Tristan's Gap

by Nancy Rue

  “She’s having fun at our place. They’re ordering pizza.”

  I knew Max wasn’t having fun. She thought Justin was “the boringest boy on the planet.”

  “Why don’t you give yourself a little space at least until tomorrow morning?” Gary said.

  “I want her home.”

  “Okay.” Gary motioned to the wicker chairs. “Let’s just talk for a few minutes first, huh?”

  “Are you going to tell me I don’t have enough faith, so Satan’s attacking me?” I said. “Because I don’t want to hear any more of that, Gary. I can’t.”

  If he was shocked, he didn’t show it. He just sat down and studied his hands, folded between his knees. “Lissa says you’re having some issues with God right now, and before you answer, just know that I think its perfectly understandable.” He nodded at me. “So does God.”

  It was still so raw, this coming out with the unspeakable. I wasn’t sure I could trust it. I sat down.

  “Let’s not call them issues,” I said carefully. “Let’s call them questions.”

  “Okay. Now’s a good time to ask.”

  “As long as you don’t answer with ‘God is good all the time. All the time God is good.’ ” Now that I’d let the imp loose, she was obviously taking over.

  But Gary only nodded again. “Depends on our definition of good. If good to us means everything the way we want it or the way we think it should be, then it’s not the answer.”

  “Did God ever promise us fair?” I said.

  He released a slow grin. “You gotta love that Hazel, don’t you? She hit it right on the nose.” Gary shook his head. “No parents in their right mind promise their kids fair, at least not fair the way kids see it. Kids think something’s unfair because they didn’t deserve it or it wasn’t the same as what somebody else got. That’s because they can’t see the big picture.”

  “I don’t care what the big picture is; somebody taking Tristan away is not fair. That’s why I’m having issues with God, Gary. I’m sorry, but I am.” I smeared at my tears with my fingers.

  “Now that I might be able to help you with,” Gary said. “Most of the time when we have ‘issues’ with God, it’s because we expect God to be something He never was in the first place.”

  “He’s not loving and gentle? He doesn’t protect us when we’re faithful?” I didn’t even bother wiping my eyes this time. “Then I’ve been sold a bill of goods.”

  “He’s that, but that isn’t all He is. Expecting Him to be soft and comforting when it’s something else you need is setting yourself up for separation from Him.”

  “What I need is Tristan.”

  Gary leaned toward me. “Maybe whatever it’s going to take to bring her home is what you need.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “God does.”

  I sank back in the chair and closed my eyes. It was dark and still inside my head. There was no vision of my Father. But at least there was nothing there to mock me. At least there was room for something I didn’t know. It was very small, but it was something.

  “Why didn’t you tell me all this before?” I said.

  Gary gave me a long and serious look. “Because you never got angry enough to ask,” he said.

  Tuesday morning, the first day of school, Max was in a black mood when she came downstairs for breakfast. Her eyes could have cut glass.

  Part of it, I knew, was that we hadn’t had our annual Labor Day party, the one we’d always planned as if it were the last party we would ever have. The end of summer always called for an all-out fiesta before the boardwalk shops nailed down their shutters and the beach umbrellas withdrew their flapping colors and the smell of cotton candy faded from the air.

  Although Max had said very little to me all weekend, I’d heard snatches of the earfuls Aunt Pete had gotten in the kitchen, on the side porch, in Aunt Pete’s room. Anywhere I wasn’t.

  “It rocked. There would be cars parked all down Ocean View Parkway … I know it can’t happen this year. Nothing can happen … Sometimes I hate Tristan for getting taken. And don’t say I’m a horrible person, because I already know it.”

  That, I assumed Tuesday morning, was the other reason for the deep crevices Max formed between her eyes as she toyed with a bowl of Cheerios. I knew what it was like to be a “horrible person.”

  “I bet you wish we’d had a party this weekend, huh?” I said.

  She didn’t look at me. “We couldn’t.”

  “I know. But did you wish we could?”

  “What difference does it make?” Her shoulders flicked, like a horse twitching at a fly. “No offense,” she added.

  “It makes a difference, because nothing’s the same as it was before, and it seems like it never will be. It’s okay to hate that.”

  She tapped her spoon and swung her legs and did everything but answer me.

  “You wanna know what I hate?” I said.

  Max shrugged.

  “I hate that I can’t make things okay for you.”

  The shoulders twitched again.

  “I’m so sorry, Maxie,” I said.

  “It’s not your fault,” she said. The words were adult, but the voice quavered with childhood fear.

  The phone rang, and I choked back tears to answer it. It was Nick.

  “I just wanted to tell our girl to have a good first day of school,” he said.

  “It’s Daddy,” I said to Max. I tried to make my voice as bright as Nick was trying to make his, but all I could hear was the absence of Tristan’s name, of a good luck wish for her too.

  “I have to go brush my teeth,” Max said and left the table.

  I let her go.

  “I heard,” Nick said.

  “She’s having a hard time.”

  “I still wish she was staying home with you.”

  Silence fell between us, yawning wider than the miles.

  “You okay?” I said finally.

  “I’m just trying to deal with all this,” he said. I could tell he was barely opening his mouth. “I’m just putting one foot in front of the other.”

  “Have you found out anything?”

  “It was a dead end. Look, don’t worry about it. You just try to hold yourself together for Max until I get home. I’m flying out today.”

  When we hung up, I went in the bathroom and sobbed, because I didn’t know what else to do. Then I put on sunglasses for the drive, even though the sky was overcast. It was already drizzling as we headed for Ocean View.

  For a while Max stayed quiet, hugging the new backpack Lissa had taken her shopping for on Saturday. My hands were white knuckled on the steering wheel.

  Finally she said, “Everybody says fifth grade’s hard because they’re getting you ready for middle school.”

  “Is that our subject?” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Our subject. School. Boys are all shoot spitballs across the room, and girls are—”

  Max shrank down behind her backpack. “I don’t feel like playing,” she said. She turned on the radio and was silent the rest of the way.

  When we pulled into the line of cars at the front of Lord Baltimore, I said, “You want me to come in with you?”

  Max’s eyes rolled up. “Mo-om! No way. It’s not like I’m some first grader.”

  “How silly of me,” I said.

  I drove home in tears, because she didn’t want me there, because I would have been a blubbering idiot in front of her new teacher, because I skidded into Garfield Parkway and careened dangerously close to Chief Little Owl, the twenty-six-foot totem pole that marked the entrance to “downtown” Bethany Beach.

  By the time I pulled up to the house, I was shaking. Aunt Pete met me on the porch.

  “The school called,” she said.

  “Already?” I said. “I just dropped her off.”

  “Not Max’s school. Tristan’s. This lady wants you to call her back.”

  I shook my head at the piece of notepaper she
waved under my nose. “Didn’t you tell her Tristan won’t be there?”

  Aunt Pete grunted. “Oh, she knew. She said it was urgent. You better call her.”

  She all but pulled my cell phone out of my purse for me.

  “I’m gonna fix you some toast,” she said and disappeared into the house.

  I stared at the numbers written with Aunt Pete’s unsteady hand and at the name she’d painstakingly printed: Virginia Hatch. That wasn’t the principal. The name didn’t ring a bell as one of Tristan’s teachers. A lump formed in my throat as I realized I didn’t know who her new teachers were, the ones she would slave for her junior year. Or not.

  I looked dismally at the rain and resisted the urge to crumple the paper in my hand and pretend Tristan would come home today and tell me all about this Ms. Hatch, who was going to be brutal and make her study so hard …

  I punched in the numbers and hoped I’d get voice mail. I didn’t feel like trying to explain what I myself didn’t understand.

  “Virginia Hatch.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “How can I help you?”

  You can’t, I thought. But I said, “This is Serena Soltani.”

  “Ah.”

  The brisk quality of Virginia Hatch’s voice softened in one syllable. Please don’t do that, I thought. My tongue was already getting thick.

  “Mrs. Soltani,” she said, “I’m Tristan’s guidance counselor here at Indian River. I apologize for not getting in touch with you sooner, but I’ve been out of the country. In fact, I just got back in time for school to start, and I heard about Tristan’s disappearance.”

  “We really don’t know much—”

  “But I think I know something.”

  I moved the phone to my other ear and raked my hand through my hair. “I don’t understand.”

  “Maybe we can figure it out together. There are some things I think you should know.” She didn’t give me a chance to question. “Can you come see me?”

  “When?” I said.

  “I think the sooner the better.”

  “I’ll be right there,” I said.

  I closed the phone, and Aunt Pete put a charred bacon sandwich in my other hand. “For the road,” she said.

  I was barely aware of the rain as I drove the seven miles to Indian River High School in Frankford. I was barely aware of anything except the questions that nearly battered me to a pulp by the time I pulled into the visitors’ parking lot. I had to take a minute to peer into the rearview mirror and make sure I didn’t look like an escapee from the state hospital. I was very nearly coming apart, and I had to glue myself back together at least long enough to find out if this counselor, this Virginia Hatch, really did know something about my Tristan.

  I can do this, I told myself. God, just help me do this.

  I was fine approaching the columned old brick building, a larger version of Max’s Lord Baltimore. It had managed to maintain its dignity, even as the newer additions had been tacked on through the years wherever they could be attached, like new words on a Scrabble board. The times I’d been there, I had always found it idyllic when the last bell of the day rang and the students poured out the front door and down the steps, as they had for decades. Even if half of them had nose rings and had lost their virginity in middle school, I could still imagine girls in poodle skirts, boys in crew cuts—or both in tie-dyed T-shirts—all ghosts from High School Past.

  But as I stepped into the main hallway, the figures around me were all too real. Teenagers. Sixteen-year-olds. Girls with long dark hair and eyes like young does, doing pliés in front of their lockers.

  I covered my mouth with my hand to keep from crying out, “Tristan! Where have you been?” and made my way to the office.

  A woman with a nametag that said “Virginia Hatch” was at the counter fending off a mob of students all waving schedules that they claimed were “screwed up.”

  “I’ll take care of these later,” she said when she saw me.

  “Come on, Mrs. H.!” was the unanimous response.

  “It isn’t like you’re that anxious to start your classes,” she said in the brisk voice I’d first heard on the phone.

  She left them muttering and led me into her office—a narrow room overlooking the parking lot and overflowing with papers and folders.

  “I almost need counseling myself by the time the first week is over,” she said as she cleared a place for me on a red-checked love seat that was obviously not the property of the Indian River School District. I took in Virginia Hatch’s face, which was evenly tanned and framed in a stylish wispy cut of gray hair. Her eyes nearly matched it, and yet her face was far from colorless. She had a warmth that came from her smile, a smile that she banished as if it was somehow inappropriate right now. I was left looking into the countenance of compassion.

  She pulled a director’s chair, covered in red canvas, near the love seat and sat facing me.

  “I don’t know if Tristan told you,” she said, “but for the last few months of last year, I was seeing her here in my office every week.”

  “You mean for counseling?” I said. I shook my head. “Of course it would be. You’re a counselor. It’s just that Tristan wasn’t—”

  “The kind of girl you’d ever think would have a problem.”

  I stared down at the checked fabric, which seemed to come up and slam me in the face.

  “Normally I wouldn’t break her confidence,” she said, “but—”

  “This isn’t ‘normally.’ ”

  “No, and I think what I have to share with you might explain some things.”

  “Please, tell me anything you think would help,” I said.

  She steepled her fingers under her nose before she began. “I first saw Tristan at the end of March. She had burst into tears in the middle of English class, and the teacher sent her in with a note saying Tristan was a perfectionist and maybe she was cracking under the pressure of tests and papers.”

  “That could be,” I said. “She has to do everything just right, or she gets so upset. She’s been like that since kindergarten.”

  “I thought that was the problem when we first talked, especially after she told me how many dance classes she was taking a week and that she was also in student government and on the dance team here at school, not to mention French club.” Virginia smiled faintly. “I needed a nap just listening to her.”

  “I thought maybe she was doing too much,” I said. “But she wanted to do everything.” My voice sounded pinched, defensive.

  “She did want to,” Virginia said. “And as we talked more, I found out why.” She directed her eyes at the ceiling. “She craved approval, especially from her parents, mostly her father.” She looked at me. “She was sure you would love her even if she’d held up the school store, but she felt like she had to prove her worth to her dad.”

  I shook my head.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this isn’t easy for you.”

  I rubbed at the pain that was gathering in my chest and nodded for her to go on.

  “Tristan involved herself in an impossible number of activities so that every minute was filled with something, and in everything she did, she toed the line obsessively, again because she equated approval with worth, and because it helped her deal with the pressure.”

  “What pressure?”

  “The pressure she was putting on herself and the pressure she felt she was getting at home.”

  “Pressure?” I said again. It was like a foreign word I couldn’t translate.

  “She felt like she wasn’t allowed to be a normal teenager,” Virginia said. “And part of the reason she packed her schedule was so she could limit her interactions with you and her dad.”

  She was obviously choosing her words carefully, but I wanted to knock the whole precise stack of them over with a swipe of my hand. Yet even as she placed one on top of the other, they formed a truth I couldn’t turn away from. I could only stare at it and wish it weren’t th
ere.

  “We had a faculty briefing this morning before classes,” Virginia said. “From what I pieced together, Tristan was last seen with a lifeguard.”

  “Ricky Zabriski,” I said. “Spider.” The word came out like a spit. “Doesn’t he sound heinous?”

  “He does. The whole thing is heinous; that’s the perfect word.” Virginia leaned forward, and I could see tired etchings around her eyes. “The police think he abducted her, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think?”

  I couldn’t blurt out what I wanted to be true. Not with Virginia’s words still trying to arrange themselves in my head: Tristan felt like she had to prove her worth to her dad. She wasn’t allowed to be a normal teenager. She wanted to limit her interactions with us.

  Virginia looked at me directly, as if I could handle one more blow. “Have you considered the possibility that Tristan may have run away with this boy?” she said.

  “It’s been suggested.” My voice went tight. “But I keep thinking it’s impossible. That’s just not Tristan.”

  Virginia got up and went to her desk. I resented her for knowing things about my daughter that I didn’t, even while I hoped she would pull something out of her drawer that would take me to Tristan.

  She handed me a piece of paper. “Tristan expressed her feelings in her poetry.”

  I stared at the paper. “She wrote poetry?”

  “She only told me the last week of school, and this is the only poem she shared with me.” Her voice softened as if she were afraid she might break me. “If I can’t convince you, maybe Tristan can.”

  She stood up and moved toward the door. “I’m sure the natives are getting restless out there. I’m going to check on them.”

  As the door clicked shut behind her, I ran a finger down the page in my lap, over the thoughts my daughter had written there, the words she’d never intended for me to see.

  “Into the Day”

  by Tristan Soltani

  I move into the day

  Like heavy

  Like lead

  Like hauling the load that’s assigned.

  I move into the day

  With orders

  With dictates

  With voices I know are not mine.