Lewis had assumed the car was unoccupied but had not checked. His mind reviewed his options. They seemed limited. He was still trying to decide what to do when he saw a green foot step onto the pavement. The right foot, which was also green, soon followed it. Both feet were webbed and began walking towards him. Continuing to squat, Lewis set the knife on the ground and looked up. A green-skinned woman with gills in her neck looked down. Lewis recognized her immediately.
Lewis could not believe he was staring at the same creature that had nearly T-boned their limo in Toronto. He looked from her hands to his—that his were neither green nor webbed seemed somehow inappropriate.
“Mavbe vou could velph me?” it asked.
“I think I know you,” Lewis said.
“I von’t fink sooh.”
“Yeah, I do. You almost crashed into a limousine I was in.”
“Fat was vou?”
“I was in the back.”
The creature needed directions, which Lewis couldn’t provide. They exchanged pleasantries about the weather and then she seemed to remember something.
“Please vait here?”
Nodding, Lewis watched her walk awkwardly away. When she returned, she held out her right hand. He was scared to touch her, not because he was repulsed, or afraid of her green skin (which did look a bit slimy), but because he knew that once he touched her the reality of her existence would become forever undeniable. After some moments, Lewis reached out his arm. Her skin felt cool and dry. She handed him a set of keys.
Lewis did not recognize them until he turned them over. There, on the back of the E.Z. Self Storage key chain, was a picture of Lisa, no older than twelve, with her family. Although Lewis was having trouble absorbing it, there was no denying that a green-skinned woman in the middle of a city he’d never been to before had just handed him a picture of his dead wife.
“Cav vou please make saue fese get back tau her?”
“I will.”
“Verv impaurtant.”
“It’s unbelievable.”
After she drove away, Lewis, still stunned, looked down and saw the steak knife on the pavement. The blade was slightly bent from where the Honda had driven over it. Keeping the keys firmly grasped in his right hand, Lewis picked up the knife with his left and tucked it between his belt and his pants. He sat on the curb for several minutes. On his way back to the hotel, he slipped the knife between grates in the sewer.
24
David Sharpen
At 6:05 a.m. the day after throwing all things Stewart into the Dumpster, Rebecca sat in the unpopulated lab, composing a list of all the tasks she had postponed since the death of her sister. When finished, the list had seventeen items that needed her immediate attention. She had three of them accomplished before the majority of her co-workers arrived. By noon, she’d completed twelve. At 3:15 p.m., she drew a line across cross-hatchings, the last item on her list.
Sitting at her desk, Rebecca spun clockwise in her chair. She released a large, satisfied sigh, and then heard the rustling of paper behind her. She stopped, turned and discovered David Sharpen, a new phlebotomist working on the seventh floor, standing nearby. He had a blood sample in his left hand and the paperwork in his right. She was surprised that he’d run the sample down himself, and she had no idea how long he’d been standing there.
“How long have you been standing there?” she asked.
“You certainly are focused today.”
“I am.”
“Can we get this out by the end of the day?”
“What do you need?”
“They want a basic metabolic panel, but especially the glucose.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Rebecca said. She took the test tube and the paperwork. She began preparing the sample, then looked up to find David Sharpen still standing in her tiny corner of the lab, his elbow bumping into the microwave.
“Do you want to get a drink after work?” he asked.
Rebecca set down the sample. She was very surprised, although not so much by David Sharpen’s invitation as by her realization that she could, indeed, go with this man, after work, for a drink. The thought that there was nothing stopping her made her conclude that at one point there must have been. Searching her mind, Rebecca quickly understood that this something was Stewart. Not missing him was accompanied by not thinking about him. She no longer needed to keep him in mind as she made each and every decision of her day. Her sudden awareness that she’d unknowingly been doing this for years was unexpected and tinged with sorrow—but discovering that she didn’t have to do it anymore was exceedingly joyful.
This sequence of thoughts came to Rebecca quickly, one right after the other, while she stared at the short grey carpet. At the edge of her sightline was David Sharpen’s right shoe. It was black leather, a fashionable shape and highly polished. Rebecca raised her gaze upwards until she looked him in the eyes. “Yes,” she said. “I’d quite like that.”
David Sharpen felt Rebecca’s conflicted emotions and then he felt them suddenly resolve. He concluded that she must be on the rebound and this made him smile broadly.
Opening her eyes, Rebecca saw that the ceiling was the wrong colour. It was cream; the one she’d woken up under for the preceding twenty-seven months was whiter. She sat up quickly, but it was only after she looked to her right and saw the bleeding heart tattoo on his left shoulder that the events of the evening returned to her. She felt happy. She pulled up the covers, tucked the sheet under her chin and waited for the good feeling to pass.
To her surprise, it remained. Confident that guilt and regret were on their way, and in an effort to hasten their arrival, she turned onto her side. She gently traced her fingers down David Sharpen’s back. But her feeling of well-being remained. She let her fingers continue to travel, and her happiness proved to be surprisingly resilient.
The large digital alarm clock on his bedside table told Rebecca she had ninety minutes to get to work, but since she couldn’t remember exactly what part of town she was in, it was impossible to estimate how long her commute would be. Climbing from his bed, Rebecca silently collected her clothing. In the bathroom, she turned the hot water tap until it was just a trickle, then washed. She dressed and wrote a warm, friendly note, which she left on the kitchen table. With a great effort to make no sound, Rebecca walked to the apartment door, unlocked it and left.
Even on the other side of David Sharpen’s door, Rebecca still felt good about herself. This positive sense of self remained as she got into her car and drove away. It was still there when she got to work. It even remained when she made a special trip up to the seventh floor just to walk past David Sharpen’s station, broadly returning his smile.
When she got home from work, Rebecca sat at her kitchen table, feeling better than she’d felt in years. She dialled Stewart’s number and was surprised that, even as it began to ring, she still felt no guilt, shame or remorse.
“Hello?” Stewart said.
“Are you working on the boat?”
“I’m manning the front desk. We have guests! Two of them. They’re a bit strange. They’re supposed to be rainmakers. Are you feeling any better?”
“Actually, I’m feeling really good.”
“You sound good.”
“I might even be fantastic.”
“You sound a bit weird, though.”
“Maybe it’s just because I’m so good.”
“Maybe.”
“It’s been awhile since I’ve felt this good.”
“True.”
“Listen—I’ve got something I want to ask you,” Rebecca said. Her tone was exceedingly casual.
“What?” he asked, warily.
“What do you think of fresh starts?”
“What do you mean?”
“Fresh starts. Are you for them?”
“That question’s too big. I mean, everyone’s for them in principle.”
“Okay. Let me rephrase. Do you think it’s cowardly, or courageous, to
get rid of your past and start all over again?”
“Why are you asking me this?”
“Don’t get defensive.”
“Well, obviously I think it’s courageous. What do you think I’m doing here?”
Rebecca was silent. She knew he believed he was telling the truth. “Stewart,” she said, “this really helped.”
“Rebecca? Don’t do this again. Tell me what’s going on!”
“Hey, Stewart,” Rebecca said. “Goodbye.”
Closing her phone, she set it on the kitchen table. She walked to her car and drove directly to E.Z. Self Storage.
25
Completion is just the beginning
Behind the front desk of the Prairie Embassy Hotel, Stewart continued to look at the telephone before setting it on the desk and pushing it away. After sitting motionless for some time, he began cleaning off the desk. He put weeks-old newspapers in the trash. He put bookmarks in the four different novels he was in the middle of reading and stacked them neatly, according to size. He gathered all the plates, carried them into the kitchen and pushed the leftover food into the garbage. Washing each dish by hand, he dried them and put them away in the cupboard before returning to the front desk.
Stewart sat down and looked at the telephone, which did not ring, and decided that tonight was the night he’d finish the sailboat. For months, Stewart had been working at a leisurely pace, but in truth there wasn’t much left to do.
Heading out to the boat and stepping onto the deck, he turned on the lights, took up his hammer and finished nailing the trim around the cabin, both inside and out. Next he applied the final coat of fibreglass waterproofing to the hull. Just before the sun rose, Stewart attached the tackle to the mast, fastened the sail and raised it.
Sitting with the rudder in his hand, Stewart looked starboard at the reds and oranges on the horizon, but he couldn’t think about anything other than Rebecca. For three years he had waited for one of two things: for her to ask him to come back, or for her to say goodbye and mean it. Now that she’d chosen the latter, he didn’t know what came next. He felt a freedom, although one so expansive it was threatening. But more than anything else he felt empty and sad. A dry wind blew over his face, and he looked up just as the wind caught the sail, filling it. But the boat remained motionless on the parched Prairie soil.
26
The physical impossibility of fresh starts
Rebecca pulled open the padlock, took it off the door and put it in her pocket. She began taking boxes out of unit #207 and placing them in the hallway. When every box was out of the storage area, Rebecca arranged them in chronological order. When she was done, they sat side by side in a line that snaked down the hallway and around the corner, where it stopped fewer than three feet from the elevator.
The boxes closest to the storage unit held the earliest moments of her life. The boxes farthest away contained the most recent ones. Only after Rebecca had double-checked the sequence, moving a few boxes here and a few boxes there, did she begin loading them into the elevator.
Using boxes to keep the doors open, Rebecca filled the elevator completely, leaving no room for herself. Reaching in, she hit the button for the first floor and ducked out as the doors were closing. She ran down the stairs, arriving before the elevator. She could not find the dolly and was forced to carry each box down the first floor hallway and outside, where she lifted it up and threw it into the Dumpster.
When she’d emptied the elevator, Rebecca rode it to the second floor and loaded it again. She repeated this cycle nine times, until every single box and every single keepsake she’d collected since shortly after she’d turned seven years old was inside the Dumpster.
Rebecca reached into her pocket and took out the padlock. She threw the lock into the Dumpster and closed the lid. Immediately, the pain in her chest began. It was excruciating, far worse than the pain she’d felt for the loss of Stewart’s objects, or Lisa’s—worse than both those pains combined. She looked at her chest, convinced that something had been ripped out of it, then collapsed to the ground. Every muscle in her body tightened. Her fingers curled into her palms, and her nails cut tiny lines into her flesh. She couldn’t breathe. Then the pain stopped. It took her almost five minutes to catch her breath, but then she stood up, walked to her car and started the engine. She looked left and right before exiting the parking lot and pulling onto Broadview Avenue. She checked both her rear-view and side mirrors before changing lanes. She drove responsibly, her hands gripping the wheel at the ten and two positions.
She rolled down the window and played the radio loudly, but it wasn’t enough—she was still falling asleep. Paying to park her car, Rebecca hailed a cab. She had barely given the driver her address before she fell asleep in the back seat.
When the driver woke her up, telling her they’d arrived, Rebecca paid, unlocked her front door and went directly to the couch. She fell asleep quickly, unaware that she’d left her front door wide open.
27
Louder than sound
Lewis attempted to focus on the feeling of the carpet against his bare feet and not on the fact that every time he closed his eyes he saw the giant frog. He got out of bed and walked to the window. He looked down at the street. He moved back to the bed, lay down, turned onto his stomach, then his side, and then watched the clock on the bedside table turn to 6:01 a.m.
He couldn’t stop thinking about the frogwoman. It wasn’t just that he’d talked to her, or that he’d seen her twice, in two different cities. These facts were minor compared to the key chain he’d held since she handed it to him. Lewis looked at the family portrait. Lisa stood to the left of her mother, who was seated. Rebecca was on the other side of the chair, and their significantly taller father stood behind it, benevolently hovering over them all. Lewis continued to stare at the key chain and reached a conclusion he felt was undeniable: its presence was a message, simply and undeniably stated, that the unbelievable must be believed.
Lewis kept the key chain firmly gripped in his right hand as he dressed, left his suite and began looking for the woman who claimed to be God. Realizing that each time she’d appeared he’d been waiting, Lewis began to wait. He waited all morning in the emergency room of Grace General Hospital. At 1:30 he moved to Gus’s Barbershop, then to a chair outside the manager’s office at the Toronto Dominion Bank on Portage. He waited in a bus shelter in front of the CBC Building, in a dentist’s office on the sixth floor of a building he couldn’t name and on a bench outside the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Just after 4:00 p.m., Lewis was in the waiting room of the law offices of Aikins, MacAulay & Thorvaldson, on the thirtieth floor of the Commodity Exchange Tower, when he saw her for the fourth time.
The woman who claimed to be God passed so close to where Lewis was sitting that he could have touched her. Her hair was in pigtails that stuck out from the sides of her head. She wore bicycle shorts that revealed too much. Her shoes had metal clasps on the bottom that made her steps click as she walked across the floor. Tucked under her arm was a large manila envelope. Lewis watched as Lisa handed it to the receptionist, waited for the receipt to be signed and walked back through the waiting room, passing as close to Lewis as she had the first time.
Lewis watched her stand in the foyer, waiting for an elevator. She pressed the down button and crossed her arms. Her posture was horrible. When the doors opened, Lewis stood up and ran as hard as he could. Turning his body sideways, he slipped between the doors just as they were closing. There were eight people in the tiny elevator, and everyone was standing very close. Lewis stood beside Lisa, but a floor passed before she recognized him.
“Hey! It’s you.”
“You’re a bike courier?”
“Very observant, Lewis.”
Their conversation stopped when the elevator did. The doors opened. Two more men got in. Lisa and Lewis moved to the back. He felt her breath on his face. He reached out his index finger. He softly stroked her cheek and then took hold of her wrist with his right
hand. He squeezed. His grip tightened. All colour drained from his face, and it was suddenly significantly easier for him to accept that this woman was God than it was to believe that a giant green frog had asked him for directions. Or that the ghost of his wife had given him advice in his hotel room. Although crude and vulgar, she was undeniably real, and stepping into her delusion, if it was one, seemed profoundly easier than remaining inside his.
“Is this the best you can do?” he asked.
“Lewis, you’re hurting me.”
“Is this really the best you can do?”
“What are you talking about?”
The shoulders of everyone in the elevator had stiffened. When the doors opened, they exited like a school of fish. Although there were people waiting outside, not one of them entered. The doors closed, and Lewis and Lisa were alone in the elevator.
“Are you talking about being a bike courier? ’Cause it’s a pretty good job.”
“I’m talking about everything.”
Lisa’s eyes became very wide, then very narrow. She shook Lewis’s grip from her wrist, extended her index finger and executed a single, precise jab to the doors-open button. The doors opened. Taking firm hold of his hand, she led him out of the elevator and pulled him through the lobby and out the large glass doors. Lewis began to lose feeling in his hand. He rushed to keep up with her. Just outside the building, at the top of a flight of concrete steps, she stopped. “Let me tell you a little something about Christianity,” she said.
“I’m not Christian.”
“The only thing your book got right, and here it is, pay attention,” Lisa said, unexpectedly cuffing Lewis on the back of the head. “Is that man was created in my image. Understand?”
“No. No, I don’t,” Lewis said, although it came out as “Wo. Wo, I thon’t,” as he’d bitten the tip of his tongue when she hit him on the back of the head.
The Waterproof Bible Page 13