Missing Mom

by Joyce Carol Oates

  It was tricky to return so quickly to Deer Creek Acres. I plotted my route in the way of a military strategist hoping to avoid snipers and land mines. If I entered the subdivision by Lilac Way, I could take Pinewood Drive to Indian Village, and avoid Deer Creek Drive entirely. I wore oversized dark glasses that left red marks on my nose, I wore the sporty green canvas hat with WCHF AM-FM in white letters, the station gave away for promotional reasons. This hat I pulled down on my forehead, to shield my tear-corroded face. In a frantic mood I decided to wear black nylon slacks that fitted my buttocks to advantage, at least I’d been so assured by one or another male acquaintance, and I wore a fuchsia satin shirt with COWGIRL stitched in black above the left breast. I wore plastic-looking sandals. I seemed to have left off my glittery jewelry. I began, then gave up on, “makeup.” (What is it we make up when we apply makeup? Do we “make” up something that isn’t there, or do we “make up” for something that is, we couldn’t bear otherwise? I wished I had Mom to ask, she’d have taken the silly question seriously.)

  My silly-Nikki questions. Who would take them seriously, now.

  Anyway: I threw together a costume. The dark glasses and the hat were most helpful. My face was a loss, forget the face. Puke-pale and swollen as with a mouthful of infected teeth. I plunged out of the house into some kind of mocking sunshine hoping people would not stare at me in the street Oh God there’s the Eaton girl, the one whose mother was murdered.

  “Why, Nikki! Sweetie.”

  As soon as I stepped inside the Habers’ house and was greeted by Frannie Haber in a crush of a hug, as Ike Haber, rubbing his jaws in sympathetic misery, looked on, there came Smoky mewing anxiously and nudging against my ankles, and when I picked him up, he kicked a bit but began purring loudly, you might say frantically, his glaring cat-eyes fixed on my face. “Smoky! Where were you, I was so worried about you…” Suddenly I was happy. As Frannie and Ike looked on, I was becoming very happy. I might have laughed aloud, as a child laughs out of sheer happiness.

  Thinking I would bring Smoky back home. I would hurry to show Mom. See? He was never lost, what did I tell you.

  For we’d had lost-cat scares, over the years. A few.

  They hadn’t always turned out happily, though. Not like this.

  Smoky was kicking more energetically now. I had to be embarrassed, he was behaving as if he didn’t know who the hell I was.

  Frannie was saying apologetically, “Oh, he wouldn’t eat! You can feel his ribs, almost! He was hiding in our garage behind the lawn furniture, at first we thought it was, oh, a wounded rabbit, or raccoon, except we heard mewing, we had no idea whose cat he was, where he’d come from, I left food and water for him in an open place but he wouldn’t touch it, even when no one was around. But then—”

  Ike Haber interrupted, “—my idea, to put out tuna.”

  “—real tuna, like for humans—”

  “—and boy oh boy did he eat that, gobbled it down—”

  “Oh but, Ike,” Frannie felt obliged to correct her husband, “he threw most of it up, he’d gobbled so fast. Though, later—”

  “—when he came inside the house, finally—”

  “—just ran in, when I opened the door—”

  “—like somebody had called him he trusted—”

  “—he did eat some cat food, dry food out of a box—and this ‘Tender Vittles’ kibble, he liked. And he drank so much water, the poor thing was so thirsty—”

  “—he knows nobody is going to hurt him here, but still—”

  “—the least little noise he runs and hides—”

  “—we weren’t sure whose cat it was, except—”

  “I knew it was Smoky! I knew, and Smoky knew me, I swear the poor thing ran to our house because he knew he’d be safe here—didn’t you, sweetie?”

  Frannie was stroking Smoky’s tomcat head, for a panicky moment I thought the cat would erupt out of my arms hissing and clawing but thank God he did not.

  The Habers looked on, sorry for me. An adult woman behaving as I was behaving pressing my face against Smoky’s fur. And it wasn’t soft fine fur, it was coarse, slightly matted fur. And Smoky wasn’t behaving like a loving-rescued cat, he was behaving like an almost-crazed cat. He was purring loudly, like a noisy air conditioner. He was kneading his claws in my hair, and in my satin cowgirl shirt where he was doing damage, yet I managed to carry him out of the Habers’ kitchen even as, with seeming sincerity, Frannie Haber was inviting me to stay for supper, sniffing and wiping at her eyes, and poor Ike Haber was blinking and staring (at my snug-fitting black nylon slacks, how could any reasonably normal man fail to stare) and swallowing hard wracking his brains for something sensible to say to me that wouldn’t provoke his wife into outright bawling, still less me. All Ike could come up with was, with ghastly enthusiasm, “Be sure to come back and visit again, Nikki, real soon!”

  to nikki with love

  “We will. We’ll—start soon.”

  “Next Monday.”

  “Next Monday! Yes.”

  We were adamant, Clare and me.

  We were breathless as girls plotting a risky adventure in a way that, as sisters growing up in the house at 43 Deer Creek, we had not been for we’d never been allies. My older sister would have disdained any adventure undertaken with only just me.

  “Rob says he wants to help. He thinks we’ll be overwhelmed, exhausted. But I don’t want him, Nikki, do you?”

  Clare spoke so fiercely, I was grateful to be spared telling her in no uncertain terms We don’t want an outsider touching our parents’ things.

  “No, Clare. I wouldn’t feel right with Rob, either.”

  “Of course he’s right, we need to clear the house and clean it and put it on the market before it’s midsummer, and people don’t look at houses. Every realtor I’ve spoken to has said this. But Rob doesn’t think we’re capable right now, he thinks I’m still upset. ‘Not yourself, Clare.’” Clare laughed harshly, enjoining me to ponder how ridiculous this was.

  I laughed, it was ridiculous. That Clare Eaton could ever be anyone except herself!

  Clare fumbled in her purse for a cigarette. She had not smoked since she’d been pregnant with Lilja and she often boasted of this fact yet somehow, since what had happened to Mom, she’d begun smoking again.

  What happened to Mom was how we alluded to it.

  Sometimes, we had only to say it.

  Or, uttering the word Since—in a certain tone of voice and breaking off with a wincing expression, no need to utter a syllable more.

  “—yesterday I think it was, or maybe it was Thursday, after taking Lilja to her dance class, driving on Lincoln Avenue downtown, I saw Mom’s car?—the way sometimes I did, you know?—and Mom and I would honk at each other and wave as we passed. And, well, I saw this car, exactly like Mom’s except it wasn’t.” Clare paused, not knowing where to go with this. She’d been recounting the story with a bemused frown to signal that it was a story on herself meant to illustrate a radical and puzzling alteration in her normally faultless behavior. “—And next thing I knew, I had a cigarette in my hand. I didn’t even realize I’d bought a pack!”

  Clare laughed. She was wearing glasses so dark I could almost not see her slitted eyes.

  I wasn’t sure how to react. Frankly, I didn’t believe it, not the part about discovering a cigarette in her hand.

  Vaguely I murmured what sounded like “Me, too.”

  “You? Since when did you stop smoking?”

  Clare’s voice was sharp. I had to wonder if we were quarreling.

  It was a Saturday in late May. Clare and I were sitting in Clare’s car parked in front of 43 Deer Creek Drive. We were not parked in the driveway but at the curb, and Clare had not yet turned off the motor. It was shocking to see the grass so grown and ragged and weedy and the driveway littered with newspapers and flyers. Neither of us wished to sigh aloud If Dad could see this—!

  Clare had forgiven me, to a degree. For my “rude”—“i
mmature”—“typical Nikki behavior”—on the day of our mother’s funeral. For days had passed. Each day passed slow as a train of lumbering rattling boxcars but once it was past, the day seemed to have gone swiftly and there was regret in its wake. “Something I forgot to do…”

  Clare picked a piece of tobacco off her tongue, peering at me through her dramatic dark glasses.

  “Nikki, what?”

  “What?”

  “You said something.”

  “No. That was you.”

  “Just now? That was you.”

  We were annoyed with each other. Almost, we didn’t need a reason.

  The modest redwood-and-stucco ranch house at 43 Deer Creek Drive was our joint inheritance. Our mother had willed her estate to both of us equally. I hadn’t wanted to tell Clare what I’d felt, that Mom really should have left three-quarters of the estate to her and her family, and one-quarter to me, for fear that Clare might have quipped, “Well, you could correct that, Nikki, couldn’t you?”

  I’d driven to Mt. Ephraim thinking that Clare and I were to begin our task of sorting, clearing, cleaning the house today. Our parents’ property was no longer designated as a crime scene, the shiny yellow MT. EPHRAIM POLICE DEPT. tape had been removed and the redwood-and-stucco house was again available to us. Arrangements had been discreetly made through the police chief Gil Rowen who’d known “Feather” and “Johnny” in the old days for a private contractor from Rochester to clean those parts of the house and garage that had been despoiled, that Clare and I would be spared these sights.

  Soon there would come to be the pretense between Clare and me, that I had not “seen” anything that Clare had not seen. I had not blundered into the house, and into the garage. I had not been the one to see our mother where she’d been struck down.

  As Rob had offered to help Clare and me with the house, so too Wally Szalla had offered to help. “It may be rougher than you think, Nikki. And it always takes much longer.”

  I’d thanked Wally but declined his offer. He had no idea how my mother had disapproved of him. How upset she’d have been to know that, after her death, Wally Szalla might enter her house and “go through her things.”

  I’d prepared myself for today but it seemed we were going to begin on Monday. Clare was one to change your mind for you without your consent and then to chide you for it. “Monday, you’ll be prepared, Nikki? Promise.”

  “Well. Monday after work.”

  “How long after work?”

  “Maybe six? I’ll try to get here by six.”

  “Six! That’s impossible for me.”

  “But—”

  “Nikki, I have a family. I have responsibilities.”

  Clare turned the key in the ignition and her car leapt forward. She was very annoyed with me as if I’d misled her. I tried to make amends: “Wednesday afternoon, I can come early. I can be here by one o’clock. Is that better?”

  “Wednesday is Foster’s soccer game. And Lilja has something after school called ‘Hi-Lo.’ You know that Wednesdays are horrendous for me, Nikki!” Ashes from Clare’s cigarette scattered onto my clothing, into my hair. I flinched seeing that Clare was driving much too fast for these narrow suburban streets.

  I said, “Maybe Thursday? I can ask for the entire day off.”

  “Please do! And don’t forget to let me know.”

  Clare spoke reproachfully as if forgetting to inform her of my days off from the Beacon was a familiar failing of mine.

  We were both trembling. I’d been gripping my cell phone in my moist hand, though it was switched off and Wally Szalla could not have called me if he’d wished.

  Clare said, exhaling smoke through both nostrils, “Yes-sss. Next Thursday might work out. We’ll get to the house early and if we don’t become distracted we should be able to finish it all in one day. And between now and then we’ll have time to”—Clare braked at an intersection, nearly having run a stop sign and collided with another car—“prepare ourselves.”

  By the time we returned to Clare’s house, Clare was in a good mood. We were both feeling we’d narrowly escaped some danger. I understood that Clare had forgiven me for my most recent bad behavior when she instructed me to reach inside her handbag and see what she’d brought me.

  It was the beautiful little tarnished-silver watch I’d left behind at her house, broken. The watch with the midnight-blue face. Clare hadn’t only returned it to me, she’d had it repaired at the jeweler’s.

  I was touched. I hadn’t expected this. Clare was always so busy and breezy, and this meant she’d taken time for me. I thanked her for her thoughtfulness and asked how much I owed her?

  “Don’t be silly, Nikki. All you owe me, you’d never be able to repay.”

  It was a joke of course. Between sisters.

  The delicate hands on the midnight-blue face read 4:17 P.M. I held the watch to my ear, I heard the minute ticking.

  Turning it over I read the finely-engraved inscription To Elise with love. For a fraction of a second I felt a childish pang of disappointment as if I’d expected to see To Nikki with love.

  “remanded for trial”

  Yes. I attended the preliminary hearing in the Chautauqua County Courthouse on June 1, 2004, where the murderer of Gwendolyn Eaton, an individual named Ward Lynch, twenty-nine years old, of no fixed address but with family ties to Erie, Pennsylvania, was officially remanded for trial—“To be determined at a later date.”

  It was at this hearing that I saw my mother’s murderer for the first time. I swallowed hard, I stared. I felt a terrible weakness in the pit of my stomach. Beside me Clare was rocking in her seat and making a low whimpering noise like a dog in pain and though we’d been instructed not to stare at the man, not to risk making eye contact with him, we stared, we blinked and stared and could not look away for the first several minutes of the hearing.

  “Oh! He’s so ordinary.”

  This was me, whispering in Clare’s ear.

  “So—nothing. Oh.”

  I was groping for Clare’s hand. My frantic fingers closed about hers that were icy-cold, in a tight grip.

  Ward Lynch was brought into the courtroom walking in stiff baby steps because his legs were shackled at the ankles. His arms were shackled at the wrists. He was a tall bony-faced man with pitted skin, ropy-greasy dark hair straggling between his shoulder blades, haggard eyes. The corners of his thin-lipped mouth were downturned into a smirk. He had a bumpy receding forehead and a narrow receding chin and his chest looked caved-in. Wasted was the druggie word. Strung out, burnt out, meth-head. The kind of guy who isn’t young any longer but isn’t grown up, either. Drives a motorcycle when he has the money for it, works at a gas station or with a lawn crew. You’d see him having a smoke outside the 7-Eleven. You’d see him hanging out at the mall, eyeing girls half his age. Hiking along the interstate in the rain. You’d see his sulky face in a WANTED BY F.B.I. notice in the post office.

  You wouldn’t want to see that face confronting you on a deserted stretch of city sidewalk. As you climb out of your car in a darkened parking lot, or in your own garage.

  Much was made of the fact that Ward Lynch had served three and a half years of a five-year sentence at Red Bank State Prison Facility for Men, on a charge of auto theft, burglary, and check-forging. That he’d been paroled for “good behavior.” That he’d lived in halfway houses, in homeless shelters in Buffalo and Rochester, he’d been enrolled in the Christian Fellowship Out-Reach Program and it was in this program that he’d initially met Gwendolyn Eaton.

  “Oh. I hate him. Oh, Nikki.”

  Clare was squeezing my fingers so hard, I expected to hear a sudden crack.

  Ward Lynch was a murderer and yet: he’d been gotten up in a bright orange clown suit. A child might laugh at him, missing the expression in his face. In a public place, he’d have been the center of attention. In this courtroom that was predominantly men and every man wore a suit, dress shirt, necktie, Lynch was wearing an oversized orange jumps
uit like TV footage. Like the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh. On both the front and back of Lynch’s uniform was CHAUTAUQUA COUNTY MENS DETENTION in black letters.

  What wasn’t ordinary about Lynch was what he’d done. The use he’d made of his hands.

  You would expect to see monster-hands. Oversized brutal hands. But these were ordinary hands, though with bony knuckles. I saw discolorations on the backs of both hands like deep bruises.

  Lynch’s face was flushed. He’d been made to look foolish in public. Shuffling to a seat at the front of the courtroom, every eye on him. He’d lurched, and sat clumsily. His mouth that looked like a rubber band pulled thin quivered.

  Beside Lynch, a harried-looking man in his forties, Lynch’s public-defender attorney, murmured into his ear as Lynch stared into space. The prosecutor who was trying the case had told us that Lynch’s attorney had been reluctant to accept him as a client, but had had no choice. Very likely, the attorney would advise Lynch to plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of life in prison without parole, sparing Lynch the likelihood of a death sentence, and sparing us all a trial.

  Clare had objected to this, initially. She’d been tearful, vehement: Mom’s murderer deserved to be executed.

  After she’d had time to think it over, after Rob and I had reasoned with her, Clare agreed. Let him plead guilty, let the state put him away for the rest of his life.

  I hoped this would happen. I didn’t believe in capital punishment.

  I didn’t want to hate Ward Lynch. It was hard for me to hate, the way Clare hated. I didn’t want to hate anyone. Our mother had taught us to see the “good” in people and while I doubted that there was much “good” in Ward Lynch, I knew that Mom would not have hated him, her very murderer.

  Probably, knowing Mom, she’d have figured out a way to “forgive” him.