A Book of American Martyrs(201)

After a forty-minute hike along the shore, at a beautiful rocky point, Darren called a halt. It was a small cove, amid large sunbaked boulders. There were clouds of iridescent dragonflies here. A faint smell of desiccated life, not unpleasant. Naomi thought that she vaguely recognized this place and Darren was declaring it the “perfect” place.

Darren set the urn down on a rock and labored to open the tight-fitting lid. Both urn and lid were made of some dark earthen-looking material that was probably synthetic, an ingenious kind of plastic meant to mimic the organic.

Naomi shut her eyes, at first not wanting to see.

A spasm of hilarity threatened. What if, after all these years, the lid would not open . . .

In her hoarse, wondering voice Jenna said, “Gus would laugh at us, if he could see. He hated any kind of fuss and formality . . .”

The lid was off. Darren turned, tilted the urn in such a way that ashes began to fall out. (She did not want to see if Darren’s hands were trembling.) (Should she be recording this scene on her camera? She had left her camera behind, she had totally forgotten her camera.) Larger chunks of what had to be bone, at which Noami stared now, not seeming to know what she saw.

“Mom? Y’want to take hold of this? Naomi?”—numbly they came to stand beside him, to assist.

“I feel as if we should ‘pray’—but—”

“No! Daddy would be furious.”

“He might not have minded . . . I saw Daddy once pretending to pray, at some ceremony.”

“At one of your commencements Gus said the pledge of allegiance to the flag, like everyone else.”

“He’d love the attention . . .”

“He’d know we loved him. That’s what matters.”

Almost too quickly the “scattering” was over: ashes and bone-chunks in the choppy water already dissipated, disappearing.

Had it happened so swiftly? And now, now what? For a moment Naomi’s brain was struck blank.

“In the end it’s just—silence. The world without us.”

Why had she said such a thing? She licked her dry lips, that felt scaly. Her eyes now were dry and burnt from the sun and wind.

She did not want to look at her mother’s dead-white ravaged face. The parted lips like her own, parched and numbed.

Is this all there is?—this?

It was not to be believed. What they had done.

Instead of a proper burial in a grassy cemetery where you might kneel, mourn.

Instead of a grave marker, the shore of Lake Huron.

Joking. They’d been trying to joke. Trying to laugh.

Trying to breathe.

Trying not to stumble, fall on the sharp-angled rocks. (Oh but where were the frothy ashes going? Where had the pale bone-chunks gone? Naomi was in terror of falling to her knees, reaching into the cold slapping water after a trail of ashes to retrieve a handful . . .)

“I—I wish—”

What was she saying? She could not speak, her breath was sucked from her.

The others did not seem to hear her. They could not face one another. Darren was shaking the last of the ashes out of the urn, tight-faced, frowning.

Why was it so important, so crucial, to shake the last of the ashes out of the urn? It was Darren’s plan to leave the urn behind too, in the inlet.

Except Jenna said suddenly, she would take it. The urn.

The sun was slanted in the western sky like an eye that is beginning to squint. The wind had come up. They were shivering. They turned to hike back the way they’d come, to the trailhead where Darren’s rented car was parked, and this hike was accomplished in less than a half hour, as if their burden had been lightened, and they were in a hurry to escape the beautiful desolate Wild Fowl Bay.


EXHAUSTED, THEY RETURNED to the Katechay Inn.

It was just five-twenty. They had not been gone long. Though it felt as if they’d been gone for a very long time, an entire day hiking an arduous trail.

“The reservation is for seven. We should leave for the restaurant at about a quarter to seven, OK? I’ll drive.”

They were reeling with tiredness. Naomi, Jenna. Even Darren.

Naomi saw her mother stagger a little as if the earthen-colored urn were heavy and not light as Styrofoam, and slipped her arm around Jenna’s waist to steady her. Now Jenna did not seem quite so tall, and her body felt frail, insubstantial. She had removed her cap and her feathery hair was matted and flat, and her skin seemed bloodless, dead white with fatigue.

“We should all rest. Try to take a nap, Mom.”

“Yes. I will. And you too, Naomi. Promise!”

As if she were a young child, who had to promise her mother to nap.

How deeply Naomi slept! Fell onto the bed in her room only just kicking off her muddy-soled hiking shoes, too tired to unbutton or unzip clothing. She had time to sleep—enough time. They would all take naps and be rejuvenated for the evening.

But when at six-fifty Darren and Naomi went to knock on the door of B18, their mother’s room, no one answered.

“H’lo? Mom? It’s us.”

“Mom? Hello . . .”

Knowing to their chagrin that it was an empty room. No one inside.

At the front desk the clerk said yes, a woman named “Jenna Matheson” had paid for the room, for one night, with a credit card; but so far as anyone knew Ms. Matheson had not actually moved any of her belongings into the room—“I think she just used the room, used the bathroom, a towel or two. That was all.”