Missing Mom: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  I replaced the chair. I think I was acting unconsciously. I would not want Mom to know that the chair was out of place, that I’d seen it out of place and might have worried.

  There was a strange smell here, too. My nostrils constricted, I could not identify it.

  “Smoky! Poor guy.”

  I poured dry cat food into a bowl for Smoky, and replenished his water bowl. Though Smoky ate hungrily, he seemed wary of me, cringing when I moved to replace the cat food box in the cupboard, freezing and glaring as if, for a split second, he hadn’t known who I was. “Smoky, come on. You know me.”

  Mom talked to Smoky constantly, she’d talked to all our cats and when we’d had parakeets she’d talked to them. It became a joke in the household how Dad would reply absentmindedly, “What, Gwen? What did you ask?”

  I kept up a bright one-sided banter with Smoky, for it seemed important to soothe the nervous cat. He needed to be assured that he’d be fed, everything was normal and routine at 43 Deer Creek Drive.

  Through the rear kitchen window, framed by ruffled sunflower-print curtains Mom had sewed, I saw the bird feeder which Dad had positioned to be at about eye level; it, too, seemed to be depleted of food. Small birds hovered and fluttered in the evergreens nearby, chirping as if querulously. I could see most of the backyard: Mom wasn’t visible.

  I was beginning to shiver. That day had been warm, a glaze of sunshine through a mostly overcast sky, now as daylight waned a decided chill rose from the earth. I’d run out of my brownstone apartment in jeans and a sweatshirt, bare-headed. With my hair so very short, the nape of my neck felt exposed.

  At the Beacon yesterday my co-workers were about evenly divided between those who thought my new look was “cool”—“sexy”—“fantastic, Nikki!”—and those who smiled ambiguously and offered no opinion.

  When I passed by his food dish, Smoky cringed and froze in a momentary panic. I went to check the bathroom in the hall: the “guest” bathroom where Mom kept her special floral-scented soaps in a little wicker basket on the back of the toilet. There was a reassuring smell here of potpourri and soap and my face in the spotless mirror did not appear so waxy-pale and drawn as, from inside, it felt.

  The dyed-maroon hair looked like a fright wig. Something to be slapped on a head at Hallowe’en. Seeing me, Wally had blinked and smiled and laughed and had to concede: Nikki Eaton was about the most unpredictable female he knew.

  Of females he’d been involved with, in any case.

  Beyond the guest bathroom was an alcove, a short corridor that led to the basement door and the garage door. I would check these later, I thought.

  The basement door was shut. If Mom had been down in the basement, running a load of laundry, ironing, she would have left the door open.

  In the dining room I saw with a shock that something was very wrong.

  Chairs had been yanked away from the table. The breakfront drawers were open and spilling their contents. On the carpet was the green silverware box, looking as if it had been flung down, spilling forks, knives, spoons in a glittery jumble. I stepped on something that rolled beneath my feet: a broken candle.

  It took me a moment to realize: our silver candlestick holders were missing from the dining room table and from a serving table against the wall. Only candles remained, flung down and broken.

  We’d been burglarized.

  My heart was beating rapidly now. The house had been broken into, ransacked. Through the doorway I saw items in the living room strewn about. I could smell an acrid odor, as of perspiration. A man’s odor.

  In the family room, the television set lay on its side, on the carpet. Not a very new or a very large set, it must have been dragged from its perch on a low table, then abandoned by the thief as too cumbersome.

  The door was open to Clare’s old room, now a sewing room. Here also drawers had been yanked out of a bureau and lay on the floor spilling such mundane contents as sewing supplies, napkin rings, woven place mats. My old room, now a spare room with matched floral bedspread, curtains, and chintz-covered easy chair, had been similarly ransacked.

  I went into my parents’ bedroom at the end of the hall, now I was very frightened. Pulses were beating in my head, in my eyes. I saw bureau drawers pulled out here, overturned on the floor with a look of violence. Mom’s things scattered on the carpet: her inexpensive jewelry, stockings and socks and underwear, sweaters. The glamorous white ostrich feather boa…

  The closet door was open, Mom’s shoes lay on the floor as if they’d been kicked about. Size-four crepe-soled shoes with laces, black ballerina flats, a single patent-leather shoe with a small heel. Clothes had been torn from hangers, flung into a heap on the floor.

  Even the bed had been disturbed, the hand-sewn quilt Mom laid over her pink satin bedspread lay partway on the floor.

  He’d been looking for money, I thought. But my parents kept no money in the house.

  I was stepping on an old purse of my mother’s, a bulky leather handbag she hadn’t used for years. And there was a glazed straw purse decorated with cherries. And a beaded white silk purse, Mom had last used for the wedding of a cousin of mine. These were yawning open, empty.

  In the hall bathroom, the mirrored medicine cabinet door was open. The narrow glass shelves of the cabinet had been cleared as if with an angry swipe of someone’s hand, a tube of toothpaste, a toothbrush, a plastic cup, deodorant in a blue plastic container and other toiletries had fallen into the sink and onto the floor.

  And vials of prescription pills, spilled onto the floor. He’d been looking for drugs.

  I couldn’t keep from staring into the toilet bowl. I thought, He has used this toilet. But the water was clear.

  All this while, a part of my mind was detached and warning me: get help, run outside, call 911. This part of my mind understood that I was in danger, I should not have remained in the house after I’d realized what the situation was. Yet, I seemed to be reasoning that, though something had happened, and this something might involve my mother, yet until I acknowledged that something had happened that required outside help, it was not altogether established that something had happened to my mother. But once I called for help, it would be established.

  I saw a movement in the corner of my eye, I turned and there was nothing. But in a mirror at the end of the hall, a woman’s thin, ghostly figure seemed to be floating. My eyes were flooding with tears, I could not see who the woman was.

  Smoky had followed me at a wary distance. He was mewing in short anxious bleats as a cat mews when desperate to be let outside.

  I returned to the kitchen, Smoky ran ahead of me panicked. Now in the kitchen I saw what I hadn’t seemed to see before: the phone cord had been ripped out of the wall, the avocado-green plastic receiver lay on the counter unattached.

  All day we’d been calling Mom’s number, Clare and me. Our calls had been automatically deflected onto the voice mail service. If we’d heard a protracted busy signal, one of us would have come over earlier.

  I went to the basement door and opened it, slowly. A cold damp air lifted to my nostrils. “Mom?”—my voice was childlike, wavering. I might have been thinking, Maybe Mom is hiding in the basement.

  A weak fading light from the narrow windows penetrated the dimness. The washer and dryer glimmered like dream-objects but other shapes close by were indistinct. No movement! No sound! Yet I could not force myself to descend the cellar stairs.

  The door leading from the kitchen into the garage was ajar, I saw. I seemed not to have noticed this until now.

  For a while I stood in the doorway staring into the garage. I told myself You can see better here, it’s safer here.

  I was smelling something strange. I was thinking of the butcher shop on Mohegan Street. Where when I’d been a little girl my mother had brought me “meat shopping” with her. I’d drifted off to stare as if hypnotized at sculpted cuts of raw meat inside the display cases while Mom talked and laughed with the butcher giving her orders in a surpris
ingly knowledgeable voice.

  A smell of blood. I knew.

  I thought Something has died here. An animal.

  My father would have been upset to see how cluttered Mom had allowed the garage to become. Now that he was gone. There wasn’t even room for Mom to have fitted her car inside if she’d tried. Everywhere were trash cans, garden tools, bags of wild birdseed and peat moss and fertilizer and wood chips. Lawn furniture including years-old chairs whose plastic slats had long ago rotted and ripped. Here were discarded household furnishings—worn-out chairs, an old portable TV, shadeless lamps and lampless shades. Both my parents had been reluctant to dispose of their handsome matched and monogrammed leather luggage, a wedding present in long-ago 1968 before the advent of wheeled suitcases. You never knew when fashions would change, my father stubbornly believed.

  I was staring at a shadowy shape on the concrete floor about fifteen feet away. It appeared to be a small rolled-up strip of carpet, an oddly shaped box or bundle of some kind…I switched on the light and saw that it was Mom.

  I called out to her. She did not move.

  She must have fallen, I thought. Tripped or something, or fainted and fallen. You are not accustomed to seeing a fallen person, almost you can’t identify what you are seeing. There appeared to be a dark oily liquid spread beneath Mom and on her lacerated neck and chest and lower body yet I continued to think that she must have fainted and struck her head. I believed that I could see her breathing. Pulses beat so violently in my eyes, I could not be sure what I was seeing. As in a dream I approached her. I seemed to be floating and yet I must have stumbled, I’d struck my leg on the handle of something metallic for there would be a bruise on my shin afterward, I felt nothing at the time. Mom was lying awkwardly on her right side, her right arm outstretched as if reaching for help and her left arm twisted beneath her. Her face was turned upward, her skin was deathly white as I’d never seen it before. Her eyes were partly opened and I believed that they were aware of me.

  I was sobbing, pleading: Mom! Mom! Mom! I was kneeling beside her. I touched her, tried to move her arm that had stiffened. I tried to lift her. I tried to revive her. But her skin was so strangely cold. I thought, There is something wrong, Mom’s skin is so cold and it isn’t winter now. When I leaned over her something ruptured and began bleeding in my chest.

  Mom’s pretty clothes, stained in blood! A blue linen jacket, a floral print blouse that matched a blouse Mom had sewed for me back in high school. Blue cotton knit slacks stained in blood.

  I panicked, on my feet and swaying. I could not faint: I could not give in. I fumbled to open the garage door. The switch, where was the switch! My fingers were slippery. It was crucial, my mother needed fresh air, to help her breathe. The sickening stench of blood in this confined space must have caused her to faint, and fall.

  The garage door opened so slowly! A rumbling of gears overhead. My bloody fingers would leave their imprint on the switch that operated the door. The bloodstained soles of my shoes, jogging shoes with articulated ridges, would leave their imprint on the concrete floor and on the asphalt drive outside: clearly at first, then diminishing as I ran from the garage. I knew that I had to get help for Mom for I could not revive her and yet it was a terrible thing to leave her alone, and so helpless. I was partway down the drive when I heard my name called in a faint anxious voice Nikki!

  I understood: I was the only one. I was all that Mom had.

  When I returned to the garage I saw that Mom was moving. I saw that Mom was breathing. Through my pulsing eyes, I saw. I ran back to her, and tried to lift her. It seemed to me in my confusion that if Mom could be lifted to her feet and if she could stand, she would be revived, she would be all right. It was a matter of balance, wasn’t it? Mom was looking at me now, her glassy eyes fixed upon my face, I saw that she recognized me, always I would believe that she recognized me, yet her head fell back limp, her mouth was open in a way unlike her and there was a terrible raw wound beneath her chin. So much blood, so many hidden wounds. Her skin was clammy as before, her body was oddly stiff and resistant and heavier than I had known it and she had not moved, she had not been breathing, and yet she had called to me, I’d heard her!

  This had been a mistake, whatever had happened. My mother had been stabbed many times. Someone had been angry with her to stab her so, and that was not possible. There’d been some mistake, whoever had done this had come to the wrong house. He could not have wanted Gwen Eaton, it had been a mistake.

  Tenderly I laid Mom back onto the floor. I pulled a strip of canvas partway beneath her. It would be difficult to explain afterward what I’d done or had intended to do and yet it was logical at the time, and necessary. I would make Mom comfortable, I would position her at rest. She would appear to be sleeping. There is peace in sleeping. There is not horror, pain, ugliness in sleeping. I must have shut her eyes. I must have touched her eyelids, to shut them. Never had I dared touch another person’s eyes in such a way, no lover’s eyes, never my parents’ eyes, yet I must have touched my mother’s eyelids, to shut them. I promised her You will be all right, Mom. I won’t go far.

  I stumbled away. Another time I collided with something metallic. Then I was outside. How strange, the air smelled of lilac! I ran doubled over, a sharp pain in my chest where something had broken. I was trying to call for help, trying to scream. The sounds issuing from my mouth were hoarse, choked. But I was able to run across the street to our neighbors’ house. This was the Highams’ redwood-and-stucco “ranch” built to the same model as our own for there was the large rectangular window facing our window as in a subtly distorted mirror, there was the same grassy front lawn, less pocked with dandelions than our own because Mr. Higham squatted out there, armed with a hand hoe, to dig the gnarly weeds out.

  I ran to the side door of the house, that like ours opened into the kitchen. I was brash, reckless as a child. In fact I was a child. I was crying, “Mrs. Higham! Let me use your phone! Something has happened to my mother.”

  rupture

  Something ruptured and began bleeding in my chest when I bent over my mother, when I saw my mother in that way. It will happen to you, in a way special to you. You will not anticipate it, you cannot prepare for it and you cannot escape it. The bleeding will not cease for a long time.

  In my case, no one could know. No one would think in pity Why, that show-offy woman with the spiky purple hair is bleeding inside.

  More likely it was thought That silly woman! What a sight! Couldn’t she have known that her mother might be murdered, isn’t she ashamed!

  “murder”

  There was a taffy-colored plastic phone receiver in my shaking hand. I managed to dial 911. A woman answered with startling abruptness and I heard my dazed voice: “I—I need to—I need to report a—murder.”

  The voice responded with an audible gasp: “You need—what?”

  “A murder. My m-mother. We are at—”

  The look in Gladys Higham’s face! As if I’d shouted at her, given her a sudden rude shove. As if, Gwen Eaton’s friend of more than twenty years, she could not comprehend the words issuing from my mouth.

  Gwen? Gwen? Not Gwen…

  I saw then: my hands were not clean but sticky. I would realize afterward that I’d left faint smears of blood on Mrs. Higham’s plastic wall phone that was a twin of Mom’s kitchen phone in design, lightness.

  Speaking with the 911 dispatcher, I seemed to be having trouble with the simplest words. My tongue had gone numb. There was a ringing in my ears. Pulses in my head beat like electric current. I was distracted by elderly Mrs. Higham clutching at her throat in alarm and disbelief, stumbling to sit down, heavily, in a kitchen chair. Gladys Higham was not a young woman, she was older than Mom by perhaps ten years and much less fit. Her old-woman legs were thick to bursting in brown support hose.

  In Mrs. Higham’s kitchen that was a mirror of our kitchen across the street there were two cages of fluttery little birds: daubs of greenish-gold beating their wi
ngs as they flew about excitedly inside their brass cages, swing to bar, bar to swing, tittering and chirping brightly. You’d have thought that I had blundered into their cages, the little birds were so aroused. The dispatcher was instructing me please to repeat what I’d said, to speak more clearly, more loudly, I had to wonder what this stranger must be thinking, a desperate call to report a murder made in the presence of tittering and chirping birds. I was repeating my name, not Nikki, for Nikki wasn’t serious, but Nicole, I was Nicole Eaton calling to report the murder of my mother Gwendolyn Eaton, Mrs. Jonathan Eaton of 43 Deer Creek Drive in the Deer Creek subdivision…

  Mrs. Higham was ashen-faced, blinking and panting. Her eyes were elderly eyes, lashless and brimming with tears. I hung up the sticky receiver, it slipped from the wall and clattered onto the counter. Parakeets, canaries! What a commotion! I was sorry to have frightened Gladys Higham, I had not meant to upset her. She was calling for her husband Walter, in another part of the house. I was trying to comfort her, I think. I’d barged into her house, into her kitchen to grab at her telephone, to leave smears of my mother’s blood on the plastic receiver. I thought, how terrible Mom would feel, upsetting Gladys Higham! Upsetting any neighbor! What was private, spilling over across the street, into a neighbor’s house! Mom had made us promise, Clare and me, years ago when she’d had a biopsy for a pit-sized growth in one of her breasts, that if the test came back “positive,” if the growth was malignant, we would tell no one.

  We’d promised, of course. Clare and me, exchanging a look of complicity. How could such news be a secret, in Mt. Ephraim! Where so many people knew Gwen Eaton.

  But we would promise, wouldn’t we, Mom begged.

  Mom dreaded people talking about her as a cancer patient. Feeling sorry for her or worse yet feeling they should feel sorry for her.

  The biopsy came back negative.

  A false alarm! No cancer.

  Elderly Walter Higham was staring at me now. Gladys was clutching at his arm, repeating what I’d said. The look in Walter Higham’s face! Such a tittering of birds!