Free Living Dead Girl by Tod Goldberg

them back on. “Now then, Mr. Luden, I want you to think hard: When was the last time you spoke with your wife?”

Chapter 7
    T he razor of madness that spread in Molly and me existed before either of us—it existed in the flood plains of the Pongola, along the banks of Lake Victoria on Rusinga Island, and in the woods behind our house on Granite Lake. It settled, though, in both of our minds, at different times and in differing degrees.
    For me, it also settled in the folds of my skin, in the lenses of my eyes, and in the fabric of the corpus callosum causing me to live life in this state I find myself now: snagged on a moment of time.
    I’m not sure when I began suspecting Molly was crazy. I’m not sure when I began suspecting that I was crazy (though I think it was a long time ago). What I do know is that the two of us lived in some kind of illusion for two years, four months and eleven days. We pretended to know what we were doing, pretended tolove a child we couldn’t define, pretended not to be sickened by the smell of each other’s skin.
    From where I stand now, it all seems so obvious. What happened to Molly and me during the hottest summer in Granite Lake history didn’t happen with words. We’d lost any ability to communicate with each other; our language turned into a series of lost syllables, until all we were left with was a dead little girl.
    The truth is lost on me now. I don’t know if I have ever known it. But this is what I have said is the truth: Katrina died from hematological malignancies. She was the victim of parents who had suffered “recurrent reproductive losses.” In her autopsy, pathologists discovered a tumor in her brain. She could have died in any number of fashions.
    It was supposed to end differently. I’d wanted, for a time in my life, to be a medical examiner and forensic anthropologist. Upon graduation from UCLA with degrees in biology and anthropology, I moved directly into graduate programs in medicine and anthropology. I imagined that I would become like the doctors I watched on the Discovery Channel forensics programs. I would sit on TV explaining the crimes of the demented, discerning the variables of human life. My purpose in life would be to solve human frailty.
    For two years my days were spent dissecting humanbodies and then tracing their very formation. At night, I would spend hours poring over textbooks, drawing distinctions between my medical science and my historical science. Molly and I were already married and she was working two jobs to support my obsessions.
    She was so tired all the time. We never had anything.
    I made a choice to live then, to make a career out of the human race.
    I dropped out of medical school and concentrated on my anthropology, immersing myself in the science of human life, and began helping Molly by waiting tables at Intermezzo in Hollywood. We moved to Granite Lake six months after I finished my master’s in Anthropology at UCLA when Spokane City College offered me $38,000 and a chance to improve my resumé by teaching three sections of Introduction to Physical Anthropology. It was going to be a steppingstone to my doctorate. It was only a matter of time before I would be overseeing digs, discovering things, changing history. Molly hoped she could paint well in the wilderness, hoped that for once her mind would be able to slow down enough for her to put brush to canvas.
    If Molly had been born a decade later, things might have been different for her. When she was ten years old and started having terrible fits of depression followed by wicked cases of euphoria, Molly’s parentschalked it up to adolescence. Now, it has a name and prescription. But that was no one’s fault. It was a different time. In the seventies, children weren’t bipolar.
    To say that Katrina was a miracle is true. She never should have been born. We never should have tried. We were damaged goods—each dead child another scratch on the prison wall.
    “A MONTH