Helpless Read online

  She lingered on the stairs. She was waiting for somebody—the tall Asian boy, it turned out. They took off toward Parliament. Feeling next to invisible in this neighbourhood of dog walkers, Ron followed close behind. Everything about her thrilled him: her thin brown arms, the insectlike hinge of her elbows, her prancing step, the shapely bulb of her head, her small square shoulders bearing the burden of her backpack, and even the backpack itself, which was mauve with a pattern of pink daisies.

  Once again, she and the boy went north on Parliament and disappeared into the video store. This time, though, the boy reemerged almost immediately and continued up the street. Ron waited a minute, then remembered that Nancy’s friend Angie had her salon in this neighbourhood, so he walked a little farther along to a bus stop, where he merged in with the crowd. Five minutes passed, ten. The bus pulled up. Ron wondered if Rachel had left by a rear exit, but why would she do that? He tied Tasha to a bicycle stand. He had to know what was keeping her.

  She was behind the counter, sitting on a stool and drawing on a pad with a marker. She didn’t look up, and neither did the woman at the cash register. A small blond woman with a hard, lean face. Ron strolled along the wall of new releases. He took down a DVD and pretended to consider it. “Oh, good, you gave me eyebrows!” the woman said.

  “Mom, you have eyebrows,” Rachel said. “And see! I drew your shadow behind you.”

  Ron replaced the DVD. A moment later a group of kids came in and he was able to slip around them and make his escape.

  He went across the road to a restaurant and got a table out on the patio, tying Tasha to the railing. The video store closed at midnight, but he figured that the mother, or somebody, would be taking Rachel home long before then. If she lived in this neighbourhood, and she most likely did, he’d find out where.

  IN HIS van down the road from the Casa Hernandez Motel, he watches the lights of the CN Tower come on. He has always considered the CN Tower a reassuring structure: hopeful and nostalgically futuristic, like a hand from one of those starburst wall clocks people had in the 1950s. It used to cheer him up. He finds this hard to believe. He finds it hard to believe that only ten days have passed since he had the self-possession to sit out on a public patio and drink nothing but coffee.

  Now it’s alcohol and never in the company of other people. He gets going after breakfast, a couple of beers. By the time he’s closing shop to drive to Spruce Court for the threetwenty bell, he’s put away another four or five and a double shot of rye. He parks in a different location every day, which might fool the neighbours but not Tasha: she knows where they’re headed. She even seems to know that it’s Rachel they’re following, because when the boy drops her off (at Tom’s Video or, as he has done two Fridays in a row now, at her house) she wants to keep going after her, right through the door.

  So does Ron. He feels better, though, less on edge, and when he returns to the shop he usually gets in some good work while the feeling lasts. At sunset he makes another trip, this time to satisfy himself that she’s not in danger. On weekends it’s his only trip, a restraint achieved, just barely, by a steady, measured increase in his alcohol intake. He always half expects to find her house up in flames or to hear her screaming. This afternoon the fear seized him the minute he got home, and he drove straight back and kept vigil behind the Shoppers Drug Mart dumpster until she left with her mother in their car, and then he followed.

  He realizes he’ll have to make up some story for Nancy about where he’s been all evening. She’ll have phoned, for sure…she knows something’s going on. A couple of nights ago she came right out and asked if he was seeing someone else.

  “I’m a little stressed,” he said. “That’s all. The work isn’t coming in.”

  It’s coming in. He just isn’t keeping on top of it.

  What’s eating away at him, aside from the craving to see Rachel, is his conviction that she’s being mistreated. She sleeps in an unfinished basement, for one thing, as he discovered last night when he turned onto the lane that runs along one side of the house and saw her through the security bars of a cellar window. She was lying on a cot and staring up at the ceiling. There was a cardboard box with a lamp on it, but no carpet, just the bare concrete floor. He walked past again, and then again, and only dragged himself away when Tasha, objecting to being yanked back and forth, began to whine.

  The cot isn’t even the most disturbing part. The landlord is. He’s not the mother’s boyfriend or husband; Ron worked that out the day he followed her and Rachel home from the video store, and a guy sitting on the porch called, “Enjoy your supper!” when they went inside. It took a few more days for Ron to peg the guy as the landlord, but right off the bat he worried about Rachel’s living in a house with a man who wasn’t her father. His fears were realized last Tuesday night when he saw the two of them together on a porch chair, Rachel sitting in the guy’s lap and the guy’s right hand (Ron couldn’t swear to this, but the more he goes over it in his head, the surer he gets) moving around beneath her pyjama top.

  Where was the mother? It is unfathomable to Ron that the mother of a girl as beautiful as Rachel would leave her alone with a man under the age of eighty. But then this is a mother who makes her daughter sing for drunks and sleep in a cot on a concrete floor.

  “If she were mine,” he thinks.

  If she were his, what wouldn’t he give her? Wall-to-wall carpeting, a canopy bed, a top-of-the-line dollhouse.

  Almost without realizing, stunned by his train of thought, he puts the van in gear and heads off.

  Chapter Four

  MIKA HAS HUNG venetian blinds on the basement windows and laid pieces of carpeting on the floor. The lumpy pullout bed Celia slept on last night now has a piece of plywood between the mattress and springs. When they came back from the motel, Mika was out on the porch but he didn’t tell them what he’d done, and only now, as Rachel is going to bed, do they find out.

  “He’s so good,” Rachel moans. “He’s so good to people.”

  “I really should break down and buy an air conditioner,” Celia says. She is sitting on the bed, testing the firmness. “If it’s this hot in June, what’s it going to be like in August?”

  “Mika will buy us one.”

  “Well, we’re not going to let him. He’s already paying the whole shot for music camp.”

  Rachel curls up beside Celia. “If we do get an air conditioner, can we still sleep down here?”

  “We won’t need to, will we? Our apartment will be nice and lovely and cool.”

  “What if we were like Anne Frank? What if we had to hide down here or we’d be shot by the Nazis?”

  “That would put things in a different light.”

  “Mika would have to sneak us down potatoes and, like, bread crusts. Right? Right, Mom?”

  “I think he’d do better than that. Come on, let’s go thank him.”

  The porch light is off. Mika says that the bulb burned out and then just seconds later the streetlight began to flicker. “Unseen forces at work,” he says. About the venetian blinds, he says, “Osmo and Happy didn’t want people peering in at you.”

  Celia bends to scratch Happy’s ears. “Always looking out for us, eh?” The two dogs pant like bellows. “I’m going to have a long, cool bath,” she announces. “You”—to Rachel, who is climbing onto Mika’s lap—“five minutes, then off to bed.”

  When she’s gone, Rachel touches Mika’s hair. “Is your hair flaxen?” she asks, having recently come across the word in a book. “Is this what flaxen is?”

  Mika’s mouth moves as if he’s talking, but he isn’t yet. Rachel waits. Her mother has told her that he used to have a stutter and sometimes needs a few seconds to get the first words out.

  “Flaxen is the fibre of the flax plant,” he says finally. “It’s blond and threadlike, yes.” He holds up a finger. “Listen.”

  “What?”

  “Do you hear that?”

  “The siren?”

  “No, listen.
Wait, it stopped. No, there it is. Up in the sky.”

  Above the shush of a sprinkler and a woman yelling in a foreign language and the clatter of a truck barrelling down Parliament Street, there’s a scraping sound, like two stones being rubbed together. “Is it a bat?” Rachel asks.

  “A nighthawk. Calling to another nighthawk. You can hear the second one now, farther off.”

  “What are they saying?”

  “Oh, they’re saying…” Another short pause. “They’re saying, ‘A lot of people are out tonight.’”

  “They’re saying, ‘That man and that girl down there should take those dogs for a walk.’”

  Mika slides her off his lap. “On the contrary, they’re saying, ‘Why isn’t that girl in bed yet?’”

  UPSTAIRS, CELIA uses her foot to turn off the taps. How is it, she wonders, that you can soak in water and not drown, or at least become saturated? We’ve got pores, she reasons. We’re porous. It surprises her that she has never wondered about this before.

  She closes her eyes and calculates how much money she made tonight: forty-two dollars in tips, and then her wages on top of that, minus deductions. Seventy dollars, give or take—enough to pay the minimum on her Visa card. Or should she get the car door fixed? Mika knows somebody at an auto body shop who will give her a deal.

  She didn’t consult Mika about the modelling school because even though he never directly confronts her or secondguesses her decisions, the question of how Rachel could be too young to pose in front of a camera and not too young to sing in a bar would almost surely have come up. The answer is, she’s too young to do either, but at least when you’re singing it’s your voice you’re showing off. So Celia argues with herself. Maybe she’s jealous. Maybe she’s balking at the possibility of Rachel’s earning more in a few hours than she can earn in a week. No, it isn’t jealousy. It’s not wanting Rachel to turn into one of those clothes-obsessed, narcissistic child sexpots. For another couple of years, anyway, she’d like to keep her under wraps.

  Keep her under wraps. She hears how that sounds. Her impulse is to be overprotective but she fights it. She dreads burdening Rachel the way she was burdened, not that her mother actively interfered with her life. Her mother watched her. She followed her around the apartment with her eyes, and when she was at work she had her friend Mrs. Craig listen outside the apartment door. There were no rules laid down—that wasn’t her style. Whenever Celia did something to upset her, she’d start in about the harmful effects of that kind of behaviour on girls in general or on herself specifically, twenty-five years ago, how she had suffered from the very same mistakes and misjudgments. It was never, “You shouldn’t…” It was, “Nice girls don’t…” or “I wish I hadn’t…” And then she’d sigh and leave the room or get back to what she’d been doing, as if she didn’t really expect to be listened to. It was confusing. It left Celia feeling like a lost cause but also mysteriously entitled, possessed of an unreasonable power. Plainly, she was the centre of her mother’s existence, and yet she can’t imagine that her mother ever looked at her and thought, “Aren’t I lucky?” or that she had nightmares about people coming to the door and saying, “A mistake was made, we have to take back your child.” Celia remembers, after Rachel was born, leaving the hospital with this utterly dependent creature in her arms and wondering, “Why doesn’t somebody stop me?”

  None of which is to say that she’ll be changing her mind about the modelling school. The fact that Rachel gave in so quickly must mean she herself doesn’t feel ready, and by the time she does, her body might not even be the right shape, although that’s unlikely. If long fingers and toes are any indication, she’s going to end up tall and lean like her father. In whose armpit Celia nestled as they walked from the Lava Lounge, where they’d discovered a mutual interest in Sarah Vaughan, over to Spadina Avenue, where he had a room you rented by the day. He was a destitute architectural student. He’d hitchhiked up from New York City to see the train stations of southwestern Ontario and Quebec. She hadn’t had sex in over a year and he was agonizingly handsome, so when he couldn’t find a condom she went ahead anyway. Afterwards he confessed to being engaged to a girl who wanted to save herself for marriage. “I betrayed you both,” he said and looked so miserable that Celia patted his shaved head and made him instant coffee in a CN Tower mug. How strange, she reflects now, that Rachel should be the outcome of those few, not unpleasant, but hardly earth-shattering hours in a squalid room where the radiator banged and a woman out in the hall kept yelling, “That’s your opinion!”

  She’s had this thought before, of course; she’s just never been so impressed by it as she is now. But over the past few days a lot of things—known things—are striking her as remarkable. “Can you imagine?” she said yesterday to someone who was renting the new Gone with the Wind DVD. “There was slavery only a hundred and fifty years ago! Mammy was Scarlett’s slave!”

  It’s as if the heat is slowing down her normally racing mind and urging her to see details and hidden implications. In her dreams, oddly enough, just the opposite is going on: she glances over things, she misses the obvious. A couple of nights ago she dreamed that she and Rachel were driving along a highway littered with what she thought were pieces of tire, but when she said, “Look at all those pieces of tire,” Rachel said, outraged, “They’re armadillos! What if you hit one?” In a dream a few nights before that, she bumped into her mother on the street, and when she said, “But you died!” her mother told her, irritably, that the dead come back all the time, they’re all around “if anyone cared to look.”

  RACHEL LIES on her cot and wonders if the black lamb is sleeping. It was so cute. Mrs. Dunlop took the class to visit it this afternoon at the Riverdale farm, and everybody tried to pat it through the fence but only Sindra, who has really long arms, could reach. “The coat isn’t called fur,” Mrs. Dunlop said, “it’s called fleece.” Rachel already knew this. The mother sheep was white, so the father must have been black, but then why wasn’t the lamb brown? Or gray? Rachel didn’t ask in case it was a stupid question. An old, scruffy man Mrs. Dunlop thought worked there (he turned out to be just a man walking by) told the class that when the farm was the Toronto Zoo back in the fifties, there was a chimpanzee who used to beg for cigarettes. “He’d go—” the man said, and he bent down right in front of Rachel and started huffing and tapping his fingers on his mouth. His pushed-out lips disgusted her but she didn’t want to hurt his feelings so she stood there until Mrs. Dunlop tugged her away.

  She thinks about lips. Fish have lips. Cats don’t. Felix only has two lines, the same pink as his nose and the pads on his feet. His pads are like beans. For some reason he’s scared of the basement. He sleeps out on their deck at night and eats moths. He’s getting fat.

  She wonders if the fat man in the baseball cap was looking at her mother. If he is in love with her mother from afar.

  OUTSIDE THE rear service doors of the restaurant, Nancy lights a joint. Frank doesn’t care. Whatever keeps her smiling is how he looks at it. She hears him through the open window, banging pots, whistling. He’s through for the night. Not her, she has to wait for the family at table 3. They’ve settled their bill, but they’re taking their time over dessert. Nancy’s guess is they don’t have air conditioning and want to stay cool for as long as possible. That’s fine with her. They’re nice people. Their little girl gave her the picture she crayoned of a woman with blue, droopy eyes, a crooked red smile, and a red-checkered apron. “Is that me?” Nancy asked because the resemblance seemed obvious.

  The girl shrugged. “Okay,” she said.

  Okay. Nancy got a kick out of that.

  As soon as they leave, she can mop the floor. She supposes she’ll drive straight home and let Tasha spend the night at Ron’s. Ever since those two fell for each other, she’s been a third wheel anyway. “Stabbed in the back by my own dog,” she jokes.

  She slips her hand into the pocket of her apron and squeezes her psychic pouch, a plastic baggie containi
ng clippings of Ron’s hair from the last time she gave him a trim. You’re supposed to squeeze the pouch and chant, “Red is your blood, red is my heart, deep is our love, never to part,” and think of your boyfriend or husband smiling at you lovingly. The more often you do this, the less likely he’ll be ever to leave. Nancy can’t imagine how she’d survive if he left.

  “You set your bar too low,” Angie tells her. “You can do better than hostile and chubby.”

  “Ron isn’t hostile,” Nancy says, although he is, sometimes, to Angie. And, okay, he could stand to lose some weight, but there’s a lot of muscle there, too. Nancy has seen him lift a refrigerator and haul it across a room. Not that she expects this to impress Angie. “When it’s just him and me,” she says, “he’s really sweet.” She means in bed, where he’s shy and careful of her and kisses her appendix scar. Before he came along, she thought men needed to hurt you to have a good time. She reminds Angie that she’d still be using crystal meth if he hadn’t made her stop, and Angie imagines the typical drawn-out, ugly fight and says, “You’ve got me there.”

  Except that there was no fight. When Ron caught her smoking in his bathroom he didn’t throw a fit. More than anything he was sympathetic. He told her about his drinking problem and how he’d beat it by going into a treatment program.

  “Oh, I’m cutting down,” she lied. In those days she thought that smoking, as opposed to shooting or snorting, was no big deal.

  “It’s hard to cut down by yourself,” Ron said, and he wrote the name and number of a counsellor from the place where he’d gone for help.

  She promised to make the call but never did. Then one night when they were sitting out on his back stoop and she was gnawing on her nails and shivering and talking too fast, he said, “You know, I don’t think I want to be with a junkie.” It wasn’t a threat; it was information, as plain and unemotional as somebody saying, “You know, I don’t think I want the pasta special.” A week later she was in rehab. Nothing other than the terror of losing him could have kept her there. She still smokes dope but he’s under the impression it’s only when her leg acts up. Too bad her drug of choice isn’t a prescription one. That he’d understand. He’s the most law-abiding person she has ever met. He’s honest, a man of honour. At least she used to think so.