Much in those months after their father’s death had not been clear and even to recall that time now, or to attempt to recall it, made Naomi uneasy as if the earth were shifting beneath her.
Naomi had assumed that the ashes had been buried in Ann Arbor. Darren had assumed that the ashes had been buried in Ann Arbor. It had been something of a shock to learn only just recently from Jenna that their father’s ashes had been with someone outside the family for more than a decade—“For safekeeping.”
Safekeeping. What did this mean?
They’d decided that it was not a good idea to look too closely into their mother’s motives. Still, this was a startling revelation. And it was a happy revelation, for now, at last, their father’s ashes could be scattered on Katechay Island as he’d wished.
“You’d think if Mom was going to leave the urn with anyone, she’d have left it with Grandpa Voorhees . . .”
“Or just given it to us, and we could have scattered the ashes . . .”
A pang in the heart. Conjoined twins. Each felt the fleet tremor, the shiver of a fierce shared emotion, they might have imagined they’d outgrown by now.
Our mother doesn’t love us. Our mother has abandoned us.
But it was ridiculous, at their ages! To feel that old hurt, bewilderment. As Darren was lately saying they should have been more protective of her.
There was a new maturity in Darren. The older brother who had his own life now, totally separate from hers.
She missed him! She missed her young, furious self, that had long abided in her brother.
It was something of a shock to realize that Darren was almost thirty years old. He’d given up comic strips and graphic novels (for the time being at least) and was in his second year of medical school at the University of Washington, in Seattle; he intended to specialize in public health, as Gus had done. He was living with a woman named Rachel, a speech therapist, whom Naomi had not (yet) met but with whom she’d spoken on the phone—“Naomi? Hello! I almost feel that I know you, Darren has told me so much about you.” Naomi had been struck dumb with wonder what this could possibly be, that her brother had told a stranger.
Hey we were just your ordinary older brother, kid sister plotting mayhem against the enemy like freaks joined at the hip. Did we actually hurt anyone?—no. Just ourselves.
And what a surprise, her first glimpse of Darren! Her brother had been awaiting her that noon at the Katechay Inn, where he’d arrived the previous evening; when Naomi turned her rented car into the parking lot there came at a run a tall smiling young man in khaki shorts, T-shirt, dark glasses and hiking shoes. A wide smile as if he’d been watching from a window.
“Hey! Hiya.”
Her first impression was—He is not wary, guarded. He has changed.
He’d hugged her so hard she winced. The change in her brother was obvious—He is happy.
Of course she’d recognized Darren at once. The changes in his appearance were superficial. His thick dark hair was threaded with premature gray like their father’s at a young age and was not so long and straggly as it had been. Nor was he quite so lanky-lean as he’d been, his face was fuller, on his jaws a short-trimmed beard that reminded Naomi of their father’s beard in one of its incarnations, in some long-ago time.
Why does a man wear a beard? Naomi had once asked their father. Gus had laughed and said it was a more appropriate question why a man might shave off his beard. D’you think “clean-shaven” is natural, sweetie? Why would you think such a thing?
She’d have liked to search through old family photos, to see if she could locate precisely the beard of their father’s that Darren’s beard emulated . . . It would have been gratifying to see Darren’s face, when he realized it.
But she didn’t have the cache of photographs with her. Some were at the grandparents’ house in Birmingham, Michigan. Some were with her things in New York City, in the room that was “hers” in Madelena Kein’s apartment.
(If Naomi was living anywhere, it was with her grandmother Madelena Kein. She’d lived with Madelena while attending film school at NYU and she’d returned to live with her after Madelena was diagnosed with cancer in the spring of 2010, in order to see Madelena through the ordeal of surgery and chemotherapy.)
Behind the Katechay Inn, a wooden deck overlooking a shallow marshy shore of Wild Fowl Bay at the southernmost tip of Saginaw Bay/Lake Huron. A sound of red-winged blackbirds, bullfrogs. In sunlit autumnal mud flats, remnants of monarch butterflies and dragonflies. So vividly Naomi remembered hiking in this area with her father, her eyes were constantly filling up with tears.
(Did Darren notice? If he did, he was tactful and said nothing.)
“If she’s late, she would call . . .”
“Would she!”
Brother, sister laughed together. Pleasure in this shared exasperation over their (eccentric, difficult) mother.