“Ron?” she calls.
She’s in the bathroom.
“It’s only me,” he says.
“I’m still having my bath!”
His vision tunnels. He feels his legs moving. It’s not a question of choice.
He reaches the door, which is open. What he sees is her naked, skinny, golden body climbing out of the tub.
“Can you get the towel?” she says.
He lifts it off the hook.
“That was a long bath, eh, Ron? All the bubbles are gone.”
He dries her shoulders. Her back. She turns in a circle, shivering. He drops the towel and picks her up under her arms.
“Hey!” she laughs.
He carries her over to the bed. “I’m still wet!” she cries. He can hardly hear her over the roaring in his skull. He lays her among the stuffed animals.
She thrashes and squeals. She screams with laughter. She’s like something primitive and embryonic, fighting for air. She tries to cover herself but he yanks the duvet from her grip. Her arms furl. She goes still. Her face blooms up at him, wide with fright. He lets go of the duvet and looks around—bewildered—for the real threat.
It can’t be him.
The roaring dies away. He looks back at her. She’s huddled under the duvet, only the heel of one foot showing.
“Oh, God, Rachel,” he says. “Don’t be scared.”
Not a twitch from her, not a sound.
“I want you to get dressed,” he hears himself say. “And then come upstairs.”
THE POLICE station is on the northeast corner. On the northwest corner is an empty lot. Nancy pulls into it and parks.
“Bastard,” she moans. She punches the steering wheel. In that same instant the sun, sinking behind her, flares off the chrome of a paddy wagon and hits her in the face.
A sign, she thinks.
She climbs out of the car. She stands there for a minute, assembling her nerve and letting go of everything else. Then she starts limping toward the station. Toward the hard, dark years she always knew lay ahead.
Chapter Thirty-five
NEITHER OF THEM speaks. Rachel kicks the dashboard and bites her bottom lip.
He told her that all the slave drivers had fled the neighbourhood. A “contact” informed him, he said, making it sound official. Then he left open both doors and waited for her in the shop. A few minutes later she came up. She was wearing the clothes she’d arrived in—the red tank top and white skirt—and she had Lyle, the stuffed monkey, whose lacerated belly she covered with her hand. Her feet were bare.
“What about shoes?” he said.
She shook her head. She was looking past him. “Are you sure they’re gone?”
The realization that it wasn’t too late, that he didn’t have to do this, entered his mind and slinked off. He opened the front door. “A hundred percent sure.”
She swallowed.
“Come on.” He had to get the both of them out of here. Now or never.
She crept forward.
“Let’s go.”
On the porch she hugged the monkey to her chest and peered around. He began to lock up, then thought, Why bother? He waved to Vince, who was closing his garage and who stared but didn’t wave back.
It still isn’t too late, he thinks, not with any hope, only because it’s a fact. He glances over at her. Her face is pressed to her window. She’s breathing fast. He remembers when he brought her to the house and was afraid she might hyperventilate. He’d like to tell her he’s sorry about the duct tape. All the things he’d like to tell her are wedged in his throat behind the one pure thing he’ll never get to say to her now.
“Hey!” she says, sitting straight. “That’s my school!” She looks at him. “Where are we going?”
He doesn’t answer. She turns back to her window.
“Hey,” she says again just before he pulls over.
They’re half a block away from her house. A police car is parked out front. A dog sits on the lawn.
“I see Osmo!” she cries. She starts to unbuckle her seatbelt.
“Rachel—”
Her distracted gaze swings around.
“Can I ask you to do something for me?”
“What?”
He removes his sunglasses. “Don’t let men touch you,” he says. “Ever again. Don’t sit on their laps, don’t let them hold your hand.” He’s looking deeply into her face and for a second he thinks he glimpses the inscrutable, self-possessed woman she will grow into. “Even men you know.”
“Okay.”
“I’m serious.”
She nods. “Okay.”
The seatbelt unbuckles. She opens her door.
“Good-bye, Rachel.”
“Oh!”—flashing him a bright, social smile—”Bye, Ron! Thanks for saving me!”
And then she’s out of the car and running into the long late-day shadows.
NORMALLY, AT sunset, Mika would be on the porch. But he has a difficult time ignoring the scrutiny of the crowd across the road. Even standing here, knowing he’s visible through the screen door, puts him on edge.
He’s watching his dogs. They’re uncharacteristically vigilant, both of them jerking their heads at every noise. Osmo, who never leaves the porch by herself, is on the lawn.
“They’re looking for her,” Mika says, hearing Celia come up behind him.
Celia peers around his shoulder then opens the door and steps out. The dogs give her a glance. She sits on the sofa, making herself mostly hidden from the crowd, although the sensation of being stared at doesn’t bother her much anymore.
Her heart is still beating quickly, from the letter. She studies the dogs. What do they know? Turning back to Mika, she says, “You did tell them that it’s going to be another two and a half weeks.”
“They have no concept of weeks.”
“I don’t either.” She sighs.
He goes out to join her. He’s remembering what Deputy Chief Morris said about how the woman could be telling Rachel things to keep her spirits up. He lays a hand on Happy’s head. As he does, Osmo starts barking and Happy leaps off the porch.
Celia stands. Both dogs are yelping now. Mika rushes onto the lawn. “Osmo!” he yells, grabbing the dog’s collar. Celia parts the branches of the lilac bush to see what’s setting them off.
There’s a girl, running toward the house. She’s thin, with wild yellow hair. A red tank top.
Chapter Thirty-six
WHEN THE DOGS begin to bark, Ron turns around and drives back the way he came. Tears warp his vision. He wonders why he never bought a gun, why he never anticipated this moment. Jumping off a bridge, his old fantasy, seems too dramatic to him now. He guesses carbon monoxide is his cleanest, simplest bet. A hose to the exhaust, the van parked out behind the shop.
He pulls into an alley and cuts the engine. Did he cry this hard over Jenny? Or his mother? He can’t remember. He grips the steering wheel. His life begins not to flash before his eyes but to glide, processionally. He sees faces and rooms and chain-link fences and model airplanes and picture tubes and motors. He sees every vacuum he ever refurbished. He sees Nancy grimacing in her sleep.
Poor Nancy. He unclips the pen from his shirt pocket and tugs a business card out of his wallet. On the card’s blank side he writes, Nancy Dunphy had no part in the abduction of Rachel Fox. I misled and used her. He adds his signature, then puts the wallet and card on the passenger seat, which is still warm. He lets his palm rest there. When the heat begins to feel like his own he starts the engine and drives off.
People will say it’s because he couldn’t face the consequences.
It isn’t that. It isn’t the thought of jail or the trial.
It’s the thought of the world without her.
It’s love.
P.S.
Ideas, interviews & features
About the Author
Author Biography
BARBARA GOWDY was born in Windsor, Ontario, the third of four children. When
she was four years old, she moved with her family to Don Mills, a suburb of Toronto that would inspire the settings for much of her fiction.
For many years, Gowdy studied piano and even considered becoming a pianist but eventually decided that she didn’t have the talent to pursue that career. While working as an editor at the publishing house Lester & Orpen, she found herself writing characters into her clients’ non-fiction and took this as her cue to start writing professionally.
Her first book, Through the Green Valley, a historical novel set in Ireland, came out in 1988, and the following year she published Falling Angels to international acclaim. Her 1992 short story collection We So Seldom Look on Love was a finalist for the Trillium Award for Fiction. Four years later, the title story from this collection was adapted into Kissed, a film directed by Lynne Stopkewich and starring Molly Parker. Two other stories in the collection have been made into films, “Presbyterian Crosswalk” (A Feeling Called Glory) and “The Two-Headed Man.” In 2003, Falling Angels was also adapted to film, with a screenplay by Esta Spalding. The White Bonewas recreated for the stage by writer Sean Dixon for Toronto’s Summer-Works Theatre Festival.
Gowdy’s books, including four bestselling novels—Mister Sandman (1995), The White Bone (1998), The Romantic (2003) and Helpless (2007)—have now been published in twenty-four countries. Her stories have also appeared in a number of anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English and The Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women.
Gowdy has been nominated for many prestigious literary awards. She has been a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and a repeat finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Award and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. In 2003, The Romantic earned her a Man Booker Prize nomination. She is a recipient of the Marian Engel Award, which recognizes the complete body of work by a Canadian woman writer in mid-career.
Ben Marcus praised Gowdy’s literary realism in Harper’s Magazine, singling her out as one of the few contemporary writers who has “pounded on the emotional possibilities of their mode, refusing to subscribe to worn-out techniques and storytelling methods.”
Gowdy appears regularly on television as a commentator on literary matters and has taught creative writing courses at Ryerson University. In October 2006, she was appointed a member of the Order of Canada. Her original screenplay, titled Green Door, has been made into a short film, to be released in 2008.
Barbara Gowdy lives in Toronto.
How I Write by Barbara Gowdy
I didn’t start writing until my early thirties. Back then, I worked on an IBM Selectric II typewriter. It featured a twirling type ball and a sticky “lift-off” correction tape—all very high-tech, I thought. I was writing what turned out to be my first published novel, Through the Green Valley (a title I did not choose and never quite understood, although it’s true to say that since most of the novel is set in Ireland and Wales, green valleys do show up here and there, and characters do occasionally travel through them).
“That computer crashed about twice a day, and its printer pounded and clacked like a cotton gin.”
In the final year of the five years that the manuscript took to complete, I graduated to a computer. I forget the model, but that computer crashed about twice a day, and its printer pounded and clacked like a cotton gin. Nevertheless, I was hooked. I loved that you could get rid of mistakes by simply banishing them to the ether. (Gone were the faint shadows left by the Selectric’s lift-off tape.) I also loved that you could do checks for repeated words. How many times is it okay to use an adverb such as “morosely” or “happily” in a 90,000-word novel? Once, I’d say. All my subsequent books have been composed on a computer: a luggable, then a portable, then a desktop, then a laptop. Currently, it’s a Macintosh PowerBook G4.
Away from the computer, I do no writing at all. I don’t keep a notebook or diary, and I almost never jot down stray thoughts. I’ve come to trust that my narratives unfold only in one place and under one circumstance: at my desk, with my mind turned to the job at hand. The odd time that I have recorded an idea on a scrap of paper and later tried to insert it into a story, the fit was bad somehow, the tone wrong, or the idea less arresting than I’d imagined.
I’m fastidious. I like a clean, uncluttered desk. Come to that, I like a clean, uncluttered house. When I sit down to write, the first thing I do is mentally scan my surroundings for any screaming mess that requires my immediate attention. More often than not, I land on something. So there goes a half hour while I rearrange the linen closet or collect maple keys from the front porch.
Back at my desk, I eventually type a word. Another word. An entire sentence. I go on for maybe forty-five minutes, then stop to return phone calls and emails. For me a full day’s writing amounts to five hours, half of them eaten up by rewriting. I avoid dwelling on the novel’s plot or the years it will take to finish. I just try, one word at a time, to get through the day—through the green valley of the day. The miracle is, you plod away like this and you end up with a book.
”For me a full day’s writing amounts to five hours, half of them eaten up by rewriting.”
About the Book
An Interview with Barbara Gowdy
How did you first become interested in the theme of child abduction?
I found myself wondering, What is the worst thing that could happen to a person? The answer I came up with was losing a child. Not to death, but actually losing a child, finding yourself faced with the unspeakable fact of her disappearance. So I decided to try to write a novel about that. The challenge became how to make the story readable, how to offer hope to the character of the mother and to pull back on the tension.
“Stereoscopic: a narrative that lights the characters from various angles.”
You have described the book as a suspense novel and also—this might be surprising to some readers—as a “love story.”
Ron, the abductor, is desperately in love with Rachel, the little girl. His is a misguided love, clearly, an unrequited love, a hopeless, illegal love, but it’s pure and true in its way.
Why did you decide to tell the story from multiple points of view?
Ian McEwan and David Gilmour tell their marvellous stories from the points of view of the male parent, whereas my novel is told from the point of view of the abductor, the abductor’s girlfriend, the little girl, the mother and the mother’s landlord. This makes for what Lawrence Durrell called a stereoscopic narrative: a narrative that lights the characters from various angles. I felt I needed to do this in order to break out of what could have been—for me, at least—a claustrophobic story. Also, I was afraid that a single point of view might restrict the reader’s ability to sympathize with other characters.
What research did you conduct while writing Helpless?
I got in touch with a superintendent of the Toronto Police Force, the guy who literally wrote the book on child abduction, and from him I learned about the massive and intricately orchestrated operation that starts up when a child disappears. I also researched vintage vacuums, because Ron, the abductor, collects old vacuums, which he stores in his basement. I found, as I suspected I would, online sites devoted to vacuum cleaner collectors. The men who are interested in them are like the men who obsess about vintage cars. They keep the vacuums at peak performance and highly polished. The big thing is to have unused bags in your collection. Ron has a Constellation model with four unused bags. I also thought that interest in extreme cleanliness and newness could be linked to children. Children are new machines, they’re clean, they’re not suppurating and dying. For Ron, anyway, the obsession with vacuum cleaners and the love of little children are linked.
“For Ron…the obsession with vacuum cleaners and the love of little children are linked.”
Do you feel you have obsessions that reveal themselves through your writing?
When I taught creative writing, I used
to tell my students to write not what they know but what they’re obsessed by. They’ll use what they know anyway, for settings and anecdotes. I seem to be obsessed by attachment, the need for humans to attach themselves to other humans, and how helpless we all are before this need. Also, I’m concerned by who it is we find worthy, what sort of human being. What are our yardsticks? How qualified are we to judge? In Helpless, for instance, Ron could be seen as heroic, because though he has pedophilic feelings, he does not act on them. To have feelings as strong as his, and to have the object of your love so close and to repress your feelings, could be considered heroic, or it could be considered appalling and disgusting just to have those feelings in the first place. I tend to come down on the side of judging people by their behaviours, not their thoughts.
“I seem to be obsessed by attachment…and how helpless we all are before this need.”
Is it this decision not to act on his feelings that makes Ron, as you have described him, “not a typical abductor”?
It is definitely not normal for a man to abduct a young girl and then to treat her adoringly and gently, as Ron does. Normally, the girl is used and then quickly disposed of. But that horrible narrative is not one I had any desire to pursue. Ron, very much like Lewis Carroll, the creator of Alice in Wonderland, loves little girls. He is an aesthete, a connoisseur of young female beauty. He is convinced that he is abducting Rachel to save her from abuse in her home. At the same time, he knows he has inappropriate feelings for her. Lewis Carroll also harboured such feelings. In his diary, Carroll referred to them as “unholy thoughts,” “unwanted thoughts.” As far as we know, he never acted upon them.
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