy-spirits. His own feet were playing a squeaky duet on the violin-snow, when for some reason he looked behind him and saw two huge dogs on shore. They stood perfectly still, watching him. He walked on and glanced back and there they were, gliding along, keeping pace. Uptown, there would have been a few cars on the road, taxis. Not here. He shouted to Ella and she bounded over and stayed close. He looked back a third time. The dogs were still keeping pace, tracking him, stalking him, and his blood ran cold. A few months later, a small boy would trip and fall directly in front of a chained-up husky and within seconds his head was torn open. A hundred stitches to close the wounds, his round scalp like a football laced with zippers. Harry looked back a fourth time, and the dogs were gone.

A few days before Christmas, Eleanor flew to Ottawa to spend the holiday with her mother. She hadn’t ever looked for another roommate. She would have, but she’d suspected that one day Dido would need a place to come back to from Eddy. Instead, Dido had turned to Harry. But how long would that last? Only yesterday she’d seen Dido and Eddy walking down the street together, and Dido had a vibrancy about her, like a watered plant after a drought.

On the long flight home Eleanor thought about her and Eddy. About the evening when she’d come to appreciate his lethal but understated anger. Their northern support group had gathered in her trailer. She’d been the one to spot the ad in the local paper by the pro-pipeline group that had swiped their name, and she showed it to Eddy. He took a pair of scissors and clipped the ad, then laid it on the kitchen table and studied it, his right hand crumpling the rest of the newspaper until his knuckles were white. Dido sat away from the table, silent, while the others expressed outrage. But then Eddy began to talk. He said this wasn’t a walk in the park. If they were going to play dirty, then so should we. That was the night their little group disbanded. Eddy was too scary, too contemptuous of the rest of them for not being radical enough. Only Dido seemed to agree with him. Eleanor pondered another moment too. She’d had a copy of
The Diary of Anne Frank
on her desk, and Eddy had picked it up and said, “Any teenager could have written this.” His dismissiveness, his crassness. He enjoyed being inconsistent if it kept you off balance and made him look ahead of the game. But somehow Dido had fallen under his spell, the spell exerted by strong men through the centuries, perhaps.

By the time she reached Ottawa, Eleanor had decided that on Christmas Eve, when she took her mother to church, she would light a candle for Dido.

Christmas Eve in Yellowknife was warmer than usual, about twenty below Celsius, and snow was expected before morning. Gwen had persuaded Harry to be her special guest on air from midnight till one.
Christmas Eve with Stella Round
. He could use a pseudonym too, she told him. He could be Johnny Q.

She sat in master control, wearing headphones. Harry was on the other side of the glass, in the studio, and they were discussing favourite songs when he startled her by saying, “Let me demonstrate.” Tilting the microphone towards the corner, he stood up and walked over to the piano, making a rapt listener of Gwen and of anyone who was tuned in at home. They heard his footsteps across the studio floor, the creak of the stool, the pause before he began to play, and the fumbling start. Then his pretty decent version of Irving Berlin’s “What’ll I Do?”

Gwen was completely charmed by Harry, by the song, by the surprise of hearing him at the piano. She hadn’t even been aware that he knew how to play. The “liveness” of it transported her, and she wished that all radio could be so spontaneous and simple, that all nights could be like this one.

The rest of the hour unfolded in the same relaxed spirit of music and impromptu recollections, including hers of hearing Kathleen Ferrier sing Brahms over the car radio one summer when she and her parents were held up for nearly an hour at a lift bridge in Hamilton. His “Alto Rhapsody,” or as the announcer called it, the “Rhapsody for Dark Voice.” Harry
responded by telling her that Kathleen Ferrier had been a telephone operator for a while, “Did you know that?”

“In England?”

“Can you imagine calling the switchboard for a number and getting Kathleen Ferrier on the other end? In northern England, while she studied music. She was only forty-one when she died, poor thing. Maybe you know this, in that rhapsody Brahms is pouring out his longing for two women, Clara Schumann and Clara Schumann’s daughter, who’s about to be married.”

“I didn’t know.” And something occurred to Gwen that hadn’t occurred to her before, except as foolishness. The real possibility of a man loving two women, first one, then both.

“Harry, how did you get that cauliflower ear? I ask, because I’ve been admiring it for months.”

“You’re after my secrets. Well, never play rugby if you value your ears.”

“You can count on me,” said Gwen.

Harry slipped out of the studio, returning a few minutes later with two cups of Maxwell House Instant spiked with Hudson’s Bay overproof rum, which he’d liberated from his bottom desk drawer. Also a recording of Kathleen Ferrier singing nineteen songs. Gwen dedicated “Blow the Wind Southerly” to Lorna Dargabble, “my favourite hairdresser,” who didn’t call afterwards, as Gwen expected her to; but it was Christmas Eve, after all.

Gwen and Harry were in such good spirits themselves that they didn’t sign off as required at one in the morning, but continued for another half hour. Gwen coaxed Harry back to the piano, where he played “Autumn Leaves” and sang the
words, forgetting only a few, and afterwards remarked that the lyrics were good, especially about missing the girl’s sunburned hands, but Johnny Mercer made a serious mistake about the weather, did you catch it? And Gwen said yes. Days grow shorter as the leaves fall, they don’t grow long. “They’re growing longer
now,”
she added. “Today we gain seven more minutes of daylight.”

After they finished for the night, Harry phoned Dido to say he was on his way, he’d be home in a few minutes. “I thought she’d be asleep,” said Gwen, suddenly forlorn in the doorway.

“Not Dido. She’s making a cheese fondue.”

Harry helped her on with her fur coat, looking her up and down, she thought, with all the romance of a sales clerk. He got his parka from his office and drove her home through the falling snow. It came down gently, fine, dry, and in surprising quantities.

That night, Lorna Dargabble went for a walk and didn’t come back. Her husband reported her missing on Christmas Day, but her disappearance didn’t become common knowledge until two days later when it was broadcast on the news. Eleanor returned from Ottawa that evening to all the speculation.

Her husband reported that she’d gone for a walk, she was always going for long, solitary walks late at night. She didn’t take her purse. It was on the table in the hallway. Her coat was gone, her boots were gone. She’d left behind her hat, but no note of any kind; he had looked. Irving Dargabble was a handsome man in his ruddy, white-haired, thick-tongued way. He’d
been a foreman at one of the mines and he was a heavy drinker. Anyone acquainted with him suspected he was in the habit of roughing up his wife. The police knew it for a fact, having been called to the house more than once. They brought him in for questioning. Then for lack of any evidence to hold him, he was let go. They questioned the neighbours on either side. They appealed on the radio for anyone who knew anything about the missing woman’s movements that night to come forward.

The search for Lorna took in the areas her husband suggested, places where she usually walked, and extended beyond them to School Draw, to the other side of Frame Lake, to the area known as Tin Can Hill, to the shoreline. But the Christmas snowfall had been followed by another, a day later, and this one was also undisturbed by wind. Whatever tracks Lorna had made had been covered over and wherever she might have gone lay hidden by snow.