Living Dead Girl

by Tod Goldberg

  Before Molly and I ever seriously tried to get pregnant, I told her what I’d been taught in one of my human development courses: twenty-five to fifty percent of spontaneous abortions are due to chromosomal rearrangements. I told her that we could go to the doctor’s office and he could show us the ultrasound and our baby could look like a wolf or a frog or a blob of eyes and fingers with no human understanding.

  It was an overstatement, for sure, but I wanted to prepare her for what could be the worst.

  And she said, “Flesh of our flesh, Paul.”

  She said, “You don’t understand. There is art in the most deformed creature. We’ll love whatever is inside me.”

  “Do you want toast with jam or butter?” Ginny says.

  “Jam,” I say, but what I’m thinking is that love isn’t negotiable—fungible. You can’t just move love from one person to another. You can’t replace a dead child with a living one.

  “Everything cooks faster up here,” Ginny says. She hands me a plate with two fried eggs, several strips of bacon, and a piece of toast. “It just makes me feel like there’s a magic to the mountains, you know? Something no film has ever really captured. I guess that boils down to story, huh? I mean, I need to come up with a story that really shows how the wilderness can become romantic and mystical and all those great things. Because, and I think you know what I mean, all these movies that I see that take place in the forest are always about men and killing and stuff. Like Deliverance. Who wants to pay to see that?”

  “Deliverance took place on a river,” I say. “And it was a book first.”

  “You know what I mean. Maybe you could help me write it.”

  “All I’ve ever written are scholarly papers. I don’t have any idea how to write a movie.”

  “Who does?” Ginny says. “I mean, everyone learns how in some way, right?”

  “I guess so,” I say.

  “Then it’s a deal,” she says. “You’re helping.”

  We eat the rest of our breakfast in silence, but I can tell Ginny’s wheels are spinning. In the six months we’ve been together, I’ve learned that Ginny believes anything is possible. She thinks that she can be whatever she wants to be, that no one can hold her back.

  Molly was the same way when we started dating. She thought she could become a famous painter, a revolutionary in watercolors. She imagined that together we would create great works of art. “You’ll discover an actual unicorn or a Sphinx and I’ll do these fantastic renderings of them,” she said once. It was before we moved to the lake. “I’ll watch you standing up in front of the world’s greatest scholars, discussing the jawbone of the Sphinx, and behind you will be my painting of what I think it actually looked like. Can you see that, Paul?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s absolutely preposterous.”

  Molly looked angry for a moment and I thought that I had said the wrong thing, had ruined a dream of hers. “Well,” she said eventually, “I suppose that does sound a little weird, doesn’t it?”

  “It sounds certifiable,” I said, and Molly, with an embarrassed grin on her face, agreed. Now I wonder if it isn’t so hard to imagine Ginny doing the same thing.

  “There are some things I need to do today,” I say.

  “I understand that,” Ginny says. “Do you want me to come with you or is this alone time?”

  “Alone time,” I say. “I still worry something has happened to Molly. I’m going to walk back through the woods and see what I see.”

  “All right,” Ginny says. “Maybe I’ll take some pictures and write down some ideas I’m having. Maybe later we can talk about story lines and stuff?”

  “If that’s what you want,” I say.

  I PUT ON a pair of heavy jeans and a sweatshirt and stuff my backpack with bandages, water and insect repellent. The woods wind around the lake for almost five miles behind my house and eventually narrow into a point overlooking the water that the locals call Loon Nest. Molly used to love to hike to Loon Nest when she was having creative problems, when her hands couldn’t create what she was imagining.

  It’s cooler today than yesterday and, before I leave, Ginny inspects my clothing and supplies. “I don’t want to have to come searching for you,” she says. “Are you sure you’ll be warm enough?”

  “I’ll be working up a sweat,” I say. “Nothing to worry about. I know the area well.”

  “If you find something,” Ginny says, “I don’t know, just, be careful.”

  “I don’t know what I expect,” I say. Ginny nods her head like she understands exactly what I’m thinking, like she knows that I’m thinking about the last day of my daughter’s life and that words are slipping out of my mind and onto my tongue and nothing seems to fit.

  “Come back before dark,” she says.

  “I will.” For a moment I think that there are words I need to say to Ginny before I go off. I want to tell her that I think there is something living inside her, that her eleven fingers barely conceal something beautiful. I want to tell her that she is a precious child and that I’m ruining her for someone else who will love her later in life. I want to tell her to call Bruce Duper on the radio inside the boat and tell him she needs to get off the shoreline and into a hotel and back to Los Angeles.

  “Be careful while I’m gone, won’t you?”

  “I’ll be sure not to rile the natives,” Ginny says.

  Chapter 4

  Our daughter is dead. She has a name and Molly and I used it often. We bought her OshKosh overalls. She did not have a vestigial tail. Her eyes were blue and her hair was sandy blond. She slept on her belly. Her fingers looked like tiny sausages. She adored me. She adored Molly. We made mistakes.

  I am walking along the path Molly and I used to take to Loon Nest. It is a rough path, its only wear courtesy of our feet. The path is lined with droopy hemlocks, their egg-shaped cones littered along the ground, and tall false cedars with their scale-like leaves overlapping like shingles.

  Molly used to collect hemlock cones, spreading them across windowsills and along the mantel of our fireplace until it felt like we were living outside.

  I stop and pick up a cone and several fallen needles and smell them.

  We were a family.

  Molly catches up to me in my mind, not that she has been far away since Ginny and I arrived here at my home. We are walking along the path for the first time. Our daughter has not yet been born. It is summer, so the air is hot and sweet. Behind us, the sound of a powerboat roars across the lake, doubtlessly towing a water skier.

  “What lives out here?” Molly asked.

  “Birds mostly,” I said. “In the winter we might see some deer coming down to forage.”

  “No bears?”

  “Not that I’m aware of,” I said.

  “Anything that eats humans?” Molly said, grinning.

  “Only mosquitoes.”

  The trail was tough to cross, branches jutting out like sabers, and we had to cut away tangles of prickly weeds just to walk.

  “If we do this enough,” Molly said, breaking off a branch in her way, “we might be able to christen this the ‘Molly and Paul’s Trail.’ Maybe get an Indian scout to help us and then sell souvenirs at our house for the tourists who idolize our trailblazing ways.”

  “Stick to painting,” I said.

  After an hour we came to a small clearing and set out a blanket to eat our lunch on. A cluster of incense cedars surrounded us, their branches dotted with sparrows and northern flickers pecking away at ants and bugs.

  “Do you think we’ll live here forever?” Molly said.

  “I doubt it,” I said. “I mean, no one lives in one place forever, right?”

  “I guess not,” Molly said. “But, if we have a baby and then we school her …”

  “Him.”

  “If we school her,” Molly said, pretending she had not heard me, “and, you know, she becomes acclimated to life out here, it would be terrible for us to take her to Seattle or San Francisco to live. S
he’d be a complete wreck.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I said. “You don’t even know if you can get pregnant again.”

  Standing here along the path now, remembering this, I know that many of the mistakes were mine. I never knew what would send Molly into a fit of depression, never could figure out the catalysts.

  I set the cone and needles back on the ground and continue walking east toward Loon Nest. Molly was a perfect wife to me, for a time, and I know that my life now, today, is 180 degrees different from the life I had with her.

  Living here in Washington was supposed to be good, safe, easy to negotiate. There were never any risks. In Los Angeles, I live day to day, my existence predicated not by natural selection or the change in seasons, but by traffic on the 405, a sale on ground beef at Ralph’s, a crew shooting a movie on my street.

  I teach my students the framework of physical anthropology. I tell them stories about discoveries in Africa and China. I never tell them that I’ve dissected my own anthropology trying to discern how I arrived here.

  I teach about the step-by-step progression of single cell life to plant life to human life but can’t figure out how to save my own existence. Can’t figure out how to say the right things at the right time to the people I love.

  “I don’t want you to think that I don’t believe we can get pregnant,” I said. “I’m just thinking about what the doctor said.”

  “I know what you meant,” Molly said. “And that’s fine. Really.” Molly leaned back and closed her eyes. I thought she was about to cry. “Tell me about how we’ll teach the kids about God.”

  “Well,” I said, “we’ll start by saying that some people believe that we were put here for a purpose and that we were given certain gifts to attain that purpose.”

  “That’s too complex,” Molly said, her eyes still closed. “They’ll just be kids, Paul.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What if I say that Mommy’s parents believe there is a mean old man who lives in the sky who is going to banish us all to Hell for heresy?”

  “Better,” Molly said, and though a smile cracked her lips, I knew she was still thinking about what I had said earlier. Still thinking that I thought her body would reject me again.

  We’d been trying to get pregnant for months.

  We’d been listening to doctors tell us that my sperm were being killed by Molly, that they were being intercepted and slaughtered.

  There were problems. One doctor said there was something wrong with me.

  “Deep seated,” the doctor said.

  We’d seen so many doctors that they started to melt into each other. Gynecologists, psychologists, obstetricians. I got them confused. There were ones we visited in California, other ones in Washington. I couldn’t remember who thought the problem was mine, which thought the problem was Molly’s, who thought the problems were ours.

  Molly sat up on her elbows and inhaled deeply. “It smells so lovely out here,” she said. “We won’t ever throw this away, will we? We won’t ruin this, will we?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

  Molly just laughed then, her eyes still closed, her body still propped on her elbows. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “This is our home now. This is where we’re going to set roots.”

  My memory is like a flash flood now. I stop walking and look up at the sky, listening for familiar sounds. I listen for the woodpeckers and flickers. I listen for the rustling tenor of the wind that I used to love. But all I hear is the soft buzzing of the few mosquitoes that are still about. They’ve bumped along the trail with me, searching for one good meal before they find a more temperate location.

  We rested in that clearing for another hour, eating our lunch and soaking up our new surroundings. Molly didn’t speak much until she got up and began walking the circumference of the clearing.

  “Wintergreen,” she said.

  “Mint,” she said.

  “Ferns,” she said.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “The plants,” she said. “They all have names, you know.”

  “But how do you know them?”

  “I was a Girl Scout just like you were a Boy Scout,” she said. “My family liked to camp.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. “How come you’ve never mentioned that before?”

  “I didn’t think you’d find it interesting,” she said. “It’s not like I can tell if a rock is actually some kind of ancient bone.”

  “What else do you know?”

  “Nothing practical,” she said. “I can tie a few knots. I know how to pitch a tent in the dark. Worthless crap, basically.”

  “That’s not worthless,” I said.

  “It would have been better if they’d taught us how to prepare for manic depression,” Molly said, perfectly serious. “Or if they’d held a day long seminar on how to feel if you kept aborting your own children.”

  The forest thickens, and for the first time it’s hard for me to see any sky. I’m about a mile from the cabin and I think that whatever I’ve done in the past hasn’t been all my fault. Being with Ginny is wrong, I know that. Morally, ethically, professionally. Ginny has dropped my class but that doesn’t stop her from sitting in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. My friend the astronomy teacher thinks that I’m a genius for sleeping with my students. He’s older, in his fifties, but he wears his hair in a ponytail and has an earring. He thinks it’s hip to date your students because he’s been married for thirty years. He says I’m living his fantasy. He says he could never cheat on his wife because he would be consumed with guilt.

  I tell him that I’m not cheating on my wife. I tell him that Molly and I are separated. Divorcing. Never getting back together.

  “Until the papers are signed and you pay her half your salary,” he says, “you are cheating on your wife. In your mind at least, am I right?”

  “No,” I tell him.

  No, I tell him, it’s not like that. We have an understanding.

  Here’s the truth: I can’t remember the last time Molly and I saw each other; can’t remember how it was I ended up in LA and she ended up here. There are spaces, blocks of time spent with Molly, which feel like they’ve dissolved, melted into something entirely different.

  “The problem I see with you,” a doctor once told me, “is that you move things around to suit your own interests. You depersonalize yourself until things seem distorted and unreal. That’s dangerous. And it’s not going away.”

  I WIND THROUGH the trail, stepping over small boulders and shrubs, and through dense pockets of berry bushes. Everything is overgrown. Obviously Molly hasn’t been through here in weeks. There would be some kind of evidence: a shoe print, a wrapper from a Power Bar, the label from a bottle of Gatorade.

  Molly always littered.

  “It’s an inherited trait,” she’d say, dropping a piece of gum on the ground. “You should know that.”

  I do know that. But what I never told Molly was that the same reason she littered was the same reason she had a fear of falling, of being left alone, of being in the dark and in enclosed spaces. Molly never wanted to hear my theories on why we act the way we do. She just wanted to keep on living in a fashion she found comfortable. And if that included unfounded fears and littering, then so be it.

  Tall weeds sprout up in front of me. I stop and measure one by sight. It’s about three feet high. Again, it’s clear no one, not even Molly, has been through this area of the trail for weeks. The weeds would be trampled or broken.

  “Shit.” I lean up against a tree and take a sip from my water bottle. I’ve been walking for just over two hours and I know that it would be foolish to continue on. She hasn’t been through here. The only reason she ever did before was to get away from me or to invigorate her mind for painting. But there wasn’t a single easel set up inside the house.

  Nobody can say I didn’t look for her.

  No one can say that I haven’t worried about her.
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  She is my wife and I do love her.

  No one can say that I haven’t missed her.

  Maybe the police are the best solution. She’s been gone several days and there’s no sign of where she might be. The boat is moored. And she couldn’t really have a lover, could she?

  The locksmith.

  She’s sleeping with the locksmith.

  “Just shut up with that,” I say and a cluster of birds, frightened by my voice, flutter out from the weeds.

  She wouldn’t take a lover. It’s not like her.

  No one can tell me that she’s in love with someone else.

  The police will want to drag the lake. Men in frogman suits will dive off slow-moving boats and search the water for her.

  She was probably sleeping with the locksmith all along. How else could she convince him to come out and change her locks?

  “Just stop that,” I say. “Okay? Finish it. It’s not true.” So I’ll go see Bruce Duper and tell him that we need to fill out the necessary papers, inform the next of kin (which is me), get a team of detectives out to do some searching because I can’t find her. He’ll tell me that’s what should have been done from the get-go, but I’ll ignore him. The guilt can’t be mine. Molly is gone because of something beyond my control. If I could have controlled her, we’d be living here, we’d have children playing in the water, fires burning in the hearth, and cones lined up on windowsills.

  I CUT THROUGH the underbrush and walk along the jagged shoreline back to the house, weaving into the forest when the water’s edge gets sharp and craggy. I find Ginny sitting on the edge of the dock in a swimsuit, a spiral notebook open next to her and her 35mm camera slung around her neck. The day has warmed up to near seventy-five.

  “Making progress?”

  Ginny whips around, startled. “Jesus,” she says. “I thought you’d be gone for a lot longer.”

  “It became pointless,” I say. “No one had walked through there in weeks.”

  “So what now?”

  “I guess have Bruce call the sheriff,” I say. “Get a professional out here to take a look around.”