The Waterproof Bible (17 page)

For six weeks they’d been arguing, although he was unable to remember what the fight was about. All he knew was that he’d decided to leave, but Lisa had convinced him to spend one last night. They slept together one last time, and it was so boisterous and gymnastic that Lewis fell asleep immediately afterwards. While he slept, Lisa took a steak knife, went outside and slashed all four tires of his car.

In the morning, Lewis was carrying a box filled with his most precious possessions when he noticed that all his tires were flat.

Furious, Lewis stormed back into their apartment, accusing her in the kitchen. She did not deny it. His initial reaction was that she was crazy, and it validated his decision to leave. But he soon reinterpreted the gesture as a
sincere display of affection. On the condition that she paid for the new tires, and that she do so before the end of the week, he decided to stay.

It was only now, standing in the bathroom of the second-best hotel room in Winnipeg, Manitoba, that Lewis realized how much more her actions had meant. At that moment, when the honeymoon glow had completely faded, when he was exhausted from the fighting and disheartened by the wet Halifax winter, he would have left her. Had Lewis been able to drive away, he would done so, and he wouldn’t have looked back until it was impossible to return. With four simple thrusts of a kitchen knife, Lisa had made this impossible, saving not only their relationship, but him.

Lewis looked up from the bathroom floor at his reflection. He couldn’t believe he’d made her pay for the tires. “There,” he said to himself. “That’s a great example of you being an asshole.” He walked out to the living room, where he plucked the steak knife from the dishes he had yet to set in the hall and left the suite.

It was in the elevator, descending, that Lewis crystallized the plan: he would deflate all four tires of a car. If that didn’t make things tactile enough, he would deflate all the tires on another car. He was prepared to stick his steak knife into as many tires as it took. However—and this was very important to him—the destruction couldn’t be completely random: whether they were all hatchbacks, or all had headlights that folded down, or all had out-of-province licence plates, the cars needed to be somehow related. Lewis wanted destruction, but it had to have a structure, a guiding principle, some semblance of order.

Lewis walked through the lobby and nodded to Beth. He was three streets north of the hotel when he decided the theme would be cracks in the windshield, primarily because he was passing a BMW that had a long horizontal crack in its windshield. Lewis knelt down at the right back tire of the car. He put his hand on the bumper, which felt very cold. He pulled the knife out of the inside pocket of his jacket and, with considerable effort, pushed it into the tire.

Doing this made Lewis feel very happy. He listened to the air escaping and pushed the knife up and down so it exited faster. When the tire had visibly flattened, Lewis tried to pull out the knife. The knife resisted. Only after several attempts did Lewis succeed in removing it. Keeping the knife in his hand, Lewis circled the BMW, slashing each tire as he passed it. He stood in the middle of the street, turning the steak knife in his hand. He watched as the other three tires deflated, and then began to search for another car with a crack in the windshield.

Winnipeg was a Prairie town, surrounded by gravel roads and farms, and Lewis had anticipated that cars with cracked windshields would be common. But after searching for forty-five minutes, he hadn’t found another one. Lewis was about to change the theme when he turned right onto Wolseley Street and his eyes focused on a white Honda Civic. Even from half a block away he could see the crack that started in the middle of the windshield and travelled upwards towards the left-hand corner. Lewis ran towards the car, then crouched at the back right tire. He pulled the steak knife out of his pocket. He heard the driver’s door open and became very still.

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.

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.”