by Nancy Rue
I move into the day
Just smiling
Just dancing
Just knowing that I am not free.
I move into the day
No flying
No singing
No light for a glimmer of me.
I move into the day
With wishes
With glimpses
With dreams that only I find
Of a time when I’ll shed
All the shoulds
All the musts
And move into a day that is mine.
I felt as if I’d been stabbed, and yet I kept reading it over and over until the rhythm of my daughter’s pain was in my breath, in my heartbeat.
“How could I not have known?” I said when I heard the door again.
Virginia moved soundlessly to her chair. Her eyes had the sheer matte finish of almost-tears.
“The important thing is that you do now,” she said. “And the more you know, the better chance you have of finding her and bringing her back. I’m convinced of that.”
I pressed the poem to my chest. “You said this is the only one she gave you.”
“She said there are more, but she didn’t tell me where. I suggested that she keep them in a special book, but she said no—you and her dad would find them.”
“I never went through her things!”
“In her mind there were no boundaries. She did tell me that she put them in various secret places.”
“More secrets,” I said.
“Now might be a good time to start going through her things,” Virginia said. “You can help her.”
I looked ruefully at the poem. “Can I?”
“I think you’re the only one who can,” she said.
Chapter Eleven
How I got home, I didn’t know. I suddenly found myself sitting in the car in our driveway listening to the windshield wipers taunt me with every slap.
Like heavy
Like lead
Like hauling the load that’s assigned.
They could have been my own thoughts right then. Thoughts I’d never had before and yet were somehow familiar. The same thoughts that had made my precious daughter so unhappy. Thoughts she couldn’t share with me.
The stabbing pain in my chest took my breath away. Had it felt this bad to Tristan? Had she gotten to the place where she wanted to hurl the family-room knickknacks or spit in people’s faces? Our faces?
With orders
With dictates
With voices I know are not mine.
She must have. And yet she smiled. And she danced. And she went to her room and wrote poems.
There were more, Virginia Hatch had told me. She kept them in “various secret places.”
I shut off the motor, leaving the wipers suspended in the middle of the windshield. I had to find those places. I had to know the secrets, or I might never get her back.
I could hear Aunt Pete snoring in the recliner as I climbed to the second floor, and I was grateful for that now. I didn’t want her on this mission with me, dragging the turquoise beach bag behind her and pouring muddy coffee down my throat. I stood outside Tristan’s room for several minutes, hand on the doorknob. I’d sailed into that room a thousand times or more with a basket of folded laundry or a snack to get her through studying for finals or a reminder to turn out her light by nine thirty. I usually entered without so much as a knock. In fact, the girls’ doors were almost always left ajar except when they were getting dressed.
“Let’s keep the open-door policy,” Nick had told me six months before when I’d reported that Max had registered a complaint about having “like, zero privacy.”
“If she doesn’t have anything to hide,” he said, “why does she need the door closed? You don’t hear Tristan complaining about it.”
Just smiling
Just dancing
Just knowing that I am not free.
Now as I stood pressing my forehead against Tristan’s door, I struggled with going in. I was barging into the room of someone I didn’t know, about to rummage through things not meant for my eyes. It was like going through a stranger’s purse.
“I have to do this, Tristan,” I said out loud, “because I have to find you.”
That tiny point of focus could hold nothing else. I went with that and opened the door.
I’d been in her bedroom at least once a day since she’d disappeared, but I hadn’t touched a thing except the bed, which I often crawled into in the crazy-making hours of the night. I wanted her room to be exactly the way she left it so that when she came home, she could step right back into her life, unscathed by whatever she’d been through.
As I dragged my gaze across the perfectly stacked wicker trunks and the gauzy curtains that softened the glare of the sun, I felt completely foolish. Was this room her life? Did she want to step back into it and pick up where she’d left off?
No light for a glimmer of me.
I marched to the windows that covered the beachside wall and shoved the curtains back one by one until the walls were drenched in sunlight. It made the room, with its subtle shades of gray, seem stark—the edge of the oak dressers too sharp, the lines of the bedposts too severe. Everything was so tidy and tucked. Where could she possibly have hidden secret poems?
My hands ached as I opened a drawer and slid them between the precisely folded pairs of socks and then the cotton panties, the T-shirts, the dance togs. My shoulders throbbed as I pulled each muslin-lined basket from the closet shelves and turned every page of every notebook and emptied the contents of every folder. My neck was a solid rod of pain by the time I put each torn movie ticket and dance recital program back into the exact place I’d found it.
Aunt Pete woke up around noon and brought me a tuna on pumpernickel that I never touched. To my utter amazement, she didn’t ask me what I was doing. I heard her on the phone to someone—probably Hazel—saying, “I wondered when she was gonna start digging. I was giving her another week, and then I was going through that bedroom myself.”
She left me alone—to dig—until two thirty, when she poked her head in and asked if I was going to pick Max up at school.
“Oh, no!” I said. I started to scramble up from the stacks of books I was going through page by page, but Aunt Pete waved me back down.
“Sit still,” she said. “Hazel said if you were in the middle of something she’d pick up Max for you. She’s picking up her two anyway.”
“Why?” I said. “Don’t they take the bus home?”
“Tri’s banned from the bus,” Aunt Pete said. “Something about Supergluing some kid’s rear end to a seat last year.”
I looked helplessly at the pile of books that had so far given me nothing. I had convinced myself that one of them would cough up a poem if I just kept searching. Nothing else in the room had.
“She offered,” Aunt Pete said. “Personally, I don’t think you’d make it out of the driveway before you hit something.”
“Nick wouldn’t like it.”
“The mood he was in when he called, he doesn’t like anything today, so it’s six of one, a half dozen of another if you ask me.”
“He called again?” I said.
“From the L.A. airport. From the Denver airport. I told him you were busy, and you still are. I’m calling Hazel back.”
I let her.
There were only three books left to go through: Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, and Jane Eyre. I opted for Jane. I didn’t even know Tristan owned a copy. I had only read it in the modern British literature course I’d taken in college. It seemed a little dark for her innocent taste.
The book looked as if it had been read more than once and with vigor. Several signatures had pulled away from the binding, and there was a chocolate stain on the page it fell open to. A stain and a slip of paper folded in half.
I tried to convince myself it was just a note from somebody. Maybe Jessica. Maybe Spider Zabriski. I unfolded it and forced myself to scan it. If
it didn’t look like a poem, I would put it back.
“Numbers 30,” it said at the top. “By Tristan Soltani.” The words were arranged on the page in careful blocks. I could already feel their rhythm in my pulse.
My lungs have no breath as I watch him descend,
Face transformed from listening to Him.
I have waited my childhood to hear it.
Who knows what God thinks,
Makes the heart of pow’r yearn?
This man, I trust.
My heart has no beat as I hear him intone
Words like tablets carved in stone.
I have promised my lifetime to heed them.
Who knows what God loves,
Makes the soul of Him burn?
This man, I hope.
My mind has no thought as I take in the Law,
Accept with automatic awe.
I have promised my future to hold it.
Who knows what God wants,
Makes the hand of Him touch me?
This man? I thought so.
My soul has no rest as I chafe at the rock.
This man can undo my promise knots?
I vow my womanhood to shun it!
Who knows what God says,
What He whispers to me?
No man. I feel that.
My self has no nerve as I grope in the dark.
Try, with no guide, to make my mark.
I have no knowledge to do it.
Who knows where God is,
How to follow His lead?
Not this man.
Then who does?
The words made no sense, but I was chilled, as if my soul already understood them.
This man. Who was that? This man who descends with the Law?
“Moses?” I said to the room.
No, Mom.
I jumped and looked, terrified, at the door. Of course she wasn’t there. For an insane second I was relieved that Tristan hadn’t found me searching through her secrets.
But I’d heard it so clearly. No, Mom. Not Moses.
I pored over the poem again. “Numbers 30.” Numbers, in the Old Testament?
I crawled between the heaps of books to the bedside table where I’d already come across Tristan’s Bible earlier. I found myself shivering as I thumbed the thin, feminine pages. The book had the smell of little girl hands. She’d had enough Sunday school and Vacation Bible School and won enough memory-verse prizes to practically head up the Christian education program at church before she was fourteen. But as I located Numbers chapter 30, I saw that the pages to this book were stiff. This book, unlike Jane Eyre, was not my daughter’s friend.
I was surprised to find whole verses underlined and exclamation points drawn sharply in the margins. The lines were nearly engraved into the paper, as if they’d been put there in anger.
When a young woman still living in her father’s house makes a vow to the LORD or obligates herself by a pledge and her father hears about her vow or pledge but says nothing to her, then all her vows and every pledge by which she obligated herself will stand. But if her father forbids her when he hears about it, none of her vows or the pledges by which she obligated herself will stand.
I looked back at the poem. Where was this Scripture in what she had written? I sat cross-legged and leaned against the bed.
Okay, Face transformed from listening to Him. That had to be Moses’s face transformed, didn’t it? And Words like tablets carved in stone. That was the Law. I got that.
My eyes snagged on the next verse. He can undo my promise knots? He who? And what promise knots?
I traced Tristan’s underlining in the Bible with my finger. Vows, pledges. That was where the promise knots came in, and she obviously didn’t like the idea of somebody untying them. My finger stopped, and with the stub of what fingernail I had left, I felt something I hadn’t noticed until then. Tristan had drawn an extra line under every reference to “her father” in the passage.
But if her father forbids her when he hears about it, none of her vows or the pledges by which she obligated herself will stand.
I went back to the poem. This man can undo my promise knots?
Her father?
My back came away from the bed, and I pulled the sides of the paper until a bitelike piece came off in my fingers. Was this man her father?
Suddenly, frantically, I tried to fit the torn piece back into its space. My thoughts raced like screaming cars. God! God, please don’t let her be talking about Nick! He’s a good father! He loves her! He protects her.
The mental race screeched to a halt as if it had been flagged down.
Nick told her and told her: “Listen to me. I know what’s best for you. I’ll decide.” I hear him intone / Words like tablets carved in stone.
Nick laid out the rules so clearly: “We follow the Bible at our house. I’m the spiritual head of the household. Let’s look at what God wants us to do.” I take in the Law, / Accept with automatic awe.
But something had happened to make her chafe at the rock. So much that she couldn’t stand it anymore? So much that she had to get away from it?
“God, is that it?”
The sound of my own voice startled me, and yet hearing it made me feel, again, as if someone were in the room with me, someone I was really talking to, who was listening.
“God,” I said, “if it is—if we drove her from home—please, please show us how to bring her back. Please.”
It was the clearest thought I’d had in weeks.
There was a brittle rap on the door. “You might want to wrap it up,” Aunt Pete said from the other side. “Hazel just drove up with the kids.”
I tucked the poem into my pocket and lined the books back up in the bookcase. I didn’t want Max to know I’d been going through Tristan’s things, at least not until I’d had a chance to talk to Nick. I was just closing the door behind me when Max reached the top of the stairs.
“Hey!” I said too cheerfully. “How was your first day in fifth grade?”
She stamped past me, eyebrows knotted as she struggled to get free of her backpack. “It was only the worst day of my entire life.”
“Honey!” I said. “Why?”
Max hurled the backpack into her room and watched it slide across the hardwood floor. I heard it crash into the dresser between the twin beds.
“Madison and Ashley and all of them,” she said. She still wasn’t looking at me. “They started a club on the bus this morning. Only I can’t be in it, because I don’t ride the bus.” Her voice spiraled up. “They’re supposed to be my friends!”
I sagged. “I’m so sorry,” I said.
She finally turned to me, eyes filming over. “Can you ask Dad to let me ride the bus?” she said, and then she threw up her arms. “Forget it. He’ll just say no.”
“Hey, Max! You comin’?”
It was Sun, shrieking from the bottom of the stairs.
“Yeah, hang on,” Max called down to her. To me she said, “I’m going swimming with her and Tri and the dogs.” She started into her room and then stopped and as an afterthought added, “Is that okay?”
There wasn’t much I would have refused her right then.
It was good to see Hazel. I let her regale us with stories of Tri, who got his name written on the board, and Desi, who tore off the pocket of Hazel’s jeans when the kindergarten teacher peeled him from Hazel’s leg. Still, it was hard to keep from silently reciting Tristan’s poems.
Hazel and her brood were leaving when Nick pulled in. His scowl told me he wasn’t happy to see her there again, and he excused himself to go upstairs to change.
“Happy homecoming,” Hazel muttered to me.
I asked Aunt Pete to give Max some supper, and I followed him up to our room.
“You okay?” I called to him.
He answered from inside the walk-in closet. “The question is, are you?” He stuck his head out and looked at me as I tucked myself into the chaise longue. I was shivering again.
“You’ve been crying,” he said.
It was almost an accusation. I hugged my arms around myself.
He started back into the closet, but I said, “We need to talk, Nicky. I found out some things today—about Tristan.”
Nick was immediately on me, standing over me, hands twitching on his hips. “What things?” he said. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“Because it took awhile to figure them out.”
“What? What was there to figure out?”
His irritation was so pointed, I could have reached out and pricked my finger on it. I watched him take a minute to smooth his hackles with his hand and lean against the bedpost, hands shoved into his pockets.
“Okay, I’m sorry,” he said. “Tell me.”
Actually, I would rather have done anything else. As I laid out the pieces of what Virginia Hatch had told me, new lines carved themselves into his face. When I started to read Tristan’s first poem, he yanked it out of my hand after two verses.
“What on earth is she talking about?” His eyes moved down the page as if he were poking holes in it.
“She was unhappy, Nicky,” I said.
“What did she have to be unhappy about?” He waved a hand obviously intended to take in our entire life. “She had everything. She was bright, she was popular, she was—” He looked momentarily stricken. “She is all those things.” He crumpled the poem in one hand. “I don’t know what this is about.”
“I think this one will tell you,” I said.
I extricated “Numbers 30” out of my pocket, and then I pressed it down on my thigh. I was about to hand him a knife to stab himself with, right in the heart.
“Is that another one?” Nick said.
I nodded.
“Let me see it.”
“This one’s going to hurt you,” I said. “But I think we have to pay attention to what she’s saying.”
“Well, let me see it.” Nick stuck out a demanding hand.
I wanted to slap it. As it was, I pressed the poem down against my thighbone. Giving it to him suddenly felt like another betrayal of my daughter.
