Helpless (12 page)

“I figured as much.”

“How long before the police get there?”

“Any patrol cars in the area will be there already.”

“But the woman won’t be.”

“Listen, she went to a crowded place. Somebody might have seen her acting suspiciously. I’d be surprised if she hasn’t been picked up on one of the surveillance cameras.”

“They’ll be able to get her fingerprints, right?” Celia is thinking that the kind of woman who would abduct a child will have a criminal record.

“Sure, if she left any. They might even get DNA. You can get it off the mouthpiece, from saliva. Not a lot of people know that. Come on. I’ll play you the message. Can you stand? Are you okay?”

They go into the kitchen. “Here, sit,” Big Lynne says, pulling out a chair. She jabs a couple of numbers into the phone and hands Celia the receiver.

Two rings, and then, “Fox residence, Constable Shriver speaking.”

“Where Rachel Fox lives?”

“That’s right.”

“Okay, I’m only going to say this once, so don’t interrupt me. Rachel is alive, she’s doing good.”

There’s a jumbled knocking sound, as if the receiver was dropped.

“Hello?” (From the woman.)

“I’m here. Who’s calling?”

“Don’t talk, okay? Just let me tell you. First off, I need a promise that it won’t get out to the media that you got this call.”

“I can promise that.”

“Okay, so, here’s a word. Pablito. You tell it to the mother and she’ll know I’m not fooling around. Pablito. Rachel told me to say it. Like I said, she’s doing good. She’s with people who only want her to be safe. They would never hurt her, don’t worry about that. But if this gets out to the media or whoever, then, I don’t know. Seriously. Something bad could happen.”

“Can you tell me—”

Dial tone.

Celia holds the receiver away from her ear, her relief shaken by the threat. “What does she mean,
something bad could happen?”

“Well, by
people
she most likely means herself and her husband or boyfriend, and maybe she made the call behind his back, so if he finds out, she’s in trouble.”

“Will he find out?”

“Not from a police source.”

“But why would she call?”

“Maybe Rachel got to her. Or she’s feeling guilty.”

“So they don’t want money.”

“She
doesn’t.”

“But why would they take her then?”

Big Lynne opens her hands. “Hard to say.”

“She sounded scared.”

“Is the voice familiar?”

“I’m not sure…”

“Do you want to hear it again?”

“Yeah.”

On it comes. The accent is East Coast or northern Ontario. The word
seriously
jumps out at her, the way it breaks into an anxious quaver, almost a laugh.

“Anything?” Big Lynne asks.

“Let me hear it again.”

This time
seriously
merges with the whole jittery tone of the message. Still, there’s something. “I should look at those lists,” she says, referring to the lists, now in police hands, of motel and video store customers.

“We can have them faxed,” Big Lynne says.

Celia stands and starts to move around the kitchen. Where has she heard that raspy, nerve-wracked voice before? She mentally rummages through the neighbourhood. Meanwhile Big Lynne radioes an officer at the mall and learns that surveillance cameras are being seized and roadblocks set up in surrounding streets. Celia pictures the woman slinking down a garbage-strewn alley. She tries to conjure a mental image of Rachel’s face to assure herself that the fear in it is bearable. Nothing comes, nothing has come for hours. It’s all right, though: Rachel is alive and being looked after by people who would never hurt her. Why would the woman say it if it wasn’t true? Why would she risk making the call? “Are the forensic guys still upstairs?” she asks.

“No. Why?”

“Maybe I’ll lie down now.”

Her apartment is undisturbed. The computer has been taken, and there’s fingerprint dust all over the place, but everything else is as it was: scattered sheet music, overflowing ashtray. She goes into Rachel’s bedroom. On the floor is a pile of dirty clothes that haven’t made it to the laundry. She kneels and brings a white cotton jersey to her face. She imagines a test where there are a hundred piles of clothes and if she finds the pile with Rachel’s smell she’ll find Rachel. A million piles, it wouldn’t matter, she’d pick the right one.

“You’re alive,” she says. She falls forward as the relief begins to burst out of her in convulsive gasps. When she can catch her breath, she says, “I knew you were, I knew it.” She rolls onto her back. A feeling of tranquility comes over her. She recognizes that it is temporary and fragile and maybe not even real, but it’s enough for now. She sleeps.

R
ON SAID HE
wanted to sleep in the shop and get up every few hours to listen at the door, but Nancy took a dim view of that. She told him Rachel would hear him moving around and it would scare her.

“What if her foot’s bothering her?” he said.

“Her foot’s fine,” Nancy insisted. “Don’t worry about it. Don’t go down there.”

When she comes out of the bathroom after brushing her teeth, he’s lying on the bed. He’s still in his boxer shorts, she’s glad to see. She smelled cologne on him earlier, and since he never wears cologne except when he wants sex, she thought—surprised and frankly disgusted—that he was in the mood. But his shorts are the opposite signal, so he must have lost interest. She’s wearing underpants and a T-shirt. For her, the idea of wanting to have sex ever again is impossible to imagine.

She pulls her half of the sheet up to her waist. A second later she throws it off. In spite of the open window and rotating fan and the rain they had earlier, the room is
stuffy. Neither of them suggests switching on the central air conditioning because then the basement gets cold.

“I forgot to let Tasha in,” he says suddenly. He starts to sit up.

“She’s with Rachel,” Nancy reminds him.

He lies back down. After a moment he says, “I suppose she’d prefer a piano.”

“A keyboard is what I told her,” Nancy says. “A piano wouldn’t fit down there anyway, right?”

“It’d fit, an apartment-sized one. The problem is carrying it. I couldn’t do it myself.”

And even if she had two good legs, Nancy doubts she’d be any help. “Well, that settles that,” she says.

She thinks about how Rachel is also limping, for the time being anyway. She heard what happened from both Rachel and Ron, and yet she can’t rid herself of the guilty feeling that
her
limp somehow got passed along, like a cold. “We’re lucky she didn’t kill herself,” she says, “falling off that chair. Poor thing, she was only trying to see out.”

“She was trying to break the glass.”

“You can’t blame her.”

“I don’t.”

“It’s like a fake room,” Nancy goes on. “Windows, but they’re painted over, they don’t even look real. A big, expensive TV but it’s only for movies. I don’t get why you can’t hook up the satellite, then block the stations that have news.”

Ron is silent.

“There’s a way of keeping the volume down, too, isn’t there? So she can’t turn it up?”

“Yeah, there is.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“I never thought of it.”

“Jeez, Ron.”

“I’ll do it tomorrow.”

“First thing.”

He pats her knee. “First thing.”

A red glow fills the room from the neon plumbing-supply sign next door. Nancy wonders if she left any lights on in her apartment. She remembers about the present under her sofa and says, “It’s your birthday.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I was thinking how long my mother’s been gone. Twenty-six years.”

Nancy lifts a hand to ward off that information. His mother dying on his birthday has always struck her as a bad omen. On top of which, at any mention of his mother’s being dead she is reminded of the envelope she found about a year ago. She was searching his kitchen for shish-kebob skewers, and at the back of a cupboard under a pile of old receipts she found an unsealed manila envelope that had
MOTHER
written on it but there was nothing inside except for six pieces of paper covered in scrawls. The scrawls had names:
Commander
and
The Victor
and other names she doesn’t remember. None of them made any sense or had anything to do with a mother. Did he mean
his
mother? She never asked. Aside from not wanting him to know that she’d looked in the envelope, she had a feeling the answer might be creepy or just plain sad. His childhood, what little of it he has ever talked about, was worse than hers in a way. At least she was never lonely.

“I bought you a present,” she tells him. “But I decided not to bring it over.”

“My present is how great you’ve been. I couldn’t have done this without you, Nance.”

You
did
do it without me, she thinks, restraining an urge to confess what she did without him—the phone call. He’d be stunned. And then he’d…what? Pack up and move Rachel somewhere else? She counsels herself to let sleeping dogs lie. There has been nothing about it on the radio, and there would have been by now if the media had found out.

“We’re going to get through this,” he says.

She turns to face the wall. “Just don’t go downstairs.”

She wonders if she still loves him. She imagines him in prison and the other prisoners kicking him in the head, calling him a fat fuck, and that tells her. But she supposes she knew she loved him when she came up from the basement and said, “You have to buy Rachel a keyboard,” and he said, “All right,” no questions, no argument, and she remembered he was only trying to protect Rachel from abuse and for a few minutes she was ashamed about having made the phone call behind his back.

Funny how she keeps forgetting about the landlord. It could be the name: Mika…she pictures a little dog. And then there’s the rage Rachel flew into, defending him. Would Nancy have defended her father like that? Well, not like that (in her house the girls didn’t lose their tempers) but she remembers how upset she got the time her uncle Barry called him an evil bastard. She was almost fifteen before she worked out that her father didn’t pick her because he loved her the most, he picked her because she was the scared one, the one who wouldn’t tell.

Ron is quietly snoring. Not that she thinks he’s asleep. She hopes Rachel is. She offered to sit with her until she
fell asleep, but Rachel wasn’t interested. “I’ve got Tasha,” she said, which Nancy took to be a good sign—how close the two of them had already gotten.

“You wait,” she said, “she’ll crawl right under the covers.” And then, at the door, she added, stupidly, “Sweet dreams.”

Rachel was nuzzling Tasha. Without looking up, she murmured, “I don’t think I’m going to have sweet dreams.”

That made Nancy cry a little as she climbed the stairs. It wasn’t just how depressed Rachel sounded, it was how excited she’d been only a few hours before…and friendly, squeezing Nancy’s hand while Nancy filled her in about the phone call. She wanted it word for word, so Nancy did her best to remember everything: the policewoman’s name (she said “Constable McIvor,” though that wasn’t it) and how she said, “Rachel’s doing good,” and so on.

“Did Constable McIvor believe you?” Rachel asked.

“Sure, she did. Because I told her
Pablito.
I said, ‘You pass that along to the mother and she’ll know I’m not fooling around.’”

“Yes!” Rachel cried, then covered her mouth with her hands.

“It’s okay,” Nancy said. “He can’t hear us in here.”

They were in the bathroom, their supposed reason being that Rachel was trying on her new clothes in front of the mirror. Nancy had brought down an ice pack, and now she got Rachel to sit on the toilet while she sat on the floor and unwrapped the bandage. There was an ugly bruise and still a bit of swelling, so she applied the ice. “Brace yourself,” she said, but Rachel didn’t seem to feel anything, she was too caught up in imagining her mother and Mika’s relief. She had them drinking wine from one of the bottles Mika put aside for
special occasions. She had them eating, finally, after almost no food since last night. She wondered what they’d be having for supper. Spaghetti, she decided. “That’s what we have on Saturday nights,” she said, “Mika and me, if I don’t go to the motel. I’ll bet my mom isn’t going to work. Not tonight.”

“Spaghetti and meatballs?” Nancy asked.

“I’m a vegetarian, I told you already.” She wiggled her foot. “That’s enough,” she said about the ice.

“So you’re
all
vegetarians.”

“My mom almost is. She eats fish. I don’t. But I’m not a vegan because I eat cheese and eggs. They don’t hurt the animal.” She was back to her chatty voice. “Mika eats veal. It used to really bother me, but he explained how eating lots of meat is part of his culture. He’s from Finland.”

“Finland, eh?” Nancy wrapped the foot back up and began examining the scratches on Rachel’s arm and leg.

“She’s alive, she’s alive,” Rachel sang.

“Who?”

“Me. That’s what my mom’s saying—‘She’s alive, she’s alive.’”

Her mood held for another couple of hours. She tried on the clothes and shoes, or at least a shoe, on her good foot. It was a bit roomy but she said she didn’t care. The purple jeans were a hit; she asked if she could keep them when she left. “They’re
yours,”
was how Nancy answered. To get off the subject of leaving, she looked at her watch. “Hey, suppertime,” she said, although it was only ten after five.

Upstairs, it gave her no pleasure to report that Rachel liked the clothes and wasn’t in pain. It annoyed her to see Ron sitting at the counter, tinkering with a motor and listening to music on the radio, while, because of what he’d
done, people’s lives were in turmoil. “From now on,” she announced, “I’m a vegetarian. I’m never touching meat again. And I’m never buying it either. You can buy your own meat.”

“I don’t need meat,” he said. “I’m on a diet.”

“And I’m eating my meals in the basement. With her.”

“Good idea.” He offered to set up the card table.

“I
can set it up,” she snapped.

“It’s in the furnace room,” he said, ignoring her tone.

She found herself infuriated. “You act like everything’s going along just fine! Well, it’s not!” And then she lit into him for waiting outside the door while she was in with Rachel: “It’s like you’re an armed guard. Like you’d shoot her if she left. Why don’t you let me have my own key?”

“You might leave it lying around.”

It was true, she might. “I’ll wear it on my chain,” she said, fingering the eighteen-karat gold necklace he gave her last Christmas.

“All right. But then don’t leave
that
lying around.”

“I’m not a complete numbskull.”

She went to get the card table.

As soon as she told Rachel that Ron wasn’t waiting outside, Rachel asked to hear about the call again. “The policewoman answered…” she prompted.

“After two rings,” Nancy said, flipping open the legs of the card table. As before, she skipped over the warning about keeping the media in the dark, saying, instead, that she finished off with, “Rachel sends her mother all her love.”

“I thought you just hung up!” Rachel cried.

“I got that in first,” Nancy said, wishing she had.

During supper Rachel stayed chatty and wound up. She
talked about a boy named Leonard who walked her to and from school and took piano lessons from her mother. She said that she also took piano lessons and practised an hour every night after supper.

“We’ll have to get a piano down here,” Nancy said, carried away by Rachel’s mood. “Or a keyboard maybe. Whatever will fit.”

“Keyboards are expensive.”

“Listen, Ron wants you to feel at home.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Rachel barely spoke after that. She huddled into herself and shrugged off Nancy’s suggestion that they watch a movie together. Nancy read through the movie titles, trying to entice her. Finally Rachel said, “If I wanted to watch anything right now, it would be TV. But it doesn’t even work.”

“Is that what’s bothering you? No TV?”

“What’s
bothering
me is I’m here.” She scowled and picked at her bandage. “Do you know who the men are that want to hurt me?”

“Not by name.” Other than Mika, there were only the men who drank at the motel, and Nancy had a feeling Rachel wouldn’t take them seriously.

“Are they slave drivers?”

“Slave drivers?”

“My friend’s brother, he’s from Africa. He says the slave drivers that live there come over here and kidnap girls that have dark skin and send them
back
to Africa.”

“Okay,” Nancy said uncertainly. Should she go along with this? Would it make things easier?

“I thought maybe they’re slave drivers.”

“Well, maybe they are.”

Rachel looked up. “Really?”

“Ron hasn’t actually told me.” She straightened the pile of DVDs in her lap.

“He doesn’t want to upset you probably.”

“Yeah, probably.”

“What will they do if they can’t get me?”

Nancy sighed. She wanted to comfort this kid, not terrify her. But if she said, “Give up and go home,” she’d just have to invent another gang of bad guys. “Wait around,” she said finally.

“For how long is what I wonder.”

“Oh. A while.”

“Ron said more than two weeks.”

“He did?”

“I think three weeks. I think they’ll wait around for three weeks.” She nodded. She intended to stick with this idea. And she was through talking about it. “I should have a bath,” she said, coming to her feet.

“I’ll run it for you,” Nancy said.

“Can we wash my hair?”

“You bet we can.”

Later, Nancy told Ron about the bath but not about washing Rachel’s hair.

She can hardly tell it to herself. You hold a little girl’s head under the tap. She’s naked in the tub, her eyes are squeezed shut, she trusts you. But she isn’t yours. She shouldn’t be anywhere near you, as a matter of fact. If there are words for how that can make you feel, Nancy doesn’t have them.

Besides, it’s none of his business.

W
HILE RON
waits for Nancy to fall asleep he holds himself motionless, although his heart is drumming and itchy rivulets of perspiration trickle down his chest and ears. Sex might help but he feels her resistance and he respects it. Not for the first time he is struck by the irony that he has stayed with Nancy all these years partly because she can’t have children, and yet what attracted him right from the beginning was her maternal instinct.

In her new incarnation she’s scarcely recognizable. Her little face, normally so eager, is pinched with purpose and judgment. Not always reasonable judgment. She’ll admit that Rachel needed rescuing from that Mika bastard, then five minutes later she’ll say, “You shouldn’t have taken her.” He’s trying to be patient. He can understand how hard it might be for her to accept that only a day ago Rachel was living through the same nightmare that she herself, at the same age, barely survived.