Helpless (20 page)

“Usually in the morning we draw,” she tells him.

She draws the customers from the motel: the pink-haired
old woman, the black man who shook her hand, and so on. Ron draws a vacuum called a Hoover Model O. It takes him a while to get going—he keeps crumpling up his page and starting again. He says he’d like to show her the real thing, and she remembers how upset he was about the Constellation’s crevice tool and asks if he found it.

“No.” He frowns at his drawing.

“You’ll find it,” she says. “You’ll find it in the very last place—” She freezes.

Somebody is knocking on the shop door.

She jumps up.

“It’s only a customer,” he says. He reaches for her hand. His knees start to jiggle. “Don’t worry,” he says.

When the knocking stops, she pulls her hand away, slowly (it’s so easy to hurt his feelings), and sits back down.

“What would you do if a slave driver broke down the door?” she asks.

“An alarm would go off,” he says. “But if the guy was stupid enough to hang around, I’d grab the wrench I keep under the counter and swing it at him.”

“Is it a big wrench?”

He opens his hands as wide as his body. “It’s heavy. It could do some damage.”

“What if he had a gun?”

“I’d throw the wrench at his head and disarm him.”

“What does disarm mean?”

“Get his gun.”

“Would you shoot him?” she asks hopefully.

“If I had to.”

“Would you kill him?”

“Maybe.”

“What would you do with the body?”

“Bury it in the backyard.”

“But wait until it’s night,” she says. “So nobody can see. And then—oh, I know!—you could plant a bush over the place and people would think that’s why you were digging!”

“Even better, I could lay down patio stones.”

“Yes! Patio stones!”

He holds up his picture. “This doesn’t do it justice.”

“It’s good,” she says, impressed. He has drawn little squares of shine on the metal part and made a shadow on the wall behind.

“You should really see the real thing.”

He looks at her. His eyes beg, like a dog’s. She doesn’t want to see another vacuum, though—he might get all excited again and forget about the slave drivers. “How about we watch TV?” she says.

As he’s flicking through the channels there’s a noise from upstairs, a thud. She covers her mouth with her hands.

“That’s just Nancy letting in Tasha,” he says. He pats her leg. And there go
his
legs again…the jiggling. After a minute, Nancy and Tasha can be heard coming down the stairs. He turns off the TV. Rachel moves down the sofa—she has a feeling Nancy won’t like Ron and her sitting so close together.

“Door’s open!” he calls.

Tasha runs in. Nancy comes over, fluffing her hair with her fingers. “Everything okay?” she says. One side of her face is wrinkled from the pillow.

“We had a little incident,” Ron answers. “I left the door open by mistake and Rachel went outside and a slave driver was there.”

Nancy’s mouth fall opens. “Where?”

“On the porch!” Rachel cries. Telling the truth will only cause trouble—they’ll want to know what she was doing down by the road. They’ll ask if she was trying to escape. Thinking this, it comes to her that she
could
have escaped. She begins to whimper with confusion, with frustration. “And then the door was stuck!” she cries. “Ron…he had to open it. He carried me down!”

“Oh, sweetie,” Nancy says. She sits. Ron stands. Nancy rubs Rachel’s arm. “That must have been scary. What did the guy look like?”

“He was black, and he was wearing a green turban.” Now she’s thinking that if she
had
tried to escape, the slave driver might have followed her.

“You never saw him before?”

“No, I never saw him. He went—” She makes claws of her hands.

“Jeez.”

Did she mail the letter? Rachel wonders. Nothing in Nancy’s face tells her.

“I should open the shop,” Ron says. “Don’t worry, Rachel. I’ve got my wrench.” He smacks his fist against his palm.

She imagines the green turban caving in, the slave driver flying across the pavement. “Okay,” she says.

“Y
OU LUCKY
bastard,” Ron says out loud. Things couldn’t have turned out better if he’d left the doors open deliberately. If he’d
hired
the guy in the turban.

He supposes he can assume, by now, that the guy failed to recognize her.

The shop phone rings. He stares at it until the machine
picks up. He looks toward the window. Nobody there, no strange cars. He goes over and slides back the lock. He pictures her terrorized face on the other side of the glass and wonders at his speed and decisiveness. She weighed nothing. He touches his shirt where she buried her face. Still damp, though whether from his own sweat or from her tears he can’t tell.

Children produce so much fluid when they cry! Laying her on the bed, seeing her drenched face, his only impulse was to clean her up. He couldn’t control his trembling, and he wasn’t unaware of the fact that the police might be on their way. But wiping away her tears claimed all of his attention. He used the edge of the bedsheet and then, as she calmed down, his fingers. She closed her eyes. He kept on going, wiping her cheekbones, under her nose, along her lips.

He makes his way to the counter and finds the towel. He dries the back of his neck. It’s what happened a little later that he’s thinking about now. He was sure she wouldn’t flinch when she felt his hand on her knee, and he was right. He figured she barely registered it. Except she did. She did register it. Because when she heard Nancy on the stairs, she tugged her skirt down and moved away from him. Like a girlfriend when the wife turns up.

She
knows,
he thinks.

A buzzing starts up in his ears. A barrage of images crowd his vision, and he stumbles into the stool. “Wait a minute,” he mutters. “Wait a minute, wait a minute…” The images retreat.

What
does she know? That she turns him on? That, like Mika and every other man in her life, he’s going to take advantage of her?

All along, maybe even before he brought her here, he had faith that they would reach a stage where they could be physically comfortable with each other, the way fathers and daughters naturally are. He didn’t think it would happen so soon, but he was confident that when it did he’d be a satisfied man. From never touching her to feeling her little body collapse against his, getting treated to innocent flashes of skin, kissing her good night, kissing that gorgeous pink mouth…how could it not be enough? Every father of a beautiful child must be tempted, he thought—he still thinks. So his theory as to why most of them don’t yield (presuming most of them don’t) was that they don’t have to, they aren’t desperate. Every day they can count on their measured-out dose of contact.

The thing is…He starts pacing. The thing is, he’s no longer sure he ever really believed this. The thing is, his hand on her knee
wasn’t
enough. And she
isn’t
innocent—far from it, she comes with more experiences behind her than he can bear to imagine. There’s a good chance she’s not even a virgin.

His pacing has brought him into the kitchen. He returns to the shop and stares at the basement door. What does any of it mean, except that he’s going to have to fight even harder? Do the resisting for both of them.

There’s a way of thinking about her that helps. If, instead of dwelling on a specific part of her body, he has her hunching in a chair or limping across the room, or even if he remembers certain facial expressions—the guarded twinges that telegraph her ticking mind—his love tends to win out.

“All right,” he says, as if everything’s settled. He hears Nancy climbing the stairs, and he goes and sits on the stool.

“So what happened?” she says.

“I was showing her the Constellation, and I got distracted. It was unbelievably stupid.”

She looks at him. She’s still very pale.
“Both
doors,” she says. “You left
both
doors open.”

“But she came back. That’s the important thing.”

“What about the guy in the turban?”

“I guess he didn’t recognize her.”

Nancy keeps looking at him. Finally she shakes her head. “Well, she can’t get over how you
scooped her up.
She keeps saying, ‘Ron’s real strong.’ She says you should eat
all
your meals with us.”

He feels his heart skip. “Is that okay with you?”

“With me?” She heads for the kitchen. “It’s what
she
wants that matters, right?”

A
LL FRIDAY AFTERNOON,
while she and Jerry and Mika knock on the doors of the derelict and stranded houses below River Street, Celia has it in her mind that if Rachel isn’t found today, she’ll phone her father when she gets home. She’ll do the right thing, win back God to her side. But as she’s eating supper her nerve begins to fail. She tries to imagine the conversation (“It’s Celia.” “Who?” “Celia, your daughter.” Silence) and decides it won’t hurt to put the call off until the next morning.

“He’s probably unlisted anyway,” she says to Mika.

“Let’s see,” he says. He looks up the Florida area codes in the phone book and dials Fort Lauderdale information. There’s a William C. Fox on 14th Avenue.

“So you think this is a good idea,” she says as he hands her the number.

“It’s up to you, Celia.”

In her apartment she finds the vodka bottle and has a swig. She punches the number with a pen that says “Fox Network.”

Five rings before he answers, his husky, slightly high-pitched “Hello” unmistakable.

“Dad. It’s Celia.”

“Celia!”

She’s taken aback by how pleased he sounds. “Your daughter,” she says.

“Of course! Celia!” He loudly clears his throat. “What a wonderful surprise. How are you?”

“Awful, actually.”

Now comes the silence.

“Is it your mother?”

“Mom died nine years ago. Didn’t anyone tell you?”

“No. No, nobody did.”

“I thought one of your old friends would have.”

“Well, I’ve been out of touch.”

Celia lets that go.

“How did she die?” he asks.

“She had a stroke.”

“That’s how her own mother went.”

“Dad, I’m calling about something else.”

“All right.”

She takes a breath. If she doesn’t get it all out at once, she won’t get it out at all. “I have a daughter. She was born a day before mom died. Her name’s Rachel. Rachel Lauren. Last Friday she was abducted from the house where we’re living. We don’t know who took her. There’s a huge search going on here in Toronto. We’re pretty sure she’s alive but…I should have told you about her before.”

“Celia. I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry.”

“I thought you should know.”

“I should. I should.” Another lengthy throat clearing. Then, “I’m afraid I’m not very mobile.”

She thinks he’s saying he doesn’t own a car.

“I’m in a wheelchair,” he goes on. “I wouldn’t be much use in the search.”

This is a small shock. Not so much the wheelchair (he’s seventy-two) but his feeling that he should come up and help. “There are hundreds of searchers,” she says. She asks him how long he’s been in a wheelchair.

“Ten years it would be now. It’s multiple sclerosis.”

“Oh, God.”

“I manage all right. But this…this abduction business. You must be in a terrible state. Do you have a husband to help you out?”

“No.” She starts to cry.

“Celia,” he says. “Celia. You don’t deserve this.”

How does he know she doesn’t deserve it? When he thinks of her, who is the little girl he remembers? When she thinks of
him,
it’s as if she’s flipping through a book of photographs featuring a person she met and liked but can’t claim to have known very well. (Somebody famous maybe, since he was handsome: a tall man with very white teeth for the time and lots of blond hair.) There he is, washing the dishes, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his watch on the glass shelf above the sink. There he is, painting the dining room ceiling, all that hair bunched under a baseball cap. Between the pictures is nothing, no rippling out of memory or impressions. With the real pictures, the ones in the photo album, she at least knows from things her mother said how old he was when the picture was taken, what the circumstances of his
life were: working at the car dealership, for instance, where he couldn’t bring himself to waylay potential customers out in the lot. Her mother never understood why a man of his retiring nature went into direct sales. Long after he had run off, she said to people, “Bill likes to keep himself to himself,” as if his absence were simply an extension of that character trait. The only memories Celia has of him ever talking to
her
are from his Sunday-night phone calls when he doled out questions about school and choir practice and she said, “Fine,” and her mother stood in the kitchen doorway, flushed and picking her nails, pathetically hopeful. Even at eight years old Celia knew he was never going to leave Hazel Beals and come home.

“Do you need money?” he asks. “I’m not in the lap of luxury down here but I could—”

“No. There’s money.”

“Well…and the police are doing everything they can?”

“They seem to be.”

“It’s a terrible thing.”

“I just wanted you to know you have a granddaughter.” She wipes her nose on her sleeve. “When she comes home, maybe we’ll visit you.”

“That would be wonderful. What did you say her name is?”

“Rachel. Rachel Lauren Fox.”

She senses him absorbing the “Fox”—his unwitting contribution. “Rachel Lauren,” he says. “Very pretty.”

“I’ll call you with any news.”

“What’s your number there? Hold on, let me grab a pen.”

The phone drops and for a moment the line seems dead. She wonders what he was doing when she called.

“All right,” he says.

She gives him the number.

“You’ll find her,” he says. “You hang on tight.”

“I will. Good-bye, Dad.”

“Good-bye for now.”

You hang on tight.
She’d forgotten he used to tell her that at the end of his Sunday-night calls. This is her first thought. Her second is, he sounded glad to hear from her. More than glad…relieved. As though all these years he’s been waiting for her to pick up the phone. But then why did he stop phoning
her?
She thinks of the things she didn’t ask. If he’s still with Hazel, or if Hazel is even alive. If he has other children, not by Hazel, who would have been too old, but by someone else. She grips the receiver. She looks toward the door, and Mika is there.

“How did it go?” he says.

She places the receiver in the cradle. “Good.”

But another thought is pushing at her. A dread. What if all she gets is one family member at a time? She had her mother, then she had Rachel—not even a full day’s overlap. Now she has her father. Unless she loses him again, she won’t get Rachel back.

“You told him what’s happening?” Mika says.

She nods. She isn’t going to burden Mika with her new fear. He’ll want to talk her out of it and he won’t be able to. Nobody could. Nobody could convince her that the world doesn’t work that way. The truth feels intensely private to her right now. She doesn’t expect logic or even sanity, she’s only trying to pay attention.