Helpless
Barbara Gowdy
(published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.)
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Excerpt from Helpless (PDF) as it appeared in the National Post on September 27, 2008.
Celia is the single mother of an exceptionally beautiful child: nine-year-old Rachel. When Rachel disappears one night during a blackout, Celia is stricken with guilt and terror. But her desperation is only half the story as Ron, the man who has taken Rachel, struggles with feelings that are at once tender, misguided and chillingly fixated.
A suspenseful and haunting novel of obsessive love, Helpless once again showcases Barbara Gowdy's incredible talent for bringing the reader face to face with the provocative and discomforting. At the height of the story's tension, she leads us with a steady hand into territory that is unexpected but ultimately as transcendent as the passing of a storm.
Barbara Gowdy
(photo credit: May Truong)
Barbara Gowdy is an award-winning author whose five previous books, The Romantic, The White Bone, Mister Sandman, We So Seldom Look on Love and Falling Angels, have appeared on bestseller lists throughout the world. The winner of the 2008 Trillium Book Award and the recipient, in 1996, of the Writers' Trust Marian Engel Award, she has been a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and a repeat finalist for the Giller Prize, the Governor General's Award, the Trillium Award and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. She lives in Toronto.
Excerpt from Helpless
Ron's mother 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-and-white 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. Somebody 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.
Helpless by Barbara Gowdy. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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