Roberts had had to arrive at Chillicothe, to be admitted through security into the Death Row unit, by 6:00 P.M. The execution had been scheduled to begin at 7:00 P.M. But now it was much later—more than two hours later.
Naomi had called her brother in Washington State more than an hour before she’d needed to have called. For Darren could not possibly hear from Roberts until after 7:00 P.M.
Darren had answered at once, irritably.
Yes, what? What do you want?
Just to talk. Before . . .
It’s too early! Christ.
But—please . . .
He’d relented. He’d heard the fear in her voice.
In this phase of his life which (Naomi thought accusingly) might be described as post-family, as it was determinedly post-modernist, Darren had taken a leave of absence from college, and had then dropped out of college, in order to devote his time to his “art”—graphic novels in a mordant vein, obsessively detailed, dark-comic-grotesque fantasies of contemporary American suburban life in conflict with what Darren called the “other side.”
D. Voorhees’s graphic novels were not easy of access. At least, Naomi did not find them easy. The first was titled Welcome to the Other Side—a Midwestern suburban family of maddening normalcy and complacency beset by demons like flying ants, mostly invisible; the second was titled Do You Want Me to Tell You When, Where, Why?—sexual ambiguity among young adults in an Ann Arbor, Michigan, setting; the third, most ambitious and most acclaimed, was titled Lethal Injection: A Romance—lurid scenes of executions by lethal injection in American prisons, drawn in excruciating detail. (For each of the executions was botched in a unique and lurid way.) Naomi had tried several times to read Lethal Injection: A Romance but had never been able to finish it.
She was fascinated and repelled by Darren’s work, and impressed by his obvious talent. But mostly she was envious of the use to which her brother had put two of his obsessions: narrative comics and lethal injection.
He is myself. My surviving self.
Since dropping out of U-M in his junior year, and moving to the west coast, initially Seattle, then Puget Sound, and now the Skagit River Valley Darren had become associated with a small press in Seattle, which had published all three of his graphic novels; he’d illustrated other books for the press which Naomi had not seen; he’d acquired an online presence—a much-visited website called Do You Want Me to Tell You When, Where, Why? She wondered how Darren supported himself, with whom he might be living, what his life was like now—she had but a vague idea.
Her own obsession had led mostly to failure. The loss of her father was the only significant event of her life but she could not give a shape to the experience, she could only inhabit it, helplessly, as a child inhabits a place of confinement, or handed-down bulky clothes.
She had tried! God knew, she had tried to assemble The Life and Death of Gus Voorhees: An Archive—but she’d been defeated by the enormity of her subject that fell into pieces like something that has been broken and inexpertly mended, that shatters again at the slightest pressure.
In her zeal she’d amassed a dozen folders. Hundreds of pages of notes. Newspaper and magazine clippings, taped interviews with people who’d known and worked with her father (most of which she had yet to transcribe and edit—indeed, some of these she had never returned to). Photocopies of letters written by her father, which recipients had provided; and letters to her father, which Jenna had allowed her to take. (Of course, Jenna had selected an undisclosed number of letters to keep for herself, or perhaps even to destroy, that were “too private” for Naomi to see.) Documents, timelines, sketches. Photographs—every kind of photograph including baby pictures. Much of the material Naomi had typed carefully online but it existed in scattered files of which several had been lost inside malfunctioning computers . . .
Most awkwardly she’d tried to “interview” relatives. What might have seemed like the most obvious course, as well as the easiest, turned out to be extremely difficult. Her mother refused to speak with her at all on this painful subject and her absentee grandmother Madelena Kein had rebuffed her in a terse email—“Maybe someday. But now is too soon. Please do not ask me again.”
Even Darren had discouraged her. He’d have liked to assemble an archive of Gus Voorhees of his own, Naomi supposed.
It had seemed to her also that the complete history of The Life and Death of Gus Voorhees could not be written so long as her father’s murderer remained alive.
Worse, the archive would have to contain material about the assassin, and the highly charged “political environment” out of which he had sprung.
This was the most bitter irony: to wish to honor her father was inexorably bound up with a fixation upon his murderer which filled her with despair, rage, shame.
She did not want to care about Luther Dunphy—whether the man lived or died. She did not want to be consumed by hatred for him, and for the many (hundreds? thousands?) of individuals who’d applauded the “assassination” (as it was called) among the right-to-life movement.
Yet, Voorhees and Dunphy were bound together, unavoidably.
Through history the assassin has attached himself, like a blood-gorged tic, to the individual he has killed. Of the many indignities provided by death, this is the most insulting.
Each time Dunphy had been scheduled to die, Naomi had begun an involuntary count. She had no need to mark the date on the calendar, for it was imprinted in her memory.
Like Darren, she’d become something of an amateur expert in lethal injection. She knew how increasingly difficult it was for penal authorities in the United States to purchase the lethal drugs, from European manufacturers; often it was the case that executions had to be postponed for this reason.
It was possible that Chillicothe had failed to secure the proper drugs in time for Dunphy’s execution. Or, something had gone wrong with the administration of the drugs. Or, the Ohio Judiciary had granted another reprieve.
For Naomi knew, if the drugs had been properly administered to the condemned man at the prescribed time that evening, the execution would have been over by 7:30 P.M.
That it was now 9:20 P.M. and Roberts had not called meant that something had gone terribly wrong.
Pointless to speculate. Yet Naomi was too restless to remain silent.
“The worst news is that it’s been stayed—again.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Don’t think—what?”
“I don’t think it has been stayed this time.”
“But—how do you know?”
“Because their final appeal was turned down.”
“But Dunphy’s lawyers will file other claims, or whatever they are called—they file these automatically, even if it’s the final appeal.”
“Well—I don’t think so.”
“But—how do you know?”
“I told you, Christ! I don’t know.”
“But you said—no.”
Quick as a match flaring up, their old childhood animosity. Naomi’s heart beat in opposition to her brother whose authority she must always undermine even as she wanted (badly) for Darren to like her.
Love was not an issue, as love was not a possibility. Naomi knew that Darren did not love her as (probably) Darren did not love anyone in the family except their father who had died.
Very likely, Darren didn’t love anyone at all. In a way, Naomi hoped this was so.
Desperately she had to keep him on the line. She dreaded his hanging up before the news came to him.
“Darren? What time is it there?”
“What time? You know it’s three hours earlier than you.”
“So you’ve been waiting since three P.M.”
It was an inane remark. It was a child’s remark, which Darren barely acknowledged.
Tell me of your life, then! Tell me something that is secret, that no one else knows like our hatred for Luther Dunphy and our wish for him to die.
But Darren was so
unding distracted. (Was he speaking to someone there with him? Was someone speaking to him? She could imagine Darren pressing the palm of his hand over the receiver.)
More likely, Darren was online. As well as speaking with her on the phone he was cruising the Internet, searching out Luther Dunphy, execution, Chillicothe Ohio.
Naomi could not have dared this. She could not have typed the hateful name into her computer to bring hundreds, thousands of bright blue titles up like sewage.
Could not bear to read of Luther Dunphy online and could not bear to think what Darren might be seeing.
HE WILL NEVER DIE. It will go on forever. This is our Hell.
Each time it had been a shock to Naomi, a knife blade turning in her heart, when Dunphy’s execution had been postponed and rescheduled.
Their father had died on November 2, 1999. It was now March 4, 2006. These years, months, Gus Voorhees had been dead. It did not seem possible that a man once so vital, so energetic, so kind, loving—a man so valued—had been dead for so long. Yet, it was so. And these years and months his murderer Luther Dunphy had been alive.
It was not closure (which was an offensive term) they awaited but an end.
Her life could not begin. Not until an end was reached.
She could not love anyone. Always there was a kind of scrim through which she perceived another person. She was preoccupied, deceitful. What mattered most to her could not be shared with another, like a shameful medical condition or illness of which she dared not speak.
Though she had learned to go through the motions of “love”—“friendship”—to a degree. Shrewdly she’d created a personality inside which she could live as she might have stitched together a quilt of colorful mismatched cloth-squares, dazzling to the eye.
Or was it a kind of mask atop a puppet. She was somewhere inside, in hiding.
She could not be an intimate friend with anyone—female or male. She could scarcely bear to be touched and she felt something like panic to find herself in close quarters with another person.
She could not speak of it—the loss, and the anger at the loss. Not to anyone except Darren.
Twins conjoined by hate.
Twins yearning to be free!
At eighteen she felt both old for her age and immature, a stunted adult. She carried herself with a kind of caution like one venturing near the edge of a steep precipice. She was not so obviously angry as she’d been as a younger adolescent. Her blemished skin had cleared, her fingernails no longer picked at her face. Her fury had become more subtle as her spite was mostly turned upon herself.
“It’s like an autoimmune disease”—Darren first diagnosed their condition.
Grief that is not pure but mixed with fury. Murderous grief, that no amount of tears can placate.
“No. It is an autoimmune disease”—Naomi had to correct him.
In the first weeks and months after their father’s death Naomi had been too stunned to fully comprehend that their father was not going to return. She knew that he was dead, but she could not accept that he was gone.
She had hated being a freak among her high school classmates in the Birmingham school. The girl whose father had been publicly murdered. The girl whose father had been an “abortion provider.”
There was further humiliation and shame, that their mother had left them to live with their grandparents. This could be explained in terms of Jenna’s breakdown as it came to be called.
What Naomi most dreaded was intrusive sympathy, commiseration. Steeling herself to endure—I can’t imagine what it must be like for you . . . Worse yet, I can imagine what it must be like for you.
“No. You can’t. You can’t ever.”
Very coldly Naomi rehearsed these words. She had yet to utter them except in private.
Trembling with rage, and in dread of crying.
Though Naomi rarely cried. As crying might be understood.
Tears sprang into her eyes, but she did not cry.
Her first year at the University of Michigan she’d been particularly alert to incursions into her privacy. The name Voorhees was not so well known among undergraduates as she had feared it might be but it was certainly a name known to older residents of Ann Arbor, as Gus Voorhees himself had been known; it was difficult for Naomi to avoid these people, though they were exemplary persons, wonderfully generous, “good”—often inviting Naomi to dinner, eager to ask after Jenna, and to reminisce.
Did I ever tell you, Jenna, how I’d first met your father . . .
Excuse me. I am not Jenna, I am Naomi.
She’d fled well-intentioned “family” dinners. A seder, a Christmas Day dinner, Thanksgiving dinner at the McMahans.
Apologizing—So sorry! I don’t know what is wrong with me.
Thinking—Just leave me alone for Christ’s sake.
She’d transferred out of university courses when it seemed to her that the instructor knew who she was, whose daughter she was, and would have liked to speak with her privately. A (woman) professor of linguistics, a (male) professor of social psychology—with no explanation Naomi dropped their courses in the second week of the semester, and never saw them again.
Was she imagining it? Darren thought so. She did not.
(She shared such follies with Darren, of course. Her brother was the only person to whom she could confess how childish she was, how insecure, immature, how ungenerous, suspicious, venal. He was the only person who knew—without being told, in fact—that Naomi Voorhees volunteered to be a literacy tutor in Ann Arbor, working with black children and illegal immigrants, not because she was a good person but because it was in the tradition of her good, liberal parents to volunteer in such ways and she was still trying to impress them long after it had become impossible.)
She’d become hypersensitive to a certain expression in a stranger’s face, that look of startled recognition, and pity, and a kind of covert excitement, that “Naomi Voorhees” was surely the daughter of “Gus Voorhees” who’d acquired, since his death, a mythic-heroic reputation in leftist political circles in the Midwest, and was revered by activists involved in the reform of legislation involving women’s reproductive rights.
She’d become particularly alert to the (literal) approach of such individuals. Invariably they were middle-aged, or older; female more often than male.
Naomi—is it? I didn’t know your father personally, but—I admired Gus Voorhees very much.
How could you reply to such a statement except with a pained
Thank you.
Dreading the next remark—What a tragedy! That terrible man! What became of him—he’s in prison, I hope?
Wanting only to flee. But too polite to turn her back and walk away.
Resenting having to speak of Luther Dunphy. Even indirectly, obliquely. Having to concede that yes, Dunphy was in prison in Ohio, and alive.
Resentment she felt too, having to be as Gus Voorhees’s daughter so damned good.
No doubt this was why Jenna had retreated from public life, and so abruptly. Canceling engagements, resigning positions, shocking and disappointing comrades who’d seen in Gus Voorhees’s widow a means of extending Gus Voorhees’s work.
Emails sent without apology. No more able to fulfill obligations, you must look elsewhere.
That did not explain why Jenna had also retreated from her own children. From family life.
Naomi had never told Darren what their mother had said to her when she’d left the house in Birmingham that morning. I can’t be your “Mommy” any longer. No more.
And worse. Gus has ceased to exist and Gus is not coming back.
He’d hated Jenna already. (Unfairly?) She did not want him to hate her more.
Soon after she’d left her children with their grandparents in Birmingham Jenna had been hospitalized (in Chicago) with severe anemia, exhaustion, malnutrition. She’d been diagnosed with a rare (autoimmune) disorder in which food was not being properly digested in her stomach. There had been a possibility of perma
nent liver damage.
In the hospital, Jenna had wanted no visitors. It was believed (by her father- and mother-in-law in Birmingham) that her own parents, who lived in nearby Evanston, had visited her regularly; but no one else had been welcome in her hospital room.
Jenna had recovered, to a degree. She’d told them that her health was “shaky” but “stabilized.” After she’d been discharged from the hospital she hadn’t chosen to return to Birmingham, or to Ann Arbor, but to live elsewhere, initially in New York City, and then in Vermont.
There was a cell phone number for Jenna, and there was an email address. But these did not make her readily accessible to Naomi.
Shortly after the New Year, as the date of Dunphy’s execution approached, Naomi began calling Darren more frequently.
Darren did not always answer the phone. He did not always return her calls. But when he did, it (sometimes) seemed to Naomi that there was someone with him in the place in rural Washington State which she could not envision.
Once or twice she’d heard a voice—voices—in the background. She was certain. But when she’d asked Darren who was with him he’d replied coldly—Sorry. That’s my business.
She felt a stab of acute jealousy. Could Darren be—in love?
That was not possible. She was sure. Darren might (maybe) have a sexual relationship with someone—but even that wasn’t likely. Not a sustained relationship. No.
If Darren was a twin of hers he would shrink instinctively from another’s touch.
She understood that her brother was not so sympathetic with her any longer. Their only link (she feared) was their parents—Gus’s death, Jenna’s departure and estrangement.
He’d fled the Midwest, he told her, to put distance between himself and family history.
How could he do that!—Naomi had been horrified.
Especially, Darren said, he didn’t want to talk about Luther Dunphy if he could avoid it.
A Book of American Martyrs Page 44