A Book of American Martyrs(68)
“We have to come back. We have school.”
Naomi has considered saying We have fucking school to impress her foul-mouthed brother but at the last moment she doesn’t dare.
Soon, however, she will dare. Fuck this fucking place she will dare.
Fuck you I hate you fuck-face who the fuck do you think you are just go to hell—will you?
Seated in the Michigan State Police cruiser two police officers remain on the property, at the crest of the driveway. When Naomi listens closely she can hear the cacophonous sound of their radio.
What are the police officers talking about? Are they laughing? Are they thinking—Well, he got what he deserved. Killing babies like he did what’d he think would happen to him someday.
Driving to Ann Arbor in pelting icy rain. In the front seat Leonard and Chrissie McMahan sit stiffly, not knowing what to say to the Voorhees children who have lost their father—who will never see their daddy again. The McMahans’ words of sympathy and comfort have trailed off into an awkward silence. So many times they have said You will be all right. Nothing will happen to you. Your father was so proud of you and he loved you so much. Your mother is a very brave woman.
It is all bullshit, Naomi thinks. No one wants to be brave! What you want is to be alive.
This is the beginning of a succession of displacements. Being driven from one (temporary) residence to another. Sometimes their mother is with them, and sometimes not. Sometimes the three of them are together, and sometimes not. (In time, increasingly not.) Being sympathized-with, comforted. Hearing the formula words. Your father was a great, brave man. Your father was loved by all who knew him. Your father would be so proud of you if he knew.
Proud is like brave, Naomi thinks. Alive is what matters.
After a while there will be fewer tears. A kind of wet ash instead of tears streaking their young faces.
It is the abrupt end of childhood. Even for Darren who is fifteen years old who might (plausibly) have thought that he wasn’t a child any longer, it is the abrupt and irrevocable end.
On this trip to Ann Arbor along icy-rain-lashed roads Darren has let his head fall against the car window beside him numbed to the vibrations of the glass against his skull, he has not been listening to anything the McMahans have been saying and if he had been, he would have taken no comfort, for it isn’t comfort Darren wants, it is revenge. Melissa is just a little girl, she has only a vague comprehension of dead, death which is like an enormous space it hurts to try to see, the up of it, and the down of it, and it’s a whitely blinding space like a vast warehouse, her brain hurts seeing it; and so, Melissa has fallen asleep exhausted. Beside her Naomi has been rethinking the situation, maybe she isn’t being punished, maybe she isn’t important enough to be punished, or to bring about a punishment of her father; in fact, there might have been a mistake, her father is in another hospital in Ohio not the one her mother was told he was in, her father was shot by an anti-abortion protester but it was only a warning shot and when they arrive in Ann Arbor there will be a message waiting for them from their mother. Good news after all! Sorry to alarm you but Daddy says hello.
Beyond this, Naomi hasn’t imagined. Not just yet.
“REMAINS”
Mrs. Voorhees?”
Was this a question? Did such a question imply that she had a choice?—she was, or she was not, Mrs. Voorhees.
“Step through here. Please.”
So it wasn’t a question. It was a commandment.
Her eyes were watering badly. Dry eye it was called.
Paradoxically, dry eye results in watering eyes. For the afflicted eye lacks sufficient moisture, precipitating tears and blurred vision.
Such tears are easily mistaken for the tears precipitated by emotion.
“And through here. I’ve got the door . . .”
She was being led somewhere. There was an elevator, that moved slowly. Descending into the earth.
She had not spoken more than a few words for approximately five hours. In the interim her throat seemed to have closed.
There had been no urgent need for speech for whatever had happened, had happened.
Are you sitting down? Please.
“Step through here, Mrs. Voorhees.”
Whoever these strangers were—Broome County, Ohio, medical examiner, law enforcement officer, county prosecutor—they spoke softly to her. She’d been introduced to them upstairs, she’d even shaken their hands—(had she?)—but the memory had already faded, sucked into a kind of vacuum.
This day had begun a very long time ago as if on another planet.
Ringing telephone in an empty house. Her first instinct had been the correct one: do not answer.
Beyond that now. Too late.
When confused, smile.
A faint courteous questioning smile—Yes? Excuse me?
Like most girls she’d been trained to smile since childhood. Smile at your elders, at individuals who have authority over you. Smile if frightened. Smile if you can’t quite hear what they are telling you. Smile to express yourself—sweet, docile, cooperative, surpassingly well-mannered, “good.” Smile at men.
Like crossing a balance beam, in gymnastics. You move with exquisite caution and concentration so that you will not “lose” your balance and crash ignominiously to the hardwood gym floor.
What was expected of her. As the slain man’s widow she would comport herself with dignity.