Born Weird (6 page)

“Did you lose someone too?”

“I did,” Angie said. Nicola nodded. She resumed cutting Angie’s hair. She made six more slices at the back. Then three quick stabs to the top. She held up a length from the right side of Angie’s head and cut at what seemed to be a randomly chosen point. She did the same on the left side. Exchanging her scissors for the hair dryer, Nicola flicked it to the highest setting and only then did Angie let herself cry.

Nicola turned off the hair dryer and stepped away. Angie looked in the mirror. Her hair seemed even more chaotic than Lucy’s. Some sections on the right side seemed untouched, while all the hair on the left was cut quite short. Her bangs had been sliced into a zigzag pattern. Four tufts stuck up from the top.

“So?” Nicola asked. “Do you like it?”

“I love it, Mom,” Angie said. “It’s perfect.”

Lucy was waiting by the elevator. The expression on her face remained neutral. She pressed the up button but the elevator doors did not open and then she started to laugh.

“We could be twins!” Lucy said. She ran her hands all over Angie’s head.

“It is really that bad?”

“I didn’t think you’d actually go through with it.”

“I still think she’s faking.”

“She’s not faking.”

“I saw a look. A look of recognition. Just for a moment,” Angie said.

Lucy stopped. She took Angie’s hands. She held them tightly and she did not loosen her grip. “She fakes that,” Lucy said. “That she does fake, no doubt.”

“She fakes what?”

“She pretends, just at first, just for a moment, that she recognizes you. Just to see if she’s supposed to. Then it goes away. It always goes away.”

There was a ping and the elevator doors opened and they stepped inside.

“I didn’t think of that,” Angie said.

“It always goes away.”

“Still. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Stop playing with it.”

“How bad is it?”

“We have to get to the airport. Our plane leaves at 11:15.”

“I really appreciate this …”

“It’s no big deal. Don’t cry.”

“I’m not … crying.”

“It’s okay. Calm down. It’ll all be all right.”

“Everything’s … so … e … motional … right … now.”

“I know. I know it is,” Lucy said, “as it always has been.”

The elevator doors opened. They followed the wheelchair tracks to the lobby. The taxi was still waiting for them.

W
HEN
R
ICHARD
W
EIRD WOKE UP
and looked at the clock beside his bed it was 11:56. He studied the pillow beside him. It did not appear to have been slept on and he knew that she was gone.

Richard lay on his back and looked at the ceiling. It had just been painted cloud white. His wife’s absence provoked the same emotional response as the ceiling did. This made him feel shallow and flawed but also relieved. It made him feel safe.

Sitting on the edge of the bed Richard pushed his toes into the blue shag carpet. He took his cigarettes from the bedside table. He lit one. He inhaled deeply. It was halfway done when he stood up. The inch-long ash fell to the floor. Richard walked across the room and opened the top drawer of his dresser. Underneath his socks he found the purple bag with the yellow drawstring. He opened it and turned it upside down. Two wedding rings, and nothing else, fell out.

One of the rings was silver. It had been given to him by his first wife, Nancy Kensington. They were married in March of 2003, less than two years after the death of his
father. Their union had lasted seventeen months. It ended primarily because he met Debra Campbell.

Debra gave Richard the other ring, which was gold, during a service conducted on August 5, 2005. This was the day his divorce from Nancy was finalized. From the moment they ran out of city hall and onto Queen Street, Richard felt himself drifting away. They stuck it out another ten months. Debra claimed that his emotional distance was a conscious decision and Richard had been unable to disagree.

He then, determinedly, stayed single for another three years. He married Sarah English, the woman who’d given him the ring that was still on his finger, on September 20, 2009. He married her believing that their love was forever. And every day Richard woke up beside his wife, he found himself a little more in love with her. This meant that every day he felt just a little more vulnerable to her. It was merely a consequence of time before, feeling increasingly unsafe, Richard began to pull away.

This had happened in all three of his marriages. It had happened with every woman he’d ever fallen in love with.

Richard switched the cigarette from his left hand to his right and put the knuckle of his ring finger in his mouth. Wetting the skin, he slid the ring off. He put it inside the purple bag. He put the two other rings back inside it as well. Then he drew the yellow drawstring and placed the bag underneath his socks. As he closed the drawer more ash fell to the carpet.

He was in the bathroom, midstream, when he noticed that something had been written in soap on the bathroom mirror. He flushed the toilet. He washed his hands. Then he read the message.

“Over?” Richard asked.

For several moments Richard looked at his reflection. The word
sorry
appeared to be written on his forehead. Then he opened the medicine cabinet. The writing, still in soap, continued on the inside of the door. The back of the medicine cabinet was white and so was the soap. Richard opened and closed the door until he found an angle that allowed him to read it.

Richard shut the door of the medicine cabinet. The sun broke through the clouds, filling the bathroom with light.
Richard ran to the bedroom and took his camera from the bedside table. He returned to the bathroom. The light was still perfect. He took many pictures from many angles of the medicine cabinet and the note that was written on the mirror. Only when the light faded did he lower his camera. Then he went back to the bedroom, dressed, took his wedding ring out of the bag and put it back on his finger. He packed a suitcase and called for an airport limo.

When the limo arrived Richard inspected it and found it met his approval.

Richard arrived at the Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport just before four. A ticket for American Airlines flight AA487 to Washington, D.C. was easily purchased. He checked his bag. He stood in the line to enter security screening. It was 4:25. The security guard held out his hand for Richard’s boarding pass. Richard reached into his pocket. He touched it. But the paper felt cold. He did not feel that it would keep him safe. Richard took his hand out of his pocket, leaving the boarding pass inside.

“Est-ce que je peux vous aider?” the guard asked.

“No, I don’t think you can,” Richard replied. He picked up his suitcase, stepped out of line and walked away. He was almost out of the airport, so close to the automatic doors that they’d rumbled open, when he saw them. He reached out and touched them. Angie and Lucy turned around and Richard, who had already raised his camera, took a picture.

W
HEN
N
ICOLA WENT INTO LABOUR
with Richard, she was not surprised that her husband put her into the back of a taxi, or that he got behind the wheel, but that he started the meter. It was March 16, 1982. Nicola sat in the back seat. She gripped the door handle as another contraction went through her. When she looked back up the amount owing on the meter equalled the number of months she’d been married—$3.00.

In those three months Nicola had been unable to determine whether she loved Besnard, or just the chaos that he brought into her life. But as their unplanned pregnancy continued on schedule, there had been less and less time to worry about this. And now that the baby was almost here, the question was irrelevant: if she loved him, fantastic; if she only loved the chaos, there seemed to be no shortage of it.

Besnard raced south on University. He sped past cars, aiming for pockets of space that hadn’t yet opened up. Nicola held the door handle tighter. She found this thrilling. It was the first time she’d seen him behind the wheel. Besnard had
been driving a cab for four months, learning the ropes of his father’s business, the Grace Taxi Service, which he was set to inherit. As they approached College Street, Nicola felt another contraction starting and the car went faster.

The traffic light was yellow. The taxi increased its speed, again—Nicola tightened her grip. The light turned red. She closed her eyes. They sped forwards. She heard a metallic crunch and the back end of the taxi jumped to the left. But they didn’t stop.

Nicola opened her eyes and saw Besnard correcting the skid. He slowed down. He looked in the rear-view mirror. Once he’d seen that the damage to the red Ford Falcon was minimal, he sped up again. Thirty seconds later he stopped in front of Mount Sinai Hospital. He turned off the meter.

“Seven dollars and twenty-five cents!” he said, “Unheard of!”

“You could have killed us!”

“But I didn’t.”

“That’s true,” Nicola said. She wanted to be angry but what she really felt was protected. That he would break so many laws to get her to the hospital as quickly as possible boded well, she felt. The delivery, although stunningly painful, was without complications and Besnard Richard Weird Jr. came into the world six hours later.

The following morning, Grandmother Weird arrived at 9:45 a.m., fifteen minutes before visiting hours began. She
was about to turn fifty-four. Her son was only twenty-two. His bride a mere nineteen. As she took the infant into her arms, a sense of maternal responsibility swelled up inside her such as she had never felt before—not even with Besnard. It was at this exact moment that the child’s parents began to relate the details of their adventurous trip to the hospital.

“And then he just kept going!” Nicola said.

“It wasn’t really that big. Not even a crash. A literal fender-bender. But still …” Besnard said.

“He went right to the hospital! He didn’t even stop!”

“Seven dollars and twenty-five cents on the meter. A record!”

As Grandmother Weird listened, her heart began beating faster. She held her grandson tighter. She wanted to cover his ears. She could not believe that his parents were mythologizing a moment of such irresponsibility and recklessness. She felt in her heart, her giant oversized heart, that this precious new Weird needed to be protected. She did not believe that his parents could do it. She knew that she wouldn’t be around forever. Grandmother Weird concluded that this task would have to fall to him. Her desire for her grandchild to possess this power, the ability to keep safe, was so strong that it took shape within her. And then it tumbled out of her, and into him.

All of the Weird children had inklings that Richard possessed this ability. They suspected that in some significant
way they fell under the umbrella of it as well. But they had no definitive proof until December 26, 1993, shortly before 4 p.m. The house on Palmerston Boulevard was filled with relatives, and after getting underfoot one time too many, the five of them were shoved into snowsuits and ski jackets, and into the backyard.

At the back of the yard there was an especially high snowbank, created by snow that had slid off the steep roof of the coach house. It was in this snowbank that the Weird siblings began to dig a tunnel. Abba and Kent worked from the south side. Lucy and Angie tunnelled from the north. Richard supervised from the outside, making sure that the two ends would meet up.

This was the winter that Besnard had started heating the coach house in an effort to preserve the Maserati. But the heat fled through the uninsulated roof as fast as the small heater pushed it out. The coach house remained cold. All Besnard had succeeded in creating was a row of long, pointy icicles, which hung directly over their tunnel. The afternoon had turned unseasonably warm, above zero, which made the snow wet and perfect for packing.