A Book of American Martyrs(75)

None of the Voorhees children wished to search out possessions, clothes, schoolbooks left behind in the hasty departure of early November.

(Our mother had withdrawn us from the St. Croix schools. We would not ever return of course. In our mother’s mind it sometimes seemed that our father had died not in the driveway of the women’s shelter in Ohio but in the driveway of the women’s shelter in St. Croix and often the two were commingled in our minds as well.)

(We would be enrolled in Ann Arbor public schools, in January 2000. We would continue to live with the McMahans until our mother made a firm decision where we would live permanently.)

(But was anything “permanent” now? Not one of the remaining family thought so.)

Floorboards creaked beneath our boots like breaking ice. We winced as if we were in danger. Our breaths steamed faintly—this was proof of being alive!

Our mother said, musing, “It is like being ghosts, isn’t it?—returning to a mausoleum where they’d come from.”

Since our father had died and she’d been driven to Muskegee Falls, Ohio, to identify what are called remains, our mother was not the person we remembered.

The elder children were particularly conscious of this change in Jenna. Naomi reached surreptitiously into her mouth to touch the rough stitches in her tongue, taking a kind of solace in seeing yes, the stitches were there.

“Oh! Nasty flies.”

Melissa shuddered. The kitchen counters and the sink were stippled with the bodies of tiny black flies. More flies lay on windowsills, and on the tile floor.

Also on the windowsills were house plants. Our mother’s abandoned houseplants which no one remembered until now.

Potted geraniums that had sickened and died and strewn their shriveled petals on the sill and on the floor. Yet, several red flowers remained on one of the plants, on skeletal branches.

Melissa hurried to the sink, to run water into a glass to water the geraniums; but when she turned the faucet the pipes groaned, and only a trickle of discolored water came out.

Silly Melissa! The older children laughed, to see their beautiful little sister so eager to water the geraniums as she’d often done in their former life in this house.

“Never mind, Melissa. The plants are dead. Watering won’t help now.”

Yet our mother touched a forefinger to the calcified dirt in one of the pots. We were remembering now, what we’d forgotten, how in each of our rented houses our mother had set out a row of houseplants in clay pots, mostly geraniums. She had not been a serious keeper of plants but she’d liked the cheeriness of vivid-red geraniums in the wintertime.

“Look! My address book.”

Jenna was surprised to find a small spiral notebook on an end of the counter.

Mixed with a hastily assembled pile of old copies of the New Yorker, Nation, New York Review of Books, and newspapers Naomi discovered a swath of math homework papers—problems she’d solved weeks ago, before her father’s death, but that looked unfamiliar to her now.

Her brain fumbled at the problems. She’d forgotten something crucial. -18(124)—she’d lost the key . . .

A rancid-stale smell pervaded the kitchen. Darren opened the refrigerator to reveal a sight of such ordinariness—a half-gallon container of milk, a quart container of orange juice, part of a loaf of bread, discolored celery stalks, a discolored head of lettuce, discolored grapes—it was shocking to us, baffling.

“Oh, terrible! Everything has spoiled and smells.”

Our mother pushed the refrigerator door shut.

Next, we noticed a winking red light on a small table. The telephone.

We would listen to the voice mail messages. Our mother activated the machine. There was a sequence of calls dating back to early November. In most cases as soon as a caller said Hello our mother deleted the message—“I’ve heard this.” Or, when a caller identified himself, quickly she deleted the message—“I don’t have to hear this.”

Then suddenly we were listening to our father.

Suddenly, our father’s voice lifting exactly as we recalled, yet had forgotten we recalled.

H’lo there? Anybody home?

(Pause)

Jenna? Darling? Will you pick up, please?

(Pause)

Is anyone there?

(Pause)

Well—I’ll try again. If I can, tonight.

I’m sorry that—well, you know.

I think I’ve been distracted by—what’s going on here.

(Pause)

If I sound exhausted—I am!

(Pause)

I have a new idea, Jenna—about next year. Or, rather, next summer. When the children are finished with school. I looked up the date—June eighteenth.

(Pause)

OK. Sorry to miss you.

Love you.

(Pause)

Love all of you.

(Pause)

Good-bye . . .

(Pause)

H’lo? Did I hear someone? Is someone—there?

(Pause)

OK, guys. Love you. I’ll call back soon.

G’bye.

Then, silence.

The shock of it, our father’s voice! We could not quite comprehend what we’d heard.

“Should I play it again?”—Darren asked eagerly.

“No! No, wait.”

Our mother had to sit down on one of the kitchen chairs. Her face had gone white, her mouth was trembling.