There were no photographs of Gus in the apartment, that Naomi had noticed. Of course, she had seen only a few rooms so far; she had not seen Madelena’s bedroom.
The room in which Naomi was to stay, one of several bedrooms in the apartment, was not a large room but appeared large and airy, with three white walls and one wall that was a plate-glass window looking out, it seemed at first glance, into blank bright air.
The view outside the window—stretching to the horizon, lifting to the sky, plunging below into the street—was mesmerizing to Naomi. She could stare, and stare. She could lose herself in staring. Her brain that often felt wounded, as if with tiny bits of glass, felt peaceful here, after only a few minutes of such solitude.
A consoling thought came to her—I am closer to him here. My father.
Something about the height. The sudden distance her vision was thrown, that was so usually blocked within a few yards. In most urban settings you can see only a short distance and soon you come to forget that your vision is unnaturally foreshortened.
But at this height there was nothing to impede vision. The sensation was, you could see past all earthly things.
That was foolish of course. That was “primitive thinking.” She’d been trained not to think in such a way. Her mother would be shocked. Her father would have laughed.
That is why my grandmother has invited me here. To be closer to my father.
On the eggshell-white walls of the small guest bedroom were works of art, framed drawings, woodcuts, paintings in Fauve colors. These were contemporary artists of whom Naomi had possibly heard—Moser, Daub, Kahn. There were bookcases crammed with books including outsized art books with slightly torn covers suggesting how closely they’d been read, studied. Naomi pulled one out—The Complete Little Nemo. A massive book of color plates of the classic surrealist comic strip of the early twentieth century—Naomi seemed to recall, Madelena had sent an identical copy to Darren for one of his birthdays.
Was it after receiving Little Nemo that Darren had become so interested in drawing comics? Or had Madelena known of his interest, and had carefully selected the book?
Naomi remembered: for her thirteenth birthday, no card or explanation included, her grandmother had sent her a hardbound copy of Homer’s Odyssey; for Melissa, barely able to read at the time, an illustrated copy of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass in an edition identical to the one Naomi had cherished as a child—Naomi hadn’t known, or had forgotten, that this favorite book of her childhood must have been a gift from Madelena Kein!
Naomi had grown up knowing very little about her father’s mother. Wryly Jenna had spoken of Madelena as her “phantom mother-in-law.” In the Voorhees household among countless books, magazines, journals and newspapers stacked on tables, chairs, sofas, floors and stairs there’d been books by Madelena Kein with such titles as An Inquiry into (Human) Consciousness (Oxford University Press), Do We Mean What We Say; or, Do We Say What We Mean? (Columbia University Press), Transformational Ethics: A History (University of Chicago Press). It wasn’t clear whether Gus had read these books though he had certainly hoped to read them. Darren and Naomi had tried, without much success. At the University of Michigan graduate library Naomi had made an effort to seek out articles and essays by Madelena Kein in publications not otherwise available—Philosophical Studies, Philosophical Review, Harvard Review of Philosophy, Journal of Psychology and Linguistics, Ethics, Meme; she’d had slightly more success reading reviews by Madelena in popular publications like the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.
But what did she know of her grandmother, having read, or having tried to read, these works of Madelena Kein? The pieces were densely argued, opaque with obscure phrases, enigmatic, riddle-like, possibly brilliant, resistant of paraphrase. Was this what philosophy had become? Confounding questions and paradoxes, and no answers?
Naomi lay her suitcase on a cedar chest at the foot of the bed. She would stay here? In this perfect place? She felt a twinge of excitement and yet uneasiness, apprehension.
A tinge of homesickness like a faint blue shadow falling over her face.
How absurd! Homesickness for—what? Where? She had not had a permanent home for years. She had never felt comfortable in her grandparents’ house in Birmingham, Michigan, a girl’s room in rosy wallpaper, a girl’s bed with a pink satin coverlet, white lattice windows. Her memory of the last house in which she’d lived with her family, before her father had departed, was the rented, fly-infested house on Salt Hill Road in Huron County, Michigan. She had hated that house as much as her poor trapped mother had hated it.
I can live here, with my grandmother—can I?
Is that what she is offering me? A life with her?
IN THE AFTERSHOCK of the murderer’s death she had not been “freed” after all—not as she’d expected.