Living Dead Girl

by Tod Goldberg

  I walked down the hallway back toward the kitchen with the papers in my hands, prepared to deal with Molly’s sinking psyche. Prepared to leave our home forever and start living life. But with every breath another memory cascaded back to me, as they do now, buffeted by emotions I’d held back, so that it seemed like every second was a year of my life. I concentrated on what I knew was true: Molly and I were as dead as our daughter, our chances of being anything more to each other save for painful memories was over. These drawings, these pictures—the clinical dispersion of all my dead children—were useless. The instant they were made, the very moment I drew them, their quantification stopped mattering. I turned around and went back to the guest room and stuffed the pictures beneath the bed, figuring I would tell Molly that I’d lost them, had forgotten them, and had decided that the life of our child, while fragile, didn’t need to be understood. It was what it was.

  There was a knock at the door. I heard Molly get up from the table and walk to the front door.

  “Bruce,” Molly said. “I told you not to come tonight.”

  “I had to see you,” he said.

  “It’s almost midnight,” Molly said.

  “Is he here?” Bruce said. “I know he’s here.”

  “Go home,” Molly said. “None of this concerns you.”

  “You concern me,” he said.

  “I want you out of my home, Bruce,” Molly said.

  I stood there in the hallway and listened to silence. I thought I could hear Bruce Duper breathing, panting, preparing to charge.

  “Are you going to be okay with him here?” Bruce said finally.

  “I’m by myself,” she said. “And I’m fine.”

  “You look like you’ve been crying,” he said.

  “I’m coming down with something,” she said. “I’m just very tired.”

  “Maybe you’ve just decided to give me up,” Bruce said. “Maybe that’s it?”

  “It’s late,” Molly said.

  “My attitude about this has changed,” Bruce said. He sounded whimsical, almost. Like he’d read a book about how to fall into and out of love. “You know, it was kinda hazy at first, dreamlike. I felt like things were really happening between you and me. I was always excited. Have you ever felt like that?”

  “Of course,” Molly said softly.

  “Both of us miserable,” he said.

  “You’ve been drinking,” Molly said.

  “Does it even matter?” Bruce said. “You know how I’ve felt about you for over a year. That’s a big chunk of both of our lives. Here I am, drunk on the porch. Why do you think men do such stupid things? This isn’t the way to make you happy, is it?” I stepped around the corner into the kitchen and peeked out into the living room. Bruce was standing in the doorframe. He had on a pair of blue jeans and a flannel shirt. He’d tugged a baseball cap over his ears, the bill just above his eyes, and it made his head look shrunken. “Anyway, I guess this doesn’t have to be the end. I can just keep on doing what I’m doing. Right, Molly?”

  “I want you to leave,” she said.

  “My judgment’s all messed up,” Bruce said. “I’m awful sorry about all of this.” He rocked back on his heels and I heard him sigh. He looked lost, like everything he’d ever wanted had just trickled between his fingers. “I can call the sheriff if you want me to. He knows Paul’s been creeping around here off and on.”

  “He’s not here,” Molly said.

  “I guess that car parked out back is someone else’s,” Bruce said, and then both of them were quiet again. I thought I should just walk into the living room and say hello, shake hands with Bruce, thank him for being kind to my wife in my absence. “I’m sorry, Molly, I really am. I’ve been drinking all night like some dumb kid. I’ll probably drown on my way back. I’m just not together on this. You’ve turned me inside out.”

  Molly exhaled audibly. “Just stay here for a minute, okay?” she said. “Don’t go anywhere.” When she closed the door, I stepped out of the kitchen.

  “I’ll go,” I said.

  “No,” she whispered. “He’s drunk. I’m just going to put him to bed. He’s in no condition to go back across the lake.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Molly nibbled on her thumbnail for a moment. It reminded me of the moment I first knew I loved her; back in her dorm room, on the floor, her hair in a ponytail. So beautiful. So precious.

  “Paul, what’s wrong,” Molly said. She had her hand on my arm. “Open your eyes.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I was just concentrating.”

  “Go out back,” she said. “Just wait out back for a few minutes. Let me put Bruce into bed.”

  “Does he love you?” I asked. We were standing at the back door.

  “It’s not always about love,” Molly said. “Why is it always about love with you? Can’t he just hurt?” She was whispering, but I could tell that Molly wanted to scream. “I’m sorry about it. I’m sorry he’s here. It’s my fault. He feels very strongly about me. He cares about me. I’m just not ready for that kind of thing.”

  “Then he does,” I said. Molly put her head down and just shook it, though I could tell she wasn’t really mad. Just frustrated and sad. “I’ll wait then. Let me know when I can come back inside.”

  I stood there in the dark and paced. It felt like everything was at stake that my life had changed perceptibly in the last fifteen minutes. So Bruce Duper was in love with my wife? What was the difference? Ginny loved me and I had already determined that I was going to try to reciprocate. The difference was that Bruce didn’t understand the depth of our relationship, couldn’t possibly understand that life and death had forgotten how to act when Molly and I were together. Bruce didn’t know that I’d already been opened up wide and that my world had a tendency to hang on a tipping axis. He didn’t know that I thought that I was finally seeing things clearly. That I was turning a corner.

  He didn’t know that I’d stopped taking my medication and that I was standing outside breaking down the words he spoke to my wife into symbols, cutting rough edges off of some letters, turning others over in my mind, flipping sounds around until they were unintelligible, until there was nothing left: until Bruce Duper failed to exist to me.

  Chapter 15

  My mother told me before she died that she thought I had turned out all right, that I’d been a troubling boy but had turned into a loving husband, a good father. “And a good son,” she said. I was sitting next to her on a couch in the living room of my childhood home in Walnut Creek. Dad had brought her home the day before, after it had become pointless to keep her in the hospital.

  “I’m sorry if I caused you grief,” I said.

  “There’s not a worry in me anymore,” she said. A hospice nurse was lingering nearby, watching the levels of morphine in the IV drip she’d hooked up to my mom. She caught my eye and smiled wanly. I thought then what a great sacrifice one must make to choose death as a means of living. To be a nurse, or a doctor, or an anthropologist, you must decide early on that you are working toward a greater good.

  “I know I scared you,” I said. “I never meant to.”

  “I’m still willing to try,” she said. I looked up again and the nurse was staring at me.

  “It’s the morphine,” the nurse said. “Just keep talking to her.”

  “Sunday mornings were the best,” Mom said suddenly, though her eyes were closed. “That was real family time, wasn’t it? We had fun sometimes.”

  “Always,” I said.

  “Your father wanted to abort you,” she said. “We’d failed so many times, he didn’t want to go through that again. I didn’t blame him. But it was illegal.”

  My dad was in the kitchen with Molly, playing with Katrina.

  “You just rest now, Mrs. Luden,” the nurse said.

  Mom stopped talking then, as if on cue. Her chest was heaving but no air seemed to be coming into or out of her.

  “Is she okay?” I said.

 
The nurse adjusted the pillows beneath my mother’s head and fixed her blankets before answering me. “No,” she said. “I’m afraid not.”

  “How much of that morphine can she take?”

  “As much as she’d like,” the nurse said. She was an older black woman with a tight wrinkled quality to her skin, as though she’d been stretched to the point of breaking, and then released. “It has a disorienting effect. Not everything she says will make perfect sense.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m a big boy.”

  The nurse sat down on a folding chair we’d brought in from the garage and picked up a magazine from the coffee table but didn’t open it.

  “What do you do?” she said.

  “I’m a teacher,” I said.

  “That’s a good job,” she said.

  “When do you think she’ll die?”

  The nurse looked at my mother kindly, like this was the toughest thing she’d ever witnessed. “Hard to say,” she said. “Never can tell when a person is ready to go. Sometimes they hold out to see a relative or to tell someone something. Folks got a lot of claim over their souls, I think. Your mom seems strong. Maybe a week?”

  “You really believe that?” I said. “About the souls?”

  “I’ve seen some things in this job,” she said, and I believed her. If you spend enough time around sick people, I found out much later on, the most unbelievable things become just like real life.

  “Do you think everyone has a soul?” I said. “There’s some awful people in this world.”

  “I believe everyone is human,” she said. “No boogie men, if you know what I’m saying. That’s what separates you and me and your mom here from, say, a dog or monkey. We got spirit. So if you’re a murderer or, say, a nurse like me, God got a place for you. Don’t mean it has to be a nice place.”

  My mom opened her eyes then and coughed hard. “You all right, miss?” the nurse said.

  “I’d like some water,” my mom said and then went right back to sleep.

  “She’s got a lot of spirit,” the nurse said.

  “What about me?”

  “You’re a mixed bag,” she said and laughed. So did I. “Oh, this is a trying time. You’ll be all right. You got a family. That always helps. I guess you’ve known your mother was gonna pass for some time now, anyway. That helps prepare you. But once it comes down for real, when it’s upon you like this here, it gets kinda mealy. Can’t let it consume you, I’d say. But you seem like you know that.”

  “I guess then I do,” I said after a while. “A week, then. Seven whole days and nights.”

  “Twenty-four hours in each of them,” she said. She’d opened up the magazine on her lap and was flipping absently through the pages, not really reading anything.

  My mother died that night. We sat around her body for a long time, not talking or crying or calling anybody on the phone. The nurse had left us alone to call the proper authorities and then had just stayed in the kitchen.

  “She looks peaceful, doesn’t she?” my dad said.

  “She does,” I said.

  “Like she can finally sleep.”

  “It’s been a long time since she’s had a decent rest,” I said.

  “I wish Katrina had gotten a chance to know her,” Dad said to Molly. “It’s good to have grandparents.”

  “We’ll tell Katrina all about her,” Molly said. Dad leaned over and patted Molly’s foot. It was one of the only times I ever saw him touch her.

  “I’ll say this,” Dad said. “You never knew her like I did, Paul. It’s a shame. She was a hard woman to understand, had some strange ideas and such, but she loved you dearly. Worried about you constantly.”

  “I know that,” I said and then we were all silent again until there was a knock on the door and the nurse let in two men from the funeral home.

  “You’ll fix her up, right?” Dad said to the men. “You’ll make her look beautiful again?”

  “Of course, sir,” one of them said.

  “I’d like to kiss her,” Dad said to no one in particular and then did, slowly, on her lips and forehead and then he took her hands and rubbed them along his cheek.

  AFTER THEY CAME and took my mother that night, I sat on the front porch with my father and watched him smoke a cigar. It was late, near midnight, and a spectral fog had rolled in, giving everything a soft, gloomy edge.

  “Mom said you wanted me aborted,” I said. “Is that true?”

  Dad sucked on his cigar until the tip glowed red and then exhaled slowly. “It was a different time. We’d had so many problems. I didn’t want the disappointment again.”

  “How close did it come?”

  Dad stared into the fog for a time before he answered me. “We tried to get it done, but you were too far along. We drove into Mexico, got all the way into the waiting room of a clinic there before we turned around.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “She felt you kick,” Dad said. “That’s all we needed. You were born three months later.”

  “Did you ever regret not staying?”

  Dad blew a stream of smoke through his nose and then stood up and stretched his arms high above his head. He looked old to me, like he might not last another hour. “This is a happy day,” he said. “Your mother is at rest and you have your entire life in front of you. Everything is wide open for you now. No lines keeping you tethered anymore. Why not just forget about the bad stuff, Paul? Why let it inhabit your life?”

  “I can’t get rid of it,” I said. “It’s who I am now. It’s who I’ve always been.”

  “That’s not true,” he said. He sounded at once tired and angry; as if this was a conversation he’d had before and had not liked how it ended. “This is how you’ve made yourself. You weren’t born into despair. The choices you’ve made stink on you like a dead skunk.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “If you knew the trouble we went through just to have you,” he said and then just stopped. Molly had walked out onto the porch with Katrina awake in her arms and neither of us had even noticed.

  “We were just talking,” I said.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt,” she said.

  “It’s all right,” Dad said. “We were through.” He went inside and went to bed.

  I’d see my father alive three times after that night, once at the funeral for my mother, once at the funeral for Katrina, and once, oddly, at the airport in Spokane a few days before he, too, died. Katrina had been gone for over a year. I’d flown into Spokane to watch Molly. We passed each other like strangers, both of us stopping a few yards away.

  “I didn’t see you,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t see you either.”

  “This is a surprise,” he said. We hadn’t spoken since Katrina’s funeral.

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  “I’m on a layover,” he said. “I’m flying to Canada. British Columbia.”

  “It’s nice this time of year,” I said. He looked worried and at once expectant, as though this moment were filled with possibilities for him. “Are you meeting someone?”

  My dad blushed. “Yes,” he said. “I met her online. We’ve been spending a good deal of time together.”

  “That’s good for you,” I said. “You’re still a young man.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Molly and I are going to give it another go,” I lied, though I believed that then. “See if we can fix things.”

  “You owe her that.” A plane filled with passengers coming back from Hawaii was disembarking around us. Everyone was wearing floral print shirts, straw hats, flip-flops. My dad was wearing a suit and tie. “People used to know how to dress when they traveled,” he said.

  “A lot of things have changed,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “You look well, though. You look great. Like you are really happy. Are you really happy, Paul?”

  “I’m not,” I said.

&nb
sp; “No,” he said. “I suppose you aren’t.”

  Reunited families were hugging each other all around us and I could tell my father felt uncomfortable.

  “You must have a plane to catch,” I said.

  “You should try and become happy, Paul,” Dad said. “You’ve spent your whole life like this. But, you know, you still have time, you can still decide to make something positive out of all of this. That’s what I’m doing. I’m living again. It feels good, son, it feels mighty good.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “Are you going to marry this woman?”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that sort of thing,” he said. “I still love your mother a great deal. Like you must still love Molly.”

  “Molly’s still here,” I said. “I guess the challenge for me is to just make things right.” Dad didn’t respond. He’d pushed himself onto his tiptoes and was looking out into a crowd of people coming down the concourse.

  “She should be here anytime now,” he muttered after the group had passed us.

  “I’d like to meet her,” I said.

  Dad grimaced then like he’d been stuck with a cattle prod. “She doesn’t know about my old life,” he said. “I figured that she wouldn’t want to be burdened with the details. It feels good. To her I’m not a widower or the manager of a restaurant. It’s like an adventure. I can be whomever I want. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “I’m happy for the first time in a long time,” he said and then he took my hand in his and shook it. “It was good to see you. You look good. You look like you’re on your way to becoming happy.”

  “I am then,” I said. My dad’s hand was trembling and I got the sense that this was just how he’d wanted this conversation to go, whenever he had it with me. “I’m better in all possible ways.”

  My dad let go of my hand and patted me once on the back as if we were old friends, our meeting shaped strictly by chance. “You give Molly and Katrina all my love,” he said, not catching his slip, and then he just backed away smiling, like I was a distant shadow from a life he’d completely vacated. If I’d known then that he only had a few more days to live, I might have told him that I loved him and that I was sorry I’d made such a mess of things. I might have said that I’d like another chance to grow up with him and Mom, in a different time and under different circumstances.