Helpless

by Barbara Gowdy

  While grateful for his discretion, Celia began to fret that the phone call would be leaked anyway. Mika couldn’t blame her. “The whole police force knows,” he reminded Gallagher.

  “They also know what’s at stake,” Gallagher said. “Many of them have kids of their own.” He put a hand on Celia’s shoulder and promised her there would be no leak, and he sounded so persuasive and looked so invincible with his large jaw and pale, deep-set eyes (even when he was smiling, which he certainly wasn’t now, he gave an impression of barely contained ruthlessness) that Celia was reassured, and Mika wondered if he didn’t have some illicit, rarely resorted-to stratagem up his sleeve.

  On his chart, under Thoughts, Mika wrote: Best course of action in event of leak—outright denial?

  Tomorrow afternoon Celia will be making another plea to the abductors, this one scripted with the help of Chief Gallagher to appeal directly, though not too obviously, to the woman caller. So Celia will be saying that she is the only family Rachel has and that a little girl Rachel’s age needs to be with her mother. She’ll beg the abductors to be merciful and to do the right thing. In Mika’s opinion the tone is perfect: he can’t imagine that the suspicions of the other abductors will be aroused, but neither can he imagine how the woman—if she hears the message—will remain unmoved.

  Eleven o’clock. He turns on the radio.

  “…continues for nine-year-old Rachel Fox, the little girl who went missing from her downtown Toronto home during last Friday’s blackout. In spite of a fifty-thousand-dollar reward offer and a massive effort that has brought together hundreds of volunteers plus scores of search-and-rescue experts, Chief of Police Tim Gallagher confirms that there are still no concrete leads. Earlier this morning police personnel spent several hours at the Victoria Park waste transfer station, separating household garbage from clothing. A few items that may or may not be related to the case were retrieved.”

  Mika knew this was going on. He entered it under 8:00 A.M. Now, with a trembling hand, he enters the details: A few items retrieved at transfer stn.

  Keeping a record, he says to himself. It’s the slightly embarrassed explanation he gave Little Lynne when she brought him coffee and he saw her looking curiously at his chart and clippings. To confess that by creating an overall picture he’s hoping to detect a clue—an unexplored avenue of investigation perhaps—would have sounded arrogant, he felt, especially to a police officer.

  “Whatever helps you get through,” was Little Lynne’s response, and he thought, Yes, there’s that as well.

  He comes to his feet and goes to the window. Pushing up a slat of the blinds, he peeks out. The crowd across the street is larger than it was an hour ago. One woman, conspicuous for her girth and yellow straw hat, has been front and centre since dawn, sitting on a folding beach chair. No one else is familiar. For the most part people stand and gaze and move on, like visitors at an exhibition. Last night a group of children from Rachel’s school held a vigil, and a few votive candles still stubble the curb. Above all this, along the telephone wire, pigeons hunch their square shoulders and make small shifts of position.

  He turns back to the room. The dogs are awake, watching him. He closes his eyes and attempts to recapture a sense of Rachel. But it’s gone…it left the moment he heard she was alive. He imagines this is because the forces of terror necessary to bring it about aren’t quite as potent as they were.

  He sits at his desk and presses a hand to his throbbing temple. He thinks, nothing prepares you for loving a child. Even when you know that you love her, you still may not have any idea how much because the feeling is so ordinary and instinctive, like a love for life or truth.

  If only he’d let her give him the flashlight. If he’d had the flashlight, none of this would have happened. “Stupid, stupid,” he mutters. That Celia forgives him is a miracle. Not for a second does he forgive himself.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  AT BREAKFAST ON Monday morning Nancy asks Rachel what she thinks the best model of electric keyboard is.

  Rachel doesn’t know.

  “Well, Ron won’t settle for anything less than top of the line,” Nancy says. “I can guarantee you that.”

  Rachel’s heart races. She has always wanted an electric keyboard. When Ron leaves to go to the music store, she lets Nancy talk her into drawing pictures on the card table. She’s nice to her. She says, “You smell good. Like cold cream.”

  Nancy touches her face. “I must’ve forgot to wipe it off.”

  There’s another smell coming from Nancy, a bad breath smell, but Rachel isn’t going to mention that. “Why do you use cold cream?” she asks. “You don’t wear makeup.”

  “I use it instead of soap, right? I’ve got really dry skin.”

  Rachel looks at Nancy’s wrinkled face. “You know what smells exactly like cold cream? Magnolia blossoms.”

  “I’ve never been to the South.”

  “Magnolias grow right here in Toronto. I guess they grow in the South, too.”

  “Have you ever been South?”

  Rachel shakes her head.

  “Would you like to go some time? To Florida or some place like that?”

  “I’d like to go to Disneyworld.”

  “One day you just might,” Nancy says. “You never know, eh?”

  Rachel shrugs. She used to have a grandfather in Florida, but he died. She studies her drawing—it’s the lamb at Riverdale farm—and decides it isn’t any good. She looks over at Nancy’s drawing, which is either a horse or a dog. “Can we watch TV now?” she asks.

  All day yesterday, from the minute Ron hooked up the satellite, she lay on the sofa and watched TV. Nancy tried to get her to play board games, but Rachel didn’t feel like it. “Being kidnapped makes you tired,” she pointed out. She kept falling asleep and dreaming about the slave drivers. In one dream their leader was Lina’s uncle, Mr. Hakim. He tried to get her to drink a potion. Waking up, she was relieved for a few minutes to be somewhere Mr. Hakim would never look.

  She goes over and sits on the sofa, leaving room for Nancy. “Okay, let’s see,” Nancy says. She picks up the remote, then puts it down again. “That’s him,” she says, hearing something Rachel didn’t, and she leaves the room. A minute later she returns to ask if Rachel is okay with Ron coming in.

  “I guess,” Rachel answers. Still, at the sound of him on the stairs, she limps into the far corner. It isn’t that he scares her, or at least not as much as he did, it’s that she doesn’t want him checking her sore foot. But all he does is glance in her direction and say, “Glad to hear you’re feeling better.”

  He has the speakers. He puts them down, then brings in the keyboard. He takes his time deciding where everything should go and what furniture needs to be moved. Rachel wishes he’d hurry up because she has to pee. Finally she can’t hold it any longer and she slips into the bathroom and turns on the tap to cover the noise. When she comes out, he’s playing notes and sliding the volume up and down.

  “It’s top of the line,” Nancy tells her. “Just like I said. All the bells and whistles.” For some reason she’s talking very fast. She gives Ron a nudge. “Let Rachel have a try.”

  Ron steps aside. Rachel walks over, forcing herself not to limp. She brushes her fingers along the keys.

  “You can change the settings,” Ron says. He goes to show her, and his hand grazes her shoulder.

  She flinches.

  “Sorry,” he says.

  “Like, you can make it be a harpsichord or a grand piano or jazz organ, or whatever,” Nancy says, still talking fast. “Go on, sweetie, sit. The stool’s adjustable. You just crank the lever there on the side.”

  Rachel sits. She presses “Rock Piano” and plays a pair of C-major chords, then tucks her hands under her legs. “I can’t play in front of people,” she says, meaning in front of him.

  “Oh, okay,” Nancy says. “We’ll get out of your hair.”

  “I won’t be a second,” Ron says and goes into the bathroom.r />
  “What’s the matter?” Rachel whispers to Nancy.

  “The matter? What do you mean? Nothing. Nothing’s the matter.”

  “You’re talking really fast.”

  “Am I? Oh, well, I’m just so thrilled. I’m thrilled for you, that’s all.”

  “But you sound upset.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  The toilet flushes, and Ron comes back out, rubbing his hands together. Rachel hopes he didn’t dry them on the towel.

  “Okay, sweetie,” Nancy says. “Have fun.”

  She and Ron leave the room.

  Rachel waits until she hears the shop door close before pressing the button for “Classical Piano” and playing the first few bars of the piece she’s working on at home—the Bach Minuet in G Minor. She wonders if Nancy is upset because the keyboard is top of the line and Ron wasn’t supposed to spend so much money. Or maybe when she was in the bathroom he told her about her bad breath and that hurt her feelings.

  It exasperates Rachel to think this. “Everybody around here is so sensitive,” she thinks. Her throat aches. She wants her mother. She wants her mother to have a top-of-the-line keyboard.

  WHEN RON pushed the toy chest back a few inches to make room for the keyboard, Nancy found herself looking at a folded piece of paper that had the word HELP written on it in orange marker. Without Ron’s noticing, she picked it up. Rachel, at the time, was in the bathroom, so she didn’t notice anything either.

  Now, standing behind the garbage shed (she told Ron she was going out for a smoke), Nancy rereads the words They are liars as if she could see them in a less wounding light. Calling Ron a liar she can understand, but why include her? Aren’t she and Rachel supposed to be allies?

  Frankly, she’s surprised Rachel still wants to escape, considering the slave drivers she thinks are prowling the streets. And how did she think she was going to get the note outside? Was she going to bide her time and wait for Nancy to screw up?

  Nancy presses the note against her chest, against her fantasy that Rachel was starting to feel at home. It’s just that she seemed almost cheerful this morning, talking about magnolia trees and the South, so when she said she’d like to go to Disneyworld, Nancy began to wonder if Ron’s plan for the three of them to live in Florida might not be so farfetched after all. She pictured the palm trees and the pretty stucco bungalows.

  She tells herself that Florida might be in the cards yet, some grimy, motel-room version of it. Because whatever happens, Rachel can’t go home. Nancy still wishes Ron had phoned Children’s Aid instead of bringing her here, but she has come around to agreeing with him about the landlord. Her change of heart happened yesterday when she was having a shower. In her mind she saw a man with his hands on Rachel’s body, and she knew, as definitely as you know you’ll never kick an animal, that she’d never send a child back to an abuser.

  Something else comes to her, now, another revelation: keeping Ron out of the basement has been a mistake. Look how Rachel cringed when he accidentally touched her arm. Unless Rachel gets to know him better and find out how gentle he really is, she’ll always be cringing.

  Nancy reads the letter again. The writing is heart-meltingly neat: straight across the page, no slanting off. No spelling mistakes. They are liars. Well, we are, Nancy thinks. Let’s face it.

  She decides to put the note back. As long as she stays awake down there, what harm can it do to let Rachel have her little secret.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  OVER THE WEEKEND Celia had thought that her best chance of finding Rachel would be to follow her instincts. “Right or left?” Constable Bird would ask, and she’d try to feel a tug in either direction. There were streets where she remembered people having smiled or stared at Rachel in a way that now seemed suspicious, and she would get Bird to pull over while she studied certain houses and strained to pick up a signal: a voice in her head, a shift of light. Anything. Twice she and Bird climbed out of the car and knocked on the front door. At the first place a blind man and his guide dog answered. At the second it was an old woman who spoke no English.

  Where was the telepathic power she’d tapped into Saturday morning? She was trying so hard to be aware and in the moment. Maybe she was trying too hard. Or maybe there’d never been any telepathic communication in the first place; it had all been wishful thinking. She felt foolish and inept, a drain on Bird’s time. But what was she supposed to do with herself? She couldn’t sit around at home, going mad. Bird suggested she join the grid search, and after not much thought she agreed. Grid search. It sounded so reassuringly methodical. She pictured the Earth sectioned off like a soccer ball, and the people and things within each section being there for the finding.

  Today, Monday, she is with a group called OVERT, which stands for…she forgets…something Volunteers something Response Team. Since 8:00 A.M. they’ve been moving up the Don Valley ravine, spreading out into the parks and wild areas. The debris down here is mostly beer cans and plastic bags and broken bottles, but there are surprises as well. Celia comes across a cardboard box of cement denture moulds, and the man to her left finds a metal Ladies sign that must have been pulled off a washroom door. Around three in the afternoon the same man finds a girl’s red tank top. Celia’s relief that it isn’t Rachel’s causes her a few minutes of deafness, during which time she is able to read lips. “I’m all right,” she insists. By now she is caught up in the rhythm of the search and is glad when it resumes. On she goes, with the expectation of finding she hardly knows what. Not Rachel (the idea of her waiting under a bush seems too fantastic, too much to hope for), and not anything belonging to Rachel, either. It’s more a case of covering ground, getting it out of the way. Shrinking the grid.

  At four o’clock the searchers divide into subgroups and go their separate ways. At six thirty, in a park on the east side of the river, Celia’s group breaks for supper. She collects an egg-salad sandwich and a Gatorade and walks off by herself to sit on a log situated above a stretch of rapids. She feels like a machine, her hand parts putting food into her mouth part as her eyes mechanically scan the rocks and trees on the far bank. A man who looks like Bill Clinton sits down next to her and starts in on his sandwich.

  “How are you holding up?” he asks.

  His raspy voice startles her for being so much like the voice of the woman on the tape. “I’m okay,” she answers but something in her has ruptured and she adds, “Except I’ve got to get back home now.”

  The man goes to look for the person in charge. So organized and efficient are these people that in no time a car is waiting for her at the nearest intersection. The driver, an older man in a Hawaiian shirt, talks the whole way about a cat he lost six months ago and is hoping will show up eventually. “Not that I’m comparing my circumstances to yours,” it occurs to him to add. On her instructions he pulls around behind her house, where an officer patrolling the lane opens the car door and then the gate to the yard. Jerry, her boss at Tom’s Video, is sitting with Mika on the back stoop. Both men come to their feet.

  “I haven’t even thanked you,” she says to Jerry. She means for putting up half the reward money. He draws her into his arms. A long time ago, during his boxing days, his wife and seven-year-old son were killed in a car accident.

  “She’s alive,” Celia says. She thinks he deserves to know.

  “I feel that, too,” he says.

  “No, I mean she is,” Celia says. She’s crying. She leaves it to Mika to tell him about the phone call.

  “Can I have a listen to that tape?” he says.

  The three of them go into the house. Big Lynne, who is sitting at the kitchen table and has obviously met Jerry, announces that she has just heard some good news.

  “What?” Celia says, stiffening.

  “The reward has gone up to seventy thousand dollars. Two separate donors called in and made pledges of ten thousand dollars each.”

  “Who?” Celia asks.

  “We’ve got their names but you would
n’t know them, apparently. One is somebody Edwards, from London, Ontario, and the other is MacDougall, I think it is. They want to remain anonymous. To the general public anyway.”

  “That’s great,” Jerry says.

  Is it? Celia has no idea. She was braced for a sighting, another phone call. “Anything else?” she asks.

  “The tips to the hotline are up over eight hundred. That’s the most there’s ever been by day three on a case like this.”

  Day three. Too much time is passing. Celia tells Big Lynne she wants Jerry to hear the tape, and after a pause to register the fact that Jerry is aware of the phone call, Big Lynne gets up, turns on the CD player and slides in the CD, which is one of several copies made by forensics from the original message.

  Jerry listens twice. “I feel like I’ve heard that voice before,” he says.

  “Really?” Celia says.

  “I’m just not coming up with a face.”

  “Was it from around here?” Big Lynne asks.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “It must be from around here,” Mika points out, “if you’ve both heard it before. A store customer.”

  “Except I’ve gone over those names,” Celia reminds him. “Twice.”

  Jerry says, “They wouldn’t be holding Rachel right in her own neighbourhood, would they?”

  “It’s not being ruled out,” Big Lynne says.

  She reads to him the police profile of the woman caller: white, midthirties to early forties, native of northern Ontario, high school dropout, tobacco smoker.

  Jerry listens to the tape a third time. He shakes his head. He offers to look at the customer list himself, although he says his gut tells him it isn’t someone from the store. Celia suggests that while there’s still light the two of them walk around and hand out reward flyers. “Something might ring a bell.”

  They go along Carlton to Sherbourne, south on Sherbourne to Gerrard, then east to Parliament, where they turn north. A few media vans follow but keep far enough back that within a few blocks Celia forgets about them. Jerry hands out the flyers, saying, “Reward’s up to seventy thousand.” He knows these people: their names, where they live. Celia knows quite a few as well, mostly from the store. Everyone knows her. Even a couple of homeless men make the connection, and when they do their sympathy is so pure and unsparing that Celia has to turn away. She studies the faces of passersby. She hardly expects the woman to be out enjoying herself. Still, she homes in on certain females, certain female voices. She looks up and down the street, at storefronts, at parked cars, hoping to spark a memory.