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.
Another message clicked on the voice mail, a stranger’s voice, which Darren deleted.
“Turn it off for now, Darren. Please.”
Darren switched off the machine. The little red light vanished.
In the freezing kitchen of the rented farmhouse on Salt Hill Road which we had not ever imagined we would reenter we were waiting, we had no idea what we would do next.
“NEW IDEA”
How many times we would ask ourselves what had Gus meant by a new idea—what did this new idea have to do with the end of the school year in June?
Darren said it was obvious: Dad was planning to leave Ohio and move back to Michigan to live with us.
Naomi said, less certainly: Dad was (possibly) going to quit working in women’s centers and clinics, and become another kind of doctor (that people didn’t hate!).
Melissa said: Oh, Did Daddy have a surprise for us?
Overhearing, Jenna would say bitterly: Better for your father not to have called us at all than to have called and left that message, to fester in our hearts.
LAUGHTER
They tried to tell me you were—dead! Of course I didn’t believe it, we know how people exaggerate.
Often, she had this dream. She and Gus laughing together. Except it was the sound of a harsh wind rustling and not true laughter. Except when she could see clearly, it wasn’t Gus.
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF OHIO V. LUTHER AMOS DUNPHY
DECEMBER 2000
Greedy and self-punishing her eyes fastened upon him. It was her strategy to sit in the Broome County Courthouse where she could observe the defendant Luther Dunphy more or less continuously yet not conspicuously for she knew (of course she knew) how others observed her.
A widow exists in the eyes of beholders. In her own eyes she is likely to be invisible.
And so she knew how they were measuring her. Is that her?—the doctor’s wife?
Or, less friendly—The abortionist’s wife?
Those individuals in the crowded courtroom who were on Gus Voorhees’s side and those who were on the side of the enemy.
Most days the defendant wore a sand-colored corduroy jacket that fitted his broad shoulders tightly though sometimes he wore a dark-hued jacket of a synthetic-seeming material like acrylic fiber. His trousers were dark and lacked a discernible crease. His shirt was white and appeared wrinkled. (Worn with a necktie most days but if without a tie, the shirt remained unbuttoned at the throat as if the collar was too tight for the man’s muscular neck.) Dunphy’s faded hair had been buzz cut like a military haircut and was sharply receding from his forehead. His negligently shaved jowls sagged. In profile she saw him. A heavy face, the face of an aged and baffled boy. Cheeks flushed and lined, dull-red blemish or birthmark in the creased skin and indentations beneath his eyes that were rigidly fixed on the judge, the witnesses, the gesticulating and quarrelsome attorneys as if he dared not glance to the side—dared not glance toward her.
If Jenna hadn’t known that on his most recent birthday Luther Dunphy was forty years old she’d have guessed that he was ten years older. His muscled-softening body was a slow landslide. His hands were a workingman’s hands, now useless. Mornings at the defense table he was able to sit reasonably straight but by mid-afternoon his shoulders began to slump, his head began to sink toward his chest. It was not possible to imagine what Dunphy was thinking as he heard, or gave the appearance of hearing, a succession of prosecution witnesses describing the shootings on the morning of November 2, 1999, and identifying him as the “lone shooter”—whether the man was righteous, defiant, indifferent, resigned. Though more than once, in the afternoon, his eyes nearly closed and a warning remark of the judge provoked Dunphy’s attorney to nudge him awake.