Living Dead Girl

by Tod Goldberg

  In the dimness of my heart, I think I have always known that beyond the truth, the lies, the death and the disappearances, that I am still at fault for so many different things. I’ve pushed the truth away, living under the impression that if I cleared my head, Molly would come back to me.

  That is not the truth as she saw it, certainly.

  But this is: Molly was my idol. If I believed in anything aside from science, it was that Molly was meant for me and that she was a true angel. If she is dead, maybe she’s looking down on me right now and trying to reason with God to get me into heaven. I needed Molly. I needed to possess her, I know that now. I am haunted by every person I have ever loved.

  I sit in a small cell in Granite Lake drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup. It has been three days since Sheri ff Drew shackled my hands together and told me I needed to be a gentleman, that for the sake of everyone involved I needed to cooperate. At night, I dreamt of Molly. We’d sit beside one another on the dock and talk about the future, about Katrina, about the nameless children we would have in the years to come. Sometimes, Ginny was one of our children and she would swim in the water at our feet, her tan, lithe body circling like a shark below us.

  I am on medication again, which probably accounts for the dreams. I requested that a doctor evaluate me and have been under observation by a fellow named Lecocq out of Spokane. He thinks I am clinically depressed but that I am not a danger to myself or others. I have no shoelaces on my shoes and no belt on my pants. I think the medication is helping me. I think I can remember some of the things I have always forgotten.

  Sheriff Drew and his deputies combed the house. They found blood and hair in Molly’s bedroom and on clothes and pillows left on the floor. They found a drawing, along with my others, of the body of a woman in what they called—because of the clinical nature of the bones, the veins, the exact dissection of the body that was depicted—a death pose. A woman that resembles my wife.

  Leo hired me a lawyer from Spokane who tells me they have nothing, no concrete evidence. He tells me there weren’t any large bloodstains found, nothing to indicate a murder. You are allowed to bleed in your own home, he tells me. He says no one has been convicted of murder because of a drawing.

  Dr. Lecocq says I need long-term therapy. He says I am hiding things and that I need to address them.

  Despite all of these things, I am being released today. After three days, Sheriff Drew and his deputies have found no further evidence that might link me to the disappearance or death of my wife. What they found in the house is circumstantial and not valid enough to hold me.

  For hundreds of years men and women have argued over the beginning of the family—about the nature of the first nuclear family. What is it in our brains or our souls that makes us think that males are always the aggressors? What is it that makes a child assume that their father is hurting their mother when they walk in on them making love? Why are the females of our species portrayed as shy, coy, submissive partners in sex? And when they are not the archetype, why are they then cast out—harlots, sluts, Hester Prynne.

  I think now that Molly has always possessed me. The mistakes we made were often the choreographed steps that signaled the false start of the human parade. Molly’s way of sabotaging me, Katrina, our family.

  It is useless for me to blame Molly now. She isn’t here to defend herself or to defend me. What remains is my memory and the black spots that drift through my mind, the spots that are beginning to pale a bit, the spots that are becoming translucent and that I am terribly afraid to look through.

  “All right, Paul.”

  I look up from my cup of coffee and see Sheriff Drew standing in front of my cell, unlocking it. He’s not wearing his hat and his face shows a growth of gray beard. There are circles beneath his eyes. He looks sad.

  “Can I have my belt?” I ask.

  “Can’t give that to you until we check you out up front,” he says. “Policy, I’m afraid.”

  “Is Ginny here?”

  “Yep,” he says, opening the door. “Bruce drove her and your lawyer friend up in his truck. You’ll get to see them in due course. C’mon out now.”

  I step through into the hallway and Sheriff Drew extends his hand to me. I don’t know why, but I take it and we shake.

  “You’re a troubled person, Paul,” Sheriff Drew says. He holds my hand tightly, like he’s trying to squeeze air out of it. “I think you’ve got too much science and not enough sense rattling around in that head of yours. People up here, they don’t think like you. Fact is, I don’t think anyone thinks like you. I don’t know where your wife is, Paul, not a single damn clue. I’ll tell you that straight to your face. I hope to God she’s somewhere safe.”

  “So do I,” I say.

  “I believe you do, Paul,” Sheriff Drew says. “I honestly think you love your wife and that you’re worried about her. And I think that sometimes you forget things, and you hide things, and you do and say things that I don’t quite understand. Does that sound right to you?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Then I want you to know something: I don’t believe Molly’s safe. I believe she’s dead somewhere and that you might know where that place is. I also think that you don’t have any idea where you might have stuck her; that you know you’re half way to crazy and capable of things you’ve never considered. Does that sound right to you?”

  “I’ve never hurt anybody,” I say.

  “That may be,” Sheriff Drew says, “but I’m going to find out for sure. You can count on that.”

  IN ANOTHER TIME, in another life, Granite City was heaven. Molly and I had grown tired of Los Angeles and the disappointments we’d encountered there, so when the job opportunity arose in Spokane, it seemed like the ideal situation.

  Molly felt at home on the lake; felt for the first time that she could be herself without the constraints of her family looming behind her, questioning her decisions. In the glimmer of a few precious months in the Pacific Northwest, I believe we never loved each other more.

  On Saturdays, we’d wake up late and eat our breakfast on the dock. Molly often would fix something different every weekend, a new recipe she’d discovered in a magazine or book, or she’d fill a basket with fruit and bread and a bottle of wine. We’d sit on the dock, our feet dangling into the lake, eating and talking; sometimes we’d merely sit silently, our fingers intertwined, watching the turn of the season.

  Sunday nights, we made love. It didn’t matter if we’d found reason to argue that day or if one of us was feeling contrary, by the time the sun sloped behind the mountain, we’d resolved to love each other, for better or worse. What was amazing was that it never felt forced or planned.

  Come Monday, when I was due back on campus, Molly would wake me with a soft kiss to the back of my neck. “Wake up, baby,” she’d whisper into my ear. “It’s time for my little boy to wake up.”

  I’d turn over to face her and she’d smile and kiss my eyes, my ears, the bridge of my nose. We’d hold each other until the last possible moment, until I knew that I’d have to go to work, again, without showering.

  True love is a blinding thing, it can color the experiences of even the worst events with a rosy tint, it can turn men and women into the best type of people—ones who will sacrifice the world for a shared moment of bliss.

  Despite the pain and the suffering that happened after we fell apart, there is nothing that can replace the memory of a time when we were perfect, a time when we were man and wife, when there were no pills, no anger, no politics of the human heart. It was a moment in our lives that was ruled by faith, love, and hope—and the consequences of believing in all three.

  Now, as I sit beside Leo, my friend and lawyer, in the backseat of Bruce Duper’s Bronco, I wonder how it could have gone so miserably wrong.

  “These people up here,” Leo says, “don’t have any idea what criminal justice is. My god. Town of morons. The lawyer I got for you in Spokane probably got his degree through the In
ternet. And that sheriff! Where’d they find him? Central casting?”

  Ginny sits stoically beside Bruce in the front of the truck, trying not to listen to Leo. Every few moments she strings her fingers through her hair and then she sighs until it sounds like every part of her body has relaxed. I touch her on the shoulder and for a moment she takes my hand, gives it the smallest squeeze, and then lets go.

  “Look,” Leo says, “I booked you a flight out of here for tomorrow. Let’s get you back to LA and some semblance of real life.”

  “I’m not going back to LA,” I say. “I need to find Molly.”

  Ginny turns around in her seat and fixes me with an empty glare, like she can’t decide if she’s angry or if she’s concerned. I wonder how much she knows now about my daughter, about my marriage, about me. “Paul,” she says, “please. Do what Leo tells you.”

  “You don’t understand,” I say.

  “I understand plenty,” Ginny says.

  “This isn’t some kind of movie,” I say. “You can’t just decide what my motives are because you think it makes a good plot. You can’t just say things because you think you should, because you think some actress would.”

  “Hey, hey,” Leo says, patting my thigh gingerly. “We’re all in for the good fight here. No one here is against you, Paul.”

  “Is that true, Leo?” I say. “Is it really?”

  No one says anything for a long while until Bruce Duper clears his throat and starts talking.

  “I remember when you and Molly first moved up here,” Bruce says. “You know what’s funny? I remember what you guys were wearing. Paul, you had on a black T-shirt and these tan cotton shorts. Do you remember that? And Molly, God bless her, she was wearing a yellow sundress and had on a straw hat with a wide brim. Like one of those ladies you see in old movies. She was beautiful, wasn’t she, Paul?”

  “She is,” I say.

  “You two just looked like movie stars to me,” Bruce says quietly. “All I wanted to do was move to California and find a woman like that. Find a woman who would make me look like a movie star. But you know that’s just dream stuff. Movie stars don’t even look like that anymore. I’ll tell you something: everybody on the lake was talking about you folks. You ever seen Molly before, Ginny?”

  “Only in pictures,” Ginny says.

  “Well, a picture doesn’t do her justice. She had an air about her, you know? Picture can’t capture that.” Bruce stares out his side mirror and shakes his head. “I really got to know Molly this past year. Got to understand a lot of things about you and her. And you know what? I think you two forgot how to love each other, and that’s just like poison. Worst thing you can do is forget how to love someone. It makes every part of you rot to shit, if you excuse my language.”

  “I never stopped loving her,” I say. “I’m sorry you have to hear that Ginny, but it’s the truth.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” Ginny says. “You think your actions these last few days don’t tell me everything I need to know about our relationship? Christ.”

  “You two are missing the point,” Bruce says. “My parents have been married going on forty-five years, and you know what? I don’t think a day has gone by when they haven’t gotten annoyed or mad at each other, but they always settle everything up by the end of the day. There was always communication. I think you and Molly lost that, Paul.”

  Ginny is fuming in the front seat. She keeps fidgeting like she wants to turn around and say something to me. But what can she say? She’s never been in a place like this, she’s never experienced anything that could prepare her for today.

  BRUCE PULLS OFF the road at a 76 station to fill up the tank and so Ginny can use the restroom. “Real spitfire, that one,” Leo says. “How old is she? Ten?”

  “She’s nineteen,” I say.

  “What’s up with her hand?”

  “Leo.”

  “Hey,” he says, “I had to ask.”

  “Listen,” I say. “Take Ginny back with you to LA. She doesn’t need to stay here.”

  “Neither do you,” he says. “She won’t go unless you do. We already discussed this while you were in the clink.”

  “This isn’t her place,” I say. “She doesn’t belong here.”

  Leo fiddles with the clasp of the manila envelope that is sitting on his lap. Inside are some of the things Sheriff Drew took from my home. “How long have we been friends, Paul? Fifteen years? Something like that?”

  “A long time,” I say.

  “A long time, right,” Leo says. “And you know I’ve always thought we had a good friendship. I thought Molly was a great girl and Katrina was just a beautiful baby, you know that, right? What I don’t understand, Paul, is the stuff that I’ve been hearing from Bruce and this Sheriff. I mean, I don’t want to sound crass here, but you sound like a freaking psycho, buddy.”

  “Molly and I had our problems,” I say. “I handled a lot of things wrong, I admit that. But I never hurt her, not once. You know that, Leo. She was the most important thing in the world to me. Katrina, too.”

  Ginny walks out of the gas station and I can’t help but stare at her. She is a specimen. I never get tired of her face.

  “Ginny says you’ve been acting funny,” Leo looks at me. “Says you grabbed her arm and nearly broke it. Is that true?”

  “That’s not the truth,” I say.

  “Look,” Leo says, and he hands me the manila envelope he’s been playing with. “I saw these pictures you drew and I can’t make heads or tails of them. Are they organs?”

  If I were in Leo’s place, I don’t think I’d ask any questions. I don’t think I’d want to know what goes on in the personal lives of my married friends. If I were Leo, I’d want to believe that a good, normal marriage was still possible. I’d want to think that my friend from college, the guy with the level head, the guy who married young to a great woman, the guy who knew what direction he was going, had all the right answers. Most of all, if I were Leo, I wouldn’t ask me anything.

  “Yes,” I say, “and bones. Different things. Renderings of different objects.”

  “But they’re of Katrina and Molly, is that right? I mean, shit Paul, let’s just get down to the basics here. You drew the organs and bones of your dead girl and your missing wife, right?”

  Ginny and Bruce stand outside the car talking. Bruce pumps gas into the tank while Ginny moves her hands wildly, like she’s trying to get something important across to him.

  “That’s right,” I say.

  “When did you draw them?” Leo says. “I mean, why the fuck would you do something like that? You know? It’s not right, Paul, anthropology aside. You don’t just draw the bones of your little girl after she’s dead. Are you listening to me?”

  My brain feels hurried, frantic, and I’m trying to set things back in time. I can feel it washing over the bad things, the mistakes, clearing away space for the happy memories. I see Molly and me sitting on the dock and then I see Ginny and me making love, hanging by the side of the road. I see the day Katrina was born and then I just see whales and diagrams of digs in Africa and there, there is Molly, finally, guiding my hand over the thin onionskin paper, etching Katrina’s organs, getting the scale correct, referring to the photos. We were her parents. The coroner had to give us the photos.

  “I don’t know when I drew them,” I say.

  “You just don’t do something like this,” Leo is saying, but I’m there with Molly at the table. There are flowers in the center of the table, two glasses of wine, sheets of onionskin. It is daytime. Molly always preferred to work in natural light. I am trying to get the scale correct, trying to make each drawing as perfectly accurate as possible. Each drawing must configure to the one before it. I must maintain the integrity of each scale or else whoever comes behind me might misinterpret my drawings. But this never happened, not exactly. I am confusing time again. Two different days have become one in my mind. The scale of events is all wrong.

  “I’m tryin
g to get the scale correct,” I say, and when I hear my voice it sounds like a phantom. I didn’t mean to say anything.

  “I’ll tell you the scale of things,” Leo says, not understanding that I am having a conversation that is stuck somewhere in time. “I think you need to come to LA and get some help. Hire some kid to drive your car back, whatever.”

  Before I can answer, Ginny and Bruce slip back into the car.

  “We all buckled up?” Bruce asks, as though he’s taking kids to a baseball game.

  “Tight as a bug,” Leo says. “Let’s just get moving. Get Paul home.”

  “I’m not flying back, Leo,” I say. “I meant it when I said it before. I appreciate you flying up here to supervise my defense or whatever it is you did, but I have to stay here with Molly.”

  “You know,” Ginny says, “you talk like everything is just all right. It’s not. You spent three days in jail. That means there’s some evidence of something, right, Leo?”

  “Well, not exactly,” Leo says.

  “Whatever,” Ginny says. “Whatever, whatever, whatever. I just can’t even think anymore. This has totally overloaded my faculty for reasoning. Things are not all right, Paul. Don’t you get it? Don’t you feel anything?”

  I do feel something, though I’m not sure exactly what it is. Sorrow? Anger? Relief? I do know that I am not all right. Perhaps I’ve gone invisible for years at a time, shifting through my home like a spirit. Perhaps I’ve lived an entire life in someone else’s skin, my words and actions invented. Or perhaps I’ve just disappeared and reappeared at the appropriate times—when my absences would have been least noticeable. The medication Dr. Lecocq gave me in jail seemed to open things up for me: memories, emotions, tiny scenes from my domestic life that I thought had been lost. When I think of myself right now, I see myself like I’m inside an old TV: body floating loosely in space, action surrounding me, lost in a blur of lights and movement. And then the TV begins to fade and my body becomes long and narrow and my head shrinks and shrinks until it is swallowed into a tiny white dot. To Ginny, Bruce, and Leo I must look absurd.