Living Dead Girl

by Tod Goldberg

  “We can’t just go running off then,” Ginny says.

  “Probably not,” I say. “I’ll have to go back across the lake and call the school, let them know it might be a few days before I can get back. Call it a family emergency.”

  “Isn’t it one?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I suppose it is.”

  “I’ll have to call my mom,” Ginny says. “She’ll think I’m dead in a ditch somewhere if she doesn’t hear from me.”

  “She has a lot of faith in me,” I say and try to force a chuckle. Ginny’s mother thinks I’m a child molester—she’s only six years older than I am.

  “She just doesn’t know you very well,” Ginny says. “But that will change.”

  “Right,” I say.

  Ginny stands up and wraps her arms around my neck. “I’m sorry you didn’t find anything,” she says.

  “It was a long shot,” I say, “but I had to look.”

  “I spent some time poking through the house, looking for clues or whatever,” Ginny says. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “No,” I say. “That’s fine. Did you find anything?”

  “Your wedding album,” she says. “Some letters you wrote. Pictures of your girl.”

  “We spent a long time here,” I say, but inside I’m boiling. Pictures of my girl. She had a name.

  Your wedding album. It was ours. Not mine. Ours.

  “Which letters did you find?” I ask.

  “I didn’t read them,” Ginny says. “There was just a big stack of them tied up with string in a kitchen drawer. I left them there.”

  “I’ll go through them,” I say. “Maybe something I wrote Molly set her off or something.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Molly went through phases,” I say. “She’d relive things from the past over and over. It was masochistic, really, but she said it made her feel strong. It was just bullshit.”

  Ginny lets go of me so that she can pick up her notebook. She starts jotting something down. “That’s good,” she says. “That’s a good character trait. Kind of whimsical, don’t you think? I like that.”

  “It’s not a trait,” I say.

  “You know what I mean,” she says and continues writing.

  “This isn’t some story,” I say, grabbing her by the arm. “It’s my life, Ginny. Okay? It’s my fucking life here. You aren’t going to marginalize my wife by saying she had traits. Do you understand me? She didn’t walk out of a page. I met her someplace. I met her and we had children and a life and now she’s not here. Do you understand me? Am I getting through to you?”

  “You’re hurting me, Paul.”

  “Am I getting through to you?”

  “Paul,” Ginny says too calmly. “Let go of my arm right now. You’re scaring me.”

  I could break her arm. I could snap it like a twig.

  I look down at Ginny’s arm. My knuckles are white. She’s flexing her hand.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, letting go.

  Ginny yanks her arm away and starts rubbing it, never taking her eyes from me. “Don’t you ever touch me like that again,” she says.

  “I don’t know where I went,” I say. “That was wrong.”

  “That was abuse,” she says. “If there were a phone here I’d call nine-one-one.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” I say. “I just wanted you to stop and understand me. I didn’t think I was getting through to you.”

  “Oh, I hear you loud and clear. I’d hate to tarnish the memory of the woman who left you.” Ginny stomps away toward the house, head down like a battering ram.

  I know what I’m supposed to do. I’m supposed to call after her, beg apology, whisper into her ear how much I care for her. Make mad passionate love to her in the sand. Like From Here to Eternity.

  I’ll let Ginny dream. She can turn this lousy moment into a movie on her own.

  WHILE GINNY FUMES in the living room, I go through the stack of letters she unearthed in the kitchen. Most of the letters are recent, from the last year, and when I read my words I feel stupid and small: I’m sorry … I love you … I can make it better … We can try again. I sound like a self-help manual—a personal twelve-step program on how to grovel for your marriage.

  She never wrote me back, which was fine. I knew her opinions about the subject.

  “Are you ready to apologize to me?” Ginny says, standing in the doorway.

  “I said I was sorry,” I say. “I overreacted.”

  “You called me a little girl,” Ginny says.

  “No I didn’t,” I say.

  “You sure did,” Ginny says.

  I stop and think for a moment, trying to focus on my exact words, but it’s impossible. It seems like an eternity ago. “If I did,” I say, “I didn’t mean to. I know you’re not a child.”

  “I don’t really think you do,” she says.

  “I apologize,” I say. “I was just tired and angry and, God, everything just seemed to fall down on me at once there. You can’t race an avalanche. I don’t know what else I can say.”

  Ginny stares at her bare feet and wiggles her toes against the wood floor for a long time without speaking. “I need to call my mom,” she says flatly.

  “I thought we’d do that tomorrow,” I say. “Today already seems ruined.”

  “You need to call the police.” Ginny says. “And I don’t plan on spending the rest of my life on this fucking lake waiting for you to do it.”

  “Ginny,” I say.

  “Either you fire up that boat outside or I start rowing,” Ginny says. “It’s up to you.”

  “Look,” I say, “if we go into town today, Bruce is going to think this is a great big deal and he’ll have people and bloodhounds and all kinds of crap. I don’t feel like I can handle that today.”

  “This is a great big deal,” Ginny says. “Either you deal with it now or I deal with it. Someone’s got to be the adult around here.”

  WE PILE INTO the Whaler and set off across the lake. It’s near three o’clock and the sun has settled low in the sky, giving everything a misty glow. Ginny sits silently beside me, a sun visor tugged down just above her eyes.

  The sheriff will have questions for me. He’ll want to know how long Molly and I have been apart. He’ll want to know why I didn’t call him right away. He’ll want to remind me that we’ve met before.

  When my daughter died, he came across the lake with the coroner. He sat in my living room and took a statement from Molly and one from me. He said that he’d never had children himself, but that he’d always wanted one.

  He told me his wife was dead and that he knew what I must have been feeling.

  He looked at me like I was a murderer.

  “You’re doing a good thing, Paul,” Ginny says now, the boat slicing through the water. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “I do,” I say.

  Ginny leans over and pats my thigh. “I know you are under terrible pressure,” she says, “and that you still have feelings for Molly. You’re just not thinking straight, that’s all.”

  “I guess I’m not,” I say.

  “Listen to me, Paul,” she says. “If you start feeling like you can’t keep things under control, just tell me. Just give me a sign or something and I’ll talk to Bruce or the police or whatever. Okay?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “If you feel like you need to see a doctor or something,” Ginny says. “I don’t want you to be afraid to be afraid, do you know what I’m saying?”

  “Yes,” I say. I know what she thinks. She thinks that I’m losing it.

  Chapter 5

  The marina at Granite Point Park is bustling. We dock the Whaler next to a houseboat loaded with college-age boys. When Ginny steps off the boat they turn and look at her in the obvious way college boys look at everything. Like they are invincible.

  “Looks like you have a fan club,” I say, but Ginny ignores me. She’s playing a role now. She’s the ADULT. She’s
the ROCK. We walk up the landing toward Bruce Duper’s house hand in hand. Bruce is standing out front talking to another college kid. This one is shirtless and has a cooler at his feet. When Bruce spots us, he shakes hands with the kid and meets us before we reach his house. “Damn frat boys,” Bruce says, “they bring a bunch of eighteen-year-olds out here to haze them and make them drink warm beer. Every year, one of the kids gets sick and they gotta drag him back to Spokane in an ambulance. You’d think they’d learn.”

  “You’d think,” I say.

  “I guess that’s not what you wanna talk about though?”

  “I think we need to call the police,” I say. “There’s no trace of Molly out there.”

  Bruce pinches his bottom lip between his index finger and thumb and nods his head slowly. “Damn,” he says finally. “I thought maybe you’d get out there and she’d be sitting on the dock painting or something.”

  “So did I,” I say.

  “Sheriff Drew is about all the police we got, you know.”

  “I know,” I say.

  Bruce kicks at something with his shoe and then sighs heavily. “All right then,” he says. “Let’s get on the horn.”

  “I need to make some calls, too,” Ginny says. “Is there somewhere private I can go while you call the police?”

  Bruce gives me an odd look. “Everything going all right out there?”

  “Yes,” I say. “She just needs to call her family. Let them know where she is.”

  “That right, miss?”

  “Yes,” Ginny says.

  “When we get inside,” Bruce says, “I’ll show you upstairs. You can call from there.”

  Ginny doesn’t say anything, but I think that maybe she’s going to call her parents and tell them that she needs someone to come and get her. She’ll tell her parents that they have always been correct—that I am not right for her. But then Ginny gives my hand a squeeze and says, “Unless you want me to stay with you while you make your calls.”

  “No,” I say. “Let your family know what’s going on.”

  Bruce leads us inside and then takes Ginny upstairs. I stand in the entry hall and try to figure out what I’m going to say. My wife is missing … My ex-wife is missing … My wife, who separated from me after the death of our daughter, is missing. None of it sounds right. People don’t just vanish. There has to be a cause and effect. Asteroid plunges into Earth, the dinosaurs die. Australopithecine moves from the trees and gets stronger and faster, more adept at catching game, arboreal relatives fall prey to natural selection.

  Child dismembers animals; child grows up to be a serial murderer.

  What had Molly done beside decide that I wasn’t a good husband?

  Bruce comes down the stairs holding a cat in his arms. “Thought McTavish here might be a calming influence on you,” he says, stroking the cat’s head. “Saw on Dateline how animals help people to recover from all kinds of pain.”

  “It’s a nice thought,” I say.

  “Hell, Paul,” he says, “I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “I’m doing okay,” I say. “I appreciate the gesture.”

  “Listen,” Bruce says, “I know you and Sheriff Drew didn’t exactly see eye to eye when your girl passed. I want you to know that he’s a good, honest man. He’s got a job to do and he does it. Never lets personalities get in the way. I respect him.”

  “I know you do,” I say. “That’s all in the past.” Bruce sets the cat down on the ground. When I reach down to pet it, it scurries back upstairs.

  “I guess what I’m trying to say here is that I like you, Paul,” Bruce goes on. “I think you and Molly are good people. Worked hard on your marriage and it didn’t work out. No crime in that, I suppose. At least you gave it a shot, right? I just don’t want to call Sheriff Drew down here unless you’re perfectly sure you know what you want to tell him.”

  “This isn’t like when my daughter died,” I say.

  “Right,” Bruce says. “I guess it isn’t.”

  “I understand your concern, Bruce,” I say. “But all I know is what you know. Molly is gone.”

  HERE’S THE TRUTH: I loved my daughter. Every time I looked at her I was amazed by the life we’d created. I’d hold her in my arms and ponder the exact moment she became a human, thinking about the precise genetic code that gave her Molly’s eyes and my nose. I imagined the millions of years it took to perfect her, the mutations, the adaptations, the biological changes that allowed for me to hold her in my arms.

  She was our last chance. Molly had suffered an ectopic pregnancy a year before our daughter was conceived; a fertilized egg grew inside her fallopian tube for nearly two months before the bleeding began, before Molly began fainting, before she nearly died.

  The doctor said, “If it happens again, that’s it. There’s nothing we can do.”

  And two years before the ectopic pregnancy, Molly had aborted a child.

  We aborted a child.

  We’d driven to a small nondescript clinic housed on a tree-lined street in Los Angeles and met with a doctor. His name was Dr. Plinkton. I remember staring at his name badge while he spoke to us, trying to figure out what nationality “Plinkton” belonged to. He ran over our options in a smooth, calm voice.

  He said, “Of course you could put this child up for adoption. There are many families who are unable to conceive who would be overjoyed to raise your child.”

  “That’s not an option,” I said.

  “We’re not talking about an option,” Molly said to me. “It’s a life.”

  “Not yet,” I said. “It’s cell division right now.”

  “I don’t know if you two are ready for this step,” Dr. Plinkton said.

  “We are,” Molly said quietly. “We’ve talked it to death.”

  It was the only decision that made sense to either of us, no matter how much we fought otherwise. We were young, irresponsible, in debt.

  We would have an infinite number of chances to start a family.

  Dr. Plinkton handed us a thick packet of documents and instructed us to sit in the waiting room and fill them out. The waiting room was painted a muted cream; a calming color designed to make us feel warm and comfortable amidst seven other women and three other men.

  Molly was nearly three months pregnant. We had no insurance to cover the pharmaceutical costs. It would cost us close to one thousand dollars to kill our baby when all was said and done.

  “How are we going to afford this?” Molly whispered.

  “I’ll do whatever I have to do,” I said. “I’ll sell my car.”

  “No,” she said. “There must be a way for us to put this on credit or something.”

  I didn’t want the people at Visa to know that I was a baby killer.

  “I’ll find a way,” I said and we made an appointment for the following Friday.

  We went home and made love that day, out of guilt I think, and partly because we knew we would never make love again without protection. When Molly fell asleep I placed my head on her stomach and listened for anything I could hear. I imagined I could see inside her to our bodiless child, imagined that I could whisper to it and that it could hear me and that it understood that I was sorry.

  We made love three times over the next twenty-four hours, and each time I felt an urgency to make Molly feel that I was willing to love her at any cost, that I would always be willing to create life with her, that I loved our baby that was destined to die.

  Molly woke me at six o’clock the next morning in a pool of blood. “I’m hemorrhaging,” she said. “Oh God.”

  Dr. Plinkton said, “You could have killed her. Do you know that? You could have killed your wife.”

  I borrowed money from my friend Vitaly. It cost us $2,317.32 to kill our child and save Molly’s life.

  Molly spent three days in the hospital with dressings binding her together. She acted cheery, unaffected, even relieved. But there was this shroud of guilt that seeped into her words then, this resoluti
on that she had done wrong, that we had done wrong.

  I would leave Molly in her room and walk down to the pediatric ward to see the babies. It was one floor below Molly’s room, but it could have been another world. There was a sense of equilibrium among the babies, the parents, the doctors and nurses. Nurses hurried between tasks, their voices muted by the thick glass wall separating the babies from the real world. One nurse was patting a baby lightly between the shoulders, another scribbling something onto an observation chart, another still walking with a baby in her arms, gently whispering into its ear. When she got close to the window with the baby, I saw that it was a tiny, shrunken thing no larger than two or three pounds.

  “Terrible thing,” a woman’s voice said. I turned and found another nurse standing beside me. “Mother of that poor child never even went to see a doctor. No prenatal care whatsoever.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You know,” she said, “lived on the street. I don’t even think the mother was sixteen herself.” The nurse nodded once, as if she’d come to some conclusion she didn’t particularly care for. “Baby’s lungs were filled with fluid, then collapsed. Eyes and ears probably won’t ever work right. The bones she does have are mostly broken. It’s a shame, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” I said.

  “A week in and she still wants to live though,” the nurse said. “Says something about resiliency, doesn’t it?” The nurse holding the baby looked up and saw us, frowned as if she’d been caught, then turned her back to the window and set the baby back down in a crib. A young doctor—he couldn’t have been more than thirty—walked over then and leaned over the baby, placed a stethoscope on her chest for a moment, and then placed his hand lightly on the top of the baby’s head. There was nothing personal in the way the doctor moved, not even when his hand slid down the child’s cheek and rested there momentarily while he spoke to the nurse. He was checking for something tangible, some proof that could somehow change the child’s destiny: Blind, deaf, and at best asthmatic. At worst, dead within hours.

  “Which one is yours?” the nurse asked.

  “None of them,” I said.

  “Oh,” the nurse said, “is your wife in labor?”