Free Missing Mom by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

way, no lover’s eyes, never my parents’ eyes, yet I must have touched my mother’s eyelids, to shut them. I promised her You will be all right, Mom. I won’t go far .
    I stumbled away. Another time I collided with something metallic. Then I was outside. How strange, the air smelled of lilac! I ran doubled over, a sharp pain in my chest where something had broken. I was trying to call for help, trying to scream. The sounds issuing from my mouth were hoarse, choked. But I was able to run across the street to our neighbors’ house. This was the Highams’ redwood-and-stucco “ranch” built to the same model as our own for there was the large rectangular window facing our window as in a subtly distorted mirror, there was the same grassy front lawn, less pocked with dandelions than our own because Mr. Higham squatted out there, armed with a hand hoe, to dig the gnarly weeds out.
    I ran to the side door of the house, that like ours opened into the kitchen. I was brash, reckless as a child. In fact I was a child. I was crying, “Mrs. Higham! Let me use your phone! Something has happened to my mother.”

rupture
    Something ruptured and began bleeding in my chest when I bent over my mother, when I saw my mother in that way. It will happen to you, in a way special to you. You will not anticipate it, you cannot prepare for it and you cannot escape it. The bleeding will not cease for a long time.
    In my case, no one could know. No one would think in pity Why, that show-offy woman with the spiky purple hair is bleeding inside .
    More likely it was thought That silly woman! What a sight! Couldn’t she have known that her mother might be murdered, isn’t she ashamed!

“murder”
    There was a taffy-colored plastic phone receiver in my shaking hand. I managed to dial 911. A woman answered with startling abruptness and I heard my dazed voice: “I—I need to—I need to report a—murder.”
    The voice responded with an audible gasp: “You need— what ?”
    “A murder. My m-mother. We are at—”
    The look in Gladys Higham’s face! As if I’d shouted at her, given her a sudden rude shove. As if, Gwen Eaton’s friend of more than twenty years, she could not comprehend the words issuing from my mouth.
    Gwen? Gwen? Not Gwen…
    I saw then: my hands were not clean but sticky. I would realize afterward that I’d left faint smears of blood on Mrs. Higham’s plastic wall phone that was a twin of Mom’s kitchen phone in design, lightness.
    Speaking with the 911 dispatcher, I seemed to be having trouble with the simplest words. My tongue had gone numb. There was a ringing in my ears. Pulses in my head beat like electric current. I was distracted by elderly Mrs. Higham clutching at her throat in alarm and disbelief, stumbling to sit down, heavily, in a kitchen chair. Gladys Higham was not a young woman, she was older than Mom by perhaps ten years and much less fit. Her old-woman legs were thick to bursting in brown support hose.
    In Mrs. Higham’s kitchen that was a mirror of our kitchen across the street there were two cages of fluttery little birds: daubs of greenish-gold beating their wings as they flew about excitedly inside their brass cages, swing to bar, bar to swing, tittering and chirping brightly. You’d have thought that I had blundered into their cages, the little birds were so aroused. The dispatcher was instructing me please to repeat what I’d said, to speak more clearly, more loudly, I had to wonder what this stranger must be thinking, a desperate call to report a murder made in the presence of tittering and chirping birds. I was repeating my name, not Nikki, for Nikki wasn’t serious, but Nicole, I was Nicole Eaton calling to report the murder of my mother Gwendolyn Eaton, Mrs. Jonathan Eaton of 43 Deer Creek Drive in the Deer Creek subdivision…
    Mrs. Higham was ashen-faced, blinking and panting. Her eyes were elderly eyes, lashless and brimming with tears. I hung up the sticky receiver, it slipped from