by Nancy Rue
“All we want you to do is just look at this picture,” I said. “Maybe I’ll take you all out for a steak dinner.”
Before I could get the photo out of my pocket, they retreated to the fire, backs to us, casting visceral resentment over their shoulders. Ed had his eyes closed.
“Please,” I said to their backs. I knew I had lost all semblance of cool, but I couldn’t stop begging. “Her name is Tristan. She has a good home. We’re not going to punish her. We just want to know if she’s safe.”
“Let’s go,” Ed murmured to me. “I think we’re done.”
“They wouldn’t even look at the picture,” I said as he pulled me with both hands to the door. My voice had disintegrated into a whimper. “If they’d just look at it, I could tell if they’d seen her.”
Ed stopped us at the end of the pointless railing outside. “It’s not gonna happen, Serena. They’re all they have. Somebody betrays another one, and there goes the only security they know right now.”
As Ed half dragged me toward the Jeep, I looked back at the building full of smoke and stench and baby children who couldn’t trust a soccer mom bearing cheeseburgers. A cry came out of me, and not just for Tristan.
I was still looking back as Ed attempted to stuff me into the Jeep. A figure with dulled red hair appeared in the doorway and waved at me as if she didn’t want anyone to see her do it. I pulled away from Ed and watched her. She jerked her head toward the basketball court and loped toward the fence. Her legs were thin as dowels and adolescent lanky.
“I have to go,” I said to Ed.
“Serena—”
I ignored him as I jogged to the fence where the red-haired girl had already climbed to the other side. She met me at a far corner, me out, her in, our frosty breath meeting in the middle. We both curled our fingers into the chain link.
“Tell anybody I told you this, and I’ll deny it,” she said.
I was close enough to see that her teeth were yellow, bordering on green.
“You said her name was Tristan?”
“Yes,” I said, “Tristan Soltani. Do you know her?”
“We got a Tristan here. Dark hair. Big eyes.” Redhead pulled her head back. “Looks kinda like you.”
I was almost too stunned to pull Tristan’s picture out of my pocket. When I did, the girl studied it and handed it back to me.
“Is that her?” I said. “The Tristan who lives here?”
“We don’t none of us look like we used to,” she said. “But, yeah, that looks like her.”
I recurled my fingers in the fence to get them closer to hers. “Where is she? Is she inside someplace?”
“She’s working. She does the day shift.”
“Where?”
“Downtown, but you don’t wanna go down there.”
I shook the fence. “Please tell me where she is.”
The girl glanced back toward the building. “Just come back here right after dark. Everybody else’ll be gone then except me. She always comes back here when she gets off.”
“Are you sure?” I said. “Do you swear to me she’ll be here?”
“Unless she doesn’t do what she’s done every night, like, ever since she got here practically. I gotta go.” She took a step backward.
“Wait,” I said. “How long has she been here?”
She shrugged. “She got here right before me, so I guess that was like August or something.”
I plastered both hands over my mouth as she took a few more steps backward.
“Thank you,” I said. I fumbled in my purse and drew out two twenties. “Here—I know you’re taking a big chance talking to me.”
She stopped and stared at the money peeking out of my glove.
“And please don’t tell her I’m coming. She might take off, because she doesn’t know what I’m going to say to her.”
The girl hissed through her teeth and took the bills I poked through a diamond in the fence. “If I had a mom like you,” she said, “I never woulda left in the first place.”
Chapter Nineteen
I babbled to Ed until nightfall, just to keep myself from imagining Tristan walking a downtown street on the “day shift.” As we went up and down the aisles of a musty grocery store a few streets over from the Sanctuary, loading food for the kids into a rickety cart, I brought up every other option there might be.
“She doesn’t necessarily have to be a prostitute, even though it sounded that way,” I said. “Maybe she’s working in a restaurant. Maybe she’s making french fries; she knows how to do that!”
Never once as I tried to talk myself out of a corner too hideous to visit did Ed remind me that without an address or clean clothes, Tristan wasn’t likely to have gotten a job. Or that if she didn’t want to be found, she wouldn’t have shown anyone her ID. He just listened as if I were actually making sense.
Only when we were parked in the shadows a block down from the Sanctuary, counting the kids as they left, did I get quiet and pray again.
Just bridge the gap, I said over and over. Please, God, hold us together.
“That’s everybody,” Ed said. “I’ll help you carry the groceries in, and then I’ll wait out here. I think you should be inside when she gets here.”
I couldn’t think about Tristan arriving, seeing me there, and bolting in fear or even hatred. I only thought of what it would be like to hold her in my arms.
The redhead’s eyes widened from their slits when she saw the bags of food I hauled through the door. She was in the process of dividing it up among the rag piles when she stood up straight and said, “She’s coming.”
I stood still in the middle of the floor, facing the door, my hands drawn up into the sleeves of my coat. Tristan was coming, and I might have only a few seconds, a few words to keep her from running away from me again. When the door opened, I could only blurt out, “Tristan!”
An emaciated girl with dark hair and a mask of makeup blinked at me. Skirt up to her upper thighs, stilettos bowing her shins—she looked every bit the prostitute. But she wasn’t my Tristan.
My chest heaved as both disappointment and relief flooded in.
“Who’s she?” the girl said.
The redhead looked from one of us to the other. “I thought she was your mother.”
“Like my mother’s really gonna come lookin’ for me.”
The girl went to the nearest pile as if it were her private dressing room and kicked off her heels, reducing her to a brittle five foot one at the most. She thrust her fingers into the front of her pink plastic jacket and withdrew a few wadded-up bills.
“I need my purse, Allie,” she said to the red-haired girl.
The redhead—Allie—disappeared through a doorway in the back. The girl went to the fire, which had all but burned out, and spread her hands over it. They were raw and twisted into claws.
“Don’t you have gloves?” I said.
She gave me a sour look. “Who are you anyway?”
“I’m Tristan’s mom,” I said. “Another Tristan. I thought you might be her.”
Her eyes, brown like Tristan’s, widened at the flames. “Forget the purse, Allie,” she called. She moved toward the doorway just as Allie appeared and tossed a lime green pocketbook at her. The girl missed it, and it landed at my feet. A faded, once-happy blue T stared up from it.
It was Tristan’s purse.
Our heads banged together as we both reached for it. I got there first and held it to my chest. She froze, still bent at the waist, and looked up at me. I could see the fear flicker through her eyes, even under the cover of shimmering silver eye shadow.
“Where did you get this?” I said.
The girl straightened slowly. Her face seemed to be trying to find its careless expression, but it was gone.
“It was a gift,” she said.
“From who?” I said.
“A girl I met.”
She made a feeble attempt to grab the purse from me, but I backed up and pulled it open. The zipper was broken, and the
contents smelled of sweet smoke. But the pink Valentine wallet was in there. So was a grimy wad of dollar bills.
“You can’t take my money,” the girl said.
“I don’t want your money.” I tore into the wallet and let the plastic cardholder cascade down. Max’s fourth-grade face grinned out of it. So did Jessica’s and all the other girls Tristan giggled with. The last one to unfold was my Tristan’s own face, wispy beneath the Indian River High School logo on her ID.
I stared at the girl now trembling in front of me. A thousand accusations jockeyed for position in my head.
“I didn’t steal it from her,” the girl said. “We traded. She’s got mine.”
“Why?” I said. “Why would you do that?”
“So nobody would find us,” she said.
I held the unfolded array of pictures in front of her. “I have to find her. Look at this. She has a family who loves her. We just want her to come home.”
The girl jutted out her hand. “Give me back my money,” she said, “and I’ll tell you what I know.”
“Take it.” I thrust it at her and dug once more into my own purse. But I stopped with a fifty-dollar bill between my fingers. “Just use it to buy some decent clothes and get a real job,” I said. “Better yet, buy a bus ticket, and go home to your mom.”
“Oh, and my stepfather,” she said. “Won’t that be fun? They don’t want me back in Huntington, trust me.”
The sarcasm was so fragile, I gave her the fifty and a hand squeeze. “Please,” I said. “If your family would welcome you back with open arms, wouldn’t you go?”
She pulled her hand away, stuffed the money into her jacket, and glared over her shoulder at Allie.
“Don’t look at me,” Allie said. “I thought your name really was Tristan Soltani.”
“What is your name?” I said.
“Who cares?”
“If Tristan is using it, it’ll help me find her. Come on. Please.”
“It’s Brandi,” she said. “Brandi Wines. My mother has a warped sense of humor.” She glared again at Allie. “You never heard me say any of this.”
“Okay,” Allie said, “Tristan.”
“Tristan has your ID?” I said.
“Driver’s license.” Brandi managed to get some of the apathy back into her face. “It’s not like I have a BMW here or anything.”
“When did she leave?”
“She was only here a few days. It was still hot then, so”—she lifted one eyebrow, studded three times with foggy rhinestones—“I’d have to check with my secretary.”
“Did she say where she was going?”
Brandi shrugged. “I don’t know. She said she was gonna go find some aunt with a guy’s name. Joe. Harry. Something like that.”
“Pete?” I said.
“I don’t know. I guess so. Look, that’s all I know. We weren’t that close, okay?”
I knew nothing else was coming out of her. I pulled another fifty from my purse.
“Buy yourself some gloves,” I said. I looked at the lime green bag I was still cradling under my arm. “And a new purse.”
“Don’t tell her I busted her,” Brandi said.
“I’ll tell her I didn’t give you a choice,” I said.
“Yeah.” She gave me the first hint of a smile with her eyes. “Right.”
Ed was by the front door when I came out. I headed straight for the Jeep, talking over my shoulder.
“I have to go to Philadelphia,” I said. “I know you can’t go with me, so just take me to the train station.”
Ed stopped me. “What? That wasn’t Tristan who walked in there?”
I poured out the story while I walked the rest of the way to the car, ransacking my purse for my cell phone as I went. When we’d climbed inside, Ed put his hand on Tristan’s bag that peeked out from mine and said, “May I?”
“Brandi said she was going to look for Aunt Pete,” I said as he peered into it. “Nick is going to have a fit, but I have to go to Philly.”
“Why would she go there? Aunt Pete was at your place when she left.”
I flipped open the phone. “As far as Tristan knew, Aunt Pete was leaving the next week. Tristan only stayed here until she thought Pete would be back home.”
“But, Serena,” Ed said. His voice went gentle. “That was at least three months ago. When she didn’t find Aunt Pete at her house—”
“Then I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know, Ed, but it’s all I have.”
I started to cry. It was a wonder to me that I had any tears left.
“She just traded herself in on somebody else,” I said.
“But now we know who that somebody is. We actually have something to go on.”
“Do we?”
“We’ll do the same thing there that we did here.”
“What if she’s … What if she couldn’t make it till now living like this?”
“She’s stronger than you think.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m looking at her mother,” he said, “the strongest woman I’ve ever known.”
I leaned my head against the seat and closed my eyes.
“What do you want to do, Serena?”
“Is that what you ask a strong woman?” I said.
“It is.”
“Then I want you to take me to the train station.”
“You’re sure.”
“Ed, I’m scared to death. But I have to do this. It’s the only thing I can do.”
He nodded. “That’s what a strong woman does.”
It was midnight when I got to Philadelphia. I got into a cab alone for the first time in my life and picked a hotel chain out of my vacation memories. I checked into the Wyndham with only my purse and Tristan’s and sat on the edge of the bed in frightening solitude until I remembered to call Aunt Pete.
“What are you doing up there?” she said when I told her where I was.
“Tristan was headed for your place,” I said. “Just tell me how to get there from downtown, and I’ll explain everything later.”
“What are you driving?” she said.
“I’ll get a rental car in the morning.”
“Don’t get anything too fancy. They’ll strip it down while you’re sittin’ in it. Matter of fact, if anybody makes a move toward it, I don’t care if you’re at a red light, you get out of there—”
“Aunt Pete,” I said, “I just need directions. And do it slow.”
She mapped it all out for me as I wrote it down, street by street, landmark by landmark, and even warned me about the places where I could easily make a wrong turn.
“Now,” she said after we’d repeated them back and forth twice, “when you get to my place, go next door to Old Man Clarence’s. He’s a bigger busybody than any woman could hope to be. If Tristan was there, you can bet he saw her. You’re gonna have to yell when you talk to him. He’s deaf as a post.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Call me if you get lost.”
“Okay.”
“Serena, you be careful up there.” Her voice filled with the static I had come to cherish. “Your problem is not their problem. They’d just as soon run you over as look at you—”
“Take care of Max for me,” I said.
“Don’t worry about Maxine. You find Tristan.”
When we hung up, I continued to cling to the cell phone, longing for a voice other than my own.
I dialed Nick’s cell number and got his voice mail. His message, pleasantly crisp and leaving no doubt who was in charge, was at once comforting and jarring. Ed had told me I was capable of doing an impossible thing. Merely hearing Nick’s voice made me wonder.
I closed the phone and fell back across the bed. Without Ed there, who was going to keep saying I could do this thing? How was I going to get through the night so I could rent a car tomorrow and find Aunt Pete’s place and face another disappointment that probably waited there to take me down?
Come after me,
she whispered.
And then she added, The bridge is there. Cross it.
“What?” I said to her.
That was all she would give me. I fell into a fitful sleep and dreamed of giant clumps of American beach grass.
Something woke me up at dawn. I reached in a fog for the bedside phone and saw that my cell was lit up. “Text Message,” the screen told me.
I had the guilty thought that it would be easier to read a message from Nick than hear his voice. But it was from Ed.
“Thought this might help,” it said. I scrolled down a list of shelters with phone numbers.
“Bless you,” I said. If I found nothing at Aunt Pete’s place, I would call them.
Wide awake, I made coffee in the pot at the sink and took a shower. My clothes smelled like nervous sweat, but I ironed them and put them back on. I tried to focus on every move and not get too far ahead of where I was.
The girl at the front desk gave me the name of the nearest rental-car agency, and the good-looking kid outside got me a cab. They were so normal. It helped, but it also made me want to weep.
Please, God, I prayed silently in the backseat of the taxi, let us find some kind of normal again.
Then I prayed that I would arrive at Hertz alive. The cab driver went up on curbs and made left turns in front of buses and never took his hand off the horn. When I stepped up to the rental counter, I was once more oozing sweat inside my coat.
On trips I’d always entertained the girls while Nick rented the cars, and he always had them reserved ahead of time. The only thing Hertz had available for me was a silver Lincoln Town Car. When the guy pulled it up to the door, I saw what might as well have been a limousine.
“Where you going?” he said.
“Italian Market,” I said.
“Dude,” he said.
I didn’t take that as a good sign.
I felt like a patient in traction groping to adjust a hospital bed as I tried to figure out how to move the seat so I could reach the pedals. By the time I finished going up and down and backward, I was queasy and had to peel off my coat.
The sides of the Lincoln seemed to hang over the lines on the pavement on both sides, and I couldn’t force myself to go more than fifteen miles an hour as I pulled onto the street. The drivers behind me leaned on their horns and shook their fists out their windows. One man let loose a string of expletives.
