Helpless (8 page)

“I’ll say she was running around all hysterical, like you said. You were afraid she’d run into traffic so you brought her here because…because…” She can’t remember why he brought her here.

“Nance.” He takes her hands in his.

“Yeah?”

“We let her go and we’re throwing her life in the garbage.”

“Okay, so you tell the police what you saw. The landlord and everything.”

“She’s been here all night. I had to duct tape her. I locked her in a basement. Do you really think the police won’t have a problem with that?”

“Then you shouldn’t have…” Her voice crumples.

“It’s going to be all right.”

“How?”

“We’re going to make it all right.”

“How?”

“By eliminating risk. Following the plan.”

“What plan?”

“The one I’ve been spending the last five hours figuring out. It’s not hard, it’s not complicated. I’ll tell you what you
have to do, step by step. Today—now—you go home, pack up your clothes and clean out your fridge.”

She tugs her hands free. “I have to make her bed.”

“Right. Right. First, you make her bed. Then you go home and pack your things. I’ve got boxes you can use. How much longer do you have on your lease?”

“What?”

“When’s your lease up?”

“October. Why?”

“We’ll pay your rent until then. Subletting is too much trouble. Don’t bother with your furniture and dishes. We’ll get them later.”

She shakes her head. He’s going too fast.

“The money’s no problem. I’ll sell another vacuum if I have to. So, you move in here. Then you phone Frank and say I’ve offered you a job doing the accounts, answering the phone, and you’ve decided to take it because the doctor ordered you to stay off your feet.”

“You want me to work for you?”

“One of us has to always be here, right? As long as we keep the radio going and the doors are shut”—nodding toward the basement—“the door up here and the one downstairs, anyone who comes into the shop won’t hear a thing. I’ve tested it out.”

“Ron.”

“What?”

“She wants to go home.”

He blinks, then goes behind the counter. Without looking at her, he says, “There should be some clean sheets in the upstairs cupboard.”

R
ACHEL DREAMS
that she and her mother are swimming underwater in a dark, cold lake, and even though they aren’t wearing snorkels they can breathe. “This is incredible,” her mother says. “I had no idea human beings could do this.” For some reason, Rachel isn’t all that amazed.

When she opens her eyes the shining circles on the ceiling give her the impression she’s still underwater. Then she sees that the circles are from the flashlights, and she knows where she is. She looks carefully back and forth, past the stuffed animals and through the sheer curtains that hang around the bed.

Nobody else is in the room. It’s quiet, except for the sound of a truck rumbling by. It’s light outside. The last thing she remembers is being in the chair and the lady kneeling in front of her and saying, “We’re your friends.”

She slips one hand under the duvet to feel the bed. Dry. She still has the towel around her waist, though. The lady said she would change the sheets, and she must have, but she didn’t bring her any clean underpants.

She has seen the lady before. Where? At Tom’s, maybe. “Nobody’s going to hurt you,” she kept saying, but the man had
already
hurt her, taking off the tape. She knows where she’s seen
him
before: he’s the man in the baseball cap, who was staring up at their deck that time. She thinks of how he looked at her when he put her on the bed, and it’s as if he’s suffocating her, crushing her bones, and she curls into a ball and tries to see the lady’s face instead, her nice face. She remembers the lady saying that Mika didn’t die. She holds onto this—
Mika didn’t die, Mika didn’t die
—and is soothed.

She has to go to the bathroom. Clutching the towel at her waist, she finds an opening in the curtains and slides her
feet to the floor. This carpet is like fur. The toilet seat is like a pillow. While she’s peeing she listens for sounds upstairs. She wonders if the man and lady are asleep or even still at home. She doesn’t flush, in case. Back in the other room she goes to the door and tries the handle. Locked, but then she knew it would be. She looks around. A huge dollhouse in the corner. Posters of Cinderella and Pocahontas on the wall. This must be a little girl’s bedroom, she thinks. But where is the girl? Is she dead?

She peers into the dollhouse. There’s a switch next to the front door and she turns it on and the whole house lights up. A lady doll stands at the kitchen sink. A man doll sits at a desk, his hand resting on the phone.

Phone! A cry of hope escapes her. Do they have a phone down here? As soundlessly as she can she opens and shuts the desk and dresser drawers. She checks the shelves on either side of the TV. She lifts the lid of the toy chest and feels between stacks of Barbie dolls still in their packages.

She hears herself whimpering and clamps her hands over her mouth, then realizes that the towel has fallen off, and she gets it and wraps it around her waist. She lies on the floor again. If the man comes in, she’ll crawl under the bed. If it’s the lady, she’ll ask when she can go home. The lady said she couldn’t go last night because there were ambulances. There won’t be any now. There might be a police car, though. She’d better not tell the lady. She’ll tell her that sometimes she stays overnight at Lina’s, so her mother is used to her not coming home and won’t be worried.

But she
will
be worried. Rachel can just see her. She’ll be crazy with worry.

G
ELIA LOOKS AT
her watch. Seven forty-five. It must be later than that, she thinks. “What time do you have?” she asks Lynne, the plainclothes female officer sitting across from her on Mika’s sofa.

“A quarter to eight,” Lynne says.

“It feels like at least nine.”

“I know,” Lynne says. She dabs her forehead with a Kleenex. “It’s already a scorcher out there.”

Celia, who is shivering, who has been shivering off and on all night in brief spurts as if she were receiving electric shock treatments, says, “There’s a fan in the dining room.”

“Oh, I’m fine,” Lynne says. She tucks the Kleenex up her sleeve. “A sedative won’t knock you out, you know, hon. It’ll calm your nerves is all.”

“I don’t want my nerves calmed.”

“I can understand that.” She comes to her feet. “Well, I’d better see about your coffee then.”

A second plainclothes officer, also named Lynne, went to make a pot half an hour ago, but Celia’s phone started ringing (her line has been extended down through a cold-air vent into
Mika’s kitchen) and this other Lynne is answering. Given the state of Celia’s finances nobody expects anything like a ransom demand. It’s more a case of taking messages and, of course, there’s a possibility that a person with information will call here rather than the police. “She’s doing all right, considering,” the other Lynne tells people. “Holding her own.” She has a loud, sociable voice. Both Lynnes do. They remind Celia of the farming wives you see in movies, the capable, sturdy women who turn up in times of crisis. They’ve yet to question her or even leave her alone for more than a few minutes so she suspects that their mission, aside from answering the phone, is to try to keep her from falling apart.

She can’t afford to fall apart. There’s something she’s not remembering, some person or place Rachel would have gone to. For at least four hours, from eleven o’clock last night until well after the power and phone lines came back on, she and Constable Bird drove around banging on doors and searching parks and laneways. Because they were in radio contact with the other constables, Celia knew Rachel hadn’t returned and she dreaded returning herself but by then there were close to a hundred officers scouring the neighbourhood and Bird said her time would be better spent compiling a list of suspicious men, by which he meant not just the homeless men in the ravine and a few of the scarier video store regulars—she’d already told him about these—but any man who had ever paid Rachel a little too much attention.

So they drove back to the house. Mika by then was at the hospital; he’d apparently been talked into going as a precaution. “Nothing to worry about,” Celia was told. She found a pad and pen, lit a cigarette, and sat at his dining room table. Suspicious men…she didn’t even know where to start. With
the exception of Mika and a handful of others, all the men she could think of, if she imagined them looking at Rachel, seemed to betray some hungry, gnawing quality under the surface. She decided to get her address book and write down the name of every man she knew. She had finished this much when the two Lynnes arrived, along with a senior investigator who wanted to ask a few more questions.

He sat across from her. He had a pockmarked complexion and small, intelligent eyes. His questions were personal. Had Rachel been upset about anything?
No.
How had Rachel been getting along at school?
Great.
Good marks?
Not bad.
Nobody bullying her?
No, no.
Any teacher on her case, wanting her to stay after class?
No.
Did she ever talk about her father?
Rarely.
Did it bother her that she’d never met him?
Maybe, deep down.
How did she get along with Mika Ramstad?
Great.

And just then Mika himself returned, and Celia went over to him and clutched his hands.

“How are you, dear?” he said.

“Oh…” She shrugged. “How are
you?”
He looked terrible, his head wrapped in a bandage, his eyes swollen and bloodshot.

“I’m fine,” he said. “No lasting damage. Celia, listen…”

She waited.

“They’ve asked me to…stay at a friend’s for a few days.”

“What?”

“It seems I could get in the way here.”

“Get in the way?” She turned to the investigator. “What’s going on?”

“Unfortunately,” the investigator said, “there’s a risk of residents contaminating evidence.”

“I’m
the resident. He owns the place!”

“It’s all right,” Mika said.

“No, it isn’t.”

One of the Lynnes, coming in from the kitchen, said, “It’s just procedure, hon.”

“Let’s do what they ask,” Mika said. “They have their reasons.”

She stared at him, wondering at his compliance, and then it struck her that maybe the police suspected him of something, of somehow driving Rachel out of the house, and she turned again on the investigator. “He’s been looking after Rachel since she was three years old!”

“I appreciate that.”

“I’ll come back,” Mika said. “As soon as I can.”

She shook her head. “This is wrong.”

“I’ll phone you.”

“Where will you go?”

“I’m not sure yet. I’ve got to drop in at the school.”

“Oh, fuck, Mika.”

“Celia, they’re going…they’re going to find…”

“I know.”

“She’s smart and she’s brave.”

He took the dogs. As soon as he was out the door she listed to the investigator what he had done for her and Rachel over the years. The gifts, the money, the ridiculously low rent, the babysitting, the school projects he’d worked on. With each fresh example she sliced her right hand against her left in a flailing gesture that made her feel as though the tendons in her arms had snapped. The investigator let her rant. He even seemed sorry for her. But he stood his ground about the need to “freeze the house.”

She went into Mika’s bedroom and collapsed on the bed. Back came the images of Rachel being raped and beaten, every possible horror. Celia writhed, a pillow pressed to her face. The pain was incredible. Only the thought of how useless she was being had her finally pulling herself together. She wiped her face on one of Mika’s T-shirts and returned to the other room.

It was dawn. The forensic team had arrived and gone straight to the basement. Outside, television crews were setting up, and there was a police command post in a mobile home parked down the street. Everything was in high gear. Celia felt another band of anxiety squeeze her chest. At some level she still refused to believe that Rachel had really vanished. “What if she just walks through the door?” she asked the Lynnes, and they said it was entirely possible and had been known to happen. But then their job was to keep her hopeful. She smoked cigarettes and mulled over her list. Where she had phone numbers and addresses she wrote them in and she put check marks beside the men she had qualms about, however unjustified. Twitches started up in both of her eyes.

B
IG LYNNE
(Celia is now mentally referring to them as Big and Little) returns with the coffee. She says, “Jerry from the video store says he’ll stick your paycheque straight into your bank account, and call him if there’s anything he can do. And your friend Laura is dying to talk to you. Where’s your cell?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Oh. Well, all right, then, you can use mine.”

“Later, maybe. Has Mika called?”

“Not yet.” She sips her coffee. After a moment she says, “You can’t be too comfortable in that dress, hon.”

Celia is still wearing her cocktail dress from the night before. Nylon stockings, slippers. “I haven’t thought about it.”

“If you like, I can scoot up to your apartment and bring something down. Shorts and a T-shirt or whatever.”

“Aren’t I allowed to go up there?”

“Oh, no. You can go up.”

“Can I go outside?”

“You can go anywhere you like. Forensics will want to talk to you but they’ll be here awhile.”

“I was thinking if I just walked around, I might get a feel for where she was and which way she went.” She is envisioning a kind of psychic jet trail, still intact.

“That sounds like a terrific idea. The only thing is, all the reporters and cameras.”

“Oh, right.”

“They’re down the street a ways but we can’t stop them from using their telephoto lenses.”

“What if I went out the back door?”

She changes into grey track pants and an oversized grey T-shirt. Instead of her regular baseball cap she puts on an old Tilley hat, and she borrows a pair of Mika’s sunglasses to hide more of her face. Little Lynne, who is going off shift and will return later to relieve Big Lynne, accompanies her past the two officers patrolling the lane, which is otherwise deserted, so Celia continues on by herself. She feels drawn to the front of the house and at the first intersecting alley she turns east to start circling around.

The sight of media trucks shakes her—there are so many. The street is closed off, and a policeman is directing
pedestrians away from the trucks and cameras down a corridor of yellow tape. Heart pumping, expecting at any moment for somebody to shout, “That’s the mother!” she allows herself to be herded along. Up ahead, on the sidewalk across from her house and behind more tape, a crowd has gathered. As she gets closer she recognizes people: neighbours, customers from the store. None of them even glances in her direction. They’re looking at the house. What are they hoping to see?
Her
at a window? She hears a man, a stranger to her, say, “There
is
no father,” and another man say, “So who’s that guy who’s always on the porch?” The voices, the murmurs, are like thick, muffling webs she has to break her way through. She edges around to the rear of the crowd and steps onto a low retaining wall.

Her house—she never noticed before—leans into its neighbour. Somehow she finds the sight unbearable. She steps back onto the pavement and walks into the lane, as far as the dumpster. Is this where Rachel ran to? Would she have crossed the street? Glancing around, Celia feels a growing conviction. She closes her eyes and imagines Rachel’s face.

Involuntarily, she begins to sway. She is aware of herself, her half-crazed self who never believed in telepathy, swaying in the throes of belief. Which way did you go? she thinks. Which way, which way? And eventually it seems that Rachel hears: the eyes widen, the mouth opens and shuts like a baby’s mouth in sleep. “Where are you?” Celia whispers. No answer, no gesture, but the face is alive and listening. “I’ll find you,” Celia says. “Hold on.”

N
ANCY OPENS
her eyes. She’s on Ron’s bed, wearing only her underwear and shoes. Light streaming in through the
blinds lies like straps across her bare legs. “Holy Christ,” she says, remembering the girl.

Her jeans and tank top are in the bathroom. She quickly pulls them on and hurries downstairs. Tasha is whining at the kitchen door so she lets her outside, then goes into the shop. “Ron?” she says before she hears him climbing up from the basement.

“Were you checking on her?” she whispers.

“Just listening.” He glances at her leg. “How is it?”

“Better. What happened? Did I conk out in the bathroom?” Her memory of last night ends with sitting on the toilet and pressing a hot facecloth to her knee.

“On the bed. I came up to see how you were doing and you were asleep.”

“Why didn’t you wake me?”

“I did. You told me to leave you alone.”

“Really?” She can’t imagine that.

“I thought I’d give you until seven.”

“Did she wake at all?”

“I haven’t heard anything.”

“Okay…well…” She looks around for her purse and notices that the pile of sheets is gone. “Did I do a laundry already?”

“I did.”

“Huh.” She shakes her head. “I had a dream…” A dream about doll-sized underpants hanging on a clothesline.

He shuffles some papers on the counter. “Were you stoned last night?”

Was she? No, she hasn’t smoked since yesterday at lunch. “I was just really tired. That’s all. Stress knocks me out, especially when my leg’s acting up.” She sees her purse
hanging from a floor lamp and she gets it and feels around inside for her cigarettes.

“The boxes are in your car,” he tells her. “How long do you think you’ll be?”

“A couple of hours.”

“She was okay, right? When you went down?”

When she went down to make the bed, he means.

“Well, yeah,” Nancy answers, “but she didn’t really wake up.”

His big face puckers with worry.

“I can get my stuff later,” she offers.

“No. Let’s stick to the plan.”

“If she starts crying, I don’t think you should go in.”

“I won’t.”

“She’s too scared of you.”

He nods.

“Jeez, Ron…I can’t…this is so…unbelievable.”

He takes her in his arms. “You’re doing fine.”

Outside, on the sidewalk, she pauses to light a cigarette. Her body buzzes, the electric feeling she used to get coming down from meth. Trying not to limp or shudder, she walks to her car. She drives at exactly the speed limit. None of the streets seems familiar and she wonders how she knows where to go. The red front door to her house is another mystery. Maybe this is the wrong place, she thinks, but the key works.

She brings in the boxes and drags them up to her apartment. In the coffee can where she stores her dope there’s a joint already rolled and she sits at her kitchen table and smokes it, then she opens the fridge and drinks what’s left of a bottle of orange juice.

Almost everything else, what little there is, has gone
bad. She pours a quart of sour milk down the drain and throws some withered tomatoes into a garbage bag. Already her leg is bothering her again.

She limps across to her living room area. There, on the coffee table, in shiny blue paper with a wide gold ribbon, is Ron’s present. She had completely forgotten that today is his birthday. The present, which only yesterday she was so happy about, is a black T-shirt that says
Plug It In
on the front. For the life of her she can’t remember why she thought that was funny. The card is even stupider. It says,
Another birthday?
over a picture of a bear with his pants down, and then inside it says,
Grin and bare it!