A Book of American Martyrs(65)

She may call other, crucial numbers. She will not remember clearly. At some point she calls her parents in Evanston, Illinois, but leaves a cryptic phone message.

Call when you can. But I won’t be here. Emergency in Ohio. I will be going there soon.

Children are all right. Safe. Gus in hospital.

She calls, or tries to call, our father’s oldest Ann Arbor friends. Our father’s attorney-friend in Ann Arbor, Lenny McMahan, who is Darren’s godfather. And other friends of Gus Voorhees scattered through Michigan. His beloved mentor, now retired from the University of Michigan medical school—Something has happened to Gus. I don’t have details. I wanted to prepare you.

Jenna knows that if she hangs up the phone it will ring again immediately and this will frighten her.

At this time Ellen Farlane has gone to pick up the Voorhees children at their schools which are within a few blocks of one another. She is accompanied by a young nurse from the Center. Ellen Farlane is grim-faced and wet-eyed in a dark green nylon jacket hastily thrown over a white uniform.

Naomi is dazed and suspicious. Why has she been summoned out of math class? Why doesn’t Mr. Cameron tell her what the family emergency is?—(doesn’t he know?). She will not be seated in the principal’s outer office but is pacing about like a trapped animal as the principal’s assistant tries to smile at her, to comfort her.

“Has something happened to my father? What is it?”—Naomi demands bravely. But all she is told is that her mother has called, it is a family emergency and someone is coming to pick her up.

Not her mother, then. Not Jenna.

It isn’t her mother to whom the emergency has happened, obviously. And yet, it isn’t her mother who is coming to pick her up.

There is a kind of vacuum, an emptiness. Naomi is confounded by such a blank. It is like trying to comprehend how the exponent 0 must result in the number 1—she can’t do it.

Her tongue has gone numb, cold. Pulses beat wildly in her head. Sometimes when she is agitated she fears that she will become insane, such pulses beating and in what she knows to be her brain, for what beats wildly is in danger of bursting, and what bursts into a brain will cause insanity—she believes. But her fear of going insane is normally bracketed by the calm and orderliness of the exterior world, that would judge her harshly, and lock her away from view; but now it seems to her, judging by the behavior of the adults at her school, their inability to speak clearly and even to look her in the face, there has been some catastrophe in the exterior world, that has nothing to do with her.

At last, Ellen Farlane arrives at the principal’s office breathless—“Naomi! Come with me, dear.”

Naomi is stunned. She has had no warning it would be her—the heavyset middle-aged woman who’d been her father’s nurse-assistant at the Center—panting and flush-faced and calling her Naomi, daring to take her arm.

Stammering she asks if something has happened to her father but Ellen Farlane will only repeat what the principal has said—your mother called, it is a family emergency.

In Ellen’s station wagon, in the rear seat, Naomi slips in beside her little sister Melissa—how strange to see Melissa here! Both girls are stiff with fear.

Naomi should comfort her sister, she knows. This is expected of a big girl of twelve.

All she can do is grip Melissa’s small hand. She is hoping that Melissa will not cry for then there is the danger that Naomi might cry.

Ellen Farlane drives to the high school to pick up Darren. Naomi is thinking how strange it is, how offensive, how she hates it, to be captive in a stranger’s vehicle, a station wagon where, on the floor at her feet, are remnants of others’ lives—a torn envelope, a woman’s glove, a child’s plastic toy. It’s as if she has already lost her own place in the world. She shuts her eyes to review the math lessons of the past several days, rapidly working out in her head problems in ascending order of difficulty—

73 = 343

(-10)4 = 10,000

137=

but it is very distracting to multiply thirteen exponentially to the power of seven—(13 × 13 × 13 × 13 × 13 × 13 × 13)—within seconds she becomes hopelessly confused.

When she blunders in math, when she can’t comprehend a formula, she feels an acute stab of pain in the gut, a thrill of something like nausea. Stupid. Failure. Ugly. Don’t deserve to live.

At the high school Darren is waiting by the rear entrance in his unzipped fleece jacket. He is not alone: a somber-looking woman is waiting with him, probably someone from the principal’s office. Like Naomi he too registers shock at the sight of their father’s assistant Ellen Farlane—for a confused moment he must think, as Naomi had, that their father is still in St. Croix and not in Ohio after all, and it’s at the Port Huron Women’s Center that whatever has happened to Gus Voorhees has happened.

White-faced, stiff-moving, Darren grabs at the handle of the rear door and climbs inside.

It is shocking to Naomi, her brother is livid with rage.

“He’s dead. He’s been shot. What else? Fuck.”


IN THE DRIVEWAY of the rented farmhouse on Salt Hill Road there are vehicles we have never seen before. One of these is a Michigan State police cruiser.

Police! Has someone been killed—in the house?

Before we can enter the house our mother rushes at us, to hug us. It is cold, snowflakes are falling, lightly, wetly—yet there is our mother outside bare-headed and without a jacket waiting for us which we feel to be wrong, and which we do not like. We see that our mother is crying and that her face is sallow and swollen and we do not like that at all, we are offended and frightened that strangers will see her in such a state. Also, her hair is disheveled and she seems totally unaware.