Read Online Missing Mom by Joyce Carol Oates - Free Book Online Page A

the nape of my neck felt exposed.
    At the Beacon yesterday my co-workers were about evenly divided between those who thought my new look was “cool”—“sexy”—“fantastic, Nikki!”—and those who smiled ambiguously and offered no opinion.
    When I passed by his food dish, Smoky cringed and froze in a momentary panic. I went to check the bathroom in the hall: the “guest” bathroom where Mom kept her special floral-scented soaps in a little wicker basket on the back of the toilet. There was a reassuring smell here of potpourri and soap and my face in the spotless mirror did not appear so waxy-pale and drawn as, from inside, it felt.
    The dyed-maroon hair looked like a fright wig. Something to be slapped on a head at Hallowe’en. Seeing me, Wally had blinked and smiled and laughed and had to concede: Nikki Eaton was about the most unpredictable female he knew.
    Of females he’d been involved with, in any case.
    Beyond the guest bathroom was an alcove, a short corridor that led to the basement door and the garage door. I would check these later, I thought.
    The basement door was shut. If Mom had been down in the basement, running a load of laundry, ironing, she would have left the door open.
    In the dining room I saw with a shock that something was very wrong.
    Chairs had been yanked away from the table. The breakfront drawers were open and spilling their contents. On the carpet was the green silverware box, looking as if it had been flung down, spilling forks, knives, spoons in a glittery jumble. I stepped on something that rolled beneath my feet: a broken candle.
    It took me a moment to realize: our silver candlestick holders were missing from the dining room table and from a serving table against the wall. Only candles remained, flung down and broken.
    We’d been burglarized.
    My heart was beating rapidly now. The house had been broken into, ransacked. Through the doorway I saw items in the living room strewn about. I could smell an acrid odor, as of perspiration. A man’s odor.
    In the family room, the television set lay on its side, on the carpet. Not a very new or a very large set, it must have been dragged from its perch on a low table, then abandoned by the thief as too cumbersome.
    The door was open to Clare’s old room, now a sewing room. Here also drawers had been yanked out of a bureau and lay on the floor spilling such mundane contents as sewing supplies, napkin rings, woven place mats. My old room, now a spare room with matched floral bedspread, curtains, and chintz-covered easy chair, had been similarly ransacked.
    I went into my parents’ bedroom at the end of the hall, now I was very frightened. Pulses were beating in my head, in my eyes. I saw bureau drawers pulled out here, overturned on the floor with a look of violence. Mom’s things scattered on the carpet: her inexpensive jewelry, stockings and socks and underwear, sweaters. The glamorous white ostrich feather boa…
    The closet door was open, Mom’s shoes lay on the floor as if they’d been kicked about. Size-four crepe-soled shoes with laces, black ballerina flats, a single patent-leather shoe with a small heel. Clothes had been torn from hangers, flung into a heap on the floor.
    Even the bed had been disturbed, the hand-sewn quilt Mom laid over her pink satin bedspread lay partway on the floor.
    He’d been looking for money, I thought. But my parents kept no money in the house.
    I was stepping on an old purse of my mother’s, a bulky leather handbag she hadn’t used for years. And there was a glazed straw purse decorated with cherries. And a beaded white silk purse, Mom had last used for the wedding of a cousin of mine. These were yawning open, empty.
    In the hall bathroom, the mirrored medicine cabinet door was open. The narrow glass shelves of the cabinet had been cleared as if with an angry swipe of someone’s hand, a tube of toothpaste, a toothbrush, a plastic cup, deodorant in a blue plastic container and other toiletries