Living Dead Girl

by Tod Goldberg

  But had they bothered to look, had they bothered to really examine Katrina, they would have seen that the tumor behind her rib, in a pocket against the transverse colon, was formed of skin, fat, sebaceous materials, and two pieces of bone that any physical anthropologist would have been able to tell was the superior maxilla. They were technicians. They were underpaid. They didn’t care.

  It wasn’t their little girl.

  She was my little girl and I took the time to find out everything about her. I wish I’d done it before she was already dead.

  I lean over and kiss Ginny lightly on her forehead. She reaches out to me and rubs my arm. She is still asleep, still dreaming, but her body is reacting the way it always has. Her body doesn’t remember that she’s lost all emotions toward me.

  “Good bye,” I say softly into Ginny’s ear.

  “Okay, honey,” she says, and it sounds sweet and tender and adult and like she’s never known how lost I’ve felt, how I’ve always been defined by the people who have loved me, how I should have loved every inch of her giving soul.

  I slide out of bed and dress quietly in the dark, which is difficult with my hands wrapped in gauze. I peek out the window in our room and see that the wind has settled some and that the rain has stopped. It occurs to me, like a picture slowly being undrawn, that this lake has always held some mystery for me. At first, I thought life here would solve everything, would give me the ability to tell the truth, would give me a family and would cure Molly.

  Ginny coughs in her sleep and then sits up, eyes wide open.

  “Are you jumping?” she says. She is still asleep.

  “You’re dreaming,” I say.

  “Yes,” she says. “Do you think I’ve taken good care of you?”

  “The best,” I say, then, “go back to sleep,” and she does.

  It’s not the unchangeable things that concern me. My time in jail proved that. I’ve accepted a few things in the last four days, chief among them being that I can only find Molly by myself, that she is there in our house, and that when I find her she will still love me and that though her heart has been broken by me, I think I can bend it, twist it, and make it mine again. For better or worse.

  I tiptoe out of the room and into the hallway, where it is colder and darker. I hear the sound of a toilet running, so I stop outside the door and wait a moment. Bruce Duper comes out of the bathroom at the end of the hall, his body backlit in dull yellow light. His hair is disheveled and he’s dressed only in his boxers. I can see his belly and his thick, stout legs, and I think that he is not an animal, he is all man. He stops there in the light and turns around.

  “That you back there, Paul?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Why didn’t you say something’?”

  “I didn’t want to scare you,” I say. It’s as though he doesn’t know he’s wearing mostly skin.

  “You going somewhere?”

  “I’m leaving,” I say.

  “Back to California?”

  “Don’t know,” I say, and it occurs to me that maybe Bruce sleepwalks, that maybe this conversation is all going to be forgotten.

  “I do believe I loved your wife,” Bruce says after a time.

  “I know,” I say.

  “You don’t know anything,” Bruce says.

  “Did you get her that new engine for the boat?” I ask. “That Johnson?”

  Bruce reaches back into the bathroom and flips the light switch off. He stands at the opposite end of the hallway, shrouded in darkness, like a gunfighter. He doesn’t say anything, but he coughs a few times, clears his throat, sighs. “She was practically marooned out there,” he says finally. “I liked helping her out when I could.” His voice sounds weak and tired, like mine. “That boat you two bought was a real piece of crap, you know. Wasn’t worth half what you paid for it. My dad really gave Jersey Simpkins hell for ripping you off. Just let him have it.”

  “Your dad was good people,” I say.

  “You can’t just leave a woman out there,” Bruce says. “She didn’t know how to fix a damn thing.”

  “I’m sure she appreciated your help,” I say.

  “You know what bewilders me?” Bruce says. “She still loved you. Still thought you two might have a chance. Thought that one day she’d just wake up a young, well woman again. And that wasn’t going to happen. You know that. Don’t you?”

  “I don’t know anything,” I say.

  “She told me that you couldn’t race an avalanche. Damndest thing I’ve ever heard a woman say. But you know, I think she had a point,” Bruce says. “It’s sure surprising how fast the world can turn upside down, isn’t it?”

  I stay quiet.

  Bruce starts to sniffle. “Oh hell,” he says and then he plops down against the wall. “Like a big old baby.”

  I walk down the hall and sit beside Bruce. “You must be cold,” I say. “You should just go back to bed.” I see that tears have cut rough canals through Bruce’s beard. His eyes are closed and his shoulders are heaving. I want to embrace him, to tell him how sorry I am, how sad I am, and how we will get through all of this together.

  But there is none of that in me. There is no diagram for grief between Bruce and me. Because the truth is that I didn’t know Bruce loved Molly, didn’t think the world could exist with more than one person loving Molly, didn’t think that anyone was entitled to those emotions aside from me.

  “Just get the hell out,” Bruce whispers. “Don’t you ever come back here. Don’t you ever say another nice thing about me or my family or about anyone here on this lake. It’s not your right anymore. You just disappear forever. Let us all forget about you. Can you do that for me, Paul? Can you let me have this place without you? Can you let me have Molly to myself now? You don’t deserve her. Maybe you did once, but that was different. You were different.”

  I don’t answer because I don’t know what I could possibly say, don’t know how to respond to a man who feels honestly about me, feels that I am dangerous, feels that I am different than I used to be.

  Bruce stands up then, as though he hasn’t spoken, as if we hadn’t had this entire conversation, and says, “I’m nearly naked out here. I’m goddamn half naked out here.”

  “You should go on back to bed,” I say.

  Bruce pauses there in the hallway. Black hair covers his body like vines, and for a moment he scratches his sternum like he’s trying to dig the roots out. “You ever broken a bone, Paul? Ever felt your body snapping?”

  “Yes,” I say. “More than you know.”

  “That’s how Molly said she felt all last month,” Bruce says. “Like you were breaking her in two every day.”

  “It was the anniversary of Katrina passing,” I say. “It’s always a tough time for both of us. Maybe you can’t understand that. I hope you never have to.”

  “She felt you watching her,” Bruce says. “She said she could feel you in her bones.”

  Yes, I think I have always watched her. I have traced her throughout time and conceived her creation, her demise. I have counted the seconds between her breaths, predicted within five the amount of times she blinks in a given minute. I have seen her through the window of our home, when she didn’t know she was being seen, crying for a life she could never control.

  “That’s preposterous,” I say.

  “Is it?” Before I can answer, Bruce shuffles slowly back to his bedroom and closes the door softly behind himself. I hear his bare feet scuff along the floor, hear his bed squeeze down beneath his weight, and then all I hear is my own breathing, steady and full and I wonder this: How long has it been since the last time I was home?

  OUTSIDE, THOUGH THE wind and rain have died, the air is cold and damp and I think that this is how it has always been for me. That no matter how many times I’ve tried to reach the center of myself, the truth about what makes me who I am, what makes me human, I always end up here, in the dark, cold and wandering. Where is the difference between man and animal? Why am I not
a monkey, a pigeon, a raccoon? What causes me to be human on the outside and yet so feral and animal on the inside?

  I’m standing beside Bruce Duper’s boat, the Angel Mine, and all I can do is wonder at myself. Wonder at the way I’m about to head out into the lake, back to my home, back to my Molly—and for what? I know this now for certain: I have never left here. And I know this: I have been back here recently. The thing that makes me different from an animal, the result of being the child of loving human parents, is my ability to reason. And though reason has left me at times, for long periods, for years I think, I know that it has come back to me now, tonight, on this lake in front of this boat with miles of water between myself and the truth.

  I step into the Angel Mine and find a life jacket that fits me beneath the captain’s chair. I turn the key that’s in the ignition and the motor comes on easily with not so much a roar but with a hum. The running lights flash on around the base of the boat and shroud the marina in an odd orange glow. I look behind me, to where Bruce Duper’s house is, and see a single light on upstairs. There is a figure in the window, like a ghost, and for a moment I think I see it waving at me, but it is too far away and much too dark. I raise my hand up and wave back anyway, in case whoever it is can see me, or in case it is a ghost and it needs confirmation that I am haunted.

  It has not always been the people I have loved who have haunted me—there have been the people I have never known who have also crept into the small spaces. From that day when I told my mother that I was afraid of myself, the apparition of who I could have been has visited me, has sat on the edge of the bed and snickered. What you could have done, it says. The people you could have saved!

  I’ve tried to define that failure in me that my mother saw, that difference that caused me to be here, now, on this boat, cutting across a blackened lake on the 22nd day of September. I stare up into the sky and see the moon shining dully through the clouds. It will be the day of the Autumnal Equinox when the sun rises in a few hours, and I know that I will be defined not by what the sun finds, but by what I must locate, what I must discover.

  I slip my hand into my pocket and pull out the medication Dr. Lecocq gave me in jail. The pill is small and round, its edges perfected by a machine somewhere in the Midwest, and I swallow it without any water. This is not the first time I’ve taken medication. The truth is that I never should have stopped, should never have deemed myself healthy. Dr. Loomis put me on Ritalin when I was twelve and again when I was seventeen, and maybe it made me calmer, less afraid, but it never was able to solve the riddles I’ve had—was never able to fill in the black spots of time that I’d lose. This new medication, however, is starting to do the trick again, causing the moments in my life that I’ve stored away to reappear, to come dripping into my mind.

  Bruce’s boat runs faster than our old Whaler used to, seems to understand the way the small waves curl, and slides over them with something less than patience. Before I am completely aware, I see that I’m already halfway home. I lay back on the throttle and the boat slows to a crawl. The water looks glassy and sharp. I think about the days Molly and I spent out on the water, the nights we made love, actually created love, in the dank cabin of the Whaler. We would lie there, our bodies intertwined in the dark, listening to nature.

  “How do you think we came from the sea?” Molly said once. Her head was on my chest and we hadn’t spoken yet, hadn’t bothered to ruin the silence.

  “It’s a long process,” I said. “Single cell life to, you know, the guy you see at Safeway, was complicated by a billion factors. I think probably it all came down to need. Food, shelter, sex, a combination of everything.” I ran my fingers through Molly’s hair. She hummed softly, like a cat.

  “But why?” she said. “Why leave something so beautiful for something so ugly, so malformed, so dangerous? It doesn’t make sense to me, to leave the kind serenity of the water.”

  “There are predators everywhere,” I said.

  Molly laughed then, this was before she was really sick, and sat up. “This whole thing,” she said, “this whole, Earth, thing—you know what I mean? This whole planet is here for what? To serve us? To serve you and me and our unborn babies? Do you think that is why it’s here?”

  “I think we’re bacteria on a big rock,” I said.

  “That’s not enough of an answer. What if one of your students raises her hand and says, ‘Uh, um, Mr. Luden, could you explain to me why we’re all here and why we exist and why this class is important?’ That bacteria answer isn’t going to fly, Doctor.”

  “Why is it always a ‘her’ in the hypothetical scenarios?”

  “Just answer the question.”

  Molly put her head back onto my chest and for a long time I thought about this question of humanity. I thought about why I was here, why Molly and I were together, why we wanted to populate the world with our progeny, and all I knew was that I’d been trying to answer these questions for my entire life.

  “I can’t just give you an answer,” I said. “Philosophers and scientists and preachers and every crazy man on the street has been trying to answer that question since the beginning of time. It’s like trying to define love. All I know is that I was put here to love you, to love whatever children we have, to love our life, to make some kind of difference. And maybe I’ll succeed and maybe I’ll fail, but at least I would have tried, right? Right? Molly?”

  It was useless. She was fast asleep.

  Now, in the middle of the lake, I think that I should have woken her, should have told her that none of the philosophy mattered. None of the history mattered. All that was important was that we had one another. We could’ve figured out the rest some other night. In the end, I guess I never told Molly how I felt, and that was my fault. It never hurt to tell the truth, no matter how many times I’d lied.

  I was here three weeks ago.

  I was here two months ago.

  I was here a year ago.

  I’ve never been far enough away from Molly. I’ve never been close enough to Molly.

  I fire the throttle back up and the boat jumps forward.

  I am never leaving here.

  Chapter 14

  The truth: I drove to Granite Lake three weeks ago. I had made the drive several times before, winding through the center of Washington State like a coil, stopping in Ellensburg to think about what I was doing, to consider my options. Once getting as far as Chelan, and then turning around, only to make the same trip the next day.

  I’d park my rental car at Morgan’s Landing and hike through the woods until I was mere feet from my home. I’d hunker down in the bushes and watch Molly, imagining the cadence of her voice as she talked herself through a painting, smelling her skin on the clothes and towels she hung outside to dry, picking up her litter as I circled the house. And there were times, I will admit, that I found myself staring into the windows of our home very late at night, imagining myself beneath the sheets where Molly slept.

  This time, I knew I would not pause along the road, knew I would not merely sit in the woods and watch our cabin from afar. I’d been invited to celebrate our survival, our defeat, our marriage, our losses. It was the anniversary of Katrina’s death.

  “Don’t let Bruce know you’re coming,” Molly whispered. She was calling from inside Bruce’s house. “Just drive around the lake.”

  “I couldn’t get a flight, so I’m driving up. I have to come along the backside anyway,” I said. “But why does it matter what Bruce thinks?”

  “It’s confusing,” she said. “I don’t think he’d approve of you coming out here after all that has happened.”

  “I don’t much care about his opinion.”

  “No,” she said, “I don’t suppose you would. But I have to live here, Paul. That means I have to make concessions.”

  “You don’t have to live there. You could come back to me.” I believed then as I believe now that our chances to be together were not predicated on any primitive idea of time, that we�
��d have eternity to work out the beginning and the end of our relationship. That all the tiny, meaningless, hurtful things we’d said to each other over the years could be smoothed over like marble, until all the rough edges of our life were stains beneath the surface.

  “Paul,” she said, her voice still just a whisper, “my life has changed for the better without you. I’m sorry if that hurts your feelings, but I feel I should be honest.”

  “Yes,” I said, and it was as though time had melted in my hand. “I understand how that could happen. I won’t say anything to anyone about coming there, if that makes you feel better. I’ll put it away in a box and hide it under my bed.”

  “That’s fine,” she said, though I hoped I would hear her laugh. It had been so long since I’d heard her unrestrained. “When you get here, we’ll figure it all out, right? We’ll get everything sorted out and it will be a happy day for both of us.”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  “It will be, Paul,” she said and then, almost as an after thought, “and we’ll be together and that will be happy, too. It will be our own personal day of atonement.”

  “I believe that,” I said, but she’d already hung up.

  We’d made promises to each other before and had seemingly come up short each time. But, and I knew this with certainty, this would be different. We’d promised to get through our lives without each other, without our daughter, and we’d succeeded in some way, had managed to live and breathe and we were going to keep on.

  I reached the lake at just past eight o’clock on the anniversary of my daughter’s death, and for a long time I just drove, not hoping to see anything or feel anything, but to remember what it was like to be normal, to not have celebrations about terrible things. I parked my rented Taurus a half-mile from our house almost from habit and walked through the trees and the shrubs, listening to the forest. And what I remembered about being normal was that I would never have done what I was doing. I’d be in bed, my body curled against Molly’s, my baby asleep in the other room. My biggest concerns would be the lesson plan for my class, the grocery list, the oil change my car needed.