Helpless (21 page)

W
HEN NANCY REMINDS
Rachel that on Thursday she called Ron weird, Rachel lifts her chin and says, “I meant
sensitive.”
A moment later she adds, “Anyway, that was
before.”

Before she found out how “strong” and “brave” he was. And “smart” now, too. “He can fix any vacuum that was ever made,” she informs Nancy.

Nancy knows she should be glad about the turnaround, and at first she was. Two days later she frankly wishes things could go back to how they were. The so-called rescue and Ron’s promise to throw his wrench at the slave driver are all Rachel can talk about. She has him bring the wrench down and let her feel how heavy it is. She draws a picture of it half buried in the slave driver’s neck, so much blood streaming out behind that Nancy thought she had him wearing a red cape. There are endless pictures of Ron: Ron holding the wrench, Ron throwing the wrench, Ron driving his van, Ron fixing vacuums. She gives him huge arms and a flat stomach. The pictures of him with the wrench she tapes to the wall across from her bed.

Ron pretends not to be as thrilled as he obviously is. He says, “She needs to see me as a hero right now. It’s a stage, it’ll pass.”

In the meantime he gets to have her run up to him, crying “Ron!” every time he enters the room. He pats her head and smiles, showing his teeth. He has a new, high-pitched laugh. Meals are taken up with him telling her about his favourite topics: bird migration, World War II, and Ives McGaffey, the inventor of the vacuum. Nancy has heard it all before, many times, and even when it was new to her she drifted off. Rachel, though, seems hypnotized. She gazes at his face. When
she
talks, it’s always to him, even if she’s answering a question Nancy asked. She wants him close by but if he stays too long she worries that he isn’t guarding the shop. “Should I go up?” he asks. She pushes him over to the door, then pulls him back. Then pushes him to the door again. He lets himself be thrown around.

She still believes she’s going home in a couple of weeks. That hasn’t changed. Her plan is for Ron to sneak her outside in a box.

“Any slave drivers still in the neighbourhood will think you’re an air conditioner,” Ron says, playing along. Afterwards, to Nancy, he says, “I can go through the motions, at least. Put her on a trolley and wheel her as far as the parking lot.”

“And then what?”

“And then I see some slave drivers—she can’t see anything, she’s in the box—and I wheel her back inside.”

“Big hero.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“Me? I don’t have
any
ideas.”

“Maybe in two weeks, she’ll want to stay.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Look how far we’ve come in just eight days.”

“Look how far you’ve come, you mean.”

She tries to form a new bond between herself and Rachel through music. She brings down her banjo and plays the songs she’s been working on: “Billy Boy,” and “Yellow Bird.” Rachel listens politely, then asks her if she has ever played the guitar.

“I don’t have a guitar,” Nancy says. “Anyways, I like the banjo. The sound, right? The cheery sound.”

“I like the guitar,” Rachel says.

Nancy goes into the bathroom and cries.

She has never felt so lonely. Just to get Rachel’s attention—and to knock Ron down a peg or two while she’s at it—she talks about the letter Rachel wrote her mother and thinks is in the mail. She says she hopes Ron never finds out. “He’d be furious,” she warns. It’s true, he would be. With Nancy though, not Rachel. As to whether or not Nancy really will mail the letter, she can’t decide. She has sliced open the envelope, and several times a day she studies the picture to reassure herself that there’s no hidden message. She turns the page over.
Dear Mom,
she reads.
I love you very very much.

W
HILE
C
ELIA WAITS
for Mika to return from the printer’s with more flyers, she sits at the dining room table and listens to the CD of the woman. She’s still hoping to come up with a face or a location, but she also listens now for the reassurance.
They would never hurt her, don’t worry about that.

The kitchen phone rings regularly: people calling about the
Lost Children
program, which aired last night. Big Lynne takes messages. One call, though, has her walking into the dining room and putting a hand on Celia’s shoulder. Celia stops the CD. “Hold on,” Big Lynne says, then covers the mouthpiece and says to Celia, “It’s a guy named Robert Jones. From New York City. He thinks he might be Rachel’s father.”

A loud noise rushes through Celia’s body.

“Do you want to talk to him?”

Celia reaches for the phone. “Hello?”

“Celia?”

“Yes.”

“I apologize for bothering you at such a terrible time.”

“Who did you say you were?”

“Robert Jones.”

Jones.
“Are you black?” she asks.

“Yes. I’m black.”

“Are you an architect?”

“Architect? No. No, I’m an investment broker.”

“You never studied architecture?”

“No, I never did.”

The tension drains from Celia’s chest.

“I’m calling,” he says, “because I saw the show last night, and you look a lot like a woman I dated ten years ago, when I was living in Toronto. Her name wasn’t Celia, it was Shelagh…Shelagh Conroy, but she’d changed it once before, and I thought she might have changed it again.”

“I’m not her.”

“All right. Well, that’s—”

“Good-bye,” Celia says, and hands the phone back to Big Lynne.

An hour later she and Jerry and Mika are waiting out a downpour in a donut shop on Dundas Street West. A sign above the tiers of donuts says No Smoking but the place is empty and there are tin ashtrays on the tables, so she lights a cigarette.

She’s been telling Jerry about the phone call. “I was braced,” she says, shifting her backpack of flyers to an empty chair. “Rachel is always going on about how, one day, a black man from New York City is going to get in touch and hook her up with her father, so I was thinking, okay, here it is.”

Jerry reaches across the table for some napkins, which he uses to wipe his bald head. “It could still happen.”

“A couple of million people watched the show,” Mika says.

“I don’t mean that,” Jerry says. “I mean exactly what she predicted could still happen.”

“Oh, she’s convinced it will,” Celia says. “It’s as if she’s
seen
it.”

Jerry shrugs. “Maybe she has.”

Celia and Mika look at him.

“I believe kids have visions all the time. Flashes of the past and future, lost souls. All that stuff. Kids are new to the world. Eternity clings to them.”

“Did Ben have visions?” Celia asks gently. Ben was his son.

“Yeah, he did. He saw these reptile guys with green scales. He took it for granted they were aliens. Who’s to say they weren’t?”

“The shape of life a thousand light years away,” Mika volunteers.

“Exactly.”

Celia turns in her seat to blow smoke. Across the road, at a rooming house, water pours thick as an arm from a downspout. A crease of light between the closed curtains of a ground-floor room keeps catching her eye. But when she and Mika knocked on the door, nobody answered.

“I don’t know if this qualifies,” Mika says, “but…”

In the pause, while Mika gears himself up, Jerry pulls out some more napkins.

“When I was five or six,” Mika resumes, “I was on a camping trip with my father and I saw very clearly an image of a skull and crossbones in front of our flat outside Helsinki…where we were living at that time. My father
told me I was only imagining things. So I believed him. Then two days later, we arrive back home…and…in the middle of the lawn is a pesticide sign with the skull and crossbones picture. While we were gone, a company sprayed our lawn by mistake. They were supposed to have sprayed a place on another street.”

“It qualifies,” Jerry says.

“It hardly seems possible, though,” Mika says. “Does it?”

“Anything’s possible,” Celia says.

And that, she thinks, is the nightmare. The worst-case scenario is just as possible as the best-case. There are a thousand possible explanations, tens of thousands of possible suspects. The possibilities of doing the wrong thing, thinking the wrong thought, you can’t even measure.

N
ANCY COMES UPSTAIRS
and announces, “She wants
you
to read to her.”

“She does?”

“Don’t look so surprised.”

He’s fixing a Cuisinart four-slice toaster. He pulls the knob off the carriage lever and removes the front-end cap. “What do you think?” he asks, trying to keep his voice casual.

“I think you better go read to her.”

“Are you going to be there?”

“She only wants you.”

“Okay, well, I’ll just wash my hands.”

In the bathroom he takes off his shirt and runs a damp facecloth under his arms. The summer evening beyond the window—cars changing gears, the drooped, tropical silhouette of an ailanthus frond—reminds him of getting ready for dates back in high school, his elevated hopes. “Take it easy,” he warns himself in the mirror. There are no hopes here, other than to earn more of her trust and affection. He gargles with mouthwash and dabs his neck with cologne.

When he comes downstairs, Nancy is holding the refrigerator door open. “We need milk,” she says. “And I told her I’d buy some chocolate ice cream.”

“I’ll get it later,” Ron offers.

“I’ll get it. Tasha needs a walk.” She shuts the fridge and walks toward him, limping a little. He steps back so that she won’t smell the cologne.

“How’s the leg?” he asks.

She turns and looks at him. “What?”

“Your leg. How’s it doing?”

“The same.”

He waits until he hears the shop door slam before going down to Rachel. She’s in bed, sitting up with the covers pulled to her waist.

“Hi,” he says. She’s wearing the pink nightgown.

“Hi.”

The bed curtains have been tied back to allow her to see the drawings of him on the far wall. The
Ron wall,
she calls it.

“Do you have the book you want to read?” he asks.

She slips it out from under the duvet.
“Amazing Grace.
Have you read it, Ron?”

“I can’t say that I have.”

“It’s good.”

He sits next to her and lifts his legs onto the duvet. The book is thrust into his hands.

“That’s Amazing Grace.” She points at the cover. “He used to be a famous race horse but now he’s sick, and Annie…”

As she chatters away, Ron stares at the nest of pleated skin over her knuckle. Everywhere on her body are these morsels of superfluous beauty.

“…which is as far as we got.” The finger moves to
indicate that a page has been turned back. “Right there. Chapter Three.”

“Chapter Three,” he says, and with shocking trust she settles into the crook of his arm. The candied scent of baby shampoo wafts up from her damp hair. His heart rattles in its cage. “‘Annie took the stairs two at a time,’“ he reads. “‘She had to reach Belinda before Sarah did. Sam laughed—’”

“No!” Rachel cries. “You missed a whole part!”

“Sorry.” He clears his throat and goes back to the beginning. “‘Annie took the stairs two at a time. She had to reach Belinda before Sarah did.’“ The sweat is starting to collect along his hairline. He wipes it with his finger. “‘Sam laughed—’”

“You missed it again! Ron!”

“Sorry.”

“It’s because you’re shaking. Why do you shake like that?” She gazes up at him. She’s as innocent as a flower.

“I don’t know.”

“Because you’re sensitive?”

His eyes fall to her mouth. A machine roar fills his skull. Her lips are moving, she’s saying something. He bends closer to hear. Closer. He smells the toothpaste on her breath. She smiles. “Rachel,” he groans, and she twists away and snatches the book out of his hands. He sits back, terrified.

But she’s only taking over the reading. Through the dying roar in his head he hears, “‘Baron was the last of the livery horses.’“ She twists around again. “What’s a livery horse?”

He disengages himself and comes to his feet. “A livery horse…” His glance skims the room: the dollhouse, the drawings of a man with huge arms and too much hair. “A livery horse…is…it’s a horse for hire.”

“Why did you get up?”

He looks at her. She seems gaudy all of sudden. Her fat pink lips. Her yellow hair. “I heard something,” he says maliciously.

“Oh.” She hunches. She shrinks back to perfection.

“It’s probably nothing.” His anguish is enormous. “But Nancy has gone out, so maybe I should go check.”

“Are you coming back?”

Other men would have slipped her a drug. He shakes his head, furious at the thought of how low other men sink, what they get away with.

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

T
ASHA TROTS
through the puddles, shattering the reflection of streetlights. Nancy sucks on a cigarette. At the intersection she wakes up to the fact that she’s heading for Mac’s Milk, which has a mailbox out front, rather than for Laird Variety, which doesn’t. She takes this for a sign that the letter in her purse is destined, finally, to be sent.

She ties Tasha’s leash to a bike rack and enters the store. Standing at the counter, waiting for the person ahead of her to buy lottery tickets, she watches the security camera. She wonders if the police are able to trace a letter to a certain box or at least to a certain neighbourhood.

Back outside, she looks for more cameras. There don’t appear to be any, although in the dark it’s hard to tell. She unzips the side pocket of her purse and removes the envelope, worried for a moment that it isn’t sealed. But it is. At some point today she must have taped it. She opens the mailbox. Drops the letter inside.

“Shit,” she says a second too late: she forgot to wipe off
her fingerprints. Oh, well, she thinks. She unties Tasha and starts walking. She refuses to feel guilty. Ron can flex his muscles and show off his wrench, but
she’s
the one who’s keeping Rachel from falling apart. If that means taking big risks, too bad.

She stops. Something she didn’t register half an hour ago has just struck her: Ron was wearing cologne. She smelled it on him.
Ron was wearing cologne.

H
E SITS
on his bed and picks up the framed photo. “Jenny,” he says, willing himself to see her in the girl’s narrow eyes and belligerent chin. He can’t do it. He sees his mother.

“I’ve never been happy,” he says to her. He scans over his life, wondering if this is true. He supposes it’s more accurate to say he has never been lighthearted. Or carefree.
Carefree
—no part of him finds any connection with that word. His mother used to tell him he was born watchful. From watchful to secretive to feeling like a freak of nature, maybe it’s a natural progression. In high school he refused to donate blood in case the doctors found some grotesque component that gave him away. His highest claim for himself is that he’s a connoisseur of beauty, but even at his most awestruck there’s a thin, sour poison always pooling underneath. Even with Rachel.

The front door slams. He puts the picture on the bedside table and goes downstairs. Nancy isn’t around; she must have headed straight for the basement. He fills a glass with cold tap water and thinks about the mickey of rye he couldn’t bring himself to throw out. It’s in the cupboard above the stove. He’s still fighting temptation when he hears Nancy coming through the shop.

She halts just inside the doorway. She’s ghostly, her eyes black sockets. “You have to tell me,” she says. “I have to know. Do you have sexual feelings for her?”

“What?” He sets his glass on the table.

“Why are you wearing cologne?”

“I didn’t smell very good. I was sweating all day.”

Those black holes stayed fixed on him.

“Did Rachel say something?” he asks.

“No. Why?”

His blood starts flowing again. “I’m just trying to figure out what brought this on.” He goes over to her, extricates the plastic bag from her fingers and puts it on the counter. “You look awful. I don’t think you’re over that flu yet.”

She lets him take her hands. But her gaze slides to someplace over his shoulder. “I feel like you have sexual feelings for her,” she says.

“I don’t.”

Her eyes come back to his.

“I love her,” he says. “The same as you love her. But because of what your father did to you, you can’t…” He feels himself growing angry. “You can’t believe a man can love a little girl without…” He drops her hands. “Jesus Christ.”

“You shouldn’t wear cologne then.”

“Fine.” If she only knew what he had just walked away from down there. Paradise. Paradise is what he walked away from. “Fine. I won’t wear cologne.”

“Okay. Good.” She looks past him again, as if distracted by a more pressing thought. “I’m going to bed.”

He waits until she’s at the top of the stairs before he empties his glass in the sink and fills it with whiskey.