Living Dead Girl (22 page)

“Had you come up before?”

Yes, I think. Every year. “I don’t know.”

Sheriff Drew’s boat is getting closer and I can make out three figures on board. Poor Ginny, I think. She never had a chance.

“I want you to think real hard about what might have happened,” Bruce says. “I was with Molly on the anniversary. I spent the night and went back across in the morning. She was alive when I left, Paul.”

“This can’t be happening,” I say, but I know that indeed it can, that I am capable of things.

I walk the length of the dock and try to reconcile myself with a memory that refuses to exist. Yes, I must have hurt her. I tell myself that I must have driven up through California, Oregon, Washington, as I had so many times before, in a sleepless drip of space. I must have watched her from my perch in the woods as she walked through the house in cut-off jeans and a tank top. Must have seen her dusting the living room, pausing over pictures of Katrina, holding the picture to her lips, kissing it. I must have seen her speaking to the picture, telling Katrina how much she missed her, how one day they’d be together again. She must have stood in the kitchen and boiled water for tea, hummed a song just beneath her breath, and dabbed at her eyes. It had been three years since our daughter had passed, an anniversary of despair. I must have circled the house, feeling bolder than I ever had, feeling like today of all days I had to be near the only person who mattered to me. Yes, I tell myself. Yes, this is exactly what happened. I must have stood in the shadows and watched Bruce stumble down the dock, the stench of alcohol slipping from his pores, from the air he exhaled when he crossed right beside me, never feeling my presence because I was no longer
opaque, had transformed into another kind of beast altogether.

“I saw you walking down the dock,” I say. “You were drunk and you could hardly walk. You were wearing a baseball cap. I remember that. You and Molly argued.”

“That’s right,” he says. “We were fighting about you.”

I try to imagine what Molly’s life might have been like with Bruce Duper. I imagine them speaking, holding each other, making plans. It would have been good for Molly to live with him. He would have made her happy, I think, and she deserved that.

I must have listened to Bruce and Molly argue at the door, must have seen how they loved each other, knew that time and consequence had finally converged, that there were no more words to describe suffering in my lexicon, no more symbols or formulas to delineate guilt and innocence in matters of the heart. Katrina was gone. Molly was lost to me forever. Another person had claimed her, made her his, had experienced emotions that belonged to me alone. I must have heard Molly invite Bruce in, listened as she quietly closed and latched the door, waited until the lights were turned off in the bedroom before I slid in the backdoor and through the rooms of my former life, pausing to smell the wood floors, touching the walls,
letting the house melt into me, trusting my habitat. I would have closed my eyes in the darkness of the living room and heard Molly and Bruce sleeping, living. I would have known there were no more chances in this world. While I was an animal capable of great care and concern, I’d reached a terminal point.

“I watched you sleep,” I say. I pace back to the end of the dock and stand beside Bruce. “I snuck in the house and watched you and Molly in bed.”

Sheriff Drew’s voice radiates across the water from a bullhorn on his boat.
“Stay right there! Bruce, keep him right there!”

Yes, I think, I must have walked into Molly’s bedroom and seen her in bed with Bruce Duper, must have looked at her sleeping body like a preying mantis looks at its mate after sex. I must have wanted to devour her, to make her part of me forever.

“The next morning,” I say, “I heard you tell Molly to get rid of me. You were holding papers in your hand. Do you remember that?”

“I do,” Bruce says sadly. “They were court papers. She’d filed for divorce but had never mailed them to you. She thought they’d put you over the edge.”

“They would have,” I say. They have. They are.

“Do you know where she is, Paul?”

“I couldn’t hurt her,” I say. “Could I?”

I can’t imagine what I must have done to her. There is not a way for me to quantify what I know must have occurred. I have seen rage throughout the annals of history, yet have no concept how it would manifest itself in me.

The truth, however, is that man has a rich history of brutalizing the ones he loves.

I must have spent that night in the woods planning, thinking, devising. I must have waited until he’d left, reasoned that my anger was not at Bruce but with Molly. The biggest mistake Bruce had made was loving a woman he couldn’t completely have. He had started to drink because of it. I had forgotten how decent he was, how honestly he’d lived, how perfect and amiable his existence was without her.

Maybe I walked back inside and smelled him in the folds of the drapes, in the hemlock cones and the cedar leaves and had gone into the kind of rage only a man like myself can: a blind destruction that empties the very corridors that I’m only now able to see.

As I stand beside Bruce Duper’s bearlike frame, I admire him, his courage to take a chance with Molly, no matter the consequence. Even if the truth were that she’d never know him as perfectly as she knew me, he was willing. He was willing to do anything to satisfy his desire.

“I’m proud that you loved my wife,” I say.

“Where is she?” Bruce says, grabbing me now by the arms. I can smell his anger, can taste it in the back of my throat. “Where did you put her?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

The human brain decides so much for you: it can black out entire childhoods; it can swallow years of adulthood. Perhaps my brain has done what it has always done: turned the traumatic into silken strips of memory. Love and anger, like science and religion—or even illness—are often guided by arbitrary factors. In the end nothing is fixed, every known variable can have a separate unknown. Once you step outside your own life and examine the world, everything seems like a paralyzing addition and subtraction that never quite computes.

Chapter 18

I
can’t be sure what I believed after I came back to LA three weeks ago, because it is still lost to me. Perhaps Ginny knows. Perhaps she can tell me what to believe about myself, because I remember being happy to see her. I remember thinking that I was on a path toward life on a grander scale, that I’d actually become happy, had finally become something other than what I am. Perhaps for the briefest of times I was beautiful: a complete human who could go on living his life, could keep up the pretenses that days, weeks, years of his life hadn’t completely dissipated.

“Is she in the woods?” Bruce asks. “You buried her, didn’t you?”

“Keep him still,”
Sheriff Drew shouts. I turn and see him there in his boat and I think that my endings and my beginnings are all the same: that they are ripples
in the fabric of my life that crash again and again on the same shore. “Be a gentleman now, Paul. Everything is going to be fine. We’re going to get this all settled.”

His words are like sediment in my mind. Sheriff Drew runs after me in the forest, back down this very dock. Molly shouts for me just to stop, please stop. And here I come with my girl in my arms, sprinting past where I stand now and diving into the water, my body twisting, turning, sinking to the bottom.

“No,” I say to Bruce. “I did not bury her. I know exactly where she is.” Bruce’s eyes widen and I feel his grip on my arm tighten. “She has always been right here.”

Sheriff Drew steps off his boat followed by Ginny and Leo. I hear Ginny’s voice, but I cannot make out her words for the roaring in my ears. At some point Ginny will understand that I was incapable of being more than who I am. Maybe, at that point, she’ll forgive me for what I’ve taken from her.

The truth is, I’m saved.

Sheriff Drew walks toward me with his palms up. “Just stay right there. Everything is going to be fine. Just stay where you are.”

The truth is that I never was meant to live.

I must have hurt her. I must have brought her back
here, to this dock. I must have done for her as I tried to do for Katrina. I must have tried to bring her back.

“I hurt my wife,” I say.

“We know, Paul,” Sheriff Drew says. I take a step backward and the sheriff moves his hand toward his gun. “Easy there. Easy.”

“I know where she is,” I say.

“Hold him, Bruce,” Sheriff Drew says.

I tilt my head back and feel the breeze off the lake and think that this is the moment I’ve waited for my entire life.

“Baby,” Ginny says. “Stop moving, please!”

I turn and look at Bruce to let him know that it’s okay, that I’ve found the love of his life as well, that we all can be put to rest, but his face is somehow gone—blank—missing even the smallest hint of humanity

I take another step and Bruce releases me. I’m floating in the air, surrounded by glory, and I’m no longer afraid, no longer confused. For the first time in my entire life, I know who I am, know where I’m going, and maybe I’ll come back one day or maybe I’ll drift into the ether. Maybe I’ll be born into another life in another time.

The water rushes up around me as I sink. Yes, I think, this is what I have always deserved; I am going back to the water, back to knowing peace. I open my
eyes to see it, to see everything I’ve done wrong, to understand that death is but a necessary step.

And I find her.

Beneath the dock, Molly is wrapped in a comforter we purchased two days before Katrina was born, and is weighed down by our old Evinrude engine, an engine Jersey Simpkins had sold us, even when he knew it was temperamental.

An engine I saw when I was here three weeks ago, attached to our boat.

An engine Molly said Bruce Duper took care of.

An engine that Bruce Duper told me he’d removed from our Whaler.

I scream and all the air in my lungs rushes out and I know that it couldn’t have been me. I flail away at the water and know that I have tied my life to memories that never existed.

Bruce Duper has killed my wife and buried her beneath my dock.

Molly’s hair fans out and dances in the current and for a moment I think that everything is perfect, that Molly is as beautiful now as she will ever be. I crane my head back and stare at the surface of the lake. The sun cuts serrated lines through the water and then I am rising into the sun, my body pulled toward the surface.

“Help me get him up,” Sheriff Drew screams.

I feel arms around my chest, under my shoulders, pulling my arms.

“Get him onto the dock.”

Ginny and Leo yank me out of the water and lay me flat on the wooden slats.

“She’s down there,” I say.

“Sit him up,” Sheriff Drew says and Leo pulls me forward. The horizon rises and dips before me and I think that maybe I am hallucinating all of this, or that I’m asleep somewhere and that I will wake up in another world.

“He pinned her down with our Evinrude.”

“What?” Sheriff Drew says. “What are you saying?”

I turn and look for Bruce and find him standing beside me, staring motionless into the water. “On the Whaler,” I say, pointing toward my boat. “He put that Johnson on, see? She’s pinned under the dock, Sheriff. He pinned her under the dock with our Evinrude.”

“Calm down,” Leo says. “Okay? We’ll get this sorted out.”

Sheriff Drew walks over to the Whaler and inspects the engine. “Goddamn,” he says. “That’s a brand new engine. Bruce, is that true? Did you put this engine on her boat?”

“She was all alone out here,” Bruce says quietly, his
back still turned to the sheriff. “You would have done the same thing, Morris.”

“When did you buy this engine?” Sheriff Drew asks.

“I don’t recall,” Bruce says.

“I didn’t kill her,” I say to Ginny. “I never hurt her.” Ginny brushes hair from my eyes and I see that she is frowning, that her face is older now, smaller, and for a moment I’m not sure I’m seeing anything, not sure my eyes are even open.

“Paul was here constantly, you know that, Morris.” Bruce turns around and faces the sheriff and I see something change in him, see a difference in his posture, see that the animal is gone from him, has left him with a cracking shell. “We used to find his footprints in the dirt, used to hear him talking to himself out in the trees. All I did was change out an engine, Morris. That’s all I ever did.”

“I’m sure that’s right,” Sheriff Drew says. He’s walking slowly toward Bruce now, his gait easy and familiar and I think that I have seen this before, a few days ago, as he came to question me. “But a man starts drinking too much, that affects him, doesn’t it? You’d agree with that, wouldn’t you, Bruce? You remember how your father got, don’t you? Now just tell me when it was you bought that engine and we can all get out of here. Safe and sound.”

Bruce stares at me, and I think he wants to cry, wants to sit down beside me and weep for a woman neither of us could have, his love for her useless now. He isn’t a bear at all. He is human as much or as little as I am.

“She was already dead,” Bruce says. He is looking at me but talking to the sheriff. “You know that? She was a ghost. I wanted to help her. I wanted to make her see things.”

“You could have,” I say.

“All we wanted was for you to be out of our lives,” Bruce says. “All I ever wanted was to be hers alone.”

“You don’t have to say anything else, Bruce,” Sheriff Drew says. “You’ve got rights.”

“Why couldn’t you have just stayed away?” Bruce says. “Why couldn’t you change? You had the chance. You had every chance.”

“She is all I ever wanted,” I say.

GINNY WALKS ME
back into my house while Leo and Sheriff Drew take Bruce across the lake. She lays me down on the bed and rests her hands soft against my face. Less than fifty yards away, Molly waits for me. “Will they bring her back up?” I say.

“Of course, Paul,” Ginny says. “People are on the way right now. Just be still for me, okay baby?”

“Will they make her beautiful again?”