Missing Mom (28 page)

Pulses are beating in my eyes.
Mom? Mom?
I am calling. At first I am not certain of my age: am I a little girl, or am I older? I am stumbling through the rooms of the house. I am pushing open the door to the garage. Oh! I am beginning to be impatient for what is this, hide-and-seek? Why is Mom hiding from me? A strange smell assails my nostrils. I am reluctant to switch on the light. I think that I can see in the darkness, I have no need of the light. I am annoyed, to have to switch on the light. For I can’t find the damned switch, my fingers grope in the dark. Outside it was brightly sunny, inside the garage it’s night. My mouth turns downward with the exasperated thought
I don’t have time for games, for God’s sake
.

Mom is hiding from me, Mom is lying on the concrete garage floor in her pretty blue clothes. This is ridiculous, I am thinking, this is going too far! I am angry with Mom, lying in a pool of something dark and oily, with a sickening odor. She is lying with her face turned to me. She is lying with her arm stretched toward me. She is lying with her eyes open and pleading.
Nikki help me! Nikki don’t leave me!
At once I begin to cry. I am not angry now, I am very frightened. Clumsily I kneel beside Mom. Her skin is so cold! Just to touch her is to feel that cold go through me, into the marrow of my bones. I am trying to lift Mom but she has become heavy. My arms are too weak. If I could lift her! If I could help her to her feet. But I am not strong enough. I am not brave enough. I am helpless. For it seems that I am a little girl after all. I am crying so hard, I am a little girl who has disappointed her mother. It will never be made right between us. I leave my mother in the garage on the dirty concrete floor, I abandon my mother to strangers.

This is my secret, I am revealing now to you.

Waking in the night. I’d heard a sound. As of something dropped, or falling. In another part of the house. The garage.

The garage! I had not entered the garage for a long time.

I knew: the overhead garage door was locked—“secured,” as the police say. The door to the kitchen was locked. Each door of the house, each window (including basement windows) was locked. In several rooms low-voltage lightbulbs were on. In the kitchen, the bulb above the stove was on. Close beside my bed in my old girlhood room was a telephone, and my cell phone was nearby. I must have been sleeping twisted in damp bedclothes. I was relieved that I’d been sleeping alone, not beside Wally Szalla. For lately when Wally and I slept together, in Chautauqua Falls, we were not so comfortable as we’d been, it is more practical to sleep alone if you’re prone to insomnia or nightmares.

In fact I’d been sleeping with Smoky cradled in the crook of my left arm but Smoky had jumped down from the bed, I must have frightened him away. I kicked off the damp sheets. I told myself it was nothing. It was a dream. I knew perfectly well that it was a dream yet still my heart beat like an angry fist. I fumbled to switch on the light: 3:10
A
.
M
. I’d been awake and reading in bed, only an hour before. As soon as the light came on, moths began to throw themselves against the window screen a few inches away.

Moths! The largest was the size of a hummingbird, beautifully marked with powdery-gray wings throwing itself against the screen.

On the floor beside my bed, another excellent reason not to have a two-legged bed companion, I kept a claw hammer. For protection. This I picked up now, to take with me. My hand was badly trembling but the weight of the claw hammer helped. In the hall, there was Smoky with pricked-up ears staring at me. In the switched-on light, tawny cat-eyes regarded me warily. As I advanced, Smoky retreated. I spoke to him to placate him but he didn’t trust me: disheveled, smelling of my body, gripping a claw hammer.

Joking, “What’s not to trust? Come on.”

Joking with a cat. Was Nikki her old crazy self, or what.

In the kitchen, though I wanted to laugh, I stood very still. I intended to approach the door to the garage and I intended to open it if only to assure myself that there was no one, there was nothing, inside, for the garage was fully “secured” and I knew this. Yet I did not approach the door, still less did I unlock and open the door. I stood without moving for several minutes listening to the silence in the garage. I told myself, “No one. Nothing.” My hand gripping the claw hammer still trembled. My mouth was dry as old newspaper baked and yellowed by the sun. It was consoling, the lightbulb above the stove was burning. Though it was only thirty watts, yet my father would have disapproved. He’d been impatient with weakness, “acting silly.” In a family of three females, he’d often been impatient.

I opened the drawer where Mom had kept cards. Plumbers, carpenters, lawn men, electricians. “Sonny” Danto the Scourge of the Bugs would be there. And the Mt. Ephraim detective whose name I kept forgetting.
Call me
.
Day or night
.
If you need me
.
Or just to talk
. I found Strabane’s card, went to the phone and dialed the number and heard the phone ring once, twice, a third time before quickly hanging up. “Crazy! What are you doing!”

I was weak with relief, like one who has narrowly escaped a terrible danger.

By this time it was 3:15
A
.
M
. The sun would rise at about 5:30
A
.
M
. The new day would begin, that would have nothing to do with the old for no trace of the old would remain.

Three days later he appeared.

“Ms. Eaton?—Nicole? Need some help?”

I was clearing out the garage. For months I’d avoided the garage. But that morning I’d forced myself to enter the garage. The single place I hadn’t been able to enter since moving into Mom’s house: the garage.

Garage!
—
garage!
beating in my head like deranged rock music.

I glanced up shading my eyes. A man? A man in dark glasses, swarthy-skinned, with weird bristly quill-hair at the crest of his head? A man approaching me in the driveway, with an urgent smile?

I was stunned to see Strabane.

But you can’t know that I called you, the call didn’t go through!

It was a balmy September day. I was dragging a clumsy lawn chair-recliner out of the garage, its canvas slats so rotted and cobweb-festooned they looked like cheap lace. Already at the curb awaiting Saturday morning pickup were boxes of household trash, rusted garden tools, a cracked birdbath, grimy lamp shades.

Strabane took the bulky chair-recliner from me and carried it to the curb with no more effort than if it had been made of plastic. He was a stocky-shouldered man, flushed with self-consciousness, edgy and excited. I wanted to run back into the house and shut the door against him, I wasn’t ready for this.

“What else you got for me, ma’am? Those suitcases?”

Strabane grinned, flexing his fingers. In his unease he was trying to be funny. Playing the role of, what?—a handyman, trashman?

I tried to laugh. Well, it was funny!

Trying not to show the surprise and fury I felt. Tears of indignation welling in my eyes. But there was Mom’s sensible advice: be gracious to all visitors.

I had dragged the “matched leather” suitcases out of a shadowy corner of the garage and into the sunlight. There were five of these including an overnight bag of my mother’s she’d tried to press upon Clare first, then me, when we’d gone away to college. The suitcases were scuffed and covered in cobwebs but still handsome, impressive. What Dad called “high-quality.” I had been staring at the tarnished brass initials
GAE
,
JAE
. Trying to imagine my parents as newlyweds, young and deeply in love and not yet parents, thrilled with such a luxury gift that must have seemed to promise travel, a romantic future.

Exactly when the matched luggage had been shifted from a closet to the musty garage, I don’t know. It was too sad to contemplate.

I’d been thinking that maybe I shouldn’t throw out my parents’ luggage? Maybe not this morning.

But there was my unexpected visitor Ross Strabane, grimacing as he managed remarkably to grip the handles of all five suitcases simultaneously, even bending his knees in the way of a competitive weight lifter. For a man of moderate height he had big hands. The deftness of his movements, a swaggering sort of confidence in his strength, were fascinating to observe. I didn’t know whether I admired such strength, or scorned it as show-offy. But I knew that I couldn’t have lifted more than two of the large suitcases, in both hands.

Strabane hesitated, seeing something in my face. “No? These don’t go?”

“I…I think so. Yes.”

“This is real leather, I guess? Nice.”

Strabane stooped to smell the leather. After years in the garage the russet-red leather still exuded a faint, luxuriant aroma.

“They were wedding presents to my parents, from my dad’s parents. See: ‘GAE, JAE.’ Their initials.” Suddenly I heard myself telling Strabane about my parents, in a halting voice that sounded unused, scratchy. As if I’d been saving up such a family tale for the first person who came along, out of sheer loneliness. “Mom would have loved to travel more than they did, but Dad was, well…He always felt he needed to ‘stay close to home’ because he had a responsible ‘executive’ position at Beechum Paper Products and he didn’t trust ‘subordinates.’ They’d gone to Key West on their honeymoon and every winter there was the vague idea of going back, Dad would sort of promise Mom but then something would come up, and they never got there. Actually it was sort of a joke in the family. Mom had wanted to go to Europe, too, in fact I’d been planning to take her this summer…” Was this true? I was stunned at what I was saying, so impulsively. And to a stranger, a police detective who’d led the investigation into my mother’s death.

Strabane was listening sympathetically. He seemed interested in whatever I was saying. I felt uneasy, not able to see his eyes behind the dark hyper-reflective lenses of his glasses, in which my own miniature distorted face was reflected as in a cartoon. “Anyway, the farthest we went as a family was usually just Star Lake in the Adirondacks where my dad’s family had a cottage and then sometimes we’d come back a day or two early, Dad got so restless.”

“Star Lake! We used to go there too, some summers.” Strabane had set the suitcases back down. Flexing his strong fingers. “Until my family moved away, I’d take them, too.”

This was an ambiguous statement. Much of what Strabane said came out just slightly jumbled, not-coherent. The way he stared, and smiled, and twisted his face, and shrugged and shifted his shoulders as if they didn’t quite fit him, was distracting. You couldn’t know what he meant by
my family
: parents? or his own wife, children?

Strabane wasn’t standing close to me yet it felt as if he was crowding me. I didn’t like the feeling. I didn’t know why he was here. It was true that I’d called him, I’d dialed his telephone number, but I hadn’t wanted him, even then. And he couldn’t know any of this. Could he!

No right to intrude. No right to remind me of something I want to forget.

At least, he’d shaved off the scruffy beard. His jaw was blunt and curiously dented, or scarred. His swarthy skin was fleshy as muscle. You had to be fascinated by the bristly quill-hair and the close-shaved sides of the man’s head. No one else I’d seen in the small-town Mt. Ephraim Police Department looked anything like Ross Strabane.

Still he was speaking of Star Lake as if it had a special meaning to him, as it must have a special meaning to me. As if somehow the two of us had known each other from summers there.

“Except I’m older than you, Ms. Eaton. I graduated from Mt. Ephraim High in 1981.”

I knew, I was expected to say when I’d graduated. But Detective Strabane already knew when I’d graduated. He knew “facts” about me and my family and he knew information acquired through interviews, of which I could have no idea and wished to have no idea.

Seeing how I wasn’t responding to memories of Star Lake, Strabane hesitated.

“Well. These suitcases? D’you want them at the curb, or—”

“I…I’m not sure. If the trash men take them away, they’ll be gone forever.”

“Do you have any use for them?
You?
”

“I have my own suitcase. You know, the practical kind with wheels like everyone has now.”

“So, these? You want them gone?”

“No, wait! I just don’t know.” I was becoming anxious, I had to think quickly. “They’re ‘high quality’ leather, that’s why they’re so heavy. No one has luggage like this any longer. I mean, my suitcase is light as plywood! It came to me maybe these suitcases could be fitted out with wheels? That way, they’d be practical.”

Strabane smiled, baffled. That just-perceptible edge of exasperation you’d see in my dad’s face, when Mom was being “logical.”

“These? That weigh a ton? Fitted out with
wheels
?”

“Is it a silly idea? On Animal Planet the other night I saw this program about dogs and cats whose rear legs had had to be amputated because they’d been injured, the animals were fitted out with ingenious little platforms on wheels. With their front legs they propelled themselves like kids on skateboards! They didn’t seem to miss their original rear legs at all.”

I didn’t like sounding so naive. Animal Planet cable TV had been one of Mom’s weaknesses we’d teased her about. But Strabane was listening respectfully. He had the air of a man practiced in considering seemingly naive remarks. “Maybe because the animals don’t have the concept ‘rear legs’—‘original legs’—they get along pretty well with what they have. Like they don’t have the concept ‘crippled,’ ‘freaky.’”

It wasn’t a rebuke but common sense. And maybe Strabane was teasing, just a little.

I said, “Animals don’t have the concept ‘animals.’ We don’t seem to have it, either, applied to ourselves though in fact that’s what we are: ‘animals.’ We want to think better of ourselves.”

“We sure do! I hope so.”

I decided to give up the “matched luggage.” I took the smallest suitcase from Strabane to carry to the curb while Strabane managed to carry the other four suitcases in two hands. He was showing off, was he? Thinking well of himself, impressing me. I tried not to wince as he dropped the suitcases on the lawn at the end of the driveway with a thud, like the most ordinary of trash.

“Thanks! I appreciate your help, Detective.”

This was a signal for Strabane to leave. Another man would have picked it up immediately. But Strabane, flexing his fingers, wiping his cobwebby hands on his trousers, seemed oblivious. My mother would have invited him inside to wash his hands but damned if I would invite this intruder anywhere.

Offer him coffee, too. Banana nut bread.

You weren’t brought up to be rude, Nikki!

Strabane asked if there was anything else I needed hauled to the curb and I told him with a bright quick smile no thank you, there was not.

You could see by glancing into the garage that there was plenty more that was bulky, cumbersome. But Strabane wasn’t about to contradict me. When he removed his dark glasses, I looked quickly away.

A police detective’s job was identifying lies. Liars. I didn’t want this man looking too closely at me.

“Guess I’m intruding here, Ms. Eaton? I’m sorry.”

“You can call me ‘Nicole.’ Please.”

After the dark lenses, Strabane’s eyes were unexpectedly warm, vulnerable. The eyes of a worried man. He’d been feeling the awkward strain between us. The fact that he’d written to me, and neither of us had acknowledged it.

“Well. ‘Nicole.’ Anyway I’m not the ‘bearer of bad news’ this morning. That’s good, right?”

Strabane stepped closer to me. The gesture seemed unconscious, instinctive. He wanted to protect me but: from what? The worst had happened, all that was over. What had happened to my mother could never happen to me. I knew, it was only common sense.

I could smell Strabane’s hair oil. Unless it was some high-octane male deodorant beyond even what Wally Szalla used. My heartbeat began to quicken as in the presence of danger.

Oh, I hated him! I hated the memory of him. I wanted him gone, so that I could lock myself inside the house, in my girlhood room, and bawl.

Specifically, I hated his clothes. Hadn’t he anyone to supervise his clothes! Maybe small-town plainclothes cops have to wear the kind of neckties you only see heaped in bargain bins, in post-Christmas sales? Maybe they have to wear shirts of some thin synthetic fabric that’s only nominally white, you can see their wiry-shadowy chest hair through the fabric?—shirts that, glimpsed from behind, show bats’ wings of perspiration across the wearer’s shoulders? I hated the flash of mismatched socks, one of them beige with small checks and the other a frayed-looking sand color. Only Strabane’s shoes looked decent this morning, maybe because they were new and unnaturally shiny, like his belt buckle.

I hated the way he’d showed up at the house when I hadn’t chosen to speak with him. I hadn’t replied to his letters. I hated it that this was a sexually aggressive male utterly unaware of himself, clumsy and uncertain. Wally Szalla gave that initial impression, too: comfortable and harmless as an old shoe. But Wally’s sexual intentions were never unconscious.

Strabane said, awkwardly, “Why I dropped by, Nicole: I’m wondering how you’re getting along.”

Getting along? Was I? I had no more idea how I was
getting along
than I knew what my white blood cell count was.

I resented the question. I resented the implication that there was a desired way in which I might be
getting along
, that I might not be living up to; that Detective Strabane might assist me. Innocently I asked, “How do I look?”

This was meant to be a joke for I didn’t believe that I could be looking great in faded denim shorts, a grimy T-shirt worn without a bra, no makeup except a smear of purple lipstick where a mouth should be. My hair was now a stiff broom-sage mix of glinting sand, wiry silvery-gray that crimped and thickened in humid weather. For my most recent tryst with my married-man-lover Wally Szalla I’d painted my fingernails and toenails peacock blue spangled with gold. The fingernail polish had mostly endured but the sassy blue toenails were chipped. I’d been noticing my visitor’s gaze drifting downward to my bare dirty feet, then lifting again quickly to my face.

“Beautiful.” Strabane spoke quickly, as if embarrassed. He was tugging at his shirt collar, his fingers left a smudge of cobweb. “You look beautiful, Nicole.”

I hadn’t heard this preposterous remark. A nerve had begun to beat in my left eyelid. I wanted to shove Strabane away with the palms of both my hands: flat and hard against his stocky chest.

“That’s why you’ve come here? To tell me—what?”

“To tell you that your life will begin again, Nicole, after the trial. You have to have faith that that’s so.”

The trial. It had been set for late October, then postponed to early December. Just recently we’d heard that it might be postponed again until “after the New Year.”

“I don’t think about the trial. I try never to think of the trial.”

“That’s good, Nicole. Because the trial is not up to you.”

“I think about my life in this house, day to day. Sometimes hour to hour. That’s what I think about, and there’s happiness in that, and I have a right to that.”

My voice rose. Strabane nodded gravely. He was looking as if I’d shoved him in the chest. Surprising him, but he’d stood his ground. And now he was rueful, chagrined. But still he stood his ground.