Living Dead Girl

by Tod Goldberg

  “No,” she continues, “of course you didn’t. None of this is about me, is it? You brought me up here because you think I make you look better, because you look plausible with me on your side. Just some other guy having a midlife crisis. Is that right, Paul? Do you think that is why you brought me here?”

  “You were never just a cause,” I say.

  “I guess not,” she says.

  “I wanted you from the first time I saw you,” I say.

  “Why?”

  I try to think back to the first time I saw Ginny. I try to remember how it was that we ended up having sex in the backseat of my Honda. I try to think of something I can say that will make Ginny stop this conversation, because I know it is going to end with one of us crying.

  I try to think of a lie. Any lie. I try to think of something that will make her cry with joy instead of with anger, sadness, and disappointment.

  I tell her the truth instead.

  “You reminded me of Molly,” I say.

  “I don’t love you anymore,” Ginny says, but she is not crying and she is not kissing me like when she said this before. Her voice is flat and dry. I look at her face, at her skin, at the way her lips come to a sharp point in the center. I try to burn her face into my mind, so that I could sketch it if I had to, so that I could document the moment she realized I would always let her down.

  “Maybe you should go back to LA with Leo in the morning,” I say.

  “You’re a monster,” she says.

  “If that makes you feel better,” I say, “that’s fine. Do what you have to do to forget me. I’ll always appreciate you coming up here with me during what must be a very difficult time for you.”

  “What did you do to your daughter?”

  It comes to knowing this: The cry of a newborn baby is the most beautiful sound. The sound of that first cry can never be replicated, can never be charted or quantified by a scientist. It is the only true, pure thing that exists.

  “I was a good parent,” I say. “I was a great provider for her. You don’t know how I struggled for that girl. She was a fight from the start. You don’t know about that. You don’t know what it means to fight for something, to really go to battle for something you want, do you? You don’t know about how man has struggled over centuries to perfect the family. I did what I thought was best for Katrina. I let her live. What would you do if your daughter was sick, Ginny? If she couldn’t live in this world without being hooked up to machines to sustain her, if, with every breath she took, there was another chance that she would catch some new infection? If I could have, I would have preserved her for generations, so everyone could appreciate her. But I couldn’t, Ginny. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t make her. They wouldn’t let me and I couldn’t do it and I would for her, I would. I would have done anything for her.”

  My eyes are closed now, and behind them I see Katrina and me running through the woods, her body limp in my arms. Sheriff Drew is behind me and he’s shouting, like Ginny is shouting right now, to stop, just stop, please stop, please. But how can I when I know that there is nothing left for me in this world? That all I’ve created is gone, that Katrina is dead, Molly is missing, and Ginny is leaving.

  I squeeze my eyes tighter and fireworks burst into the darkness, orange and blue and yellow gusts of light. I hear my voice behind the lights, behind Ginny’s shouting. I’m saying, “I thought I could plant her like a seed in the ground. I thought that.”

  For two and a half years I thought I could heal my daughter, thought that the dermoid cysts that covered her body in the end could be removed. Thought that whatever was inside of her, whatever was eating her away could be stopped. The truth is that I thought we would be able to strip away the illness from our daughter so that one day she would be entirely new, entirely different, the healthy living child of my dreams.

  “Where is she, Paul,” Ginny is saying now, through tears and coughs. “What did you do with your wife?”

  I told Molly that one day we could bring her back. I told Molly that one day she would love me again, that after all the pain and suffering, there was still a piece of us remaining—another vestigial part of our former selves.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  What I know is that I should never have tried to find the center of things, never should have placed my wife and daughter under a microscope, never should have believed that I was anything other than a husband and a father.

  “Did you hurt her?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  Katrina was the child of my dreams. I used to dream, when Molly was pregnant with Katrina, that Molly was in labor and that doctors and nurses were assembling around us. There were bright lights, beeping machines, good cheer. Then, one after another, our other children came springing from Molly. Our abortion, our ectopic, and finally Katrina. I’d wake up to the sound of my own voice and Molly would soothe me back to sleep. She’d say, “You’re dreaming, Paul. Everything is fine. We are going to have a beautiful child. She’ll paint and draw and love science and she’ll be smart. She’ll know everything. And she’ll have kids, and they’ll have kids, and we’ll grow old around a huge family. Now sleep, Paul. Sleep.”

  It’s like I’ve been asleep ever since.

  “You tell me, Ginny,” I say. “You tell me what I’ve done. Because I can’t remember anymore. I can’t decide if this is real or if I’m going to wake up in my bed and be seventeen again. It’s like I’ve never left here. Like every time you open that mouth of yours, everything tilts to one side. So you tell me. What have I done?”

  I don’t know when it happened, but Bruce and Leo are standing next to Ginny now. She’s shaking and crying. I remember. My eyes have been closed. Everything seems so bright in here now, like the lights have been turned up, like everything is getting clearer.

  “What the hell’s your problem?” Bruce says, repeating it like a mantra.

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” I say.

  Ginny gags, as if she might vomit, then stops and fixes her eyes on me. She doesn’t say anything, no one does. The three of them stand there in the too bright light staring at me. I want to close my eyes again and open them back up and be in the cabin with Molly and Katrina and all of this is a nightmare.

  “I’m going to leave in the morning,” I say.

  “I think that’s a good idea,” Leo says.

  BY THE TIME I get up to our bedroom, Ginny is almost completely packed.

  “I guess you’re going, too,” I say.

  “No reason to stay,” she says. “You’ve made that pretty clear.”

  “Let me at least pay for your ticket,” I say.

  “I don’t want anything from you anymore,” she says. “Leo was nice enough to put it on his credit card. He said I could pay him back whenever I got a chance.”

  “He’s been a good friend to me,” I say, but Ginny doesn’t respond. She’s packing her camera and several notebooks into her backpack. “I’m sorry this had to happen like this.”

  “Just don’t speak,” Ginny says. “For ten minutes, just keep your mouth closed.”

  I think then that I’ve misdiagnosed everything about Ginny. She is stronger than I’ve ever been.

  Despite it all, Ginny still lets me sleep next to her in bed.

  “It’s all right,” I say. “I can go downstairs and sleep on the couch.”

  “We’re adults,” she says and I believe her. I believe that maybe Ginny is old inside and aging with every moment.

  “I appreciate you,” I say.

  “I woke up this morning feeling pretty good,” Ginny says. “That was fifteen hours ago. I have to be smart about things. Really just decide what my limits are. This is amazing, Paul. And amazing things don’t happen to me everyday. Maybe they used to, when I was a kid. I won’t be nineteen forever, you know, so maybe I’ll look back and think that this was a watershed year. Do you think it’s possible that I’ll have another year like this?”

  “I don’t
remember nineteen,” I say.

  “No,” she says, “I suppose you’re too far removed from this sort of talk. Would all of this have been better if I were twenty-five? What about thirty-seven? Are those good numbers?” I think Ginny is going to cry, but she doesn’t. Instead, she pulls back the covers on the bed and slides in fully clothed, as if she’s afraid her body will somehow deceive her brain and will allow itself to warm me, to hold me. But it’s impossible. Her body can’t work independently of her brain anymore. She knows too much.

  I slide in beside her, wearing just pajama bottoms, and for a long time I wonder if this is how it would feel if Molly and I shared a bed again. I look at Ginny out of the corner of my eye and she seems alien to me. Her eyes are closed and her breathing is short and moderated in a perfect replication of sleep. I turn on my side and face her. I place my hand in the vacant space between us and I can feel the heat radiating from her body. She flinches when I touch her arm.

  “Are you asleep?”

  Nothing.

  I look at my watch. The minutes I felt passing have somehow accelerated. We’ve been in bed for an hour.

  “The truth is that doctors found something inside Katrina that changed how I look at life,” I say. “You might not want to believe me, but it’s true. When they did her autopsy they found hair inside her brain tumor and bone fragments. Do you know what that means?”

  Nothing.

  “She was doing it herself,” I say. “She was trying to find a way to live! It’s true, Ginny. It is the absolute truth.”

  Nothing.

  I take my hand from Ginny’s arm and turn over onto my back. She doesn’t want to hear me, which is fine. I’ve done too much to make her think I am speaking the truth. But what’s funny is how good it feels. I think about the times when I didn’t have to lie, when it wasn’t my nature to mislead everyone, including myself.

  There were times when I was a young man when I didn’t think I would ever grow old. I’d find myself in the middle of physiology class poised over the organs of a frog or fetal cat, my hands dirty with dried blood and tissue, and I couldn’t be sure how I’d gotten where I was, wasn’t absolutely positive I hadn’t killed the animal with my own hands. It was in those times that I thought I might just kill myself and never know it, that I’d wake up dead.

  I remember the day I told my mother that I was afraid of myself. It wasn’t too long after she’d found me with the fetal pig. We were sitting at the kitchen table cutting strawberries.

  “Don’t tell your father that,” she said, fingering the cross that hung around her neck. “It would break his heart.” She got up then and started walking around the room slowly, watching each of her steps intently. It was as if she thought she could just stomp my words out of her head. “It’s a failure in you,” she said rather suddenly. “You’ve never known how to be a regular boy. Never wanted to play sports or drink beer or fix cars. Why do you think that is, Paul? Did we make some mistake with you?” She walked out of the kitchen and into the living room. I followed her.

  She circled the couch twice and then just stopped in the middle of the room. I could smell her from where I was standing: strawberries and baby powder perfume.

  “Don’t cry,” I said. “I don’t want you to do that.”

  “You’ll break his heart,” she said, and I felt sorry for her. All these years she’d tried to raise me, tried to give me some sense of value, some sense of God and church and all I had become was a boy who was afraid of himself—a boy who hurt things. No one wants to raise a wicked person.

  “We just won’t tell him,” I said. “We’ll act like I never said anything, okay Mom? We can do that, can’t we?” Right then, I wanted to fold my entire life up and throw it away. I wished that I’d never even opened my mouth, wished that I could spin the world backwards to catch up with myself fifteen minutes earlier. I would’ve said, “Stop, Paul. Just keep cutting strawberries. Just go into your room and do pushups, situps, lift weights.” I worried for my mother then, worried what she might say next and what I might say back to her.

  I would forever have this desiccated moment in my head. From then on I decided I would weigh every situation and decide which version of me the people I encountered received, no matter the consequence. Science tells me now that was the wrong decision to make, the wrong philosophy to subscribe to, because the gulf between truth and fact widens long before it contracts. My mother and father would likely have agreed. Because the truth is that they knew all about me, as any good parents surely must. And they were good parents, despite me.

  But that day, that wretched day, all I understood was that I needed to make a change, or else I might just collapse my family.

  “He can’t ever find out,” Mom said. “We’ll put you back into therapy. Yes. That’s what we’ll do. I’ll tell him you felt like you needed it. And that will be fine, and this time maybe we can fix you. Are you a bad person, Paul? Do I need to be afraid of you?”

  “No,” I said. “I’d never hurt anybody.”

  “I guess I should have known about all of this,” she said. She was still standing in the middle of the room. “It’s probably all just in your head, anyway. And you can’t control your thoughts. Not even medication can do that. You probably shouldn’t even attempt that, at your age. There is always something else going on that could divert you. I get lost in work sometimes, which helps. I just concentrate on working, make it my life for those nine hours. You should try that, yes, that’s something you should attempt.” I sat down without saying anything. Mom went to the window in the living room and looked out. She was still a young woman then, only in her forties, but I thought that she suddenly seemed very old to me, like this conversation had slipped twenty years off her life.

  “Maybe you should take a nap,” I said. “Rest before dinner. You look tired to me.”

  My mom put a hand up against the window and shook her head deliberately. “I think it’s colder this year,” she said. “Do you think that? That this year is a touch cooler than last?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You get these ideas in your head,” she said, and it was as if she was floating between two conversations, “and it seems like it’s your whole life. Everything seems so important. It can ruin things, Paul. It can ruin whole lives.”

  “I can change,” I said. “I think this has helped.”

  “Do you believe that?” my mother asked.

  My mother was staring at me and for one of the first times in my life, I felt like an adult. Her voice was very calm, so I just said, “Yes, I do.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  When my father got home a few hours later, we were both still in the living room, my mother silent and poised by the front window, me sitting in a large overstuffed chair thinking about death and redemption and about my problems and about what my own children would be like and how I would raise them.

  “The hell’s going on in here?” my dad said. “There’s a bunch of rotting strawberries in the kitchen.”

  Mom didn’t say anything then, she just walked past my father and into the kitchen where I heard her turn on the sink and then the small black-and-white TV she kept on the counter. I looked at my watch and saw it was six thirty. The 700 Club was on.

  “What the hell is going on here, Paul?”

  “I want to go back into therapy,” I said. “See Dr. Loomis again.”

  Dad sat down on the couch across from me and sighed deeply and then a queer look crossed his face, a look I would see again after my mother finally passed on from the cancer, a look of honest relief. “Well,” he said, “I think that’s fine. I think that’s real fine. Whatever makes you feel right, son. We’ll do whatever we can. Mother and I support you one hundred percent.”

  Chapter 13

  I open my eyes and look at the clock. It is one forty in the morning. Ginny is asleep, one of her arms draped across my chest. She has taken off her pants sometime during the night, probably in her sleep, and the
y are balled up at my feet.

  Watching Ginny sleep makes me think that there still is a conviction in me that life is worth living, that there is hope for all the beautiful things. Because Ginny is beautiful in her own precious way, and maybe she doesn’t really know it, which is fine. Maybe I’ve made mistakes that are irreversible, maybe I’ve seen things that I can’t unsee, but what remains in me is that life is valuable—that we’ve all worked terribly hard to perfect this model, that Homo sapiens are the only successful branch of our family tree. It isn’t humanity that has failed me.

  I peel Ginny’s arm from my chest and place it beside her. My hand smarts. She stirs a bit, swallows twice, and then continues to snore lightly from her nose. If the truth be known, I wanted to hurt her. I wanted to make her hate me, wanted to show her things that would claim her for the rest of her life. I wanted to run to her and have her reject me for all that I am worth, but she’s always been there, always tried to see me as something more than I am. And so she says she doesn’t love me. All that means to me is that she once did and that she could again.

  The truth about Katrina is this: she was a rare child, even in death. What the pathologists in Granite City said were brain tumors, were actually our children. What the pathologists didn’t understand, nor wished to figure out, was that Katrina was a vessel. In her medulla oblongata was a fetus in fetu, three inches long, formed of bone, hair, and a mass of macerated embryo.

  The pathologists in Granite City didn’t know what it was, thought that it was just an anomaly, that it was nothing. They were not students of human history, they were technicians. They were bored technicians cutting apart a child they didn’t care about. What they had missed was so obvious: that Katrina had died not from malignancies, not from the dermoid cysts, not from the heat, not from the neglect at the hands of her parents, but that she was doomed from birth.

  A week before she died, Katrina’s abdomen had begun to swell. She didn’t seem to be in any more pain than usual, but each day her side would expand. I kept a chart that Sheriff Drew confiscated with the drawings that detailed the swelling. On the first day it grew 1.5 centimeters. On the second day it grew 1.8 centimeters and so on. When the pathologists sliced her open, violated her sanctity, they said there was a tumor beneath her last rib on the left side. They didn’t bother to dissect it. The tumor in her brain had killed her, they said.