Helpless (13 page)

There’s also the fact that Rachel’s mother has a hold on her sympathies. She met the woman once, unfortunately, and found her to be
really nice.
“Who could love a child more than her own mother?” she asks.

Me, he thinks. I could. But he knows better than to say so. “She’s the love of my life”—what if he said that? What if Nancy had come back early today and caught him slumped on the counter, sobbing? She’d have been scared to death. No explanation other than that he was losing his nerve would have made sense to her.

It isn’t his nerve he’s losing, it’s his grip, his emotional equilibrium. The thought of Rachel in the basement is agony. He’s almost better off going down there because then he sees her for the scared little human being she is, and all
he wants is to make her feel safe. If killing somebody would accomplish anything, he’d do it. He’d kill Mika in a minute, not that Rachel would thank him.

He reminds himself that it has been only twenty-six hours. In a few days the tension will ease off, they’ll all relax, and Rachel will be in a better position to see her old life for what it was. Right now
he’s
the enemy.
He’s
the one she hates. Thinking this, his eyes fill, and for a few seconds he’s on the verge of breaking down again. He retrieves the memory of her foot in his hands, and that helps. Except now he has to go down there.

“Nance?” he whispers.

Silence.

“Are you asleep?”

He gets out of bed and leaves the room. Once he’s in the kitchen he breathes more freely. Despite what Nancy said, he doubts that Rachel can hear him through the three-and-a-half-inch fibreglass insulation. And even if she can, a few muted creaks aren’t the kind of noise that disturbs a sleeping child.

He feels his way to the shop, where he switches on a light. A towel is under the counter, and he gets it and wipes his face and chest. It’s much cooler down here. He looks at the door to the basement. Is she warm enough? He’d better check. He picks up the key and takes a few steps, then stops, shocked by the ease with which he almost talked himself into barging in on her.

And yet…What if she’s in trouble, moaning in pain?

He opens the door and steps onto the landing. Before he knows it, he’s at the bottom of the stairs. He remembers Tasha and counts himself lucky that she hasn’t woken up
and started barking. He presses his ear against the door to the room. Nothing. Good, he thinks forcefully, pushing aside his disappointment that there’s no need for him to enter. He sits on the bottom step.

She’s not even ten feet away. She’s wearing the pink nightgown Nancy bought her. He stands. He sits. He begins rocking back and forth, big swings of his torso as if physical momentum alone could decide whether he should go in or stay put. And yet even as he surrenders to the sensation of consciously abdicating responsibility he knows which side of him will prevail and when it does, when the rocking stops, it’s as though he has passed through fire.
This
is why he needs to be down here, he tells himself. To test his love.

“Pssst!”

He jerks around. Nancy is on the landing, motioning violently for him to come up. He gets to his feet. The joy evaporates. Why didn’t he send Nancy home hours ago? He can’t remember. He can’t remember why he was so adamant about having her move in.

He enters the shop and shuts the door. He isn’t looking at her, so when the first punch strikes him in the ribs he thinks he’s been shot: a sniper through the window. He grabs onto the counter, one arm raised against what there’s no mistaking now—the hard fast jabs pelting him like rocks. “Hey!” he’s saying. “Hey!”—trying not to yell. Finally he gets hold of her wrists. For a moment they stare at each other. Her face leaps with fury.

“You promised not to come down!” she hisses.

“I didn’t promise.” Her body slackens and he releases his grip. He thinks she’s going to collapse but she only hobbles sideways. “I was worried about her,” he says. “I haven’t
spent any time with her, not really. You two have spent hours together. I’ve spent what? Ten minutes?”

“So?”

“I wanted to…see how she is.” A tide of exhaustion has him groping for the stool. He sits.

“You’re why she wet the bed,” Nancy says. “Why she crawls under it.”

Her fists clench, and he braces for another battering. Where did she learn how to throw a punch like that?

“Don’t you get it?” she says.

“No,” he admits.

“Because you were never scared of somebody. Of somebody coming…”

Her voice catches, and he is moved. “Nance,” he says. “You know I would never hurt her.”

“She
doesn’t know.”

“Oh, God.” He walks out from behind the counter and takes her in his arms. She presses her forehead against his chest.

In bed he holds her until she’s asleep and then he rolls over and looks at the picture on his bedside table. There’s enough light that he can make out the frame and the crack in the glass. The picture itself he can imagine, although it’s only because his mother died twenty-six years ago today that he even tries to impose her on the cocky stance and stubborn jaw, the bony knees. A long time ago the girl in the picture became somebody else to him.

J
ENNY’S SCHOOL WAS
in Burlington, just down the street from where her mother worked. Since Alcan’s head office was on the way to Burlington, the plan was for Ron’s father to give them both a ride, although it would mean that he’d have to leave an hour earlier and Ron wouldn’t get his usual lift to school. Ron didn’t care. For one thing, he’d gotten used to being alone in the house. Also, he wanted to take apart Mrs. Lawson’s vacuum cleaner, and on Monday morning, as soon as he heard the car doors shut, he wheeled it out of the broom closet and turned it on.

There wasn’t much suction, partly because, as Ron knew, the exhaust on these old Hoover Constellation models was designed to blow onto the floor and form a cushion of air. He cleared out the intake tube and adjusted the fan belt, and matters improved. He decided against telling Mrs. Lawson. The last thing he wanted was to have her thinking he’d fixed her vacuum for her sake, for the sake of impressing her.

That night she heated up chicken stew from a frozen batch she’d brought in a cooler the day before. Ron, remembering how her husband had died, scrutinized every
spoonful for bones. So, he noticed, did Jenny. After supper Ron’s father asked if anyone wanted to play gin rummy, but Mrs. Lawson said Jenny had homework to do, and when Jenny left the table, Ron felt awkward. The partnership between him and his father, so clearly broken with a woman in the house, now seemed like a game he’d made the mistake of taking seriously.

“I’ve got homework, too,” he said.

On his way past Jenny and Mrs. Lawson’s room he glanced in. Jenny sat very straight at her desk, her back to the door. He went down to his room and lay on his bed and wondered about her. Was her “Moving Day” story true…was she really happy to be here? Did she miss her father? Her horse?

He rolled onto the floor and dragged out from under his bed one of the suitcases in which he kept his old toys. Beneath all the tanks and trucks and soldiers he found a Shetland pony, partly melted from the time he tried to see how the plastic would burn. He threw it back in, searched around some more and dug out Geronimo’s black stallion, Midnight.

Downstairs they were watching television. There was a wailing sound—on the TV, he thought—but then he realized it was coming from Jenny’s room. He crawled across the floor and pressed his ear to the adjoining wall. “Go to sleep,” Jenny was saying, “go to sleep now, go to sleep.” And then the wailing sound again. “Oh, all right,” she said, “I’ll heat up your bottle.”

He stood and went out into the hall. Silence. He went down to her room.

She was sitting in front of the dollhouse. Without looking around she said, “Do you want to play?”

He stepped across the threshold.

“You can be the father,” she said.

“Those shingles are real cedar,” he told her, moving closer. He’d noticed them earlier.

“I know.” She got up on her knees. “It’s all real. The chimney is real brick. They make little bricks especially. And when you do this—” She pushed a button on the fireplace. “Look! Fire!”

Fake fire, but still. He set Midnight down and peered in. No wires were visible.

“Okay,” she said importantly, “look at this.” She flicked a switch on the stove and the burners turned red. “And there’s food in the fridge.” She opened it. “Ketchup and milk and juice and a roast of beef and everything a person would eat.”

Her arm bumped his as she reached into the dining room. On came the chandelier. “Everything works,” she said. She tipped a rocking chair that had an old-lady doll in it. The chair rocked hard, the old lady keeled over. She grabbed something and pressed it into his hand. It was a chimpanzee. She’d taken it from a crowd of tiny stuffed animals propped up on one of the toy beds. “My mother told me your mother used to collect stuffed monkeys,” she said.

It was a perfect replica of his mother’s favourite chimpanzee, right down to the orange segmented fingers and the red vest and cap.

“Your mother was a scatterbrain,” she said.

“She was not,” he said angrily. Where had she heard that?

Jenny looked puzzled. “What’s a scatterbrain?” she said.

“I have to finish my homework,” he muttered.

He put the chimpanzee back and went to stand but
Jenny cried, “Hey!” She had picked up Midnight. “I didn’t see him! What’s his name?”

“Midnight.”

“I think he should be Misty.” She snatched up a man doll and thrust it at him. “Put him on Misty. He’s outdoor father.”

Ron didn’t think to refuse. He spread the doll’s legs and set him in the saddle. Because the knees wouldn’t bend he could only secure him by leaning him forward and pinching the arms on either side of the horse’s head in a jockey’s pose. Jenny seized a woman doll from the kitchen and pranced her out of the house. “Oh, Phil,” she said in an actressy voice. “You promised to mow the lawn.”

Ron waited. The man looked so small and insecure on Midnight, though he was smiling happily. He had brown wavy hair and wore blue jeans and a blue-and-green checkered shirt.

“He has to answer,” Jenny said in her own voice.

“I’m riding my horse,” Ron said.

“All right, darling. Don’t be too long.”

Ron cantered Midnight to the end of the carpet.

“Okay,” Jenny said. “Leave him there. Now you’re indoor father.” She handed him a blond man wearing a navy bathrobe and smoking a pipe. He had a sleepy, heavy-lidded smile.

“Can’t the other guy go in?” Ron said. The man’s smile disturbed him.

“Don’t be silly.” She pointed to a bedroom. “Okay, lie him down. Turn on that lamp.” Ron obeyed. Jenny switched off the downstairs lights and hopped the woman up the stairs. In the doorway the woman paused to say, “How many times do I have to tell you not to smoke in bed?”

Ron tugged at the pipe.

“It doesn’t come out,” Jenny said briskly. She placed the woman beside the man. “Oh, darling,” she moaned, and turned her doll and pressed it against Ron’s. “Hold him!” she ordered because Ron’s hand had flown right out of the house. “You have to hold him,” she said. “They’re sexing!”

Ron sat back on his heels. For the first time since he’d come in here he was aware of Jenny’s proximity.

“Hurry up!” she said, a blush overtaking her face.

His mouth felt parched as he reached in and held the man. That was all he had to do; Jenny’s doll did the pushing and moaning.

“Hey, Buddy!”

It was his father, calling from downstairs. Ron jumped up and ran into the hall. “Yeah?” He still had the man doll.

“Wild Kingdom
is on!”

“I’m doing my homework!”

“Just letting you know!”

He returned to the room and dropped the doll on the carpet. Nothing of the panic he felt constricting his face showed on Jenny’s. She looked only irritated as she plucked the woman off the bed and walked her into the baby’s room.

“See you later,” he said.

No answer.

At breakfast she was her silent, unfriendly self. It surprised him that she could pretend nothing had happened; it elevated her in his eyes. After everyone had left the house he went into her room. The man dolls were where he’d left them, one lying across Midnight, the other on the floor nearby. The woman doll was leaning against the refrigerator, her head twisted backwards. He picked her up and picked up
the indoor man and rubbed them together. Nothing. He twisted the woman’s head to the front and tried again, this time saying, “Sexing,” and now he felt a thrill but it was disappointing compared to what he’d felt last night. He needed Jenny, he guessed. Without her, the dolls were just dolls.

That evening he stayed in his room and started putting together his new model airplane. Although Jenny chattered away next door, he fought the temptation to go over. He suspected she knew better than to talk to anyone about the sexing, that wasn’t what worried him. It was his father’s finding out he’d played with dolls at all. If Jenny gave up waiting and came to his room, he’d tell her he was busy. “Can’t you see I’m busy?” he practised under his breath, using different tones of voice. But she didn’t come. Why? Was she mad at him? Had she even thought about him at all?

D
AYS WENT
by and then weeks and she kept to herself. He figured he’d let her down. Or maybe she just didn’t like him. She barely spoke to his father, either, except when she had a new story to read. (Since “Moving Day,” there’d been “Guess What? I’m Part Chinese,” “How to Make Friends,” and “The Tragic Death of White Star,” about a racing horse that broke its ankle and had to be put to sleep.) Mostly she stayed in her room, or she and her mother sat at the kitchen table and worked on her flash cards. Every Saturday after lunch they visited people they knew in Burlington. On Sunday evenings they lay on the sofa together and watched
The Wonderful World of Disney.
It unsettled Ron how they clung to each other with their legs and arms entwined. If his father also found this behaviour peculiar, he never let on.

She began to be the girl he dreamed about at night, the girl who was in danger but didn’t realize it and couldn’t hear him yelling. He’d been having these dreams for years but until now the girl had always been faceless.

One night he woke up from such a dream, and there she was. “What?” he said, frightened.

“Shhh.” She wore a long white nightgown. She moved into the horizontal bars of light coming through his blinds. “They’re sexing,” she whispered.

“Who?” He thought she meant the dolls.

“My mother and your father.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Come on! You can hear them!”

Still uncomprehending, he got to his feet and followed her into the hall, then stopped at the sound of birdlike cries coming from his father’s room. Jenny, who was right outside the door, covered her mouth with her hands.

The cries jerked higher. There was a deep male groan, after which the cries broke off. Jenny hurried back to where he was. She tugged his sleeve. He pulled away.

The rescuing thought that the man in there wasn’t his father came and went. He returned to his room, shut the door, and sat on the edge of his bed.

Jenny giggled.

She was lying under the covers. He jumped up. “What are you doing?” he whispered. “Get out of here!”

“I’m scared,” she said in a small voice. He knew she wasn’t. All he could see of her was the glint in one eye and the suggestion of her face, a darker whiteness than the pillow. He wondered if she and her mother were sex maniacs.
Mrs. Lawson must be, or else why would his father let her into his bed? It was quiet down there now. Were they finished? His skin felt pricked all over by pins or sparks.

“For goodness’ sake,” Jenny said, “are you going to stand there all night?”

She sounded like the woman doll. Stirred—and shamed—he yanked at the covers. “I said get out of here!”

“Don’t, don’t,” she whimpered.

“What if your mother comes back?”

“She won’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because she stays with him for…I don’t know…an hour sometimes.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They used to sex all the time at our old house.”

He couldn’t quite let himself hear this. “Maybe they’re going to get married,” he said.

“My mother is never getting married again,” she said. “Ever.” She pulled the covers back up around herself. “Are you coming to bed or not?”

He climbed in and lay at the very edge of the mattress, turned away from her. Spears of light from a passing car shot through the blinds onto the wall, where they leaned and fell, then drifted upwards.

“We could play,” she whispered.

Up near the ceiling the spears zoomed off.

“Okay,” she said, “you’re Phil and I’m Carol. Our baby is called Wendy and our horse is called Misty.” She shunted closer. “Wendy fussed all day long,” she said in the woman doll’s voice. “I hope she hasn’t got the croup.”

Ron had no idea what the croup was. He said, “Me, too.”

“You have to speak lower,” she said.

“Me, too,” he growled.

“I don’t know what I’d do without Misty. He’s such a comfort to me.” Her arms slipped around Ron’s waist.

He ejaculated, although because it was his first time, he thought he’d got so keyed up he’d wet his pants.

“Now you say something,” she said, nudging him.

“I’ve…” He struggled for breath. “I have to…”

“What, darling?”

“Go to sleep.”

“Aren’t you going to kiss me first?”

“Stop it, Jenny. I mean it.”

She withdrew her arms and climbed out of bed. “Okay,” she said. She still seemed to be in the game but as a squeaky-voiced little sister who cheerfully did what she was told. “Nighty-night,” she whispered from the hall.

He waited until he heard her door shut before turning on his light. He’d already figured out what had happened, and he wondered if some evil force had entered the house and taken possession of all its inhabitants. Except that he didn’t feel evil, but maybe you weren’t supposed to, maybe the evil force vanquished guilt. Which would explain how his father and Mrs. Lawson could have sex only a few feet away from their own children.
They used to sex all the time at our old house.
If it was true, it must have been before his mother died because, since then, his father had never once gone out after supper.

And even this prospect, for all its awfulness, failed to disgust or offend him. He was barely able to hold it in his mind. He turned to face the wall on the other side of which was Jenny.

He couldn’t believe how normal everybody was at breakfast. Jenny read a book about Welsh ponies and kept checking her watch. She looked at him woodenly when he asked her to pass the milk. Of course, his father and Mrs. Lawson were old hands at putting on a show, he knew that now. Still, it amazed him that they gave nothing away. When his father squeezed by Mrs. Lawson to get to the fridge, all she did was say, “Oops, sorry.”

After everybody had left, he rummaged through Jenny’s desk. There was a pad of paper, some markers, four decks of flash cards, and a harmonica. He blew on the harmonica. He considered writing her a note that said, “Dear Carol, hope to see you tonight, your husband, Phil.” But what if Mrs. Lawson found it? Jenny’s nightgown was hanging from a hook on the back of the door, and he went over and stroked the soft flannel. It dawned on him that he had better start wearing shorts under his pyjama bottoms, just in case. Maybe Jenny knew what happened to boys—she knew more than she should—but if not, he couldn’t imagine telling her. What he
could
imagine was her saying, “Hey, why are you wet?” Then he’d have to jump off the Bloor Street Viaduct. To make certain he died instead of turning into a human vegetable, he would jump from the highest point.