Missing Mom (7 page)

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 surprisingly 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.”

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!

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 wings 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!

Now it would begin. Now was the start. Nothing could prevent it. Nothing could shield us from it.

Gwen? Gwen Eaton?

Not Gwen! No.

It isn’t possible: Gwen Eaton?

I don’t believe it. Can’t believe it. No.

My God, no. Not Gwen.

Of all people, not Gwen.

Gwen Eaton! Gone.

Murdered.

I stood in the driveway, shivering. I was aware of the garage, the opened door, at my back. By now the sky was beginning to darken, in the west the sun had become a broken, bleeding red yolk. It was the kind of mottled-luminous twilit sky you might lose yourself staring into, in other circumstances.

I wondered if I should move my car. There would be emergency vehicles, my car might be in the way. I peered through the window and there was my cell phone on the passenger’s seat. I retrieved it, and called Clare’s number. My fingers were clumsy, I punched out the wrong number and had to begin again. At the same time, I was aware of Mom in the garage, on the concrete floor where she’d fallen.

It was difficult to resist thinking: Mom is going to be all right. I have called an ambulance, Mom will be taken to the hospital and will be all right. A part of my mind was urging me to believe and I was weakening yet I would not give in.

As if she’d been waiting impatiently for my call, Clare answered immediately, like the 911 dispatcher. Clare answered before I was ready to speak with her. I’d hoped for more time. I’d hoped for Clare’s voice mail. I was saying, “Clare. I’m at the house. Mom has been hurt.” Clare cried, “Hurt! Oh, God! I knew it. What—” I could not speak, my mouth had gone dry. I saw a Mt. Ephraim Police patrol car turning onto Deer Creek Drive, moving swiftly. And another patrol car, close behind. They braked to a stop in front of our house, at angles to block the street. I was distracted by these maneuvers so deftly executed. Across the street at 44 Deer Creek Drive, Walter Higham was standing in his driveway, staring. I had not remembered Mr. Higham so white-haired, a stoop to his shoulders. Talking with Dad at their mailboxes, which were side by side as if companionable, on solid wooden posts on the Highams’ side of the street, Mr. Higham had been my father’s height which was at least six feet.

Clare’s voice was sharp and fearful in my ear. I tried to explain: Mom was hurt. Mom was badly hurt. I could not utter the word
dead,
and speaking to Clare I could not utter the word
murder
. I did not want to break down! It was my responsibility not to break down now that I’d summoned police.

One of the uniformed officers approached me to ask if I had called 911, if I’d reported a murder. “Do you mean, am I the one who made the call? Yes.” I was sounding excited, angry. Yet calmly the officer asked my name. “What does it matter, my name! My mother needs help.” Officers had entered the garage. I ran to join them but was prevented from entering. I pushed at arms, restraining hands.

I could see where Mom was lying. Where she’d fallen. Strangers crouching over her.

My cell phone was in my hand. I’d forgotten it. A small voice screamed out of it, “…Nikki? For God’s sake…” It was Clare. I told her that Mom was badly hurt, someone had hurt Mom and she must come immediately. “Mom is
hurt
? How—is Mom
hurt
?” I heard myself stammer that Mom was dead and the cell phone fell from my hand.

The house at 43 Deer Creek Drive, Deer Creek Acres had been transformed. From a short distance, you would believe its occupants were being celebrated.

The street was blocked by police vehicles. Residents of the neighborhood were being rerouted. When they asked what had happened they were politely told to move on.

Vehicles, turned away, moved slowly and haltingly. Some stopped altogether. People were coming out of their houses to stand in the street, staring. Teenagers, younger children. There was a fearful wish to know: what was it? whose house? fire? ambulance? so many police cars—why?

“Somebody has been hurt.”

“Hurt—how?”

“…Mrs. Eaton, in that house.”

“Mrs. Eaton?
Gwen?
”

A chill was lifting from the grass. The air smelled damply of lilac. Strangers were asking me questions. The same questions were repeated. Wildly I thought, If Dad was here—! Dad would be the one to speak to the officers.

I was feeling light-headed, dazed. I was not feeling adequate to the situation. It seemed to me a terrible thing, I had told Clare
Mom is dead
. She would hate me now. Between us now there would be the unspeakable
Mom is dead
.

Yet it seemed to me plausible that I’d been mistaken. I wanted to interrupt the police officers to ask: “But is my mother really…dead?” The more I considered it, the more I doubted my judgment. Emergency room physicians might see that Mom was still breathing, her heart was still beating, oh why hadn’t she been taken to the hospital, why were they leaving her broken and helpless in the garage…

In the confusion Clare came running. Clare was frightened as I had never seen her. She saw my face, and stumbled past me without a word, toward the garage. For it was obvious, what had happened to Mom had happened in the garage. “I’m her daughter! I’m Gwen’s daughter! Let me see her!
Let me see her!
” Police officers prevented her entering the garage. I heard her sharp raised voice. I heard her scream.

Later, we embraced. Like drowning women clutching helplessly at each other.

My brother-in-law Rob Chisholm was trying to comfort us. My uncle Herman Eaton, Dad’s older brother. There was Lucille Kovach, my mother’s cousin. There was Fred Eaton. Other relatives, mostly men, I had not seen in a very long time. Gil Rowen, chief of Mt. Ephraim Police, who’d gone to school with “Johnny” Eaton and had known “Feather” Kovach in the old days when they’d all been young, newly married.

Gil Rowen appeared deeply moved. Firmly he clasped my hand in his. He clasped Clare’s hand. He introduced us to one of the plainclothed officers, Detective Strabane, who would be heading the investigation into “your mother’s murder.”

We were meant to shake hands with Detective Strabane. Oh but why!

And then I was sitting down. I seemed to be sitting in the grass. Maybe I had fallen. Voices conferred over my head: “daughter”—“found the body.” It was suggested that I be taken to Mt. Ephraim Medical Center but I refused angrily.

I saw that the knees of my jeans were stained with something dark. My hands were sticky. Vaguely I recalled, I had wanted to wash my hands. But I’d forgotten, and kept forgetting. There were things I meant to recall but had forgotten even as I told myself I must not forget. I thought
I’ve had no practice at this! Nothing has prepared me for this
.

Clare was being questioned now. Clare had regained something of her schoolteacher poise. The detective was calling her “Mrs. Chisholm” and she was calling him “Detective.” A wave of childish relief came over me, Clare would shield me.

I had been the one to discover Mom. I had been the last person to touch Mom. The last person Mom had seen.

It seemed to me yes, Mom had seen me. Had Mom tried to speak to me? I didn’t want to make a mistake, I was in fear of saying the wrong thing.

Had I said the words
Mom is dead!

And now the word
murder
was being uttered, as a statement of fact.

Murder, dead. Multiple stab wounds. Caucasian female fifty-six years old. Resident of. Wife of. Mother of.

The Pedersens next-door were offering us their house so that Detective Strabane could ask his crucial questions. The Highams offered their house. Clare was sitting beside me in the grass now, to comfort me. Clare was holding me as you’d hold a young child. Suddenly it was dark and everywhere there were lights. Police spotlights, blinding. Clare and I stared at our house, where every window blazed light. It did look like a celebration. Even the grimy basement windows emitted a faint warm glow.

“Poor Dad. He’d be so embarrassed…”

“The garage, you mean? All that junk…”

“The basement windows. So dirty.”

Clare laughed, suddenly. It was the first hint that Clare might not be so composed as I’d thought. “He always took such care of the house, and the lawn. Now people are trampling the lawn. Mom’s flower beds. And all those lights on, Dad would rush around switching them off. ‘A penny saved is a penny earned.’”

We laughed, shivering. We resisted being re-located to our neighbors’ house. Yes, Rob Chisholm was right, it was the sensible thing to do, to go inside, but Clare and I resisted. Detective Strabane squatted beside us, to speak with us. He meant to humor us for we were the daughters of the murdered woman. We were children, Gwen Eaton’s children. We had become childish, excitable. Strabane was an earnest man in his late thirties, not young. His features were swarthy and simian and his necktie was twisted. My impulse was to straighten the necktie. As Mom had straightened Dad’s neckties, or his shirt collars, with a sweet little apologetic murmur
There! That’s better
.

Strabane was saying how sorry he was to disturb us at such a “tragic time”—“a time when you just want to be alone”—but it was crucial to ask us a few questions immediately: about our mother’s bank account, her credit cards, car; whom she’d been scheduled to see that day, who might have been scheduled to come to the house; who might have been at the house recently—plumber? carpenter? lawn crew?

It was a surprise to me, in my confused state, to be made to know the simplest thing, obviously taken for granted by everyone else: my mother had been murdered, there was a murderer or murderers to be apprehended.

I knew this, with a part of my mind. I’d known immediately, seeing my mother’s body. Yet somehow, I had not absorbed the knowledge.

Mostly, Clare answered the detective’s questions. She knew names, even the correct spellings of names. She knew with certainty what I would have guessed: Mom’s bank was the Bank of Niagara. She knew that Mom had only a single credit card, a Visa. (Dad had not “believed in” credit cards. If he’d had his way, we would have had none.) In her clear brave voice Clare recited the names of workmen who’d been in the house in the past several months and this litany of names was provided to the detective, who took notes in an old-fashioned spiral notebook. When Clare failed to recall a name, Rob provided it. I was made to realize how much my sister and brother-in-law knew of my mother’s life, that I had not known! I was made to realize how irresponsible I had been, and how negligent. Suddenly it was clear, the detective would know, how I was the daughter who had abandoned her widowed mother while Clare was the good daughter who’d remained.