“What’s bothering me is I’m here.” She scowled and picked at her bandage. “Do you know who the men are that want to hurt me?”
“Not by name.” Other than Mika, there were only the men who drank at the motel, and Nancy had a feeling Rachel wouldn’t take them seriously.
“Are they slave drivers?”
“Slave drivers?”
“My friend’s brother, he’s from Africa. He says the slave drivers that live there come over here and kidnap girls that have dark skin and send them back to Africa.”
“Okay,” Nancy said uncertainly. Should she go along with this? Would it make things easier?
“I thought maybe they’re slave drivers.”
“Well, maybe they are.”
Rachel looked up. “Really?”
“Ron hasn’t actually told me.” She straightened the pile of DVDs in her lap.
“He doesn’t want to upset you probably.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“What will they do if they can’t get me?”
Nancy sighed. She wanted to comfort this kid, not terrify her. But if she said, “Give up and go home,” she’d just have to invent another gang of bad guys. “Wait around,” she said finally.
“For how long is what I wonder.”
“Oh. A while.”
“Ron said more than two weeks.”
“He did?”
“I think three weeks. I think they’ll wait around for three weeks.” She nodded. She intended to stick with this idea. And she was through talking about it. “I should have a bath,” she said, coming to her feet.
“I’ll run it for you,” Nancy said.
“Can we wash my hair?”
“You bet we can.”
Later, Nancy told Ron about the bath but not about washing Rachel’s hair.
She can hardly tell it to herself. You hold a little girl’s head under the tap. She’s naked in the tub, her eyes are squeezed shut, she trusts you. But she isn’t yours. She shouldn’t be anywhere near you, as a matter of fact. If there are words for how that can make you feel, Nancy doesn’t have them.
Besides, it’s none of his business.
WHILE RON waits for Nancy to fall asleep he holds himself motionless, although his heart is drumming and itchy rivulets of perspiration trickle down his chest and ears. Sex might help but he feels her resistance and he respects it. Not for the first time he is struck by the irony that he has stayed with Nancy all these years partly because she can’t have children, and yet what attracted him right from the beginning was her maternal instinct.
In her new incarnation she’s scarcely recognizable. Her little face, normally so eager, is pinched with purpose and judgment. Not always reasonable judgment. She’ll admit that Rachel needed rescuing from that Mika bastard, then five minutes later she’ll say, “You shouldn’t have taken her.” He’s trying to be patient. He can understand how hard it might be for her to accept that only a day ago Rachel was living through the same nightmare that she herself, at the same age, barely survived.
There’s also the fact that Rachel’s mother has a hold on her sympathies. She met the woman once, unfortunately, and found her to be really nice. “Who could love a child more than her own mother?” she asks.
Me, he thinks. I could. But he knows better than to say so. “She’s the love of my life”—what if he said that? What if Nancy had come back early today and caught him slumped on the counter, sobbing? She’d have been scared to death. No explanation other than that he was losing his nerve would have made sense to her.
It isn’t his nerve he’s losing, it’s his grip, his emotional equilibrium. The thought of Rachel in the basement is agony. He’s almost better off going down there because then he sees her for the scared little human being she is, and all he wants is to make her feel safe. If killing somebody would accomplish anything, he’d do it. He’d kill Mika in a minute, not that Rachel would thank him.
He reminds himself that it has been only twenty-six hours. In a few days the tension will ease off, they’ll all relax, and Rachel will be in a better position to see her old life for what it was. Right now he’s the enemy. He’s the one she hates. Thinking this, his eyes fill, and for a few seconds he’s on the verge of breaking down again. He retrieves the memory of her foot in his hands, and that helps. Except now he has to go down there.
“Nance?” he whispers.
Silence.
“Are you asleep?”
He gets out of bed and leaves the room. Once he’s in the kitchen he breathes more freely. Despite what Nancy said, he doubts that Rachel can hear him through the three-and-a-half-inch fibreglass insulation. And even if she can, a few muted creaks aren’t the kind of noise that disturbs a sleeping child.
He feels his way to the shop, where he switches on a light. A towel is under the counter, and he gets it and wipes his face and chest. It’s much cooler down here. He looks at the door to the basement. Is she warm enough? He’d better check. He picks up the key and takes a few steps, then stops, shocked by the ease with which he almost talked himself into barging in on her.
And yet…What if she’s in trouble, moaning in pain?
He opens the door and steps onto the landing. Before he knows it, he’s at the bottom of the stairs. He remembers Tasha and counts himself lucky that she hasn’t woken up and started barking. He presses his ear against the door to the room. Nothing. Good, he thinks forcefully, pushing aside his disappointment that there’s no need for him to enter. He sits on the bottom step.
She’s not even ten feet away. She’s wearing the pink nightgown Nancy bought her. He stands. He sits. He begins rocking back and forth, big swings of his torso as if physical momentum alone could decide whether he should go in or stay put. And yet even as he surrenders to the sensation of consciously abdicating responsibility he knows which side of him will prevail and when it does, when the rocking stops, it’s as though he has passed through fire. This is why he needs to be down here, he tells himself. To test his love.
“Pssst!”
He jerks around. Nancy is on the landing, motioning violently for him to come up. He gets to his feet. The joy evaporates. Why didn’t he send Nancy home hours ago? He can’t remember. He can’t remember why he was so adamant about having her move in.
He enters the shop and shuts the door. He isn’t looking at her, so when the first punch strikes him in the ribs he thinks he’s been shot: a sniper through the window. He grabs onto the counter, one arm raised against what there’s no mistaking now—the hard fast jabs pelting him like rocks. “Hey!” he’s saying. “Hey!”—trying not to yell. Finally he gets hold of her wrists. For a moment they stare at each other. Her face leaps with fury.
“You promised not to come down!” she hisses.
“I didn’t promise.” Her body slackens and he releases his grip. He thinks she’s going to collapse but she only hobbles sideways. “I was worried about her,” he says. “I haven’t spent any time with her, not really. You two have spent hours together. I’ve spent what? Ten minutes?”
“So?”
“I wanted to…see how she is.” A tide of exhaustion has him groping for the stool. He sits.
“You’re why she wet the bed,” Nancy says. “Why she crawls under it.”
Her fists clench, and he braces for another battering. Where did she learn how to throw a punch like that?
“Don’t you get it?” she says.
“No,” he admits.
“Because you were never scared of somebody. Of somebody coming…”
Her voice catches, and he is moved. “Nance,” he says. “You know I would never hurt her.”
“She doesn’t know.”
“Oh, God.” He walks out from behind the counter and takes her in his arms. She presses her forehead against his chest.
In bed he holds her until she’s asleep and then he rolls over and looks at the picture on his bedside table. There’s enough light that he can make out the frame and the crack in the glass. The pic
ture itself he can imagine, although it’s only because his mother died twenty-six years ago today that he even tries to impose her on the cocky stance and stubborn jaw, the bony knees. A long time ago the girl in the picture became somebody else to him.
Chapter Twenty
JENNY’S SCHOOL WAS in Burlington, just down the street from where her mother worked. Since Alcan’s head office was on the way to Burlington, the plan was for Ron’s father to give them both a ride, although it would mean that he’d have to leave an hour earlier and Ron wouldn’t get his usual lift to school. Ron didn’t care. For one thing, he’d gotten used to being alone in the house. Also, he wanted to take apart Mrs. Lawson’s vacuum cleaner, and on Monday morning, as soon as he heard the car doors shut, he wheeled it out of the broom closet and turned it on.
There wasn’t much suction, partly because, as Ron knew, the exhaust on these old Hoover Constellation models was designed to blow onto the floor and form a cushion of air. He cleared out the intake tube and adjusted the fan belt, and matters improved. He decided against telling Mrs. Lawson. The last thing he wanted was to have her thinking he’d fixed her vacuum for her sake, for the sake of impressing her.
That night she heated up chicken stew from a frozen batch she’d brought in a cooler the day before. Ron, remembering how her husband had died, scrutinized every spoonful for bones. So, he noticed, did Jenny. After supper Ron’s father asked if anyone wanted to play gin rummy, but Mrs. Lawson said Jenny had homework to do, and when Jenny left the table, Ron felt awkward. The partnership between him and his father, so clearly broken with a woman in the house, now seemed like a game he’d made the mistake of taking seriously.
“I’ve got homework, too,” he said.
On his way past Jenny and Mrs. Lawson’s room he glanced in. Jenny sat very straight at her desk, her back to the door. He went down to his room and lay on his bed and wondered about her. Was her “Moving Day” story true…was she really happy to be here? Did she miss her father? Her horse?
He rolled onto the floor and dragged out from under his bed one of the suitcases in which he kept his old toys. Beneath all the tanks and trucks and soldiers he found a Shetland pony, partly melted from the time he tried to see how the plastic would burn. He threw it back in, searched around some more and dug out Geronimo’s black stallion, Midnight.
Downstairs they were watching television. There was a wailing sound—on the TV, he thought—but then he realized it was coming from Jenny’s room. He crawled across the floor and pressed his ear to the adjoining wall. “Go to sleep,” Jenny was saying, “go to sleep now, go to sleep.” And then the wailing sound again. “Oh, all right,” she said, “I’ll heat up your bottle.”
He stood and went out into the hall. Silence. He went down to her room.
She was sitting in front of the dollhouse. Without looking around she said, “Do you want to play?”
He stepped across the threshold.
“You can be the father,” she said.
“Those shingles are real cedar,” he told her, moving closer. He’d noticed them earlier.
“I know.” She got up on her knees. “It’s all real. The chimney is real brick. They make little bricks especially. And when you do this—” She pushed a button on the fireplace. “Look! Fire!”
Fake fire, but still. He set Midnight down and peered in. No wires were visible.
“Okay,” she said importantly, “look at this.” She flicked a switch on the stove and the burners turned red. “And there’s food in the fridge.” She opened it. “Ketchup and milk and juice and a roast of beef and everything a person would eat.”
Her arm bumped his as she reached into the dining room. On came the chandelier. “Everything works,” she said. She tipped a rocking chair that had an old-lady doll in it. The chair rocked hard, the old lady keeled over. She grabbed something and pressed it into his hand. It was a chimpanzee. She’d taken it from a crowd of tiny stuffed animals propped up on one of the toy beds. “My mother told me your mother used to collect stuffed monkeys,” she said.
It was a perfect replica of his mother’s favourite chimpanzee, right down to the orange segmented fingers and the red vest and cap.
“Your mother was a scatterbrain,” she said.
“She was not,” he said angrily. Where had she heard that?
Jenny looked puzzled. “What’s a scatterbrain?” she said.
“I have to finish my homework,” he muttered.
He put the chimpanzee back and went to stand but Jenny cried, “Hey!” She had picked up Midnight. “I didn’t see him! What’s his name?”
“Midnight.”
“I think he should be Misty.” She snatched up a man doll and thrust it at him. “Put him on Misty. He’s outdoor father.”
Ron didn’t think to refuse. He spread the doll’s legs and set him in the saddle. Because the knees wouldn’t bend he could only secure him by leaning him forward and pinching the arms on either side of the horse’s head in a jockey’s pose. Jenny seized a woman doll from the kitchen and pranced her out of the house. “Oh, Phil,” she said in an actressy voice. “You promised to mow the lawn.”
Ron waited. The man looked so small and insecure on Midnight, though he was smiling happily. He had brown wavy hair and wore blue jeans and a blue-and-green checkered shirt.
“He has to answer,” Jenny said in her own voice.
“I’m riding my horse,” Ron said.
“All right, darling. Don’t be too long.”
Ron cantered Midnight to the end of the carpet.
“Okay,” Jenny said. “Leave him there. Now you’re indoor father.” She handed him a blond man wearing a navy bathrobe and smoking a pipe. He had a sleepy, heavy-lidded smile.
“Can’t the other guy go in?” Ron said. The man’s smile disturbed him.
“Don’t be silly.” She pointed to a bedroom. “Okay, lie him down. Turn on that lamp.” Ron obeyed. Jenny switched off the downstairs lights and hopped the woman up the stairs. In the doorway the woman paused to say, “How many times do I have to tell you not to smoke in bed?”
Ron tugged at the pipe.
“It doesn’t come out,” Jenny said briskly. She placed the woman beside the man. “Oh, darling,” she moaned, and turned her doll and pressed it against Ron’s. “Hold him!” she ordered because Ron’s hand had flown right out of the house. “You have to hold him,” she said. “They’re sexing!”
Ron sat back on his heels. For the first time since he’d come in here he was aware of Jenny’s proximity.
“Hurry up!” she said, a blush overtaking her face.
His mouth felt parched as he reached in and held the man. That was all he had to do; Jenny’s doll did the pushing and moaning.
“Hey, Buddy!”
It was his father, calling from downstairs. Ron jumped up and ran into the hall. “Yeah?” He still had the man doll.
“Wild Kingdom is on!”
“I’m doing my homework!”
“Just letting you know!”
He returned to the room and dropped the doll on the carpet. Nothing of the panic he felt constricting his face showed on Jenny’s. She looked only irritated as she plucked the woman off the bed and walked her into the baby’s room.
“See you later,” he said.
No answer.
At breakfast she was her silent, unfriendly self. It surprised him that she could pretend nothing had happened; it elevated her in his eyes. After everyone had left the house he went into her room. The man dolls were where he’d left them, one lying across Midnight, the other on the floor nearby. The woman doll was leaning against the refrigerator, her head twisted backwards. He picked her up and picked up the indoor man and rubbed them together. Nothing. He twisted the woman’s head to the front and tried again, this time saying, “Sexing,” and now he felt a thrill but it was disappointing compared to what he’d felt last night. He needed Jenny, he guessed. Without her, the dolls were just dolls.
That evening he stayed in hi
s room and started putting together his new model airplane. Although Jenny chattered away next door, he fought the temptation to go over. He suspected she knew better than to talk to anyone about the sexing, that wasn’t what worried him. It was his father’s finding out he’d played with dolls at all. If Jenny gave up waiting and came to his room, he’d tell her he was busy. “Can’t you see I’m busy?” he practised under his breath, using different tones of voice. But she didn’t come. Why? Was she mad at him? Had she even thought about him at all?
DAYS WENT by and then weeks and she kept to herself. He figured he’d let her down. Or maybe she just didn’t like him. She barely spoke to his father, either, except when she had a new story to read. (Since “Moving Day,” there’d been “Guess What? I’m Part Chinese,” “How to Make Friends,” and “The Tragic Death of White Star,” about a racing horse that broke its ankle and had to be put to sleep.) Mostly she stayed in her room, or she and her mother sat at the kitchen table and worked on her flash cards. Every Saturday after lunch they visited people they knew in Burlington. On Sunday evenings they lay on the sofa together and watched The Wonderful World of Disney. It unsettled Ron how they clung to each other with their legs and arms entwined. If his father also found this behaviour peculiar, he never let on.
She began to be the girl he dreamed about at night, the girl who was in danger but didn’t realize it and couldn’t hear him yelling. He’d been having these dreams for years but until now the girl had always been faceless.
One night he woke up from such a dream, and there she was. “What?” he said, frightened.
“Shhh.” She wore a long white nightgown. She moved into the horizontal bars of light coming through his blinds. “They’re sexing,” she whispered.
“Who?” He thought she meant the dolls.
“My mother and your father.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Come on! You can hear them!”
Still uncomprehending, he got to his feet and followed her into the hall, then stopped at the sound of birdlike cries coming from his father’s room. Jenny, who was right outside the door, covered her mouth with her hands.
Helpless Page 15
