Living Dead Girl

by Tod Goldberg

  We stare at each other for a moment in silence. There are two people in this room. If we were the last two humans alive on the planet, what are the odds that one of us would kill the other?

  Which one of us has the strongest animal instinct?

  Is it the hairy beast with the soft mane of brown facial hair or the anthropologist who can break down each step of the human parade?

  “We’ll need to rent a boat,” I say.

  “I already reserved you one down at the marina. No charge on it, Paul,” Bruce says. “Mom and Dad consider you guys just about family and would be sick to hear your wife was missing.”

  “I’m sure she’ll turn up,” I say. “Probably just a touch of miscommunication on all of our parts.”

  We both stand up, and when I reach out to shake Bruce’s hand, he pulls me into his body and hugs me roughly, slapping my back hard.

  He smells like orange peels.

  “Hell,” he says in a tiny whisper beside my ear.

  “It’s going to be all right,” I say because I’ve never been so close to Bruce in my life. I guess I do consider him an old friend, though his parents once told me I was going to rot in hell for trying to debunk the Bible. “Everything is going to be fine,” I say, but Bruce is crying and then I’m crying and I can’t figure out how long I’ve been away.

  Chapter 2

  She has a name. It’s Molly. When I hear her name in my head it sounds disembodied. I rarely say it out loud. Couples never do. You only hear your first name when you’ve done something wrong or when you’ve done something terribly right.

  We are not in love anymore.

  I am.

  She isn’t.

  There isn’t a date on a calendar that marks the end of us.

  There are marks on my chest that do.

  Molly and I were married in May 1990. We were both twenty-two; too young, but still older than the woman who wants to be my wife now.

  Ginny leans over the side of the boat and vomits, lake water spraying into her face.

  “Can you slow it down, Paul?” Ginny says in a tearful voice I’ve heard before. “Can you slow it fucking down!”

  “Okay, okay,” I say, but she retches again and doesn’t hear me. Our rented boat is a rectangular aluminum barge with an Evinrude outboard motor attached to the back. It’s for lake fishing and not meant for comfort. My old house is on the north side of the lake, a forty-five-minute ride by boat, a ninety-minute ride by car. The water is rough today from the wind, a cool Alaskan, and foot-tall white caps are making the boat bounce.

  “Christ,” Ginny says. I hand her a Kleenex and she wipes her face. “I didn’t realize we were river rafting. Tell me again why we couldn’t drive?”

  “Remember these details,” I say. “It will make your movie seem more real.”

  Ginny frowns. “Be kind to me, all right?”

  I try to always be kind to Ginny. She is a good student. I don’t feel compelled to root for her when she takes one of my exams. I grade her as I would any student. Her theories about evolution vacillate wildly, but in an intriguing fashion. She tries to figure out ways that Adam and Eve could have existed alongside primitive man.

  “What if Adam and Eve were Australopithecines?” she asked me once. “Couldn’t the Bible then just be an allegory about the links in our chain?”

  “Could it?” I said.

  “Be kind to me,” she said then. “Just give me an answer, not another question. My brain is about to implode.”

  I reach over now and touch her knee. “Are you going to be all right?”

  “I shouldn’t have eaten all of those doughnuts,” Ginny says.

  “It’s not much longer,” I say. “We’ll be there before the sun goes down.”

  “Fine,” Ginny says. “There’s nothing left inside me now anyway.”

  AFTER I FIRST noticed her in class, I would see Ginny everywhere I went. She would be the girl checking my groceries at Ralph’s, the woman jogging at the gym, the ingénue in the new sitcom.

  To make it clear, I’m not a dirty old man. I don’t teach school so that I can find women. And I guess it’s not really school, is it? Community college isn’t school as much as it is a weigh station. No one who wants to be an anthropologist is sitting in one of my classrooms. And no one teaching anthropology at a community college will ever be an anthropologist. The Leakeys never taught at Los Angeles Pierce College.

  But Ginny.

  She began showing up during my office hours to chat about Indiana Jones movies. She’d ask if I thought they were realistic.

  She didn’t know the difference between archaeology and anthropology. I explained it to her.

  One day she came into my office and asked me if I could drive her home since her car wouldn’t start.

  “That’s crossing a certain line,” I said. “The faculty frowns on that sort of thing, I’m afraid.”

  “I could drop your class,” she said.

  “Or you could call AAA.”

  She grinned then and started tapping her extra pinky against her front teeth, like she knew every sweet, evil thing I had in my mind whenever I saw her.

  “Tell me something, Ginny,” I said. “Do you know why you have an extra finger?”

  “It’s called polydactyly,” she said.

  “I know what it’s called.”

  “My mom told me it was because she rubbed her belly so much when she was pregnant with me,” Ginny said. “But I stopped believing that after I saw The Elephant Man and his mother thought he was deformed because of some elephant accident.”

  “When was this?”

  Ginny paused for a moment and closed her eyes. “Gosh,” she said. “I guess that was Tuesday.”

  We made love that day in the backseat of my Honda.

  Made love. That’s not right. We’ve never made love.

  Banging.

  “What did you guys do for fun out here?” Ginny says now.

  “We read,” I say. “We talked. Ate home-cooked meals.”

  “No TV?”

  “No,” I say.

  “I’d be mainlining in a month,” Ginny says, almost wistfully. “Not that you could probably score anything out here.”

  There are a few other boats on the water today, mostly fishermen. In the summer, people from Spokane usually filled the lake with house boats and water skis, but during the fall and winter the permanent residents of Granite Lake numbered under one hundred. Our house is a mile away from the closest neighbor, and now, as I see it rising behind the evergreens, I wish that I still lived in it.

  I suppose I could. I suppose if we had lawyers and accountants and screaming fights I could live here year-round. I could apply to some doctorate programs. I’d spend two weeks in southern France searching for mandible bones, two weeks at Olduvai Gorge discovering the missing link, and then the rest of the year here, piecing it all together.

  “That’s the place?” Ginny says, pointing ahead.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “I feel funny about this, Paul,” Ginny says, but she pulls out her 35mm camera anyway. “I mean, if she’s just sitting in there or something I’m going to feel like a real bitch.”

  “It’s fine,” I say, but she’s already snapping photos.

  It comes to this, finally: admitting that the worst is possible. Making a decision that you could walk into your home and it could be splattered with blood. You could see your wife dead in a heap, body twisted like they always are in those forensics programs. Your life could disintegrate in front of you, and immediately you’d need to figure out how to pick up the pieces.

  “The scenery is immense,” Ginny says. “Immense colors. Immense smells. It’s so large, isn’t it, Paul?”

  But then it’s not you at all. How could it be? How could it be anyone but this person in the boat? This person who just nods while his nineteen-year-old girlfriend-fiancée-banger is framing pictures for a movie she will never make. This person who is me.

  I TIE OUR boat to
the side of the wooden dock Molly and I built during our first summer here. Our old Boston Whaler is tied to the other side, and I think about how we had to sell Molly’s convertible Volkswagen to buy the damn thing.

  “We won’t need two cars,” Molly had said.

  “I don’t know anything about boats,” I said. “If it breaks down it’s not like I can look under the hood and figure out what’s what.”

  “That’s why God made paddles,” Molly said, and I remember loving her very much then. She was wearing overalls, and her hair was tucked under a baseball cap, and she kissed me on the forehead to let me know that our discussion was over.

  So we gave a Granite Lake old-timer named Jersey Simpkins five-thousand dollars for his fifteen-year-old Boston Whaler and figured the rest out as we went along. In time, I learned a lot about boats and about the water.

  “How do I get out of this thing?” Ginny says. She’s standing up in the middle of the barge.

  “You can’t be indecisive,” I say. “Put one foot on the dock and then step over. If you wait, you run the chance of having the boat drift away a bit and then you’re scissored between the two.”

  “That’s great,” Ginny says but manages to get herself onto the dock with little problem.

  We unload our bags onto the dock, and then I just stare at my house. Ginny, even though she’s only nineteen, has sense enough not to talk to me for a moment.

  Molly and I paid seventy-five thousand dollars for this two bedroom log cabin.

  I know she’s not inside.

  We bought paintings and built bookshelves.

  I know everything about her is inside.

  We made love, children, plans.

  I know that wherever she is, she knows I am here.

  We fell apart, piece by piece, bone by bone, until all that was left were the words, the pictures, and the hope that someday it would be recovered. Someday they would build condos here, and everything would be found and put back together in its proper place.

  “Do you want to check the boat first?” Ginny says. Her voice is low and sweet and completely female. I look at her, and she looks like a baby. Everything is so grand around her. An entire world is standing beside Ginny and she appears so frail.

  It’s natural selection, I think. The wolves will devour her.

  “No,” I say, and we head toward the house.

  THE FRONT DOOR is locked.

  “Should we knock?” Ginny asks. She is nervous, I can tell.

  “I have keys,” I say.

  “But what if she’s asleep or has a guy over or something?” Ginny asks. “It would be rude to just rush in on her.”

  “This isn’t a dorm,” I say. “This is my house.” My voice sounds bitter and raw. Ginny shrinks back from me.

  I fumble with my keychain for a moment, making enough noise that if Molly were inside she’d hear it. I put my key into the deadbolt and try to turn it.

  “Shit,” I say. “She changed the locks.”

  “Let’s just go,” Ginny says. “We could drive up to Seattle and get a big room in a hotel and drink coffee and go to that Pike Place Market they always show on TV.”

  “Wait here,” I say. “I’m going to go around back.”

  “This is stupid,” Ginny says, but I’m not paying attention. When could she have changed the locks? At what point did she think that the idea of me with a set of keys to my house, my house, was a bad one?

  We never even locked the doors.

  I walk past our garden, where Molly and I planted radishes and onions and carrots that never grew. There are foot-tall weeds where our small crops used to live and die. I try to peek in through one of the side windows, but the blinds are down.

  What locksmith would be willing to boat out across the lake to change two stupid locks? Or drive for three hours?

  I reach the back of the house and look around at the mud. There are footprints here in the soft earth, as there always were. We never used the front door. We’d walk out through the back door to where our grill was to take a walk among the evergreens or to lie on the moist ground to watch the stars.

  I lean over and trace the outline of Molly’s bare right foot.

  Mary Leakey found footprints in the lava deposits of Laetoli that were 3.5 million years old. The prints told stories about how our ancestors lived, how tall they were. They detailed the possible start of the nuclear family.

  I detail Molly’s longitudal arch.

  I run my index finger over her transverse arch.

  Her prints lead away from the house. They lead to the house. They circle small areas.

  There are other prints that run the length of the yard. Some are beside Molly’s. Some are apart from the house, running the perimeter.

  I stand up and try the back door. It opens into a blackened room.

  “Molly?”

  Nothing.

  “Molly?” I say again. “Are you in here? It’s me.”

  I’m home.

  “It’s Paul,” I say. “Are you here?”

  I flip a switch beside the door, and the overhead light in the kitchen flickers on.

  There are dishes in the sink: three plates, silverware, glasses. The teakettle we registered for is on the stovetop.

  Dead flowers are on the kitchen table in a vase we got on our first anniversary.

  A full garbage can.

  “Paul?” It’s Ginny.

  “Come around back,” I holler. “The door’s unlocked.”

  You prepare all your life to be disappointed by things. You imagine what it will be like to bury your dog, your parents, your children. You imagine scenarios where these things sort themselves out.

  “Ugh,” Ginny says from behind me. “Do you smell that?”

  I don’t say anything.

  “That’s septic,” she says.

  Scenarios.

  In the summer, the septic tank always backed up. In the fall, it occasionally leaked into the soil beneath the house and I’d have to flood the dirt with water until it diluted the smell. Molly used to chop limes up and scatter them around the base of the house.

  “I can fix it,” I say.

  “I hope so,” Ginny says.

  WE DUMP OUR bags in the guest room.

  “I wouldn’t feel comfortable sleeping in her bed,” Ginny says.

  “That’s fine,” I say.

  “I’d feel like Goldilocks,” Ginny says and then gives my arm a tug. “Laugh, Paul. I said something funny.”

  I move in to kiss Ginny on the lips, to show her that I’m alive and well and living in my skin, but she puts a hand on my chest to stop me.

  “No kisses until I brush my teeth,” she says. “You don’t want to taste the Krispy Kreme in reverse like I did.”

  Here’s the truth: She reminds me of Molly. Seeing her here in the house, standing in what used to be my office but what is now a guest room, I want to hug her and kiss her and plan the future. I want to get out the wedding video and laugh at my best man’s speech. I want to unbury everything I kept hidden from her, dust off the age and say, Look, everything is different now.

  I want to remove the slashes from my chest.

  I would offer her all of these things if Ginny were really Molly.

  And that is also the truth.

  WHILE GINNY SHOWERS, I go from room to room looking for anything. Molly could be anywhere. There is no crime in leaving your home unannounced.

  I start in her bedroom. Our bedroom.

  The room she sleeps in.

  The bed is unmade, the light summer comforter rumpled at the foot of the bed. Molly’s four down pillows are splayed out across the floor, her two cotton-filled pillows, usually placed behind the down ones to be used solely for sleeping, are in the center of the bed.

  The napping pillows, always kept under the bed and away from sight, jut from beneath the bed skirt.

  On the dresser is our wedding picture.

  Molly wore a long white dress and held a bouquet of red roses.

/>   My hair was longer and I was a little drunk.

  Looking at the photo, I have to remember these details about myself because I’ve been sliced away. It’s just Molly and her flowers. She looks radiant.

  I pick up the picture and hold it against my chest. I want Ginny to walk out and see me and think that this is just terrible, to think that I am fragile and hurting and that only she can pull me through.

  But that’s not really it at all. I know Ginny won’t walk out. She’s mid-verse in her favorite Alanis Morrisette song, and I can hear the water running. I’m holding the picture against my chest because I am fragile, and I do hurt, and I miss Molly and wish that I were holding her.

  I set the picture down and start pulling out the dresser drawers. They are filled with clothes: socks, underwear, T-shirts.

  There’s a bottle of Diorxel on the nightstand. I touch it and think that perhaps Bruce is right. The lake changes people. The Diorxel, however, shouldn’t be a surprise. It’s an antidepressant.

  I go to the closet and open it up. Her sun dresses are hung up, organized by color, in sharp rows. Her shoes are lined up according to season.

  There’s a pair of men’s boots. I pick them up and hold them in my hands. They are heavy and dirty. The kind of boots a man who liked the outdoors would wear. Stuck in the grooves of the soles are dirt and grass.

  So.

  You can’t be jealous when you have a nineteen-year-old girlfriend.

  I set the boots down. There’s a large flannel shirt hung up in the closet.

  A pair of black socks.

  A baseball cap.

  I start scratching at my chest.

  I don’t see any pants.

  I sit down on the bed and open up the small chest of drawers on my old side of the room.

  They are blue, size 36.

  My chest feels hot, and I think that everything is fine. No one can live an eternity without feeling loved. It’s part of being a primate. It’s in our code, our contract with life. I know these things. I teach them. I tell my students that in today’s society we don’t need bonding, we don’t need to feel guilty for being jealous or promiscuous, we don’t need to be worried about finding a mate.

  We don’t need anything anymore.