Missing Mom (22 page)

Belatedly I saw that Clare’s Post-its were still prominent: red, yellow, green on selected items of furniture.

“Anywhere. Please sit.”

I sank into an easy chair, not very gracefully. Strabane adjusted an upended cushion, and sat on a sofa facing me. There was a coffee table between us, heaped with family photo albums, Mom’s scrapbooks and envelopes crammed with snaphots dating back to the 1960s.

“My sister and I are clearing out the house. It will have to be sold, no one lives here now.” I laughed, wiping at my face. “My mom never threw away a thing. There’s a little portfolio there, a dozen snapshots from thirty years back, ‘Fluffy’s Last Days.’ An orange tiger cat, I’d never known.”

This information seemed to come from a long distance. My voice was reedy and nasal and wavering. Strabane was trying to smile, as if to put me at ease. “Your mother lived in this house a long time, Ms. Eaton?”

“With my dad, twenty-seven years. Herself, longer.”

But Strabane already knew that, probably. I had the uneasy idea that he knew things about me, my family, and what had happened to my mother on the final day of her life, that I would never know.

He was peering at me, frowning as he removed his dark glasses and shoved them into a coat pocket. Asking how I was, how my sister was, how we were “getting along.” My answers were monosyllables, mumbled. My memory of Ross Strabane was returning painfully. It was like sensation returning, where you’d had Novocain. The man was familiar to me as a blood relative I’d known long ago, someone I’d known for too long, who’d brought me cruel, crude news. I’d been exhausted by him and I had not wanted to see him again for between us there was a terrible knowledge, I could not forgive him for this knowledge. There seemed a kind of further insult, Strabane’s jaws were covered in a bristly dark stubble, the start of a beard! It wasn’t a good idea, the beard.

Strabane’s hair was now trimmed razor-short at the sides and back to erupt in a cascade of quills across the crown of his head. And his eyes! I resented those eyes.

I wiped my face on the front of my tank top, where it left a smear of greasy damp. Beneath this garment, my breasts were naked and loose and tender, as if they’d been roughly squeezed. I was remembering now, at the hearing in the courthouse when I’d given my testimony, Strabane had watched me fixedly. I’d tried not to look at him. I’d tried not to look at Wally Szalla at the back of the room. Or at Clare, my brother-in-law, any of my relatives. Especially I had tried not to look at the man in the orange jumpsuit, “in custody” and charged with my mother’s murder. I’d tried to focus on the prosecuting attorney who was formally questioning me, leading me across a tightrope above an abyss…Seeing Strabane, I was back in the courtroom. A rivulet of sweat slithered down the side of my face.

Strabane cleared his throat, uneasily. Trying to smile, but not very convincingly. “I’m afraid I have some bad news, Nicole. There is probably a call on your answering machine, at home. The prosecutor’s office…”

“Last night, I stayed here. I didn’t go home. I haven’t checked my calls for a while, officer.”

I spoke quickly, to defer what Strabane had to tell me.

It occurred to me: everyone tries this. With homicide detectives, you bet. “I’d left plenty of food and water for my cat, before I came here. I mean, I do that automatically. Whether I stay away somewhere overnight, or not.” I paused, my heart was beating rapidly as if this were a flirtation suddenly: but who was this man? and where were we, that looked familiar as a much-dreamt dream, the kind you can’t remember? “I became so tired, yesterday. I didn’t mean to sleep so long. I lay down on my old bed, my bed-I’d-had-as-a-girl, Mom kept my room as a guest room, about the most frequent guest in that room was
me
. When I woke it was so late, it only seemed practical to stay overnight. But I’ll be back in Chautauqua Falls tonight, I think. I’ll pick up my calls then. Actually, I can pick them up from my cell phone but—”

Strabane was hunched forward awkwardly, elbows on his knees. His scruffy appearance contrasted strangely with his eyes that were unexpectedly clear: as if you could see deeply into those eyes, so dark as to appear black, into another place in which things made sense and were all right and you should not worry.

Strabane was saying there would be a trial, after all. It looked pretty definite now.

A trial! For a moment, I didn’t know what trial he could be refering to.

“—his lawyer’s been trying to tell him, explain to him, the guy is plain stupid, he can avoid the death penalty if he pleads guilty and accepts a sentence of life in prison without parole, but, no!—he wants to plead ‘not guilty’ and have a trial. So, there you are. Like I say, most criminals are missing part of their brain. Especially a meth-head like Lynch who hadn’t much brain to begin with.”

Strabane spoke vehemently. The dream shimmering around us careened in and out of focus. I’d been hearing words but couldn’t seem to process them. My mouth twitched in a smile, as if I’d been nudged.

(By Mom? Wasn’t it time to smile? When your visitor seems discomforted, if he has brought you bad news and is very sorry and you owe it to him, to assure him
he has not
?)

Numbly I said, “I see. A trial.”

“Asshole’s firing his lawyer! That shows you how stupid he is.”

Strabane’s nostrils flared in indignation. The lapels of his ill-fitting sport coat bunched up as he leaned forward, fists on his knees. Vaguely I wondered: is he carrying a gun? In our house, on this ordinary weekday afternoon? This house, the Eatons’ house, in which nothing much had ever happened, in all our memories?

“It’s rotten for you and your sister, everybody in your family, this dragging on. You’re really nice people, decent people not like any kind a guy like Lynch deserved to mingle with for five minutes. The thing is, the defense always tries to stall, that’s to their advantage. They figure, witnesses might move away, or die, or change their minds, or forget. They figure, time is on their side. ’Cause the defendant won’t be going anywhere. In a capital case, the idea is there’s so much at stake, a ‘man’s life,’ everything has to be done by the book ’cause there will be an appeal if he’s found guilty which in this case, for sure Lynch will be.” Strabane paused, incensed. He was clenching and unclenching his fists like a man yearning to fight. “Worst thing, Lynch was a suspect in a case ten years back, ‘home invasion and sexual assault’ in Niagara Falls, except there wasn’t evidence enough to charge him, the Falls PD had to let the bastard go, and that time, too, a woman was hurt, so bad she couldn’t remember a thing that’d happened, a woman sixty years old! Now an informant, Lynch’s own cousin down in Erie, tipped off police about Lynch involved in that. So there’s that, Nicole, that if Lynch had been charged, and put away for a long time like he deserved, he wouldn’t have been out to hurt—well, anybody else.”

Through a ringing in my ears I wasn’t hearing this. So much information, so quickly! Like Mom’s albums crammed with snapshots, clippings, mementos of long-forgotten occasions: each item was precious as each moment in our lives is precious but there was too much, you felt the terror of falling.

“Could be a year, maybe.”

“Year…?”

“Before the trial.”

“I…I see.”

What was this insipid
I see
I kept repeating! This was no way of speaking natural to Nikki Eaton.

“The D.A.’s office should be keeping you better informed, Nicole. It’s lucky I can intervene. I have taken a special interest in this case, see. ‘Gwendolyn Eaton’: I think of that lady a lot. I think that your mom was a wonderful decent special person and him, that piece of garbage, hurting her like he did, that upsets me pretty bad. I should be used to it by now. In theory, I am. I mean, I am a professional, don’t get me wrong! We don’t have a lot of violent crime in Mt. Ephraim, though. This is more what you’d get in Rochester or Buffalo. I never went into police work for any kind of glamour. You know, like on TV. It’s more like
Cops
, on TV. That kind of routine. Mostly you follow procedure, it’s familiar. I’m a detective for any kind of case needing to be investigated, not just homicide. We have like one homicide in five years! What I hate is being the bearer of bad news. I wish I could be the bearer of good news for once! To people like you, Nicole, and your sister. When I signed up for the police academy, after the army, this was in ’85, I’d been influenced by a thing that happened in my uncle’s family. Not to go into details, but there was a violent crime. This was over in Lackawanna. And there was a death, of somebody who deserved better. And this detective, in the Lackawanna PD, was instrumental in helping us through it. I mean, his spiritual person, not just his police work. He was a professional but it went beyond that. Helping people through a bad time. You never know when you will need that kind of help. Thank God if there is somebody who can give it. I vowed I would be of that type. I mean, I would try. It doesn’t always work out, people don’t always want you. And things get screwed up. It’s nobody’s fault, the way the courts are. ‘Criminal justice system’—it’s a lottery. I’m kind of clumsy, I guess. I can see I’m embarrassing you. Hell, I’m embarrassing myself. I need to leave you alone, I guess. You will want to call your sister probably. You will want to commiserate. But the trial will be all right. There’s no bail for Lynch, he’ll stay where he is. After the trial, he’ll be shipped to Attica. ‘Death Row.’ I vow that. Whatever I can do, I will. We’ve got the evidence, it’s airtight. You don’t argue with DNA. You don’t argue with so many witnesses. We will get justice for your mom, Nicole. I vow!”

Strabane’s face had darkened with blood. His eyes shone with a startling lustre. I stared at him, astonished at this outburst. In his left eyelid a tiny nerve twitched.

“Hey. I’m sorry, Nicole—Ms. Eaton. Got carried away.”

Strabane stood, embarrassed. He looked like a man who has stepped into an empty elevator shaft and is still falling.

Shakily, I got to my feet. For a fleeting moment I felt that Strabane might grip my hand, to help me up. If he thought that I was feeling weak or light-headed.

If he’d touched me, his hand would have closed tight over mine.

I knew this. The sensation was so powerful, afterward I would feel that it had happened.

Strabane asked me if I had any questions. He wasn’t eager to leave but clearly it was time. I wanted him gone yet as I walked him to the door I heard myself ask, as if casually: “Why are evil people ‘stupid,’ Mr. Strabane? Why do you think so?”

Strabane blinked at this. As if I’d reached out and poked him.

I knew, I should have called him Detective.

He said, sucking at his lower lip, “Well. ’Cause they don’t know how they hurt other people? They’re missing a part of their brain that would let them know.”

“You’re sure of this.”

“Ma’am, I’m not sure of anything, much. But this has been my experience, I think.”

“You don’t believe in ‘evil,’ then.”

“Like ‘good and evil’? Like, God?” Strabane laughed uneasily, running a hand through his bristly-porcupine hair. I wondered, if I came to know this man better, would I dare tease him about this hair; or would I find it weirdly attractive. I wondered if there were women who found Ross Strabane weirdly attractive.

He was saying, “Hey, I don’t know! I’m not—what’s it—‘theological.’ That’s a total different line of thinking from mine. I see what’s to be done, and I do it. I see connections between things, to relate how they make sense. If I look back, it’s to look forward. To see where to go next. My thought about guys like Lynch is, like Hitler, or some terrorist blowing up innocent people, if they could feel it, the way you or I would feel it, the actual hurt they do to other people, they wouldn’t do it. They would not commit their crimes. That, I believe.”

It was an amazing speech, from Strabane. I had no wish to argue with him. In a way, I wanted to believe that he was right.

On his way out, Strabane fumbled to hand me his card.

“Call any time, Ms. Eaton. Day or night. If you need me, or—just to talk.”

Just to talk!
I would pretend I hadn’t heard this.

As the detective walked away I saw a glaring red Post-it stuck to the back of his wrinkled sport coat.

Strabane must have forgotten he’d already given me his card. I had no idea what I’d done with it. Vaguely I recalled crossed-out numbers on the previous card and wondered if these were identical, or new. Like Wally Szalla, Ross Strabane had the harried look of a man between addresses. Unlike Wally Szalla, Ross Strabane hadn’t the look of a man for whom women are waiting to love in the night.

I held the card between my fingers debating what to do with it.

“As if I’d ever call
you
.”

In the end I tossed it into the kitchen drawer with Mom’s accumulation of business cards, expired cat food coupons, ragged old grocery lists. I knew she’d have wished this.

why Mom? why Mom? why did you Mom? tell us why Mom? why you are not to blame Mom? because you are to blame! you are! YOU ARE TO BLAME! no one but you Mom! you, you are to blame! you brought him here! you brought him into your life! you brought him into our lives! you trusted him! you trusted everyone! you caused this! how can we forgive you! why Mom? why Mom? weren’t we enough for you Mom? you are to blame for what happened! what happened to you! what happened to us! you are to blame! you are to blame! you! you! no one else! Mom, why? Mom, why? why? why Mom? why Mom? WHY MOM? WHY MOM? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY?