by Nancy Rue
“Not very long after she started to work there,” she said finally. “Maybe two weeks.”
“So this was three months ago?” I said. Hope dropped out of sight once more. “If it was that long ago, then he probably didn’t have anything to do with Tristan’s disappearance.”
Aylana’s brows drew together as if I’d just missed the point of the story entirely. “He didn’t go away after that. Tristan came back the first night that she went with him, eyes all shiny, smiling in that way.”
“What way?”
She touched my elbow. “That way you looked at your husband when you were young and in love.”
“In love?”
“This is a surprise to you.” Aylana nodded. “Tristan told me her father wouldn’t let her date. She wasn’t exactly dating him. I don’t think so. She just spent her breaks with him.”
“Tristan?” I said. “Are you sure?”
“Oh, yes.”
I pressed my temples with my fingertips. Images flashed, foreign images—Tristan leaning over the counter, smiling coyly at a stranger; Tristan slipping out the side door of Boardwalk Fries and lacing her fingers through his as they stole down the steps; Tristan running to meet him on the boardwalk Thursday night and disappearing into some dark corner of his life. Even in my mind, she was no one I recognized.
“You okay?”
I opened my eyes. “You’re sure?” I said. “Inga and Yuri never mentioned him. Her best friend didn’t tell me.”
“No one else knew,” Aylana said. “I only guessed because I know about these things.”
“Who is he?”
Aylana looked startled, as if she was realizing for the first time that this was not once upon a time, that it might not be happily ever after.
“I don’t know his name for sure.”
She glanced down at my hand, which was currently squeezing her arm. I didn’t know how it had gotten there, and I didn’t let go.
“She said his name sometimes when he teased her, but it wasn’t a real name. It was something he was called—”
“A nickname?” I said.
“Yes! It began with …” She made a hissing sound. “Scooter. Snake. No. I can’t remember!”
She put her hand over mine. Her eyes were enormous and pleading. “I am so sorry. It was innocent, I thought.”
“So he didn’t seem dangerous to you? Not threatening?”
“No, no! He was …” She pulled gently away and held her hands out from her face as if she were shaping an aura. “Dark sometimes. Then sometimes not. What do you call that?”
“Moody?” I said.
She snapped her fingers. “Right. Guys are like that, but he was more.”
“You said you didn’t know what he looked like, but do you really?”
Aylana deflated. “No. I never looked at him close. He was not my type, you know? Too skinny. Too much lips. And”—she leaned in—“he used bleach on his hair. I hate that.”
I did too. I hated everything about him.
“Please,” I said, “will you tell the detective all this?” I saw her hesitation. “Please. We have to find her.”
I covered my mouth, and she folded her arms around me, the scantily clad girl with the eyebrow ring who knew a secret my daughter hadn’t told me.
“I’ll help,” she said.
When Ed Malone arrived to question Aylana, Nick wasn’t with him. He didn’t get home until both of them were gone. By then, I was actually dozing on the family-room couch. Some of the anxiety had ebbed away when Ed told me that even though a secret boyfriend whose nickname started with an S didn’t give them much to go on, they would follow up. The space that a piece of hopelessness left filled up with fatigue too big to deny. Nick found me just on the edge of a nap.
“Don’t go waking her up, Nicky,” I heard Aunt Pete say.
“I’m not asleep.” I propped up on an elbow. Nick strode across the room and dragged one of the wicker chairs closer to the couch. His face was pinching something back.
“What?” I said.
“Aunt Pete told me about Aylana.”
“It could be a good thing, couldn’t it?” I said.
“We don’t even know if it’s true.”
I blinked at him. He ran the telltale hand down the back of his head. “Hon, why didn’t you call me before you brought Malone back over here to question her again?”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re already upset. Then the girl shows up again with this story about Tristan having a boyfriend.” He stopped to crinkle his face in disbelief. “I wish you’d called me first.”
I could only stare at him.
“From now on, let’s discuss things.” He kissed my forehead and then dropped himself against the back of the chair. The weariness was palpable. “Is this really happening, Serena?”
Judging from the fear that was once again pressing down on me, I had to say yes.
The rest of the afternoon and evening held enough distractions to keep me from flattening completely. Tristan’s dance teacher brought over a larger-than-life homemade card from the girls in the studio. An older couple from church delivered a bushel each of corn and tomatoes. Ring-to-ring phone calls offered everything from prayers to tranquilizers.
But the quiet of the night was brutal. Around 4:00 a.m. it finally beat me into an exhausted sleep, riddled with dreams of a hissing boy with huge lips and Tristan dressed in Aylana’s halter top and Nick telling Rebecca to hit me over the head with the cast-iron skillet if I wasn’t asleep in twenty minutes. Just as the frying pan was coming at me, I sat straight up in bed and cried out, “I can’t help it! I can’t sleep until she comes home!”
There was no one there to argue with me. Slats of sunlight striped the hardwood floor, and the clock winked a digital 9:15. Propped against it was a note:
Hon, we’ve gone to church. You needed to sleep. You’re safe—someone’s watching the house.
Nicky
I touched the paper, touched the pillow where his head had been. His troubled head. He’d muttered things in his sleep before I finally drifted off, and although I couldn’t decipher the words, the threatening tone was more than clear. I’d seldom heard Nick go beyond “a little bit cranky.” He gritted his teeth at times, tightened his jaw muscles, and then he usually dug in for the fix. Nothing was worth yelling about or punching at when a solution was just a calm thought away.
That wasn’t working for Nick now. My usual smile and reduction to “just a little bit scary” wasn’t working for me, either. Alien tactics were rising up in both of us.
As alien as some part of Tristan now was. If Aylana was telling the truth, my daughter must know how to talk to a boy and how to make fifteen minutes with him put a glow on her face. That was hard to fathom.
Just three years before, when Tristan was barely thirteen, she’d climbed off the bus one day, puffy eyed and silent. All the way home from the bus stop, I tried to coax out of her what was wrong, but she wouldn’t even confess to being upset, as if I might have somehow missed her spine curved miserably into a question mark and the vulnerable looseness around her mouth. I found her sobbing in her room an hour later.
“I hate boys,” she said.
This was nothing new. Boys had been tormenting her since kindergarten with their nose picking and their alphabet burping and their armpit noise making. There had been several traumas over preadolescent males who wouldn’t cooperate on group projects and who laughed high and silly when she practiced en pointe on the playground. But she’d never carried on like this before.
“Why do we hate boys today?” I said. I motioned for her to roll over so I could rub her back.
“They won’t leave me alone, especially Ian.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Writing me notes. Following me around. Talking to me all the time.”
“That jackal,” I said.
“Mo-om, I’m serious!” Tristan flipped herself over to face me, and I stifled a
grin.
“Is he being mean?” I said.
She flattened her hands, fingers spread jazz style against the bedspread and gave an exasperated sigh. “No! But he’s being weird.” She came up on her elbows, brown eyes large as moons. “He’s all ‘Do you like me?’ and ‘Do you want to go out?’ ” The eyes grew wider. “Honest, Mom, I didn’t do anything to make him do that. I know I’m not allowed to like boys. And I so don’t!”
“Honey, we never said you couldn’t like boys.”
“Daddy did. He said they were all absurd little creeps and to stay away from them.”
I had to work at not laughing. “Daddy was kidding, baby girl. You can’t date, but, honey, you’re precious. Why wouldn’t some boy like you?”
“He can’t!” she cried. And then her wonderful, wide-open face crumpled into pubescent agony. “I don’t know what to do about it!”
“You don’t have to do anything,” I said. “Just be your nice, sweet self, okay?”
There hadn’t been any complaints about Ian after that. Jessica went boy crazy the next year, and I heard references from her to this hottie and that loser. Tristan told her more than once in my presence to give it a rest.
It was painful to think that something, or someone, had changed her mind.
The bed was suddenly a mattress of tacks again. I climbed out and pulled on Capris and a top before I pushed aside the sheers at our reading-nook window to see who was “watching the house.” Ed Malone looked up from a newspaper he appeared to be reading standing up. He lowered one foot from the parking lot curb and waved. I waved back and pointed downstairs.
I met him on the side porch with two cups of coffee. Nick had obviously beaten Aunt Pete to the pot because it was several shades lighter than mud. Ed took one cup and smiled sheepishly down at his cutoff sweat shorts and sleeveless T-shirt. At one time it had probably said “Bethany Beach” on the front, but the letters were cracked and disintegrating into faded blue confetti.
“Im off-duty,” he said. “I was out taking a bike ride and thought I’d let the uni take off. He was here all night.”
“Uni?” I said.
“Uniformed officer.” Ed gave me a sad look. “I guess you haven’t had much reason to learn police lingo, have you?”
“I’ve never even had a speeding ticket.”
He put his fist softly to his mouth. There was no wedding ring, but I asked anyway, “Do you have kids?”
“No. I can’t come close to imagining what you folks are going through.”
His eyes belied that. I suspected that even now they were drawing up a pretty clear image of our agony. Especially when he once again tilted his head.
“What?” I said.
He set the mug on the porch railing and leaned, ankles crossed. “Mrs. Soltani—”
“Serena.”
“Serena. Look, I want to make sure you know we’re still treating Tristan’s disappearance like an abduction.” I looked down into the blackness of my coffee. “The good news is—”
My head came up, and he winced. Good was obviously too strong a word.
“I don’t want to give you false hope,” he said. “But we did find out when we canvassed the boardwalk again that every lifeguard on the eastern shore has a nickname.”
“What’s the bad news?” I said.
He smiled at me. “It’s not that bad. So far nobody on the Bethany Beach squad has a nickname that starts with S, but this isn’t the only beach. He could be from Ocean City, Fenwick—”
“And that could be why Aylana didn’t know him,” I said.
Ed grinned again. I noticed this time that his two front teeth overlapped slightly. “Yeah, I get the feeling she’s pretty much checked out every male in this territory.”
My eyes stung. “I hope you don’t think that about Tristan. It’s hard for us to believe she even had one boyfriend.”
“Here’s the deal,” he said. “I’ve spent the better part of the last forty-eight hours with the Soltanis. I think I have a pretty good feel for your family. You’re not parents who raised”—his lips twitched— “an Aylana.”
I tried to say “thank you,” but my throat had closed off.
“It’s okay,” he said.
It seemed impossible that the workweek could start without a trace of Tristan.
Not a call. Not a scrap of a clue. Max wanted to know why nobody had asked for Tristan’s comb or her toothbrush so they would have her DNA.
“Where does she get this stuff?” Nick asked me Monday morning as we sat at the kitchen bar while Aunt Pete charred the bacon.
“She might be watching just a bit too much TV right now,” I said.
Nick nodded. “Poor kid. I guess there isn’t much to do when you’re ten and you can hardly go outside.”
“Which is ridiculous,” Aunt Pete said. She rapped her knuckles on the window. “We’ve got Junior staked out in the parking lot and that detective hovering around like Sherlock Holmes. Why can’t one of them give us an escort?” She walked back to the stove, eyes squinting down to nothing. “I’ve got half a mind to stick Maxine in sunglasses and a wig and at least take her down the boardwalk—”
“No boardwalk,” Nick said.
Aunt Pete turned and shoved the bacon around in the pan. Nick stared at his hands.
Shortly thereafter he left to check in at the office and make sure things were taken care of. I promised three times to call him on his cell phone if anything at all came up before he got back. As he drove away, I secretly wished I had somewhere to go, some activity that would keep me sane. There was nothing to do but wait.
Aunt Pete, however, had other ideas. Around nine, she folded the newspaper with a vengeance and said, “Nobody told me I couldn’t leave the house.” She disappeared into her room and came down twenty minutes later wearing the red hat and the sarong with a Phillies T-shirt and carrying the ubiquitous woven bag.
“Where are you going?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just know it’s not here.”
Max was still asleep. The laundry was folded Rebecca-neat in drawers. We had enough prepared meals to last us until Halloween. No horizontal plane in the house had ever been so dust free. I was about to take another dive into panic when someone knocked on the front door. I peeked out, Max-style, to see Officer Frankie with a woman who looked vaguely familiar. Since every new face was a possibility, I whipped open the door.
It took me a full ten seconds to realize the woman was Hazel, from Thursday night’s moms’ meeting. It seemed to take her equally-long to recognize me.
“Geez,” she said, “you look terrible.”
Officer Frankie straightened his shoulders, his pimpled face already on its way to scarlet. He looked a little bit huffy.
“It’s okay,” I said to him.
He looked doubtfully at Hazel as I let her in.
“I’d feel real protected by Officer Clearasil there,” she said, jerking her thumb toward the closed door. She sounded as if she’d smoked a pack of Marlboros already that morning. The blue-against-leather eyes scanned what she could see of the house and came back to me.
“I read it in the paper this morning,” she said. “Have you flipped out yet? I’d have flipped out.”
“I can’t flip out,” I said.
She surveyed me for a long moment. “I highly recommend it,” she said. “Looks like you’ve got all your emotions stuffed into those carry-on bags under your eyes.”
I heard myself laugh. It was a pale, wan rendition of my Marlene Dietrich guffaw, but it was the first one that had come out of me since the last time I’d talked to Hazel. Ten minutes before I had discovered my daughter was gone.
“You want some coffee?” I said.
At first Hazel turned down my offer. “The brood’s out in the car,” she said.
“They can come in,” I said, trying to remember how many children she’d reported having. She must have told us that night; she’d shared everything else about her life.
“You got a yard?” she said. She gazed around at the foyer. “They could trash this place in about seven seconds.”
I was about to give her an automatic “They can’t hurt anything in here” when a horn blared from the direction of the parking lot, too long and obnoxious to be a car alarm.
“I’m about to bust some behinds,” Hazel said and flung open the front door.
I stood on the porch while she marched to an ancient Suburban that might once have been red. It was now a milky pink in the places where rust hadn’t eaten it away. Officer Frankie was bent at the waist, peering in and knocking on the driver’s side window. I could just make out a bouncing brown shape behind the wheel.
“Hey, knock it off!” Hazel yelled. “Or so help me I’ll take you down.”
I thought at first she was talking to Officer Frankie until she all but shoved him out of the way and yanked the door open, releasing a metal-on-metal screech and a small, mocha-colored boy who bolted across the parking lot.
“Grab him, would you?” Hazel hollered at Officer Frankie. Her inflection implied that he should have foreseen the child’s escape and been ready with the SWAT team.
She had her hands full with the two who erupted from the second seat—a chunky nine-ish boy with spikes of hair I was sure Hazel had colored from her own bottle and a frighteningly thin preadolescent girl in Raggedy Ann tresses whose legs seemed to sprout directly out of her neck like a three-year-old’s drawing.
“Don’t let those dogs out,” Hazel growled at them. But two lanky Irish setters spilled onto the parking lot, rolled entangled in each other several times, and shook free to chase the little horn honker as he made for the beach with Officer Frankie in hot pursuit.
Yes, Hazel I thought, I do have a yard. But I don’t think it’s big enough.
She turned to me, one hand clamped around the blond tank-shaped boy she had secured under her arm, the other poised to smack the almost nonexistent behind of the girl.
“You can change your mind about that coffee,” she said.
I considered it. Watch a junior wrecking crew demolish my backyard? Or spend the day shoving my fears into corners until one of them finally sprang loose and mauled me? It didn’t take much for me to make a decision.