Helpless (9 page)

Impatiently she shoves the present beneath the sofa. Even more repellent to her than the shirt and card is the prospect of celebrating. She goes over to her closet and lifts a load of blouses and skirts off the rod and dumps them in a box. She hasn’t got much in the way of clothes, in the way of anything for that matter, so the packing takes only about fifteen minutes. The last few boxes she fills with her aromatherapy candles, her china upside-down clown, and, after some thought (will she ever again feel up for playing music?), her banjo and songbooks.

Hobbling badly now, she carries the boxes one at a time down to the car. Nobody she knows walks by. Nobody even glances at her.

There’s more traffic, though. She’s conscious of people in other cars. Without really thinking, she turns on the radio and punches in the all-news station.

“…Described as nine years of age, small, thin build with blond curly hair, blue eyes, light brown skin…”

She swerves, braking just in time to avoid running down
a pair of teenage girls. They pound the hood of her car. “Fuckin’ bitch!” one of them shouts.

She stares straight ahead.

“Police are canvassing the area on foot,” the reporter is saying, “searching homes, stores, garages, and backyards. Seventy men and women from the province’s Volunteer Emergency Response Team have been called in—”

She turns the radio off. She seems to be outside the car, watching herself: a woman in an orange tank top, gripping the steering wheel of a red Cavalier.

O
N ALMOST
every radio station they’re talking about Rachel: “…Went missing from her Carlton Street home last night…,” “…Small, thin build, nine years old…”

Nine surprises Ron. He’d have said eight. Everything else coincides with his expectations: the grid search, the volunteers being called in, and the landlord (who has the peculiar name of Mika, Mika Ramstad) not dying after all, only suffering a few cuts and bruises. “We have a Rachel hotline set up,” a police spokeswoman says. “We ask anybody who may have seen or heard anything to call it at—” Ron switches stations. “…No leads yet, but it’s still very early in the investigation—”

He keeps switching stations until he finds music. No leads yet, he repeats to himself. And there won’t be any, either. What could anybody have seen or heard? Shapes, shadows, the sound of a child crying and a man comforting her. Remembering how Rachel held his hand as he led her to the car, he feels a rush of love and he takes the underpants out of his pocket and holds them to his face.

He washed them along with the sheets and skirt; he had to in case Nancy asked where they were. But he can’t bring
himself to part with them. Not yet. They’re mauve with a pattern of white coils. The leg holes are so small his fist won’t fit through. He stretches the waistband along the ruler that’s fastened to the edge of the counter. Seven and a half inches. Double that and you’ve got fifteen. A fifteeninch waist, he says to himself, amazed, slipping the underpants back in his pocket.

He could use a drink.

Those days are over, however, so he goes to the kitchen and brews a pot of strong coffee, then fixes his regular breakfast of six slices of bacon, four scrambled eggs, and four pieces of toast. He has had only a few bites when it occurs to him that if he lost a few pounds Rachel might not find him so terrifying. He wasn’t always this big. Until his midtwenties he looked pretty good, and he wouldn’t mind looking that way again, for her. Say he lost five pounds a week…

He gets up and scrapes his meal into the garbage.

It’s a quarter to eight; Nancy has been gone nearly an hour. He wonders whether he should be more worried about her than he is. Right now, at this moment, she could be talking to the police. Never trust a green-eyed woman, his father used to say. Well, his father never met Nancy. Sure, she feels sorry for the mother (Nancy’s the type of woman who feels sorry for mass murderers) but her hunger to have a child of her own is at the bottom of who she is. No, he assures himself, Nancy’s all right, Nancy won’t betray him.

Without realizing, he has taken the underpants out of his pocket again. He folds them and puts them back. He should get down to work, he thinks, keep his mind occupied. He carries his cup of coffee into the shop and considers the Honda mower, which has been sitting around for
almost a week. With these self-propelled models, it’s usually the clutch, a simple matter of adjusting the gap between the bolts. He grabs his screwdriver and steps through the clutter, pausing to listen at the basement door and then going cold as it comes to him that maybe the reason for the silence is that she has stopped breathing. People die of fright. They choke on their own vomit.

A pulse beats in his throat as he opens the door and descends the stairs.

The bed is empty.

“Rachel?”

He looks in the bathroom. Not there. No way she could have gotten out. The dollhouse lights are on. Was that her doing? The toy chest isn’t quite closed and he lifts the lid, prepared to find her crammed inside. He goes down on his knees and peers under the bed.

There she is.

“Hey,” he says.

She’s on her stomach, head tucked into the floor, arms straight at her sides.

“I just wanted to make sure you’re all right,” he says. Her left foot jerks. “Listen, Rachel,” he says, his voice catching in his relief. “I’m not going to hurt you. I would never hurt you.”

The foot jerks again. A long, graceful foot, dusky pink on the underside. To squeeze it in a gesture of comfort and reassurance, would that be wrong? Yes.
She’s too scared of you.
It takes everything in him, all his strength of will, to grasp the bedpost and pull himself up.

“What do you think of the dollhouse?” he says. “It’s what’s called a Colonial style. The next time you’re looking at it, turn on the switch next to the fireplace.”

He is speaking too loudly. For a moment he seems to know her terror and he picks up a stuffed animal, a zebra, and presses its spongy body between his hands. “Everything here is for you, you know,” he says. “The DVDs, the books, the Barbie dolls. If there’s anything else you’d like, you only have to ask.” He sees that she has drunk some of the orange juice but that the banana is untouched. He opens the can of Pringles. Full. “Nancy will be back soon. You can tell her what you want for breakfast.”

He sets the zebra on the bed and pulls up the duvet, patting it into smoothness. Outside, right by one of the windows, the dog begins to bark. “Must be a squirrel,” he observes.

Or a person. Not a customer, though…it’s too early for customers. And they never pull into the lane. He wipes his wet palms on his shirt. Hearing no tread on the outside stairs, no pounding on the door, he relaxes and says, “Would you like to meet Tasha? How about I go get her?”

And so he does, returning a few minutes later with the dog under his arm. As soon as he puts her down she runs to the bed and pokes her head under.

“Tasha, meet Rachel,” he says.

Tasha backs up, wagging her tail, whining for Rachel to come out.

Ron waits. After a minute he realizes that with him in the room, nothing’s going to happen. “I’ll leave you two to get acquainted,” he says. He’s about to shut the door when he takes another look and there’s her arm reaching out to pat the dog on the head.

R
ACHEL WAS THREE
weeks old when Celia learned at the reading of the will that her mother hadn’t been as financially strapped as she’d always let on. There were Canada Savings Bonds, Bell Telephone Class A shares, and over thirty thousand dollars in Treasury bills. During her pregnancy Celia had dimly envisioned keeping the job at Valu-Mart while leaving her baby in the care of a Jamaican woman she’d heard about, a grandmother who loved children and charged next to nothing. She had reconciled herself to finding a cheaper place to live. Now, not only would she be able to look after Rachel fulltime, she’d have enough money to stay in her mother’s apartment and to buy some half-decent baby furniture. Rachel had been sleeping in an old red wicker basket next to Celia’s bed, so a crib was the first priority, but Celia also bought a changing table, a monitor, a dresser, a rocking chair, and a rug.

The day before the furniture was to be delivered, she and a few of her friends cleared out and wallpapered her mother’s bedroom. The wallpaper had a pattern of blocky, cockeyed letters from which monkeys hung by their hands and tails. The rug was pale pink. The handles on the dresser
drawers were lime green and fish shaped. Once everything was set up, Celia walked Rachel around, saying, “This is yours and this is yours and this is yours…,” feeling for the first time a glow of worthiness. But that night, the first night she and Rachel spent apart, she lay awake in misery, as if the separation had been brought about by force. Eventually she lifted her baby out of the crib and carried her back to the basket, and not for another five years did they ever again sleep in separate rooms.

“I’ll make a lot of mistakes,” she had warned Rachel in the hospital. “I know how to change a diaper and that’s about all.”

That was enough, as it turned out. From the first day, Rachel nursed without any fuss and she slept four hours at a stretch. Celia could hardly believe her luck. None of the books she’d read had prepared her for things to go so smoothly. Given her situation, she was supposed to, she was
entitled
to, get so lonely and depressed she’d want to jump off a bridge. Yet here she was, doing fine. Nobody believed her. “Good for you!”—she heard that a lot. Everyone seemed to think she was putting on a show. “You’re a brave young lady,” the caretaker of the apartment building, a mournful old German named Klaus, told her almost every time she and Rachel passed him in the halls.

If he only knew. As far as she was concerned, a husband, even a wonderful husband, would have only gotten in the way. And her mother…Her mother had thought that breast-feeding was medieval and that babies should be left to cry. It was impossible to imagine how the three of them could have lived together, and yet just as impossible to imagine how she and Rachel could have abandoned her when she had already
been abandoned by Celia’s father. But then the problem of living together never arose. It was as if, in her bones, her mother had known about the pregnancy and in a fit of heroism deeper and truer than her conscious will had decided to take herself out of the picture. For Celia to think of the death in these terms was easier than to accept that there was nothing, no sense or virtue, behind its glaringly convenient timing.

Her oldest friend, Laura Colemen, was the only person who didn’t just assume that her mother would have been a great comfort and support. But Laura was like everybody else in suspecting her of having a harder time of it than she let on. “Don’t tell me you never get bored,” she said. “I’ll believe everything else, but not that you don’t get bored.”

Twice a month, on a Saturday afternoon, Laura insisted on babysitting so that Celia could go to a movie or read in a coffee shop, just be by herself for a few hours. Celia usually ended up walking around fretting, imagining Rachel’s confusion and uneasiness. Who was this skinny woman with her jangly bracelets and loud voice? Where was the woman with the leaking breasts? Laura was clumsy. What if she dropped Rachel? In store windows Celia would catch her anxious reflection. Thoughts that at other times stayed buried would begin to assail her. She’d be ashamed, in a stingy, resentful way, about not having informed her father of her mother’s death, let alone that he had a grandchild. And then she’d get sad about her mother, who had never allowed herself a moment’s lightheartedness, whose one passion, music, had been discouraged by her own mother, and yet despite that and despite being so frugal she did things like separate two-ply Kleenexes so there’d be twice as many, she paid for Celia to take piano lessons.

At a certain point of wretchedness, she would return to her apartment building and stand in the hall outside her door, listening. Either she’d hear nothing or the TV or Laura on the phone. When she finally brought herself to go inside (and not even an hour would have passed since she’d left), Laura always looked at her as if she were an alcoholic caught with a drink in her hand.

Don’t tell me you don’t get bored.
She didn’t, though. There was too much to do. There was the feeding and bathing, the diaper changes, the laundry, all the usual chores. And unless it was pouring rain, she took Rachel out in the stroller for at least an hour every afternoon and let her be ogled by the neighbourhood women, some of whom came right out and asked, “Are you the mother?” It occurred to Celia to be offended but she could never muster the outrage. “Well, I gave
birth
to her,” was the extent of her sarcasm, and even then a note of disbelief crept into her voice.

Her inheritance lasted three years. Before it was completely gone, she made up flyers that said “Piano Lessons in My Home” and taped them to telephone poles near her apartment. There was plenty of interest, but either she was charging too much or something about her phone manner put people off, because only one person made an appointment.

His name was John Paulsen. He looked to be in his late thirties, tall and gaunt with milky skin, a big sculpted head and short black hair combed forward like a monk’s. He had an accent she couldn’t place—Scandinavian? Dutch?—and a tentative, formal way of speaking. “I should like to play a little Bach before I die,” he announced right away. She wondered if he was terminally ill, but then Rachel emerged from the bathroom, and after being introduced to her he said,
“Rachel is the name I plan to give to my first daughter.” So there were a few years in him, anyway.

“Do you have sons?” Celia asked.

“No, no…” He tapped his hands together. His fingers were extraordinarily long. “I mean to say, if I am ever…
fortunate
enough to marry and
have
a daughter.”

It was agreed that he would come two afternoons a week. He was self-employed, he explained; he could make his own hours. She asked him what he did.

“I take care of my investments,” he said.

He had investments.

But no talent, no ear. Mondays and Thursdays from two until three thirty in the afternoon, Celia sat beside him on the bench and battled to get him through the most elementary of exercises. His utter lack of rhythm and coordination staggered her. Those wonderful fingers, which never fumbled unbuttoning his coat and which plucked an eyelash once, from Rachel’s cheek, went sloppy and thick on the keyboard. At the end of the lesson everyone would be frazzled: him murmuring, “Forgive me,” Celia babbling about not losing hope (he was, God help her, her only student), and Rachel actually wringing her hands.

Rachel adored him. He spoke respectfully to her; he seemed to arouse in her three-year-old heart a desire to rescue. As he did in Celia’s, but for her there were also flickers of lust. His bony wrists, his noble profile, his whole starving-aristocrat elegance coupled with his hopeless musical ambitions had her wanting to lay him on her bed and tenderly peel off his clothes. She hadn’t even looked at a man in almost four years and had never been attracted to anyone so delicate, but his delicacy was exactly why she
could imagine him sliding into her life. Not a hulking intrusion but a tasteful ornament. Who had investments! Without any encouragement on his part, aside from his habitual gallantry, she began fantasizing marriage, a house with a yard, no more guilt about how much she spent on cigarettes, no more buying her bras at the Dollar Store.

It took two months before he finally played his first little ten-bar tune straight through. To celebrate, she asked if he would like to stay for tea, and somewhat to her surprise (he was always heading off to meetings with bankers and stockbrokers) he said, “I would like that very much indeed.” She used the good china and served lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches on white bread with the crusts sliced off. He gobbled them down. He seemed happy and relaxed as he told them about growing up in Oslo and Frankfurt, the only child of a pediatrician mother and financier father.

“Our father lives in New York City,” Rachel said when he paused.

“
Your
father does,” Celia corrected.

“He’s black,” Rachel said.

“Is he indeed?” John said. He smiled at Celia—a complicit, amused smile. A
husbandly
smile.

The following Thursday he stayed right through supper and Rachel’s bath and then, at Rachel’s insistence, he read her her bedtime story.

“Do you want some Kahlua?” Celia asked when he came back into the living room. She was on her third glass. “Or would you rather go straight to sex?”

He fingered the knot of his tie. “I should like to have a quick cleanup first,” he said.

A shower, he meant, and by himself. She found this
completely endearing. She waited for him in bed, wondering if he would come to her naked or wrapped in a towel. Wrapped in a towel, she decided correctly. In fact, he didn’t discard it until he was under the covers.

They kissed, or at least she kissed him. His body was unexpectedly soft and unmuscled, like foam tubing. Nothing she did succeeded in giving him an erection, and finally he rolled over onto his back and pulled the sheet over himself. “Forgive me,” he said. “With Rachel in the next room, I can’t feel right.”

“She’s asleep.”

“I find myself…feeling somehow responsible…”

What was he getting at? Celia came up on her elbow. “Responsible for what?”

“Of course, she’s
your
daughter…”

“That’s right.”

“I keep seeing her little face.”

Celia lay back down. She got the picture: the attraction in this household was Rachel, not
her.
Come to think of it, maybe Rachel was the only reason he’d been showing up at all, week after week. “You’ll never play Bach, you know,” she said, delivering a hard truth of her own.

“Yes, I’m a lost cause. I should—” He turned to face her, holding the sheet at his throat. “I should like to continue paying you, since you had every right to expect that—”

“Don’t worry,” she cut him off. “We’ll be fine.”

O
N MONDAY
afternoon, to distract Rachel from his absence, she took her to Riverdale farm in Cabbagetown. As he was leaving, John had asked if he might visit occasionally, but Celia told him she didn’t think that would be a very
good idea. It was Rachel he wanted to visit, not her, although that wasn’t the reason. The fiasco in bed had begun to sink in. She was feeling ridiculous, and so entirely over her lust that his bony head and pole-thin wrists, his pale complexion, all the parts she had swooned over, were now striking her as unhealthy, maybe even catching.

She told Rachel he had to go away.

“Where?” Rachel asked.

“I don’t know, honey. Far away.”

“But he’s our student.”

“He
was,
” Celia said, “but he’s finished now.”

“But he loves us.”

“Yes, he does,” Celia allowed.

“So he has to come see us.”

“He can’t anymore. He’s gone away.”

Rachel thought a minute. “Hey!” she said. “He’s gone to New York City!”

“You know what?” Celia said. “I’ll bet he has!”

Rachel’s hands opened at the obviousness of her logic. Her face brightened. In her world so far, it was a plain and unwavering fact, something to be counted on, that the men who loved you ended up in New York City.

They left for Riverdale farm after her nap. The sky was clear when they set out but it clouded over while they were on the bus and darkened a few minutes after they got off. The thunder and rain started before they were halfway down Carlton Street. Celia raced the stroller under a tree and tried to pull up the hood. It was stuck.

A man materialized, asking if she needed help. He gave the hood a few tugs. “A screw fell out,” he said. “If you would not…not mind waiting, you could wait”—he gestured at
the house behind him—“on the porch here while I…I can fix it.”

He sounded like John Paulsen, that northern European accent and the hesitancy. He brought them towels to dry themselves off with, and after he had fixed the stroller he invited them to stay for lemonade. Celia accepted. The rain was torrential now; they were going to have to wait it out.

She felt the oddness of the situation: a man with John’s accent and beautiful manners turning up at the same time that she would have been giving John his lesson. Physically he resembled John not at all. He was a little over medium height, fit and compact with a round, ruddy face and straight, white-blond hair. She had a feeling she’d met him before, but his name—Mika Ramstad—was new to her, and they seemed to have no friends or history in common. And yet…This porch, the rain, the white wicker furniture, and the two of them smoking cigarettes and talking about their lives while Rachel sat with his little dogs and squished her hands into their fur—there was a homey familiarity to it, a relief.

By the time they left she had arranged to rent his upstairs apartment for one-third of what she was currently paying. He had been prepared to let her have it for nothing until she got herself a job, but she said that would be going too far. You would think that she would find his generosity to a complete stranger suspicious—Laura did—or that, in light of what had happened with John, she would mistrust her reading of the situation. At Laura’s urging she tried: she thought, God, maybe he’s a pervert, but she couldn’t bring herself to believe it. As for her getting romantically involved, that wasn’t going to happen; she was pretty sure he was gay.