The Waterproof Bible (18 page)

“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.

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.

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.

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.

“Look at me,” Lisa said. “I am frail and weak and fragile. And therefore so are you. Therefore so is the world.”

Lewis didn’t say a word. He stood on the front steps of the Commodity Exchange Tower, watching the street. On the sidewalk immediately in front of him were an inconsolable toddler and a mother running out of patience. Lewis felt for the toddler. He felt for the mother. He wanted to cover his ears before either of their screams got louder, but then he discovered he didn’t need to. A city bus stopped at the corner and Lewis heard the brakes squeal but not the doors opening or the people getting off. The conversation of two office workers walking past him disappeared. He looked at Lisa and saw her mouth moving, but she made no sound. He heard no sounds at all.

Lewis had been deaf for twenty-nine hours, the last three of which he’d spent sitting at the bar in the Palm Room, unable to hear the piano player and finding this wonderful. Not being able to hear meant he didn’t have to listen. He was no longer forced to notice the symmetrical sharpness of squealing bus brakes, or the concise melody of an elevator door opening, or the ramshackle perfection of a slightly out-of-tune piano played by a slightly inebriated man wasting his talent. Without sound, the world was a muted television that Lewis could watch or ignore as he pleased. He felt perfect in his perfectly silent world until, having set his glass on the bar, he noticed a tiny version of his wife swimming in his drink.

Lewis watched as she broke the surface and climbed the ice cubes to the top of the glass. She jumped, landed on the bar and ran towards a martini glass filled with toothpicks. Her steps left behind footprints that looked like single drops of water. Approaching the martini glass, she slammed her body against the stem, tipping it over and spilling the toothpicks. As Lewis watched, she began pushing the toothpicks across the bar. He didn’t immediately realize that she was spelling.

“Have to what? Be clear. Be more specific. I have to what?” Lewis said.

The toothpicks were slightly longer then she was. He found it very hard to watch her struggle, but he didn’t want to get in her way. Lewis feared she would disappear before conveying her message. Hovering over the bar, Lewis watched the tiny version of his wife continue to spell. She pushed toothpicks this way and that. Finally, she stopped, stepped back and looked up at him, clearly exhausted. She had spelt: