Helpless (22 page)

T
HEY SPEND
M
ONDAY
in the Dupont-Davenport area, Jerry knocking on doors north of the railway tracks, Celia and Mika working the south side. The next day Jerry comes down with a bad cold, and it’s just Celia and Mika. They decide to concentrate on the industrial strips at the very periphery of the official search grid. They drive from place to place, then get out and walk along little out-of-the-way streets they never knew existed.

By late afternoon they’re making their way up Laird Avenue, north of the bridge. Only a few promising places are left. The first is a shabby redbrick house with a parking lot out front and what might be an apartment on the second floor.

“Hold on,” Mika says. He takes out his cell.

“Who is it?”

“The battery just died.” He slips the cell back into his pocket and looks at the house. “Ron’s Appliance Repair,” he says, reading the sign above the door.

N
ANCY IS
in the kitchen, fixing supper. Ron is in the storage space, searching through a box of gaskets.

“Hello?” a man calls from the shop.

Ron recognizes Rachel’s mother immediately, although she seems ten years older than when he saw her at the motel. “Sorry,” he says, walking over to the radio and turning it up. “I didn’t hear the door.”

“That’s all right,” the man says. “We were wondering whether…” He reaches into his canvas bag, and Ron places him. “Whether you would post one of our flyers.”

Ron accepts the flyer, pretends to read. He glances at the mother a few times, as if comparing her to the picture. “Sure,” he says. “Be glad to. I’ll put it in the window.”

The mother looks where he’s indicating. “I’ve seen your van on my street,” she says in a tone of having just realized.

“I’ve done a few house calls in Cabbagetown,” Ron says. “You must be going through hell. I’m sorry.”

Her gaze has shifted to the basement door. “Is there a cellar?”

“Yep.” He nods. “A good-sized one.” His pulse is high and shallow in his chest.

“Is that the door to it?”

“It is.”

“Do you mind if we have a look?” This from the man. Mika.

“Downstairs?” Ron says.

“If you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind.” He plunges his hands into his pants pockets. “Provided I can find the key. I’ve got a collection of vintage vacuums down there, so…” He walks over to the counter and opens a drawer. “Extremely rare, some of them.” He opens another drawer. Rummages around. A voluptuous
sensation of terror and surrender is slowing his movements. “Now where would I—”

The phone rings.

Taking advantage of the distraction, he picks up. “Ron’s.”

“It’s me,” Nancy hisses. “Act like it’s an emergency.”

“What?”

“Act like you just heard somebody was in a car accident.”

“When?”

“Right now! Say, ‘Jesus.’”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah, and you’ve got to rush to the hospital. So now you’re listening to the directions.”

“Okay.” He checks his watch. “Fifteen, twenty minutes.” He finds a pen and writes some numbers. “Five, two, seven…Okay. See you soon.”

“Now hang up.”

He puts down the receiver.

“Everything all right?” Mika says.

Ron takes a moment, as a shocked person would do. He lets the murderous hatred he feels for this man glaze all other feeling. “A friend of mine has been in a car accident.”

The mother touches her throat.

“It doesn’t look good,” Ron says. “I’ve got to go.”

“Of course,” Mika says. He and the mother make their uncertain way to the door. “Maybe we’ll drop by another…time.”

“I’m usually here,” Ron tells him. “Good luck.”

“Good luck to your friend,” Mika says.

Ron follows them out, gets in the van and drives as far as Eglinton and Yonge before turning back. To be on the
safe side—they might not have left the neighbourhood yet—he parks in the lane.

Nancy is sitting on the kitchen floor, still holding his cell.

“That was genius,” he says.

“She knows.”

“Who?”

“The mother.”

“She probably wants to look in everyone’s basement. Anyway, I called her bluff.”

“She felt something. Rachel is right under where she was, and she felt it.”

The certainty and doom in her voice give him pause. A mother’s instinct—there’s something to that. “We might have to move her to the spare bedroom then.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Just for the next few days.”

“What about the window up there?”

“Stick a sheet of Mylar over it. Hang some shutters.”

“Hang some shutters.” She gets herself standing. “This is all way too crazy.”

The cell beeps.

“Oh, jeez,” she whimpers.

“Leave it,” he says.

She flings it to the floor. “I can’t do this!” she cries.

“You can.”

“I can’t! I can’t!” Stepping over the still-beeping cell, she grabs her purse and hobbles past him.

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know.”

“You shouldn’t drive.” He trails after her into the shop. “You’re too upset.”

“Fucking door,” she mutters, trying to open it.

He reaches around her and slides back the bolt. “She’ll wonder where you are. She’s scared enough as it is.”

“Oh, yeah?” In her furiously closed face the tears fight to escape. “Well, whose fault is that, eh?” And then she’s outside and limping to her car.

He locks the door. The mother and Mika aren’t anywhere to be seen, but across the road Vince is standing in an empty bay of his garage. He waves. Ron lifts a hand. The two of them watch Nancy reverse into the cement barrier and drive off on screeching tires.

T
O BYPASS THE
crowd out front Mika has taken to parking either on Sumach or Winchester so that they can approach the house from the lane. This evening, before they’re halfway across the yard, Big Lynne opens the porch door. “Oh, God,” Celia whispers but then sees that the policewoman is smiling.

“There’s a letter from Rachel,” Big Lynne says.

Chief Gallagher and Deputy Chief Morris are in the kitchen, having themselves just arrived. It seems that the letter was mistakenly delivered to an apartment building down the street and only found its way to the house a little over an hour ago. “We’re lucky the tenant wasn’t on vacation,” Gallagher says. He explains how Big Lynne thought she recognized the writing on the envelope and therefore made a comparison with the writing in one of Rachel’s homework books.

“That geography one you showed me,” Big Lynne tells Celia. “And sure enough. I tried to phone on Mika’s cell.”

“The decision was made to open it,” Gallagher goes
on. “We couldn’t know how time-sensitive the message might be.”

“Sure, of course,” Celia says.

Gallagher takes some papers from a manila folder. “The original is with forensics. These are copies.”

Mika reads his standing. Celia sits at the table. She reads the last part out loud: “ “When the coast is clear in two and a half weeks, I’ll be coming home and then I’ll tell you all about my adventures. Love Rachel.’”

“When the coast is clear…” Mika says.

Celia looks up. The air between her and Gallagher seems to buckle as he reaches for a copy of his own. He says, “Forensics has to weigh in, but assuming that the person who mailed the letter is the same woman who made the phone call, it’s safe to say she’s willing to take substantial risks. So it could be she has an escape strategy and Rachel is in on it.”

“In two and a half weeks. That’s quite specific,” Mika says.

“Maybe our woman knows that in two and a half weeks whoever else is involved will be away from the premises.”

“The other possibility,” Morris says in his soft baritone, “is that she’s telling Rachel certain things to keep her spirits up.”

“Which is good in itself,” Big Lynne says.

“What’s the postmark?” Mika asks.

“Toronto. Yesterday.” Gallagher opens another file. “There’s also a drawing.”

It says
I MISS YOU
across the top in capital letters. Under that is a picture of a purple-haired, orange-skinned girl playing a keyboard. Black tears run down her face.

Celia lets her own tears fall. Mika grips her shoulder. “She got her streaks after all,” he says, referring to the hair, and Celia gives a pained laugh.

Gallagher says, “On the wall, between the windows, it looks like she’s drawn a
P
and then, further down, an M.”

“Well,” Celia says after studying her copy. “Sort of.”

“You don’t think they’re deliberate?”

“They’re not like her writing at all.”

“No, but maybe she’s sneaking them in. Trying to tell us something.”

“A street name,” Morris suggests. “Parliament. Metcalfe.”

“Maybe,” Celia says doubtfully. “I mean, we should check those streets again. But she isn’t…she isn’t that crafty.”

“The keyboard is a Yamaha,” Mika says. “That little circle there? It’s the Yamaha logo.”

“How accurate are her drawings in general?” Morris asks.

“She’s a realist,” Mika answers. “Not with colour, obviously, but with form and substance she draws exactly what she sees.”

“So the windows would have bars.”

“Definitely.”

“And they’d be high up on the wall.”

“She’s in a basement,” Celia murmurs.

“Ah,” Mika says. “Right.”

And yet neither of them thinks of Ron’s Appliance Repair. They get caught up in the previously unconsidered idea—proposed by Morris—that because of the keyboard and bigscreen TV, the abductors could be holding Rachel in a more middle-class neighbourhood than anyone had assumed. They
rethink their door-to-door search plans and get sidetracked by street maps and strategies.

They get sidetracked by the easing of their worst fear. By the force of their relief.

N
ANCY IS
crying so hard that she puts on the windshield wipers. When she realizes how crazy this is, she pulls over.

She has ended up on Cherry Street, almost at the lake. She restarts the car and drives the last quarter mile to the parking lot. Everything before her eyes—the trunks of trees, the falling-down dock house, the crumpled stretch of sand, the glittering dark blue water—seems stamped with dread. She opens her purse and finds the joint she tucked in with her cigarettes last Sunday. “Yeah, right,” she mutters, remembering Ron’s “We have to stay clearheaded.” How clearheaded is
he,
saying they should move Rachel upstairs? Voices travel through the grates in that house, especially between the shop and the two bedrooms. But even if Rachel’s mother makes it to the basement without Rachel’s hearing her, what’s she going to think when she finds an apartment down there all decked out for a nine-year-old girl?

Nancy can’t believe Ron hasn’t asked himself the same questions. So now his only choice is to move Rachel out of the house. Sneak her across the border, drive to Florida. At this very moment he could be loading the van. No, the car—the van has his name on it. Nancy wonders if he’s expecting her to come back in time, or if he even wants her to. Maybe he’s hoping she’ll be too late and he’ll have Rachel all to himself.

She puffs on the joint. In her mind she sees a certain
motel room: the closed drapes and soiled light. There’s a double bed and a man in boxer shorts sleeping on his side. He’s holding a little girl to his belly. He’s snoring. The little girl is eating Smarties. Her reward, he said.

W
HEN RON
opens the door, Rachel and Tasha both come running over.

“Ron!” Rachel cries.

He lays a fatherly hand on her head. Her hair feels alive, pushing back against his palm.

“Aren’t we having supper soon?” she says.

“We’re a little behind. Nancy isn’t feeling well, so I’m doing the cooking. It’ll be another fifteen minutes or so.”

“What’s the matter with her now?”

“Her leg’s acting up.”

“I
told
her she should get a prescription.” She traipses over to the keyboard and sits. “I’m practising my arpeggios.”

Upstairs he pours himself a rye and drains the glass. He pours himself another and goes to the kitchen and lets Tasha out into the yard. He surveys the counter. There’s a spinach salad already made and some slices of tofu in the frying pan. Four skinned, cooked potatoes on the cutting board. He starts chopping these up. If Nancy isn’t back soon, he’ll phone her apartment. He can’t imagine her staying away for longer than a few hours when she suspects him of having sexual feelings for Rachel. It’s easier to imagine her going to the police, but he’s betting she won’t. Even if she’s prepared to crucify him, the only person she now trusts to take care of Rachel is herself.

She was right about the bedroom. It’s a bad idea. He’s not as convinced as she is that the mother will turn up again, but
he can’t rule out the possibility. They’re going to have to leave, probably tonight. And go where? Florida is out; the U.S. border crossings will be on alert. West, he thinks. Manitoba, Alberta. Pack the car with a few essentials, make the maximum withdrawals on his debit and Visa cards. He’ll wait until the last minute to tell Rachel. He’ll say…what will he say? A gang of slave drivers is prowling the neighbourhood.

She’s standing on the other side of the door. She holds it open, then shuts it behind him and watches approvingly as he sets down the tray and turns the key. Any barrier between her and the slave drivers has her approval now.

“Sorry it took so long,” he says.

“Potato salad,” she says. “Yummy.”

“I hope it is.”

“It will be, and you know why?”

“Why?”

“Because
you
made it, and
you’re
yummy!”

His heart starts jumping.

He focuses on laying out the meal: the plates and cutlery, her glass of apple juice, his rye and water. Only when she picks up her fork does he relax again. Watching her eat has a mollifying effect on his nerves, although it’s also a great sensual pleasure. There’s something about seeing her put food in her mouth that gratifies and relieves him, as if she were a starving creature he has brought back from the brink. She chews conscientiously, working her entire face. When she swallows, she makes a soft gasping sound at the back of her throat.

Conversation is all about the torturing and killing of the slave drivers. This has been the case since Sunday. For a minute or two she’ll tolerate a change of subject, then it’s
right back to him sawing off a slave driver’s legs with hedge trimmers (his weapons having multiplied to include anything lying around the shop), baking a slave driver’s eyeballs in one of the microwave ovens, and so on. “What else have you got up there?” she asks eagerly. “I’ve got a soldering iron,” he says. “Do you know what that is?” Given the abuse she suffered before coming here, he understands her need for revenge fantasies. Even Nancy, who hates this kind of talk, can see how revenge fantasies might be therapeutic.

Tonight, when the meal is over, Rachel gets him to bring down the wrench. Usually he just swings it at the air, but tonight she wants him to hit the stuffed monkey, whose name, she informs him, is Lyle. “Here comes a slave driver!” she cries, throwing Lyle into the air. “Take
thatl”
she screams.

Ron feels the strangest sadness to see the monkey, with his gentle smile and floppy sausage limbs, go catapulting into the wall. On the other hand, it exhilarates him to use the full force of his body and to have her jumping around screaming. Lyle is indestructible, or appears to be, until the fifth or sixth strike, when his stomach rips apart and a wad of foam bursts out.

“Uh-oh,” Rachel says, picking him up. She looks at Ron, stricken.

“Nancy can sew him back together,” Ron says. “Or I can pin him with safety pins. For the time being.”

“No pins,” she says sternly. She sits on the sofa and cradles the monkey to her chest. “Poor Lyle,” she coos. “Poor little Lyle.”

Ron drops the wrench on the bed. “Would you like to watch a movie?” he asks hopelessly.

She cocks her head. “What time is it?”

“It’s…” He checks. “Almost seven.”

“Can we watch TV?”

“Sure. Sure we can.”

“Can we watch
Everybody Loves Raymond?”

At first she stays over on her side of the sofa. She’s quiet. Feeling guilty, Ron imagines. But then Raymond’s wife pours spaghetti sauce on Raymond’s lap, and she laughs and stretches out her legs.

Now her bare feet are pressed against Ron’s left thigh. He keeps his eyes on the television. When she laughs again, he begins to stroke her calf. She acts as if she doesn’t notice. Maybe she doesn’t. He feels the fine blond hairs under his fingers. He runs his hand down to her ankle. Squeezes her foot. Amazingly he isn’t shaking. He concentrates on experiencing her foot as if it were a separate organism and the entire object of his desire.

He’s no longer paying attention to the TV, so it startles him when she pulls her feet away. “Time for my bath,” she says, jumping up. She tosses Lyle on top of the other stuffed animals. “You have to run it for me, Ron.”

“What?” he says.

“My
bath.”

“All right.” He stands, teetering a little. He wonders if he’s drunk. Gripping the bedstead, the door frame, he makes his way to the tub.

“Don’t forget the bubble bath!” she calls.

Is she getting undressed? Now his legs tremble. Please don’t let her be naked, he thinks—a feeble, insincere prayer against the onslaught of his arousal. By the time he turns off the taps his shirt is drenched with sweat.

He goes into the other room. She still has her clothes on. “Have you read this, Ron?” she says, holding up a book.

“No.”

“Do you want to read it to me after?”

“You have your bath, and then if Nancy’s feeling better she can read it to you.” He seems to be moving toward the door.

“Will you come and say good night?”

“I will.”

“Don’t forget your wrench!”

The evening sun spreads his shadow across the lawn mowers and microwaves, all the clutter he should have stopped taking in days ago. He phones Nancy. Gets her machine again. “Call me right away,” he says. “It’s urgent.”

A tremor of fear goes through him as he puts down the receiver. What if she’s at Angie’s? Does she have the willpower to keep her mouth shut around that woman? He doubts it.

He’d better start packing right now. Right now. He hauls himself upstairs and drags his suitcase out of the linen closet. Jeans, shirts, underwear, socks—he throws everything in. He gets what he needs from the bathroom, throws that in. He carries the suitcase downstairs. His mind swerves to the shop. He’ll have to post a notice: “Closed for Family Emergency.” He’ll have to change the message on the answering machine.

He checks his watch: five to eight. They’ll leave when it’s dark. Maybe Nancy will be back by then. He takes a nip of whiskey. Hours seem to have passed since he ran Rachel’s bath. He’d better go down, he thinks, say good night. Let her get some sleep before the commotion starts.

She isn’t in the bed. She isn’t anywhere. For a sickening moment he’s sure she has escaped.

“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.