15. You Betta Work B!^&$ #6
“Ankle straps?” Rebekkah helpfully answers, though it’s more of a rumination as she gets clarity on her vision than a response to Carrington.
“The little leashes that keep you attached to the paddle board? First, Japheth bends over, easy there Tiger, and fumbles with the Velcro around his ankle before leaning over to cuff Rino’s ankle.
He’s wobbly, and everyone collectively sucks in a breath, like, ‘Is this how the wedding ends? With someone drowning?’ But he gets it.
And now Rino is unstrapping his own ankle and fastening his strap around Japheth’s leg.
Very gently. Very… deliberately. He gives Japheth’s leg a little squeeze as if to remind him this cuff is for life. ”
“This is beautiful!” Suwarna cries. “I must have come up with it. It must be an ancient pagan practice of joining souls. Literally tying themselves to each other on a precarious, wobbly plank of wood out on the water. Like, ‘If you fall, I fall. If you drift, I drift. But the two-board system when pushed together actually makes a sturdier vessel. It provides stability, predictability, spreading weight over a greater surface area thereby steadying the sailors and making a smoother voyage. A life built for the high seas and any storms that may gather on their proverbial horizon. My goodness, I’m clever and quite poetic. Sorry, Rebekkah, do go on.”
“And now they’re kissing,” Rebekkah brings a hand to her heart.
“Oh boy, are they kissing! Like, we-get-it-you’re-in-love kissing.
And it’s hot. But also, so sweet! Like a Hallmark card with two ponies in tuxedos on the front cover and some kinky shit with wild stallions in leather chaps when you open it up. ”
“The sun is hitting the water just right, so everything is backlit and glittery. The string quartet starts playing something with an emotional swell, I think it’s Truly, Madly, Deeply by Savage Garden.
The paddle boards slowly spin in a lazy circle as Rino and Japheth keep kissing, as if little frogs or fish couldn’t help but get front row seats and accidentally but effectively add a little cinematic movement as they elbow lean with chin on fin in adoration.
It would be an excellent moment for a drone shot.
This feels like their first dance, like a slow waltz orchestrated with safety in mind for people with a lot of wobbles and no traction. ”
“I’m sure I thought of this,” Suwarna chimed in, her own chin on fin as she leaned into the tale.
“What about us?” Ronald piped up eagerly. “Are we there?”
“Oh, everyone is here,” Rebekkah assures him, though it’s still unclear if she’s responding or simply driving forward in her dreamy state.
“Ronald, you and Carrington are on the houseboat deck arguing playfully about whether any guacamole fell onto Carrington’s gauze face veil or your greige Grenadine tie while sharing a chip toast and post-chip kiss. ”
“I’m wearing a tie!?” Ronald exclaimed. “Everything else tracks.”
“If we’re together, and going to the event of the season, you’ll be wearing a tie,” Carrington assured him.
“Okay, I guess we’re on track,” Ronald said with a smile.
“Rebekkah is… me, I mean, there I am! I’m on a little raised platform near Suwarna with a vintage mic, and I’ve joined the string quartet to sing Truly, Madly, Deeply with a few lyrics tweaked for the moment.
My hair, oh wow, my hair looks incredible.
I’m not sure if there’s a wind machine or if it’s just the breeze off the water but it is flowing and glowing in a Mariah Carey moment. ”
“I told you, it’s a great cut. It just needed time to find its shape!” Carrington noted with a haughty nod of their head, confident they knew what they were doing all along.
“What about the Ferraris? Are Mamma and Papà there?” Japheth asks, wringing his hands and wanting this vision more than anything to be true.
“Front row on the houseboat,” Rebekkah drones on in her daze. “Alma dabbing her eyes, Leo pretending he’s not. Evangelista making rude hand gestures at her brother Marco and snickering as the kiss continues on the edge of overdoing it and just right. They look happy.”
“And then the houseboat horn blows,” Rebekkah seems to perk up at the sound, “and the paddle boards turn and start gliding toward it, side by side, ankle strapped to ankle, the rest of their lives literally tied together for wobble or for worse. Suwarna raises her arms, the cape catches and releases the light as the inside is lined in micro prismatic, silver fabric.”
“Can you hold it there?” Suwarna asks. “I’m just making a few notes. Micro prismatic… silver fabric… cape lining…”
“We can run by Fabricland later, Suwarna,” Carrington winked.
“Okay, go on,” Suwarna encouraged Rebekkah, after completing a small sketch of a cloak with various arrows and asterisks.
“She shouts, ‘By the power vested in me by the province of Ontario and my own excellent judgment, I now pronounce you legally entangled, spirit, soul and limber limbs.’ People cheer. The whole scene zooms out like a drone shot–the speck of the houseboat, the paddle boards on the coruscated corridor of water, the thousand islands like emeralds dropped casually and haphazardly by Celine Dion, (priceless jewels? I have more than enough in my warehouse), and the sun is melting on the horizon.”
Rebekkah’s ear flap of hair slowly took notice of gravity and her parade of visions began to fade, the colours draining back into the grey-and-black of the burned-out lot, but the feeling stayed with her–a strange, shimmering mixture of grief and hope, like standing in the doorway between two rooms. She blinked and squinted from the daylight, back with her friends and surrounded by ashes instead of islands.
“So… yeah,” she sniffled, the emotion still well rounded.
“If my prophetic channel is working correctly, one day you two are going to be officially, publicly, ankle-strapped for life. On a boat. With all of us there. And I’m telling you right now, I’m not redoing my makeup if I cry through the whole ceremony, so plan accordingly. ”
Japheth looked stunned; Ronald was delighted; Carrington looked like they were already mentally flicking through their wardrobe to determine what to wear; Suwarna had the faraway, satisfied expression of a woman who had just seen her future in the iridescent flicker of a cape.
Rebekkah tucked away the vision like a secret Polaroid in her heart–a glimpse of the future that, for the first time in days, didn’t end in disappointment.
“Wait a minute, what about Emma-Lou?” Suwarna asked.
Rebekkah shook her head, “I didn’t see her. She wasn’t in any of the future visions before I lost the signal.”
“It would have been more helpful if your visions had a rearview mirror. Seeing the future is cool but not super helpful when we’re trying to figure out what happened yesterday,” Ronald noted astutely.
“Smell,” Carrington said finally. “Smell can always be counted on to leave a good memory and the first thing to haunt a bad one.”
They closed their eyes, frowning in concentration, “I remember being in the lobby. The lemon cleaner wafting up from the morning’s mop on the tiles.
The smell of coffee, cheap and burnt, definitely not the lovely aroma pumped out from an espresso machine.
Rebekkah’s perfume. No wait, not a perfume.
A bath bomb from The Body Shop in the strip mall. A buttery vanilla.”
“Thank you!” Rebekkah grinned. “You’ve really got a nose for this.”
“It wasn’t a compliment, simply an olfactory observation and an assumption on your shopping habits,” Carrington clarified. “And layered under it all… popcorn.”
“Popcorn,” Japheth echoed.
“Sweet at first,” Carrington went on. “That fake butter smell from the machine by the staff kitchen. And then it shifted. Sharper. Acrid. The smell of popcorn when you’ve left it in the microwave too long and it goes past movie magic and edges over into snacker beware.”
“Burnt popcorn,” Ronald said slowly.
“Like at the fair!” Rebekkah recalled. “When we were supposed to do the Not Short on Talent talent show, Emma-Lou got the news about her parents being lost at sea. Remember?”
“Her parents vanished. Popcorn,” Suwarna said slowly, almost to herself. “Our station vanishes. Popcorn.”
“Either God has a very specific scent for traumatic events,” Carrington said, “Or someone leaves a trail of burnt kernels whenever big life changes happen.”
“Could be a coincidence,” Ronald said. “Lots of things smell like smoke in a fire. Maybe we’re not remembering it right.”
“Or could be a pattern,” Suwarna countered, “and we’re just not sniffing out what’s important from what’s not.”
They drifted deeper into the ruin; each lost in their own thoughts.
A twisted metal staircase led to nowhere.
A melted wall clock drooped like a Dali painting, its hands frozen at some arbitrary, pre-apocalyptic moment.
A fragment of a poster clung stubbornly to a brick wall depicting a cat hanging by its paws precariously from a clothesline that read auspiciously Hang in There.
Rebekkah brushed soot from the cat’s face on the poster, leaving a black streak on her fingers and the appearance of a mischievous moustache on the cat. “It’s like someone hit pause on our lives,” she said, “and forgot to press play again.”
“You still have your voices,” Carrington reminded them gently.
“You still have each other. Japheth, you and Rino still have a ridiculous amount of unresolved romantic tension as do Ronald and I. Rebekkah, you have the fashion sense of a low budget music video and we’re gonna be able to fix that. That all must count for something.”
“I want to resolve the romantic tension because I agree, it’s getting ridiculous and I’ve practiced abstinence so long I’m ready for the playoffs.
But how do we use the crescendo of my romance or a make-over moment at the mall with Rebekkah to pay rent?
” Japheth levelled with them. “Or find Emma-Lou? Or un-burn a radio station?”