Living Dead Girl (11 page)

“I’m not,” I say. “When all of this is over, I’ll tell you everything that happened with Katrina. Molly and I will get divorced and we’ll make the plans. We’ll do it. We’ll do whatever you want.”

Ginny flips over and faces me. There are streaks of tears covering her face, but she is smiling. “Paul,” she says, “I’ll make you so happy.”

“I know you will,” I say.

“And we’ll have more kids, Paul. We’ll have as many as you want. We’ll have to move into a shoe we’ll have so many kids!”

“We’ll have quite a family,” I say.

Ginny wraps her arms around me and squeezes tight, like she’s afraid I might get up and run. I bury my head into her and all I can smell is her shampoo and perfume and all I think is that I’ve had this same conversation before. All I can think is that right now Sheriff Drew is prying through my precious drawings of Katrina. He is staring hard at the charts and graphs I’ve made about Katrina. Deputy Lyle is trying to make sense of what
the hell he’s looking at, and I’m holding on to Ginny and we’re rocking back and forth and she’s whispering into my ear and crying and I’m telling her that I love her. I tell her over and over again that I love her, that I want her, that I need her. I will never be better to her than I am right now. She will look back on this moment with a sense of glory that will never abate. I close my eyes and think about the day Katrina died. I try to think about the truth. I try to think about how I felt at the very moment she stopped breathing.

“Our house will be like a shrine,” Ginny is saying. “We’ll always have flowers and pictures.”

“Are you afraid,” I ask, “that there will be nothing left for us when this is over? Are you afraid of that?”

“Everything is left,” she says.

We could both die right here and it would be fine.

“Paul Luden,” Sheriff Drew’s voice echoes in my head. I keep my eyes closed and pretend not to hear it. Pretend that it isn’t bouncing off the walls of my head, between my eyes and out my mouth. “Paul, c’mon now.” Ginny has let go of me but I’m still holding on to her. “Let’s not make this hard for everyone. Be a gentleman.”

“Paul,” Ginny says, “let go.”

If I keep my eyes closed and hold onto Ginny I can just dream this all away. I can make this all disappear.

“Let go of the girl, Paul,” Sheriff Drew says.

I can tell the sheriff that it is all art. That even our earliest ancestors expressed themselves with ritualistic drawings. I can tell him about Lazaret Cave in southern France where each dwelling archaeologists unearthed had a severed wolf’s head at what amounts to the front door.

“Goddamn it, Paul,” Sheriff Drew says. “Let’s not go through this again. For the sake of Ginny here, just let go and stand up.”

For the sake of Ginny.

For the sake of Molly.

For the sake of me.

I have made so many mistakes.

The truth is that I never should have come back. The truth is that I’ve never left.

“I’m placing you under arrest,” Sheriff Drew says and then handcuffs my wrists.

“No,” Ginny cries. “You can’t just arrest him! He hasn’t done a single thing.”

“Miss,” Sheriff Drew says, “you don’t even know half the truth, do you?”

Chapter 10

A
bove all else, I needed someone to save me. There were problems. There are problems. The sheriff says there must be something wrong with me, that there is something inside me that isn’t firing right.

Dr. Loomis, that was his name. He was the doctor who told me I had problems. He told my parents that I had a dissociative disease, that I rearranged my life according to my own reality, that I depersonalized the world to such an extent that I might do myself harm. “Puberty,” he wrote in a report to my parents, “will be a period of great change in Paul. I recommend aggressive medication until that time.”

Aggressive medication. Weeks that turned to months that became years under his care and never once did he tell me the truth about myself. I had to find it in a file cabinet after both my parents were dead. Had
to find out that my parents were told that I compartmentalized my mind in times of trauma, or terror, or simple stress. Like a farmer who’s tractor turns over on him in the middle of a desolate field and who calmly cuts his leg off with a saw to extricate himself and only goes into shock after he’s free.

In the dimness of my heart, I think I have always known that beyond the truth, the lies, the death and the disappearances, that I am still at fault for so many different things. I’ve pushed the truth away, living under the impression that if I cleared my head, Molly would come back to me.

That is not the truth as she saw it, certainly.

But this is: Molly was my idol. If I believed in anything aside from science, it was that Molly was meant for me and that she was a true angel. If she is dead, maybe she’s looking down on me right now and trying to reason with God to get me into heaven. I needed Molly. I needed to possess her, I know that now. I am haunted by every person I have ever loved.

I sit in a small cell in Granite Lake drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup. It has been three days since Sheri ff Drew shackled my hands together and told me I needed to be a gentleman, that for the sake of everyone involved I needed to cooperate. At night, I dreamt of Molly. We’d sit beside one another on the
dock and talk about the future, about Katrina, about the nameless children we would have in the years to come. Sometimes, Ginny was one of our children and she would swim in the water at our feet, her tan, lithe body circling like a shark below us.

I am on medication again, which probably accounts for the dreams. I requested that a doctor evaluate me and have been under observation by a fellow named Lecocq out of Spokane. He thinks I am clinically depressed but that I am not a danger to myself or others. I have no shoelaces on my shoes and no belt on my pants. I think the medication is helping me. I think I can remember some of the things I have always forgotten.

Sheriff Drew and his deputies combed the house. They found blood and hair in Molly’s bedroom and on clothes and pillows left on the floor. They found a drawing, along with my others, of the body of a woman in what they called—because of the clinical nature of the bones, the veins, the exact dissection of the body that was depicted—a death pose. A woman that resembles my wife.

Leo hired me a lawyer from Spokane who tells me they have nothing, no concrete evidence. He tells me there weren’t any large bloodstains found, nothing to indicate a murder. You are allowed to bleed in your
own home, he tells me. He says no one has been convicted of murder because of a drawing.

Dr. Lecocq says I need long-term therapy. He says I am hiding things and that I need to address them.

Despite all of these things, I am being released today. After three days, Sheriff Drew and his deputies have found no further evidence that might link me to the disappearance or death of my wife. What they found in the house is circumstantial and not valid enough to hold me.

For hundreds of years men and women have argued over the beginning of the family—about the nature of the first nuclear family. What is it in our brains or our souls that makes us think that males are always the aggressors? What is it that makes a child assume that their father is hurting their mother when they walk in on them making love? Why are the females of our species portrayed as shy, coy, submissive partners in sex? And when they are not the archetype, why are they then cast out—harlots, sluts, Hester Prynne.

I think now that Molly has always possessed me. The mistakes we made were often the choreographed steps that signaled the false start of the human parade. Molly’s way of sabotaging me, Katrina, our family.

It is useless for me to blame Molly now. She isn’t here to defend herself or to defend me. What remains
is my memory and the black spots that drift through my mind, the spots that are beginning to pale a bit, the spots that are becoming translucent and that I am terribly afraid to look through.

“All right, Paul.”

I look up from my cup of coffee and see Sheriff Drew standing in front of my cell, unlocking it. He’s not wearing his hat and his face shows a growth of gray beard. There are circles beneath his eyes. He looks sad.

“Can I have my belt?” I ask.

“Can’t give that to you until we check you out up front,” he says. “Policy, I’m afraid.”

“Is Ginny here?”

“Yep,” he says, opening the door. “Bruce drove her and your lawyer friend up in his truck. You’ll get to see them in due course. C’mon out now.”

I step through into the hallway and Sheriff Drew extends his hand to me. I don’t know why, but I take it and we shake.

“You’re a troubled person, Paul,” Sheriff Drew says. He holds my hand tightly, like he’s trying to squeeze air out of it. “I think you’ve got too much science and not enough sense rattling around in that head of yours. People up here, they don’t think like you. Fact is, I don’t think anyone thinks like you. I don’t know
where your wife is, Paul, not a single damn clue. I’ll tell you that straight to your face. I hope to God she’s somewhere safe.”

“So do I,” I say.

“I believe you do, Paul,” Sheriff Drew says. “I honestly think you love your wife and that you’re worried about her. And I think that sometimes you forget things, and you hide things, and you do and say things that I don’t quite understand. Does that sound right to you?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Then I want you to know something: I don’t believe Molly’s safe. I believe she’s dead somewhere and that you might know where that place is. I also think that you don’t have any idea where you might have stuck her; that you know you’re half way to crazy and capable of things you’ve never considered. Does that sound right to you?”

“I’ve never hurt anybody,” I say.

“That may be,” Sheriff Drew says, “but I’m going to find out for sure. You can count on that.”

IN ANOTHER TIME
, in another life, Granite City was heaven. Molly and I had grown tired of Los Angeles and the disappointments we’d encountered there, so when the job opportunity arose in Spokane, it seemed like the ideal situation.

Molly felt at home on the lake; felt for the first time that she could be herself without the constraints of her family looming behind her, questioning her decisions. In the glimmer of a few precious months in the Pacific Northwest, I believe we never loved each other more.

On Saturdays, we’d wake up late and eat our breakfast on the dock. Molly often would fix something different every weekend, a new recipe she’d discovered in a magazine or book, or she’d fill a basket with fruit and bread and a bottle of wine. We’d sit on the dock, our feet dangling into the lake, eating and talking; sometimes we’d merely sit silently, our fingers intertwined, watching the turn of the season.

Sunday nights, we made love. It didn’t matter if we’d found reason to argue that day or if one of us was feeling contrary, by the time the sun sloped behind the mountain, we’d resolved to love each other, for better or worse. What was amazing was that it never felt forced or planned.

Come Monday, when I was due back on campus, Molly would wake me with a soft kiss to the back of my neck. “Wake up, baby,” she’d whisper into my ear. “It’s time for my little boy to wake up.”

I’d turn over to face her and she’d smile and kiss my eyes, my ears, the bridge of my nose. We’d hold each
other until the last possible moment, until I knew that I’d have to go to work, again, without showering.

True love is a blinding thing, it can color the experiences of even the worst events with a rosy tint, it can turn men and women into the best type of people—ones who will sacrifice the world for a shared moment of bliss.

Despite the pain and the suffering that happened after we fell apart, there is nothing that can replace the memory of a time when we were perfect, a time when we were man and wife, when there were no pills, no anger, no politics of the human heart. It was a moment in our lives that was ruled by faith, love, and hope—and the consequences of believing in all three.

Now, as I sit beside Leo, my friend and lawyer, in the backseat of Bruce Duper’s Bronco, I wonder how it could have gone so miserably wrong.

“These people up here,” Leo says, “don’t have any idea what criminal justice is. My god. Town of morons. The lawyer I got for you in Spokane probably got his degree through the Internet. And that sheriff! Where’d they find him? Central casting?”

Ginny sits stoically beside Bruce in the front of the truck, trying not to listen to Leo. Every few moments she strings her fingers through her hair and then she sighs until it sounds like every part of her body has
relaxed. I touch her on the shoulder and for a moment she takes my hand, gives it the smallest squeeze, and then lets go.

“Look,” Leo says, “I booked you a flight out of here for tomorrow. Let’s get you back to LA and some semblance of real life.”

“I’m not going back to LA,” I say. “I need to find Molly.”

Ginny turns around in her seat and fixes me with an empty glare, like she can’t decide if she’s angry or if she’s concerned. I wonder how much she knows now about my daughter, about my marriage, about me. “Paul,” she says, “please. Do what Leo tells you.”

“You don’t understand,” I say.

“I understand plenty,” Ginny says.

“This isn’t some kind of movie,” I say. “You can’t just decide what my motives are because you think it makes a good plot. You can’t just say things because you think you should, because you think some actress would.”

“Hey, hey,” Leo says, patting my thigh gingerly. “We’re all in for the good fight here. No one here is against you, Paul.”

“Is that true, Leo?” I say. “Is it really?”

No one says anything for a long while until Bruce Duper clears his throat and starts talking.

“I remember when you and Molly first moved up here,” Bruce says. “You know what’s funny? I remember what you guys were wearing. Paul, you had on a black T-shirt and these tan cotton shorts. Do you remember that? And Molly, God bless her, she was wearing a yellow sundress and had on a straw hat with a wide brim. Like one of those ladies you see in old movies. She was beautiful, wasn’t she, Paul?”