Missing Mom by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

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.
    Strabane glanced at me, brooding.
    “Ma’am? Ms. Eaton? Anything you can add, any name…?”
    My mind was blank. I could not think. I was tamping down my spiky hair, of which I’d become acutely ashamed. Like the Statue of Liberty, I must have looked. And my face dead-white, and my lips caked with an acid-vomit taste.
    I didn’t remember vomiting. Anxiously I wiped at my mouth, I saw that the front of my shirt was dappled with something whitish, sour-smelling.
    Clare said suddenly, “Oh. ‘Danto.’ He’s an exterminator, he came to the house a week or so ago, to exterminate red ants.”
    I said, “Clare, no! ‘Sonny’ Danto would never…”
    “Detective, his name is ‘ D-a-n-t-o .’ ‘The Scourge of the Bugs’ he calls himself.” Clare was becoming fired-up, vindictive. “My mother was a lonely, vulnerable woman, a widow. She was so friendly to everyone, so trusting. I hated it how people took advantage of her!”
    But Danto was a joke, wasn’t he?—just one of Mom’s many eccentric acquaintances, not to be taken seriously.
    Strabane was saying, for my benefit, that “all names, any names” of persons who’d been in my mother’s house recently were urgently wanted for purposes of the investigation. “Ma’am, if there’s weeding-out to do, I will do it.”
    It was taken for granted that the person or persons who’d murdered our mother had also taken her Visa card and her car, her wallet, various household items we would be asked to identify in the morning. It was taken for granted that our mother had probably walked into a burglary in progress which had resulted in her death. (Dad had had a security system installed, but after his death, since Smoky was always tripping the alarm, Mom had asked Rob to dismantle it.) In my confused state I’d known that Mom’s car was missing but I had not seemed to grasp that it had been stolen, and might be the means of finding the murder or murderers.
    Rob asked Strabane if whoever had done this would be that stupid, to drive a stolen car, and Strabane said, “Yes, sir. They are all stupid.”
    I could have told the detective that my mother’s car was a metallic-green Honda, a fairly new model, four-door, but Rob Chisholm knew precisely that it was a 2001 Honda Accord for he’d been the one to accompany Gwen to the dealer and help her make the purchase. I could not remember anything of my mother’s license plate number but both Clare and Rob recalled the first three digits— SVI —and Rob also knew the name of the garage where she took the car to be serviced: the manager could give police more information.
    I saw how I was being left behind. How Mom was being left behind.
    I saw how the police investigation would move swiftly and professionally, as if I did not exist. I saw how others seemed already to know much more about what had happened to my mother than I knew.
    I was frightened by this realization, I think. I could not accept it. In the garishly lighted garage (so cluttered, so embarrassing, what will strangers think of us!) my mother’s small lifeless body was being examined and photographed by strangers who had not known Gwen Eaton and for whom she was but a body, a “victim.” Her designation was lurid: “murder victim.”
    Soon, the “murder victim” would be removed from the garage. It was to be transported to the Mt. Ephraim Township morgue. This was a place, you could say it was an institution, to which neither Clare nor I had given the slightest thought, ever. Yet, for many others, it was a known place. It would be a known place, for us.
    We would have liked to accompany our mother’s body to the morgue but we were not allowed this privilege. Nor could we approach our mother simply to touch her, in