Missing Mom: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  I would be expected to testify. I did not see how I could refuse to testify. Though what could I say! I want him dead was the wish of my relatives and it was assumed that this was my wish as well but if I testified I would have to tell the court that my mother would not have wished for a death sentence, not Gwendolyn Eaton. She would have forgiven even her murderer, I believed. And yet, for me to testify My mother would not want this man executed, speaking in her place I do not want this man executed would anger my relatives, especially Clare.

  In the night sleepless. When I wasn’t thinking of what to wear at the trial, and the possibility of a jury finding Ward Lynch not guilty, I lay awake imagining my testimony at the penalty phase and the hurt and indignation of my relatives. Sweating and dry-mouthed I lay awake seeing myself trying to speak with Clare and being rebuffed. Trying to touch Clare’s arm, and she throws off my hand like a snake.

  In her fury crying, face distorted in grief, “Nikki, how could you! Betray us, and Mom! I never want to see you again.”

  I woke from the nightmare. For a brief moment I felt relief, it had only been a dream, then the realization swept over me like dirty water that the trial was still to come.

  And then, finally, after so many weeks, months, days and hours of anticipation—“For once, Nicole, I’m the bearer of good news.”

  Three days before the trial was scheduled to begin, Ross Strabane called me. As soon as he identified himself, my heart began to beat rapidly. I knew, somehow. There was a barely concealed tremor of elation in the man’s voice.

  He wanted to see me in person, if possible. As soon as possible.

  “I can be there in ten minutes. Prepare for some good news.”

  When Strabane arrived, he was breathless and he was carrying a bouquet of lilies. Waxy white calla lilies, dusky-pink day lilies with freckled petals. Beautiful flowers of a kind Mom had cultivated, that came to bloom in late June. As soon as I opened the door to him Strabane said, “The trial’s off. The defendant has pleaded. You can relax, Nicole. You can call your family.”

  I wasn’t hearing this. I was staring at the man’s face. I had not seen Strabane in months and yet he was utterly familiar to me, as if I’d seen him the day before. He had to repeat what he’d told me, there would be no trial.

  “In the morning you’ll receive a call from the prosecutor’s office, Nicole. I just heard now and I wanted to tell you as soon as possible.”

  “No trial? Has it been postponed?”

  My fingers, that had gone numb with cold, were gripping the bouquet of long-stemmed lilies. Their fragrance was so sweet, I felt faint. I must have looked utterly shocked and bewildered, in the way of one who has just been informed that she hasn’t after all a terminal disease.

  Strabane explained that the trial had not been postponed. There was to be no trial. Lynch’s lawyers had finally got him to agree to a plea of guilty in exchange for a sentence of life in prison without parole, instead of risking the possibility of a death sentence.

  “But why? Why has he changed his mind?”

  “For some good reasons.”

  Still I was fumbling with the flowers. My eyes were so filled with tears, I couldn’t see. The lower part of my face was wanting to break into sobs. I couldn’t trust my voice to invite Strabane inside, so he came inside uninvited. He shut the door behind him. He was still breathless. He looked like a man who has completed a brilliant downhill ski run. Seeing that I needed to hide my face in my hands, he took the flowers back from me and said he’d look for a vase himself, in the kitchen.

  I heard him opening cupboard doors. I wanted to follow him into the kitchen to direct him to a tall cut-glass vase of my mother’s that would be ideal for long-stemmed lilies but my legs were too weak. I found myself sitting heavily on the edge of the living room sofa. Like a child dazed by good fortune, distrustful of what she’s been told, I murmured aloud, “No trial? No trial?” I meant to laugh but somehow my mouth twisted, and tears spilled from my eyes.

  Strabane returned with the ideal vase. He’d filled water to overflowing and was leaving a wet trail in his wake. I remembered my father on some long-ago occasion carrying a vase of flowers to my mother, in his eagerness dribbling water on the floor. Mom had laughed, and hadn’t said a word except to thank Dad and kiss him in her bright pert way at the edge of his mouth.

  I thanked Strabane, and took the vase from him. All our hands were trembling.

  “They ratted on him. Even the grandma. I knew they would, if I could get the evidence.”

  Oh, it was a complicated story. I seemed to know that it was a story I would hear many times and each time it would become more complicated, embellished. It was a story of victory which was why I’d offered Strabane a victory supper.

  First, coffee. Then, something to eat. Then, a bottle of red wine I’d been planning to serve Wally Szalla, months before.

  I was in an emotional state. My mouth wanted to smile, and my mouth wanted to cry. My eyes spilled tears like a leaky but erratic faucet. Strabane pretended not to see. His face was flushed with pleasure, a kind of electric vigor in all his movements. I had not noticed in the past how strong his profile was. His jaws, his nose. The slope of his forehead. He’d shaved before coming here, quickly and not very carefully. He had a naturally thick dark beard and he’d scraped the underside of his chin in several places. I thought about offering him Band-Aids but couldn’t summon the courage, the offer seemed so intimate.

  Oh, the story! How and why Ward Lynch’s relatives in Erie, Pennsylvania, had “ratted” on him! It might seem like a miracle, such an end to the case, but—“It’s what I figured. If I could get the right people to talk, and the evidence.”

  For Strabane, it hadn’t been enough that Ward Lynch was slated to be tried for my mother’s murder. He hadn’t been satisfied that the investigation was complete. So on his own time he’d looked into Lynch’s criminal past since Lynch’s discharge from Red Bank. He’d interviewed prisoners in the facility and guards who’d known Lynch. Eventually he pieced together “connections”: he learned that Lynch had delivered stolen goods to certain of his relatives (including the elderly Ethel Makepeace), who’d either kept the goods for their own use or sold them and shared the revenue with Lynch. These were small-time burglaries from 7-Eleven stores and private houses, cases of liquor and beer, cartons of cigarettes, TVs and CD players, jewelry. Still, the crimes were felonies, and warrants were served to Lynch’s relatives. “They were allowed to plea bargain a deal of only two years’ probation, in exchange for testifying against Lynch. They’re stupid but not crazy. They knew a good deal, even Grandma. I’m only sorry it took so damned long, Nikki.”

  Nikki. The sudden shift was marked by a rush of emotion in the man’s voice.

  By this time it was past 9 P.M. It was a wet, windy April evening. In my emotional state I did not want to be alone but had no wish to reveal the rawness of my need. Nor did Strabane seem to want to leave. Yet we were shy with each other, a man and a woman somehow in a canoe together in white-water rapids, rushing downstream sharing a single paddle. I was wearing a cable-knit pullover sweater with sleeves so long, I could draw my hands up inside them, to warm them. Strabane wore a sport coat that fitted his shoulders tightly, over a cheap nylon V-neck sweater that showed a patch of chest hair gray-grizzled and wiry as a Brillo pad. His corduroy trousers were of that hue of too-bright tan appropriate for grade-school boys. On his feet, which were big as hooves, a pair of rusted well-broken-in Nike running shoes. Strabane explained he’d been off-duty today, a friend had called from headquarters when the news came from the prosecutor’s office. “Knowing of my interest in the Eaton case. Knowing I would want to call you.”

  He was awkward, edgy. He was a man not at ease with speech yet driven to talk, in head-on plunges. He made leaps in reasoning I could not follow. Yet I understood him, somehow. When he lapsed into silence, I felt that I understood him best.

  I’d run to call Clare to tell her the good news and to ask
her to tell others in the family, we’d been spared the ordeal of the trial. Clare, too, had been disbelieving at first. Then she began to scream. Then she began to cry.

  She must have dropped the receiver. I heard her calling Rob! Rob! and in the background my brother-in-law’s raised voice.

  When I invited Strabane to stay for supper I saw him ponder the question. He seemed to be thinking with his face. He seemed to require running both hands through his bristly hair. I understood: he was committed elsewhere. He had a family, obviously. He’d dropped by my house on his own time, out of kindness. The sexual tension between us was—was not?—was?—palpable as the tension in the air before an electrical storm. He knew, he was a man of powerful sexual feelings, but also powerful emotions, so he knew, he was debating. Almost, I could hear Thank you Nikki wish I could but I can’t except he said instead, in a cracked voice, “Yes. I’d like that. But I need to make a call.”

  In the kitchen where I had not prepared any meal for anyone except myself, this kitchen where, when Mom was alive, I’d helped her prepare meals for the family, I drifted about dazed and giddy and frightened and excited, at first wanly opening and shutting cupboard doors, staring into the refrigerator and seeing nothing, disoriented as Aunt Tabitha had been in her kitchen when I’d taken charge. I would prepare a gigantic omelette. Six eggs with yolks and one egg white. Stir-fried onions, green peppers, mushrooms. I whipped the eggs in a bowl until my wrist ached. Strabane was eager to help. He wasn’t a guy, he told me, who liked to be waited on: he’d come from a big family, everybody helped out. I was embarrassed to direct him to search the refrigerator, see what he could find. Salad things? The remains of a loaf of oatmeal/dried buttermilk bread I’d baked a few days ago?

  “Stale doesn’t matter if you make toast. I’ll make toast.”

  Strabane knew exactly where the toaster was. Afterward I would think He knows this house. A crime-scene house.

  I wasn’t sure that I liked this. That I could live with this. That, having resented the man’s knowledge for so long, I could learn to be grateful for it.

  Accompanying the omelette enormous as a hubcap was an enormous salad. Strabane opened the bottle of red wine. We ate at the breakfast nook, famished. Black rain splattered against the window overlooking the rear terrace and, invisible in the dark, the bird feeders my father had set up. Frequently Strabane peered past me into the pitch-black beyond the window as if he’d heard something out back. His forehead creased into knife-sharp furrows. I wondered what he was seeing there.

  My victory meal was a success. Strabane finished every morsel on his plate. With a crust-stub he wiped up every glistening bit of omelette. He was drinking two or three glasses of wine to my one glass. He was becoming ever more elated, ebullient. A look in his face like he’s about to stand up in the hurtling canoe.

  Attracted by our voices, Smoky had appeared in the kitchen. Like an apparition of some bulk, weight and attitude. Male visitors offended him on principle yet he was approaching this one by slow degrees, tawny eyes alert. When Strabane saw the tomcat he leaned over to beckon to him. “Hey Big Turk! You’re a big guy, ain’t ya! C’mere, and be petted.”

  Strabane had a way with animals, you could see. Smoky was intrigued. He approached the man’s outstretched fingers with exasperating slowness, yet he came; he was wary but flirty, half-shutting his eyes and sensuously arching his back in an invitation to be petted.

  I asked Strabane who “Big Turk” was.

  “Never heard of Big Turk? He’s this funky cable TV wrestler covered in tattoos, must weigh three hundred pounds. He’s got a shaved head and demon eyes. Turk is, like, the all-purpose villain. White guys, pure-blood Americans with blond hair, get to beat the crap out of him, but not right away.” Strabane laughed. “Plus, Big Turk is a screamer.”

  I asked if he often watched TV wrestling?

  “Jesus, no! There’s enough bullshit in my line of work, I don’t need more. It’s my hundred-year-old grandpa is the fan.”

  All this while Strabane was rubbing Smoky’s chunky head as if they were old friends. He scratched Smoky behind the ears vigorously, the way Smoky liked to be scratched. These were seasoned tomcat ears, scarred and part-shredded. Though Smoky had been neutered long ago, he was aggressive with other cats. Beneath Strabane’s practiced fingers he erupted in a crackling purr and his big body shivered in feline ecstasy. Imagine our surprise when, a moment later, he turned, lifted his tail, and sprayed a thin stream of amber liquid onto Strabane’s feet.

  “Hey! Damn you.”

  Smoky retreated, flat-eared, to his food bowls on the far side of the refrigerator. His stumpy tail was switching.

  Strabane was crestfallen, but tried to laugh. Quickly I gave him wetted paper towels to clean his Nikes that were already damp from the rain. “Smoky has never done anything like this before, I’m so sorry.”

  It wasn’t a tactful remark. Probably it wasn’t even a truthful remark. Flush-faced, Strabane was swiping at his feet. He tried to make a joke of it: “He has, sure, ma’am. You’re covering for him.”

  I stifled nervous laughter. My hands were small fists drawn up inside the long sweater sleeves. Like a child in distress I’d drawn my feet up beneath me in the breakfast nook. Watching this man I scarcely knew swabbing at his shoes where a tomcat had sprayed him I felt so powerful a wave of tenderness, for a dazed moment I didn’t know where I was.

  “It’s other cats he smells on me, maybe. Dogs! There’s at least six dogs, mostly boxers, at our place. That big old shingle-board farmhouse on North Fork, probably you’ve seen it?—kind of an eyesore, used to be a farm property owned by some relatives of mine now it’s going to be torn down next year and all that land made into a subdivision. It’s about a mile north of that eyesore trailer court, where they never take the Christmas lights down.”

  I was astonished. “That’s where you live?”

  One of the doomed old farmhouses with stone foundations from the 1800s, in that beautiful hilly countryside. Not sleazy-chic North Fork Villas as I’d assumed.

  Strabane explained that his life was “complicated” at the present time. Not his professional-cop life but his personal life. “I went to live with my grandfather last year, poor old guy couldn’t handle all the family he’d acquired. We’re talking about eighty years of acquisition. His oldest daughter, not living now, had this stepson from one of her hippie communes, this guy has been in the wind for twenty years but they keep waiting for him to return like the Messiah. It’s Reuben’s wife, this sweet sad woman who’d liked to think of herself as my mother, when I was in need of a mother which hasn’t been lately, of course, and what keeps turning up of her family from West Virginia including some so-called cousins of hers that, looking at me, seeing who I am, they can smell the fact I’m a cop, start acting really nervous. Plus there’s remnants from Grandpa’s old bluegrass band, and old lovers of his must’ve been underage when he knew them, and ‘fans’ that show up and pitch tents in the pasture like the year is 1965 and we’re into Flower Power. Jesus! My grandpa the celebrity, I think you met once—Jimmy Friday?”

  Now I was truly astonished. “Jimmy Friday? Your grandfather?”

  “‘Friday’ was never his name. ‘Harold Burkholtz’—my mother’s name was ‘Burkholtz’—was his name. The audience my grandfather was aiming for with his special brand of country-and-western music, he figured ‘Jimmy Friday’ had a hell of a better chance.”

  It seemed a lifetime ago, I’d interviewed the elderly bluegrass performer with the frothy white hair and slyly sexual manner, on the occasion of his memoir Songs My Daddy Taught Me: The Mostly True Tales of Jimmy Friday. After last May, I hadn’t given Jimmy Friday another thought. To remember him now, the sweetly seductive old man eyeing me so wistfully, clasping my hand in his and lifting it to kiss in parting, was an effort like trying to haul a dream up into consciousness even as it’s sinking downward to oblivion. Strabane was saying he hated to disillusion me but his Burkholtz grandfather hadn’
t any background remotely like the one “Jimmy Friday” had invented for himself, that seemed to have been modeled after the life of Johnny Cash, the man he’d most admired and envied.

  I saw Strabane’s mouth moving. I saw him smile. I saw that his nose was just slightly asymmetrical, must’ve been broken. I saw that his skin was olive-dark, there were fine, almost invisible scars at his hairline. And the hairline was corroding, at the temples. And the bristly-oily hair was threaded with gray, at the temples. The eyes, the kindly-moist eyes. The slightly red-veined eyes. The eyes of a man who has seen too much and who knows too much but maybe he won’t tell you, for he is kind. I wasn’t following much of what he was telling me about Jimmy Friday, the doomed farmhouse on the North Fork Road, six—six?—boxer dogs of whom one was the mother, the rest were pups. I was thinking how the Nikki who’d interviewed Jimmy Friday had been so young. Had been so ignorant. Fuming and cursing at her recorder. Playing the damned tape, trying to make sense of the interview, and Mom had still been alive.

  That morning. “Jimmy Friday.” My last chance to have saved my mother.

  Strabane was saying he’d been married, too. For three years, in his early twenties. A girl he’d met on a blind date arranged by an army buddy. He’d been in the U.S. Army stationed in New Jersey and in Oklahoma and in South Korea—where the average American didn’t know the U.S. has had soldiers for fifty years!—and in all these places “nothing was happening, and always the same way every day.” His marriage hadn’t lasted. Fell apart like wetted Kleenex. His wife who’d claimed to love him for all her life got herself pregnant at an embarrassing time when they’d been like 50,000 miles apart for months but they’d decided, for the sake of their families, to pretend the baby was his no matter the baby turned out to look nothing like him. But the consequence was, Ross Strabane was financially responsible for this dependent child, he was the legal husband and father and even when Robin divorced him, and was living with another guy, and later another guy acting as “legal counsel” for some questionable tribe of Indians hoping to be legitimized to operate a casino in the Catskills, still the state would not recognize any change in Ross Strabane’s status. The state did not allow DNA testing after the fact, out of a legitimate fear that welfare rolls would be even worse than they are now. “I can see the logic of it. It’s a social necessity. Half the guys paying child support might not be willing to pay if they learned who their kids’ actual fathers are. As a police officer, I can see the point. But as a civilian, I wonder if it’s fair. For sure, when it’s you, it hurts like hell. Not that I would not have paid. Not that I would not have bailed out my ex-wife when she was desperate. I would have, and I did. Now the boy is almost eighteen, they’re living in Yonkers and he’s been twice in juvie hall, twice in drug rehab and dropped out of high school without graduating and his goal in life is to be the ‘white Snoop Doggy Dog.’ Anyway my ex-wife is remarried. She will make her way like a sleepwalker. Just that, by the time I was twenty-eight it was like that part of my life was finished. You know what a phantom limb is, you don’t have the limb, you have just the pain. So I went into police work. This work has saved my life. I told you, Nikki, there was this older detective who’d investigated a case involving my family, he’s retired now, but I keep in touch, he’s been a model to me, it’s like he is always with me, working on a case. Because what I do is mostly in my head, not on foot. I need to make connections. I need to work backward from what there is, which is somebody hurt, I work back to who did the hurting, and why. What I respect about police work, it has its own dimension. I never talk about my work with civilians. I have friends not on the force, I’ve had women friends, I don’t talk about it. Women have objected, they say that I am ‘secretive’—‘in my own head’—‘weird.’ But I don’t talk about it. With you, I needed to talk about certain things but no more, that case is closed. Another thing women object to, your time at work. Well, I’m a detective, I’m not a meter reader. I’m not a mailman. I don’t have the same schedule every day. I can work ten-twelve hours on a new case and sometimes longer. I can’t sleep, at the start of a case. Sometimes I sleep in my car, if it’s an emergency. The way we located Lynch, it was an emergency. Because he would have hurt other people. He’d have hurt his relatives if he knew they’d rat on him. His old grandma, he’d have hurt. If there’s like a kidnapping, an abduction. You have to act fast if there’s any chance the victim is alive. Your own life, your ‘private’ life, is nothing.” Strabane paused. He’d been speaking rapidly, passionately. I had never heard any man speak in such a way. “Any woman I loved, I would want to protect her from such knowledge. You can see that, Nikki, right?”