by Nancy Rue
“I can get cash,” I said, “if there’s an ATM. I had a little problem on my way here.”
I told her about my confrontation with the four boys in Kensington. “It was the only way I could think of to get them away from me,” I said.
“Did one of them have a big red birthmark on his neck?” she said.
“I didn’t see that. All I remember is one was wearing a blue bandanna thing, and he laughed like some kind of—”
“Okay, I know them.” She nodded. “You actually did the right thing. I can probably get your car back for you—”
“What I want is my daughter. Please, Cri— Do you know her? Do you know … Brandi?”
“You mean Tristan?”
My hands froze before I could get them to my mouth, and my fingers curved as if to hold the sound, the sound of someone saying her name.
“I knew the first time I saw her ID that Brandi wasn’t her real name. The picture doesn’t even look like her.” The violet eyes scanned me. “She looks like you.”
“I’m her mom,” I said lamely. “Can you take me to her?”
She nodded toward my purse. “I’m a little hungry. Why don’t we discuss it over lunch?”
I closed my eyes, forced myself not to smack her and say, “Look, kid, where’s my daughter?”
But this could be Tristan, anywhere in this city, conning some other girl’s mother into buying her a meal because she was close to starving.
She and her baby.
Cricket led me to a smoky sandwich shop where she devoured a Philly cheesesteak and talked at the same time.
“See, the thing is, I don’t know if she wants to see you,” she said. “She’s not like she was before. Actually”—she licked a finger thoughtfully—“I don’t know what she was like when she was living with you. First time I saw her, she came in the club where I dance, looking for a job. She could move—like, we could tell she had training but not in the, uh, genre we typically look for.”
“Like, a stripper?” I said.
Cricket gave me a look over the top of her Coke. “Exotic dancer. Anyway, she seemed like a smart kid. I thought I could teach her, but then she put on the costume and …” She swore. “She had to be five months pregnant.”
I could only nod for her to go on.
“There was something else about her too. I mean, kids on the street have a look. You know what I’m saying? I used to have it. They’re scared, on their own with nothing, but you can see this thing in their eyes, like what’s back where they came from is worse than this. So they get tough, and they don’t let anybody see they’re scared.” She shoved the remainder of her sandwich into her mouth and said, “Tristan didn’t have that look.”
I pressed both hands to my lips and held back everything. I wanted her to tell it all without stopping.
“So, like, I’m basically the mother figure with the kids in Kensington,” Cricket said. “I got myself a job, got off the street, but I can’t forget the younger ones are still down there.”
“Was she living there?” I said through my fingers.
“Yeah, she found a squat, and some of the girls told her about the club. Up to that point she hadn’t done any alcohol or anything as far as I could see, but I knew she wouldn’t make it down there unless she started getting some relief.”
“Drugs,” I said.
“Yeah, whatever. So I told her, ‘Look, there’s a place you can go where they’ll take you in, especially if you’re pregnant.’ I told her she’d kill that baby if she didn’t start taking care of it.” For the first time Cricket smiled, a smug grin that briefly lit up her eyes. “I got her with that—she freaked. When she finally stopped crying, I took her to my place, because there was no way anyone would believe she’s eighteen, and that shelter wouldn’t take her if she wasn’t. I put some makeup on her, gave her some clothes, tried to teach her some attitude—total loss …”
I closed my eyes. This was the moment; these were the words I’d left my entire self behind for. But I didn’t know what to do with it all, which of the barrage of questions to ask first.
“And about a month ago,” Cricket went on, “when I thought she might be able to pull it off, I took her to Covenant House. It’s up in Germantown. When I get your car back, you can drive there.” She sat sideways in the booth, legs stretched out, and concentrated on her Coke. “When she was with me, she cried every night. I said, ‘Look, if you miss your family that much, go home.’ ” Cricket pumped the straw up and down in the plastic cover. “Something about the whole deal was always weird to me. I mean, I went through the checklist: Was she abused? Molested? Neglected? Did the house burn down and kill everybody but her? She said it was none of that, and I believed her. I mean, here’s a kid who won’t be a hooker, won’t run drugs, won’t even steal a candy bar. Someone actually raised this kid.” She took a long pull on the straw and gave one of the Slinkies a flick. “I pried it out of her. She said she couldn’t go back because her father would probably throw her out.”
“What?” I said.
She put both hands up, one of them waving the Coke cup. “Lady, I’m just telling you what she said. I said to her, ‘What about your mother?’ ” She stopped. She seemed to measure me with her eyes.
“And?” I said.
“You sure you want to hear this?”
“If you don’t tell me exactly what she said in the next seven seconds …” I stopped there, because, of course, I had nothing to threaten her with. But Cricket actually seemed impressed.
“All right. She said, literally, ‘I want my mom,’ and she sobbed for, like, an hour. But she said her mom would do whatever her dad told her to, because that’s what she always did.” Cricket leveled her eyes at me. “I don’t see that. You’re a little out of your league, but seriously”—she plunked the cup down with authority—“I can’t picture anybody pushing you around.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Cricket used my cell phone to make a few calls and then walked with me to the Wyndham, instructing me en route to stay at the hotel and wait to hear from her.
“Maybe I should just take a bus up to Germantown,” I said.
“And then you’d have to walk three blocks in the dark.” We stopped in front of the hotel door. “You got lucky today. Don’t push it.”
It was hard to let her walk away, taking her memories of Tristan with her. As I watched, she turned and came back.
“I forgot to give you this,” she said. She pried a folded piece of paper out of her jeans pocket. “Tristan gave it to me when I dropped her off at Covenant. I thought you might want it.”
As the clicking of her teetering-tall boot heels faded down the sidewalk, I stared through the paper at Tristan’s round handwriting.
I managed to wait until I was in my room, huddled on the bed with a pillow to cling to, before I unfolded it.
“Saving Me for Her”
by Tristan Soltani
Dribbling down a corner
From a ceiling cracked and torn
A thin dark trickling mourner
A refugee forlorn
Trailing down the plaster
To an ending nil and small
Some long ago disaster
Stained it on the wall
I know its fatal season
As those looking on it see
A blot that has no reason
In this place to be
But can I stop in that same way
A puddle without meaning
Waiting to be washed away
Or painted out of being?
Once this trickle lost its place
It died there bleak and dry
It had no other tiny face
Growing down inside
Stirring deep inside me
Little heartbeat, little soul
Another life besides me
Wants to become whole
I am not a drop of rain
Once leaked in through a crack
I’m a mother bound for
pain
Needing her life back
So I can feed my baby
With more than dirty scars
In hopes that someday maybe
We will see the stars.
I smoothed my hands across the page, half expecting to feel a pulse beating in the words. Her other poems had screamed from her head. This one thrummed from a well of desperation. Only a tiny face and a little heartbeat were keeping her from trickling away.
It was a feeling I knew well.
I pulled the phone out of my bag and set it on the night table. Then on the bed. Then in my lap. Its silence was a torment.
I couldn’t tie up the hotel phone. I still had no way to charge the cell phone, so I didn’t want to run the battery down. But I wanted to call Aunt Pete. Hazel. Even Nick. Maybe Nick most of all. But what was I going to tell him? That his daughter had risked unspeakable horrors because she thought he would throw her out of the house if she came home pregnant?
I looked again at the poem. In all her other verses Tristan had agonized about Nick’s—and my—narrow limits and towering expectations. But even from her dizzyingly slanted point of view, it was an impossible stretch from there to being kicked into the street. Cricket herself had said there was more to it than that. Whatever it was crept along in the secret places between the lines of the poem, but it wouldn’t show itself to me.
The phone jangled me right off the bed. I snatched up the cell even as I realized it was the room phone.
“Mrs. Soltani,” said the first pleasant voice I’d heard all day, “this is Jackie at Hertz. We understand you ran into some difficulty today.”
Oh, lady, I thought, you don’t know the half of it.
She explained that a police report had been filed and that Hertz would be happy to deliver a replacement car to the Wyndham first thing in the morning. When she offered me another Lincoln Town Car, I fell over myself telling her to bring me the smallest vehicle in the lot.
Then I thanked God for Cricket and whatever arrangement she had with Officer Slater.
It was tempting to call Hertz back and ask if they could bring the car right then. Why couldn’t I just drive to Germantown tonight? Tristan and I could be back at Bethany Beach before morning.
But a deep weariness descended, and so did the knowledge that I couldn’t face the labyrinth of insulting streets again without at least trying to get some rest first. At the end of that twisted path, I wouldn’t be able to convince my daughter to come home if I felt as if I’d been hit by a crosstown bus.
I looked that way too I discovered when I dragged myself into the bathroom and caught my reflection in the mirror. The woman who stared back at me had raked her fingers through her hair so many times that it stood up in dark spikes all over her head. Raccoon rings hung in the skin around her eyes, and her lips were raw from the cold and from nervous teeth. If she’d had on makeup, it was gone now, except for the trails of mascara that had formed with her tears. She bore little resemblance to the woman who’d stepped up to the counter at Boardwalk Fries almost four months ago and asked for her daughter. Especially in her eyes. There was something in the eyes of my mirrored self that I had never seen there before. I was just too exhausted to figure out what it was.
The phone rang—the cell this time. It was Cricket, sounding smug and maternal.
“Did I take care of you, or did I take care of you?”
“You did,” I said. “I don’t know how I can repay you.”
“Just make her go home with you,” Cricket said, “no matter what your old man says.”
When we hung up, it was my “old man” I wanted to talk to. Despite what I had to tell him, I wanted him. I wanted him with me when I went to Covenant House so he could tell Tristan himself that she was wrong about him. Whatever else was holding her back, at least we could bridge that gap.
But Nick didn’t answer, and I couldn’t think how to leave a message.
“You can’t reach him,” Aunt Pete said when I called her, “because he’s on an airplane on his way home.”
“Thank You, God,” I said.
Aunt Pete grunted. “You might not say that when you hear how mad he is.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “Aunt Pete … I think I’ve found her.”
She was strangely quiet as I told her what I’d learned, leaving out my run-in with the thugs in Kensington. The only thing I heard was a low raspy sound. My flinty Aunt Pete was crying.
“This is almost over,” I told her. “I know I’m going to see her tomorrow.”
“I’m just a crybaby,” she said.
“That makes two of us.”
“Serena—” Her voice cracked. “I hate that I’m probably not gonna be around to watch this baby grow all the way up.”
While she went to get Max, I slid to the floor, my back against the bed. Until then it hadn’t hit me that I would be taking two children home, one of them yet to be born. Life as we’d known it seeped out under the door. Nothing was ever going to be the same, on any level.
“Mom?” a tiny voice said.
It sounded so fragile and young that I said, “Maxie?”
“Did you find Sissy?” she said.
This could not be the all-knowing ten-year-old I’d left two days before. I could almost hold her apprehension in the palm of my hand.
“I think so,” I said. “Maxie, are you okay?”
“Yes,” she said.
The no whispered through her breath.
“So … tell me about you,” I said.
“We’re having a Christmas play at church. They picked me and Sun for angels.”
“Of course they did.”
“Hazel says it’s casting against type, but I don’t know what that means. Mom?”
“Yeah, honey?”
“Are you ever coming home?”
I didn’t remind her that I’d only been gone for two days. It seemed to me, too, that I’d left Bethany Beach a lifetime ago.
“Just as soon as I find Tristan—maybe even tomorrow. It’s going to happen, and then …”
I didn’t finish, because I could envision nothing beyond walking up the steps of yet another shelter that had no more obligation to tell me whether Tristan was there than any of the rest of them had. I longed for the days when I could cheerfully chirp my girls or myself out of any dark place.
“I love you,” I said. “You and Aunt Pete make some Christmas cookies. Tristan’s going to want lots when she comes home.”
“She’s gonna want Aunt Pete’s cookies?” Max said.
That was a big enough piece of her outrageous self for me to cradle until I could get home. I had no idea how I was going to make the last four months up to her.
When Aunt Pete got back on the phone, I asked her not to tell Nick anything. I wanted to do that myself.
“He’ll be here five o’clock in the morning,” she said, the flint restored. “Be prepared for a phone call.”
I tried to wash the day off in the shower and rinsed out my underwear and called the front desk for a toothbrush and toothpaste. When I’d done everything I could to distract myself, I turned out the light.
I lay down long enough to know I’d lose my mind if I stayed that way any longer. I propped myself up against the pillows. Knees drawn up to my chin, I prayed for morning to come.
I could almost see God shaking His head. In fact, the picture was so clear in my mind, I was struck by how different He looked to me now. The comforting image of Jesus with a lap full of children had snapped out almost the moment I knew Tristan was gone. But when had this new, more rugged God developed?
This was a God who had borne the hard words I’d thrown at Him and never flinched. Who’d refused to allow me to slosh around in fear until I drowned. Who’d stood me up against the truth and wouldn’t let me deny it.
Now it wasn’t enough to simply stay safe in His lap. He wasn’t going to rock me in His arms tonight and let me sleep. There was no reassurance that this was all going to turn out the
way I wanted it to.
But His strength was in the room, so present and so solid that I spoke out loud to it: “You’re here.”
You came after me. Now stay close.
The catch in my heart, the gasp from my lips were fleeting. It really wasn’t surprising that the voice I’d thought was Tristan’s was His. It had been all along.
“I’ll stay close,” I whispered. “There’s nowhere else I can be.”
I slid down on my side, facing the window, and waited for dawn.
At seven I woke up, startled and confused. I searched under the covers for my cell, but there were no missed calls. The phone, in fact, was dead.
I’d have to charge it in the car. What car? When would that be here? Where was Covenant House? Where was Germantown, for that matter?
Stay close.
Hard to do when I was running around the room, plucking at things. Stay close. Take another shower. Put on the same clothes for the third day in a row. Order some breakfast and choke it down.
Playing each moment close to my chest like a hand of cards, I got directions from the concierge, signed for the Chevrolet Cobalt, and bought an overpriced sweatshirt from the gift shop that said “City of Brotherly Love” on the front. I changed in the lobby rest room and headed north for Germantown, charging the phone on the way.
The Philly streets were clogged with Monday morning traffic, but wide, tree-lined Lincoln Drive that led me through RittenhouseTown and into Germantown was uncluttered with cars and actually had a nostalgic feel. Germantown had once been largely a Quaker area, the concierge had told me, and some of their quiet patience seemed to remain.
The end of School House Road dumped me into a ghostly part of town where prosperity had obviously packed up and left years ago. Still, on the corner was the Christian Center whose banner proclaimed that “God created people who cannot be destroyed.” Even the crooked back streets that finally took me to Covenant House, though potholed and lined with incongruous flower shops and long-suffering pizza joints, weren’t as threatening as the dead ends I’d reached in my search for Tristan so far.
