Living Dead Girl (13 page)

“What does that even mean?”

“It’s like a sliver beneath my skin,” I say. “I just keep trying to claw it out but I can’t force it. It’s coming, I think. I really do.” I take Ginny’s hand, but she wrenches it free.

“That’s bullshit,” Ginny says. “You’ve lied to me about everything. You never planned to marry me, did you?”

“We’ll go back to LA and make it work,” I say.

“You think I’m just a little girl,” Ginny says. “I’ll never be as good as your wife. I’ll never give you the same things she did. You’re ungrateful, you know. You probably wish I wasn’t even here. That’s the truth, isn’t it?”

“No,” I say. I want to tell her that it’s like flying with paper wings—that when you’re a child, it seems possible—but when you grow up it just sounds doomed for failure. “I want you to be proud of me, Ginny. You’re going to have moments in your life where you feel like I do. You won’t want people to think you’re crazy because you do things they don’t like. But that’s how I feel and you’re not part of it. Not right now at least.”

“You let your daughter die,” Ginny says.

“I didn’t,” I say.

“Sheriff Drew said you did,” Ginny says.

“We made mistakes,” I say. “He doesn’t know anything.”

Ginny stops walking and glares at me bitterly. “I don’t know anything, Paul. You haven’t told me a single thing.”

I put my hands on her waist and am surprised when she lets me keep them there. “I want to explain things to you now,” I say. “I want to fill in the spaces. I just don’t feel right dropping it all on top of you.” I lean forward and kiss her once on the lips.

“I hate you,” she says, her lips still touching mine.

I can feel the heat radiating from her body. She is more alive to me right now than she has ever been. We kiss again and when Ginny closes her eyes, I open mine. I stare beyond her face and see the swirling water and the black clouds. Her hands are in my hair and I feel her eleventh finger.

“I hate you,” she says over and over again, her words beginning to lose shape for me. Beyond her words, beyond her face, beyond the rolling lake water and the storm clouds, I know that Ginny exists for me right now. I know that she is alive and she has emotions and that to her I am something enormous.

Ginny presses herself hard against me and slides her hand down my back, squeezing at my flanks. I close my eyes and Molly is there. We are walking along the Santa Monica Pier. It is summer. Our hands are intertwined and we are swinging them back and forth. The air is warm and breezy and children are running in front of us, eating cotton candy and dragging balloons.

It is an event that never happened.

“I love you,” I say, to this vision in my mind.

“Don’t say that,” Ginny says, pressing me down into the sand. “Don’t ever say that again. I won’t ever love you.”

WE LAY IN
the sand talking, our voices calm, rational. We could be discussing the grocery list. The rain falls now in a steady torrent, but the air isn’t too cold. Ginny’s face is flushed. There is sand in her hair, eyebrows, stuck to her chin. Our bodies are twisted together so that for a moment I don’t know whose body I’m touching—everything below my head feels numb, useless, dead.

Ginny props her head on my chest and then tilts it back to catch the rain. I look in her mouth and see her teeth, her gums, her pink tongue. She gulps at the rain like an animal, like she is standing before the last pond in a receding wetland.

I did not kill my daughter.

I made a choice of who could be saved between the three of us and who could be sacrificed. It was a simple task that natural selection would have dictated in a different time. I wasn’t well, of course. These are not decisions I would make today.

“It tastes so salty,” Ginny says dreamily, like she has forgotten that she doesn’t love me.

I was afraid that I wasn’t alive. I couldn’t feel anything anymore. At night, I would put Katrina to bed and then I would sit beside her, watching her chest heave, her face twitch. I would imagine what she would look like if she were a boy, a different girl, our other children.

“When you get back to LA,” Ginny is saying, “I’m going to drop out of Pierce and transfer to Valley or Moorpark. I think we’ll appreciate each other more that way. We’ll have more distance. I think that’s important.”

“Yes,” I say. “Distance and time.”

“Are you ready to tell me everything?” Ginny says.

“Yes,” I say. “Everything I can remember.”

I AM GUILTY
of this: I have made my life off the carcasses of the dead.

My parents made the first mistake—I should never have been born. When my mother died at sixty-two after her childbearing and child rearing organs conspired to kill her (ovarian cancer followed by breast cancer that finally claimed her), I knew for sure that everything I’d become had been set in motion years before.

As a child, I wanted to be a veterinarian. My parents took a loan out on their home so that I could go to a private school for children adept at science. I rode a bus two hours from Walnut Creek to the Bay Area Science Magnet in Palo Alto in order to spend six hours each day sitting in a classroom with kitchen gloves on slicing through the organs of animals, trying to figure out how each worked. I once tried to rig plastic tubing
to the heart of a fetal cat so that I could run water through its veins, but I couldn’t make it work. I was encouraged to experiment, to explore my science. But it wasn’t about science. It was the feeling of touching the insides of these beasts, of seeing the things they’d never seen, of probing within their bodies, of coming closer to God than I had any right to come.

I became fascinated with finding the roots of man, of trying to see how we had evolved. I yearned to see what was inside of me, to make sense of the feelings and sensations I’d always had. I needed to be able to compare what I was finding in these animals with what I knew was bearing down inside of me:
Why had I ever been born? Why wasn’t I a dog, a cat, a possum? What made me any different from these animals?

The first cut I made on my own flesh was on the backside of my thigh. I was twelve. I carved four squares out of myself and placed them in Ziploc bags and then buried them beneath a tree for three days. When I dug them back up, my specimens were black and shriveled. I compared my dead skin to the skin of a raccoon I’d found in a text book.

We looked the same.

I kept cutting myself, looking for proof that I was different than the animals I was finding. The more I dug into myself, the more I became obsessed with
finding some kind of center. It felt like I could just keep slicing away and nothing would happen.

My mother found me out back with the carcass of a fetal pig I’d brought home from my advanced physiology class. I was seventeen. I’d made an incision along the top of the pig’s head and was peeling the skin back over its eyes; just as the book I’d gotten from the library on human pathology described. I was writing notes in my sketchbook about my impressions, my feelings, the way it felt to be so close to the center.

“Good God,” she said.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “It’s a homework assignment.”

“What did you do to your hair?” she said. I remember her voice sounded hoarse, like she’d been running.

“I shaved it off,” I said.

Mom looked down at the pig. “Why do they make you bring these things home?”

“I get extra credit,” I said. “They’re going to let me be a teacher’s assistant next quarter. I’ll be helping other kids.”

“Where do they get these animals?” my mom asked. She stared at the lines I’d drawn bisecting the pig’s head into hemispheres.

“They’re already dead,” I said.

My mom lifted up my sketchbook and began flipping through it, through the diagrams of my specimens, my
skin comparisons, my conclusions. She stopped at a drawing I’d made years before of her standing in the kitchen. I’d charted the way her words seemed to fall out of her mouth and shatter. I’d broken her words down by the letter, the sound, each word taking on a new significance.

“Paul, what are you?” she said.

“I’m your son,” I said, because that was all I could say.

“I thought you stopped all this years ago,” she said.

“I never stopped,” I said.

“Dr. Loomis told me that you’d grow out of this,” she said. “That puberty would fix you.”

“I’m trying,” I said.

“This ends today,” my mom said.

But how can you stop when it’s the only thing that makes you feel alive? The only thing that tells you there is a purpose to your life beyond eating, breathing, procreating?

I tried my best to become normal. In college, I joined a fraternity and made friends with people I never would have met otherwise—people not obsessed with science, only obsessed with being college students—and found that if I was distracted long enough, I didn’t think about the words and images that had plagued me for so long. I discovered what it meant just to be
a kid, just to live life for what it was then: a series of unrelated events that I had no control over; had no chance to wreck.

The error I made was assuming it would always be like that, as long as I kept perspective.

I TELL GINNY
about how I met Molly, about how we began dating, about the first time I realized I was in love with her. We were sitting on the floor of her dorm room at UCLA eating pizza. Her hair was long and tied into a ponytail. She was wearing overalls.

“I just looked at her and knew that she was the person I wanted to marry,” I say.

“Do you have moments like that with me?” Ginny asks.

“They’re different,” I say. “I’ve experienced so many different things that I can’t believe in that innocent kind of love anymore. It’s just not possible to me. But I never get tired of looking at you.”

Ginny frowns in a way that I have come to believe is her way of resigning herself.
This is my life
, it says.
This is the person I have dedicated my life to
.

“Molly was my first,” I say.

“But you’re mine,” Ginny says.

Yes, I think. Perhaps she finally understands that you never outlive your first; that I will haunt her.

The rain begins to turn from a sprinkle into a full shower.

“We should get back,” I say.

“They’ll be worried,” Ginny says, gathering her clothes. “I told them we’d only be gone a few minutes.”

I grab Ginny’s arm, softly this time, and stop her from putting her clothes back on. “I want you to understand something,” I say. “I’m not dangerous. I’d never hurt you. Those drawings you saw—those were from another time. They weren’t me. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever understood you completely,” Ginny says. “I’m not scared of you. Plenty of people are smarter than me, but I think I can tell when I should fear someone. You’re sick, though. That’s true, isn’t it?”

“I used to be,” I say. “When I did those drawings—I don’t even remember when I did them—but I was sick and Molly was sick and we missed our little girl so much. I can’t explain it all to you yet, because I’m not clear where it all fits. It wasn’t me, though. You have to believe that. It wasn’t wrong. It was—clinical.”

“I don’t know what I want to believe about that,” Ginny says.

“I guess I’m not terribly proper,” I say, “but all you need to believe is the truth.”

“You’re young for your age,” Ginny says. “I always thought adults were supposed to have all these issues worked out by now. Why is it, Paul, that you dump everything together and never unsort it? Do you think that’s the right way to live? I don’t. I hope I’m not like you when the time comes.”

“You have wonderful intentions,” I say, but Ginny doesn’t hear me over the clap of thunder above us.

BY THE TIME
we get back to Bruce’s cabin, Ginny and I are drenched.

“Thought you guys might have decided to swim back,” Bruce says, handing us towels to dry off with. “I’m gonna broil some salmon here in a bit. You two must be hungry.”

“Famished,” Ginny says. She starts to towel her hair dry but stops when clumps of matted sand start crumbling onto the floor at her feet. Bruce doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to. I’m not looking for his approval. “I’m going to take a shower upstairs. Is that okay, Bruce?”

“Of course,” he says. “Whatever you need to do.”

“Where’s Leo?” I ask after Ginny has left.

“In the sitting room by the fire,” Bruce says. “He’s screaming at somebody on his cell phone.”

“That’s what lawyers do,” I say and Bruce smiles
faintly. “I appreciate what you said in the car. You didn’t have to do that.”

“I know,” Bruce says. “I didn’t say it for your benefit, in case you’re curious.”

“Even still,” I say.

“It’s important that everyone remembers who the victim is here,” he says.

“I’m going to find her, Bruce,” I say. “It’s just a matter of time. I’m just not one hundred percent clear on some things, that’s all. I’ve not been well, I guess. It’s just confusing right now, but wherever Molly might be I will find her.”

Bruce makes a clicking noise in the back of his throat and then slowly shakes his head. “When this storm lets up, I want you out of here,” he says. “Ginny and your friend Leo are welcome to stay, but I want you out.”