by Nancy Rue
We squeezed hands, and he left the library, phone pressed to his ear. His footsteps faded upward on the stairs. I felt another rush of doubt that set me once again pacing in my cage.
Ed called as the Mentoring Moms were packing up to leave. The press conference was set for the next morning at nine.
“You want me here?” Lissa said to me. She put her hand on my arm. “I could at least help you pick out something to wear.” She cringed. “That sounded so shallow, Serena. I’m sorry. I just have no idea what you need to hear, you know?”
“As soon as I figure it out, I’ll tell you,” I said. I gave her the last smile I had. She left looking almost transparent, the tears and the pity and the fear shivering just beneath the surface. She put her arm around Justin and buried her fingers in the wet spikes of his red hair as they headed for the door.
Every other mother who had heard our story that day was, I knew, watching her children, devouring the little world around them with her eyes and seeing them as fragile eggs. There would be cuddling in front of the television that night. Quiet talks at bedtime about the dangers of strangers. Tiptoed walks into bedrooms in the wee hours to make sure their precious ones were warm and peaceful and still there.
I wished I were one of those mothers.
It was another almost sleepless night. Nick insisted that we go to bed and at least rest. I lay there listening to Max breathe the deep, even sleep that only a ten-year-old can achieve. She was curled up on the love seat in our reading nook, and Nick lay on the side of our bed closest to her, taut as an unspent spring. He dozed off, but his sleep was so light and fitful, I tried to stay perfectly still and not disturb him.
Before she left that day, Rebecca told me the congregation would be holding an all-night vigil at the church. Several times during the bleakest hours of predawn morning I considered joining them.
The candles would be spreading their light like little Christs. The familiar beeswax smell, the warm hands of friends in a circle, the God-trusting voices—they would all offer comfort. It was the same kind of comfort I had provided for other people. Lissa when her grandmother had died. Rebecca when Isaiah was diagnosed with asthma. Tristan when she wasn’t chosen to play Clara in The Nutcracker ballet. Those were the times I’d considered my prayer life and my commitment to God to be the most ripe and whole, as if it had to be enough for all of us.
But it seemed to be shriveling up. Over and over that night I turned to God and saw only a tsunami of terror coming for me. I whispered, “Father, please …” and got no further. All I heard were my own desperate thoughts screaming their what-ifs at me.
It was hard to hope that the prayers being lifted for us that very moment would bring Tristan home. Hope itself was too dangerous to pray for, and as I faced the dark predawn, I realized one of the reasons why.
For the first time, I was afraid God would say no.
Chapter Five
I was standing in my walk-in closet the next morning, staring blindly at my wardrobe, when Nick took me by the elbow and steered me back to bed and made me lie down.
“There isn’t going to be a press conference,” he said.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
He put an arm up on the bedpost. “All the press is after is a story. I don’t want you up there being stared at like a zoo animal. Lissa told me the kind of stuff they were asking yesterday when they thought she was you, and I don’t think that’s going to bring Tristan home.”
I lay stiff, looking up at him. A guttural sound I’d never heard myself make before escaped from my throat.
“Come on, hon,” he said. “Cry, scream, whatever you have to do. It’s just us here now.”
I couldn’t. Anxiety surged through me and left me wilted. I wanted Nick to hold me so it couldn’t come back, and I put my arms up.
“I don’t think a big press conference is a good idea,” he said into my hair. “Malone thinks he knows what he’s doing, but he doesn’t know you.” He put his hands on the sides of my head and tilted it toward him, searching my face as if I, too, were about to disappear. “Your job right now is to stay as calm as you can, for Max. She needs her mom strong. If she sees you coming apart, what’s going to hold her together? Look—”
There was a light tap on the bedroom door. “That detective wants to talk to you guys,” Max said in a raspy whisper.
“We’ll be right down,” Nick said. “Who’s with you?”
“Right this very second, nobody. I gave my bodyguard a coffee break.”
I started for the door, but Nick held on to me. “Serena,” he said, “we’re going to find her. Focus on Max. Please, hon.”
I nodded. And then my mind raced straight to Tristan. Right now, maybe somehow, somewhere she was staring at her own picture on a TV screen. Maybe she was waiting for me to appear and plead for her return. Maybe the press conference Nick said we shouldn’t do would give her something to hold on to.
“Please,” I whispered. I just didn’t know to whom.
If Ed Malone was disappointed that we weren’t doing the press conference, he didn’t show it. He said putting Tristan’s picture on the news was having the desired effect. The police station had reported several calls already.
“Nothing much to go on yet,” he said, “but it’s still early.”
He left with Nick to meet with two FBI agents and get their take on the possible kidnapping angle. Max reported from her post at the foyer window that the same cop from yesterday was out there in his car.
“What is he, twelve?” Aunt Pete said as she peered out the window. Then she went back to dusting the entire house with pink chenille.
Another detective, younger and, according to Max, geekier than Ed Malone, brought a copy of the flier they were distributing. I stood in the middle of the foyer and stared back at the girl who smiled from the page.
She couldn’t have been Tristan. She had my daughter’s bashful smile, her wide eyes, the wisps of hair that danced across her forehead. This girl lowered her chin the way my daughter did. But she couldn’t be Tristan, not with the words in bold type beneath her picture: Have You Seen This Child?
The “pedigree information” was listed—her height, her weight, her Boardwalk Fries uniform. There was no mention of her bell of a laugh or the way she pirouetted across the kitchen or how much she loved mustard on a hot pretzel. If this girl was my Tristan, how could they find her without knowing those things?
“Jody Johnstone just called,” Christine said. She’d materialized beside me, clipboard in hand. “She’s mobilized a group of moms and daughters to help distribute fliers.”
“I wanna go!” Max said.
“Over your father’s dead body,” Aunt Pete said. She was at the top of the stairs, polishing the railing.
I put an arm around Max and nudged her toward the living room. She flopped into one of the armless chairs, limbs sprawled.
“You guys always said if anybody ever stole me, they’d bring me right back, so I don’t know what you’re worried about.”
“What makes you think we’re afraid somebody’s going to steal you?” I said in a too-high voice.
Max rolled her eyes. “I’m not a moron.” She pulled her knees to her chest and stretched her shirt down to her toes. I realized she was wearing one of Tristan’s tees. The one with Baryshnikov on it.
“Nobody’s gonna take me, Mom. I’d kick and scream and bite. You know, be my usual charming self.”
She grinned. I sat on the couch and held out my arms to her, and she came to me and curled up in my lap. She was solid in my hug, such a different feel from Tristan. The willowy Tristan who only two days ago had seemed to turn into a woman before my eyes. Now that loss of little-girlness made her look even more vulnerable in my mind, too fragile for whatever she was headed for.
We had been talking about her hair that night. That alone had nearly moved her to tears. I couldn’t bear to think of her coping with anything worse. I couldn’t bear it.
“I don�
��t see why we can’t at least go down to the beach,” Max was saying. “You can watch me, and”—she leaned closer—“who’s gonna come near us with Aunt Pete there? You gotta admit she’s pretty scary looking.”
“I heard that,” Aunt Pete called from the kitchen.
Max concealed a grin with her hand.
“The kid’s got a point.” Aunt Pete appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands on the bathrobe. “We can watch her down on the beach as easy as we can in the house. Junior out there can stand guard instead of sleeping in that patrol car like he’s doing now.” She nodded toward the thumb I was gnawing. The nail was long gone, the cuticle bleeding. “If we don’t get out of this place, we’re all three gonna go batty.”
I squeezed Max, anticipating something like “You’re already gone, Aunt P.” coming out of her mouth.
“Nick was pretty clear on our staying inside,” I said.
“No, he wasn’t,” Max said. “He said to watch me like a hawk and stay by the phone. He didn’t say it couldn’t be the cell phone.”
“Little pitchers have big ears,” Aunt Pete said. “I’ll pack a picnic.”
“I’m not hungry,” Max said quickly. She leaped from my lap. “Let’s just go.”
The young policeman was summoned. His name, Christine told us when she arrived to man the home phone, was Frankie Bales.
Aunt Pete loaded herself up with her personal beach chair, a thermos of her undrinkable iced tea, and the woven turquoise bag the size of a mail satchel that she spent most of her time on the beach digging through as if the secrets of the universe lay in the bottom.
I’d wondered several times that summer how Aunt Pete had ever managed when she and her husband, the legendary Uncle Hank Bernardi, used to travel. They’d never had children, which Max had pointed out to me was probably a good thing or she would have killed them with her cooking. Until Uncle Hank’s death two years before, they had spent the years after his retirement “doing” every tourist attraction on four continents. She had sent us postcards that said variations of “We did the Louvre, Versailles, and the Eiffel Tower this morning. We’ll do the Left Bank this afternoon.” When Uncle Hank had died of a sudden massive heart attack at age eighty-two, Africa, South America, and Antarctica were left undone.
I didn’t know Aunt Pete or Uncle Hank well back then; the postcards and boxes of magnets and T-shirts and salt and pepper shakers shaped like English phone booths and Japanese pagodas were my only contact with them. Most of what I knew of them came from Nick’s stories of his childhood. Back then, Uncle Hank owned two movie theaters in Philadelphia and made sure Nick came up to visit from Bethany Beach at least once a month to see as many showings of the current films as he wanted and to consume popcorn and Milk Duds until he was bloated or threw up, whichever came last. Aunt Pete did the books and ordered the candy and generally minded the more mundane aspects of the movie theater business. According to Nick, she also minded everyone else’s business. She hadn’t lost her touch for that.
“You’re going out too far!” she yelled at Max. She jabbed me with her elbow. “She’s going out too far, Serena.”
Max was about two yards from shore with her back to us, dancing in front of a wave and tugging one side of her polka-dotted bathing suit down over her bottom only because she knew I’d be looking. Max herself never cared that her suit stayed in a permanent wedgie. As we watched, she plunged into the wave, headfirst, and swam out to conquer the next one.
I could almost see her out there at age four, when Nick taught her and Tristan, then ten, how to ride the waves. Nick would stand before the oncoming surf, a hand holding on to the back straps of their bathing suits.
“This one, Daddy!” Max had squealed that first day.
“No!” Tristan cried. “It’s too big!”
“Not big enough!” Nick said. He lifted them both above the wave with their slippery legs dangling in the air. Tristan’s giggle rang on the breeze like a tiny bell.
“We have to wait for just the right one,” Nick had told them. “And here it comes. Ready?”
“Yes!” Max squealed.
“No!” Tristan cried.
“Swim!” Nick shouted. “Swim till I tell you to stop!”
He swam between them as the girls wriggled through the water, Max free as a little fish, Tristan in a rhythm schooled by hours of swimming lessons. I stood up on the beach, shielding my eyes with my hand and assuring myself that Nick wouldn’t let them drown. My babies looked so small out there—
“Okay, let go and ride it in!” Nick called to them.
Max let the wave carry her all the way to the shore, where her chunky little form bounced in a gale of giggles. Tristan stuck her arms out in front of her, straight and stiff. As she skimmed closer, I saw that her face was taut with the effort to get it just right.
I closed my eyes now. I could hear her chirping, “Was that good, Daddy?” I could smell her delicious concoction of sunblock and Life-savers and cucumber-melon shampoo.
The only thing I couldn’t do was ask her, “Tristan, baby girl, where are you?”
Now Max rode a breaker in, sliding over the soaked sand on her belly, and proclaimed, “Yes!”
“You were out too far,” Aunt Pete said. She went back to rummaging through the woven bag and emerged with a huge, floppy-brimmed red hat. She situated it on her head and dug in again for the sarong she’d bought when she and Uncle Hank “did” New Delhi. It was as inevitable on the beach as the chenille bathrobe was in the house.
Max flung herself down on her knees in the soft part of the sand, lower legs splayed out behind her at forty-five-degree angles, and dug with a vengeance.
“Another sandcastle,” Aunt Pete said. “I don’t know why she keeps building them. Some jerk always comes along and ruins them.”
“I don’t know, either,” I said. My hope was slipping again. I told myself it was from sleeping for only two hours just before dawn. But even as I clutched my cell phone between both hands, the hope of Tristan’s calling was dwindling to nothing.
What would she say at this point? I’d already ruled out “Mom, I’m sorry. I did something stupid.” And “Mom, please come get me. I’ll never do this again.” I couldn’t allow myself to think “Mom, I’m okay. They haven’t hurt me.” Or “Mom, please do everything they say, or they’ll do something terrible to me.”
Tristan wouldn’t be able to say those words anyway. If she had been abducted, the terror of it would have jolted her into shock. She would be doing what I wanted to do—shut down, close in, block out. She’d be mummified by fear.
I sat straight up and tried to breathe. I’d never known panic could be suffocating. But then I’d never felt panic like this before.
“Hey, Mom,” Max called from the hole she was now thigh-deep in.
“Hay is for horses,” Aunt Pete said. She produced a People magazine and an industrial-sized bottle of sunscreen from the bag.
“No, look.” Max pointed toward the south end of “our” beach. “It’s that Mylanta girl.”
“Mylanta?” Aunt Pete said. “What are you talking about, child?”
Aylana. It was Aylana, standing on the other side of the fence with Officer Frankie. He beckoned me over with his hand, which was entirely unnecessary because I was already halfway there.
The sun glinted from Aylana’s eyebrow ring and her earrings and the chain below her waist that followed the dangerous plunge of her white shorts. Her halter top was little more than a nod to the American custom of covering essential body parts on the beach. Officer Frankie was the color of a radish, and he kept his eyes fixed on me.
“Sorry for the interruption, Mrs. Soltani,” he said. His voice squeaked into soprano range.
“It’s okay,” I said. “She’s a friend.”
As if to prove it, Aylana put her cheek next to mine. “I want to talk to you alone,” she whispered.
“You need me?” Officer Frankie said. By now he could barely speak at all. Any other time, my imp-
self would have wondered which was the bigger favor to him, having him stay or sending him away.
“We’re okay,” I said.
I glanced behind me. Aunt Pete was standing over Max, who appeared to be completely absorbed in the sandcastle. Neither of them was fooling me.
Aylana looked toward the house. “Her father isn’t here, is he?”
“Tristan’s father?” I said. “No—”
“Good. There is something I need to tell you, and I don’t want him to hear. He’s violent, your husband.”
“He’s just a little bit cranky right now,” I said. That couldn’t have sounded more ridiculous, I knew. It was just my automatic response when Nick snapped at one of the girls or Max pouted at the dinner table or Donald Rumsfeld cut somebody off at a news conference.
Nick had obviously redefined the word cranky for Aylana. “He scared me,” she said. “I was afraid to tell what I know.”
I felt myself going still. “What do you know?”
“That boy, the one I said comes just for fries—”
“What? What about him?”
“He came a lot. I mean, a lot.” She shook her head, ponytail swinging. “I lied before. Fries, no fries—he came to talk to her. I told her he liked her. You know, he was interested in her, and at first, no, she said there was no way, all those things, because she doesn’t know how beautiful she is.”
“At first,” I said. My lips barely parted to speak. I was afraid if I moved, some vital piece of this would fall away and be lost.
“He was into her,” she went on. “He wasn’t giving up, kept asking her to go on break with him, go on break. And finally one night she did.”
“She left with him?”
“Just for fifteen minutes.”
I wanted to tell her she was hallucinating. At the very least she was making it up. But I said, “When was that?”
Aylana toyed with a hoop earring and gazed at the sand. Her face was lit up, as if she were enchanting me with a fairy tale.