Living Dead Girl (7 page)

“I’m doing okay,” I say. “I appreciate the gesture.”

“Listen,” Bruce says, “I know you and Sheriff Drew didn’t exactly see eye to eye when your girl passed. I want you to know that he’s a good, honest man. He’s got a job to do and he does it. Never lets personalities get in the way. I respect him.”

“I know you do,” I say. “That’s all in the past.” Bruce sets the cat down on the ground. When I reach down to pet it, it scurries back upstairs.

“I guess what I’m trying to say here is that I like you, Paul,” Bruce goes on. “I think you and Molly are good people. Worked hard on your marriage and it didn’t work out. No crime in that, I suppose. At least you gave it a shot, right? I just don’t want to call Sheriff Drew down here unless you’re perfectly sure you know what you want to tell him.”

“This isn’t like when my daughter died,” I say.

“Right,” Bruce says. “I guess it isn’t.”

“I understand your concern, Bruce,” I say. “But all I know is what you know. Molly is gone.”

HERE’S THE TRUTH:
I loved my daughter. Every time I looked at her I was amazed by the life we’d created. I’d hold her in my arms and ponder the exact moment she became a human, thinking about the precise genetic code that gave her Molly’s eyes and my nose. I imagined the millions of years it took to perfect her, the mutations, the adaptations, the biological changes that allowed for me to hold her in my arms.

She was our last chance. Molly had suffered an ectopic pregnancy a year before our daughter was conceived; a fertilized egg grew inside her fallopian tube for nearly two months before the bleeding began, before Molly began fainting, before she nearly died.

The doctor said, “If it happens again, that’s it. There’s nothing we can do.”

And two years before the ectopic pregnancy, Molly had aborted a child.

We aborted a child.

We’d driven to a small nondescript clinic housed on a tree-lined street in Los Angeles and met with a doctor. His name was Dr. Plinkton. I remember staring at his name badge while he spoke to us, trying to figure out what nationality “Plinkton” belonged to. He ran over our options in a smooth, calm voice.

He said, “Of course you could put this child up for
adoption. There are many families who are unable to conceive who would be overjoyed to raise your child.”

“That’s not an option,” I said.

“We’re not talking about an option,” Molly said to me. “It’s a life.”

“Not yet,” I said. “It’s cell division right now.”

“I don’t know if you two are ready for this step,” Dr. Plinkton said.

“We are,” Molly said quietly. “We’ve talked it to death.”

It was the only decision that made sense to either of us, no matter how much we fought otherwise. We were young, irresponsible, in debt.

We would have an infinite number of chances to start a family.

Dr. Plinkton handed us a thick packet of documents and instructed us to sit in the waiting room and fill them out. The waiting room was painted a muted cream; a calming color designed to make us feel warm and comfortable amidst seven other women and three other men.

Molly was nearly three months pregnant. We had no insurance to cover the pharmaceutical costs. It would cost us close to one thousand dollars to kill our baby when all was said and done.

“How are we going to afford this?” Molly whispered.

“I’ll do whatever I have to do,” I said. “I’ll sell my car.”

“No,” she said. “There must be a way for us to put this on credit or something.”

I didn’t want the people at Visa to know that I was a baby killer.

“I’ll find a way,” I said and we made an appointment for the following Friday.

We went home and made love that day, out of guilt I think, and partly because we knew we would never make love again without protection. When Molly fell asleep I placed my head on her stomach and listened for anything I could hear. I imagined I could see inside her to our bodiless child, imagined that I could whisper to it and that it could hear me and that it understood that I was sorry.

We made love three times over the next twenty-four hours, and each time I felt an urgency to make Molly feel that I was willing to love her at any cost, that I would always be willing to create life with her, that I loved our baby that was destined to die.

Molly woke me at six o’clock the next morning in a pool of blood. “I’m hemorrhaging,” she said. “Oh God.”

Dr. Plinkton said, “You could have killed her. Do you know that? You could have killed your wife.”

I borrowed money from my friend Vitaly. It cost us $2,317.32 to kill our child and save Molly’s life.

Molly spent three days in the hospital with dressings binding her together. She acted cheery, unaffected, even relieved. But there was this shroud of guilt that seeped into her words then, this resolution that she had done wrong, that we had done wrong.

I would leave Molly in her room and walk down to the pediatric ward to see the babies. It was one floor below Molly’s room, but it could have been another world. There was a sense of equilibrium among the babies, the parents, the doctors and nurses. Nurses hurried between tasks, their voices muted by the thick glass wall separating the babies from the real world. One nurse was patting a baby lightly between the shoulders, another scribbling something onto an observation chart, another still walking with a baby in her arms, gently whispering into its ear. When she got close to the window with the baby, I saw that it was a tiny, shrunken thing no larger than two or three pounds.

“Terrible thing,” a woman’s voice said. I turned and found another nurse standing beside me. “Mother of that poor child never even went to see a doctor. No prenatal care whatsoever.”

“Why’s that?”

“You know,” she said, “lived on the street. I don’t even think the mother was sixteen herself.” The nurse nodded once, as if she’d come to some conclusion she didn’t particularly care for. “Baby’s lungs were filled with fluid, then collapsed. Eyes and ears probably won’t ever work right. The bones she does have are mostly broken. It’s a shame, isn’t it?”

“It is,” I said.

“A week in and she still wants to live though,” the nurse said. “Says something about resiliency, doesn’t it?” The nurse holding the baby looked up and saw us, frowned as if she’d been caught, then turned her back to the window and set the baby back down in a crib. A young doctor—he couldn’t have been more than thirty—walked over then and leaned over the baby, placed a stethoscope on her chest for a moment, and then placed his hand lightly on the top of the baby’s head. There was nothing personal in the way the doctor moved, not even when his hand slid down the child’s cheek and rested there momentarily while he spoke to the nurse. He was checking for something tangible, some proof that could somehow change the child’s destiny: Blind, deaf, and at best asthmatic. At worst, dead within hours.

“Which one is yours?” the nurse asked.

“None of them,” I said.

“Oh,” the nurse said, “is your wife in labor?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“Boy or girl?”

“Both,” I said. “We’re having twins.”

“That’s just wonderful,” she said. “I guess I’ll be seeing a lot of you down here in the next few days.”

“Yes,” I said. “We’re going to have quite a family.”

Long after the nurse had left, I stayed and watched the babies. Listened to the families that came to view the newborns, watched new fathers holding their babies like footballs. Babies kept arriving all day, and the families would come and stare at them. There were unlit cigars and back slaps and funny hats. And there were tears, and cries and prayers and sometimes there’d be a grandmother or a grandfather and they’d mutter beneath their breath that something good had to come from this, didn’t it? Some babies came swathed in IVs—their arms hooked to hanging inter-states of tubes that would keep them alive for a little while at least.

And above me, in a room shared with a woman named Louise who’d had an appendectomy, was Molly, the mother of my abortion.

Chapter 6

“T
his is Sheriff Drew.”

“Sheriff,” I say, “this is Paul Luden.”

“Paul Luden?” Sheriff Drew says. “From the lake?”

“Yes sir.”

“What can I do for you, Mr. Luden?”

“My wife Molly,” I say and it sounds like a foreign language, “is missing. I don’t know how long she’s been gone.”

“Back up here a minute, Paul,” the sheriff says. “You aren’t still living on the lake, are you?”

“No,” I say. “I live in Los Angeles. Molly has been living in the cabin by herself for some time.”

“Are you separated?”

“Yes,” I say. “I mean, no, not legally. But we are apart.”

“Okay,” he says. “Let me get a handle on things here, Paul. When was the last time you talked to your wife?”

“I don’t know.”

“A year?”

“No,” I say. “Within the year.”

“When was the last time anyone saw her?”

“Bruce Duper saw her about ten days ago,” I say. “He called me after he hadn’t seen her for several days.”

“Did she normally go days without coming ashore?”

“No,” I say. “Bruce says she got her mail daily. He went by the place and said the boat was docked and the house was empty. He got worried.”

“All right,” Sheriff Drew says. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Don’t go anywhere this time.”

He remembers me.

HER NAME WAS
Katrina. She weighed six pounds and nine ounces at birth. My mother called her the most beautiful girl she’d ever seen. My father said that she smelled like crushed velvet.

Molly just kept crying and calling her a miracle.

Molly’s mother bought Katrina a crucifix that hung from a gold chain and demanded that we take pictures of her with it around her neck. “If you make Jesus part of her life early,” she said, “she’ll always have faith.” Molly’s mother never met a choking reflex she couldn’t exploit.

Molly’s father chain smoked Pall Malls and told me
that Katrina looked just like his daughter. “She’ll grow up to be a heartbreaker, that one.”

It was the most perfect day of my life.

I memorized her orbital bone. I memorized the spiral of hair that circled the crown of her head. I memorized the thick folds of skin under her knees.

After all of the dread, the denial, the fighting—here she was: tangible evidence that Molly and I could make something beautiful. Proof that the chemicals between us were finally in sync.

“She looks like you, Paul,” Molly said. Katrina had been wrapped in blankets and placed on Molly’s chest. “My dad doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

“She looks like both of us,” I said. “Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?”

And that’s how it did work. Katrina grew up quickly, it seemed. She was walking upright after nine months, speaking her first words at a year. Her blond hair was long and Molly kept it brushed. She loved to dig outside for bugs—which she then brought to me like an offering. I would tell her what the bugs were, explain to her what their purpose was, how they lived, what they ate. Anything I could think of. If she seemed intrigued by a particular bug, Molly would draw it and then tack it up on Katrina’s bedroom wall.

Her name was Katrina Luden and she lived for two
years, four months and eleven days. She died on the last day of the hottest summer in Granite City history. She died just like every other child I never had.

SHERIFF DREW PULLS
up just as I’m hanging up the phone with my department chair, Dr. Norris. I told him that Molly was missing and that I needed to take a leave of absence, and he just exhaled and said, “This sounds just awful. Any timeline?”

“A week. A month. I don’t really know.”

Dr. Norris paused, and I knew he was trying to figure some way to sound empathetic toward me, a person he barely knew. “Be strong,” he said. “And come back when you can.”

“I will,” I said and hung up, imagining Dr. Norris sitting behind his desk at the college cringing, trying desperately to sound caring when all that is going through his head is how on earth he’s going to cover my classes.

Ginny walks downstairs holding Bruce Duper’s cat in her arms. Her face is puffy and streaked with tears.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“They can be just cruel sometimes,” Ginny says. “It’s like they think I can’t handle myself if I’m not within twenty miles of them.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say.

“My mom wanted you to know that she’s sorry this is happening to you,” Ginny says. “It was my dad who was being an asshole. He thinks the world spins only for him.”

Before I can say anything, Bruce walks in from the kitchen carrying three glasses of water on a tray. “See that Sheriff Drew is here,” Bruce says to me and then he notices Ginny. “Maybe it might be best if you had a glass of water and calmed down a bit, miss.” Bruce touches Ginny’s shoulder lightly, like he’s afraid she might be generating electricity, and hands her a glass. “You need anything, Paul?”

“No,” I say.

“All right then,” Bruce says, “I’ll bring him inside and you can get this over with.”

After Bruce has walked outside, I get up and watch him from the large picture windows in his living room. He greets Sheriff Drew with a handshake and one of those awkward “man hugs” big men give each other and then the two of them talk with their heads down, like a wind is blowing.