Helpless (19 page)

“
A
MEN,” RON SAYS
in response to the caller’s declaration that no child should be an accident. He pulls up in front of the shop but keeps the radio on to hear the news. The lead story is about the steelworkers’ strike. Rachel is next—the same report as an hour ago: a second candlelight vigil held last night; DNA samples being taken from staff and patrons of the Casa Hernandez Motel.

He turns the van off. That the mother doesn’t have ten illegitimate kids is what he finds surprising in all this. Although maybe she does and they’re living in foster homes. Or maybe Rachel is the only one she didn’t get around to aborting.

He grabs his toolbox and climbs out of the van. Across the road, Vince, who is climbing out of his truck, calls, “How’s it going?”

“Not too bad,” Ron answers.

“You’ve been closed a lot this week.”

Ron tenses. Since when did Vince start noticing his Closed sign? “Running around on house calls,” he says.

“I was just out on a call in Mississauga,” Vince tells him. “It’s raining like a sonofabitch out there.”

“It’ll be hitting us soon,” Ron says, relaxing. Vince is being neighbourly, that’s all.

The shop blinds are down, the overhead lights off. Behind the counter Nancy sits holding a cigarette she makes no attempt to conceal.

“What are you doing?” he says.

“Oh,” she says foggily. “Sorry.” She drops the cigarette on the floor.

“That’s not dope, is it?” he says, crossing the room.

“What? No, no…” She slides off the stool and grinds the butt under her foot. “Listen, Ron. I think I have the flu. I need to lie down.”

“Is Rachel all right?”

“Yeah, she’s fine. She’s playing the keyboard.”

He lowers the volume on the radio. “I don’t hear anything.”

“She was a minute ago.”

He checks his watch. According to the schedule she should be watching cartoons.

“All of a sudden I felt woozy,” Nancy says.

In the dim light her face is chalky. He switches on the lamp, and she’s even whiter. He notices the piece of paper she’s holding. “What’s that?”

“Oh. A flyer about Rachel.”

She gives it to him. He quickly reads it over. “Where’d you get this?”

“Somebody dropped it by.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. They left it…” She waves in the direction of the door. “It was in the mail slot.”

“Really?” That flyers begging for Rachel’s release are
being distributed beyond the official grid is worrying. On the other hand, volunteers go where they want; it doesn’t necessarily follow that the search has widened. “They didn’t knock?” he says.

“No. Nobody knocked.”

He scans it again. “‘I am the only family Rachel has,’” he reads out loud. He snorts, then decides not to get himself worked up. “So,” he says, “Rachel’s fine.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Her indifference takes him aback. “I should look in on her,” he says.

No response. He assumes she’s mustering her opposition.

“I can ask her if she wants to see the vacuums,” he says.

“Oh. Right.”

“You don’t have to be there, do you?”

“It’s up to her.” She steps around the counter. “I need to lie down. Wake me in an hour.”

He balls up the flyer. For all its troubling implications, it has given him an idea, which is that to pique Rachel’s interest in the vacuums he should first show her one of his pamphlets. He gets the most recent version off the shelf and opens it on the counter. He’d forgotten about the author’s photo, but there it is. His smile is insanely wide. His hair is slicked down flat.

He finds a pair of scissors and cuts the entire panel off. Better to lose the section on Eurekas than to leave a hole in the panel and have Rachel wondering what it was he didn’t want her to see. He skims the rest of the pamphlet. There’s the odd word she might stumble on, but by and large the language is simple enough, intended for the general public.

She’s kneeling in front of the dollhouse.

Hi,” she says. His heart pounds, not just at the sight of her in her white skirt and blue-and-white sailor jersey but at the sight of her
there,
where he has placed her a hundred times in his imagination. “Can I come in?”

She cranes to look past him.

“I’m afraid Nancy’s feeling a bit under the weather,” he says, stepping over the threshold. “She might have the flu. How are you feeling?”

“Fine.” She shifts her weight so that she’s sitting on the foot she hurt. She thinks he’s asking about that.

He closes and locks the door.

“Did Nancy go out?” she says.

“Out?”

“Did she, like, go shopping?”

“No.” He wonders what she’s getting at. “Nancy’s here. Taking a nap.”

Her hair is pulled back into a ponytail, and he is treated to the spectacle of her small, protruding ears. Her only defect, objectively speaking. It is unbearably sweet to him that she shows them off by wearing pearl studs.

He gestures at the dollhouse. “See that red button? Above the fireplace?”

She twists around.

“Push it,” he says, moving closer. “See what happens.”

She sticks her hand into the living room and gives the button a quick tap. The logs glow red. A second later the mantelpiece candles come on.

“Isn’t that something?”

She nods.

In her other hand she’s holding the mother doll. “Have you given her a name yet?” he asks.

“No.”

“How about the baby, does she have a name?”

“No.”

“Where’s the father?”

She points to the office. The father is sitting behind the desk. What could be more natural than for Ron to get down on the floor, pluck the father off his chair and have him say something? Have him say, “Honey, isn’t it time to feed the baby?” Or, “How about I fix us some supper?” He takes a step closer. As if reading his mind, Rachel lays the mother doll on the veranda and flicks the switch that turns off all the lights.

“Enough of that, I guess,” Ron says. “For one morning.” He sounds anything but nonchalant. He slaps the pamphlet against his thigh and only then remembers he even has it. “Oh,” he says, gathering his wits. “You might find this interesting. It’s about my collection. I don’t know if Nancy has told you, but I collect and fix historical vacuum cleaners, some of them over a hundred years old.” He offers her the pamphlet. After a moment’s hesitation she takes it and pulls it open. “That one you’re looking at,” he says, “that’s the Constellation.”

“It’s like a spaceship,” she murmurs.

“That’s what I always thought. I thought they should have called it Sputnik. Would you like to see the real thing?”

She shrugs. “Okay.”

“I’ll just be a minute.” He hurries to the door. “You have a look at the pamphlet, see what other ones you want me to bring down.”

When he returns with the Constellation and its box of attachments, she’s sitting on the sofa, the pamphlet spread across her lap. “It’s starting to rain,” he announces, pushing the door closed with his foot. He’s out of breath. He sets the box on the side table. The machine he puts on the floor in front of her.

“Do you like the colour?” he asks.

She nods.

“It’s called Aqua,” he says. “For aquamarine. Fifty years ago you saw a lot of aqua around. Aqua fridges and stoves, aqua cars. It was a real popular shade back then. So—” He clasps his hands. “The Hoover Constellation, model eight-two-two. A classic example—I go into this in my pamphlet—a classic example of form over function. Do you know what that means, form over function?”

She shakes her head.

“It means nice to look at but not very good at its job. The problem with the Constellation is the exhaust. Somebody had the bright idea that the exhaust should blow out onto the floor under this metal ring.” As he leans down to demonstrate he finds her bare legs only inches from his face. He drags his eyes to the metal ring but now he’s forgotten what he was talking about. “Here,” he says. “I’ll plug it in.”

Of all his mid-twentieth-century machines the Constellation produces the most satisfyingly smooth whirr (which he considers ironic, given its disappointing performance). He lifts the switch with his toe, and after a few seconds of not looking at her, just listening, his mind clears. “So what happens,” he says, returning to his earlier thought, “when you have the exhaust blowing onto the floor, is that the machine is
easier to drag around, sure, because it’s sitting on a pillow of air. But you pay for that little feature on the suction side.” A reckless impulse takes hold of him and he says, “Would you like to give it a try?”

“You mean vacuum?”

“There’s a bag inside, ready to go.”

She stands. He passes over the handle, not quite believing that he’s about to let her dirty one of only four unused Constellation bags in his possession.

“Should I do the sofa?” she asks.

“Why not?”

Before he can instruct her, she has started. She uses firm, straight sweeps, up and down. He should intervene—she’s pushing too hard on the bristles—but her purposeful little hips have him captivated. When she says something over her shoulder it comes to him like a voice in a storm.

“What?” he says.

“Look—” She shows him the brush. “The fuzz isn’t going
in.”

He stares at her pointing finger.

“See? The fuzz is all
here,
and it should be going in. Right?”

“Right.” He switches off the power. The sudden silence is jolting. “That’s what I was telling you about,” he says, opening the box he brought down. “About the pillow of air…” He takes out the drapery brush and the bags. “How that…ah…gets in the way of…” He takes out the instruction booklet. “Where’s the crevice tool?” he mutters. “It should be in this box.” He paws through the remaining attachments. “Don’t tell me…” The sweat begins to drip
down his forehead. Did he accidentally throw it out when he was emptying the storage space? Without all its attachments, the machine is next to worthless.

“Stay right where you are,” he says. “I’ll be right back.”

W
HEN THE
thud of his footsteps fades altogether, she lays the vacuum cleaner handle on the sofa and walks to the open door. He has left the door at the top of the stairs open as well.

In her amazement it doesn’t occur to her to escape. All she can think is, now’s her chance to sneak her note outside. She gets it from under the toy chest. She refolds it so that the word
HELP
shows, then tucks it into the waistband of her skirt and leaves the room. She tiptoes up the stairs. Just inside the shop she pauses to listen. Ron seems to be at the back of the house; she hears what sounds like furniture being moved back there. She makes her away around the lawn mowers and lamps. So that she doesn’t bump anything she presses her elbows to her sides.

The front door is unlocked. She steps onto the concrete porch. It isn’t raining anymore. Cars and trucks zoom by, splashing water. Pigeons drop from the hydro wires to peck at an orange pizza box.

Where should she put the note? Across the road there’s a man leaning against a truck and talking on a cell phone. She decides to give the note to him. She descends the stairs. She passes Ron’s van, knowing it’s his because it says Ron’s
Appliance Repair
on the side.

The man is getting into his truck. She walks faster. The pigeons scatter ahead of her, onto the road.

“No!” she cries, worried that they’ll get hit. She waves her arms to bring them back.

The note falls out of her skirt and is run over by a motorcycle.

It’s all she can do not to dash out into traffic. She doesn’t, though. She waits until it’s safe.

So where does the car come from? It’s suddenly there, an inch away from her leg. Behind the windshield is a black man in a turban. His door opens. He climbs out.

“Are you all right?” he says in a foreign accent. “Did I hit you?”

She steps back onto the curb.

“Little girl, did I hit you?” He moves closer.

She turns and runs.

The shop door is stuck. She bangs on it with her fists. She starts to cry.

Through the glass she sees Ron charge out from the hallway. He opens the door and scoops her up. Kicks the door shut. He carries her down to the basement. Kicks that door shut. He lays her on the bed. She can’t stop crying. “They saw me!” she cries. “They saw where I am!”

“It’s okay,” Ron says. He strokes her face. “You’re okay. I’m here. Ron’s here.”

W
HAT WAS
that loud noise? Nancy listens, rigid with fright. Except for the drone of voices from the shop radio, the house is quiet. She sinks into the pillow.

She was having a terrible dream: the flyer and the letter Rachel wrote to her mother this morning and the
HELP
note under the toy chest—they were getting all mixed up. She
opened the flyer, but it turned into Rachel’s letter, and she thought, Holy Christ, these are all over the city! She looked at it again and it was the note, it said
HELP
in orange marker, and she thought,
These
are all over the city. And they were. She looked outside, and there were notes everywhere, on telephone poles, on car windshields.
HELP, HELP, HELP
as far as she could see.

She should get up. She’s so tired though. Just a few more minutes, she tells herself.

A
FTER A
while Rachel becomes aware of him stroking her face. His hand shakes, but he’s gentle. She sees the silver button on his cuff and is reminded of the silver snaps on Mika’s blue jean shirt.

She misses Mika. She’s glad it’s Ron who’s with her, though. She can’t imagine Mika grabbing her and kicking the door shut. Mika would have wanted to know what the matter was. He might even have gone over to the slave driver and said, “May I help you?” Once, he caught a homeless man yanking out his lilies by the roots, and instead of yelling at him he went over and said politely, “May I help you?”

She needs to use the bathroom. She tells Ron, and he stands to let her off the bed. He checks his watch.

“Are you going upstairs?” she asks worriedly.

“I’ll stay if you want.”

She nods.

In the bathroom she tries to think what it was about Ron that used to frighten her. She can’t remember. When she comes out, he’s crouched in front of the dollhouse.