Helpless

by Barbara Gowdy

  “That’s something for dogs,” Nancy agrees.

  “‘I’m fine,’“ Rachel goes on more slowly. “‘So don’t worry. I have a beautiful room with a big-screen TV and a soft, white carpet and a brand-new electric piano, and—’”

  “Hold on,” Nancy interrupts.

  Rachel spins around.

  “Don’t say brand-new. That means it was just bought, and the police might be able to trace the store.”

  “‘And an electric piano, and I’m practising a lot. When the coast is clear…’” She turns on her heel again. “Can I say about the slave drivers?”

  “No, better not.”

  “Why?”

  “Well…” Nancy fusses with collecting the dishes. “You don’t want to scare her, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So I’d leave them out of it, if I were you.”

  “Okay, I’ll say, “When the coast is clear in two and a half weeks, I’ll be coming home, and then—’”

  Nancy sighs.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” Now isn’t the time to dash her hopes about going home. “Go on.”

  “‘And then I’ll tell you all about my adventures. Love, Rachel. Ex oh ex oh ex oh.’ And I want to draw a picture.”

  Fifteen minutes later Rachel is watching cartoons, and Nancy is in the shop trying to find a stamp, her ears pricked for the sound of Ron’s van, although it’s still early. A book of stamps turns up in a coffee mug. She rips off two for good measure. Before sealing the envelope (on which Rachel has already written the address) she takes out the letter and reads it again to make sure nothing is given away about the house. The picture is on the other side. At the top it says I MISS YOU and then there’s a girl, Rachel playing a keyboard. She has purple hair and orange skin. Black tears fall from her eyes. The TV and both windows are shown but, like the girl, they’re done in all the wrong colours. Nancy sticks the letter in the envelope and goes to the kitchen to hide it in a side pocket of her purse.

  She’s coming back down the hall when somebody pounds on the front door.

  “Hello!” a woman shouts.

  It’s Angie.

  Nancy limps into the shop. After a few fumbling attempts she gets the door opened.

  “Where is he?” Angie says, entering on a gust of perfume. She glances around. “Is he here?”

  “He’s out,” Nancy whispers. The room seems to be tilting. She feels sick to her stomach.

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Look at you. Your worried, scrunched-up face.” She presses Nancy’s cheeks between her hands. “Why haven’t you been returning my calls? Eh? Eh?” She gives Nancy little slaps. Her bracelets rattle.

  Nancy is puzzled. What calls? Did Angie call here? “Oh, right,” she says, as the fact of her abandoned apartment drifts back to her. “I haven’t been checking my messages.”

  “So,” Angie says, dropping her hands, “I phone Frank and he says you’re working for Ron now and living with him, too. Doctor’s orders. Obviously your doctor hasn’t met Ron.”

  “Yeah, I’m doing the bookkeeping,” Nancy says. “Stuff like that.”

  “Well, it isn’t helping. Your limp is worse than ever.” She takes her cigarettes out of her purse, then goes still. “What’s that? A piano?”

  Nancy doesn’t answer. She has already heard the keyboard and is hobbling over to turn up the radio.

  “Where’s that coming from?”

  “Next door.”

  “You can hear it from next door?”

  The radio is on the top shelf. Nancy is barely able reach it. She twists the volume knob.

  “CALLING FOR RAINI” a man blares.

  “Whoa!” Angie cries.

  Nancy twists the knob the other way. “It drives me crazy, hearing scales…” She finds the right volume. “…all day.” She rests her weight on the lowest shelf.

  “You’re losing it,” Angie says. “You know that?” She sticks a cigarette in her mouth. Her red hair, with the light coming in from behind, smoulders at the edges. Nancy pictures her bursting into flames. She pictures the police pulling up and shooting her in the head.

  “Oh, my God!” Angie says.

  “What?” Nancy says, petrified.

  “I almost forgot. You know that girl who was abducted?”

  Nancy’s stomach turns over.

  “Well, don’t you recognize her?”

  “No.”

  “She’s the girl from the salon that day! Remember? When you brought the chocolates, and her mother caught you?”

  “Really?”

  “I can’t believe you don’t recognize her. You’ve seen the pictures of her, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s a natural blond, even though she’s part black. That is so exotic. But, God…” Back the cigarette goes between her lips as she fishes around in her purse. “Where did I put…Oh, here!” It isn’t a lighter she pulls out, it’s a piece of paper. She steps around the floor lamps. “Have you seen this flyer?”

  With a wildly shaking hand, Nancy takes it. There’s a photograph of Rachel and her mother hugging. Above that it says, Please Give Me Back My Daughter.

  “Look at them,” Angie says. “They’re so happy. I hate to say it but she’s probably already dead. Those sickos don’t waste time…” She tails off. “Are you okay?”

  Nancy’s gut is heaving. Letting the flyer fall to the floor, she leans over and throws up.

  “Shit,” Angie says, prancing back. Some of the vomit has landed on her ankle. The rest is sliding down the front of a dehumidifier.

  “Sorry,” Nancy gasps.

  “Where’s the kitchen?”

  Nancy gestures over her shoulder.

  “Do you want water?”

  “Ginger ale, maybe. There’s some in the fridge.”

  She picks up the flyer, blood rushing to her head and blinding her for a few seconds so that the photograph seems to develop before her eyes. Rachel is smiling at the camera. The mother is smiling at Rachel. If there is evil in the mother’s face, Nancy can’t detect it. She gets herself over to the counter and sits on the stool. The flyer, which is powder blue, she folds into a small square.

  “I could only find one glove,” Angie says, coming back into the room. She has a bucket of water, a roll of paper towels, and the ginger ale. A yellow plastic glove is on her right hand. “You aren’t pregnant, are you?” She sets the glass on the counter.

  That almost makes Nancy laugh. “It must be some kind of bug,” she says, and wonders if this isn’t the case—she feels hot and achy. “I hope I don’t give it to you.”

  “I never get sick,” Angie says. With one foot she shoves a box out of the way, then sets down the bucket and kneels in front of the dehumidifier. “What a piece of crap. Why didn’t they just throw it out?”

  “You’d be surprised what people want fixed.”

  Nancy sips her ginger ale. She is very aware of the coldness of the glass under her fingers and the tingling sensation inside her mouth. She looks at Angie’s big curvy hips in her flowered pants and at the strip of white skin where her blouse has ridden up. At her beautiful, manicured hand, the one without the glove, pressed flat on the dirty floor. Every time she thinks about it, she can’t believe she has a friend who’s so sexy and strong. You should hear how Angie orders around her mafia boyfriend! And yet she’s caring, too, and loyal. All through Nancy’s bad times, Angie was the only person Nancy could count on. Could she count on her now? What if she just blurted it out, what if she said, “Oh, by the way, Rachel Fox is in the basement”?

  Angie throws the dirty paper towels into the bucket. “Listen,” she says, “I don’t know what’s going on around here…”

  Nancy sits straight.

  “But if Ron’s trying to keep you hidden away, all to himself, you’re crazy to let that happen.”

  “I’m not hidden away,” Nancy says. She holds the glass of ginger ale with both hands, stunn
ed by how close she came to confessing. “I’m in a shop. Where people are.”

  “Yeah, right. Look at them all. Frank feels the same, you know. That Ron is bad for you. He thinks you’re getting beat up, actually.”

  “He said that?”

  “He said you act like his sister did when she was getting beat up.”

  “Ron couldn’t beat up a worm! If anybody’s getting beat up around here, it’s him!”

  “Well, good. Good for you.”

  “It isn’t good for me. Jeez.”

  Angie comes to her feet. “Are you going to be sick again, do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Go lie down.”

  “I will.”

  “If you weren’t acting all weird, all nervous and freaked out, then I’d keep my mouth shut about Ron.”

  “I always act all nervous and freaked out,” Nancy says, half joking.

  Angie sighs. Either she thinks this isn’t true at all, or she has just realized it is. She picks up the bucket. “Come and get your nails done one of these days. On the house.”

  As soon as she’s gone, Nancy secures the bolt lock and closes the blinds. Then she goes over and opens the basement door a crack. Rachel is still playing the keyboard.

  Thank God for that keyboard, Nancy thinks. She digs into the front pocket of her jeans, feels her lighter and her psychic pouch, and removes them both. Like most of the things in her life before Rachel, the pouch seems pathetic, not that she discounts its powers. Her fear of losing Ron is what she can’t believe, how she clamped on to the idea that he was picking up women in bars. It’s little girls he likes, not women.

  Her breath catches; she has shocked herself. Why would she think that? Ron can barely look at Rachel, he’s so shy. Except…except he does look at her. When they were watching the movie last night, every time Nancy glanced over at him his eyes were on Rachel. Every time Rachel turns around, his eyes are on her bum.

  Nancy shudders. This is crazy. She’s always looking at Rachel, isn’t she? At her mouth, her hair, at her bum, probably, and it has nothing to do with sex. And if Ron isn’t interested in sex with her anymore, well, the feeling’s mutual. She shakes her head to clear it of disgusting ideas. You’ve got a fever, she tells herself. It’s the fever talking.

  She tosses the psychic pouch into the garbage and lights herself a cigarette. Back behind the counter she fingers the flyer with a sharpening suspicion that if she unfolds it and sees the picture again, something in her will crumble—and maybe she wants something in her to crumble.

  Sandy, her dealer, used to pass her the baggie of meth in a powder blue envelope, like an invitation to a tea party. His hand sliding across the table to her hand in the glassed-off smoking section of Coffee Time Donuts. She places her hand over the flyer, and the sweet feeling of giving herself over to some huge, heartless force comes back. She shuts her eyes. On the radio a woman is saying, “Our next caller is Ellen, from Toronto. How are you today, Ellen?”

  Ellen coughs. “Sorry about that,” she says. “I’m getting over a cold.”

  “So, Ellen,” the host woman says. “Are the children of single mothers at greater risk than children living in twoparent families?”

  “Absolutely,” Ellen says. “If there’d been a father around, then Rachel’s mother wouldn’t have had to work two jobs.”

  Nancy twists in the stool and looks up at the radio.

  “Presuming the father had a job,” the host woman says.

  “Well, yeah,” Ellen agrees, “but most fathers do. So if he’d been around, then either him or the mother would’ve been at home when the lights went off. And if the landlord fell and knocked himself out, that wouldn’t have been Rachel’s problem.”

  “You’re jumping to a lot of conclusions,” the host woman says. “Anybody—the mother, the father—anybody could have fallen and hit their head in the pitch dark.”

  Good point, Nancy thinks. She can’t quite understand what she’s hearing. Is Ellen blaming Rachel’s mother?

  Ellen coughs. “Sorry about that. Yeah, but they said the landlord had been drinking, so—”

  “Who said that?”

  “It was on the news. On TV, I think.”

  “You’re giving me a rumour, Ellen, and I’m not in the business of spreading potentially harmful rumours. Next on the line is Maria from Orangeville. Go ahead, Maria. You’ve got thirty seconds.”

  Maria says, “I feel really badly for the mother. I just want to get that out up front. I mean, it’s a parent’s worst nightmare what she’s going through, and I’m praying for her.”

  “We all are,” the host woman says.

  “But, well, I just think she could have made wiser life decisions.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, for instance, I read in today’s Sun that the reason we haven’t heard anything about the biological father is that she doesn’t even know his name.”

  “I read that, too,” the host woman says. She sounds sad.

  “You know? I mean, before you have sex with strangers, and I don’t think that’s right but it happens, at least take responsibility for your own protection. Because sooner or later you’re going to get pregnant and bring a fatherless child into the world.”

  “You’re taking a risk in more ways than one,” the host woman says.

  “The health risks and on and on,” Maria says. “But what I’m getting at is, there’s a side of the family, the father’s family, that hasn’t been there for Rachel her whole life.”

  “That would certainly seem to be the case, I’m afraid. As to whether or not any of those family members would have been in the house on the night of the blackout, we can only speculate. Thanks for your call, Maria.”

  “No child should be an accident,” Maria gets in.

  Holding on to the shelf, Nancy switches the radio to a station where there’s music. She wonders if it’s true about the mother not knowing the father’s name. Ron is always saying that the mother is stupid and selfish. What if he’s right? What if, in spite of how much the mother loves Rachel, she has lousy maternal instincts? Nancy looks at the square of blue paper in her hand. She opens it. The picture and the words blur together. She thinks about the letter Rachel wrote, and right now—with her head swirling and her skin on fire—she can’t imagine actually driving to a mailbox and dropping it in. Risking everything for a woman who maybe never deserved Rachel in the first place.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  THE LOST CHILDREN people are in Celia’s apartment, setting up their equipment, when Laura arrives and somehow manages to talk her way past the police officers stationed on the porch. And then Mika, not knowing any better, invites her into the house.

  At the sight of her, Celia feels her whole body clench. The reason she hasn’t been returning Laura’s calls is that Laura can be overbearing and hysterical. She can be spectacularly generous as well (for two months she let a homeless woman sleep in her second bedroom) but it’s this other side of her, the high-strung, interfering side, that Celia can’t imagine taking on right now. She looks at Mika. He blinks and looks at his shoes. Laura says, “Hi, Celia,” in a small voice, and Celia goes over and hugs her, pulling away when Laura starts to cling.

  “You’re busy,” Laura says, stepping back so that a man with an armload of cable can get by.

  “I have a few minutes,” Celia says.

  They go into Mika’s kitchen. Laura has brought a vegetable lasagna, and she hands it over to Little Lynne. She waits for Celia to sit before sitting herself. She’s subdued, not herself at all. An opened pack of du Maurier Lights is on the table, and when she picks it up and sets it down again, Celia says, “Go ahead.”

  “That’s okay,” Laura says.

  “Oh. Right.” Laura is a rabid nonsmoker. That’s something you should know about a close friend. Celia does, of course, know it. She pulls out a cigarette for herself. “You don’t mind.”

  “God, no.”

  They look at each oth
er. Laura’s eyes fill, and Celia looks away and reaches over to the counter for some matches.

  “Celia, what can I do?” Laura asks.

  “You can hand out flyers.”

  “I have been. So has everyone on my street. Everyone wants to do something.”

  Celia lights her cigarette. Whenever she is reminded of how people all over the city are giving their time and money to help out, she feels a vague alarm. This onslaught of generosity from strangers. How can she be grateful enough? And if she isn’t grateful enough what will happen? Her anxiety is of an accruing debt, some complicated moral interaction understood by everybody except for her and for which, whatever happens, Rachel will end up paying.

  “I don’t know how you do those press conferences,” Laura says. “The one on Tuesday? I could tell it was killing you, but you were so good. Did many people call in afterward?”

  “Yeah, a lot of tips came in. But no real leads yet.” She turns, hearing someone in the doorway.

  “Ready when you are,” says a man from the TV show.

  Celia puts out her cigarette.

  “Is it all right if I wait?” Laura asks.

  Celia looks at her again. The threat of tears has passed. “Sure,” she says, softening. “Have some coffee.”

  The man leads the way up to her apartment. People and equipment crowd the living room, but he takes her past all this out onto the deck where the host—Celia met him downstairs—is seated on a kitchen chair. “Sorry to keep you waiting so long,” he says.

  “That’s okay.”

  The man who came to get her says, “If you could just sit right there.” He’s indicating the sofa. Not the middle of it, where the gash is, but to one side of that. She sits on the gash.

  “Do you mind moving a little to your left,” a woman in earphones asks.

  “I’m better here,” Celia says. She doesn’t see how showing rips in her furniture will get Rachel home any faster.

  There’s a silence.

  “How about I do the moving?” the host says and shifts his chair.

  Celia tugs her skirt over her knees. She’s wearing a sleeveless white blouse and a blue jean skirt. No lipstick, hair combed flat. A technician comes over and clips a tiny microphone to her collar. A makeup lady powders her face. The host, meanwhile, crosses and uncrosses his legs. He’s a dark, compact man with quick brown eyes. He is dressed like a fashion model: black shirt unbuttoned at the neck, black pants, black boots. Big Lynne told her that his son was killed by a pedophile, and as he glances around, then lifts his chin to the makeup lady, Celia wonders how many months or years went by for him before he began to care again about the way he looked.