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

had fallen into the sink and onto the floor.
    And vials of prescription pills, spilled onto the floor. He’d been looking for drugs.
    I couldn’t keep from staring into the toilet bowl. I thought, He has used this toilet. But the water was clear.
    All this while, a part of my mind was detached and warning me: get help, run outside, call 911. This part of my mind understood that I was in danger, I should not have remained in the house after I’d realized what the situation was. Yet, I seemed to be reasoning that, though something had happened, and this something might involve my mother, yet until I acknowledged that something had happened that required outside help, it was not altogether established that something had happened to my mother. But once I called for help, it would be established.
    I saw a movement in the corner of my eye, I turned and there was nothing. But in a mirror at the end of the hall, a woman’s thin, ghostly figure seemed to be floating. My eyes were flooding with tears, I could not see who the woman was.
    Smoky had followed me at a wary distance. He was mewing in short anxious bleats as a cat mews when desperate to be let outside.
    I returned to the kitchen, Smoky ran ahead of me panicked. Now in the kitchen I saw what I hadn’t seemed to see before: the phone cord had been ripped out of the wall, the avocado-green plastic receiver lay on the counter unattached.
    All day we’d been calling Mom’s number, Clare and me. Our calls had been automatically deflected onto the voice mail service. If we’d heard a protracted busy signal, one of us would have come over earlier.
    I went to the basement door and opened it, slowly. A cold damp air lifted to my nostrils. “Mom?”—my voice was childlike, wavering. I might have been thinking, Maybe Mom is hiding in the basement.
    A weak fading light from the narrow windows penetrated the dimness. The washer and dryer glimmered like dream-objects but other shapes close by were indistinct. No movement! No sound! Yet I could not force myself to descend the cellar stairs.
    The door leading from the kitchen into the garage was ajar, I saw. I seemed not to have noticed this until now.
    For a while I stood in the doorway staring into the garage. I told myself You can see better here, it’s safer here .
    I was smelling something strange. I was thinking of the butcher shop on Mohegan Street. Where when I’d been a little girl my mother had brought me “meat shopping” with her. I’d drifted off to stare as if hypnotized at sculpted cuts of raw meat inside the display cases while Mom talked and laughed with the butcher giving her orders in a surprisingly knowledgeable voice.
    A smell of blood. I knew.
    I thought Something has died here. An animal .
    My father would have been upset to see how cluttered Mom had allowed the garage to become. Now that he was gone. There wasn’t even room for Mom to have fitted her car inside if she’d tried. Everywhere were trash cans, garden tools, bags of wild birdseed and peat moss and fertilizer and wood chips. Lawn furniture including years-old chairs whose plastic slats had long ago rotted and ripped. Here were discarded household furnishings—worn-out chairs, an old portable TV, shadeless lamps and lampless shades. Both my parents had been reluctant to dispose of their handsome matched and monogrammed leather luggage, a wedding present in long-ago 1968 before the advent of wheeled suitcases. You never knew when fashions would change, my father stubbornly believed.
    I was staring at a shadowy shape on the concrete floor about fifteen feet away. It appeared to be a small rolled-up strip of carpet, an oddly shaped box or bundle of some kind…I switched on the light and saw that it was Mom.
    I called out to her. She did not move.
    She must have fallen, I thought. Tripped or something, or fainted and fallen. You are not accustomed to seeing a fallen person, almost you can’t identify what you are seeing. There appeared to be a