A Book of American Martyrs(73)

“What is what?”

“You seem always to be—well, clearing your throat—and your voice has been hoarse for days . . .”

“I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”

“Do you have a sore throat, or—a cold? . . .”

Furious, Naomi slammed out of the room. She could not bear it, such close scrutiny which angered her even more than its reverse—our mother’s distraction.

Soon after our father’s disappearance from our lives—(which she did not exactly acknowledge to be death)—Naomi began to feel her throat constrict at unpredictable times. It was silly, like coughing and sputtering, very annoying, embarrassing. She had difficulty swallowing and could not speak always clearly. She felt a curious sensation in her mouth like Novocain. Her tongue felt swollen, and was very tender.

If she tried to speak, her voice was hoarse and inaudible; soon she gave up trying. She saw her surroundings at a remove as if looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Often she saw people speaking to her but could not hear them. She was in dread of beginning school in this new place where no one knew her though everyone knew whose daughter she was.

The abortionist’s daughter. Her father was killed.

There was something wrong inside her mouth. Contorting her face before a mirror she could see—almost—an ugly black stitching in her tongue, that rendered speech painful. How had such a thing happened!

The mutilation of her mouth was confused (somehow) with what had happened to our father in Ohio. Shotgun blast. Point-blank. Upper chest, throat, lower face devastated. (How did Naomi know this? Somehow, she knew. She and Darren knew far more than the naive adults surrounding them could have guessed.)

Often, Naomi approached Darren just to be near him. She assured him he didn’t have to talk to her, he didn’t have to acknowledge her, she would not intrude in whatever he was doing—(at his computer); she just did not want to be alone. “Play with Melissa,” Darren said negligently, “she needs you.” But Naomi did not want to be needed, she had not enough strength.

And how insulting to her, her grief snubbed by her brother as if play might be a remedy.

Naomi seemed to Darren exactly wrong in all ways. She was too old for childish behavior and yet too young to be taken seriously as a teenager. She had nothing of the funky-sexy chic of certain Ann Arbor schoolgirls of her age who were as likely to be Asian, Caribbean-American, Hispanic, Eastern European as Caucasian; these were the American-born children of university professors and research scientists who knew how to wear tight jeans, tight little “tops” and sparkly sneakers, how even to disguise blotched skin as poor Naomi never would. It was adolescent-boy disgust Darren preferred to feel for his sister rather than dismay: her skin was both blotched and chalky-white.

More seriously, there were purplish crescents beneath her eyes. She had acquired a habit of swallowing compulsively as if her mouth were very dry and often when she tried to speak her voice was hoarse, scarcely audible.

“Go away. Don’t follow me around. It’s God damned depressing just to see you.”

“But—”

“I am not you. Get that!”

His grief he carried secure in his arms as you would carry an explosive device that is very delicately primed to detonate.

His grief was precious to him. His sister’s grief was excruciating, unbearable.


IN ANN ARBOR in the snowy fields beyond the McMahans’ house where he prowled by night. In secret slipping from the darkened house to run, run, run like a furious goat—a ram with curled, lethal horns—until his heart beat hard with a kind of angry jubilance.

Such secret times, Darren plotted revenge.

His brain was bright with fire. He imagined that his eyes, glimpsed from a little distance, were flame.

Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.

He’d have liked (he thought) to travel to Ohio, to seek out the Dunphys.

The Dunphy son who was his approximate age. He’d have liked to murder him.

It would not be difficult to set a house on fire, in the night. You would sprinkle kerosene around the foundation of the house, you would encircle the house completely so that no one could escape.

Then, you would strike a match. You would toss the match.

You would run, run, run until your heart burst.


HE DID FEEL BETTER IF he ran until he was exhausted. It gave him great happiness that no one knew where he was.

His lungs sucked in air. His heart scuttled inside his chest like a trapped, frantic rat. He knew, he’d disappointed the McMahans. They had opened their household to the remnants of Gus Voorhees’s family but it was not working out as they’d hoped. Especially, Darren was not accessible to them though he was Leonard McMahan’s godson.

What the fuck does that even mean—godson?

Some whim of his father’s. The men had been old, close friends like brothers—Gus Voorhees, Lenny McMahan. But what had that to do with him?

Some nights, he ran for miles until his legs ached. Craned his neck staring at the night sky as if he’d never seen it before. Scattered stars, so many pinpricks of light! Once, his father had told him of a conviction he’d had as a boy peering at an anatomical text, marveling at the musculature of the human body, that the personal life was a means to bring us to the impersonal, larger life—the life of science, of an objective and shared truth; and there was tremendous solace in that, in the impersonal.