Helpless

by Barbara Gowdy

  They call it quits at the corner of Parliament and Wellesley. It has been dark for a while by then; the streets are emptying.

  “What we should do tomorrow,” Jerry says, “is knock on people’s doors.”

  “The police have done that.”

  “We haven’t. You never know who might answer.”

  “Do you think the woman would?”

  “These kind of people, they’ve got to be cocky, right? But even if it’s one of her kids or her boyfriend that answers, it might trigger something.”

  She reminds him of the press conference at four o’clock. “I’ll need be to be back by three.”

  “I’ll keep going on my own.”

  “What about the store?”

  “John’s there. Listen, I’m in this for as long as it takes.”

  They start walking south. In front of one of the Tamil groceries that are still open this time of night, a young girl sits on a milk crate and peels an orange. Why didn’t the abductors take her, Celia wonders: she’s beautiful, she’s unsupervised.

  “You can go crazy going down that road,” Jerry says.

  “What road?”

  “Wishing it was some other kid.”

  “I don’t wish it,” Celia says, only mildly surprised that he read her mind. She comes to a stop and considers him, a still-handsome man with a tanned bald head, massive tattooed arms, and a barrel chest. “How did you get through?” she asks.

  “Get through?” But it’s clear he understands the question. He rubs his head. “There were some bad years there. My sister…you met Jean?”

  Celia nods.

  “She scraped me off a couple of floors. And then, the passage of time. You don’t want to be that person anymore.”

  They keep walking. Her heart overflows. She stops again and says, “We should get married.”

  “Celia…”

  “We should.”

  His gaze descends to her throat. She remembers she hasn’t taken off the necklace she wore to the motel Friday evening.

  “Rachel’s alive,” he says. “You hold on to that.” He tugs her necklace around so that its single pearl hangs at the front.

  Big Lynne is still sitting at Mika’s kitchen table, arms folded over her large breasts, eyes pouched with fatigue. “Anything?” she asks. Celia shakes her head. Big Lynne sighs. She gestures at the desk and says she has put Celia’s messages in two piles: “The one on the left is your friends, and the other is what came into the command post. People writing down their prayers and good wishes.”

  Celia thanks her. She says good night. Big Lynne says, “I’ll be right here if you need anything, hon.” They’re like women speaking to each other in a dream. Before leaving the room, Celia takes the CD player.

  Nobody has been in her apartment all day, it looks like: the dust is still thick; the footprints—mostly her own—track every inch of bare floor, evidence of her hellish nightlong wanderings. Felix saunters in from the deck, and she fills his bowls before hunting for a cigarette. She finds a half-smoked one in the bathroom, gets it lit, then drops on the sofa and listens to the CD. When the woman says that Rachel is with people who only want her to be safe and would never hurt her, she feels her chest loosen, only to have it tighten at something bad could happen.

  She presses Start again. This time she talks along, trying to match the woman’s pitch. At seriously she attempts the quaver. She turns the CD player off and says, “They would never hurt her, don’t worry about that,” and the next thing she knows she’s waking up to the smell of burning.

  She grabs the butt and tosses it into the ashtray, then spits on the glowing orange circle in the sofa. She hears the TV in Mika’s office. Still trembling, she makes her way down there.

  He’s sitting at his desk among his newspaper clippings.

  “Hi,” he says, swivelling around. He turns off the TV. The dogs haul themselves up and wag their tails halfheartedly.

  She drops onto his chaise longue. After a while a thought she had earlier in the day returns to her, and she says, “Remember my friend Hannah, who I told you about?”

  “The one who died of cervical cancer?”

  “Uterine cancer.”

  “Yes. Right.”

  “I know it sounds awful but I never really liked her all that much. She liked me, so I was her friend. But she was paranoid. She thought everyone hated her. A lot of people did because she’d phone them in the middle of the night and accuse them of gossiping about her behind her back.”

  “Did she do that to you?”

  “All the time. After Rachel was born, it really started to get to me. I stopped returning her calls. I didn’t even call her when I found out she had cancer. I told myself I was too busy. And then one day I was coming out of my dentist’s office on St. Clair, I was by myself, and a woman at the bus stop says, ‘Hi, Celia,’ and it was her. She looked terrible. She had a moustache, this black fuzz on her upper lip, and she was wearing a baggy man’s coat with egg all down the front. I said how I’d heard the news and hoped she was feeling better. She said she was going to make it. I said, ‘Good,’ or something like that. I could have said ‘I’ll call you’ or ‘I’ll come round to see you.’ But I didn’t. She just sort of stared at me. And then the bus pulled up and she got on. A week later, she died.”

  “So now,” Mika says, “you’re being punished.”

  “Maybe.” She lies back. From this angle the bump on his temple—he has removed the bandage—is disturbingly large.

  “If God wanted to punish you, why wouldn’t he give you cancer?”

  “That would be too straightforward. And it wouldn’t hurt as much.”

  He nods. His mouth moves, then he says, “But of all the people who never returned Hannah’s phone calls, why…why would you be the one who has to suffer?”

  “Because she showed herself to me at her unloveliest. At her most exposed. And I turned away.”

  “She got on the bus.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You aren’t being punished, Celia, dear.”

  Something about how sympathetic he sounds, this warm, rueful moment the two of them are sharing, has her burning with anger. “Of course I’m being punished,” she says. “I’m being punished because I’m a bad mother. I’m being punished for going to my dumb job and leaving her…”

  With you. The unspoken words clang around the room. He fingers the bump on his head.

  “Just leaving her,” she says. “Not being home. I don’t blame you, Mika. I really don’t. I blame myself and always will.” She starts to cry.

  “Oh, Celia.”

  “Can I lie here for a while?”

  “Of course you can.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  SITTING AT THE shop counter, looking out the window at the turquoise sky and at the unmarked van that has been parked across the road for the past two hours, Ron remembers the evenings he sat on the porch stairs of the house on Logan Avenue under a sky filled with the same aquarium light. The prickly sensation gripping his skull was the same, too, generated back then by a real fear that his father wasn’t coming home. This was in the months after Jenny and Mrs. Lawson left, when his father stayed late at the office and phoned Miss Spitz two doors down and asked her to cook Ron his supper, something Miss Spitz, a retired schoolteacher whose saving grace, in Ron’s eyes, was that she owned an ancient Kirby vacuum with a floor-polisher attachment, seemed glad enough to do.

  He comes to his feet and moves around the counter—stepping over Tasha—for a better look at the van. The windows are tinted, so if someone’s inside, staking out the shop, he can’t tell. But why would someone be staking out the shop? In child abduction cases the police don’t wait to have their suspicions confirmed, they kick down doors.

  “Getting paranoid in my old age,” he says to Tasha.

  She watches him with her big, crazy eyes. She is lying on a piece of cardboard between a pair of Honda lawn mowers, both of which are due to be picked up in t
he morning. He’ll have to get to work first thing. Or maybe he should start tonight. He stands there, mentally disassembling the engines, checking the throttle plates. No, he decides, he’s too tired. And anyway, he wants to finish going through the newspapers.

  He closes the blinds, switches on a light, and walks over to the basement door. Not a sound. He pictures Rachel asleep and is suffused with tenderness. Before the feeling can turn into something else he strains to hold it there, at that safe, protective place. The vision of her pee is what he’s up against—he’s been up against it since he saw it in the toilet this morning. He wills himself to remember instead the shy droop of her body when she said she couldn’t play the piano in front of people. And how bravely she held herself together when he told her about seeing her mother on TV.

  This came later, the talk about her mother. They were eating supper. He’s still not sure what caused Nancy to reconsider her position about his spending time in the basement, but sometime after lunch she announced that keeping him and Rachel apart was doing everybody more harm than good and that Rachel had agreed to let him eat his supper downstairs.

  “I told her you were feeling hurt and left out,” she reported. “That did the trick.”

  Ron nearly wept. To think that Rachel cared about how he felt! At five o’clock he went upstairs and changed into a clean shirt. A half hour later, when Nancy started fixing the trays, he rifled through the corner cabinet and found the linen napkins that had been his mother’s. “Her meals should be an occasion,” he said, removing the paper napkins that Nancy had laid out. “Something for her to look forward to.”

  “Do you want me to put on a dress?” Nancy asked.

  “A dress?” He turned to her. Despite the three place settings, he hadn’t actually been picturing her at the table. She was wearing the same jeans and tank top she’d been wearing since Friday night, but how she looked hardly mattered. He was the one who needed to make an impression. “No,” he said. “You’re fine.”

  Rachel sat beside him, to his left, and for the first part of the meal he restricted himself to quick glances. Just having her close by, listening to her breathe and swallow, that was enough. He was content to keep out of the conversation, such as it was—Nancy babbling on about vegetarianism and playing the banjo, Rachel responding in monosyllables, made timid, he felt, by his presence. So it surprised him when she caught his eye and said, “You’re watching TV and reading the newspapers, right?”

  He admitted that he was.

  “Okay, so…” She set down her fork. “What are they saying happened to me?”

  He wiped his mouth with his napkin. “That you went missing,” he said carefully. “And that the police are searching for you—”

  “Who’s for more salad?” Nancy cut in. “Ron?”

  He lifted his hand. He could handle Rachel’s questions.

  She was rolling up the corner of her placemat. “Have they shown my picture on TV?”

  She’s vain, he thought, amused. “Oh, yes. Lots of lovely pictures.”

  “Have they shown my mom?”

  Her lower lip quivered, and he was taken aback. Was she going to cry? He stared at her, dazzled by the twitches of life under the polished-wood smoothness of her face.

  It was Nancy who answered. “They’ve shown her a few times,” she said cheerfully. “Eh, Ron? Talking to reporters?”

  With an effort he transferred his gaze to her. “Just once.”

  “When was that again?” Nancy went on, keeping up a show of lightheartedness.

  “Saturday.”

  “In Rachel’s house?”

  “Out on the lawn.”

  “The front lawn.”

  “That’s right.” He glanced back at Rachel. Her face was still again, her eyes clear. She asked if her mother had been upset.

  “Not that I could tell,” he lied.

  “What did she say?”

  “She said…” He cut his eggplant into squares and tried to think of something credible and comforting. “She said, ‘I hope my daughter is safe.’ She said, ‘Whoever has her, please take good care of her.’”

  “She wasn’t crying?”

  “No, she wasn’t crying. She seemed to be doing fine. Holding up.”

  Rachel scratched her throat and looked off to the side, presenting her exquisite profile. He was about to add, “Of course, I don’t know her,” when she turned to Nancy and said, “Can I feed Tasha some of my tofu?”

  “You can try,” Nancy said.

  Ron would have liked to have asked Rachel how she was enjoying the keyboard, but he sensed she wouldn’t welcome a question that obliged her to express any gratitude or pleasure. Besides, her enjoyment was obvious. For most of the afternoon, every time he stood at the door to listen, he caught halting snatches of melody. Or scales. She seemed to practise scales endlessly. But he couldn’t risk mentioning this either, in case she turned the volume down so low he’d be denied hearing her at all. So the subject of her piano playing wasn’t touched on, not until dessert, when Nancy asked about sheet music: did Rachel need any? “There’s this store on Yonge Street where I buy mine,” she said. “It’s got music for every instrument. Mostly piano, though.”

  “I know,” Rachel said. She patted her lap, and Tasha jumped into it. “My mom goes there.”

  “Oh, okay,” Nancy said.

  With two fingers Rachel began to stroke the dog’s back. Ron felt himself becoming entranced again. He felt as if his entire life had been spent waiting for exactly this display of delicacy and sweetness and feminine self-containment. He gazed at the blond hairs on her forearm. His breath quickened, and he stood and walked over to the keyboard and made a show of checking the speaker connections.

  Nancy started to clear the plates. Apparently she wasn’t going to press the matter of the sheet music but Rachel had been considering it. “Maybe the Grade 4 Conservatory book,” she said at last. “There’s some other books but I have to remember what they are. I’ll write the names down for you later.”

  And then she informed them that she was playing a recital on August 10, and since she was going to be missing music camp she had a lot of practising to do.

  “Actually,” she said, “I should get back to practising right now.”

  For a disoriented moment Ron imagined that he would be attending the recital. Taking his cue from Nancy, he left the room, still uncertain as to how this piece of news should be handled.

  “We go along with it,” Nancy said when they were upstairs. “Like we’re going along with the slave drivers.”

  “Right.” He kept forgetting about the slave drivers. They came in handy but the idea of them was so absurd.

  “Let’s just be happy she’s settled down for now. We can burn our bridges when we get to them.”

  “Cross our bridges,” he corrected. He agreed with her, though.

  Nancy should be asleep by now. After putting Rachel to bed she took a couple of Gravol pills and went upstairs.

  He checks his watch. Nine thirty. He turns up the radio. Rachel is the lead story: another mention of the fact that this morning a few items possibly related to the case were retrieved from the Victoria Park waste transfer station. Possibly related but not, as only he knows for certain. In a case where there was no struggle, no coercion, and not even a crime scene, there can be no items. The phrase immaculate abduction leaps to mind, briefly stunning him with its brilliance. He half wishes he could phone it in to the media. He feels, tonight especially, a compulsion to broadcast his extraordinary luck and the sense of destiny it has conferred on him.

  The weather report comes on: below seasonal temperatures for the next few days. He may need to get the furnace going to keep the basement warm enough. He turns the radio down, switches on the lamp and takes the day’s newspapers out from under the counter. Nancy is avoiding the newspapers (as well as the radio and TV) so he goes through them only when she isn’t around.

  He starts with the Sunday Star, which has a section called �
�Where’s Rachel?” Knowing that he’s vulnerable tonight, he avoids the pictures of her. But on the second page there’s a big colour shot of her wearing her “Super Star” T-shirt, the one she was wearing that first day he saw her, and before he can stop himself, he’s on his feet.

  He looks at the door to the basement.

  He takes a step. Halts.

  Yesterday he promised Nancy that he would never enter the apartment without first getting Rachel’s okay. He was only too willing to promise—he needs these kinds of restraints—and he’s determined to keep his word.

  Like an automaton, feeling the great resisting force of his body’s machinery, he changes direction and walks to the window.

  The van is gone.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  TUESDAY AFTERNOON IS cool and clear, no threat of rain, and this time the press conference takes place on schedule. When it’s over, Big Lynne sets out plates and forks and serves the apricot tart she made in her own kitchen the day before. Celia accepts a small piece to prove she isn’t starving herself. With her back to the phone (if she looks at it, the woman won’t call) she smokes cigarettes and drifts in and out of listening to the others talk about the huge media turnout and whether or not the Globe and Mail’s crime reporter suspects the police of knowing more than they’re saying.

  Eventually the conversation moves on to more neutral topics. Big Lynne and Chief Gallagher discover that they both grew up on dairy farms in large families, and the two of them compare stories of 4-H Clubs and 6:00 A.M. milkings, and Celia reflects without resentment or envy—it’s simply a stray thought—that these are people whose lives have never hung, as hers does, by the thread of a single human attachment.