Living Dead Girl

by Tod Goldberg

  I remember all of this as I sit and stare at the pictures of Katrina. Time and circumstance have ruled every aspect of my life: I’ve never made proper use of either. All the times I’d come back here, to this lake, with the intent to say to Molly that we should try to get back with each other, that we should try to have another child, that we should try to get really happy, but all that ever transpired was that I would sit in the woods and watch her life. It was as though I was hunting her existence, letting her stray only a few precious feet from me sometimes, so close that I could smell her perfume, so close that I could touch her, could pet the loose strands of her hair, could blow kisses onto her cheek.

  It was in those times that I got the sense again that there wasn’t a clear line inside me, that I’d somehow overlapped—that the part of me that was human and the part of me that had evolved from animal ceased to exist. I was an anomaly, a trick in evolution. The truth is that I think my dad knew everything he needed to know about me that day in the airport.

  I was forgettable.

  When Molly asked me to go outside that night, I did willingly. I stood in the shadows for over an hour, paced around the trees, thought about life and love. Thought about my daughter. I decided then that I wasn’t a horrible person. That if given the chance, I think I’d like to meet me, would like to share a cup of coffee with me, would have a nice time finding out about how I lived. Sure, I’d let my lines go slack now and again, had done some things that were crazy, had made mistakes with the people who I loved, but I thought that this night was something of a turning point: I was hiding outside so my wife could put a man who loved her to bed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, stepping out onto the back porch. She had my overnight bag in her hand. “I wanted this night to go differently.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, and I think now that I must have believed that. Must have thought that this wasn’t the kind of thing I’d obsess over. I was wrong.

  “He’s drinking again,” Molly said.

  “I didn’t know he had a problem.”

  “Yes you did,” Molly said. “Remember the night we saw him at the Branding Iron?”

  “No,” I said, but then I heard Kenny Rogers singing in my head, heard Molly say that Bruce looked like a real man, but that he was probably no smarter than the fish he caught on the lake, heard her say that the time was now, that an egg was dropping. “Wait. I do remember that.”

  “Maybe we can do this tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” I said. “We can do that.”

  Molly handed me my bag. “Let me go back inside to make sure he’s asleep and then I’ll walk you back to your car. Okay?”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Please wait.” Molly touched me on the arm. “I’ll be right back.”

  Chapter 16

  I slide the photos of Katrina back into the envelope and walk out the front door. The sun is up and, despite the storm last night, the sky is clear. It looks purple to me, but I know it’s just a trick of light. Everything is as it is supposed to be. Nothing has changed in the last twenty-four hours.

  What a slow process this life is. We die in sixty-second increments every day. Things cannot continue to slip away forever; at some point all of this must end. And where does that leave me? I’m not ready to leave this world without some sense that I’ve done what’s right at least once. I want to leave a mark, something more than the stain that already exists. The truth: I believe now that Molly is dead. I believe I may have killed her.

  Time has gone missing for me, days and weeks turning to ash in my mind, so that I’m not sure what I’ve done, what I’ve seen. I’m not certain that I’m capable of rearranging events correctly anymore.

  I turn and look at our house. It seems so small. Hardwood floors and a view of the lake couldn’t save me. So many lives lost to such a tiny place.

  Each step I take triggers another scene in my mind, so that I wonder if I ever lived here in complete happiness, or if my mind has always opened like a trap door and I’ve slid through it all, blinded by the speed.

  “Why don’t you at least come out and get your stuff,” Molly said to me once on the phone. I’d been back in LA for just over a month. I’d been out of the hospital for two months. They gave me a clean bill of health, prescribed me Diorxel, told me to let go, get back to the things I love doing.

  “I’m coming back,” I said. “We’ll be a family. We have a house.”

  “Are you still on medication?”

  “Yes,” I said. “For a while.”

  “That’s good,” she said.

  “I’ve made some drawings,” I said. “I appreciated you coming down to the hospital and showing me how. It will help my research.”

  “It was just basic,” she said.

  “I made some drawings of you,” I said. “I’d like for you to see them someday.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  “I guess what I want to say is that you’ve helped me,” I said. “More than any doctor or psychologist. It was always you who made things seem substantial.”

  “Let’s not do this anymore,” she said. “Let’s not have every conversation be a ‘session.’ Can’t we just speak like adults?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “No,” she said and I thought I heard her laugh. “Too many nights on the ledge, I guess.”

  “I’m teaching again,” I said. “They’ve hired me at Pierce.”

  “That’s good,” she said and then neither of us spoke for a moment. “I want to ask you some things, because they’re troubling me. And I guess it contradicts everything I just said. But I need to know. Did you hurt Katrina? I remember you cutting her hair and she was crying. Did that happen?”

  “I never hurt her,” I said. “She’d never seen her hair come off. She didn’t know what was happening.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Yes,” I said, and it was, is.

  “I remember you holding her, like she was hurt.”

  “She wasn’t,” I said. “You know what she did, Molly? She told me that she loved me. It is my fondest memory of her.”

  “She never said that to me,” Molly said.

  “I’m sorry for that,” I said, and for a moment Molly was silent. In my mind, I could see her holding the phone beside her ear, trying to find words where none existed.

  “You aren’t still reordering things, are you?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “I know where everything fits.”

  “I’ll just send you your stuff,” she said. “Okay? Is that fine? I’ll get Bruce to come out and UPS it all to you.”

  “It will have to be,” I said.

  “I want you to stay on your medication.”

  “I will.”

  I kneel down and dig my hands into the sand; it feels cool and damp, and I think that all of this has been put here just for me. The whole world was built to serve me: the earth, the sun, the moon, all of God’s people, placed here to be my lab. And the birds fly just for me. And the wind blows just for me. I’ve gotten what I’ve always wanted. I am free now. I am so terribly free.

  I stood outside, behind the house, and waited for Molly. I imagined her walking barefoot across the hardwood floor, going into our bedroom and checking on Bruce, leaning over, kissing him on the forehead, sliding into bed beside him.

  This is not happening, I thought. My arm felt warm from where she’d touched it. How long had it been since she’d touched me? Years, I thought. Years since her touch was electric on my skin, since I deserved it, years since I’d run through this forest with Katrina in my arms. How long since Molly held me and said that everything would be fine, that everyone was trying to help me?

  It had been a long while since we’d talked like people, not patients. What made me think I could come back to this house on this lake and think things could ever change toward the positive?

  It felt like a lifetime ago, a moment ago, it felt like a grain of sand frozen in an hourglass.

 
; I took a step toward the house and remembered our first night in it, unpacking our dishes and silverware, remembered the moment I knew we’d never leave this place. I took another step and I was on the porch, opening the door back into the kitchen. Had I really seen Bruce Duper there at the house? Had I really heard Molly and him arguing? Had she really stepped outside and touched me on the arm and told me to wait for her? Didn’t she know I’d always waited for her?

  Yes.

  Our teacups were still on the table, the kettle on the stove, and from the other side of the house I could just make out the sounds of Molly cooing to Bruce, coaxing him to sleep.

  THINGS OCCUR TO me differently today, standing on my dock on this perfect fall morning.

  For the first time, I feel balanced. I feel calm. I feel that things are happening just as they were destined to occur.

  This sense of balance, this understanding of gravity, astonishes me. Because, for a time in my childhood, I believed I was invisible. My parents could perceive me only slightly. I’d walk through school in a trance, touching only the outlines of a real life, speaking only when I had to, and then coming home and dissecting everything, anything: words, telephones, animals. I’d cut into anything I could find, hoping to find a center—equilibrium, significance. It never worked. I’d get into an argument with my mother just so that I could diagram the sentences she said. I’d rush to my room to write her words down from memory, breaking down the prepositional hitches, commas splices, adverbs, nouns, subjects, predicates, her entire way of dealing with me.

  There have been moments in my life when I’ve questioned if I was actually real. It was in those times when I hurt myself, clawed at my skin, ripped at my hair, just so that I might feel some kind of pain, something to let me know that I was here and that I was now. I’ve never thought I was entirely human, never understood how I could be asked to exist when I couldn’t figure out how, exactly, we’d all come to be. I could never find that delicate balance.

  If my mother were still alive, I would tell her that she should have been afraid of me. I would tell her that she should have me removed, she should take me back to Mexico and get me extracted, let me start again.

  The day that forward motion ended for my life was when Katrina died. I’ve been living in rewind since then. There’s a tendency in me that says I should have just ended it all then. Ginny, in many ways, saved me. Maybe I do love her. Maybe I am capable of giving that to her.

  I stood in the kitchen and recalled the day I tried to cure Katrina, remembered the Sundays when Molly and I made love for hours, the terrible quiet when Katrina was gone and there was nothing left for us to say, when I thought love had died.

  Love doesn’t die, I decided. I was looking at the teakettle Molly had been warming up before Bruce arrived. Love can change into other emotions, can linger like a disease in a dead animal, until it rises again and attacks, and you’re left with the sense that it has always been a part of you, even when you thought it was lost forever.

  I picked up the kettle to feel the weight of it, to make sure I was tangible, and caught a glimpse of myself in the shined silver. I brushed the hair away from my face where it was matted with sweat, and I saw this: a good-looking man with an honest face, someone who’d led a decent life, had parents who loved him, a profession he valued, had nobody, had nothing, was utterly and without mistake alone.

  It seemed perfectly appropriate; my face was that of a man whose endings and beginnings seemed to be the same. I set the kettle back down and quietly backed out of the house.

  Half way through the shrubs, I heard Molly calling for me from the backyard.

  “Paul?”

  I stopped in the forest and listened to the way her words hung in the air. She called my name again, this time louder, and the letters fell from the sky and crashed around me. I curled myself around the trunk of a tree and waited for Molly to find me.

  She would come for me. She would take me back to the house and show me Bruce. She would say, “I love him,” and I would try to understand, because I couldn’t be hurt anymore. I couldn’t be seen or heard or touched or cheated or lied to or told that my daughter was dead or that my wife was loved by another person or that everything, everything, had fallen to pieces.

  I stayed in that one spot for a stretch of time that seems endless now. I slept or passed out, because one moment it was dark and in the next the sun was beating down on me and mosquitoes were feasting on my flesh. Time had shuttered itself again.

  Chapter 17

  I have come to believe that fate is a stronger science than medicine or anthropology. There are so many equations that must be solved before one can understand what fate brings.

  There were fifteen thousand other women with me in college, each imbued with a sense of cause and hope that these years spent in university life would lead them to their destiny, that they would find a willful career, a livelihood, and perhaps someone who wanted to share in this life, someone who would complete the symmetry of their existence.

  I am haunted by the false equations, by the fateful errors that have brought me back to this lake, beyond a life with the person I’d always loved, to where I am now, questioning my own mind and very best intentions.

  Bruce Duper is crossing the lake in his father’s old Fischer, his arms waving wildly to attract my attention.

  I am standing on the dock on the threshold of a life I’m not sure I’ve led, trying to piece together the traumas that have caused me to forget who I am and what I’ve done. A fish jumps and for a moment it seems suspended above the lake, its skin like quicksilver, and then it is gone. I think about Molly and see her as if she were a dream, gliding above the ground, her hair flowing behind her, hands outstretched. I think about how I used to pick her up in my arms and twirl her until she giggled and laughed and begged me to stop, covered my face in kisses. We were so in love then. She was light, peaceful. And then in the kitchen that night three weeks ago—like she’d lost all sense of space and was living in a dead world where there was no reason, no rules. But that was not the truth. The truth was that I’d killed her years before. That night in the kitchen, though, she looked worn down, as if the world had spun much too close to her again, and that, finally, she wanted to push the future forward and end this era of destruction and death earmarked by my arrival.

  A Chinook wind has picked up from the north causing the lake to ripple with curled waves. The glare from the sun makes everything seem to be on fire. When I close my eyes they burn orange, then blue, and Molly is rising from the flames, sailing towards me, Katrina in her arms.

  I’ve never felt so alive.

  Bruce shouts, honks the horn on his father’s boat. I lift a hand up to let him know that I see him, that I feel him, that he has entered my being like a virus, has infected my capacity to remember things as they actually occurred.

  I STOOD UP in the forest and got my bearings. The house was just over a hundred yards away. Either I had run in a circle or I had never left at all. From behind the trees, I could hear voices: a man and a woman.

  I prowled the perimeter of my home like a panther, stooping through the trees, sniffing into the air, pausing at any noise. Stepping into the clearing behind the house, I coiled, prepared myself to attack, to launch myself toward whatever it was that I found. I would rip the world to shreds.

  She was pacing in the backyard, walking in concentric circles, following the same pattern over and over again, her feet falling in her footsteps. I stood still and imagined myself an animal, camouflaged by my colors, hidden in plain sight.

  “Come back inside,” he said.

  I flinched when I heard his voice, soft and measured, comfortable in my home, in my bed with my wife.

  “I don’t want to fight about this anymore,” Molly said, though she said it to herself.

  “Molly,” he said, stepping out onto the porch. I wilted back into the trees. “I want to talk about putting an end to this.” He waved a handful of papers in the air. “We need
to be rid of him, once and for all. Rid of these letters, these drawings, everything.”

  “Don’t tell me what we need to do,” she said.

  “When I get back home,” Bruce said, “I’m calling the sheriff, have him arrest Paul for stalking you. He’s a threat, you know. He’s not right in the head.”

  Molly looked up from the ground then, and I think she may have sensed me, may have known I was standing only a few feet away. Though our worlds had come to a point that seemed hopeless, she could salvage a portion of herself. She stopped pacing and walked over to Bruce, standing on the porch.

  “He’ll never be out of our lives,” she said. “You’ll have to accept that.” Molly slid an arm around Bruce’s neck and pulled him toward her. Yes, I thought, grab him by the throat and push him away.

  No.

  They kissed and he held her and she buried her face in his chest, and then he saw me. He called my name and he chased after me. I could feel his footfalls as he lumbered toward me.

  No.

  I am remembering another day, another man.

  Bruce’s boat is only twenty feet from the dock now. He is wearing a flannel shirt and jeans and his face is red from the wind whipping against it. “Don’t move, Paul. I want to talk to you.”

  “I’m not mad at you,” I say.

  He didn’t see me there in the woods. What he saw was Molly and he held her and they kissed, and maybe for Bruce life had finally begun. Maybe he’d found the one thing that he’d always wanted—a purpose to wake up each morning, knowing there was another person, another life that depended on him.

  I thought that I could never unsee this. I would never wake up and not know that I’d lived this moment. I wished then that I were just an animal, that I could sniff the scent of Bruce and Molly, could run my paw over the matted earth below me, leaving a mark for them to know that I was close, that I could seize upon them if they came too near, and then simply leave without any sense of sovereignty. And I think I even prayed for a moment, which I never do, and asked God to save me, to make me invisible, to let me go on living in some other form.