Missing Mom: A Novel Read online

  Had I hugged Mom goodnight, I wasn’t sure.

  I thought so. Probably. Mom would’ve hugged me.

  Clare was saying, “Mrs. Kinsler, Mom’s friend from church, called me to ask if I knew where Mom was, they were supposed to meet at the mall for their crafts class this morning at ten-thirty, then have lunch with some other women. But Mom never showed up, which isn’t like her, and never called to explain, and hasn’t been answering her phone all day.”

  “Clare, it’s only a little after five P.M. What do you mean, ‘all day.’”

  “I mean, it isn’t like Mom to miss a date with a friend, or one of her classes. Even if her car broke down, she’d have called.”

  Clare was trying to speak calmly. Clare was allowing me to understand that this might be serious, or it might not be serious. But she, Clare, the elder and more responsible of the Eaton sisters, was the one to provide information.

  I couldn’t think how to reply. My mind felt shredded. I’d been trying not to think of Wally Szalla while struggling to make sense of the mottled quality of the tape I was transcribing, wondering if it was my example that caused Wally too to be drifting, years had passed since he’d begun filing for a divorce from his wife, wondering if it was my fault that the tape was so difficult to decipher or whether it was the fault of the new, compact, Japanese-manufactured recorder, that made me want to cry. I had only until tomorrow morning to type into my computer some sort of coherent and entertaining “human interest” feature under the byline “Nicole Eaton.” Now, I saw that the tape cassette was still turning, soundlessly. In my haste to answer the phone I’d punched the volume and not the on/off button.

  “Fuck.”

  “Nikki, what?”

  “—I mean, I did call Mom around eleven this morning. But she was out, I just left a message.”

  “And she didn’t call back?”

  “It wasn’t that crucial, Clare. Just thanking her for the party, no need for Mom to call back.”

  “But Mom always calls back…”

  “Look, did you drive by the house?”

  I’d asked this innocently, should have known better. Clare exploded, “Did I drive by the house! In fact yessss, I drove by our mother’s house, Nikki. In the midst of this crazed day, one errand after another, already I’ve driven Lilja halfway across town to a friend’s house, and swung around to pick up Foster from soccer practice, and waited for the plumber who finally came forty minutes late and now I’m due in fifteen minutes to pick Lilja up again and drop her off at home and drive out again to a late-afternoon dentist appointment I’ve already rescheduled not once but twice, and his office is in that new medical/dental center up North Fork, and you have the gall to ask me from Chautauqua Falls a very convenient thirty miles away did I drive by our mother’s house which is across town from my own, yesss in fact I drove by the house but Mom isn’t home, or wasn’t home around four, her car wasn’t in the driveway.”

  “You didn’t check inside…”

  “No. I didn’t ‘check inside.’ If Mom’s car isn’t in the driveway, she isn’t home.”

  I supposed this was so. For Mom never parked the car in the garage as Dad had wanted her to. In all weathers it was parked in the driveway becoming ever more rust-stippled, dotted with white bird droppings like accent marks.

  Clare spoke of calling Mrs. Higham, Mom’s neighbor across the street, asking her to look out the window, see if Mom’s car was back, I told her this sounded like a good idea, then Clare immediately objected, in a way that echoed Dad who dreaded neighbors becoming overly involved in the private life of our family as he’d have dreaded bubonic plague, “Oh, but that might embarrass Mom, you know how she prizes her independence, once Gladys Higham knows we’re worried about Mom she will tell everyone in the neighborhood, you know how people are, and Mr. Higham is retired with nothing better to do than gossip, it will get back to Mom and she’ll be upset with us.”

  I felt a tinge of alarm. It wasn’t like my sister to fuss in this way. I said, “The last time we were worried about Mom, remember?—it turned out she’d been talked into emergency babysitting over at Rhoda’s.” (Rhoda Schmidt was a cousin of ours with whom we’d never been especially close.) “And before that, around Christmas, someone called us from the hospital, where was Mom for her gift shop shift, and she’d been at a movie matinee with friends, the woman at the hospital had made a mistake about scheduling and Mom was annoyed with us, and I don’t blame her. ‘I didn’t realize I had to report my hourly schedule to my daughters,’ Mom said. ‘Maybe you should put one of those ankle radar things on me, they put on parolees.’”

  We’d laughed, Mom had been funny about it. But she’d been humiliated, for we’d called a number of her friends.

  I did feel guilt, sometimes. About having moved away from Mt. Ephraim. About leading a slapdash kind of life, unmarried, unsettled-down, that life of drift and impulse of which Mom so disapproved. But I’d left home several years before Dad died, and Mom became a widow.

  How is it my fault! I wanted to protest.

  “Why don’t I drive over this evening, Clare. Between six-thirty and seven. If Mom isn’t back by then, I mean. You’ve already done enough running around, have dinner with your family and I’ll call you around seven. I’m sure we’re exaggerating all this, and Mom is fine. There are only a few places in Mt. Ephraim Mom is likely to be, right?”

  “But she gets involved with people. She’s such a soft touch. If this is ‘Reverend Bewley’ exploiting her again…”

  “Clare, stop worrying. I’ll call you after I check the house. In the meantime maybe Mom will call one of us back. Or we’ll get through to her.”

  “Well. If you promise…”

  “Promise! I just said I would, didn’t I?”

  “You’re not always reliable, Nikki. A call from your editor, and you’re off. Or some friend. Or, well—your friend Szalla turns up, you might disappear for days into a time warp.”

  “Wally has ‘turned up,’ you’ll be pleased to know. We had a time warp yesterday, thank you. And this evening I intend to drive to Mt. Ephraim to check out Mom, as I said.”

  “Fine! Let me know. ’Bye.”

  We hurried to hang up, a habit of years. Which one of us could get off the line first.

  I was trembling, I wanted to think because of my bossy sister.

  I checked the time: 5:08 P.M. I would leave for Mt. Ephraim in about an hour.

  I rewound the cassette and returned to transcribing the flawed tape, hunched over my laptop trying to catch crucial sentence fragments and key words, typing in frantic flurries for I had to e-mail the feature to my editor at the Beacon no later than 11 P.M. that night. It had to be no more, and not much less, than 1,000 words to fit into the insert supplement Valley News & Views. The subject was a ninety-nine-year-old bluegrass and country-and-western performer named Jimmy Friday who’d had several hit singles in the long-ago 1950s and was still locally active, a Chautauqua Valley celebrity of sorts who performed wherever and whenever invited, produced his own CDs and had just published his memoir Songs My Daddy Taught Me: The Mostly True Tales of Jimmy Friday with a local press which was the ostensible occasion of the interview. At the time of the taping that morning I’d been basking in the erotic/emotional afterglow of the time warp with Wally Szalla and so in a mood to be utterly charmed by Jimmy Friday, as Jimmy Friday had been charmed by me, marveling at my punk haircut, wondering if it was too late for him, his hair was a beautiful floating-frothy white and he was in fact a handsome elderly man who required only a cane to walk with, he had a wicked sense of humor and a way of presenting himself that was both gallant and frankly sexual. About old age he’d been blisteringly funny. “The most praise we can hope for is Oh! he isn’t completely deaf!—Oh! his wheelchair is so well-oiled!—Oh! his dentures don’t clatter” except hearing these remarks now, or what was coming through of them in the tape, as I was trying to type with increasingly desperate fingers, causing the little spell-check alarm t
o cheep every few seconds, I didn’t think that Jimmy Friday was being funny at all. I swallowed hard and forced myself to continue until the tape stopped abruptly as if broken in the midst of one of my inane questions Mr. Friday, what advice can you give to—

  There was silence. I was alone in the empty apartment. Five rented rooms on the third, top floor of an elegantly shabby Victorian brownstone in a residential neighborhood of Chautauqua Falls approximately thirty miles from 43 Deer Creek Drive, Mt. Ephraim. Strange how, as I was here, I was also there. Well, I wasn’t really here, I was there.

  Since speaking with Clare I’d been waiting for the phone to ring but it had not rung. I’d been waiting for Mom to call but Mom had not called. And I was made to realize that, if Clare hadn’t called to upset me, if Mom had called in her place, I would have peered at the caller I.D. screen, seen EATON, JON and probably would not have picked up because I was working: because I didn’t want to be interrupted in my work.

  And it came to me Here is what you deserve: never to hear your mother’s living voice again.

  I was frightened suddenly. It wasn’t 5:30 P.M. but I left for home now.

  finding mom

  I was so disappointed! Clare had been right, Mom’s car wasn’t in the driveway.

  Though I’d known what to expect. On the drive to Mt. Ephraim I’d punched out Mom’s number repeatedly on my cell phone. And always the phone at the other end rang four times, then came the click, and the eerie computer-generated voice This is 716 737 2695. There is no one home please leave a message at the sound of the beep.

  We’d insisted that Mom have a computer voice installed, after Dad died. Not use her own voice. So no one could guess that an older woman lived by herself at that number.

  Not that there was crime in Mt. Ephraim: there wasn’t. People left their doors unlocked during the day, car keys in ignitions. There had probably not been a break-in or burglary in any residence in Deer Creek Acres in years. But still.

  While Dad was living, Dad’s taped voice was what you’d hear when you called my parents’ number. So stiff and self-conscious, Dad had resembled a computer voice. We’d teased him about Hal in the movie 2001. Both Dad and Mom had been reluctant to leave messages when they called. In recent years Mom had become more practiced but initially, when voice mail was new for them, they’d hang up quickly as soon as the recording clicked on, like guilty children. I would arrive home to a series of hang-ups on my answering service and think, Oh, Dad. Mom. When I called back, I knew not to embarrass my parents by alluding to these.

  So exasperating! Our parents! Why won’t they leave messages!

  As soon as I turned onto Deer Creek Drive, a block from the house I could see that the driveway was empty. My heart beat hard in disappointment, dismay.

  I was beginning to be worried about Mom but also: I’d wanted to prove Clare wrong, she’d been so adamant that Mom wasn’t home. We were adult women in our thirties but every exchange between us was a tug-of-war of wills, and Clare invariably won.

  Strange to be returning to the house, so soon after Sunday. It seemed as if I’d just left. Unlike Clare, who lived in Mt. Ephraim, I didn’t visit home often. I tried not to feel guilty: Mom tried not to make me feel guilty. But a kind of constriction came over me when I returned, an invisible clamp across my chest. When will you get married, Nikki. When will you settle down, have children. Without family, what is there?

  Mostly this was unsaid. And yet I heard.

  Waning sunlight slanted across the front of the house, which was set back from the road in a grassy lawn pocked with dandelions. There were vividly blooming lilac bushes along the driveway. The air was fragrant with lilac. My mother’s house was small but attractive, the most ordinary of suburban houses, I guess you’d say. As a family we’d never lived anywhere else except this single-story redwood-and-stucco “ranch” at 43 Deer Creek Drive. Four bedrooms, a living room and a dining room and a “family” room with sliding glass doors opening onto a rear patio. The subdivision had been built in the late 1950s and each lot was one-and-a-half acres.

  Growing up, Clare and I had bicycled everywhere in Deer Creek Estates. We had classmates, friends who lived in the subdivision and we knew half the residents by name. Away at college when I’d been lonely I’d played a game: lying in bed, eyes shut tight I would see myself bicycling along the curving roads of Deer Creek Estates. There was Deer Creek Drive intersecting with Green Glade Drive; there was Cedar Point beyond Oriole, and the cul-de-sac Cedar Point Circle where larger, more expensive ranch houses and handsome white colonials had been built. There was man-made Deer Creek Lake beyond Lakeside Drive, and beyond that a stretch of woods, birches, pines, oaks, and the raised embankment of the Chautauqua & Port Oriskany railroad. Beyond that, Mt. Ephraim. My memory began to wane.

  Directly across the road from our house was a near-identical ranch with a plate glass “picture” window mirroring, or mimicking, our own. For as long as I could remember, Mr. and Mrs. Higham lived there. They’d grown old, within my memory.

  Mom was friendly with Gladys Higham, who was in her sixties. The women admired each other’s lawns and flower beds. Dad had been stand-offish with Mr. Higham as he’d been with most neighbors but Mom had always liked Gladys. I was sitting in my car thinking maybe Gladys knew where Mom was, Clare should have called her. And then I thought, with a childish thrill of hope, maybe Mom was at Mrs. Higham’s: that was where she was.

  I had to resist the impulse to run over to Mrs. Higham’s. To avoid entering Mom’s empty house.

  I’d parked in the driveway as I had hundreds of times. This was the season of my classy-looking 2002 Saab well beyond the range of a Beacon reporter’s buying power except a friend of Wally Szalla had been the dealer. I left the keys in the ignition thinking I would be right back. I left my cell phone on the passenger’s seat thinking I would have no need for it. I would enter the house by way of the kitchen as everyone in the family did. I had a key of course. I’d never not had a key for the house at 43 Deer Creek Drive though I hadn’t lived there for almost a decade.

  It was 6:05 P.M. The sky was riddled with beautiful bruised clouds above Lake Ontario to the north and in the west the sun was partly obscured amid clouds yet still high above the horizon as if reluctant to set. I thought, again with that childish thrill of hope, It’s still day, nowhere near night.

  And yet: 6:05 P.M. And now 6:06 P.M. My mother would not have been away from the house for so many hours. If she’d left for the mall at about 10 A.M., rapidly I calculated she’d been gone now for almost eight hours.

  Today was an ordinary Tuesday in Gwen Eaton’s life, I was certain. She’d planned no ambitious outings, there was nothing in her schedule to account for this absence. If there had been, Clare or I would have known.

  Mom would have told us, she told us everything.

  Oh, why was my heart beating so hard! As I walked slowly up the driveway, approaching the side door. The concrete stoop upon which Mom had placed the usual pots of geraniums: red, pink, white. At its base she’d put in purple pansies, I could smell the wet pungent earth-smell. I saw that no lights were on in the kitchen. The door was unlocked. When I pushed it open I heard the quick welcoming tinkle of the little sleigh bells overhead.

  I wondered if I felt so edgy because it was unnatural to be entering Mom’s house in her absence. Now that I no longer lived here, and so much time had passed.

  I never “dropped in” as Clare was always doing. My visits were premeditated. I would not have wished to make the trip home, to be disappointed by an empty house.

  No one to greet me at the door with her breathless little hug: “Why, Nikki! Hi, honey.”

  I imagined this. I imagined Mom at the door, after all. (The Honda was being serviced at a garage. Mom would pick it up in the morning.) This time, Mom wouldn’t be so shocked at my hair. She’d shake her head ruefully, she’d laugh.

  I’d be a beauty, Mom insisted. No matter if I were bald.

  “Mom? Are yo
u home? It’s…”

  Silly. I heard my silly voice.

  There came Smoky, Mom’s burly gray cat, to push against my ankles and mew. The cat was behaving strangely, I thought. Smoky was a friendly cat, at least with people he knew, but he was behaving now edgily, anxiously. When I stooped to pet his head he stiffened, ducked, seemed about to run away. “Smoky, it’s me. Don’t be afraid of me.” I stroked his head, I coaxed a hesitant purr from him. I saw that his plastic food bowls were empty and the water bowl nearly depleted.

  There were other things wrong in the kitchen but I couldn’t seem to see what they were. I saw, but wasn’t registering. Somehow, I kept waiting for Mom to appear. I was waiting for her footfall, her voice. “Nikki? Why honey, what a nice surprise…” I was remembering a day years ago when I’d come home from school and Mom was supposed to be home but didn’t seem to be home and I’d wandered through the house sort of looking for her and finally calling, “Mom? Are you home?” in a whiny voice but really I wasn’t thinking much about it, at the age of fourteen you don’t think much about anyone except yourself, certainly you don’t think about your mom, you don’t imagine a life for your mom in any way separate from or independent of your own, and finally happening to glance out a window in my room into the backyard I saw Mom in her garden clothes and straw hat weeding in one of her flower beds, exactly where Mom would be. And immediately I turned away and forgot whatever vague edginess I’d been feeling, not to remember for seventeen years.

  Well, here was a wrong thing: one of the kitchen chairs looked as if it had skidded across the floor to collide with the refrigerator. If you knew Gwen you’d know that she would never have dragged the chair there, unless maybe she’d been mopping the linoleum floor, but she would not have left the chair there, as she would not have left soiled dishes untended to for even a short period of time.