Missing Mom by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

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