Helpless

by Barbara Gowdy

  At six o’clock they turn on the TV for a rebroadcast of Celia’s appeal. She is disturbed to realize that she never once looked up from her notes to address the woman personally. But the others assure her that looking down is better, more natural.

  “Playing up for the camera never works,” Big Lynne assures her. “It’s like you’re acting, and that puts people off.”

  A few calls come in, from friends and well-wishers. Nothing from the woman. At seven o’clock Chief Gallagher leaves, and a bit later Little Lynne shows up with pizzas and to take over from Big Lynne, who nevertheless hangs around for another hour or so. The waiting goes on until midnight and beyond, with Little Lynne staying up after Celia has gone to bed.

  Not that Celia sleeps. She paces and smokes. She has fits of sobbing—into pillows and towels so as not to alarm Mika. Lying on the pile of clothes on Rachel’s floor she mentally inventories the faces of every woman she has ever served at the video store. She goes into the living room and listens to the CD of the woman until the voice disintegrates into a meaningless, hideous racket. She opens books and points at the page, and the word her finger has landed on is a message. But no matter what the word, she can’t tell whether she should be encouraged by it or frightened. Even hope (which she lands on) is inscrutable.

  No call comes the next morning, either. It’s possible, of course, that the woman isn’t listening to the radio or TV. And so Mika designs another flyer, this one featuring a photo of Celia and Rachel hugging each other under the heading “Please Give Me Back My Daughter,” and then there’s a transcription of what Celia said on the air. An hour later the flyer is being distributed citywide by the volunteers who have been taken off the ground search. Meanwhile Celia and Jerry continue knocking on doors that the police knocked on a day or so earlier. They work opposite sides of the street or, if they’re in an apartment building, opposite sides of the hallway. Where they can, they look in windows.

  The only way that Celia manages to stay functional is to enter a state of detached, almost catatonic alertness, a thing she finds she is able to do once she’s outside her own home. People look at the flyer and then at her and then at the flyer again and become stricken with sympathy and with their inability to help. Holding herself at an otherworldly distance, Celia asks them to check their garages and lockers one more time. She can barely feel it when the women touch her arm. There are women of the right age and with the right general appearance but they don’t have the right voice. There are men who could be the boyfriend of the woman, and Celia peers past them, down their hallways. At one house, a queasy feeling infiltrates her composure and she asks the man if she can look around. “Be my guest,” he says, holding his German shepherd by its studded collar, waving her into his grimy, smoke-filled living room. He even opens a locked basement door and then apologizes for the mess, explaining that the police searched the room a couple of days ago.

  “Sorry to bother you,” she says.

  “Hey, no problem,” he says. “I’d be going out of my friggin’ mind if I was you.”

  It’s almost ten o’clock by then, and Jerry walks her back to the house, where Big Lynne and Mika are waiting to tell her that the television show Lost Children phoned and a crew is arriving tomorrow morning to tape a segment.

  “It’ll air Saturday night at nine o’clock,” Mika says, referring to his notes. “The Fox Network.”

  “They’re doing a special about abducted children from other countries,” Big Lynne says. “Kids who might have ended up in the States. They want Rachel to be the main story.”

  “The States? Who says she’s in the States?”

  “Nobody, hon. Nobody. It’s a slim possibility, that’s all.”

  Celia tries to remember if she’s ever seen the show. She doesn’t think she has.

  “There’s a sizeable Canadian audience,” Mika says. He checks his notes again. “Eight hundred thousand. Of which more than half are here in Ontario.”

  “We don’t have to tell them about the phone call, do we?”

  “No, no,” Big Lynne says. “Absolutely not. That’s top secret.”

  “Will they want to talk to me?”

  “They asked to.”

  “Well…I guess…” Celia sets down her canvas bag of undelivered flyers. She feels anxious about taking time away from her door-to-door search. “If it doesn’t go on too long.”

  “You give them as long as you like, hon, not a minute longer. They’ll be here at eight sharp so you’d better try and get some sleep.”

  She tries until 2:00 A.M., then gives up and wanders through the apartment. There’s something about being in motion that keeps her a split second ahead of panic. At around three o’clock Mika comes upstairs and offers her a tranquilizer. She declines. She doesn’t want to be foggy for the interview. She asks him to lie down with her, though. She thinks that might help. They lie on Rachel’s bed and gaze at the ceiling, where three lines of light, which seem to have no connection to the gap between the curtains, cross to form a collapsing H.

  “What does it mean?” Celia says.

  Mika takes a long time answering. “Nothing,” he says finally.

  She dozes off. When she wakes up, she’s shaking.

  “It’s all right,” Mika says.

  “If they kill her,” she says, finishing a thought from her dream, “I don’t know how I’ll be able to kill myself fast enough.”

  “They aren’t going to kill her.”

  “I need a gun. Do you think Gallagher could get me a gun?”

  “Celia, the phone call hasn’t been leaked. Nothing’s happened.”

  “I need a gun.”

  “Why are you talking like this?”

  “If she dies—”

  “But she won’t.”

  “But if she does, why would I live another minute?”

  A siren screams down Parliament Street. She could swim out into Lake Ontario, she guesses. It’s only a ten-minute drive to Cherry Beach.

  He starts to speak, then squeezes her hand. She turns and looks at him.

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  She closes her eyes. When she opens them, it’s dawn. She smells coffee. Still barely awake, she shuffles to the kitchen, where Mika is cutting up the apples and plums he found at the bottom of her refrigerator. She sinks onto a chair. “Did you sleep?” she asks him.

  “A little.” He touches the bump on his temple.

  “How is that?”

  “Fine. I’m completely recovered.” He sets the plate of sliced fruit on the table. He has more to say, and she waits, listening to the spatter of rain on the roof.

  “If it’s all right with you,” he says at last, “I’d like to go out with you and Jerry…after the television people leave. I can’t match the woman’s voice to a face, I can’t do that, but I’m sure…I would recognize it if I heard it.”

  “If you feel up to it, that would be great.”

  “The other thing I was thinking is that we should look beyond the grid. I’ve been asking myself, Why would they be holding her inside the grid when they must know that that’s where the most intensive searching goes on?”

  “The phone call came from inside the grid.”

  “To deceive us, maybe.”

  “But beyond the grid is the rest of the world.”

  “Let’s suppose it isn’t. Yes, they may have taken her out of the country, but from what I’ve read that’s rare in cases of abductions by strangers.” He’s speaking energetically now, without hesitation. “So if we suppose that she’s still in Toronto, I think we should also suppose that they’re not holding her in a high-rise apartment building or anywhere else where the neighbours are too close for comfort. We should be focusing on less congested places. Apartments above stores, that kind of place.”

  “Houses next to empty lots,” she says.

  “Down at the waterfront, for instance. In the industrial areas.”

  “Oh, Mika.” She’s wide awake now. “This is a really good
idea.” She feels in the pocket of her bathrobe. “I was sure I had a cigarette in here,” she mutters, coming up empty.

  “Are you out?”

  “Do you have one?”

  “Sorry. I meant to buy some yesterday.” She bursts into tears.

  “Celia. Oh, God. I’ll go see if Lynne or—” “No…it’s…” “You’re exhausted.” “It’s just that…”

  It’s that her hopes are up. It’s that last night all she could think of was getting her hands on a gun.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  THANKS TO GRAVOL, Nancy falls into long, dreamless stupors. At ten o’clock she closes her eyes and the next thing she knows it’s morning and the guy who lives above Vince’s garage is revving his motorcycle. While Ron goes on sleeping, she gets out of bed and hurries down to the basement.

  She has discovered that by pulling the handle toward her she can turn the lock silently. The only sound is the whisper the door makes brushing over the carpet. This morning, Thursday morning, Tasha is in the room. She dashes past Nancy and up the stairs. Nancy goes over to the bed and parts the curtains.

  Her newest terror is that to punish everybody—herself and Ron and the mother—to get back at them for their sins, Rachel won’t make it through the night. But here she is, only asleep, fists tucked up by her throat. Nancy lets out her breath. Every morning she is stunned all over again that this beautiful girl wound up in Ron’s basement. It’s like having a fairy in the basement, or a movie star.

  She closes the curtains. Before she reaches the door, a small, strangled sound has her rushing back. “Rachel?” she says. Rachel’s eyelids are fluttering. What Nancy wouldn’t give for the right to hold her.

  “Rachel?”

  Rachel sighs and rolls onto her other side, facing the wall.

  Back upstairs, Nancy lets Tasha into the yard and puts on the coffee, then sits at the kitchen table and takes a look at the chart Ron wrote out last night for the sake of having a clearer picture of how Rachel is passing her time. “It isn’t cut-and-dry,” Nancy told him, but as they went through Rachel’s day together she realized that it was pretty cut-and-dry, that, since Monday, things had more or less settled into a routine.

  8:00-8:30—breakfast*

  8:30—10:00—watching cartoons*

  10:00-11:00—drawing*

  11 :00—12:00—flaying keyboard

  12:00-12:30—lunch*

  1:00—2:00—watching Antiques Roadshow*

  2:00—3:00—playing keyboard

  3:00—snack*

  3:15—4:30—playing cards or board games*

  4:30—5:30—watching Cheers, playing keyboard

  5:30-6:00—supper**

  6:15—8:15—watching DVD movie**

  8:15-9:00—bath*

  9:00-9:30—reading*

  9:30—lights out.

  A single star means that Nancy is usually in the room. Two stars mean that Ron is there as well. Granted, he has only watched a movie with them the one time, and that was last night, but he’s hoping it will turn into a regular event, and Nancy can’t see why it won’t. Rachel was fine. Afterwards, when Nancy asked her if she’d minded that he’d stayed on, she said, “He didn’t talk. People talking all through movies is the only thing I mind.”

  “So you’re not so scared of him anymore,” Nancy ventured.

  “Not if you’re there.” She picked up the Beauty and the Beast DVD—it was the one they’d just watched—and said, “He’s like the Beast.”

  Nancy had to laugh. “He is, isn’t he? Big. And shy. Even the hair!”

  “I mean he’s weird.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “But don’t tell him.”

  “Hey, he’d never get mad at you.”

  “It might hurt his feelings, though.”

  “It might,” Nancy said slowly. “That’s true.” On Monday, to win Rachel over to the idea of letting him join them for supper, she’d talked about his mother’s dying when he was little and how not being allowed downstairs was hurting his feelings, but she hadn’t expected it to be taken so deeply to heart.

  She pins the chart to the bulletin board. The coffee is ready, and she pours herself a cup, then steps outside with her cigarettes. In the corner by the fence Tasha is digging a hole, her stubby tail going like a motor. “Tasha, come!” Nancy calls. The dog keeps digging.

  “Tasha!”

  The dog trots over. There’s something in her mouth. She drops it on the stoop.

  It’s a dead rat, a little grey one. Shaggy coat. Smooth, banana-coloured belly.

  “Ah, jeez,” Nancy says. She picks it up by the tail and tosses it over the fence. She likes rats. She used to keep them when she was a kid. She hopes this isn’t a sign, that’s all. It feels like a sign: your dog bringing you a dead rat first thing in the morning. Don’t let it be a sign, she prays.

  RON WAKES from a dream that Rachel is sitting on his lap and kissing him on the lips. He tries to hold on to the sensation of her luscious mouth but quickly loses it to the real world: Tasha barking, the smell of coffee.

  He gets out of bed and lumbers down to the bathroom. He’ll be fixated on that kiss all day now, as though it really happened. If he could just see her, he knows he’d be set straight. But Nancy doesn’t want him going down to the basement without her, not unless there’s a good reason. Maybe he could say he needs to check the vents for mould. Or maybe—his hand goes still on the hot-water tap—he could show Rachel a few of his vacuums. It seems to him that she’s just about ready for a little educational diversion.

  He shaves and showers, his mind wholly occupied by this exhilarating prospect. Which machines would she get the biggest kick out of? The Westinghouse, for sure. She’ll never see another machine like the Westinghouse, he can guarantee that. And then the Hoover Model O because it’s one of only three left in the world. Maybe he’ll bring down the Hercules Dust-Killer as well, show her how they used to generate power with hand pumps back in the 1800s. It’ll be a history and science lesson rolled into one.

  It’ll have to wait until later, though. Edith Turnbull, an old friend of his mother’s, is expecting him to drop off her rewired floor lamp first thing, and then she wants him to take a look at her central vacuum canister.

  But that’s all right. Thinking about his vacuum cleaners, picturing the best of them in the room again—with Rachel looking on—has given him some breathing space.

  NANCY STUBS out her cigarette and goes back inside to fix Ron his new crash-diet breakfast: orange juice, a soft-boiled egg, a piece of toast with margarine, black coffee. Right on schedule, at seven thirty, he comes down.

  “I was thinking,” he says. He pulls out the chair and sits. “I could show her my vacuums this morning.”

  “This morning?”

  “Not the whole collection. Three or four.” He taps his spoon on the back of the egg. “It’ll be educational for her. Stimulating as well.”

  “I suppose,” Nancy says. She can always cut it short, if Rachel gets too bored. “Don’t you have to go to Mrs. Turnbull’s?”

  “I’ll be back by nine thirty. We can move her drawing time to one of the TV-watching slots.”

  He eats quickly, gulping his coffee. When he’s gone, Nancy makes breakfast for herself and Rachel. It’s the same every day now: orange juice, slices of banana and apple, scrambled eggs, porridge with cream and brown sugar. She picks the tray up gingerly, testing her bad leg, then heads down to the basement.

  She hears the sobbing before she reaches the bottom of the stairs. “I’m coming!” she calls. But in her agitation she drops the key, and hours seem to pass before she finds it and gets the door open. By now her leg has begun to cramp. She staggers over to the bed and falls next to where Rachel lies curled up on her side.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “The slave drivers…they…”

  “No, no, no.” Sensing there won’t be any resistance, she draws the hiccuping child into her arms. “You had a bad dream, sweetie, that’s all.�
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  “The man, he put me in a cage…”

  “Shhh. There’s no man. He’s all gone.”

  She frees up one hand to punch her cramped leg. With the other, she presses Rachel closer. The sobs seem to be pouring out of Rachel’s chest into her own. They seem to be rattling down her body to her aching thigh, where they start to have a soothing effect. When they stop, in that same instant, so do the cramps.

  For a few minutes they both lie still. Out in the yard, Tasha barks.

  “See?” Nancy says. “You’re here with Tasha and me and Ron, safe and sound. It was only a dream.”

  Rachel wriggles out of the embrace. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she says crossly.

  She picks at her breakfast and refuses to talk. Finally she throws her fork on the floor and cries, “I know it was only a dream! Quit saying that!” Her eyes fill. They look blind, they’re so light blue. “I want my mom,” she whimpers.

  “I know,” Nancy says miserably.

  “Couldn’t I just talk to her on the phone for a minute?”

  “Sweetie…”

  “Couldn’t I write her a letter then?”

  Nancy tries to imagine what the risks might be. Fingerprints, but those can be wiped off.

  “When I was at science camp,” Rachel presses, “I wrote her every day.”

  “Well…”

  “Please.”

  “Maybe a short one.”

  Rachel jumps to her feet.

  “But you can’t write about me or Ron. Or even Tasha. You can’t write about the shop.”

  “I won’t, I won’t, I won’t!”

  “We’d better do it now, before Ron gets back. Let’s talk about it first, though. What do you want to say?”

  “I want to say…” And she launches right in: “‘Dear Mom. I love you very, very much. I miss you so much. I miss Felix. Don’t forget his vaccination shot. I miss Mika. I hope he’s all better. I hope Osmo and Happy aren’t moping about me like they did last summer.’” Her face darkens. To Nancy she says, “They hardly ate.”