The Waterproof Bible

  The more distress she felt, the more emboldened her houseguests became. She began biting her right thumbnail as they began laughing louder. Derrick Miller coughed, wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and passed the vodka to his right. The partiers cheered. The bottle was passed through the hands of three people, and then it stopped. All laughter ceased. Derrick looked to his right and up. Following his eyes, Rebecca discovered her little sister standing in the doorway of the kitchen.

  Twelve-year-old Lisa was supposed to be attending a sleepover at Ruth Montgomery’s house. She’d thought it was going to be just her and Ruth, but when she arrived six other girls were there. Suspecting that the worst aspects of prepubescent girls were about to be displayed, Lisa endured the gossip about older boys and girls not in attendance. But minutes after midnight, fuelled by sugar, overtiredness and the need for approval, the other girls started ganging up on Lisa. They teased her because her nightgown was made of flannel and her hair was messy, whereas theirs looked like it had been ironed. They excluded her, forming a clique in the process, and Lisa suspected that this was the reason she’d been invited in the first place.

  Lisa had really wanted to be friends with Ruth, but she’d found Ruth’s friends boring and stupid. Her feelings were hurt but not broken. While they were busy trying to catch glimpses of a scrambled movie on upper cable, Lisa changed into her clothes, packed her things and walked home. Leaving felt like victory, but when she arrived, Lisa was surprised to find her house filled with teenagers. Standing in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen, she pointed her index finger directly at Derrick Miller, a boy she knew to be no good.

  “What are you doing in my house?” she said and then, taking a step into the kitchen, she saw her sister. Rebecca looked at the kitchen floor, and Lisa instantly felt her shame. Without looking at anyone in the room, Lisa walked through the kitchen.

  Rebecca listened to the basement door open and close. She heard Lisa walk down the steps. The guests laughed. Derrick Miller continued laughing after everyone else had stopped. As the bottle of vodka was passed back to him, every light in the house went out, the stereo slurring to a stop.

  Rebecca stepped back, leaned against the wall of the kitchen and held the beer bottles tightly against her chest. She tried to make herself small. She wanted to become invisible. She concentrated on thinking nothing at all.

  “What happened?” someone said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Lame.”

  The refrigerator door opened and bottles clinked in the darkness. The kitchen cleared. The front door opened. In five minutes the house was empty and silent. Rebecca heard a click from the basement. The lights came back on. The record player started playing. She couldn’t believe how loud it was. She set the beer bottles on the kitchen table. Picking up the vodka bottle, Rebecca peeled off the label and put it in her pocket, then she went into the living room and turned off the stereo. When Rebecca returned, Lisa was at the kitchen table with an empty beer case in her hand.

  Lisa started collecting bottles. Rebecca joined her. Lisa still wouldn’t look up. Rebecca gathered beer caps and coffee mugs that had served as ashtrays. She swept up broken glass. They opened every window in the house and filled an orange plastic bucket with soap and water. The stains on the carpet, the coffee table in the living room and the linoleum in the kitchen were all scrubbed. They rehung the painting that had been knocked to the floor. They washed the sheets from the master bedroom. They remade the bed. They did all this work without saying a word or making eye contact.

  When they were finished, it was four in the morning. They stood shoulder to shoulder at the bottom of the stairs, Rebecca staring at the carpet. Reaching up, Lisa grabbed her older sister’s chin. Rebecca was shocked by her sister’s aggressive gesture as Lisa’s fingernails dug into her cheeks.

  “You know, you don’t have to make them like you,” Lisa said.

  Rebecca did not know what to say. She had expected to be extorted by her little sister, or at least made fun of. Biting her bottom lip, Rebecca shrugged agreement.

  “Just promise me you won’t do anything this stupid again.”

  Rebecca didn’t say a word, but her cheeks grew red and shame radiated from her every pore.

  “Okay,” Lisa said. She held Rebecca’s face for a second longer, then let go and went to bed. She never told.

  Rebecca opened her eyes and looked at the dingy linoleum floor of the church basement.

  “Rebecca? Rebecca?” she heard. She turned her head and was momentarily surprised when she did not see Stewart beside her. Looking down, she saw the cellphone, which explained why his voice seemed so tiny and far away.

  “I’m here.”

  “And?”

  “Yeah, that one’s going to work,” Rebecca said. The Derrick Miller memory made her feel tremendous love and respect for Lisa. It reminded her how much joy she felt simply to have known her, let alone been her older sister.

  “There you go.”

  “Thanks, Stewart.”

  “You’re gonna do great.”

  “Plus, I think I lost my keys.”

  “Don’t worry about that right now. You have a second set.”

  “I even have a third.”

  “You’re going to be fine.”

  “Thanks, Stewart.”

  “Okay, then. Call me after?”

  “I will.”

  “Okay,” Stewart said, but Rebecca hung up her phone before he finished, as she didn’t want him to feel how much she missed him.

  Going upstairs, Rebecca met a bald uncle coming down.

  “Where were you?”

  “I got lost.”

  “We’ve been waiting.”

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  Rebecca walked to the front pew, where she sat between her mother and father. She opened a hymn book. She looked down and noticed an ant crawling along the worn hardwood floor. Watching its progress, Rebecca lost track of time until she felt an elbow push into her ribs. Turning to her right, she saw her mother smiling sadly.

  “It’s you now.”

  “Oh,” Rebecca said. She looked up. From behind the pulpit, Reverend Stevenson stared over his glasses at her, his left eyebrow weirdly magnified by the lens. She stood. The hymn book fell to the floor. The sound echoed through the church. Rebecca bent over and reached for the book, but it slipped from her fingers, falling to the floor a second time.

  “Go, just go,” her mother whispered.

  Leaving the book on the floor, Rebecca pushed past shifted knees into the aisle. She walked to the casket. She looked down. She stayed like this, looking, until the minister cleared his throat. Startled, Rebecca turned and then walked behind the pulpit. She folded her hands behind her back. She let them fall to her sides. She took a very deep breath, but as she opened her mouth to speak, Rebecca realized that all of her emotions surrounding the Derrick Miller memory had disappeared. The facts remained clear—she could see the teenage girls in tight jeans, Derrick Miller’s long black hair and the vodka bottle on the kitchen floor. But all the emotions had seemingly evaporated. The joy, love and respect she’d felt not twenty minutes earlier were gone.

  The church remained silent. Rebecca looked at her hands. She searched for another memory. She remembered several: when Lisa had refused to move into her new bedroom; when she’d gotten into trouble at summer camp; when she’d driven the car at fourteen. But there were no emotions connected to these memories, either. Their absence caused Rebecca to feel a number of different things: surprise, anxiety and even fear. But what she felt most was shame. Two days after Lisa’s death, her love had already weakened.

  This shame left Rebecca. It went to everyone sitting in the church. Women felt the shame that radiated from Rebecca and wondered what could possibly have caused it. Men looked up from the floor, anger visible in the corners of their eyes. There was no sound. No one moved. Neither her mother nor her father would look up from the floor as Rebecca stepped f
rom the pulpit. Keeping her head down, she walked to the back of the church and through the doorway, the large wooden doors closing behind her.

  5

  The first haircut of the rest of his life

  Twenty-six hours after his wife’s funeral ended, Lewis Taylor looked through the peephole of the second-finest hotel room in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Squinting, he refocused his right eye and saw a man wearing a crisp, white, collarless shirt standing in the hallway. A black comb and a pair of scissors with long, slim blades protruded from his breast pocket. Lewis continued watching. He did not open the door.

  “Are you the barber?” Lewis asked.

  “I am,” the man said. His accent was Eastern European, although Lewis could not place it more precisely.

  “How can I be sure?”

  “Listen, I can come back later. Maybe even send someone else? Makes no difference to me.”

  “No, no. You’re right. I’m sorry,” Lewis said. He slid off the chain and unlocked the door.

  The barber stepped inside. Both men stood in the small foyer. Behind them was a living room of considerable size and a hallway leading to the bedroom and bathroom. Some moments passed.

  “Where should I cut?”

  “Where’s best?”

  “Is the bathroom okay for you?”

  “Sure. That’s fine,” Lewis said.

  Lewis watched the barber’s dress shoes leave prints in the carpet as he walked towards the bathroom. Lewis had never seen a carpet vacuumed so perfectly. He imagined a fleet of miniature snow-grooming machines hiding in the closet, coming out at night to work the carpet as if it were a ski hill. When he opened his eyes, the barber was carrying a chair into the bathroom, and Lewis followed him inside.

  Setting the chair on the tiled floor in front of the full-length mirror to the left of the vanity, the barber gestured for Lewis to sit. Lewis sat. Closing his eyes, he felt the barber’s massive hands on the sides of his head, turning it this way and that. The barber saw that the roots of Lewis’s hair were brown and that it had been cut quite recently, no more than two or three days earlier.

  “This hair is very well styled. Very modern.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You sure you want me to cut?”

  “Very much.”

  “More conservative?”

  “Yes. That’s right. More conservative.”

  “Unlike the suit you’re wearing?”

  Lewis looked into the full-length mirror, although he did not look at his face. The suit was the height of fashion. As were his shoes and tie. As he stared at his reflection from the neck down, he had the disturbing premonition that his clothes would someday be someone’s Halloween costume.

  “Yes,” Lewis said. “That’s it. That’s it exactly. The opposite of what I’m wearing.”

  Lewis felt a towel cover his shoulders. He heard the scissors open above his head. As the barber began to cut, Lewis kept perfectly still.

  Many things had happened to Lewis since he’d stood in the middle of an intersection in the east end of Toronto, watching a green-skinned woman pilot a white Honda Civic. The first had been backing away from the limousine he’d been travelling in. The second was climbing inside the nearest taxi.

  “Hello,” the driver said.

  “Yes?”

  “Where to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The taxi did not move. Lewis took two twenty-dollar bills from his wallet and, leaning forward, placed them on the passenger seat.

  “Straight,” he said. “Just go.”

  The cabbie drove west on Queen Street, and Lewis slumped in his seat, asking himself if he was doing the right thing. The answer came quickly—he wasn’t. The right thing would be to go to his wife’s funeral and sob uncontrollably. He knew that he should be immobilized with grief. That he should, very shortly, begin raging against a distant and uncaring god. But Lewis was incapable of doing any of these things. Instead, he turned his body slightly to the right and looked out the window.

  The taxi drove past buildings that were familiar to Lewis, but he felt as if he had entered an entirely different city. Rolling down the window, Lewis stuck out his head, dog-like. He looked down at the asphalt blurring below him. He turned and looked up at the sky, where an airplane was leaving a long white trail like a line of cocaine prepared and waiting for the crisp, rolled-up twenty-dollar bill.

  “Wait,” he said. He pulled his head back inside the cab. “The airport. Take me to Pearson.”

  Already heading west, the cabbie continued on his present course. Two hours later, Lewis was waiting in the designated waiting area at Gate 23, Terminal One, having purchased a one-way ticket to Halifax, Nova Scotia. The rectangular digital clock suspended from the ceiling told him it was 5:43 p.m. Lewis realized his wife’s funeral was over by now. He set his watch so it would beep forty-three minutes into each and every hour. Then he presented his ticket to the overly polite airline representative and boarded Flight AC719.

  Three hours and forty-six minutes later, Lewis deplaned on the east coast of Canada. Outside the terminal, he took a deep breath. The air that filled his lungs was fresh. He liked this very much, but he knew he couldn’t stay. Back inside the terminal, Lewis stared at the departures board. He wanted to travel but lacked any desire to arrive. He purchased a one-way ticket to Vancouver, British Columbia, because it was the longest domestic flight available.

  Once in the air, Lewis rested his head against the window and listened to the hum of the airplane. The sound was consistent and made him feel safe. Nothing strange happened until midway through the flight, when Lewis got up and rushed to the bathroom. He did not need to pee. He needed to be alone. In the tiny room, Lewis locked the door and filled the stainless steel sink with water. After several minutes of staring into the top right corner of the mirror, deliberately avoiding eye contact with himself, a slight movement drew his attention.

  Looking down, Lewis saw a tiny version of his wife swimming through the water. She wore a green one-piece bathing suit and was th her usual size. She was perfect in every detail—the black hair, the smile in her eyes, the way she swam the breaststroke, which had always been her favourite.

  Lewis pushed his palms against his eyes until he felt like he was falling. “Listen,” he said, consciously deciding not to figure out who he was addressing. “I know I’m an asshole. I know I’ve always been an asshole. But I want to change. I’m willing to change.” He lowered his palms and opened his eyes, and when he looked down at the sink, she was gone.

  Lewis returned to his seat. At 12:55 a.m., now technically Friday, August 20th, Lewis arrived in Vancouver. He did not leave the airport. He stared at the departures board. The next domestic flight scheduled to leave Vancouver International Airport was flying to Winnipeg, Manitoba. Lewis bought a one-way ticket.

  Lewis arrived in Winnipeg at 6:37 a.m., although his watch told him it was 8:37 a.m. He walked past reunions, didn’t stop at the luggage carousel, and went directly outside. Standing on the sidewalk, he closed his eyes and listened. Winnipeg felt still, as if it had been unplugged, and this made him feel safe. He had no relatives or friends in Winnipeg. He had never been here before. He had no reason to be in this city. Lewis decided to stay, and he got inside the first taxi in line.

  “Take me to the best hotel in town,” Lewis said, then he leaned forward between the seats until he could see the driver’s face. “No. I want the old hotel. The hotel that used to be the best in town but isn’t anymore. I want elegance in decline.” The driver nodded and drove him directly to the Fort Garry.

  The roof of the Fort Garry Hotel had steep lines in the château style. There were turrets and ornately decorated windows. There was a doorman in a long red coat. There were well-dressed couples entering and exiting. Lewis was surprised to find such a vision of old-world elegance in the middle of the Canadian Prairies. When the doorman opened his door, Lewis decided he would stay forever.

  He played with the idea of registering un
der a pseudonym—perhaps S. Isyphus, or Dr. F. Austus. But in the end he rented the Vice-Regal Suite under his own name. The woman who had shown him to his suite had stood in the middle of the living room, hesitating. She studied Lewis. She nodded her head once she was sure that she recognized him.

  “Are you?” she asked, her eyes sparkling.

  Lewis did not immediately answer. Raising his eyebrows in an unintentionally comic manner, he reached into the inside pocket of his suit. The hotel employee could not help but notice the thickness of the envelope. Lewis held up a hundred-dollar bill. Pausing, he pulled out a second.

  “Not anymore,” Lewis said. He held up both bills. The employee nodded. When she’d taken the money, Lewis read the name tag pinned above her heart. “Beth, I’ll need a haircut, too.”

  “I’ll make you an appointment.”

  “Can you send him up?”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like, right now?”

  “Well, as soon as possible.”

  “It’ll still be a couple of hours.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “Is there anything else?”

  “I’ll let you know if there is,” Lewis said, and he closed the door of the Vice-Regal Suite. He went into the bathroom. He filled the bathtub but didn’t get in. He pushed down the plug in the sink and filled it too. He sat on the edge of the bathtub, looking from the sink to the tub, then the tub to the sink. But ninety minutes later, when he heard a knock on the suite’s door, the miniature version of his wife had still not appeared. Pulling the drain in both the sink and the tub, Lewis went to answer the door.