Helpless Read online

  “They must have run out of mints,” the woman chuckles as her grandchild approaches, pushing the stroller.

  “The lady said we could come back,” the child says shyly.

  “I’m done here, I think,” the woman says. “Hi, honey,” she says to the baby, who is clapping. “Say hi to the lady. See? Over there.”

  The baby stops clapping and gazes at Celia with large, gentle eyes.

  “Hi, darling,” Celia says to the baby. “Aren’t you lucky to have your big sister to look after you.”

  “Big brother,” the woman says.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Celia says.

  The child—the boy—studies the rag doll in his hands. The woman slips on a pair of sandals and comes to her feet. “Nice to meet you,” she says cheerfully.

  “Yes!” Celia says too loudly. “Nice to meet you, too!”

  The moment they’re out of earshot Rachel hisses, “That was so embarrassing.”

  “I know,” Celia says.

  Rachel frowns up at the television. Celia takes a magazine from the table beside her and flips through the pages. This was supposed to be a treat, their first professional pedicures, which Rachel will now remember as the day her mother more or less announced that, when it comes to black children, she can’t tell the boys from the girls. It wasn’t his blackness, though. It was his red shorts and sweet, round face and his attentiveness to the baby. She wonders how Rachel knew. Or maybe she didn’t know and simply had the sense to keep her mouth shut. Rachel has a social canniness far beyond her years. That this should be so strikes Celia with fresh pleasure and amazement. “I’m sorry,” she says. Rachel sighs. Celia leaves her alone until they’re both putting on the rubber sandals, and then she says, “That pink is perfect for you.”

  More sighing.

  “Seashell pink,” Rachel’s pedicurist offers.

  “Yes, my favourite pink,” Rachel says in an unnaturally friendly voice intended to ostracize Celia further. “I have a lot of clothes this colour.”

  The black woman has left. Celia and Rachel are placed on the same side of the drying table, the side facing the reception area. As soon as their feet are under the light panel Rachel picks up a tabloid and pretends to be immersed.

  Celia watches the action. It has gotten quite busy. The customers coming in all exclaim at how hot it is out there. A woman arrives with a box of chocolates she worries might be melted. They’re for Angie, a belated birthday gift, but Angie says, “I need those like a hole in the head,” and tells the woman to offer them around. The woman seems unoffended. She’s freckled and small, with a face that’s both childlike and weathered. She opens the box, declares the contents “kind of squished, not bad,” and extends it to a couple of teenaged girls who are choosing their nail colours. “Get them while they’re hot,” she says. The girls each take one. The woman turns to Celia and Rachel. “Pot of Gold,” she says, and then lets out a cry as her leg buckles. The box drops to the floor. The woman teeters. Celia, jumping to her feet, catches her by the wrist.

  “Oh, jeez,” the woman gasps. “I’m sorry.”

  “Are you all right?” Celia says.

  “Yeah, I’m good. Thanks a lot.”

  Angie has come over. She puts an arm around the woman’s waist and leads her to a bench. “Honey, why aren’t you using that cane I bought you?”

  “I left it somewhere,” the woman mutters.

  “Yeah, sure you did.”

  “Only one fell out,” Rachel says. She has retrieved the box and is offering it to the woman.

  “Oh, thanks, sweetie. Leave it there.” She waves at the table. “Help yourself to as many as you want.”

  “You can have one,” Celia says.

  “Two?” Rachel says in a small, pleading voice, holding up two fingers.

  So Celia is back in her good graces. “Okay,” she says.

  “Three?” Rachel tries.

  “Three. That’s it.”

  “I get these leg spasms,” the woman informs Celia. “It’s like somebody stuck a knife in you. Seriously. I’ve never had one this bad, though.”

  “That sounds awful,” Celia says. She watches Rachel wiggle her fingers above the box. I’m a bad mother, she thinks. I’m a pushover.

  Angie crouches in front of Celia and presses her big toe. “You’re done,” she says. “Unless you want to hang around and save more lives.”

  Chapter Seven

  NANCY SETS DOWN her banjo and lights a joint. Something’s bothering her. What? Is it Tasha? Whether Ron remembered to walk her?

  Oh, now she remembers: it’s the girl Ron told her about. Nancy can understand why he’s worried, just not why he’s so worried—following her around everywhere and watching her house. She keeps forgetting what she has figured out about this. He was abused as a child, that’s it. She lets the smoke out of her lungs in a long, reassured breath. She would never ask (he would never say), but if he was abused, some things would make a lot more sense.

  Usually when the weather’s nice she practises out on the fire escape. But she’s got the electric heating pad wrapped around her right knee and the cord doesn’t reach that far. So she’s sitting at her kitchen table, which is really only a shelf hinged to the wall. Anything bigger wouldn’t fit. It’s an attic apartment: one room, a window at either end. In the front window her ancient air conditioner rattles. The kitchen window looks out onto a blue spruce tree and the robin’s nest she watched all spring. No two creatures ever worked harder than those robins, building their nest, guarding it, driving off constant attacks from crows. Then one afternoon it was empty. What happened? Did a gust of wind knock the eggs out? Did the crows eat them? This morning Nancy found a piece of blue eggshell stuck to her windshield and she could have cried.

  From that point on, the day went downhill. First, her car wouldn’t start. Then the bus never came, so she accepted a lift from a harmless-looking old man in a pickup. He kept glancing back and forth from the road to her lap, interested, she thought, in the box of chocolates she was holding. Finally at a stoplight he said, “Ya got something for me there?”

  “Pot of Gold,” she told him. “Not for you though, I’m afraid.”

  “Spreading it around, are ya?” he said.

  “Pardon me?” she said.

  He shoved his hand between her thighs.

  She jumped out and walked the rest of the way, half running to get to Angie’s before the chocolates melted. And after all that, Angie didn’t even want them. And then, from running, her leg cramped and she had to borrow money from Angie for a taxi home. Frank was good about it when she said she wouldn’t be able to work her shift, but she still felt guilty. She phoned Ron for some sympathy. “We don’t have to talk long,” she said to his machine.

  That was eight hours ago. He must still be down in the basement.

  She’d like to phone her sister Brenda and hear about the new baby, except if Brenda asks about her and Ron, she’s liable to start blurting things, and Ron made her swear on her mother’s life that she’d keep her mouth shut. He won’t even let her call adoption agencies, not yet. “The minute you start broadcasting your plans,” he says, “they fall through.” And she thought she was the superstitious one. He says he intends to take it one step at a time, and the first step is fixing up a bedroom. Which, if you ask her, should be the third or fourth step, but try telling him that. He used to be sensible and easygoing; almost overnight he’s become superstitious and stubborn. Don’t get her wrong, she’ll take the new Ron over the old, the new Ron being the one who wants the two of them to settle down together. She just needs time to get used to him, that’s all.

  Another thing about the old Ron…he was a person who minded his own business. Now he’s obsessed with a little girl he’s never even met. He thinks she’s being molested, so it’s sweet how upset he is, but Nancy feels—and she told him as much—that it’s time he phoned Children’s Aid. “You wouldn’t have to give your name,” she pointed out.

  He frowned. He
seemed to be considering it.

  “A lot of children are in bad situations,” she went on. “So that’s why it’s good we’re adopting, right? Because then at least one little girl will have love and a safe place. Right?”

  This perked him up. “You think she’ll like the room?”

  “Oh, yeah. Of course.”

  She held back from saying, yet again, that one of the upstairs bedrooms would have been a better idea. The adoption agency people will set him straight. And if they don’t, the little girl will.

  The little girl. If the agency people find out about their stints in rehab, Nancy has a feeling that the girl they get will be a leftover, somebody no one else wanted. She’ll be hard to handle or stuck in a wheelchair. Nancy hasn’t brought this up with Ron in case it puts him off. It doesn’t put her off. The more unlovable the girl is, the more love she’ll need poured into her, and Nancy is jam-packed with love. If the girl is in a wheelchair, she’ll decorate it with pretty decals and push her around the neighbourhood. She’ll massage her legs with essential oils.

  She unwraps the heating pad from her own leg. The pain is a soft ache, not too bad. She tries phoning Ron again. “I guess you’re still working,” she says to the machine.

  At least he’s not with another woman, she can stop torturing herself about that. She can put away the psychic pouch.

  She picks up the banjo again. “Yellow bird,” she sings, “up high in banana tree…”

  Chapter Eight

  HIS MORNING IS spent painting the bookcase. After lunch, he cleans the brushes and carries the paint cans out to the garbage shed.

  It comes to him, with the sound of the shed door banging shut, that except for buying a few posters and picking up the dollhouse from J. R. Miniatures, he’s almost finished. The fact takes him by surprise, as if he heard it from someone else. He returns to the basement and looks around at what he’s done. He starts touching things: the desk and chair, the dresser, the toy chest, the sofa. All the furniture is white. Yellow was what Nancy recommended—something warm and sunny—but white is purer, cleaner, the colour of nurses and angels, and against the mauve walls it turns out to be unexpectedly vibrant.

  He touches the TV: a thirty-two-inch Samsung highdefinition plasma. He runs a finger down the stack of Walt Disney DVDs. In the middle of the night, lying on the canopy bed among the stuffed animals, he has watched every one of them. If he had to choose a favourite it would be Cinderella, for obvious reasons, he supposes: the flight from the evil stepmother, the tiny feet. He straightens the stack and aligns it with the edge of the screen. He wanders into the bathroom and touches the unused bar of Ivory soap. The container of Johnson’s baby powder.

  It has been a form of worship, putting the apartment together. Not even when he was refurbishing the Westinghouse did he feel this kind of dedication to making a thing perfect. He strokes the chrome faucet and tries to recapture the sensation of being in a dream. He can’t do it. The work was the lullaby, and with the work virtually over he finds himself wide awake. He’s here, in the moment. In the middle of…what? What would you call this? Not an apartment really, not in the normal sense. Showroom, he thinks.

  He climbs up to the kitchen and pours himself a drink. Then he goes into the shop, unlocks the front door, and checks his phone messages. One is from Vince, telling him that his car is ready. He finds his insurance forms and heads across the street.

  A couple of days ago, while he was at the garage checking to see if Vince had installed Nancy’s alternator, he noticed a 1994 silver Civic for sale at eight hundred dollars. He bargained it down to six hundred cash. “It’ll do the job,” Vince said, and for a quaking moment Ron thought Vince knew that the job was to cruise around Rachel’s neighbourhood in something more anonymous than a van with Ron’s Appliance Repair written on the side.

  How will he explain the car to Nancy? As he’s driving out of the garage, the thought of accounting for himself makes him feel claustrophobic. Nancy has been acting like a wife lately, ever since he mentioned adoption. Why did he do that? Thank God he refrained from saying he didn’t want just any girl, but he showed her the basement room. The next morning, what horrified him even more than the heartless way he’d misled her was the glimpse he’d gotten of his fantasy—how it seemed to have a will and inevitability of its own. And yet his devotion to it held. As soon as he picked up a paintbrush, the dreamlike state returned.

  A small car is easier on gas—there’s his explanation, and it’s not a lie. He drives on, relieved, and only now becomes conscious of where he’s headed. A few minutes later, at twenty-five past three, he pulls up in front of the parched front lawn of Spruce Court School.

  Four days have passed since he was here. Such has been the basement’s compulsive hold on his mind. He massages his wet palm on the gearshift and tells himself that without the smokescreen of Tasha he’d better not get out of the car. He glances in the rearview mirror and is startled by his manic-eyed reflection.

  What’s happening to him? Three weeks ago he was a man in charge of his life. He worked in his shop, paid his bills, returned his phone calls. Maybe once or twice a week he drove by a school, but there was a line in his head and he never once came close to crossing it.

  He’s close now. Unless he finds another overpowering distraction, he’s in trouble.

  Chapter Nine

  HIS MOTHER DIED on the morning of his eleventh birthday. She was on her way home from the Dominion Store with his chocolate ice cream cake when she stepped into the intersection against a red light and a car ran her down. At first she seemed unhurt. Several witnesses described how she got right back up and said to the driver, “You’ll be paying for that,” referring, it was presumed, to the smashed cake. Then she fell again.

  He still can’t believe it, not so much that she died but that only seconds away from death she mustered the nerve and presence of mind to lecture the driver. She’d been a shy woman and by her own frustrated admission a scatterbrain. The reason she’d called him Constantine, she’d said, was because it meant “firm and unwavering,” unlike her.

  Only she ever called him by his full name. Outside of the house he was Con, and from a very early instinct not to draw attention to himself he told people it was short for the more normal-sounding Conrad. He started going by the name Ron in his midtwenties, after buying Ron’s Appliance Repair. For the sake of a single letter he couldn’t see changing all the sales receipts and invoices, let alone the neon sign. His father, who was still alive and had always called him Buddy anyway, said, “Your mother would have understood.” (Would she? In his dreams, the ones where she came back from the dead to finish the ironing or to wash the kitchen floor, she seemed sad and disappointed. “I’m no different,” he’d tell her, and yet the truth was—and he had the experience of it every morning when he woke up—he felt different. He felt more himself: disguised by ordinariness…Ron of Ron’s Appliance Repair.)

  She was buried in a church cemetery in the tiny southwestern Ontario town where she’d been born. A few days later a group of women showed up at the house to ask his father if he’d like to donate any of her clothes to the Crippled Civilians. His father told them to take whatever they could find. “There isn’t much,” he apologized. Except for her winter boots and some boxes in the spare bedroom, he and Ron had already cleared out nearly everything: her clothes and toiletries, her metal hair curlers that reminded Ron of a bunch of tiny carburetors, her scarves and gloves, and all her old purses with their residue of pennies and lintcoated Chiclets. An antique toy dealer had bought the collection of stuffed monkeys, and a bookseller had carted off the books, though most of them were rippled and stained from her habit of reading in the bath.

  And now the churchwomen. Once they were gone the only thing left that had been hers alone was the black-andwhite framed photograph, which Ron’s father said Ron could keep in his bedroom.

  It was a photograph of a girl standing with her hands on her hips and her legs planted apart. Somebod
y had written “Yvonne 6 years” on the cardboard backing, but Ron’s mother had always doubted it could be her. “I never stood like that in my life,” she said. She thought that the girl was her sister, Doreen, who’d been the strong-willed, confident one. Whatever the case, it made no difference to Ron. For him, the keepsake was the Y-shaped crack in the glass from the time his mother accidentally knocked the photograph off the mantelpiece. Being forked, the crack represented not only her first initial but also the warring emotions of protectiveness and exasperation that brought her most vividly to his mind. Not that he welcomed these emotions or was even able to name them. The thought of her was a barely lit fire that nobody, including his father, could be bothered to keep going.

  So it was up to Ron. Alone, after school, he lay on the couch and visualized everything she would have done that particular day if she were still alive. He was faithful to her habit of starting one chore and then, a few minutes later, abandoning it for another. Sometimes he drew a chart to illustrate where the chores took her: from the kitchen to the backyard to the basement, and so on. The tangled circuit he ended up with seemed eerily significant, as if he had copied down a message from an alien. He gave the charts names—“Commander,” “Junior,” “Rochester”—after his favourite vacuum cleaner models, and then he put them in an envelope labelled, simply, MOTHER. Meanwhile, as he was doing all this, he yelled out replies to questions he imagined her calling from another room. “What?” he’d yell. “I’ll be right there!” He set a place for her at the table but always whisked it away again before his father got home.