Living Dead Girl (12 page)

“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 trying 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.

“I’ve done some things that I don’t admire,” I say.

“You don’t have to tell us anything,” Leo says.

“Yes he does,” Ginny says. “He has a whole lot of explaining to do to me.”

“You don’t know anything about me,” I say to no one particular, but I mean it for everybody.

“Go fuck yourself,” Ginny says.

BY THE TIME
we get to Bruce’s, the wind has picked up and thick blankets of black clouds are hovering above the lake. The water is rolling with foot-tall whitecaps.

“I don’t understand why anybody lives in this state,” Leo says. We get out of Bruce’s truck and the first sprinkles of the day begin to fall. “Does it ever stop raining?”

“You’d all better stay here tonight,” Bruce says. “No use going out on the boat and getting stuck in a storm.”

“That’s very generous of you,” I say, but Bruce just nods obediently. It’s the first time I’ve spoken in almost thirty minutes.

I look at Ginny and try to smile. Her skin has paled since we arrived here and I think that the sun makes her beautiful. I think that Ginny requires the sun like a plant does: Without it, she would wither and die, a pale, limp twig.

“Do you want to take a walk?” I ask Ginny.

“Are you sick? It’s about to pour.”

“We won’t go far,” I say. “I just want to spend some time alone with you. We can talk.”

Ginny looks at Bruce and Leo like she needs approval. Neither says anything. She looks up at the sky and shakes her head. “Let me go inside and get a coat,” she says.

I CAN’T LINE
all of the events up in order, but I am beginning to see them again for what they are.

I’ve learned things about humans that astonish me. I am able to pinpoint certain places in our collective time-lines when things occurred: We moved from trees, we began hunting with simple tools, we drew pictures on the walls to tell our stories.

We’ve used pictures to convey everything from love to savagery. We’ve used them to help discover inner truths.

Molly used pictures to work out the demons, to make the choices she couldn’t make in real life. I’ve used them to demonstrate human life, the variables we have been given. To document discovery. To dissect our existence.

I thought I could figure out what was wrong with Katrina. I thought I could get a better understanding of her body if I looked at it.

I am a scientist, or at least I am training to be one. I am qualified to examine human bones and tissue for anthropological reasons.

“I want to take a sample of Katrina’s hair,” I said to Molly. It was the fifty-second straight day that the temperature had topped one hundred. “Maybe I can see something from her follicles.”

Molly sat at her easel, her brush swiping the canvas in rough strokes, as though she were conducting a symphony. She was painting a breast. She’d been painting it for three days, this single disembodied breast.

“You’re the doctor,” Molly said, not looking at me. “Does this look right to you?” She’d outlined the breast with thick, black lines. “Are the proportions correct?”

“Yes,” I said, because there were no other words I could possibly say.

I found Katrina sitting out front, her tiny hands buried in the sand. She more a wide-brimmed hat like her mother favored and her face was covered in sunblock. Her hair had grown long, well beyond her shoulders, and it fanned out softly against her back.

I sat down beside her.

“What are you doing?”

“Digging,” she said, her voice just a whisper. She curled her tongue out of her mouth in concentration,
like her mother used to do when she was painting more acceptable objects.

“I want to do something,” I said. “It won’t hurt. Not even a little. Daddy wants to find out why you don’t feel so good.”

“The heat,” she said. She picked up words and sayings like a magnet.

“I’m just going to take a little piece of your hair,” I said and she immediately swung her head around and stared at me. I thought I’d said it gently. “It’s not even going to hurt a teensy-weensy bit.”

I brought Katrina into the kitchen and set her up on the counter. Her body was covered in cysts and open sores, though when I looked at her I never saw them. I wet a comb and ran it through Katrina’s hair, avoiding the lesions that dotted her scalp.

“Cold,” Katrina said. “That’s chilly.”

“Sorry about that,” I said.

“Brrr,” Katrina said and then she giggled.

“Quiet her,” Molly said from the living room.

I used a pair of scissors Molly purchased months before, when she thought she was well, when she thought she might like to sew one day, and I trimmed the loose ends from Katrina’s wet hair. When she saw the first locks tumble to the ground, her eyes began to well up with tears.

“Don’t cry,” I said. “Even Mommy and Daddy get haircuts. You’re such a big girl now. Such a little angel.”

I scooped up a handful of hair from the floor and placed it in a petri dish filled with iodine.

“You don’t have to cry,” I said. “Everything is fine. Look.” I picked up our teakettle from the stovetop and brought it over so Katrina could see herself.

“I’m round,” she said.

“That’s just the reflection,” I said. “Look at your hair. Isn’t it pretty?”

“Like Mommy,” she said.

“That’s right,” I said. “Just like Mommy’s.” I set the teakettle down and picked my baby girl up from the counter. She wrapped her arms over my shoulders and hugged me, her damp hair against my cheek. She raised her tiny head and kissed me on my chin, where my stubble is always the softest. “I love you, Daddy,” she said.

“My little angel,” I said and it was all I could do not to break down in sobs, because I knew then what I know now: that the end had long since been determined.

Chapter 11

“D
o you love me?” Ginny says. “I mean, is there part of you that actually is still capable of that sort of thing?” We’re walking along the narrow beach below Bruce Duper’s cabin.

“I don’t know if it’s possible right now,” I say. “Nothing seems solid to me. Like this is a dream we’re all having. I know that 1 feel very strongly for you and that I will love you again. That I need to.”