Missing Mom Read online

  In the man’s arms I did not think of any other man. I did not think of any other place. I did not think of May in Mt. Ephraim: the sweet-sickly smell of lilac that had the power to make me physically ill. I did not think of the eleven-year-old girl pushing open the door to her mother’s bedroom and the last, fleeting moment before she saw what lay inside. I did not think of pushing open the door to our garage and that last, fleeting moment before I saw what lay inside. Eagerly I kissed the man who was kissing me, the man in my arms, I held him tight like a drowning woman. I thought This is now, I am here. This is now.

  Next morning I slept heavily as if my bones had turned to lead and my eyes were stuck shut. I was naked in an unfamiliar bed and there was a naked man beside me whose name, for a panicky moment, I could not have said. I felt the mattress ease and lift as he slipped from the bed. I understood that he was being thoughtful, or cautious. I heard the floorboards creak as he padded about barefoot. I heard the door to the room being opened and shut quietly and when some time later he returned, I was still in bed and probably I hadn’t moved. Through shut eyelids I saw the man standing indecisively at the foot of the brass bed looking at me.

  “Nikki?”

  He waited, watching me. I was at the bottom of a pool of water, I was pushing myself up to the surface. My lungs ached, I’d been holding my breath for so long.

  “Nikki. Hey.”

  Eventually, I came to the surface.

  We were walking on the beach. The sand was crumbly, my feet sank into the sand and I was having trouble walking. Circling in the air above a pier were prehistoric-looking birds: pelicans. The sky above the Gulf of Mexico was purely blue, beautiful. I was very happy and yet a sudden sensation of weakness came over me, a terrible sensation of sickness, emptiness. I told the man I was with that I had to return to the hotel. I apologized, I had to leave him. Stumbling and staggering I returned to the Windward Inn. I returned to our room and lay on the bed. It was a bed with a slightly sunken mattress and a jiggly brass frame. It was a bed you would call quaint. I was very weak lying on this bed though it was a comfort to me. Through slats in the part-broken blind waning sunlight glowed. I wanted badly to be alone but the man followed me and came to ease himself onto the bed beside me. The weight of him in the bed! He was so heavy, he was so warm, he was breathing so audibly, almost for a moment I resented him. Intruding into my grief as if to steal it from me.

  He gripped my hand. My fingers were icy and unresponsive. I thought You can’t warm me, I am ice. I remembered how I had run from Mom where she had fallen in the garage and I had paused to look back at her and saw that she was alive, she was alive and breathing and her eyelids were fluttering open. She was looking at me—she saw me! She tried to speak my name. She was very weak from losing so much blood but she had strength enough to call my name. But when I returned to her, and tried to lift her, she had died, it was too late. And so I had failed her after all. And then I had abandoned her to strangers. I thought I am on trial and the trial will never end.

  “You’ll live with it, Nikki. I’ll help you.”

  I waited for Strabane to say more. I knew him now: my lover.

  I waited for him to reason with me, to argue with me. I waited for him to say those words we say to one another at such times. But he remained silent. He gripped my hand in such a way that his fingers pushed through my fingers, and held them tight. I understood that this was the reasoning, this was my lover’s argument.

  In this way ended my first full year of missing Mom.

  About the Author

  JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/ Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and since 1978 has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2003 she received the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature and the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for more information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  Other Ecco/HarperCollins Books by Joyce Carol Oates

  NOVELS

  Blonde*

  Middle Age: A Romance*

  I’ll Take You There*

  The Tattooed Girl*

  The Falls*

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  The Assignation

  Where Is Here?

  Faithless: Tales of Transgression*

  I Am No One You Know*

  NOVELLA

  I Lock My Door Upon Myself

  NONFICTION

  George Bellows: American Artist

  On Boxing

  PLAYS

  The Perfectionist and Other Plays

  MEMOIR/ESSAY

  The Faith of a Writer*

  Uncensored: Views & (Re)views*

  CHILDREN’S BOOKS

  Come Meet Muffin!

  Where Is Little Reynard?

  *Also available as a HarperCollins e-Book

  Credits

  JACKET DESIGN BY HIGH DESIGN, NYC

  JACKET PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER ZANDER/PICTUREARTS

  Copyright

  MISSING MOM. Copyright © 2005 by The Ontario Review, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  ePub edition September 2005 ISBN 9780061748080

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Oates, Joyce Carol, 1938–

  Missing mom : a novel / Joyce Carol Oates.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-06-081621-X

  I. Title.

  PS3565.A8M54 2005

  813'.54—dc22

  2005040002

  ISBN-13 978-0-06-081621-6

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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