by Tod Goldberg
Sheriff Drew rubs at something on his neck and then exhales sluggishly, like he’s never been more tired. “Paul,” he says after a while, “I’m getting old, so take me through this in a slow fashion: You say you spoke to your wife about a month ago, right?”
“Yes,” I say.
“And Bruce Duper told me outside that he and Molly spoke a little over ten days ago when she came in to get her mail. He mention that to you?”
“He told me she came across every day or so for her mail,” I say. “So that seems likely.”
“Then explain this to me, Paul,” he says. “How come Molly told Bruce that she’d gotten into a fight with you just a few days before she went missing?”
“I don’t know what she could be talking about,” I say. “She doesn’t even have a phone out there anymore.”
“No?”
“Just the radio on the boat,” I say. “When I wanted to reach her I’d either write her a letter or call Bruce and have him get a message to her. She’d either call me from Bruce’s or she’d write me a letter. And I can guarantee that Bruce was never privy to our arguments.”
“But you just said that, when you needed to contact her, you went through Bruce,” Sheriff Drew says. “Might he get a little from both ends? It certainly is possible that Bruce and Molly might have had a discussion or two, isn’t it?”
“Why don’t you ask Bruce,” I say.
“I will.” Sheriff Drew makes a note on his pad and then takes a sip of water and holds it in his mouth while he thinks. “How often do you need to contact Molly?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “We’re still married, legally, so there are issues.”
“Would you say you wrote her once a month?” Sheriff Drew asks.
“Sometimes,” I say.
“And you haven’t come to visit during the recent past?”
“No,” I say. “I’m teaching again and am involved with Ginny. My life has moved on.”
“You’ve never just shown up then,” Sheriff Drew says. “Never dropped in on Molly by surprise?”
“I live a very ordered life, Sheriff,” I say. “I don’t have room for surprises anymore.”
“Do you have anyone who can vouch for you whereabouts for the last few weeks?”
“Maybe,” I say. “If I had to.”
“Paul,” he says, “you’re making this difficult on me. You’re not on the stand here. We’re just having a conversation. I’m trying to figure out Molly’s standing, mentally or whatever, at the point Bruce last saw her.”
“We’re not having a conversation anymore,” I say. “You’ve got your badge on and you have a gun on your belt. This is an interrogation, and I don’t see where it’s going. I’m here as a courtesy to you and I’m being made to feel like a suspect. And I don’t like it, Morris.”
Sheriff Drew sets down his pen and glances at me for a long time without saying anything. He may be getting older, but there is nothing slow in Sheriff Drew. His small-town-bumpkin act is not working on me. “Let me tell you something, Mr. Luden,” he says finally. His voice is firm and low and I think he has been silent for so long because he did not want to scream at me. “I don’t think you coming here is a courtesy to anybody. It’s your goddamn wife that’s missing out there and you’re sitting here with some little nineteen-year-old girl pretending to be Mr. Scholar and Gentleman and I don’t believe one red cent of it. So let’s just get everything square here, Mr. Luden. I’m here to do my job and my job is to suspect people. I’m not afraid to say that your actions strike me as a touch peculiar. If my wife was missing the first thing I would have done was call the police. The last thing I would have done is pile Miss Navel Ring into the car and head up the coast for some R and R while we searched for her. If you want to talk about courtesy here, Mr. Luden, it should be that I didn’t smack you in the mouth right when I walked through the door.”
“I want to talk to a lawyer,” I say.
“I think that’s a good idea,” he says, and then pulls out a slip of paper from his breast pocket and slides it over to me. “That’s a search warrant. As a professional courtesy, I’ll wait for you to call a lawyer before I execute it.”
GINNY AND BRUCE return while I’m talking to my lawyer on the phone. “What’s going on?” Ginny mouths to me but I put a hand up to quiet her. My lawyer is an old friend from college named Leo who specializes in personal injury cases. He is completely confounded by what is occurring.
“Tell me again exactly what you told this cop,” he says, and I repeat our entire conversation. Ginny sits down beside me and listens intently. “Okay,” Leo says. “Okay. Nothing incriminating in that.”
“I haven’t done anything,” I say. “There’s no crime here.”
“Let’s just reserve judgment on that sort of thing for now,” Leo says. “You have no idea what kind of crimes Barney Fife thinks you might have committed, and that’s what counts.”
“Can you fly up here?”
“Not for another two days,” he says. “I’m trying a slip-and-fall against a supermarket that should be wrapping up post-haste. Right now, everything seems in order. You’ve got nothing to hide, am I right?”
“You are right.”
“And if Andy Griffith goes over to the house there’s nothing of merit to discover, correct?”
“Nothing of mine.”
“Fine,” Leo says. “Just fine. If it looks like he wants to arrest you or something, call me on my cell phone and I’ll post bond for you. How much equity do you have in that house?”
“I don’t know, Leo.”
“Fine, fine, no problems,” he says. “Call me if anything happens and I’ll be there ASAP.”
I hang up and Ginny is near tears. “What’s happening?” she says.
“The sheriff has a search warrant for the house,” I say. “Leo says it’s perfectly normal.”
“Are you under suspicion for something’?”
“No,” I say. “The sheriff’s just doing his job.”
“Then why were you on the phone with Leo?”
I want to tell Ginny that there is a back-story to all of this that she’ll never understand no matter how many films she wants to make. I want to tell her that she doesn’t have the capacity to understand the dialogue that has transpired. I want to tell her that she does not know a single thing about me. “Just to be safe,” I say and before I can say anything else, Bruce Duper walks into the room with two thermoses.
“Filled these up with coffee for you,” Bruce says. “Sheriff is out front waiting on you with one of his deputies. Looks like it’s gonna be a long night.”
“Ginny, maybe you should stay here with Bruce,” I say.
“I don’t want to do that,” she says. “I belong with you.”
I look outside and see Morris sitting on the hood of his car with a tall, thin deputy and I think all of this is about gravity. There’s no part of me ruled by nature anymore. There is no animal in me that keeps me poised on the face of this earth. What it has all boiled down to, what it has always been, is about getting some gravity beneath me. I frown at Bruce and take the thermoses from him. He looks scared and baffled; like it is his home they are about to search.
“I want you to know that I didn’t tell the sheriff anything I didn’t tell you,” Bruce says.
“There’s nothing to be concerned about,” I say. “Maybe he can find my wife.”
Ginny sucks her breath in and I think that it doesn’t matter how much air she breathes, how much love she gives me, how many times we hang, it all comes down to the fog in my mind and the trouble within Molly’s.
“Paul,” Bruce says, “this is all going to turn out fine.”
“You’re right,” I say because nothing worse can ever happen than losing my little girl. Nothing will ever be as final. “You are absolutely right.”
Chapter 8
For three months the sun bleached everything that washed up in front of our cabin: ducks, fish, candy bar wrappers. Katrina wa
sn’t allowed to leave the house without a hat and sun block.
At night the sunset would turn the sky red and then purple, but the heat would persist. We drove into Spokane and bought oscillating fans to put into every room. Nothing helped. I showered four times a day.
“We should fly to LA,” Molly said once the heat had persisted for over a week. “Rent an apartment in Santa Monica until the heat breaks.”
“What if it never breaks?” I said. “What if this is the beginning of the end and we’re all just going to bake to death?”
“Paul,” Molly said, “be serious. It can’t be healthy for the baby to be in this kind of heat.”
“I can’t just pick up and leave,” I said. “Who will teach the summer session?”
After a month, Molly began to turn.
“Tell me something,” she said. “Tell me why we sit here and let the sun beat down on us? Tell me why we don’t just kill ourselves now and let the scavengers pick us apart.”
She’d stopped taking her medication. She’d stopped bathing Katrina. All she painted, over and over again, were copies of clinical drawings of the female reproductive organs. Eventually she stopped doing even that.
So I took care of Katrina. I bathed her. I read to her. I walked with her. I told her that we loved her so much. I told her that sometimes parents aren’t prepared to deal with certain things.
I told her that we’d made some mistakes but that we were going to turn out all right.
After two months, Molly stopped speaking to Katrina altogether; she referred to her as “the child” and “that” and sometimes “her.” The truth is that by this time I had begun to see through Molly. I began to deconstruct her. She turned into an abstract principle to me: a vessel for Katrina. At night we would still make love, but it was wordless, algebraic sex. Something we both needed to do to complete whatever equation we were both working out.
For me, the math was simple: I wanted another child, another piece of Molly, another piece of me, another piece of whatever child we’d killed before. It didn’t matter that Molly was slipping in and out of herself. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t figure out how many hours had passed at any given time.
Everything about that time seems liquid and out of focus now. The truth is that I haven’t been well since Molly’s abortion. The truth is that I began to look at Molly and Katrina as animals, as experiments in human anthropology, as verbs and nouns that lived in my house.
I didn’t know all of that then. I didn’t know all of that until after Sheriff Drew came across the lake with the coroner to pick up my girl. I look at Sheriff Drew now, sitting beside his deputy at the front of the police boat as we cut across the lake, and wonder what he takes me for. Does he think that we will get off the boat at our dock and he will find Molly like he found Katrina?
Into my head floats my first image of Sheriff Drew. I see him jumping out of a tugboat and storming onto the beach with a rifle in his hands, screaming like an animal. But that’s not right. That’s John Wayne in an old movie my father used to love.
I close my eyes and listen to the water crashing around the boat. I am vaguely aware that Ginny is saying something to me, but I’m trying to focus on the day I first met Sheriff Drew, trying to reason with the visions of him I have, trying to remember the endings and the beginnings of everything.
It comes to me all at once: a small boat with a medium-size Evinrude outboard engine. It slides up onto the beach and Sheriff Drew, wearing a tan short-sleeved shirt with sweat rings around the neck and arms, jumps out. He shouts for me to stand still but I’m running into the trees with her in my arms. She’s so light in my arms. She makes me feel like I’m floating, like I’m above the trees and above the screams I hear behind me. When I finally stop running I look down and see that there are scratches on her arms and face from the branches. I look up and he’s standing there with his gun out telling me to set her down. Behind him is a panting man wearing glasses, the coroner. He also tells me to set her down, that they are here to help, that this is all going to be fine, just fine.
I open my eyes and Ginny is glaring at me.
“Are you listening to me?” she says.
“Everything’s going to be fine,” I say.
Sheriff Drew turns around at the sound of my voice and regards me with a slight nod of his head, like he wants to believe me.
“Do you see,” Ginny is saying, “the way the mountains look flat in front of us?”
“Yes,” I say.
“It’s a trick, you know,” she says. “Your eyes make them look like walls, like they’ve been fused together and slapped onto the horizon. Are you getting my point, Paul? About everything I’ve just said, are you piecing it together?”
“Yes,” I say, because all I have heard are memories from three years ago, visions that happened and didn’t happen, a past and a present that won’t stop colliding, until I’m not sure which is which.
“We’re going to get through this, and later it will all seem just like a mirage,” Ginny says. “A year from now, Paul, when Molly is fine and we’re back in California, you’ll be able to look back at this. Right?”
“Yes,” I say. Yes, everything is going just as planned. A year from now I’ll be married to a human mutation, we’ll try to have children just as Molly and I had tried, we’ll review charts and graphs that detail my sperm count, we’ll hold hands and cry when we get the first look at the ultrasound, and all the while I’ll be wondering how many fingers it will have, how many flippers it will have growing from its back, how many different animals it will have floating in its blood.
How long until it dies?
“THIS IS HOW it’s going to work,” Sheriff Drew says. We’re standing on the front porch of the cabin. “Deputy Lyle and I are going to go room to room. This isn’t like the movies. We’re not going to break anything, we’re not going to cut open your couch, we’re just looking for anything we might find important. And everything we take will be catalogued. Okay, Paul?”
“That’s fine,” I say. “Where do you want us?”
“Just sit on the couch,” he says. “If we need you, we’ll let you know.”
I open the cabin door, and it seems different to me; like it has grown larger and emptier since we’ve been gone. I stand there in the doorway for a moment and it feels like I’ve been carved in two. Like the person who slept here last night and the person standing here now are completely separate.
“All right then,” Sheriff Drew says. “Why don’t you two take a seat and let Deputy Lyle and me get to work.”
“This is insane,” Ginny says after the sheriff has gone into the kitchen and Deputy Lyle has moved toward the bedrooms. “I mean, what’s with the hoopla of a warrant? Couldn’t they have just as easily asked you if they could search the house?”
“He’s just doing his job,” I say. “Everything by the book.”
“Bruce said he thought the sheriff was a fair man,” she says. “That he would give you a fair shake. Why would he say something like that?”
Inside the kitchen, I see Sheriff Drew pick up the stack of letters I’ve left on the table. I wonder if he’ll read each one. I wonder if he’ll sit in his sweet little home in Granite City and pore over each sordid detail. I wonder if he’ll go to the Branding Iron Cafe and listen to Hank Williams songs on the jukebox while he reads my pleas for forgiveness.
“The sheriff investigated Katrina’s death,” I say. “Bruce was probably just thinking out loud.”
“Wait a minute,” Ginny says. “Wait, wait, wait. You said your daughter died of natural causes. You told me she died out here from some kind of disease. Isn’t that what you told me?”
Sheriff Drew unties the string around the letters and starts examining the postmarks.
“Is that what I told you?”
“Yes,” she says. “Goddamn it, Paul. What’s going on here?”
“He was just following procedures,” I say. “Somebody dies out here, he gets notified. That’
s just how it works.”
Sheriff Drew pulls the first letter out and runs his finger along the edge of it slowly, like a groan, before he unfolds it. I want to run into the kitchen and tell him that he is not allowed into my mind. That he can’t have access to my Molly.
“Paul,” the Sheriff says without looking up, “I’m gonna have to take these letters. I’ll bring them back when this is all taken care of.”
“Those are personal in nature,” I say.
“They won’t be up for display and at this point I need to consider all of my options. I know you understand,” he says and shoves the whole stack into a clear plastic evidence bag and seals it.
Ginny puts her hand on my knee and I hear her say that she’s confused, that she doesn’t think I’ve told her the whole story about Katrina dying, about why Molly and I split up.
“There were problems,” I say. It feels like there is a dark cloud behind my eyes, like everything is slowing down for the first time. I look past Ginny and see the sheriff. He is watching us. I see him as I did that first time in the clearing: an impostor, a badge, a gun, a hat, words that mean so much to so many but that can do nothing for me. I trace him back through time, through the ages, through the sand and the dust, beneath the footprints and the bones, across the plains and down into the Omo River in Ethiopia, until he is nothing but a single cell. Until he becomes irrelevant.
“Paul,” Ginny says, but inside I’m running through the trees toward the water with Katrina in my arms. I’m sprinting down the dock and Sheriff Drew is shouting that he’ll shoot, Molly is crying and telling me to just stop running, the panting man in the glasses is screaming that she’s dead, she’s dead, and all I can do is leap into the lake.
My feet sink into the sand, the water spilling over my shoulders, my neck, and my head. My eyes are open and everything is blurred and hazy and I’m floating along the bottom. I hold her in my arms and twist until I am on my back looking up at the ripples in the water, rays of sunlight cutting the surface. We can stay here forever, Katrina. We can stay until the forests have petrified, until the sun has boiled the earth. We can stay until we grow gills and learn to breathe the water.
