A Book of American Martyrs(142)

More likely, Darren was online. As well as speaking with her on the phone he was cruising the Internet, searching out Luther Dunphy, execution, Chillicothe Ohio.

Naomi could not have dared this. She could not have typed the hateful name into her computer to bring hundreds, thousands of bright blue titles up like sewage.

Could not bear to read of Luther Dunphy online and could not bear to think what Darren might be seeing.


HE WILL NEVER DIE. It will go on forever. This is our Hell.

Each time it had been a shock to Naomi, a knife blade turning in her heart, when Dunphy’s execution had been postponed and rescheduled.

Their father had died on November 2, 1999. It was now March 4, 2006. These years, months, Gus Voorhees had been dead. It did not seem possible that a man once so vital, so energetic, so kind, loving—a man so valued—had been dead for so long. Yet, it was so. And these years and months his murderer Luther Dunphy had been alive.

It was not closure (which was an offensive term) they awaited but an end.

Her life could not begin. Not until an end was reached.

She could not love anyone. Always there was a kind of scrim through which she perceived another person. She was preoccupied, deceitful. What mattered most to her could not be shared with another, like a shameful medical condition or illness of which she dared not speak.

Though she had learned to go through the motions of “love”—“friendship”—to a degree. Shrewdly she’d created a personality inside which she could live as she might have stitched together a quilt of colorful mismatched cloth-squares, dazzling to the eye.

Or was it a kind of mask atop a puppet. She was somewhere inside, in hiding.

She could not be an intimate friend with anyone—female or male. She could scarcely bear to be touched and she felt something like panic to find herself in close quarters with another person.

She could not speak of it—the loss, and the anger at the loss. Not to anyone except Darren.

Twins conjoined by hate.

Twins yearning to be free!

At eighteen she felt both old for her age and immature, a stunted adult. She carried herself with a kind of caution like one venturing near the edge of a steep precipice. She was not so obviously angry as she’d been as a younger adolescent. Her blemished skin had cleared, her fingernails no longer picked at her face. Her fury had become more subtle as her spite was mostly turned upon herself.

“It’s like an autoimmune disease”—Darren first diagnosed their condition.

Grief that is not pure but mixed with fury. Murderous grief, that no amount of tears can placate.

“No. It is an autoimmune disease”—Naomi had to correct him.

In the first weeks and months after their father’s death Naomi had been too stunned to fully comprehend that their father was not going to return. She knew that he was dead, but she could not accept that he was gone.

She had hated being a freak among her high school classmates in the Birmingham school. The girl whose father had been publicly murdered. The girl whose father had been an “abortion provider.”

There was further humiliation and shame, that their mother had left them to live with their grandparents. This could be explained in terms of Jenna’s breakdown as it came to be called.

What Naomi most dreaded was intrusive sympathy, commiseration. Steeling herself to endure—I can’t imagine what it must be like for you . . . Worse yet, I can imagine what it must be like for you.

“No. You can’t. You can’t ever.”

Very coldly Naomi rehearsed these words. She had yet to utter them except in private.

Trembling with rage, and in dread of crying.

Though Naomi rarely cried. As crying might be understood.

Tears sprang into her eyes, but she did not cry.

Her first year at the University of Michigan she’d been particularly alert to incursions into her privacy. The name Voorhees was not so well known among undergraduates as she had feared it might be but it was certainly a name known to older residents of Ann Arbor, as Gus Voorhees himself had been known; it was difficult for Naomi to avoid these people, though they were exemplary persons, wonderfully generous, “good”—often inviting Naomi to dinner, eager to ask after Jenna, and to reminisce.

Did I ever tell you, Jenna, how I’d first met your father . . .

Excuse me. I am not Jenna, I am Naomi.

She’d fled well-intentioned “family” dinners. A seder, a Christmas Day dinner, Thanksgiving dinner at the McMahans.

Apologizing—So sorry! I don’t know what is wrong with me.

Thinking—Just leave me alone for Christ’s sake.

She’d transferred out of university courses when it seemed to her that the instructor knew who she was, whose daughter she was, and would have liked to speak with her privately. A (woman) professor of linguistics, a (male) professor of social psychology—with no explanation Naomi dropped their courses in the second week of the semester, and never saw them again.

Was she imagining it? Darren thought so. She did not.

(She shared such follies with Darren, of course. Her brother was the only person to whom she could confess how childish she was, how insecure, immature, how ungenerous, suspicious, venal. He was the only person who knew—without being told, in fact—that Naomi Voorhees volunteered to be a literacy tutor in Ann Arbor, working with black children and illegal immigrants, not because she was a good person but because it was in the tradition of her good, liberal parents to volunteer in such ways and she was still trying to impress them long after it had become impossible.)