Helpless

by Barbara Gowdy

  The cries jerked higher. There was a deep male groan, after which the cries broke off. Jenny hurried back to where he was. She tugged his sleeve. He pulled away.

  The rescuing thought that the man in there wasn’t his father came and went. He returned to his room, shut the door, and sat on the edge of his bed.

  Jenny giggled.

  She was lying under the covers. He jumped up. “What are you doing?” he whispered. “Get out of here!”

  “I’m scared,” she said in a small voice. He knew she wasn’t. All he could see of her was the glint in one eye and the suggestion of her face, a darker whiteness than the pillow. He wondered if she and her mother were sex maniacs. Mrs. Lawson must be, or else why would his father let her into his bed? It was quiet down there now. Were they finished? His skin felt pricked all over by pins or sparks.

  “For goodness’ sake,” Jenny said, “are you going to stand there all night?”

  She sounded like the woman doll. Stirred—and shamed—he yanked at the covers. “I said get out of here!”

  “Don’t, don’t,” she whimpered.

  “What if your mother comes back?”

  “She won’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because she stays with him for…I don’t know…an hour sometimes.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “They used to sex all the time at our old house.”

  He couldn’t quite let himself hear this. “Maybe they’re going to get married,” he said.

  “My mother is never getting married again,” she said. “Ever.” She pulled the covers back up around herself. “Are you coming to bed or not?”

  He climbed in and lay at the very edge of the mattress, turned away from her. Spears of light from a passing car shot through the blinds onto the wall, where they leaned and fell, then drifted upwards.

  “We could play,” she whispered.

  Up near the ceiling the spears zoomed off.

  “Okay,” she said, “you’re Phil and I’m Carol. Our baby is called Wendy and our horse is called Misty.” She shunted closer. “Wendy fussed all day long,” she said in the woman doll’s voice. “I hope she hasn’t got the croup.”

  Ron had no idea what the croup was. He said, “Me, too.”

  “You have to speak lower,” she said.

  “Me, too,” he growled.

  “I don’t know what I’d do without Misty. He’s such a comfort to me.” Her arms slipped around Ron’s waist.

  He ejaculated, although because it was his first time, he thought he’d got so keyed up he’d wet his pants.

  “Now you say something,” she said, nudging him.

  “I’ve…” He struggled for breath. “I have to…”

  “What, darling?”

  “Go to sleep.”

  “Aren’t you going to kiss me first?”

  “Stop it, Jenny. I mean it.”

  She withdrew her arms and climbed out of bed. “Okay,” she said. She still seemed to be in the game but as a squeaky-voiced little sister who cheerfully did what she was told. “Nighty-night,” she whispered from the hall.

  He waited until he heard her door shut before turning on his light. He’d already figured out what had happened, and he wondered if some evil force had entered the house and taken possession of all its inhabitants. Except that he didn’t feel evil, but maybe you weren’t supposed to, maybe the evil force vanquished guilt. Which would explain how his father and Mrs. Lawson could have sex only a few feet away from their own children. They used to sex all the time at our old house. If it was true, it must have been before his mother died because, since then, his father had never once gone out after supper.

  And even this prospect, for all its awfulness, failed to disgust or offend him. He was barely able to hold it in his mind. He turned to face the wall on the other side of which was Jenny.

  He couldn’t believe how normal everybody was at breakfast. Jenny read a book about Welsh ponies and kept checking her watch. She looked at him woodenly when he asked her to pass the milk. Of course, his father and Mrs. Lawson were old hands at putting on a show, he knew that now. Still, it amazed him that they gave nothing away. When his father squeezed by Mrs. Lawson to get to the fridge, all she did was say, “Oops, sorry.”

  After everybody had left, he rummaged through Jenny’s desk. There was a pad of paper, some markers, four decks of flash cards, and a harmonica. He blew on the harmonica. He considered writing her a note that said, “Dear Carol, hope to see you tonight, your husband, Phil.” But what if Mrs. Lawson found it? Jenny’s nightgown was hanging from a hook on the back of the door, and he went over and stroked the soft flannel. It dawned on him that he had better start wearing shorts under his pyjama bottoms, just in case. Maybe Jenny knew what happened to boys—she knew more than she should—but if not, he couldn’t imagine telling her. What he could imagine was her saying, “Hey, why are you wet?” Then he’d have to jump off the Bloor Street Viaduct. To make certain he died instead of turning into a human vegetable, he would jump from the highest point.

  She didn’t show up that night or the next. He had a good idea why. Both nights until past two o’clock he lay awake with his door ajar, and no sounds came from down the hall.

  On the morning of the third day he caught her by herself as she was going down to breakfast. She was wearing another of her old-fashioned, baggy dresses, this one red velvet with white bows at the wrists.

  “Hey,” he whispered, leaning over the banister. “When do you think we can play again?”

  Without turning, she cocked her head. “Pardon?”

  “You know,” he said. “Phil and Carol.”

  “Oh,” she said, starting to blush. “Well, the trouble is, I don’t think your father likes my mother anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He just doesn’t like her.” She touched her birthmark.

  “Why not?”

  “How should I know?” And on she went, down the stairs.

  She came to him that night. He must have fallen asleep as soon as he closed his eyes because the last thing he remembered was pulling the covers over his shoulders.

  “Phil? Phil?” She was lying behind him. “Are you awake?”

  “Hi, Carol.”

  Before he was even properly facing her, she had her arms around him. She clung and squirmed. “Oh, darling, darling, darling,” she whispered. He grasped handfuls of nightgown.

  When it was over, she went still, as if sensing the change in him. He held her by her shoulders. She felt alarmingly flimsy, like one of his model airplanes. He asked if she was sure her mother wouldn’t go back to their room. She said, “Uh-huh.” She sounded groggy.

  Already he was getting excited again. “Better not fall asleep,” he said in his regular voice.

  Her body tensed. “I won’t,” she said crossly, and pulled herself free.

  “What’s wrong?” Could she tell he was excited?

  “Wendy needs her bottle.”

  He had a flash of cunning. “But, darling,” he said in Phil’s voice, “aren’t you even going to kiss me good night?”

  The kiss was a hard pushing together of their closed lips. It hurt more than he’d thought kissing a girl would. As his arms started to go around her, she wrenched back. “Good night, good night, good night,” she snapped from within another baffling flare of temper. She slid her feet to the floor.

  She showed up the next five nights in a row. Provided he talked like Phil and called her darling, she was happy to kiss him. In Carol’s voice, she said, “I love you so much,” and in Phil’s voice he said he loved her, too. He wished he had the nerve to say it in his own voice.

  Before and after school, when he had the house to himself, he looked through her closet and dresser drawers. He laid her underpants, dresses, and tights on the double bed she shared with her mother, putting the dresses above the underpants and the tights beneath, to make a line of girls. Back in his own room he imagined enemies
for her—werewolves, assassins, cannibals—then killed them with his G.I. Joes. He decided that he would marry her as soon as she had finished high school. She’d be nineteen by then, he’d be twenty-two. A lightness came over him to have this resolved; he felt cleared of an enormous guilt he hadn’t been entirely aware of. What she felt, he couldn’t guess. During the day she hardly glanced at him, and he understood that if he wanted to keep their game going, he was to keep his distance.

  SHE FAILED to show up the next three nights, even though he heard Mrs. Lawson in his father’s room. What was the matter? Had he upset her? Was she tired of him? He couldn’t bear not knowing. On the morning of the fourth day he waited for her outside the bathroom door and when she emerged he said in his man’s voice, “I missed you last night, Carol. I hope Wendy isn’t sick.”

  Instantly she fell into character. “Oh, she’s just going through a fussy stage.”

  “I hope I see you tonight.”

  “I need my sleep, you know,” she said, though not so dismissively that he lost hope.

  She came just after midnight. He pretended to be asleep and let her kiss him awake. By simply saying, “Aren’t you boiling hot, darling?” he got her to take off her nightgown.

  She had shut the door, as always, and they weren’t even talking, and yet her mother must have suspected something because she threw the door open and flicked on the overhead light.

  “Oh, my God!” she cried. She rushed over and dragged Jenny off of him.

  “You’re hurting me!” Jenny cried. She hung limply in her mother’s grip. Mrs. Lawson snatched up the nightgown. Through her nightgown her body showed, the thin, flatchested shape of it. Naked Jenny and naked Mrs. Lawson, one taller than the other, that was all. Ron, who wasn’t naked, pulled up the covers.

  “What’s going on?” His father stood in the doorway.

  Mrs. Lawson wrapped the nightgown around Jenny’s middle. “Go to your room!” she said, giving her a push. With tight, stumbling steps—the nightgown was tripping her up—Jenny headed out, past his father.

  “He had her on top of him,” Mrs. Lawson said. “Naked.” Her voice was clipped now, matter-of-fact. She spoke as someone who had seen this coming.

  Ron’s father looked at Ron as if perplexed to find him there, in his own bed. “Okay,” he said to Mrs. Lawson. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “You’d better,” she said.

  His father waited until she was in her and Jenny’s room before asking Ron what had happened.

  “Nothing,” Ron said. Under the glaring overhead light his father’s bald spot shone like glass, like a glass lid.

  “Nothing,” his father said. He looked up at the model airplanes that hung from the ceiling. “Okay,” he said, switching off the light. “We’ll deal with this tomorrow.”

  Next door, Jenny and her mother were talking in quiet voices. Ron was too terrified to get out of bed and listen at the wall. You’d better. What was it Mrs. Lawson wanted his father to do? Hit him? Call the police? If the police came, he’d sneak out the back door and jump off the Bloor Street Viaduct. It helped to imagine his suicide and the aftermath, all the guilty parties.

  His father didn’t wake him for breakfast. He woke him as everyone was leaving the house. “We’ll talk tonight,” he said. Instead of going to school Ron went to the ravine and walked for miles along the Don River, whose dereliction—the odour of sewage, the stranded plastic bags and halfsubmerged shopping carts—provided a sad, companionable comfort. He had figured out that he probably wouldn’t be sent to jail. What was more certain was that Jenny would never come to his room again. He doubted she’d even want to. He wondered—and this compounded his dread—if she’d write a story about what the two of them had got up to.

  Dusk and hunger finally drove him home. The light was off in the front hall but he perceived the emptiness. Except for the television, the floor lamp, and his father’s chair, the living room had been cleared out as well.

  “Is that you, Buddy?” Ron went to the top of the basement stairs, and there his father was at the bottom, pushing up a mattress. “Grab that end,” he grunted.

  Little was said as they worked. Mrs. Lawson had hired a truck and two men and had moved her furniture to her sister’s place in Barrie—his father told him that much. Where she and Jenny were now, he couldn’t say. “Nope,” he answered as to whether he thought they’d ever come back.

  For supper he ordered pizza. They sat on their old chairs at their old kitchen table, which compared to Mrs. Lawson’s seemed cheap and rickety. The pizza cutter was missing, though it had been theirs. Ron’s father used scissors. “You know what you did was wrong,” he said. “You know that.”

  “I’m probably going to marry her,” Ron said. “When she finishes high school.”

  His father set a slice of pizza on each plate. “You’ll get over her long before then.”

  “I’ll never get over her.”

  “Sure you will. Believe me, I know what I am talking about.”

  He seemed to be on the verge of offering up some of his words of wisdom, of taking the two of them back to where they’d been before Mrs. Lawson and Jenny. Ron waited, but there was nothing else. They put their heads down and concentrated on eating.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  IN THE SECOND-FLOOR bedroom that serves as his office, Mika presses an ice pack to his temple and studies the chart he has been putting together. His cell phone is on the desk by his left hand, and as he reads he nervously flips the case open and shut. True, the woman phoned on Celia’s line, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility of one of the other abductors phoning him. The not-so-veiled offer to pay for Rachel’s release still stands, after all.

  Happy and Osmo slump at his feet. They are anxious and despondent and won’t be comforted. Every once in a while Osmo gets up and turns in a circle, and Mika, his concentration broken, glances at the television set he keeps tuned to the twenty-four-hour news station. If there’s nothing on about Rachel, he looks at the bookshelves for the sake of satisfying himself that they’re free of fingerprint dust. A police-hired firm is arriving in a day or so to clean the entire house, but despite persistent nausea and vertigo (the aftereffects of the concussion), Mika took care of this room on his own.

  He sets down the ice pack and checks his watch. Ten fifty-five. Under the A.M. column of his chart he writes 11:00. The day is Monday, the hour 61. Hour by hour, he’s tracking the investigation and media coverage. A child vanishing during a blackout would be a big story no matter what; make the child gorgeous, and it’s huge. On Saturday the picture Mika took of her in her white-lace dress filled the front pages of all three daily papers, and yesterday the Star had an entire “Rachel” section in which neighbours were interviewed, various experts consulted, and pertinent aspects of the case itemized, including details of Mika’s fall down the stairs and Chief Gallagher’s unequivocal statement—more of a relief to Celia, it seemed, than to Mika—that “Mr. Ramstad has been cleared of all suspicion and is now helping to facilitate the investigation.”

  Throughout these articles Rachel’s looks are underscored. “The Face of an Angel” was the Sun’s headline this morning, over another full-page photo. What do the editors mean to suggest? That the disappearance of a more normallooking child would be less newsworthy or terrible? Maybe Mika is being too cynical. Rachel does have the face of an angel and, as he tells Celia, if ever there was a time when the media’s fixation on beauty could prove useful, it’s now. Let the media be enraptured is his primary feeling. Let them enrapture the public, let the public fall in love with Rachel, let the public become so personally invested in seeing her found safe that not even their own brothers and sons will be above suspicion.

  People take for granted it’s a man they’re looking for. The woman’s phone call is still a secret (a false-alarm bomb scare is how the police are accounting for their activities at the Gerrard Square Mall) and one of the reasons Mika is scouring the newspapers and listening to radio an
d TV reports is to assure himself it remains that way. He has heard the recording, the woman saying they would never hurt Rachel, but could she really speak for the man or men or cult that, with her phone call, she betrayed? He confesses nothing of his misgivings to Celia. She is trying so hard to imagine Rachel in reasonably safe hands. When she learned that the woman’s DNA had failed to produce a match, instead of being discouraged, she said, “Okay, she hasn’t got a criminal record, she’s not a criminal, that’s good.”

  Right now, Celia is searching the Don Valley with a group of volunteers. Mika had thought, after hearing about the phone call, that the ground search would be called off. But as a lead investigator explained to him, calling it off after only two days would have the media demanding to know why. On top of which, and more importantly, the phone call doesn’t preclude the discovery of physical evidence—an item of clothing, or even of Rachel herself.

  “Abductors have been known to let their victims go,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t she run straight home?” Mika asked.

  “If she was in a condition to.”

  If she was in a condition to. With these dreadful words now at the front of his mind, Mika is more frustrated than ever that he’s still not feeling steady enough to take part in the search.

  There are other ways to be useful, however. Yesterday afternoon he and Jerry Osborne, Celia’s boss at Tom’s Video, arranged to post a fifty-thousand-dollar reward—twenty-five thousand each—for any information leading to Rachel’s safe return. The announcement was made public at a 4:00 P.M. news conference, as Mika has noted on the chart. A reward entering the picture so early in an investigation is unusual, but the feeling of Chief Gallagher is that, while the abductors may not trust a ransom offer, there’s a chance that one of the greedier or less involved participants could be lured out with the more legitimate prospect of a reward. For the news conference he said simply, “We have no leads and no suspects. We’re hoping fifty thousand dollars will do something to change that.”