by Nancy Rue
“Can you hurry? It’s already been so long since she was there.”
“The trail’s pretty cold, that’s true. But it’s still a trail.”
I tried to fix an image in my mind of Tristan forging a path for us to follow. It was at once encouraging and chilling. The beginning of that path didn’t bode well for the rest of it.
Ed cleared his throat. “I don’t want to sound like a father,” he said, “but it really isn’t the best idea to go into rough neighborhoods like that by yourself.”
You don’t sound like my father, I thought. You sound like my husband.
“If I have someone to go with me next time, I won’t go alone,” I said.
“Call me.”
“You?”
Ed gave a soft laugh. “Yeah. I’m a detective.”
“I know that! But you’re busy.”
“Just let me worry about that.”
After we ended the conversation, I sat on the chaise longue in the bedroom with the phone in my lap while my thoughts caught up to me. It was hard to imagine leaving Bethany Beach in a police car, next to a man who wasn’t Nick. Hard to imagine, but not impossible. Not if it led me to Tristan.
But for an agonizing five weeks there was no reason to go anywhere. There were no more phone calls or messages from Tristan. No leads from the fliers, which were curling up and fading on bulletin boards all over town. No additions to the tale from Ricky, who, according to Ed, hightailed it back to Georgetown as soon as we were convinced there was no real cause for pressing charges.
“Yet,” Nick said.
Ed confided in me that he was glad Ricky hadn’t had Nick charged with assault.
Nick stopped suggesting to me that Aunt Pete should go home, especially after he announced that he was going to Dallas.
“Why?” I said.
“It’s business,” he said.
I watched him carefully as he dealt his folded shirts into a suitcase, eyes avoiding me.
“Tristan business?” I said.
“Look, I have no place else to investigate, okay?”
“I’m not accusing you of anything,” I said.
“I guess I could let my entire corporation go down the tubes, but we’ve already lost enough.” He yanked at the zipper on the bag. “If I don’t go down there, a whole plant could fold. If I didn’t have to leave you and Max alone right now, I wouldn’t.”
“We’ll be fine,” I said. “Please don’t worry.”
In spite of my best effort not to sound defensive, he shot me a look.
“You will be fine if you do what I ask you to do and stay put,” he said. “But since I can’t count on that, yes, Serena, I will worry.”
Lissa called every other day or so, trying to encourage me, assuring me that no one at church thought I was a nut bar. I debated over whether to tell her exactly what was going on. I knew if I did, Nick would shrivel in her mind. I would dissolve into the milieu of bad parents. Tristan herself would seem—
What? Real? Normal? Like a girl who could speak without being afraid someone would hear her?
So I filled Lissa in one day in October when she dragged me out for coffee. The longer I talked, the more she looked at me as if I had gone off into a land that didn’t exist.
“That just doesn’t sound like our Tristan,” she said.
“I don’t think she was really our Tristan,” I said. “I think she was her own Tristan, and she just burst out one day and ran because she thought we’d never let her be who she was.” I watched the gentle vertical lines between Lissa’s eyebrows deepen. “That’s the Tristan I have to find. I have to find her and tell her she can be whoever she wants.”
“I just don’t understand,” she said.
It wasn’t much of a stretch to figure out that if Lissa didn’t get it, Peg and Rebecca definitely wouldn’t. I didn’t make any attempt to contact them, and Hazel was like a fullback running interference for me at church. Still, I thought about them.
“So I guess you aren’t going to the moms’ group anymore,” I said to Hazel the day she came with ten pots of chrysanthemums for my porches.
She snorted as she hoisted the flowers from the back of her ancient Suburban into the wheelbarrow I hadn’t used since August. “I don’t think Rebecca Godfried can teach me a single thing about being a mother. Looks like I’m not the only one, either.”
“I heard Christine dropped out.”
Hazel cocked an eyebrow over a pot of daisy mums. “Dropped out? When she found out Rebecca was taking over, she ran like a spooked cat. The only other person who still goes, far as I know, is Lissa. It’s probably in her contract or something.”
I felt a vague pang. “I hope Rebecca’s feelings aren’t hurt,” I said.
Hazel peered at me over green half glasses with black polka dots on them. “See, that’s what blows me away. The chick judges you like she’s Sandra Day O’Connor, and you still worry about her feelings. Trust me, as long as she can hear herself talk, she’s fine.”
She rolled the wheelbarrow toward the house, and I looked at her curiously as I walked beside her. “How do you know all this stuff?” I said.
She shrugged her hamlike shoulders, bare even in the October chill. “Just from hanging out at the church. When I’m not working or over here, I do things for Gary—put up bulletins boards, design the newsletter, print the bulletins.”
“Are you serous?” I said.
“Sure.” She stuck a pot on a step and rocked back to survey it.
“That’s really wonderful, Hazel. I’m so glad for you.” I leaned my cheek against her arm. “Praise God, huh?”
“Dude,” she said.
“What?” I said.
“That’s the first time I ever heard you say that ‘praise God’ thing.” She grunted as she picked up a pot of flowers with each hand.
“I haven’t had that much to praise about since you’ve known me.”
“Yeah, well, when you bring your kid home, I want to hear it twenty-four/seven.” She looked at me sideways. “It actually sounds authentic coming out of your mouth.”
Autumn had arrived, but except for the mums Hazel set out and watered and fertilized, there was little to show that it was my favorite season. Max and Aunt Pete carved some pumpkins, which led to an entire pumpkin-carving marathon with Hazel and her tribe, including the Irish setters, who scarfed up the seeds. Gary brought over a bushel of apples, and Aunt Pete burned only about a quarter of them in the process of making applesauce and apple crisp and several apple pies that puckered our lips because she’d left out the sugar.
A few days before Halloween, Max reminded me that I always made her a costume for the party at church. She looked so crestfallen when I said, “Oh, honey, I don’t know about this year,” that I went up to the third floor while she was at school the next day to see if I could find something in the dress-up trunk that I could modify. It wasn’t what I usually did, but everything I usually did only made me cruelly aware that nothing was at all usual.
The dress-up trunk, once the source of days of endless delight, had been pushed into the back corner of the old sleeping room. It looked rather forlorn with its wicker lid slightly ajar, as if it were waiting, open mouthed, for its little girlfriends to come back and finish the game they were playing when they had to stuff their costumes inside and run off to dinner.
As I knelt in front of it, I couldn’t remember seeing it in such a jumbled state the last time I’d been up there. When was that? The end of July when I’d cleaned up after Max’s birthday sleepover?
I lifted the lid warily, though I wasn’t sure why. Did I think something was going to jump out at me?
Two of Tristan’s old tutus did spring loose, and I jumped at least a foot and a half. They’d been stuffed on top of a bunch of garments heaped like the sale table at Old Navy.
I pulled out a purple rayon nightgown Tristan had called her Princess Leia dress when she was four or five, and I folded it. I did the same with Max’s vinyl cowgirl vest
and the poodle skirt everybody fought over. The neat pile I made on the floor beside me was somehow comforting. Maybe I could still create some kind of order.
I was reaching for the mime costume I’d made for Max the year before when my fingers touched paper. What I pulled out was folded precisely at the corners. From the outside I could see the round letters of Tristan’s handwriting etched into the paper with a gel pen.
“Tristan!” I said.
There was no racing anxiety this time, no fear that I was going to discover what I didn’t want to know. I unfolded the poem and dug hungrily into the words.
“Lost, from Self”
by Tristan Soltani
Praying
Smiling
Dancing
Doing
I knew who I ought to be
Sobbing
Sighing
Gritting
Screaming
Ashamed that I could not be
Yearning
Writing
Loving
Risking
I found who I might be
Sinking
Shrinking
Losing
Dying
Afraid I would never be
Hoping
Planning
Dreaming
Fleeing
Till I find refuge to be
Me.
I read it again, out loud, and then again, until I could hear it in Tristan’s voice. In the very corner where she might have written it and then stuffed the paper frantically into the dress-up trunk, perhaps at the sound of intruding footsteps, the words rose and fell with her hope of finding herself.
How many times had I scoffed silently when I heard people on talk shows discuss how a woman could “find herself”?
“What do I need to do that for?” I’d said to the TV screen more than once. “I’m not even lost.”
But now, following the words that tumbled down the page, I had never felt so separate from the self I had always been content to be. Tristan, it was clear, had known her own lostness. She’d fled to meet herself somewhere.
I listened to her poem over and over, but she wouldn’t tell me where that somewhere was. She must have known where she was headed. She’d asked for directions.
I traced my finger down through the ing words again, hoping to feel a clue in the ink. She wrote nothing about a specific place. The only place she seemed to seek, in this poem and in “Sanctuary,” was a refuge.
I hugged the poem to myself and, crazily, snatched up a tutu and hugged it too.
“I’m so sorry you couldn’t find it here, Tristan,” I whispered. “But I promise you, I swear to you, it will be here when you come home.”
Sinking, shrinking, losing—I cried.
I wasn’t sure how long I’d been there when Aunt Pete’s voice pierced the silence.
“Serena! Maxine’s school is on the phone. She’s been hurt.”
Chapter Sixteen
I ignored the Please Check In at the Office sign and careened around a corner to the nurse’s office. It had occurred to me halfway to Ocean View that if they weren’t taking Max to the emergency room, it couldn’t be too serious. But I knew now how brittle their little lives were, and I floored the Blazer right through the school zone.
Max was propped up on a cot with a bandage on each knee and a bag of ice on the side of her face. Although I ran straight to her and examined her, face to fingertips, it was obvious nothing was more bruised than her pride. She could barely look at me.
“What happened, honey?” I said.
“I got in a fight on the playground.”
“A fight?”
She nodded miserably. “Ashley and them were all talking trash about Tristan, and me and Sun made a pact not to let anybody do that.”
“So you punched somebody out?”
She shook her head. “No, we made a pact not to do anything violent.”
“Then how—”
“When I told Ashley if she wanted to see a tramp, she oughta look in the mirror, she pushed me down.” Max pointed to her bandaged knees.
“And what about your face?”
“I crashed into the wall when I was running away.” She blinked hard against the inevitable tears. “I guess I’m not that good at standing up for Tristan. I guess I’m not that good at anything.”
I let her cry. When I went into the outer office to get her some Kleenex, Mrs. Abbott was waiting.
“Mrs. Soltani,” she said. She clasped my hands. She’d been Tristan’s fifth-grade teacher too, and I’d always had the image that her skin was made of cream.
“I’ve been trying to contact you for some time now,” she said. “I know this must be a horrible time for you. I can’t even imagine—”
“Contact me how?” I said.
“I’ve left messages on your answering machine a few times. I’ve e-mailed you as well. I’m sure there must be so much going on at your house …”
I looked back at Max. She was curled on the cot, as still as a rabbit trying to make herself invisible.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Mrs. Abbott. “I don’t know what’s happened to your messages. Did you want to speak to me about Max?”
Mrs. Abbott motioned me out into the hall, where I stood before her like a truant student.
“I’m sure we can attribute it to her sister’s disappearance,” she said. “But Max has been acting out for the past—well, ever since she gave her report on runaways. According to some of my little tattlers, a few of the girls make rude remarks about Tristan on the playground, saying she must be on drugs now and she must be a prostitute. Naturally, Max has struck back.”
“Meaning?”
“Nasty notes in their cubbyholes. Bursting out with insults during class. I’ve given her lunch detention twice for launching projectiles at them when she gets mad—Chap Stick, erasers, whatever’s at her fingertips.”
Stone coasters? I thought.
“I’m trying not to be too hard on her,” Mrs. Abbott said. “I’d like to suggest that maybe she see a counselor.”
The words “I’ll discuss it with her father” came automatically to mind. But I said, “Thank you so much. I’ll talk to Max. We’ll get this straightened out.”
“I’m sure when you do, her grades will take care of themselves.” She patted my hand. “They aren’t stellar right now.”
“Please let me know if there’s any more trouble,” I said.
“Absolutely,” she said. “We’ll work on this together.”
Max shoved the pillow up to her face when I returned to her. I sat on the edge of the cot and pulled it away. I wasn’t going to let another daughter hide from me.
“You want to tell me what happened to the e-mails?” I said.
“I deleted them.”
“And the phone messages?”
“I erased them.”
“Because you knew you’d get in trouble?”
“No,” she said. “Because I knew you’d get in trouble.”
“I would?”
“With Dad. He thinks I’m messing up because you’re upset about Sissy. But it’s not you, Mom.” Her eyes filled up again. “I’m just scared I’ll never see her again.”
I tried to concentrate on Max as Nick’s stay in Dallas dragged on. I was able to get her back on track with her schoolwork, get her signed up for basketball, and take her to a movie, which I sobbed through. The tears had nothing to do with the film.
I couldn’t have done any of it without Aunt Pete and Hazel. It was Aunt Pete who packed Max’s lunches and made sure the Tristan-shirt Max had to sleep in every night was clean and pointed me toward my car on those afternoons when I didn’t think I could make it to Lord Baltimore Elementary to pick Max up.
And it was Hazel who took Max out for pizza and painted her fingernails purple and taught her how to do fancy basketball dribbling on the patio.
They both talked me down out of the crazy tree when I whatiffed myself up to its highest b
ranch. Neither of them would let me sink into the quicksand when I realized how many days it had been since I’d heard Tristan laugh. They took turns telling me I was a good mother, no matter what anybody else said.
The Monday of Nick’s fourth week away, Ed came by when Hazel, Aunt Pete, and I were having lunch at the kitchen table. Aunt Pete put a bowl of chili in front of him and ordered him to eat it.
“You’re looking awful puny,” she said.
Actually he did. He seemed thinner than he had the night we saw Ricky, and his face was drawn. His usually broad shoulders had an apologetic hunch to them.
“Serena,” he said, “the Baltimore cops have canvassed every business that’s still open within five blocks of Maryland General. Nobody’s seen Tristan.” He looked at me sadly. “I’m so sorry I don’t have more to tell you.”
“I know you’re trying,” I said.
“You need to try harder.” Aunt Pete pushed the breadbasket toward him. “Have a roll.”
Ed’s lips twitched. “You ever think about joining the police force?” He fished a roll out of the basket and turned to me. “If I could just see more of the big picture, ya know?”
“Then you could be Supercop,” Hazel said. She sat back in her chair, revealing an inch of solid midriff below her tequila green sweater. A sequined frog on one shoulder rose and fell with her breathing.
Ed grinned at her and ran the back of his hand across his forehead. Aunt Pete’s chili was just a little spicy.
“The only one who has the big picture is God,” Aunt Pete said. “ ’Course, I’ve been asking Him to give it to me ever since Tristan disappeared, but so far …” She shrugged inside the ratty sweater she’d traded the chenille robe for when the weather had turned cold.
Ed took another spoonful of chili and dabbed at his shaved head with his napkin.
“God’s not telling me anything, either,” Hazel said, “I’m new at this praying thing, though.” She tugged at the bottom of her sweater as she looked at me. “If He’s gonna tell anybody, He’s gonna tell you.”
“You overestimate me, Hazel,” I said.
