Late Nights on Air Read Online Free PDF Page A

sky deep blue, the air continuously warm. Yellowknife was like a summer residence, a northern resort. It was Summer itself. Children were in the playgrounds all night long.
    Harry’s little white house on Latham Island overlooked Back Bay, an extension of Yellowknife Bay, itself an arm of Great Slave Lake. One evening he enticed Dido to spend time with him by offering to take her sailing on the bay. Later the same week they went out in his canoe, paddling across Back Bay to the tiny abandoned cemetery on the opposite shore. Dido asked to get out and wander about, and it was there, in that spot, that she first smelled invisible apples.
    “‘Transparent fruit,’” nodded Eleanor a few days later when Dido thought it wise to bring her along as a chaperone. The pleasant odour, pervasive but without a source, made Eleanor think of other phrases that captured the North as it lit up the human imagination. “Garden of Desire.” “Country of the Mind.” She was sitting in the middle of the canoe as if she were a factor for the Hudson’s Bay Company. “My father would have loved this,” she murmured as they paddled her around, a woman who seemed older than she was, closer tofifty than forty, but she’d always seemed older than she was, always an Eleanor, never an Ellie.
    That evening Dido stayed alone in the cemetery, while Harry and Eleanor explored the shore. She was kneeling in the long grass, trying to make out the name on a weathered wooden cross and thinking of her father in his tweed cap and trench coat, an anglophile until the last. She’d learned about his sudden death three weeks after it happened, in a letter from her mother, an act of casualness that still dumbfounds her. Now, in the sloping, overgrown shadiness of a faraway cemetery, something extraordinary happens. She hears him call her name.
Dido
. And she looks around, exactly as she did when she first caught the sweet smell of apples in the air.
Dido
.
    Her heart opens wide and she trembles. The voice is real. Not old or quavery, but clear, unmistakable, as confident in her as ever. A steady, loving voice. Not wanting to break the spell, she stays kneeling for several minutes and says nothing to the others.
    That night she sleeps a long, deep, uninterrupted sleep, and in the morning she dresses for work knowing she’s equal to whatever lies ahead. At 5:30 p.m., when she reads the news, her accent is gone and each word seems to pronounce itself.
    It was like putting my foot on firm ground, she marvelled a few days later when she confessed what had happened.
    Gwen gave her a look of honest envy, keen and wistful. She had always wanted the same kind of miraculous release. To be caught up in something so remarkable that she was taken completely out of herself.
    Slender-hipped Dido. Who didn’t fall in love with her that summer? Who didn’t notice her habit of holding her mug backwards, embracing it with both hands and lacing her fingers through the handle? Or recall that she drank her coffee black? Or remember her boast that she had a Thermos of coffee at her bedside in order to indulge herself first thing in the morning before getting up?
    Harry thought her voice sounded like a tarnished silver spoon. He listened for it coming down the hall, catching her unusual scent first. Patchouli, she told him. A heavy, dark-brown fragrance from the other side of the world.
    Dido was slender despite having wide shoulders and thick wrists and big hands. Reliably kind despite being reliably hurtful. A long, pleasant evening might be the prelude to a single, crushing remark: “Harry, you grunt like an old man when you lift that canoe.” Yet she was zealous in her compliments and capable of the most reckless intimacy.
    That she would marry a man younger than herself, for instance, yet be more intrigued by his father even before she met him, her sense of attraction building from the son’s initial description and abetted by his answers to her many questions, until she