Tristan's Gap

by Nancy Rue

  “Honey, she never showed up. Nobody’s seen her—”

  “Whoa, whoa.” His voice flattened into annoyance. “What’s this now?”

  “I dropped her off, but she didn’t go to—”

  “Okay. First of all, this is the end of her working, for the rest of the summer.” There was another sigh. “All right. I’m just passing Oceanview Deli. Meet me at home. We’ll sit down with her and put it to her—”

  “Nicky!” I saw Max dart her eyes my way. “She’s not at the house,” I whispered. “I don’t know where she is. Nobody knows where she is.”

  Within a split second, Nick did what he always did. He scooped up the shards of me and began to piece them back together.

  “Where are you now?” he said.

  “We’re still on the boardwalk. I didn’t want to leave in case—”

  “One thing at a time. Where on the boardwalk?”

  “At Boardwalk Fries. No, by the railing, right across from it.”

  “Okay, you stay right there. I’ll meet you in ten.”

  “You don’t think we should call the police?”

  “No, hon. If she shows up before I get there, call me.”

  I nodded as if he could see me.

  “I’m overreacting, aren’t I?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “But don’t worry about it. It’s in your contract.” I could picture him softening his eyes at me, grinning half of his straight-line grin. “You okay?”

  “I’m just a little bit freaked out,” I said.

  “Understandable. But just concentrate on not killing her when she shows up.”

  “Hurry,” I said.

  I closed the phone against my chest and pressed it there as if my heart’s hammering could send a signal to my daughter to call me and tell me she’d stopped off somewhere between the car and the boardwalk and lost track of time.

  But that wasn’t one of the things I could imagine just then. I was leaning more toward visions of her bound and gagged in the trunk of some psychopath’s car. It was far easier to conjure up that unwelcome fantasy than to entertain the thought that my Tristan had lost track of anything. I knew as I knew every fathom of my daughter’s eyes and every nuance of her face that she hadn’t wandered off and forgotten to go to her job.

  That realization made it impossible to stay there clinging to the railing of the boardwalk as if it might take flight and carry my mind off with it. But I couldn’t face Max yet, either. While I watched her chatter away with Inga and Yuri, cheeks bulging with fries, I flipped open the phone and pulled up the number for Jessica Johnstone, Tristan’s best friend.

  “Hello?” a voice chirped in my ear.

  “Jessica?” I said. “It’s Mrs. Soltani. Sweetie, have you seen—”

  “Hi, Mrs. Soltani! How are you?”

  Jessica always flipped her phrases up at the ends, just like she styled her hair. She was as effervescent as a soda. I could feel myself fragmenting again.

  “So what’s up?” Jessica said.

  “Tristan,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I mean, have you talked to her tonight?”

  “No-o!” Jessica said. “She was supposed to call me when she got off work, and she so hasn’t!” The child gasped. “She’s not grounded from the phone is she? No, that’s not Tristan. That’s me, except not right now because my dad’s out of town, and my mom doesn’t care how long I talk. She’s cool. Like you!”

  I’d listened to enough of Jessica’s monologues to know she had stopped only because she was out of breath. I had to cut in before she could take another run at it and before I shattered completely.

  “No, she’s not grounded,” I said.

  “O-kay …”

  “I’m just looking for her,” I said.

  “Are you okay? You sound funny.” There was another gasp. “Not in a bad way. Just not like you—”

  “It’s going to be fine,” I said. I wasn’t sure as I hung up who I was trying to reassure.

  I had at least five other numbers in my cell phone for girls Tristan spent time with. Their mothers and I were a network of “Sure they can study over here” and “Sure I’ll pick them up from dance rehearsal/French club meeting/student government retreat.” We charted the movements of our teenage daughters like air-traffic control. But it made no sense to call any of them. If they were with Tristan, then Jessica, the event coordinator, would have known about it.

  I stared across at Boardwalk Fries, where Yuri swabbed the counter to the rhythm of a Led Zeppelin song and Inga was silhouetted at the cash register. Tristan and her ponytail were conspicuously absent from the scene. Another head was missing, which I hadn’t picked up on before.

  Dodging the stragglers who were making their way toward the stairs, I went back to the counter. Yuri’s velvet eyebrows shot up when he saw me.

  “You found Tristan, yes?”

  “Not yet.” I plastered on a smile. “Is Aylana still here?”

  Aylana Kalidimos was a young Greek college student who usually worked Tristan’s shift with her. Tristan always came home with an Aylana story. One night she reported that Aylana had pierced her belly button during break. Nick had warned Tristan not to get any ideas about putting a hole in any part of her anatomy. Another evening she said Aylana had everyone behind the counter doing a synchronized dance to a Creedence Clearwater Revival tune. I’d enjoyed imagining Tristan’s kicking it to “Down on the Corner.” I always loved watching her dance …

  “Aylana called in sick tonight,” Inga said.

  Her cheekbones grew sharper, as if she doubted the credibility of said illness, but I dove for it like it was a lifeline.

  “Do you have her home number?” I said. I already had the cell phone open.

  Looking slightly sheepish, Yuri dug into the pocket of his T-shirt and extracted several folded slips of paper. He held an unfolded one up between his index and middle fingers.

  I was poking the numbers on my phone before the paper came fully to rest on the counter.

  “If my sister went off with Aylana,” I heard Max tell them, “she is in so much trouble.”

  I stepped away from the counter and counted the rings, my heart sinking further with each one until a female hip-hop group spewed out something unintelligible to the tune of “If I Were a Rich Man.” Aylana’s throaty voice broke in, heavily accented but rolling in American teenage rhythm. “If I were a rich girl, I would have my personal secretary answering my phone, but I am a poor college student, so talk at the beep, ’kay?”

  The beep was interminable, which probably meant either Aylana hadn’t checked her messages in a while or she received frequent calls. I suspected the latter. According to Tristan, the girl stirred up more male interest than Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl. It was actually Max who had thought of that analogy, which had prompted an instant interrogation from Nick.

  I left a message for Aylana, asking her to call me when she got in. The final beep cut me off before I could leave my number. Judging from Aylana’s legendary social life, I was sure she had caller ID.

  I clung hard to the phone. When Tristan told Aylana stories, she always looked as if she was having a near-death experience. She seemed to find the telling delicious, but the thought of the incidents themselves all but made her hyperventilate. Wherever Aylana was right now, I knew Tristan wasn’t with her. I let go of that lifeline.

  My baby was gone. She’d vanished somewhere in the crowd that had now disappeared from the boardwalk, and I wanted to scream after them, “Where is she? Which one of you has her?”

  I wrapped my arms around myself to keep from ripping apart. That’s when I heard Nick bark, “Serena.” It was obviously the last of several attempts to get my attention. His hands on my shoulders turned me around to look into his Mediterranean-dark face, which had grown even darker.

  “She’s not here,” he said. It wasn’t a question, but I shook my head anyway.

  “No,” I said, “and she didn’t go to Jessica
’s, and—”

  “She’s not home, either. I just called there again.” Nick scanned the boardwalk with an irritated squint. He ran his hand over his dark head, a gesture I recognized as an attempt to keep the top of it from blowing off.

  “Okay, now I’m ticked,” he said. “What was she thinking?”

  I wanted to join in the Tristan bashing, ached to assume as he obviously did that our daughter was off partying while we wrung our hands. But I couldn’t.

  “What if somebody grabbed her after I dropped her off?” I said.

  Nick’s eyes flinched. “Serena, come on—”

  “You’re the one who didn’t want her walking home alone because something might happen to her. What if something did?”

  Nick pulled me against his chest. “Okay, you have to get a grip, hon. We have a hundred other possibilities to explore before we go there.”

  I didn’t believe it. And I could tell from the way he held on to me that he didn’t, either.

  But in true Nick fashion, he had Plan A formed before he let go to look at me again. He told me to take Max home and call the rest of Tristan’s girlfriends and anybody else I could think of. He’d canvass the shops.

  As I turned to leave, I took one last doubtful look at the boardwalk. The awning was already down on Tropicana Beachwear. Inga had her hand on the shade pull at Boardwalk Fries. Neon lights flickered out in both directions as I watched.

  I wondered what Plan B was, but I didn’t ask Nick. The face he turned toward the beach was a frightened gray.

  It didn’t occur to me until then that I hadn’t looked at the waterfront. Maybe I had been too stunned. Or maybe some automatic self-protective mechanism had kicked in. But the entire time it took me to drive the three blocks to our house, with Max uncharacteristically silent beside me, was devoted to the possibilities that lay in the sand and beyond.

  Every year Tristan was required to listen to the “Don’t go on the beach at night” litany from Nick once a week from Memorial Day to Labor Day. She was ten when we’d moved to the shore, which meant she’d heard it no less than seventy-two times in her life. She usually did it dutifully, doe eyes practically unblinking. Max, on the other hand, recited it right along with her father.

  “It’s just like a city street,” they said in unison. “You don’t go walking down it alone after dark. There are psychos out there.”

  Not that anyone in the “Quiet Resorts” had ever been attacked by a psycho on the beach, Max always reminded him. It had never stopped Nick from going on to explain—again—that the jetties were especially dangerous. You couldn’t see what might have washed up there and gotten caught—anything from a jellyfish to a—

  “Psycho,” Max had muttered during the August 1 recitation. She’d been sent to her room for that.

  Because our house directly fronted the ocean, the restless roiling of the surf was such a constant for me that it was barely more than background noise unless I was actually on the beach. Now, as I drove, every crash of a wave dropping onto the shore, every hiss of it creeping back into the Atlantic was a taunt I could feel more than hear.

  Tristan could be under here, you know. We could be rolling her back and forth on the ocean floor We could be carrying her out to sea where you won’t find her until she washes up one day …

  I jolted the Blazer to a halt in the driveway.

  “Why don’t you go in and see if she’s home yet?” I said to Max.

  She flung herself out of the car, and I sank my head onto the steering wheel, eyes closed. The posture brought up something I hadn’t thought of.

  God.

  I hadn’t said even one prayer.

  Wouldn’t Rebecca Godfried have a field day with that?

  “Father?” I whispered.

  My image of Him came at once, soft eyed with arms wide open. It was an image that had gotten me through my mother’s death at fifty, my dad’s at sixty-one, thirty hours of labor, four stitches in Max’s chin.

  “She’s okay, right? You wouldn’t let anything happen to her, would You?”

  I waited for the calm. The sense of being admonished with Serena, Serena, Serena. You know that. You’re faithful—

  It wasn’t there, but I knew it would come. I had to have that before I could go inside to Max and Aunt Pete.

  I had a maternal attachment to our house. Nick’s great-grandparents had built its front section in the early twentieth century. It had hugged its boxy three-story self with a wraparound porch until the 1920s, when Nick’s grandparents added a then-modern kitchen and indoor bathrooms and a dormlike sleeping room on the third floor for their famous weekend house parties. Nick’s parents had given the house a face-lift and added a pool in the early sixties when Soltani Casters gained momentum.

  After Nick’s mother, Maxine, died in 1980, midway through Victorianizing with blue chintz and flowered wallpaper, Nick’s father, Nicholas Sr., shed himself of the house and its memories, as well as Soltani Casters, in an alcoholic fog. He let Maxine’s sister, Aunt Lee Anne, live in it, and he was in such a stupor that he even allowed her to try to convert it into a bed-and-breakfast, a venture that never got beyond the redecoration of each of the seven bedrooms to reflect a different rock’n’roll personality.

  By the time Nicholas Sr. caved to liver disease and emphysema in 1998, my Nick had returned Soltani Casters to its former status. Two years later he finally unsnarled the legal rat’s nest in which his father had entangled his legacy, relocated Aunt Lee Anne to an assisted-living facility, and moved us back to his beloved shore house.

  Judging from the condition of the house, that assisted-living facility was long overdue for poor Aunt Lee Anne. Elvis, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, and Chubby Checker, to name only a few, writhed on the walls. Ancient food and grime plastered the kitchen.

  I touched every inch of that house the first week we were there, from the painted-shut windows in the sleeping room to the Pepto-Bismol pink porch railing that nearly gave way and pitched me into the sea. I whispered as I went, promising it that we would restore its dignity and make it proud again.

  It took me four years to make good on that promise. While Nick worked sixty-hour weeks, I nurtured my three children: Tristan, Max, and the shore house. All day while the girls were in school, I tenderly pulled up my house’s carpets and rubbed its hardwood floors to a shine. I eased off the life-size stick-ons of Elvis and the Victorian wallpaper beneath with its roses the size of cabbages.

  As twenty years of indignities were slowly washed and scraped and chiseled away, I could feel the house sigh at times. Every time I pulled into the driveway, it seemed to welcome me with its diamond-paned eyelids and open-armed porches and arched-eyebrow roofline. I was always eager to get inside and breathe with it.

  But that night I couldn’t even force myself to get out of the car. It came to me that I wasn’t waiting for God. I was avoiding the stark absence of Tristan that waited inside.

  The front door burst open, throwing light onto the porch. Max flew down the steps toward me, phone in hand. I fumbled for the door handle, but she wrenched it open from the outside. As I tried to extricate myself from behind the wheel, I discovered I still had the seat belt on.

  “Is it Tristan?” I said.

  Max shook her head. “Mrs. Johnstone.”

  I took the phone and moved, heart plummeting, toward the steps.

  “Jody,” I said.

  “Have you found Tristan?” Her voice was high and shrill.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Okay, listen, Serena, I hope I wasn’t out of line, but when Jessica told me you called, looking for her, I went ahead and got on the phone and called—”

  She went on to list every girl Tristan had known since fifth grade and some I’d never heard of. There were even some boys’ names on the roster. With each one my heart sank deeper into the crevice it was carving in my chest. Another mother was thinking what I was thinking, and it made the possibilities all too real.

  “No one has
seen her, Serena,” Jody finished with a gasp reminiscent of Jessica. “I was hoping you’d found her already.”

  “We haven’t looked everywhere yet,” I said.

  “Then you’ll find her; I know you will. I hope you don’t think I was overstepping—”

  “No, no, I appreciate it,” I said. I felt out of breath and sank into the red wicker chair near the front door.

  “I will absolutely call you if I hear anything at all,” Jody said. “I had to leave a message at Dahlia Carr’s house, so there’s always the chance she’s with her—”

  I looked blankly at Max, who had her cheek pressed against mine to hear. I didn’t even know who Dahlia Carr was.

  “She’s that RMG Tristan’s in student government with,” Max whispered. “She doesn’t even like her.”

  I somehow ended the call with Jody and stared numbly at Max. The only thing I could think of to say was, “What’s an RMG?”

  “Really mean girl,” Max said. “That time you used that crimper thing on Tristan’s hair? Dahlia asked her if we had any mirrors at our house.” She rolled her eyes. “Tristan is so not gonna hang out with her.”

  At the moment I wouldn’t have cared if Tristan were hanging out with the Hell’s Angels, as long as I knew where she was and that it was not at the bottom of the Atlantic.

  Max watched me, one foot propped on the opposite leg like a flamingo.

  “Maxie,” I said, “do you have any idea where your sister could be? Be honest. Did she mention any plans to you, anything she might have forgotten to tell me?”

  Max cocked the eyebrow. “You’re kidding, right?”

  I might as well have been, and we both knew it. Not only would Tristan have asked permission, but she would have written it on the family calendar and checked in twice by phone to make sure it was still okay.

  “I don’t know why you’re just sitting there, Serena.” Nick’s great aunt, whom we called Aunt Pete, stood in the doorway. Ever since she’d arrived in June to stay with us for the summer, her voice had reminded me of an old-time radio announcer, complete with crackling static. She folded her arms across the front of the ancient pink chenille bathrobe she slipped into every night at eight and wore until midmorning the next day. Parts of it had turned a dirty rose color, because she regularly wiped counters and dusted furniture with it during that fourteen-hour period.