by Nancy Rue
“Everybody just stop being mad at me!” I said. Suddenly I was the object of hatred simply because I didn’t know what I was doing.
Somehow I managed to follow Aunt Pete’s directions and find the right neighborhood. Her brick row house was squeezed between two others just like it. The screen on the storm door was torn, and a gutter hung at a rakish angle, weighted down by icicles. But if Tristan had somehow managed to get in and camp out, it was as good as a five-star hotel as far as I was concerned.
Just as Aunt Pete had predicted, the door on the house next to hers creaked open when I went up the front walk, and an old man shuffled out and gaped at me.
Clarence’s nose hooked down to meet his chin, a feat made possible by an absence of dentures. He was conveniently dressed for the outdoors, complete with a fifties vintage fedora.
“Good morning,” I called to him.
“Heh?” he answered. His voice had all the finesse of an air horn.
I crossed a patch of winter-browned grass and met him as he continued to shuffle toward me. The closer he got, the more wizened he looked, until I was afraid he would shrivel up and blow away before he got close enough to hear me. But his eyes were sharp as a hawk’s. Aunt Pete was probably right. He looked as though he saw everybody’s business.
“I’m Serena Soltani,” I said.
He cupped a hand around one ear under the brim of his hat and shouted, “Who?”
“Mrs. Bernardi’s niece.”
“Whose?”
I pointed at Aunt Pete’s house.
“Oh. Old Pete. Yeah.” He pulled a pair of overgrown white eyebrows together. “Worst busybody you ever saw. She didn’t die down there in Delaware, did she?”
“No, she’s fine.”
“Heh?”
I took Tristan’s picture out of my pocket and pressed it into his hand. “I’m looking for my daughter,” I shouted. “Has she been here?”
He studied the photo for so long I thought I would go mad. I chewed at my lip and prayed myself back from screaming, How long does it take to figure out whether you’ve seen her or not?
“Yep,” he said so abruptly I wondered if I actually had shrieked at him. “Three or four times.”
“Really?” I said. “Are you sure?”
He shifted his piercing gaze to me. “I might be old, lady,” he said, “but I’m not blind.” He thumped Tristan’s picture with his knuckles. “First time was, oh, say, August, first of September maybe. Caught her peekin’ in Pete’s windows. When I asked her what she thought she was doing, she run like a rabbit.”
My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat. “But she came back?” I said. “When?”
“Heh?” he said and then plowed on with, “She showed up again around Halloween. First I thought she was one of them punks going around smashin’ punkins, ‘cept I seen her sittin’ here on the steps, cryin’ like a baby. I figured she was harmless.”
“When was she here last?” I shouted at him.
He wheezed and put his hand to his mouth to collect a cough. For an awful moment I thought he was going to keel over before he got to Tristan’s last visit.
He fished a stiff-looking handkerchief out of his pants pocket and found an unused spot on it to blow his nose. I didn’t wait for him to stuff it back in.
“When was the last time you saw her?” I shouted.
He scowled. “No need to yell. I’m about to tell you.” The eyebrows drew together again, threatening to tangle hopelessly.
“Musta been last week sometime,” he said. “Just happened to look out the window, and there she was, standin’ out on the sidewalk, starin’ at old Pete’s place like she lost her best friend.”
“Was she okay?” I said.
“How should I know?” he said. “I stuck my head out the door and told her the old bag wasn’t home, and she run again.”
“Where?” I said. “Which direction?”
“Thatta way.” He pointed down the street. “I don’t guess she got too far runnin’, though. Not in her condition.”
I stopped breathing. “What? Was she hurt?”
“Nah,” he said. “Just pregnant.”
Chapter Twenty
She was still pregnant. Tristan had been pregnant, and she was still pregnant, and she was somewhere in Philadelphia.
It was a simple concept, and yet I couldn’t grasp it. I could only move where it took me.
I wrote down my cell phone number for Old Man Clarence and made him promise to call me the instant he saw Tristan again—even if it was in the middle of the night. As he shuffled away, he muttered something about me thinking he must spend all his time peeking out the window. I did think that, and I thanked God for it.
I found a deli where I could sit down and ignore a bagel and call every shelter on Ed’s list. Of course, no one would tell me whether they’d ever heard of Brandi Wines or Tristan Soltani. It struck me about halfway through the list that my precious, perfect, pregnant daughter had an alias.
My pregnant daughter, who needed prenatal care. I borrowed a phone book from the woman behind the counter and called every hospital in Greater Philadelphia. No Brandi or Tristan currently listed as a patient.
I paid for the bagel and wandered back to the Lincoln. The sun had heated the inside in spite of the below-freezing temperature, and I tried to draw some calm from its warmth, but my hands and my mind wouldn’t rest.
I called Ed and got his voice mail, but I didn’t leave a message. The reassuring voice was enough. I hung up and dialed 411 for the number of the Philadelphia police.
A woman answered at the police station, but she hadn’t said five words before I knew she could have learned a thing or two about phone manners from Ed.
“Officer Slater. How can I help you?” she said. Her voice indicated she was too busy to help me at all.
I told her my story anyway. I could hear her clicking keys, and I was about to ask if she was listening to me when she interrupted with, “She’s already on the NCIC as a runaway.”
“But now I know she’s in Philadelphia,” I said. “Can’t your people do something?”
“Sure,” said Officer Slater without enthusiasm. “I’ll put out the word. Where can we reach you if she turns up?”
I dug my fingers into the leather seat. “If she ‘turns up’? Are you just going to wait until somebody trips over her in a gutter?”
“Look, ma’am—”
“Don’t tell me how many runaway kids you have on the streets in this city,” I said. “You know what, just tell me where their squats are, and I’ll go there myself and look for her.”
There was a small silence. The voice that broke it was a fraction softer. “We don’t want you to do that. The squats we know of are in places you shouldn’t go by yourself.”
“That’s exactly what I’m worried about,” I said. My voice teetered. “If my pregnant daughter is in one of those places, I want her out of there.”
Officer Slater cleared her throat. “Have you tried one of the private investigation agencies that specialize in finding runaways?”
“I read about them on the Internet,” I said. Or at least on the information Max had printed out for me. “They want the parents to back off and let them do the work. I don’t really want my daughter and my grandchild to have a bounty on their heads.”
“Okay, okay.” The officer coughed again. “Here’s what we can do. I have a kid who does some work for me in Kensington now and again—”
“What’s Kensington?”
“It’s one of those neighborhoods you should stay out of. Lot of white girls who end up on the streets live there. I’ll get in touch with my—”
“When?” I said.
“As soon as I hang up with you,” she said, less than patiently. “Give me your number, and then just stay cool until I call you back— or she calls you. Her name’s Cricket.”
“Can you trust her?” I said. “What about that code of loyalty they all seem to have with each
other?”
“I’m keeping Cricket out of jail. She owes me.”
“And if I don’t hear from you or her—”
“You will. Just try not to freak out in the meantime.” She let out one more cough. “Actually you don’t strike me as the freaking-out type.”
If she only knew.
My cell phone was beeping, so I somehow found a Radio Shack and bought a car charger. I kept the phone in my hand throughout the purchase. When the multi-earringed kid who rang me up handed me the bag, I asked him where Kensington was.
“What do you want to go there for?” he said.
“I just need to know where it is.” I pulled out a piece of paper and the map I’d found in the glove box. While he talked, I wrote, asking for landmarks and possible wrong turns.
“I don’t know what you got goin’ there,” the kid said, “but, man, I wouldn’t go near some of the streets in that neighborhood. A kid got shot over there night before last.”
“Thanks,” I said.
There was no reason for me to drive into Kensington. I didn’t even know if Tristan was there. And the stricken look on the face of the boy with the earrings was enough to back up Officer Slater’s warning. Still, as long as I didn’t get out of the car …
Besides, I couldn’t sit for another second just waiting for the phone to ring. I studied the directions, memorized the first few streets, and ventured back out.
I made only two wrong turns finding Front Street, which, I calculated, was just twelve blocks from my hotel. That was reassuring. I could practically run that far if I had to.
But when I crossed Kensington Avenue and headed toward the Delaware River, I knew I wouldn’t be going anywhere on foot.
The bubble-lettered graffiti on the brick walls burned my eyes. A Dumpster on the sidewalk had belched its contents into the road, and a woman wearing at least four sweaters was picking through it. I had a flash of my daughter scavenging through garbage, and I missed seeing the man on the other side of the car until he had spit on my windshield. I couldn’t read the bumper stickers on his hat through the trail of yellow mucus, but I heard him wail something about the end of the world.
I was pretty sure it had already happened.
I’d seen it before, on North Howard Street in Baltimore. Yet I couldn’t be numb to it. Not with tiny children sitting alone on front steps in ragged, too-big sweatshirts, staring vacantly as I passed. Or with pairs and trios of adolescent boys slouching on corners and in doorways with various items pressed between their teeth—cigarettes, drinking straws, objects I couldn’t even identify.
There were girls, too, loitering on the sidewalks and sagging porches of row houses that made Aunt Pete’s place look like Buckingham Palace. Each wore some variation on a theme—multiple piercings; tattoos on ankles, thighs, and bellies; ghoulish makeup. Clouds of icy breath hung about their slickered lips, but they all bared their skin to the blistering cold as if they were made of steel.
But they weren’t. I drove slowly, grazing the curb with my tires, searching their faces. There was fresh child-skin under those masks. Eyes yearning for tenderness. Mouths aching to smile without a price. I stopped expecting any of their flat-tummied selves to be Tristan. They were all my daughters.
One of them yelled, “Why don’t you just take a picture?”
I winced at what she called me, but could I blame her? I was staring at her and her friends as if they were specimens under glass. If I wanted any strength left for Tristan, I had to get out of there.
I gunned the motor and tried to remember which way I needed to turn to escape. I definitely didn’t want to go any deeper into the angry maze of walls that screamed obscenities at me.
I stopped at the corner, still debating right or left and watching the harlot-waifs in the rearview mirror. There was movement on my side of the car. It bounded across the hood and quadrupled before my eyes. Four boys took positions at the front of the Lincoln and attached themselves to it. Working like a rowing crew, they bounced it, cruelly, up and down.
I clung to the steering wheel for my life.
One who had a blue bandanna around his head looked straight at me and laughed like an insane hyena. I could hear Aunt Pete telling me they were going to strip the car while I sat in it.
I put my foot on the gas pedal and then on the brake, shaking two of the boys loose to stumble backward. When I mashed the accelerator again, a third one let go, and I missed nicking his backside by an inch. I didn’t see what happened to the last one, but as I squealed around the corner, I felt a hard thump on the passenger-side fender.
The air went blue with livid profanity. I slammed on the brakes only long enough to see all four of them running for me at full tilt.
“I didn’t kill anyone, I didn’t kill anyone …”
Saying that over and over was the only thing that kept me from becoming completely hysterical as I careened the Lincoln over curbs and around blocks until I couldn’t see the boys in the mirror anymore. Ahead of me a garbage truck was pulled up next to a line of trash cans. I pulled in behind it and leaned my forehead on the steering wheel, heaving in air that reeked of spoiled milk and rancid meat. At least adults were there, men with jobs, who could throw galvanized metal. Maybe I could count on them in the minutes it would take me to get my mind back into my body, in case the thugs reappeared.
A horn blasted beside me, bigger and more intimidating than the average sedan driver who wanted me to go back to Delaware. A bus driver hissed his door open and informed me that I couldn’t park there.
Then he proceeded to park there, blocking me in. He left the bus and sauntered to a hole of a store across the street. The garbage collectors now had their backs to me, lighting each other’s cigarettes beside a Dumpster. I jerked the Lincoln into reverse and gasped out loud as I plowed toward a van that had just appeared. I jammed on the brakes in time to keep from smashing into it—and to see four figures round the corner, led by a kid in a blue bandanna.
Every pulse point throbbed in alarm. Poking furiously at the seat belt release button, I shoved open the door and screamed for help. The only response was from the growling jaws of the sanitation truck. I could feel the foursome gaining on me.
I snatched up my bag, yanked the cell phone out, charger and all, and stumbled away from the car. I tried to turn and run at the same time, but my feet tangled, and I sprawled chest first into the street. Pounding feet vibrated through the pavement and into the palms of my hands.
“Someone help me!” I screamed.
But there was no time to wait for anyone to bother. I couldn’t have come this close to Tristan only to be beaten in the street by a bunch of kids who saw a fancy car.
I scrambled up and dug into my purse for the bills and change I’d been dumping into it for the last day and a half. “Here!” I shouted— and flung it, handful after handful, into the faces that were now so close to me. “Take it! Take it all!”
As the four boys watched money fall at their feet, I shoved my purse under my coat and ran. Only twelve blocks to the hotel. Only twelve blocks.
I didn’t know how many I actually covered before I collapsed onto a park bench in a place where no one threatened to relieve me of the rest of my belongings. The few people braving the cold just looked at me curiously and hurried on.
I pulled my hood around my face and doubled over, head between my knees on the bench. It was harder to breathe that way, but it was the closest thing to a fetal position I could achieve. All I could do was say God’s name and Tristan’s. Surely I must have fit right in with every other poor demented soul I’d come across in Philadelphia.
When my phone rang somewhere in the depths of my coat, I leaped from the bench and fumbled until I could get the thing to my ear.
“Are you Mrs. Soltani?” a female voice said.
“Yes.” I said. “Is this … are you Cricket?”
“Look, I want to help you out, but I don’t want it advertised—no names.”
The voice w
as young and hard and a bit contemptuous, but there was something confident about it that slowed me down enough to say, “Okay. Sorry. I’m not good at this.”
“Are you good at getting to the Chinatown Station?”
“Where is it?” I pawed in my bag for the map and had a flash of it still lying on the front seat of the rental car I’d just abandoned to a street gang.
“Where are you now?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“You really aren’t good at this, are you? Look around.”
I did. “There’s a statue of Benjamin Franklin.”
“Just go to it and stand there. Can you do that?”
I ignored the bite and said yes.
“I’ll be there in five.”
“How will I know you?”
Cricket gave me a harsh laugh. “Trust me, I think I’ll know you. Oh, and bring cash.”
I was halfway to the statue when I remembered I’d just thrown all my cash in the road like pigeon feed. I assured myself that I still had credit cards, that I would buy her anything she wanted if she would just take me to Tristan. I was so close. I had to be.
“God, please, just a little further,” I whispered. “I’ll do anything, I’ll even let Tristan go live with Aunt Pete if that’s what she wants—”
“Somehow I knew you’d be the one talking to yourself.”
I whipped around and looked into a pair of blue, almost violet eyes. They glittered cold and hard under eyebrows so studded with gold rings they looked like tiny Slinkies.
“Cricket?” I said.
“Either you have a really short memory,” she said in a low growl, “or you don’t want my help.”
“No! Sorry. Yes.”
“Whatever.” She tossed her head back, though I wasn’t sure why. All her hair was covered tightly by a piece of camouflage cloth. The austerity of it matched the sharp angles of her jaw and cheekbones. In another time, another place, she might have looked exotic. Right now, she just looked frightening.
“Cash?” she said.
