Living Dead Girl

by Elizabeth Scott

  Here’s a tip: leave no evidence behind.

  15

  ONCE UPON A TIME, A LITTLE GIRL who lived at 623 Daisy Lane disappeared. The police questioned everyone, even a woman who remembered talking to a man whose little boy had already gone out into the parking lot. She remembered because he asked where the gift shop was and said thank you after she told him.

  “No one says thank you anymore,” she told the police. “No one’s ever grateful for anything.”

  Ray let me watch her say that on TV, and then turned it off and smiled at me.

  16

  I GET HOME AT FIVE, WHICH IS AFTER Ray gets home. He works 7–4 every day, with an hour for lunch, loading trucks at a warehouse that ships boxes of ready-to-assemble furniture, the kind that comes with picture instructions and lots of little screws. All our furniture is from there, and all of it leans to one side, manufacturer seconds.

  Errors.

  My hands are shaking as I close the door behind me.

  “What happened?” Ray says. He’s still eating his apple. Crunch, crunch, crunch.

  “Bus broke down. We had to wait.” I sit down at the kitchen table to be judged.

  “What bus?”

  “75.”

  He calls the bus company. I watch him throw his apple away. There is still some flesh left, white around the tiny core. I am too nervous to imagine eating it. Also, for once, I am not hungry.

  I have not brushed my teeth. I will smell like food.

  And Ray will smell it on me.

  I look at the knife on the kitchen counter and picture it in my chest. I don’t think it would take long for my heart to stop beating.

  “All right, thank you,” Ray says, and hangs up the phone. He looks at me. “I’m glad you didn’t lie to me about the bus, Alice.”

  I nod. Look right at him.

  Does he know about the food?

  “Do you have a receipt?”

  I fish it out of my pocket and hand it to him. He looks at it, and then throws it in the trash. “Hungry?”

  I nod.

  Does he know about the food?

  He opens the refrigerator. It is the loudest thing in our apartment, makes odd wheezing noises, like it is struggling to stay cold. “You know what will happen if you ever do lie to me, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” he says, and slides me a fun-sized container of yogurt. The top promises it’s the perfect lunch for children. “Because I would hate to take time off work to drive all the way to 623 Daisy Lane and wait for everyone to come home and … take care of things. Helen and Glenn both have new jobs. Did you know that? Do you want to know where they work?”

  I shake my head. I open my yogurt. Ray doesn’t give me a spoon so I scoop some out with my fingers. My breath will smell okay now.

  “I’d hate for them to come home and find me there, waiting for them,” he says. “I’d hate for your parents to die because of you.”

  “I didn’t lie to you about the bus,” I say.

  “I know, silly girl. My girl,” he says, and stands up, unbuckles his belt. Opens his pants. “Come over here. Give me a kiss hello.”

  I get up and walk over to him. He frowns and I hunch over so I barely come up to his shoulder.

  “Alice, my baby,” he says, kissing my cheek.

  Then he shoves me to my knees.

  When he’s finished, he throws the rest of my yogurt away.

  “It spoils so easily,” he says. “I wouldn’t want you to get sick. Let’s go watch TV.”

  We do. He drinks beer and orders a pizza and puts me on his lap during the sitcom he hates. I am hungry again now, think of food; hot dogs, candy bars, the pizza crusts inside the box on the floor.

  Ray likes how smooth I am, how raw my skin is. It burns by the time he’s done touching it.

  “No breakfast tomorrow,” he says afterward. “I think you might be over 100 pounds. That’s not acceptable.”

  At bedtime, he rumples his sheets—we have a two-bedroom apartment, because we are father and daughter and he wants to take care of me, wants me to have my own room like other little girls—and then crawls into my tiny bed with me. My sheets have pictures of cartoon princesses on them, with pink trim and a matching pink comforter.

  “Love you,” he says before he falls asleep. I am so hungry my head hurts with it, making me slow, and he pinches my thigh, hard.

  “Love you too,” I say, but it is too late and he holds me down, breathing hard and fast.

  “Show me,” he says. “Show me.”

  So I do.

  17

  RAY GETS UP AT 6, SHOWERS AND dresses. He whistles while he shaves, and I listen for the clanking hum of the refrigerator, count out its wheezing rhythm. 1, 2, 3 . . . . . . 4. 1, 2, 3 . . . . . . 4.

  Ray tried to teach me how to whistle once, in one of his better moods, but I could never pick it up. He said he still loved me anyway.

  Lucky me.

  “No breakfast, remember?” he says, sitting down next to me on the bed, one paternal hand on my forehead while the other gropes below. He keeps it up until he starts to sweat, little beads of moisture gathering at his temples, and then gets up.

  Every Sunday we go to Freedom Church. Ray believes in God, and in looking at all the little girls in their Sunday best, ribbons and bows and tiny socks with lace on them.

  The day I got too tall to wear the white dress with short, puffy sleeves and little tucks along the chest, he filled the kitchen sink with water and shoved my head into it.

  I was thirteen then, and when I tried to stay down after he’d held me there, lungs burning, inside of my head going dark, he hauled me out and slapped me so hard the right side of my face grew a hand-shaped bruise, jaw to forehead. I couldn’t go outside for a week.

  No one missed me.

  Two days later, when my face was still swollen hot, he came home with a lock of my mother’s hair. He wouldn’t tell me how he got it, even when I cried and crawled onto his lap to beg the way he likes best.

  He just said, “I decide everything. Remember that.”

  God and monster all in one, and mine to worship.

  I tell him to have a good day before he leaves my room, and he turns back to grin, proud.

  “I look good today, don’t I?”

  I nod. He looks like Ray. There are no words for what he looks like to me.

  He whistles again as he leaves.

  I close my eyes.

  There are several women at Freedom Church who think Ray is attractive, with his full head of hair and carefully pressed clothes. They like that he is so strict with me, they say when they talk to him, his hand resting on my shoulder (remember what I will do if you ever try to leave me, remember who you belong to). Their eyes gleam with hope. They want to be taken care of, and they think Ray could do that for them.

  He laughs at them on the way home, laughs at how old and sad they are. “Not like me,” he says, and then rests one hand on my knee. “Not like you.”

  18

  EVENTUALLY I GET OUT OF BED AND walk to the bathroom. We don’t have a tub, just a shower, but I ignore it and brush my teeth, swallowing the toothpaste instead of spitting it out. I hear it can be poisonous, but I guess it’s only if you’re really young.

  I am 15 now, and I keep waiting for Ray to tire of me. I am no longer short with dimpled knees and frightened eyes. I am almost as tall as he is, and his license says he is 5′7″. He likes the picture. He says no one ever takes a good driver’s license picture except him.

  I am 15 and stretched out, no more than 100 pounds. I can never weigh more than that. It keeps my breasts tiny, my hips narrow, my thighs the size Ray likes.

  I am 15 and worn out, tired of everything.

  I am 15, and I figure soon he will let me go.

  19

  THERE WAS ANOTHER ALICE BEFORE me. Ray let her go when she turned 15.

  He drove her all the way back to where she used to live, to where she was when she was another gir
l, back to her before.

  Her body was found in a river, floating downstream just a mile from the house she grew up in.

  Ray used to tell me this story a lot, pulling me close and saying, “But I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen to you. I’ll keep you safe. All you have to do is be good. Be my little girl forever. You can do that, can’t you?”

  I am 15, and I figure soon Ray will kill me.

  I could run, but he would find me. He would take me back to 623 Daisy Lane and make everyone who lives there pay.

  He would make everyone there pay even if he didn’t find me. I belong to him. I’m his little girl.

  All I have to do is be good.

  20

  THIS IS MY DAY:

  After I chew on some toothpaste, I go into the living room and turn on the television. Morning television is boring, all bad news and infomercials, but at nine the talk shows start. I lie on the sofa and look at the ceiling.

  Sometimes, in the afternoon, if the soaps aren’t any good, I’ll watch movies about angry, scared women who fight back or teenage girls who suffer but then overcome. There are always shower scenes in them, shots of the women scrubbing their abuse or grief away.

  I don’t understand this. You can’t make yourself clean like that, and fresh-scrubbed skin only invites attention. Ray makes me shower once a week, and I hate coming out of the bathroom. I hate knowing he’s waiting for me, that he will rub his hands and himself all over me and whisper things. His hands used to make me cry, but now I’m used to them.

  The thing is, you can get used to anything. You think you can’t, you want to die, but you don’t. You won’t. You just are.

  Today I smell like Ray, which is normal, and a little like yesterday’s wax. My head itches, and I scratch it until the undersides of my fingernails are bright red. I flick the blood and dead bits of my head onto the floor, and get up to take my pills.

  Ray doesn’t want me getting pimples or my period, and so he makes me take a pill for both every day. The one for pimples dries out my skin, and makes the sun blotch me angry red. The one to prevent my period does just that, and although the ads on TV say it just makes your period less painful, I never get mine.

  I don’t ask Ray why.

  I only got my period once, late last year, and Ray got so angry he took out a knife and made me sit on a chair in the corner of the living room. He looked at me for a long, long time, and then tied me to the chair and left me there until the bleeding stopped. He wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t look at me. Food and water once a day, a trip to the bathroom each morning and night. One time, I stood up and blood dripped down my leg and onto the carpet and he threw up.

  And then he rubbed my face in it.

  When the bleeding stopped he made me scrub myself, the chair, the carpet all around it, and then he threw the chair out and gave me the pills.

  “We can work this out,” he’d said, and cradled me in his arms, my legs cramping from being curled up so I’d fit on his lap. “You’re my Alice. You’re my little girl. You’re all I’ll ever want.”

  21

  RAY MET THE ALICE BEFORE ME WHEN he was nineteen and she was eight. He keeps the newspaper clippings from when the police found her body, from the funeral and afterward. Sometimes when he reads them he touches the picture of her in the article, black and white photo of a little lost girl, and cries.

  He cries and says he’s sorry, so sorry, and do I forgive him? Head on my lap, breath hot on my thighs.

  I say yes for her. I say yes and used to figure out how many days until I was fifteen while he hunched over me.

  Now it’s here, all those days have passed, and I can’t help but wonder what he’s waiting for.

  22

  TODAY IS A GOOD DAY ON THE TALK shows, and I sit and watch people cry and fight over who fathered their baby and why they love their cousin and how their moms dress like whores. The audience is always so excited, so happy with all the misery.

  Sometimes the shows will have on older women with lost eyes and round faces who cry about being abused when they were younger. They call their Rays names and scream, and the host pats their shoulders or gives them a fast one-armed hug and says things like, “But you survived. You’re strong.” Then they will ask why they didn’t say anything.

  Why didn’t you tell someone?

  Why didn’t you ask for help?

  Why didn’t you leave him?

  Why didn’t you respect yourself enough to get away?

  The women usually crumple, shed their flesh shells, and become quivering living dead girls, trapped. A few will say that no one listens, that people don’t want to see, and that if you try something, anything, you won’t suffer but others will.

  The audience always boos and says You Should Have Done Something. You should have fought back. You should have known no one has that kind of power. You should have been strong.

  You shouldn’t have been so stupid.

  The women nod and sniffle. They are still broken. They still agree with everything anyone wants. Even the ones who try to explain end up with their heads down, their hands in their laps. Little girl ready to say she’s sorry.

  All our fault, always.

  23

  THE THING IS, YOU CAN HAVE THAT kind of power, and everyone in those audiences knows it. That’s why they yell. That’s why they say You Should Have Done Something.

  They have power too.

  I’d like to see them with it taken away. I’d like to see What They’d Do then.

  24

  THE MORE BORING TALK SHOWS, THE ones with celebrities with shiny teeth and musicians who swear their songs are from the heart, are on next. I look out the window at the empty parking lot. Everyone who lives in Shady Pines Apartments works. Everyone has a busy job, long days, and comes home tired. In the five years I’ve been here, three people have learned my name, and two of them were younger, softer versions of Ray, eggs that hadn’t yet rotted. They both told me I could come over “to visit” anytime I wanted.

  The third was a woman. She was old, bent and wrinkly, and walked with a cane. She said I should be in school and asked what I was studying when I said my father taught me at home. She sometimes pooped herself and had a daughter, worried-looking and angry, come and take her away three months after she moved in.

  The old woman told Ray he was an abomination as she left, but then she also said that to the mailman and the three little boys playing on the sidewalk. Her apartment was rented by the Indian family, a man, a woman, and four little girls. I thought Ray might like the girls but he said they were ugly dark and had bad teeth.

  I see them in the hall sometimes, and they never look at me. I am smelly and strange, a dirty-haired girl who doesn’t go to school and steals food people leave half-eaten on the washing machines in the basement.

  They know I am wrong, and stay away.

  I am allowed to eat lunch and I eat yogurt during a soap opera, licking the spoon slowly and carefully, tiny mouthfuls as Storm worries she’s in love and Dessen breaks glasses because Emily broke his heart and ran off with his brother and wise Aunt Marge pats worried Henna’s hands and tells her that Craig will see that he loves her, that he just needs time. Craig was with Emily before, but now he loves Henna and I think next he will love Susan. She’s only a little girl now, but in six months she will be twenty and a doctor or a lawyer and will swear she hates him right before she kisses him.

  I love soap operas. If I lived in a town like Ridgefield, Aunt Marge would see me and invite me in and then call her daughter or son, who would be a cop or a lawyer, and they would come and rescue me and I’d live with them, and their children wouldn’t like me but would come to love me after I saved them from almost drowning or burning to death. I would never have to eat or even be hungry.

  I would always be listened to.

  25

  WHEN RAY COMES HOME AT 4:30, I pour him a glass of milk. He doesn’t believe in drinking alcohol; his mother told him it was a sin. I rub his back
and feet while he watches the judge shows that come on before the news.

  He likes Judge Hammer, who was a military judge and who yells, “Justice hurts!” when people cry during his verdicts. Today’s case is about a man who says his ex-girlfriend owes him money and took his car. Hammer tells the ex-girlfriend, who is chewing gum and leaning forward so the camera can see down her shirt, to pay up, and Ray says, “What a crock. Anyone can tell that guy is lying.”

  I nod—Ray thinks children should be seen and not heard, just like his mother taught him—and he sighs, scratches his stomach, and continues. “Did you see how he kept blinking? Classic sign. You know, I went to Alice’s funeral and talked to her parents and said I wished I knew why she’d run away all those years ago, and they had no idea she was with me because I knew not to blink like that. They had no idea how much she loved me.” He sighs. “How much I loved her.”

  He strokes my hair. “She was never as good as you.”

  I press my hands to Ray’s feet, stare at the yellow undersides of his socks. I’ve seen enough television to know Ray is missing something other than his soul. It’s like you see him, and he’s a person, but if you look close enough, you can tell that he’s not. Like underneath his skin, he’s not hollow. He’s rotted out.

  “You’re too tall, though,” he says, frowning, and pushes my hands off his feet, dragging me up toward him. Hands on my throat. “Too tall and you want to leave me, don’t you? You’d run away in a second if I let you. You wouldn’t care if everyone at 623 Daisy Lane had to die for you. So selfish.”