With an awkward sort of adolescent humor Darren said that Gus wouldn’t mind. Gus had been waiting long enough, a few minutes more wouldn’t matter.
Naomi laughed though she was feeling disoriented, giddy. How strange this was, and how wonderful—their mother had not abandoned them after all. And here—this handsome young man with the broad, warm smile—was her brother Darren, as well.
Another time she embraced them both. Her family!
In a hoarse voice Jenna was saying that she’d been afraid to call them, to explain why she was late. She’d thought that, if she’d said that she was lost somewhere between the airport and the lake, they would tell her not to bother to come—“You would tell me that you didn’t need me, you could do this alone.”
Her voice trembled. Her hands clutched at them to hold them fast.
“Mom, for Christ’s sake! What a silly thing to say.”
“Yes, Mom. Silly.”
Though exactly what they’d been thinking, just before Jenna had arrived.
Delightful, delicious and thrilling, to lightly scold their mother who smiled shyly at them, not certain how to respond.
“In any case, I think my cell phone is dead. I’d forgotten to turn it off for the plane flight, and the battery has run out.”
Together in Darren’s car they drove two miles to Wild Fowl State Park, and to the trailhead (which Naomi recalled as soon as she saw the green-painted paired outhouses). Jenna had not wanted to take time to check into the motel, unpack and hang up her clothing, she’d already made them wait—“There’s plenty of time for that afterward.”
Pausing then, for the word afterward had sounded strange to their ears for no reason they could have named.
On the trail, Darren led the way and carried the urn. He’d said that Gus’s ashes were “ashy-light”—“weightless”—but the pewter urn was somewhat heavy.
“As Dad would say, ‘death with dignity.’ You would not want an urn made of Styrofoam or plastic.”
Naomi laughed. Why was this funny?
Jenna said, “Oh Darren. You sound so like—him.”
“I guess I do. Sometimes I hear it, myself. A kind of echo.”
They hiked along the trail, single file. Darren in the lead but turning back to Naomi and Jenna, to speak over his shoulder. Darren in an ebullient mood, expansive, like one who is very relieved. Like one who is in charge.
On any trail they’d taken Gus had always been in charge—of course. In any vehicle in which he’d ridden, Gus had always driven. But now in his place Darren would do as well, it seemed.
It was a bright, chill autumn day. At the height of the day the sun was warm but as soon as the sun declined, the temperature would drop into the low fifties.
Naomi saw that Jenna was wearing sensible hiking clothing: lightweight mosquito-repellent trousers, a khaki jacket, a cap with a visor to protect her eyes, hiking shoes. Gus had insisted that his wife and his children wear proper hiking shoes for such hikes, as they had to wear proper hiking boots for rockier trails. It did not surprise Naomi that their mother who seemed to have drifted so far from their old life was observing Gus’s requirements.
Darren had brought walking sticks for them all. A hiking stick would have been Gus’s recommendation for such a hike along the pebbly lakeshore, with the possibility of encountering rocks, boulders, fallen logs and other impediments on the trail, it was a good idea to be prepared.
Gripping her stick, Naomi was beginning to feel just slightly panicked. She had vowed, she would not break down.
Many times she’d heard the click-click-click of her father’s hiking stick against rock, in front of her. She had not heard that sound for a long time.
Yet: so many years had passed, she wasn’t the grieving child any longer. She did not think of Gus Voorhees every hour of every day—hardly. Nor did she think so often of Jenna, ironically now that, at last, Jenna seemed to be moving back into their lives.
The fact is, Naomi had been thinking since Muskegee Falls: we are all growing older.
Though she looked younger, waif-like, wan, Jenna was in her mid-fifties. Poor Madelena was nearly eighty—(and looked her age, or nearly). Their Voorhees grandfather was eighty-five at least. If Gus were still alive, he would be fifty-seven years old.
Many times Naomi had thought, she would not ever see her father old. She would not see him aged, ailing. She had seen him only in the prime of his life, in the prime of his robust manhood. She had never heard his voice except as a strong voice, even a commanding voice.
The first part of the trail led through a wooded area of birch trees, cedars, pines. There were outcroppings of rock, you had to take care hiking. Then the trail opened onto a grassy marshy area, and then onto a rock-strewn area, and then they were at the lakeshore where the sky opened above them, somewhat abruptly, before they were altogether ready. The horizon was distant, there came a chill wind from the north with a faint familiar smell of rotted things—fish, kelp, driftwood.
Jenna was hiking well, considering. Of course, Jenna could not have kept up with Darren and Naomi if they’d chosen to hike ahead. But Naomi had positioned herself at the rear. Wanting to be last, to watch the others. Her tall confident brother, her silvery-white-haired mother. Hers.
She would tell Madelena—My mother and I are reconciled, I think.
And Madelena would say—I’m happy for you. That is a good thing.
It had happened, without Naomi quite realizing, she was closer to her grandmother now than to her mother. She’d come to love her grandmother more than she loved her mother.
Was that unnatural? It seemed to have happened without her awareness.
But she loved Jenna, too. Her love for Jenna was wary, guarded. She did not quite trust Jenna, as she had grown to trust Madelena. The one had kept her at arm’s length, hinting at an invitation to come, that Naomi might stay with Jenna in Bennington for a while; the other had made it clear that Naomi was welcome to stay with her, to live with her, at any time and for as long as she wished.
Madelena loved her, but Madelena also needed her. It was not clear that Jenna needed any of her children.
On the hike Darren was telling Jenna about his medical school life. His courses, his professors. The climate in Washington, the cabin he and Rachel had built on the Skagit River, which they tried to get to whenever they could. Naomi was half-listening. She had heard some of this before from Darren, and could take pleasure in her brother’s voice. And Jenna’s murmurous—Oh yes? Really? Really! Naomi was staring at her mother’s back, her mother’s head. Wanting to touch her mother’s hair, or her shoulder, or an arm. Just the lightest touch.
They were to have dinner together, at the Light House. Exactly the restaurant Gus would have chosen. And Gus would have insisted upon calling to “book” a table, though it wasn’t likely that a reservation would be needed midweek at this time of year, on Katechay Island.
In his place, Darren had called to “book” a table. Naomi had smiled to hear her brother speaking earnestly on the phone, and had heard Gus’s voice in his. That echo.
Mid-October, a pearlescent cast to the choppy lake. At a distance, a lake freighter passed with the stately aplomb of a prehistoric sea creature. Since they had lived in Michigan, near the Great Lakes, freighter traffic had diminished significantly. (Naomi had learned.) Gus had always pointed out the “lakers,” as they were called; as an undergraduate at U-M he’d worked on one of them in summer months, with the odd name Outlander Integrity, moving cargo from Sault Ste. Marie to Chicago to Buffalo and the Port of Montreal and back.
After a forty-minute hike along the shore, at a beautiful rocky point, Darren called a halt. It was a small cove, amid large sunbaked boulders. There were clouds of iridescent dragonflies here. A faint smell of desiccated life, not unpleasant. Naomi thought that she vaguely recognized this place and Darren was declaring it the “perfect” place.
Darren set the urn down on a rock and labored to open the tight-fitting lid. Both urn
and lid were made of some dark earthen-looking material that was probably synthetic, an ingenious kind of plastic meant to mimic the organic.
Naomi shut her eyes, at first not wanting to see.
A spasm of hilarity threatened. What if, after all these years, the lid would not open . . .
In her hoarse, wondering voice Jenna said, “Gus would laugh at us, if he could see. He hated any kind of fuss and formality . . .”
The lid was off. Darren turned, tilted the urn in such a way that ashes began to fall out. (She did not want to see if Darren’s hands were trembling.) (Should she be recording this scene on her camera? She had left her camera behind, she had totally forgotten her camera.) Larger chunks of what had to be bone, at which Noami stared now, not seeming to know what she saw.
“Mom? Y’want to take hold of this? Naomi?”—numbly they came to stand beside him, to assist.
“I feel as if we should ‘pray’—but—”
“No! Daddy would be furious.”
“He might not have minded . . . I saw Daddy once pretending to pray, at some ceremony.”
“At one of your commencements Gus said the pledge of allegiance to the flag, like everyone else.”
“He’d love the attention . . .”
“He’d know we loved him. That’s what matters.”
Almost too quickly the “scattering” was over: ashes and bone-chunks in the choppy water already dissipated, disappearing.
Had it happened so swiftly? And now, now what? For a moment Naomi’s brain was struck blank.
“In the end it’s just—silence. The world without us.”
Why had she said such a thing? She licked her dry lips, that felt scaly. Her eyes now were dry and burnt from the sun and wind.
She did not want to look at her mother’s dead-white ravaged face. The parted lips like her own, parched and numbed.
Is this all there is?—this?
It was not to be believed. What they had done.
Instead of a proper burial in a grassy cemetery where you might kneel, mourn.
Instead of a grave marker, the shore of Lake Huron.
Joking. They’d been trying to joke. Trying to laugh.
Trying to breathe.
Trying not to stumble, fall on the sharp-angled rocks. (Oh but where were the frothy ashes going? Where had the pale bone-chunks gone? Naomi was in terror of falling to her knees, reaching into the cold slapping water after a trail of ashes to retrieve a handful . . .)
“I—I wish—”
What was she saying? She could not speak, her breath was sucked from her.
The others did not seem to hear her. They could not face one another. Darren was shaking the last of the ashes out of the urn, tight-faced, frowning.
Why was it so important, so crucial, to shake the last of the ashes out of the urn? It was Darren’s plan to leave the urn behind too, in the inlet.
Except Jenna said suddenly, she would take it. The urn.
The sun was slanted in the western sky like an eye that is beginning to squint. The wind had come up. They were shivering. They turned to hike back the way they’d come, to the trailhead where Darren’s rented car was parked, and this hike was accomplished in less than a half hour, as if their burden had been lightened, and they were in a hurry to escape the beautiful desolate Wild Fowl Bay.
EXHAUSTED, THEY RETURNED to the Katechay Inn.
It was just five-twenty. They had not been gone long. Though it felt as if they’d been gone for a very long time, an entire day hiking an arduous trail.
“The reservation is for seven. We should leave for the restaurant at about a quarter to seven, OK? I’ll drive.”
They were reeling with tiredness. Naomi, Jenna. Even Darren.
Naomi saw her mother stagger a little as if the earthen-colored urn were heavy and not light as Styrofoam, and slipped her arm around Jenna’s waist to steady her. Now Jenna did not seem quite so tall, and her body felt frail, insubstantial. She had removed her cap and her feathery hair was matted and flat, and her skin seemed bloodless, dead white with fatigue.
“We should all rest. Try to take a nap, Mom.”
“Yes. I will. And you too, Naomi. Promise!”
As if she were a young child, who had to promise her mother to nap.
How deeply Naomi slept! Fell onto the bed in her room only just kicking off her muddy-soled hiking shoes, too tired to unbutton or unzip clothing. She had time to sleep—enough time. They would all take naps and be rejuvenated for the evening.
But when at six-fifty Darren and Naomi went to knock on the door of B18, their mother’s room, no one answered.
“H’lo? Mom? It’s us.”
“Mom? Hello . . .”
Knowing to their chagrin that it was an empty room. No one inside.
At the front desk the clerk said yes, a woman named “Jenna Matheson” had paid for the room, for one night, with a credit card; but so far as anyone knew Ms. Matheson had not actually moved any of her belongings into the room—“I think she just used the room, used the bathroom, a towel or two. That was all.”
“But—what did she say to you?”
“She said she was ‘checking out’—she’d changed her plans and wasn’t going to stay the night. She didn’t give any reason. She drove away around an hour ago.”
“Which direction did she drive in?”
“I think—toward the bridge.”
“Did she leave a note?”
The desk clerk checked the mail slot for Darren’s room, and for Naomi’s. In Naomi’s was a folded sheet of paper with a handwritten message—Forgive me, very sorry. Jenna.
They read the terse little message several times. Darren was muttering, “But—this isn’t possible . . .” Naomi was too shocked to speak at all.
Seeing their faces the clerk asked sympathetically, “Was Ms. Matheson some relative of yours? Are you all related?”
FIGHT NIGHT, CINCINNATI: NOVEMBER 2011
MIDWESTERN BOXING LEAGUE WOMEN’S 8-ROUND WELTERWEIGHT BOUT
PRYDE ELKA (“THE SQUAW”) VS. D.D. DUNPHY (“THE HAMMER OF JESUS”)
EAST CINCINNATI WAR MEMORIAL ARMORY —NOVEMBER 18, 2011
TICKETS AVAILABLE BOX OFFICE, MAIL ORDER & ONLINE
She bought a ticket to the fight online. Ninety-four dollars plus tax for an aisle seat, eleventh row. She had no idea what she was doing only just that she would do it.
With the same air of impulse and deliberation she bought plane tickets. Round-trip New York City–Cincinnati.
Two nights she would stay in Cincinnati. Maybe that was a mistake, one night in Cincinnati might be all she could bear.
Nonetheless, two nights she booked at an airport motel.
Naomi where are you going? Again? What on earth is there in—Cincinnati?
She had no answer to give to her grandmother Madelena. She had no explanation. It was like that first grief, she’d felt the interior of her mouth stitched together with coarse black thread.
Don’t know. Or maybe I will know, when I get there.
IN THE COLLAPSE of her life she wasn’t unhappy. In the ruins in which she stumbled she would salvage something valuable, she was sure.
Why she seemed to be returning to the Midwest every month and always clutching her camera.
Why she’d given up the archive of her father’s life (and death) yet had not destroyed the archive.
(Not a single notebook once belonging to Gus Voorhees had she destroyed. Not a single letter, postcard, Post-It, newspaper clipping, torn and creased snapshot. Not a single taped interview. All remained neatly labeled in files, folders, boxes in her room in Madelena Kein’s apartment in New York City.)
Why (in secret) she’d been tracking the career of “The Hammer of Jesus”—D.D. Dunphy.
It had been all new to her, a total surprise—that Luther Dunphy’s daughter had become a professional boxer. At first she’d been jeering, skeptical. For she disliked Dawn Dunphy, intensely.
She recalled the young girl?
??s sullen face in newspaper photos.
It had roused her, and Darren, to a kind of rage, that the children of Luther Dunphy existed.
After she’d returned from Muskegee Falls she’d researched “D.D. Dunphy” online and learned to her surprise (and something like chagrin) that Luther Dunphy’s daughter had acquired a solid reputation as a boxer since she’d begun fighting professionally in early 2009; Dunphy had won all of her fights except for a single draw, in venues in Cleveland, Dayton, East Chicago, Indianapolis, Gary, Scranton, Pittsburgh. She seemed to be fighting often. She was not yet a top contender for a title but on several lists “D.D. Dunphy” was ranked in the top ten in her weight division.
In some online sites she was called the female Tyson.
Naomi recalled how the desk clerk at the Muskegee Falls Inn had spoken of Luther Dunphy’s daughter as a boxer—the first time Naomi had heard of such a thing.
It had seemed bizarre to her then, repugnant. For she hated boxing—what she knew of boxing. She hated violent sports.
In this she was echoing Jenna, who had written about the exploitation of women in such violent entertainments as boxing, wrestling, mixed-martial arts. A kind of prostitution, Jenna Matheson had claimed. And as always, men were the ones who profited from this exploitation of women.
Jenna Matheson had written such feminist polemics long ago, in the 1990s. She was continuing to write, and to publish, but less frequently, so far as Naomi knew.
A coincidence: the following night, in the Muskegee Falls hotel, in the pub attached to the hotel called the Sign of the Ram, a TV had been on above the bar; and on the TV, a clip of a women’s boxing match. It was pure chance that Naomi had come into the pub for a late supper—the hotel dining room had closed. Though she hadn’t done more than glance at the TV screen she happened to overhear the bartender and several other men discussing the fight—That there is Luther Dunphy’s daughter. Jesus!
Luther Dunphy’s daughter! In an instant, Naomi’s attention was riveted.
It was not a broadcast of a live boxing match but rather a sports news program. The boxing clip had been brief. And there followed excerpts from a post-fight interview with the winning boxer who was still panting, smiling with childish excitement, covered in sweat, with heavy eyebrows and a coarse-skinned face mottled from her opponent’s stinging jabs—“D.D. Dunphy.”