Living Dead Girl (4 page)

Ray doesn't want me getting pimples or my period, and so he makes me take a pill for both every day. The one for pimples dries out my skin, and makes the sun blotch me angry red. The one to prevent my period does just that, and although the ads on TV say it just makes your period less painful, I never get mine.

I don't ask Ray why.

I only got my period once, late last year, and Ray got so angry he took out a knife and made me sit on a chair in the corner of the living room. He looked at me for a long, long time, and then tied me to the chair and left me there until the bleeding stopped. He wouldn't talk to me, wouldn't look at me. Food and water once a day, a trip to
the bathroom each morning and night. One time, I stood up and blood dripped down my leg and onto the carpet and he threw up.

And then he rubbed my face in it.

When the bleeding stopped he made me scrub myself, the chair, the carpet all around it, and then he threw the chair out and gave me the pills.

"We can work this out," he'd said, and cradled me in his arms, my legs cramping from being curled up so I'd fit on his lap. "You're my Alice. You're my little girl. You're all I'll ever want."

R
AY MET THE ALICE BEFORE ME WHEN he was nineteen and she was eight. He keeps the newspaper clippings from when the police found her body, from the funeral and afterward. Sometimes when he reads them he touches the picture of her in the article, black and white photo of a little lost girl, and cries.

He cries and says he's sorry, so sorry, and do I forgive him? Head on my lap, breath hot on my thighs.

I say yes for her. I say yes and used to figure out how many days until I was fifteen while he hunched over me.

Now it's here, all those days have passed, and I can't help but wonder what he's waiting for.

T
ODAY IS A GOOD DAY ON THE TALK shows, and I sit and watch people cry and fight over who fathered their baby and why they love their cousin and how their moms dress like whores. The audience is always so excited, so happy with all the misery.

Sometimes the shows will have on older women with lost eyes and round faces who cry about being abused when they were younger. They call their Rays names and scream, and the host pats their shoulders or gives them a fast one-armed hug and says things like, "But you survived. You're strong." Then they will ask why they didn't say anything.

Why didn't you tell someone?

Why didn't you ask for help?

Why didn't you leave him?

Why didn't you respect yourself enough to get away?

The women usually crumple, shed their flesh shells, and become quivering living dead girls, trapped. A few will say that no one listens, that people don't want to see, and that if you try something, anything, you won't suffer but others will.

The audience always boos and says You Should Have Done Something. You should have fought back. You should have known no one has that kind of power. You should have been strong.

You shouldn't have been so stupid.

The women nod and sniffle. They are still broken. They still agree with everything anyone wants. Even the ones who try to explain end up with their heads down, their hands in their laps. Little girl ready to say she's sorry.

All our fault, always.

T
HE THING IS, YOU CAN HAVE THAT kind of power, and everyone in those audiences knows it. That's why they yell. That's why they say You Should Have Done Something.

They have power too.

I'd like to see them with it taken away. I'd like to see What They'd Do then.

T
HE MORE BORING TALK SHOWS, THE ones with celebrities with shiny teeth and musicians who swear their songs are from the heart, are on next. I look out the window at the empty parking lot. Everyone who lives in Shady Pines Apartments works. Everyone has a busy job, long days, and comes home tired. In the five years I've been here, three people have learned my name, and two of them were younger, softer versions of Ray, eggs that hadn't yet rotted. They both told me I could come over "to visit" anytime I wanted.

The third was a woman. She was old, bent and wrinkly, and walked with a cane. She said I should be in school and asked what I was studying when I said my father taught
me at home. She sometimes pooped herself and had a daughter, worried-looking and angry, come and take her away three months after she moved in.

The old woman told Ray he was an abomination as she left, but then she also said that to the mailman and the three little boys playing on the sidewalk. Her apartment was rented by the Indian family, a man, a woman, and four little girls. I thought Ray might like the girls but he said they were ugly dark and had bad teeth.

I see them in the hall sometimes, and they never look at me. I am smelly and strange, a dirty-haired girl who doesn't go to school and steals food people leave half-eaten on the washing machines in the basement.

They know I am wrong, and stay away.

I am allowed to eat lunch and I eat yogurt during a soap opera, licking the spoon slowly and carefully, tiny mouthfuls as Storm worries she's in love and Dessen breaks glasses because Emily broke his heart and ran off with his brother and wise Aunt Marge pats worried Henna's hands and tells her that Craig will see that he loves her, that he just needs time. Craig was with Emily before, but now he loves Henna and I think next he will love Susan. She's only a little girl now, but in six months she will be twenty and a doctor or a lawyer and will swear she hates him right before she kisses him.

I love soap operas. If I lived in a town like Ridgefield,
Aunt Marge would see me and invite me in and then call her daughter or son, who would be a cop or a lawyer, and they would come and rescue me and I'd live with them, and their children wouldn't like me but would come to love me after I saved them from almost drowning or burning to death. I would never have to eat or even be hungry.

I would always be listened to.

W
HEN RAY COMES HOME AT 4:30, I pour him a glass of milk. He doesn't believe in drinking alcohol; his mother told him it was a sin. I rub his back and feet while he watches the judge shows that come on before the news.

He likes Judge Hammer, who was a military judge and who yells, "Justice hurts!" when people cry during his verdicts. Today's case is about a man who says his ex-girlfriend owes him money and took his car. Hammer tells the ex-girlfriend, who is chewing gum and leaning forward so the camera can see down her shirt, to pay up, and Ray says, "What a crock. Anyone can tell that guy is lying."

I nod--Ray thinks children should be seen and not heard, just like his mother taught him--and he sighs, scratches his stomach, and continues. "Did you see how he kept blinking? Classic sign. You know, I went to Alice's funeral and talked to her parents and said I wished I knew why she'd run away all those years ago, and they had no idea she was with me because I knew not to blink like that. They had no idea how much she loved me." He sighs. "How much I loved her."

He strokes my hair. "She was never as good as you."

I press my hands to Ray's feet, stare at the yellow undersides of his socks. I've seen enough television to know Ray is missing something other than his soul. It's like you see him, and he's a person, but if you look close enough, you can tell that he's not. Like underneath his skin, he's not hollow. He's rotted out.

"You're too tall, though," he says, frowning, and pushes my hands off his feet, dragging me up toward him. Hands on my throat. "Too tall and you want to leave me, don't you? You'd run away in a second if I let you. You wouldn't care if everyone at 623 Daisy Lane had to die for you. So selfish."

"I don't want to leave," I tell him, cracking out the words as the world goes fuzzy around the edges. "I want to stay with you."

"Liar." He squeezes harder. "You always say that, and then one day I'll come home and have to track you down,
find you talking to people, maybe telling them stories." He frowns. "My mother hated storytelling. You know what she used to do to me when I did it?"

I can't breathe, but that's not why he lets the pressure up. He lets go a little so I can nod. Because he knows I will. I am not strong; I cannot stop him or even slow him down. I can only wait until he gets so tired of me that he lets me die and moves on.

"She would punish me," he says. "Hold me down and show me how all we think of is sin. How we are all sin." He spits the last word out, like he can taste it, and then touches my hair, slides his fists under my shirt and twists the sullen rise of my right breast, the little lump that's there. "Would you be that kind of mother?"

"No."

Ray has never come out and said it, but I know from years of listening to him dream that his mother did to him what he does to me. Held him down, rubbed him raw, broke him open. In them, he cries and begs her not to touch him, that he doesn't want to go inside her, that he is a good boy, he really is.

I let Ray have his nightmares, watch him thrash and listen to his voice squeak with fear. I lie there and watch him and wish he was trapped back there, with her, and had never broken free.

But his mother died when he was eighteen, burned
to death because she fell asleep smoking a cigarette. Ray got an insurance check from the church school where she worked as a secretary and moved away.

He met the first Alice a year later.

His mother never smoked. But she was such a private woman, he's told me, that people just assumed she'd kept it a secret. She seemed the type to do that.

"You aren't listening," Ray says, and his hands tighten again. "You know you're supposed to listen when I talk." He shoves me to the floor and pulls off my pants.

I stare at the ceiling while he sweats and thrusts, air aching down my throat and into my lungs until he grabs my hair and says, "I know what I'm going to do. What's going to change."

He pushes faster then, harder, and slams my head into the floor over and over until my vision is bright and fuzzy and there are strands of my hair caught in his hand.

I think of the knife in the kitchen, of the bridges I've seen from the bus or on the way to church or the supermarket (Ray and I go every Saturday morning. Ray stares at little girls and I stare at the food), and feel my heart cramp.

It will be over soon, finally, but the thing about hearts is that they always want to keep beating.

They want to keep beating, and when Ray's finished he says, "I like that. A family. You'd be a good mother,
wouldn't you? Let me watch out for a little girl of our own? Let me take care of her? Help me teach her everything she needs to know?"

"A little girl?" In all the dreams I have had, and they are small dreams, bloody ones that end with me floating free, I never dreamed this.

He shivers into me, grinning sharper. "She'll be so bad at first, crying and whining and maybe even screaming." He fingers my hair. "You cried, remember? You screamed. And now look at you. Happy as can be."

I nod, mind as numb as the rest of me. He is not letting me go. He wants me to stay. He wants me to find a girl for him.

For us.

He can't mean it. I will find him one, a beautiful little stupid girl, as dumb as the one at 623 Daisy Lane used to be, and show her to him. He will want her, with her little limbs and happy face and solid, live flesh.

She will become the new Alice, and he will want her so much he will forget all about me. Kill me to teach her a lesson, probably, and then move on. Yes, that is what will happen.

What must happen.

"I'll help you," I tell him. "I'll find what you need."

He kisses my cheek and then rolls off me, motioning for me to get up. "That's my girl."

Not for much longer, I think, and bend over, touch my fingers to my curled up mouth.

"I see that," Ray says, and yanks my jaw up, looks at me. "I see that smile. You want to help me, don't you? You want to teach our girl everything I like."

I nod, and he shoves me down again, forgetting dinner in his visions of this girl to come, this new child. This new me.

I
AM ALLOWED TO LEAVE THE HOUSE the next afternoon.

Ray has given me bus fare and told me the name of a park he wants me to go see. It is close to the apartment but not too close, a short ride in his truck but a long ride on the bus, and he tells me to remember everything I see.

I get to the park after sitting on two buses, and blink at all the people there. So many of them, and all so young. I will never remember everything but find a bench that has bags and backpacks tossed in a stack near it anyway, watch kids run over and pull out snacks and drinks, trailing crumbs everywhere.

I try to focus, but the world is dizzy, spinning as I
think of what I will find here. Ray's prize. The new me.

She has to be just right. She has to make him forget everything.

Or at least me.

I take a breath, to slow the world down, and look.

I look and see a girl there. And there. And over there. I grab a notebook, pick up a pencil.

The first girl is blond and a little chubby, a thumb sucker. Ray would like teaching her not to do that. I carefully write down blonde and thumb.

She has a babysitter or mother, though, a woman who brings her a foil-wrapped package that the girl bats away, annoyed. Ray won't like the mother/babysitter hovering around. But still. People can be distracted, and Ray really doesn't like wasting food.

The other girls I see are both dark-haired like me, and both are alone, maybe dropped off by an older brother or sister who has to "watch" them, or maybe they've sworn to go straight home after school but come here instead. They don't play so much as stand, sullen, watching the others. They would scream and kick, I can tell. Ray would like that too. I write scream and kick, 2, and then sit with my face turned toward the sun. I don't bother to close my eyes.