Living Dead Girl (16 page)

“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 they 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.

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.