Missing Mom (21 page)

The bequests ($5,000 to the Mt. Ephraim Christian Life Fellowship Church, $3,000 to the Mt. Ephraim Arts Council, $1,500 to the County Humane Society Animal Shelter, etc.) had not surprised me so much as the money Mom had left to Clare and me: $18,000 each. Mom had been so frugal, since Dad’s death. It was sad to think of her pinching pennies, saving money for an “estate” to be divided between “my beloved daughters Clare and Nicole.”

I said, “I wish they’d spent the money on themselves. While Dad was alive. They’d been talking of going back to Key West for years, where they’d gone on their honeymoon.”

“Oh, Nikki! You know Dad. He’d never get around to going.”

“We could have encouraged them more. Dad wasn’t always so predictable.”

“He was! More predictable than we knew, weighing himself every day and…Oh, God.” Clare laughed harshly, and began coughing. When I made a move to touch her she shoved at me reflexively, unthinkingly as you might shove at a small child or an animal annoying you. In the same instant she lurched to her feet, pushing out of the breakfast nook.

“I guess—I don’t feel well. Excuse me—”

Clare hurried to the bathroom in the hall. Quickly I began clearing away our plates, running water at the sink to muffle the sound of Clare being sick to her stomach.

This was the “guest” bathroom kept in perpetual readiness for visitors. As girls we’d been allowed to use this bathroom with the understanding that we would not soil the dainty embroidered linen towels or the fragrant pink soap sculpted into ingenious flower shapes. We might use the toilet, but we must wash our hands elsewhere. Above all, we must not somehow “speckle” the sink or the spotless mirror above the sink.

Dad had avoided the guest bathroom entirely. He’d joked it was the easiest way to stay on Mom’s good side.

Strangers had examined that bathroom, I knew. Very likely, strangers had even used the toilet.

Possibly, he had used it, too. The man I had not yet accustomed myself to identifying as my mother’s murderer.

By the time Clare reappeared, deathly pale, sullen and repentant, I’d tidied up the kitchen and cleared away all evidence of our meal of leftovers. The last of the Hawaiian chicken, buckwheat pasta, tuna casserole and spicy cocktail sausages scraped into the garbage disposal, and gone.

The remains of the bread, I wrapped in aluminum foil and returned to the freezer.

We didn’t resume our sorting that afternoon, Clare wasn’t feeling up to it. Nor did she think she could drive home by herself, so I drove her.

In the Saab, Clare began crying. I had never heard my sister cry so helplessly. She was saying she couldn’t make it without Mom. She was saying she didn’t love anyone anymore. It was too much effort, she wasn’t strong enough.

“People make me angry! They seem so silly. I seem so silly to myself. Lilja screams at me, ‘I wish I was dead!’ and this terrible thought came to me, Why do people keep going, really? What is the point? Lilja won’t talk about Mom, not a word. Rob says give her time. I think she’s more embarrassed than grief-stricken, and I hate her. I hate my own daughter! And that man. At the hearing, I wanted to scream at him, ‘Why? Why our mother? Why us?’ Except I knew there was no answer. There is no answer. I don’t love Rob. I love Foster, but I don’t love his father. I made a mistake marrying Rob. I made a mistake quitting my job. I wanted to go back to school, I wanted to get a master’s degree. I wanted to study in New York City. I wanted to travel. Mom was so fond of Rob, and Dad liked him, too. Especially Mom was anxious for me to ‘settle down’—‘be happy.’ And I wanted to make Mom happy, of course! But it was a mistake. I don’t love him. I don’t even know if he loves me. We’re like these people who met at a party and got to talking and wound up trapped in an elevator together, stuck between floors. We try to be civil, we try not to panic or scream at each other, but we’re running out of oxygen. Oh, Nikki.” In this way my second day at 43 Deer Creek Drive ended early.

I was thirty-one years old and shouldn’t have had to beg.

“Smoky! Come cuddle.”

This lonely June night, I’d begun drinking early.

Oh, not serious drinking: just wine.

A glass. Just a glass!

(What harm, a single glass? Let’s be serious.)

This lonely June night when I’d made a sensible decision not to be exhausted/depressed/anxious. Two glasses of the terrific Chianti Wally’d brought the other evening, I could hardly recall why I’d imagined I should be exhausted/depressed/anxious.

“Smoky? You’d better love me, buddy. All we have is each other.”

(This wasn’t exactly true. At least on my part. For after all I had my current married-man-friend who adored me.)

(He said.)

(Well, he did! Said, and said, and said.)

Except here I was being blackmailed by my mother’s orphan cat. Emotional blackmail it was. Though Smoky had no one but me, somehow Smoky didn’t trust me. Each time I unlocked the door to my apartment and stepped inside, Smoky seemed not to know who I might be, or who might be accompanying me.

As Wally was allergic to Smoky, so Smoky was allergic to Wally.

If I managed to entice Smoky into my lap, to settle down, allow me to pet him, lapse into a quivery drowse and even purr deep in his throat, as soon as he heard Wally’s footsteps on the stairs, more recently just the sound of a car door being slammed outside, Smoky would panic and leap from me, digging his claws through the fabric of my clothes into the soft flesh of my thighs.

“Smoky, oh! That
hurts
.”

The tiny scratches rarely bled. Maybe just a little.

Still, I longed to hold Smoky in my lap tonight. Longed to stroke his bristly fur, that wasn’t so soft and lustrous as it had been in the days of Mom, but still it was fur, and Smoky was a warm creature with a potential to love me.

It was early evening when I decided to have a single small glass of Chianti. Eventually, it become later.

Time for
WCHF FM
’s “Night Train” at 10
P
.
M
. Wally Szalla’s radio voice until midnight.

That afternoon when I’d returned from Mt. Ephraim, having taken my weeping sister home first, there’d been two messages from Wally on my answering machine. (There were other messages, too. I wasn’t paying too much attention to these.) The first, recorded at 1:48
P
.
M
., was a promise to “Nikki darling” he’d be over immediately after the radio broadcast, which was airing live that evening. The second, recorded at 4:20
P
.
M
., was a harried and evasive message saying he “hoped” he’d be there “as soon as I can get away.”

It had been our plan, Wally would be staying with me tonight.

(I think. I’d thought.)

Vaguely I knew there were “new complications” with Wally’s family. Not only his “emotionally unstable wife Isabel” but his “very demanding” daughter (whose name I seemed to be blocking though by now, I should have known it as well as I knew my own). And, of course, there was Troy.

I wanted to protest
I’m a daughter, too
.
Love me!

Smoky poked his tomcat-face out from beneath my bed. I’d been drifting through the apartment, seductively rattling a package of seafood cat-kibble, pausing now in the doorway of my bedroom. “C’mon, buddy. Midnight snack, then we’ll cuddle.”

Begging a cat for affection. This poor animal kept prisoner in my apartment.

Smoky’s wedge-shaped head had not lost weight, like the rest of his body. If a cat can have jowls, Smoky had jowls. Though I spoke cajolingly, shamelessly to him, still he regarded me with suspicion as if Wally Szalla was somehow crouched behind me ready to spring.

“Nobody here but me, Smoky. And you know me.”

Smoky resented it, he wasn’t allowed outdoors. At Mom’s house he’d been allowed absolute freedom but there was too much traffic in my neighborhood and anyway I knew he would run away, if I let him outdoors, and I’d never see him again.

Smoky is safe with me, Mom. I promise.

I shook a small amount of kibble into Smoky’s green plastic bowl in a corner of the kitchen, watching as the gray cat ate in the quick-darting way of a traumatized creature. I would make Smoky love me, I vowed. I would win him over, as Mom had done when she’d brought the scrawny skittish six-month-old cat home from the animal shelter.

Any cat that qualifies as a lame duck, Dad said dryly, your mother will locate. And bring home with her.

“…and now, here at WCHF FM in the heart of the historic Chautauqua Valley, as the hour moves past eleven
P
.
M
. ‘Night Train’ is going to take us on a sentimental journey to the Sweet Basil Jazz Club in New York City, 1953…”

I had to keep the radio volume low. Smoky glanced up nervously hearing the D.J.’s familiar voice: low throaty sexy as an alto saxophone.

This was Wally’s radio voice, not exactly his own voice. But you could recognize it. Smoky’s ears pricked, his stubby tail switched restlessly.

“He isn’t here, I said. Not yet.”

Since I’d become involved with Wally Szalla, I listened to WCHF FM obsessively. In my car, and in the apartment. Every waking hour, and more. “Night Train” (10
P
.
M
. to midnight, five evenings a week) was naturally my favorite program. If I couldn’t be with Wally, next best thing was listening to him.

Sipping a third glass of wine, listening to Dave Brubeck. To console me for my loneliness. To prepare me for Wally’s arrival.

Wally would ask how the “sorting-through” had gone. I would tell him,
fine
!

No, I wouldn’t tell my lover about my sister’s breakdown that day. I hadn’t told him about Gladys Higham the day before. (I hadn’t told Clare, either.) When a man shares with a woman his marital/domestic problems, the kind of problems that seem never to be solved but only to morph into yet more complicated problems, like hair snarls proliferating, sympathy flows in one direction only. By instinct a woman knows it’s naive to expect the flow to reverse.

And maybe I didn’t want sympathy, really. From Wally Szalla or anyone.

Much of the programming on WCHF AM-FM was taped. But Wally preferred to do “Night Train” live. He liked the edgy excitement of live radio, the thrill of receiving calls while on the air. There was something boyish and appealing about his D.J. personality you’d mistake for a lonely middle-aged guy with no one to love him, no one waiting for him when he left the studio.

Clare had called Wally a “type.” As if Clare knew the first thing about him!

“…a special request has just come in for ‘N.E.’…who I hope is listening somewhere out there in the Chautauqua Valley on this mellow June night…‘N.E.’: this is from ‘someone who adores you…who hopes you will be patient with him’…the incomparable Duke Ellington in a 1943 recording of ‘Mood Indigo’ followed by ‘Pretty Woman’ followed by ‘Just Squeeze Me.’ Mmmm!”

I laughed aloud. Smoky, who’d settled at last in my lap, almost asleep, glanced up irritably.

Soaking in hot fragrant sudsy water preparing for our lovemaking.

If Wally left the radio station as soon as “Night Train” went off the air, he’d be here by 12:30
A
.
M
. I had a luxuriant hour to anticipate his arrival.

I’d decided that I would save Dad’s neckties for another time, to give to Wally. Or maybe I should give the ties to him singly. I had brought them home from the house, neatly laid out on a closet shelf. Clare needn’t know. What I took from our parents’ house was none of Clare’s business.

Yes Clare: sex is terrific between Wally Szalla and me. You can imagine!

No Clare: because I sleep with Wally and have been sleeping with Wally for more months than I care to tabulate on the fingers of both hands it does not mean that the man does not respect me. It does not mean that the man will never marry me.

Don’t you judge us, Clare: you don’t know Wally Szalla. You don’t even know me.

When I woke, the bathwater was tepid. It was already past midnight. Hurriedly I stumbled from the ungainly old bathtub and toweled myself dry. The stippled-red claw marks on my thighs smarted. I was surprised to see such clusters of scratches. Some were old, and nearly healed; others were fresh. When Wally had first noticed a few days ago, he’d reacted with alarm: “My God, Nikki, did I somehow do this?” and I’d laughed at him, and kissed his mouth. Telling him that yes in a way he had, but not directly.

There’d been a time. Such a sweet time. When Mom and I left secret messages for each other around the house.

I LUV U
in cake frosting.
I LUV U
2! in toothpaste.

Naughty Nikki daring to squirt Dad’s shaving cream onto a mirror knowing that Mom would find it first, not Dad.
MRS H IS TAKING US TO THE MALL BE BACK BY
6.
U
-
KNOW-WHO
.

Valentines bought at flea markets. Old used scenic-sights postcards scribbled over in strangers’ handwriting. Tiny plastic bunnies, ducklings, Cracker Jack whistles attached to pieces of cardboard: 4
U
from
ME
. Beads spelling out
CRAZZE
4
U
. A photo clipped from a magazine of a herd of white-tailed deer including fawns gazing pensively at the camera—
DEER NIKKI COME PLAY
!!! A Chinese fortune inside one of Mom’s herbal tea packets, ingeniously inserted:
LOOK FOR THE SLIVER LINING
. Homemade cards for birthdays, Easter, Halloween, Ground Hog’s Day. More valentines. Mom’s flower beds were great places to leave messages for her since only Mom would find them there, part-covered by loose dirt or leaves. Also Mom’s sewing machine, kitchen cupboards, bureau drawers. Mom left messages for me on and beneath my pillow, in my textbooks (where I’d discover them in school), inside my socks (I’d discover when I put my socks on).
NIKKI PLEASE PICK UP YOUR ROOM PLEASE PLEASE U-KNOW-WHO
. And clever Nikki responded
PICK UP MY ROOM & take where
?
PLEASE INFORM
!
U-KNOW-WHO
.

There were messages spelled out in jelly beans—and lima beans—on the kitchen table
KISSKISS
! There were messages coiled about the collars of Miranda and Suzie-Q., our cats of the time. Some of the messages were practical exchanges of information but most were plain silly. Most, I’ve long forgotten.

Like most of what Mom and I talked about, all those years.

For such a long dreamy time it seemed, I’d been a little girl. And then, a girl. Eleven, twelve years old. When I was in middle school, Mom had been in her thirties. She’d looked young as a girl herself, running around in jeans, shorts, T-shirts and sneakers, her hair tied back in a ponytail or frizzed in a windblown halo about her head.

Before the days when Gwen Eaton helped senior citizens navigate the pool at the Y, she’d taken us swimming at Wolf’s Head Lake summer afternoons. (Dad hadn’t cared for swimming, and especially not for the child-centered boisterousness of Wolf’s Head Lake.) While other mothers sunbathed, or sat gossiping beneath beach umbrellas, Mom had taught Clare and me to swim, dive. In the murky lake water Gwen Eaton had swum quick and lithe as a fish.

Yes you can do it!
Mom would cry.

Oh yes you can.

Mostly, that turned out to be true. I think.

I was jealous of Mom. Dad complained of “open house” on Saturdays when neighbors and women friends dropped by to see Gwen, but he hadn’t any idea how busy weekdays could be. A rap on the kitchen screen door, and before anyone invites her inside, there’s a woman poking her head in calling: “Gwe-en? You home?”

I’d have said, “No! Nobody’s home!” or, more inspired, “Yes! We’re home but we’ve got Rocky Mountain speckled fever. You know, that’s so contagious.”

But Mom never hid away. Even if she wasn’t feeling well, or in one of her rare “blue moods” (Mom attributed merely to “cramps”—“migraine”—“a touch of the flu.”) Always she’d hurry out to greet whoever it was who’d barged in, smiling and gracious and ready with Gwen Eaton’s perky signature remark: “Why! You’re looking
good
.”

That summer, when I was twelve years old. Idly pedaling my bicycle along Deer Creek Drive into the cul-de-sac Deer Creek Circle, and back. Lazy figure-eights in the midsummer sun. So bored! Maybe I’d pedal over to see if Ruthie Haber was home…Just then I happened to see an unfamiliar vehicle pull up to park in front of our house. It was larger than a car, possibly a minivan. Yet it didn’t look like a delivery or service vehicle. From a half-block away I saw a man (maybe in a uniform? maybe not) get out of the vehicle and check the address, walk to the front door and ring the bell. Anyone who knew us would have gone to the side door, this was a sign the man was a stranger or anyway no one accustomed to visiting our house. I knew that Mom was inside, and I knew that Mom was alone. I wasn’t really interested but I waited long enough to see if Mom would answer the door, and she did; then I bicycled over to Ruthie’s house a few blocks away, but Ruthie wasn’t home, only just Ruthie’s mom who liked me, and was looking lonely, so I was stuck with Mrs. Haber until a sudden panic came over me, this weird conviction passing through my head swift as lightning
He has come for her
.
It was all a mistake, that Mom married Dad and had Clare and me
.
We will never see Mom again because we did not deserve her
. That summer I’d been reading science fiction novels by Philip K. Dick that were both bizarre and matter-of-fact, about alternate universes, time dimensions in which for instance your twin who’d died when you were born is alive but you are dead; time dimensions that were like gloves pulled inside-out. You know that there is an “inside” to things normally only seen from the “outside” but you never think about it. And if you do, it can be scary.

I got away from Mrs. Haber, and bicycled back home, and saw that the vehicle was gone from the curb, and my heart was beating hard by this point, and I’d broken out into a cold sweat. I let my bike fall in the driveway and ran into the house, through the screen door and into the kitchen (no tinkling bells on the door yet), and there was blue-eyed long-haired snowy-white Miranda blinking at me in alarm, from her perch atop the refrigerator. “Mom?
Mom?
” I seemed to know
Mom is gone, this is my fault for leaving her
even as I knew it could not be so, my mother would never leave us, of course Mom would never leave us because she loved us, because she was Mom; and I heard a loud buzzing sort of hum that meant Mom, Mom on the steps from the basement, she’d been ironing in the basement and was only just now coming upstairs carrying an armload of ironed shirts, and seeing me so frazzled and sweaty she asked what on earth was wrong, and I told her nothing, nothing was wrong, except who’d been that man who had rung the doorbell about fifteen minutes ago, a man who’d driven up in a minivan?—and Mom blinked and smiled at me as if perplexed, seeming not to know what I was talking about. Her face was round and innocent as a full moon. Her eyes were greeny-amber, and her hair looked windblown, in her brushed-back-behind-the-ears style.

“A man, Nikki? What man?”

“Wasn’t there a man, just now? He rang the doorbell…”

With warm fingers Mom brushed my sticky hair out of my forehead, and laughed at me. Now she remembered: “The electric meter man, you must mean. He’s come, and gone.”

I felt so silly: the electric meter man!

Of course, that’s all it was. That’s all it could have been.
The electric meter man. Come to 43 Deer Creek Drive to check the meter, and gone.

A man’s voice, abrupt and jarring.

“Ma’am? Hello? Is anyone inside?”

Through slats in the dusty venetian blind I saw him outside, on the front stoop, only a few yards from where I was crouched in a mounting panic. This had to be a stranger. A neighbor would have called me by name, having seen my car at the curb. A relative would have walked inside uninvited calling
Hey Nikki? You here?

There was something familiar about the man: stocky-shouldered, with a crown of thick hair erect as a porcupine’s quills. I couldn’t see his face, except to know that he had an olive-dark skin, and he was wearing dark glasses. On this warm muggy day in late June he was wearing a sport coat that fitted his shoulders tightly but hung loose at the small of his back, of some vague dull color like eroded stone. His manner was both aggressive and nervous. He frowned and gnawed at his lower lip like a man arguing with himself, and losing the argument.

I cringed as he rang the doorbell again. A churchy chime-sound, meant to be musical. “Ma’am? Mt. Ephraim Police. May I speak with you?”

Police! I knew now why he looked familiar.

He’d known that someone was in the house, and seemed to know it was a woman. He must have seen my car parked on the street, knew whose house this was. But I had a right to park there, didn’t I? I had a right to enter this house I’d inherited, didn’t I? The police officer’s own car, a stolid squarish unmarked sedan with tinted windows, was parked in the driveway. The venetian blind slipped from my fingers, making more noise than I’d wished for. I stepped back from the window hoping the officer hadn’t heard.

An impulse came over me to hide. Barricade myself in the bathroom. Run up into the attic, or down into the basement. This man had no right to enter the house, had he? If I refused to acknowledge him wouldn’t he have to go away?

It was mid-afternoon of a day that seemed to have begun a very long time ago. Yesterday, maybe. I’d returned to Mom’s house to continue sorting through her things. Since Clare was otherwise occupied, I’d come alone. For hours I’d been working in the basement and didn’t smell exactly fresh. My hair that was partly grown out, at the roots threaded with gray, needed shampooing but instead I’d covered it with a red-polka-dot scarf retrieved from the Good Will box in Mom’s bedroom, tied at the nape of my neck. When I’d thrown on clothes that morning the polka-dot scarf had looked funky and stylish in a down-low gypsy way but after hours in the basement it had become bedraggled like the rest of me. Without Clare around to sneer at me, what did it matter what I looked like? Nor was I scheduled to see Wally Szalla that night. My grimy tank top was slipping off one shoulder, my denim miniskirt was creased across my belly and buttocks. Somewhere I’d misplaced my shoes and was barefoot, my feet were filthy. I hadn’t dared to glance in a mirror for hours out of a fear of seeing exactly how I looked, no lipstick and oozing an oily sweat on my forehead and nose. This was the true Nikki, nothing like the show-offy glamour Nikki most people knew. The sensible thing would be to hide, and not just because I was frightened of a solitary male visitor when I hadn’t expected anyone to intrude upon me because no one should have known that I was here.

I hadn’t told Clare that I’d be at the house today. The previous week I’d called her several times, left urgent messages asking how she was, asking her please to call me, I was worried about her. But Clare, being Clare, supremely self-absorbed and indifferent to my concern, hadn’t called back. Finally I called Ron Chisholm at Coldwell Electronics, managed to get past a protective female assistant with a plea that this was a “family issue,” and there came my brother-in-law on the line to assure me, in a voice somewhere between evasive and apologetic, that Clare had certainly meant to call me, but had been “caught up in the kids’ schedules” all this week.

So that was it. I’d been worried about Clare’s health, and it was Mommy-Clare she’d retreated to, thumbing her nose at me.

Careful not to sound ironic I said, “Oh. It’s the ‘crazed time,’ I guess?” and Ron said, “Is it! So much is happening at the kids’ schools, Lilja has events every day, and weekends, nothing like when we were kids.” I surmised that Clare hadn’t told her husband about her emotional collapse, the terrible things she’d revealed about her marriage, and she wouldn’t have wanted me to speak of her behind her back, even in sympathy. Instead, I asked if Clare had any plans to return to our mother’s house soon, or should I proceed alone? I’d asked the
Beacon
for a few days off. I didn’t mind working at the house alone. Ron said, relieved, “Nikki, if you can do it alone, I would be so grateful. As much or as little, anything you feel up to. The sooner we can place the house with a realtor, the better. And Clare hasn’t seemed to be herself lately…”

I resisted the impulse to say, Oh. Is that the worst news, my sister not “herself”?

On the front stoop, the plainclothed detective wasn’t about to go away. He’d heard the venetian blind clatter. He’d probably seen me. He was rapping on the door sharply. A curious thrill ran through me.
This man doesn’t give up. I can’t shake him off easily
.

I’d felt that way about Wally Szalla, two years before. The way he’d pursued me. At the time, it always feels like fate.

As the detective lifted his fist to knock again, I opened the door. “Yes? What do you want?” The man’s eyes widened at the sight of me, in a kind of startled pity. Maybe I was part-naked, or my face was smeared with grime, I was too tired to care. Damned if I would invite him inside.

He was showing me his shiny police badge, like something on TV. Identifying himself, Detective Ross Strabane, hoped I remembered him, wanted just a few minutes of my time. Awkwardly, he extended his hand. As if I would want to shake his hand! Every memory associated with this man was hateful to me.

I stepped back into the vestibule. My knees were trembling.
Ma
’
am
he was calling me.
Ms
.
Eaton. Nicole?
I saw his lips move, he was speaking to me. I made no attempt to decipher his words. There was a roaring in my ears through which I heard only hissing syllables.

Go away! Go away I hate you.

Mom nudged me. Of course, I knew better.

“Come inside, I guess. This way.”

Blindly I walked before Strabane, into the living room. I could feel his laser eyes on me: my sweat-stained tank top, the ridiculous miniskirt puckered at the crack in my buttocks, my long thin too-pale legs and filthy feet. At least, the furniture in this room had been rearranged, by me, more or less as it had been in my parents’ time. Almost, except for the partly rolled-up carpet, and a flurry of dust-mice stirred by our feet, you might mistake this for a normal living room in a Deer Creek Acres ranch house.