Helpless (16 page)

S
ITTING AT THE
shop counter, looking out the window at the turquoise sky and at the unmarked van that has been parked across the road for the past two hours, Ron remembers the evenings he sat on the porch stairs of the house on Logan Avenue under a sky filled with the same aquarium light. The prickly sensation gripping his skull was the same, too, generated back then by a real fear that his father wasn’t coming home. This was in the months after Jenny and Mrs. Lawson left, when his father stayed late at the office and phoned Miss Spitz two doors down and asked her to cook Ron his supper, something Miss Spitz, a retired schoolteacher whose saving grace, in Ron’s eyes, was that she owned an ancient Kirby vacuum with a floor-polisher attachment, seemed glad enough to do.

He comes to his feet and moves around the counter—stepping over Tasha—for a better look at the van. The windows are tinted, so if someone’s inside, staking out the shop, he can’t tell. But why
would
someone be staking out the shop? In child abduction cases the police don’t wait to have their suspicions confirmed, they kick down doors.

“Getting paranoid in my old age,” he says to Tasha.

She watches him with her big, crazy eyes. She is lying on a piece of cardboard between a pair of Honda lawn mowers, both of which are due to be picked up in the morning. He’ll have to get to work first thing. Or maybe he should start tonight. He stands there, mentally disassembling the engines, checking the throttle plates. No, he decides, he’s too tired. And anyway, he wants to finish going through the newspapers.

He closes the blinds, switches on a light, and walks over to the basement door. Not a sound. He pictures Rachel asleep and is suffused with tenderness. Before the feeling can turn into something else he strains to hold it there, at that safe, protective place. The vision of her pee is what he’s up against—he’s been up against it since he saw it in the toilet this morning. He wills himself to remember instead the shy droop of her body when she said she couldn’t play the piano in front of people. And how bravely she held herself together when he told her about seeing her mother on TV.

This came later, the talk about her mother. They were eating supper. He’s still not sure what caused Nancy to reconsider her position about his spending time in the basement, but sometime after lunch she announced that keeping him and Rachel apart was doing everybody more harm than good and that Rachel had agreed to let him eat his supper downstairs.

“I told her you were feeling hurt and left out,” she reported. “That did the trick.”

Ron nearly wept. To think that Rachel cared about how he felt! At five o’clock he went upstairs and changed into a clean shirt. A half hour later, when Nancy started fixing the trays, he rifled through the corner cabinet and found the
linen napkins that had been his mother’s. “Her meals should be an occasion,” he said, removing the paper napkins that Nancy had laid out. “Something for her to look forward to.”

“Do you want me to put on a dress?” Nancy asked.

“A dress?” He turned to her. Despite the three place settings, he hadn’t actually been picturing her at the table. She was wearing the same jeans and tank top she’d been wearing since Friday night, but how she looked hardly mattered.
He
was the one who needed to make an impression. “No,” he said. “You’re fine.”

Rachel sat beside him, to his left, and for the first part of the meal he restricted himself to quick glances. Just having her close by, listening to her breathe and swallow, that was enough. He was content to keep out of the conversation, such as it was—Nancy babbling on about vegetarianism and playing the banjo, Rachel responding in monosyllables, made timid, he felt, by his presence. So it surprised him when she caught his eye and said, “You’re watching TV and reading the newspapers, right?”

He admitted that he was.

“Okay, so…” She set down her fork. “What are they saying happened to me?”

He wiped his mouth with his napkin. “That you went missing,” he said carefully. “And that the police are searching for you—”

“Who’s for more salad?” Nancy cut in. “Ron?”

He lifted his hand. He could handle Rachel’s questions.

She was rolling up the corner of her placemat. “Have they shown my picture on TV?”

She’s vain, he thought, amused. “Oh, yes. Lots of lovely pictures.”

“Have they shown my mom?”

Her lower lip quivered, and he was taken aback. Was she going to cry? He stared at her, dazzled by the twitches of life under the polished-wood smoothness of her face.

It was Nancy who answered. “They’ve shown her a few times,” she said cheerfully. “Eh, Ron? Talking to reporters?”

With an effort he transferred his gaze to her. “Just once.”

“When was that again?” Nancy went on, keeping up a show of lightheartedness.

“Saturday.”

“In Rachel’s house?”

“Out on the lawn.”

“The front lawn.”

“That’s right.” He glanced back at Rachel. Her face was still again, her eyes clear. She asked if her mother had been upset.

“Not that I could tell,” he lied.

“What did she say?”

“She said…” He cut his eggplant into squares and tried to think of something credible and comforting. “She said, ‘I hope my daughter is safe.’ She said, ‘Whoever has her, please take good care of her.’”

“She wasn’t crying?”

“No, she wasn’t crying. She seemed to be doing fine. Holding up.”

Rachel scratched her throat and looked off to the side, presenting her exquisite profile. He was about to add, “Of course, I don’t
know
her,” when she turned to Nancy and said, “Can I feed Tasha some of my tofu?”

“You can try,” Nancy said.

Ron would have liked to have asked Rachel how she
was enjoying the keyboard, but he sensed she wouldn’t welcome a question that obliged her to express any gratitude or pleasure. Besides, her enjoyment was obvious. For most of the afternoon, every time he stood at the door to listen, he caught halting snatches of melody. Or scales. She seemed to practise scales endlessly. But he couldn’t risk mentioning this either, in case she turned the volume down so low he’d be denied hearing her at all. So the subject of her piano playing wasn’t touched on, not until dessert, when Nancy asked about sheet music: did Rachel need any? “There’s this store on Yonge Street where I buy mine,” she said. “It’s got music for every instrument. Mostly piano, though.”

“I know,” Rachel said. She patted her lap, and Tasha jumped into it. “My mom goes there.”

“Oh, okay,” Nancy said.

With two fingers Rachel began to stroke the dog’s back. Ron felt himself becoming entranced again. He felt as if his entire life had been spent waiting for exactly this display of delicacy and sweetness and feminine self-containment. He gazed at the blond hairs on her forearm. His breath quickened, and he stood and walked over to the keyboard and made a show of checking the speaker connections.

Nancy started to clear the plates. Apparently she wasn’t going to press the matter of the sheet music but Rachel had been considering it. “Maybe the Grade 4 Conservatory book,” she said at last. “There’s some other books but I have to remember what they are. I’ll write the names down for you later.”

And then she informed them that she was playing a recital on August 10, and since she was going to be missing music camp she had a lot of practising to do.

“Actually,” she said, “I should get back to practising right now.”

For a disoriented moment Ron imagined that he would be
attending
the recital. Taking his cue from Nancy, he left the room, still uncertain as to how this piece of news should be handled.

“We go along with it,” Nancy said when they were upstairs. “Like we’re going along with the slave drivers.”

“Right.” He kept forgetting about the slave drivers. They came in handy but the idea of them was so absurd.

“Let’s just be happy she’s settled down for now. We can burn our bridges when we get to them.”

“Cross
our bridges,” he corrected. He agreed with her, though.

Nancy should be asleep by now. After putting Rachel to bed she took a couple of Gravol pills and went upstairs.

He checks his watch. Nine thirty. He turns up the radio. Rachel is the lead story: another mention of the fact that this morning a few items possibly related to the case were retrieved from the Victoria Park waste transfer station. Possibly related but not, as only he knows for certain. In a case where there was no struggle, no coercion, and not even a crime scene, there can be no
items.
The phrase
immaculate abduction
leaps to mind, briefly stunning him with its brilliance. He half wishes he could phone it in to the media. He feels, tonight especially, a compulsion to broadcast his extraordinary luck and the sense of destiny it has conferred on him.

The weather report comes on: below seasonal temperatures for the next few days. He may need to get the furnace going to keep the basement warm enough. He turns the radio
down, switches on the lamp and takes the day’s newspapers out from under the counter. Nancy is avoiding the newspapers (as well as the radio and TV) so he goes through them only when she isn’t around.

He starts with the
Sunday Star,
which has a section called “Where’s Rachel?” Knowing that he’s vulnerable tonight, he avoids the pictures of her. But on the second page there’s a big colour shot of her wearing her “Super Star” T-shirt, the one she was wearing that first day he saw her, and before he can stop himself, he’s on his feet.

He looks at the door to the basement.

He takes a step. Halts.

Yesterday he promised Nancy that he would never enter the apartment without first getting Rachel’s okay. He was only too willing to promise—he needs these kinds of restraints—and he’s determined to keep his word.

Like an automaton, feeling the great resisting force of his body’s machinery, he changes direction and walks to the window.

The van is gone.

T
UESDAY AFTERNOON IS
cool and clear, no threat of rain, and this time the press conference takes place on schedule. When it’s over, Big Lynne sets out plates and forks and serves the apricot tart she made in her own kitchen the day before. Celia accepts a small piece to prove she isn’t starving herself. With her back to the phone (if she looks at it, the woman won’t call) she smokes cigarettes and drifts in and out of listening to the others talk about the huge media turnout and whether or not the
Globe and Mail’s
crime reporter suspects the police of knowing more than they’re saying.

Eventually the conversation moves on to more neutral topics. Big Lynne and Chief Gallagher discover that they both grew up on dairy farms in large families, and the two of them compare stories of 4-H Clubs and 6:00
A.M.
milkings, and Celia reflects without resentment or envy—it’s simply a stray thought—that these are people whose lives have never hung, as hers does, by the thread of a single human attachment.

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.