by Nancy Rue
“Maybe Ed can tell where she is from background noises,” I said.
“I didn’t hear any background noises,” Nick said. “This isn’t CSI, Serena.”
“We have to take this tape to Ed Malone,” I said.
“Fine. Do what you want, since that’s your new lifestyle.” Nick glared toward the foyer and lowered his voice to a deep growl. “As far as I’m concerned, if Tristan wants us to find her, then she can tell us where she is.”
He turned away, but I grabbed his sleeve and curled it into my fingers. “What are you saying?”
“She’s playing a little game now.” Nick’s lips barely moved. “I thought I raised her different from that, but evidently not. She knows where she lives. Let her find her own way home.”
When his tires had squealed off down Ocean View Parkway, Max crept into the kitchen, face the color of Cream of Wheat. “What’s going on?” she said.
“Daddy’s just a little bit upset,” I said.
“Ya think?” Max said. She pointed to the answering machine. “I wanna hear my sister.”
I nodded to Hazel, who pushed the button and stood by her.
Aunt Pete motioned for me to join her in the foyer.
“His pride’s wounded,” she said. “He’ll see the light, but you can’t wait for that.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m taking the tape to Ed tomorrow.”
“What’s wrong with today?”
I just shook my head. Maybe I thought Nick would “see the light” before then and go with me when I handed it over. Maybe I thought Tristan would call back. Maybe she was disappointed that we hadn’t been there.
Maybe if I had been, she’d be on her way home right now. No. I’d be on my way to get her.
“Mom?”
I jumped.
“Tristan sounds scared,” Max said at my elbow. “Wherever she is, I don’t think she wants to be there.”
I held on to her, and we both cried. Max cried because her big sister was afraid. I cried because, as much as Tristan didn’t want to be where she was, she didn’t want to be home, either.
Chapter Thirteen
Max informed me late that afternoon that Nick was down on the beach.
“What’s he doing?” I said.
“I don’t think he’s building sandcastles,” she said. “Can me and Sun have a secret club meeting in the big room?”
When the two of them were tucked away in the rec room on the third floor, I ventured down to the beach. I felt like a small child, watching Nick as I drew closer, looking for twitches and tightenings that would signal I should run. But he turned from his stance at the water’s edge and saw me first. There was only regret on his face.
He looked down when I got to him, his shoed toe skimming the shallows that lapped at his feet.
“I was a jerk today,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
I didn’t know how to respond to “I’m sorry.” I only nodded.
“I know it’s not like Tristan to scheme,” he said. “I just want somebody to blame.”
“You can’t blame her,” I said.
“I know that, Serena.” His voice was strained. “I called the private investigator back in. I’m more convinced than ever now that someone has her who isn’t going to hurt her. He just wants to make me suffer.”
“For how long?”
“Now, how would I know that?”
“It just doesn’t make sense to me, Nicky. And what about the poems?”
“The poems. You talk about something that doesn’t make sense.” Nick’s face darkened, and he looked away. “She and I will have a talk about that when she comes home.”
I had a flash of him stabbing a finger at Tristan’s poems while she looked on in tears.
“What kind of talk?” I said.
“I don’t know. What have I been trying to tell you for the last five weeks, Serena? All I can think about is hunting this person down and getting my daughter back. Now that’s it.”
“Conversation over?” I said.
His whole face squinted. “Don’t get smart. Look, we can’t have this thing happening between us. We have to stay united, or I can’t do what I have to do.”
And then the man who wanted me to stay united with him stormed off to the house. I waited a long time before I followed him inside.
I was at the police station at seven o’clock the next morning. Ed listened to the tape with me five times. When he stopped it for the last time, he said, “How does she sound to you?”
“Afraid,” I said. “Not hysterical, not like something horrible is about to happen to her. But she’s scared.”
There was something else, something I’d heard at three o’clock that morning when a sullen Nick had finally fallen asleep and I’d crept down to the kitchen to listen to the tape again. I couldn’t define it yet, though, so I shrugged at Ed.
“What do you think?” I said.
He shifted in his chair. Fluorescent light shone on his shaved head. “Let’s just talk from the theory that Tristan wasn’t abducted. From my experience with kids who have left home, I’d say it took a lot for her to get up the nerve to make that call. If that’s the case, then the fear we’re hearing is more from making the call than anything that’s threatening her.”
“She was afraid to call us?” I said.
He didn’t have to answer. I knew we were both thinking about the poems.
“I didn’t hear any background noise,” he said, “at least nothing that would help us determine where she is. I’m going to send it to the crime lab in Dover, though. They have some pretty sensitive equipment—”
“You’re going to take it away from me?” I said.
Ed’s eyes went soft. “I’ll make you a copy. Then you can listen to her as much as you want.”
“I haven’t heard her voice in so long,” I said.
“Does it sound different to you?”
I was a little startled. It was the very thing I’d searched for in the tape last night.
“It does and it doesn’t,” I said. “Her voice itself hasn’t changed, but it’s like somebody else is using it.”
“Like maybe someone was telling her what to say?”
I shook my head. I finally zeroed in on the feeling I hadn’t been able to put into words. “It’s more that now she’s somebody I don’t know,” I said. My voice thickened. “She’s a stranger.”
“Hey,” Ed said. “We’re going to give you a chance to discover her all over again. This is a very good sign.”
“Nick doesn’t think so,” I said.
Ed nodded. “He’s pretty upset. Any father would be.”
I didn’t ask when Ed had talked to Nick. Instead I said, “I’ve never seen Nick angry like this. He’s mad at me; he was mad at Tristan. This morning he cut himself shaving and threw the razor in the bathtub. Nick just doesn’t do that.”
“Just from a man’s point of view,” Ed said, “and I’m not a father, but it seems like he’s angry with himself. He thought he could protect his family or at least beat the tar out of anybody who tried to hurt them. For you it’s easier to accept that she ran away, because it might mean she’s safer. For him—” Ed shrugged. “Maybe for him it’s harder. If she left willingly, that destroys his whole image of himself as a father.”
I had to agree. It wasn’t doing much for my mother image, either.
“So what do we do now?” I said.
“I can actually point you in a direction.” Ed swiveled in the chair, pulled out a piece of paper, and wrote down some instructions for us. If Tristan called again and we were there to answer, we were supposed to stay calm and tell her we wanted her home with us. We were to ask where she was but not lose patience if she wouldn’t tell us.
“The idea is to let her know it’s safe to come home,” Ed said. “She’s been gone long enough now that things may have become distorted in her mind.”
“Or not,” I said ruefully.
“Just don’t let an argument develop over
the phone.”
I sighed deeply, out of the very emptiest place in myself. “You know something?” I said. “I’ve never had an argument with Tristan. I’d give my left arm to have one with her right now.” My eyes blurred, and I nodded at the tape. “How long will that take?”
“A day or two.”
“I shouldn’t get my hopes up, should I?”
“Get them up as high as you want. What’s the future in the alternative?”
There was a long, quiet space. Ed seemed to shake himself inwardly. “I know you’re worried about how she’s eating, whether she’s got a roof over her head—”
“That’s all I think about,” I said.
“There are a lot of resources out there for her. There’s the National Runaway Switchboard; they’d set her up with the Home Free bus service Greyhound’s got—free transportation for runaway children returning home. Foundation 2 has shelters all over—”
I pulled my hands through my hair. “How is Tristan going to know about all that? She’s never even been away from home before.”
“Other kids will tell her,” Ed said. “The National Youth Crisis Hotline has their number posted all over the place. Kids on the streets know it: 1-800-HIT-HOME.”
“I don’t even know if she had enough money with her to make a phone call.”
Ed stopped midway into standing up and sat back on the edge of his chair. “What did Tristan do with the money she made?”
“Saved it. I don’t think she bought herself one thing. It all went straight into her savings account.”
Ed scratched his forehead. “We should have asked you before if she had access to money, but we were focused on the abduction theory. Why don’t you—”
He didn’t even have to suggest that I go to the bank. I stopped on my way home. Five dollars were left in Tristan’s account. Her last, and only, withdrawal—$675—had been made at one thirty on August 2, the day before she disappeared. She’d worked the day shift that day. She must have made the withdrawal during her lunch break.
“There’s no doubt now, Nicky,” I whispered.
But the certainty didn’t stab me as it might have a week, maybe even a day earlier. Instead, I felt a gathering in my chest, a tightness that told me the $675 was probably gone by now. I couldn’t just wait for her to find her way home.
After I called Ed to report that news, I went up to Tristan’s room and sat cross-legged in the middle of her bed, down comforter puffing up around me but offering me no comfort.
I had inspected every inch of that room, and yet I knew there was still something that would give another piece of her up to me. There had to be more poems.
I sank back against the pillows. If she’d planned ahead enough to take her money out of the bank, she’d probably taken her poems with her too. I tried to imagine her slipping from one secret place to another, pulling them out and tucking them safely into her pockets. I didn’t get far with that vision. With the door open and our eyes always on her, how could she have done that without one of us noticing?
Or maybe somebody had and that somebody had just kept her mouth shut.
I hurried downstairs. Aunt Pete was on the back porch, attempting to cut her toenails. A delicious September breeze came up off the ocean. The passage of time it signaled went through me. It had been so stifling hot when Tristan left.
“It’s getting harder and harder to reach these blasted things,” Aunt Pete said. She snapped the clippers in the direction of her knotted toes.
“Let me do that,” I said. I joined her on the deacon’s bench and put her foot in my lap. Her leg went stiff.
“I’m not used to this,” she said.
“You’ve been taking care of me for the last month,” I said. “I owe you.”
Besides, now I had her where she couldn’t get away if she didn’t like my questions.
“You told me Tristan confided in you, right?” I said.
“A little.” Aunt Pete was way ahead of me. “If she’d told me something that could help you find her, don’t you think I would’ve said something by now?”
“That’s not where I was going,” I said. I got a firm grip on her foot and positioned the clippers on her big toenail. It was as hard and brown as a horse’s hoof.
“Did you see her poking into any strange places, maybe right before she, you know, went?”
“You still looking for more poems?” she said.
I crunched down hard, but the nail didn’t budge. I moved to the next one.
“No, I didn’t see her looking,” Aunt Pete said, “but I been thinkin’ about something.”
“What?”
“That day I saw her writing on the beach. She had that beach bag with her, the one I sent her from the Riviera that time.”
I pretended to concentrate on the little toenails, which were splitting in the wrong direction, Tristan had pulled the hideous rhinestone-encrusted bag down from the closet shortly after Aunt Pete’s arrival in June. “I should use this while she’s here,” Tristan had told me, “so I don’t hurt her feelings. I just hope none of my friends see it.”
The last time I’d seen it, it was stuffed under the towels in the pool house. Her worst fear must have been realized, and she’d stashed it there to avoid the inevitable teasing—
I shoved Aunt Pete’s legs off my lap and tossed the clippers on the seat. She was still muttering when I tore open the pool house door, pulled up the lid on the bench, and knocked the neatly rolled-up beach towels out of the way.
There it was, the seaweed green bag with the rhinestone fish swimming gaudily across it.
And inside was a blue spiral notebook, with a poem Tristan had forgotten to take with her. I looked around the scratched-out words and read the ones she’d allowed to stay.
“Sanctuary”
by Tristan Soltani
She was my safe place
She made it okay
“Kiss it better
Mommy’s here
I love you. You’re special, Tristan dear.”
She was my God space
She taught me to pray
“Jesus loves you
God is great
Bless Daddy. Bless Maxie. Go night-night, it’s late.”
Until I grew ears
And I could hear:
“Yes, hon. No, hon. You are right
You have made me see the light.
She’s just cranky, tired, pubescent.
I’ll stay bright and effervescent.”
Until I peeked out
And I could see
Serve the coffee. Calm the girls.
Bite your tongue and keep his world.
Bob your head. Don’t rock the boat.
Say his words you’ve learned by rote.
The haven’s grown plastic
She’s taught ME to nod
“How’s your day been?
Were you good?
Kept the rules, the smiles, the shoulds?”
She can’t be my refuge—
No walls of her own
“I’ll ask your daddy.
I’m not sure.
Who am I but sweet and pure?”
I look for shelter
And I find:
Potluck suppers. Smiley people.
“Thou shalt not doubt beneath this steeple.”
I go to God
The way they say:
“Submit to husband, fathers, teachers.
Deny yourself and honor preachers.
God is love and Jesus Master.”
Say the verses, say them faster.
Could love be my sanctuary?
He tells me it is.
“You’re a woman.
They don’t know.
Let me take you, let it show.”
Is he my temple?
It’s in his kiss
“I can free you
Spread your wings
Your heart, your arms, wide open fling.
Now I have heart
And I can feel
I am more than what they planned
Now the flames of love are fanned
There is warmth beside his fire
My old prison’s now a pyre.
“God!” I cried out loud. “I failed her. Why did You let me fail her?”
The break in my heart was so painful I couldn’t sit up. I closed the bench lid and lay down on top of it, still holding the poem that had just cut me in two.
I sobbed at the ceiling. “God? Did I do everything wrong? Why didn’t You tell me? Why didn’t You knock me over the head?”
But it hadn’t seemed so wrong. I’d taught her to pray. “God is great, God is good” at the supper table. “Now I lay me down to sleep” every night as I tucked her in. Little whispers of “God bless Daddy and Maxie” as I tucked her in for night-night.
I taught her to pray the way I prayed, to a gentle and loving Jesus, who would always watch over her perfect little world. Did she know how to pray now? Was she badgering God the way I was, shouting at Him, throwing tantrums at His feet?
If she was, she hadn’t learned it from me—not the way I was going to Him now, pounding my fists.
“Please teach her, God,” I cried, “because I didn’t.”
“You all right in there?”
Aunt Pete’s voice was crackly outside the door. She pushed through and let in a shaft of sunlight that didn’t belong in the scene. I covered my eyes.
“You found one,” she said. I heard her shuffle across the floor, felt her sit stiffly beside me. I tucked up my feet and pressed my face to my knees.
“This one was about me,” I said. “Now I know how Nick felt.”
“Come on, Serena. What teenage girl doesn’t think her mother’s ridiculous? I thought mine was an idiot until I turned twenty-five.”
“You didn’t run away from home.”
“Not the way Tristan maybe did, but I left, went out on my own when I was barely eighteen. Thought I knew it all.”
I lifted my face and waved the notebook. “I evidently didn’t know a thing.”
“And now you do.”
I looked at her. “What do I know?”
