by Nancy Rue
“Serena, let me see it!”
“Not if you’re going to call her a liar,” I said.
It stopped both of us in midbreath. My heart was pounding, but I couldn’t let go of the paper. Nick looked at me as if I had just walked in off the street. I watched him calm himself.
“Okay, hon, let’s not blow this out of proportion. These are the writings of a mixed-up kid.”
“Our kid!” I said. I pressed the poem to my chest.
“Sure doesn’t sound like our kid. This counselor probably had her digging around for what made her flip out in the classroom, and you know Tristan. She was just trying to please.”
Just smiling
Just dancing
Just knowing that I am not free.
“I think that’s the problem,” I said.
“What problem?” Nick held out the poem he’d crumpled. “This is something she made up when all that was really going on with her was probably hormones.”
“PMS did not make our daughter run away!” I said.
“Who said she ran away? The counselor? The lady with all the answers?”
Nick hurled Tristan’s balled-up poem across the room. It hit the window and dropped to the floor. I went to it and smoothed it out and folded it with the other one. With both of them held to my lips, I cried silently out at the ocean. Nick’s arms came around me.
“I’m sorry, hon.” The words were murmured and thick. “I hate to see you grasping at straws. It’s just getting you all upset, and you can’t even think straight.”
I pushed his hands away with my forearms and moved out of his reach. “No, Nicky,” I said. “For the first time since this happened, I am thinking straight. I don’t like what I’m finding out, but we have to face it. It could lead us to Tristan.”
“There’s nothing to face.” Nick’s mouth stiffened. “Somebody took Tristan against her will—whether it was that kid Zabriski or somebody trying to get me. We’re trying to hunt him down and bring her home.”
“You and your private investigator?” I said.
Nick’s eyes flicked away. “I’m in touch with Ed Malone daily too.”
“And what does he say?”
“Not much. But we will find her, Serena, and reading things into it that just aren’t there isn’t going to help.”
“Why haven’t you told me you talk to Detective Malone every day?” I was shouting, and my voice was so unaccustomed to that volume that it was wobbling like toddler legs.
“Because I was afraid of this!”
“What?”
“This.” Nick held out both hands. “You getting yourself all upset and losing control—”
“Don’t tell me I’m losing control! My daughter has been missing for a month. Nobody knows where she is, and now I’m finding out maybe she doesn’t want to come home!”
“Don’t go there, Serena.” Nick’s jaw muscles flexed. “And don’t go back into Tristan’s room. It’s not good for you, and it’s not telling us anything.”
I stared at him. I didn’t say a word. He tried to reach for me, but I turned away.
“Why don’t you give me that stuff?” he said.
“What stuff?” I said.
“Those poems or whatever they are.”
“Why, if they aren’t going to tell you anything?”
“Mom?” Max said from the other side of the door.
I gave Nick a long look before he went to open it.
“Hey, short stuff,” he said.
“Hi. Is Mom here?”
I waved to her from the window.
“Nice to see you again too,” Nick said.
“I said hi.” She turned to me. “Is it okay if I write on my old T-shirts?”
The pure simplicity of it brought me to tears. “What’s up?” I said.
“Me and Sun are starting our own club.”
“Me and Sun?” Nick said. “What kind of grammar is that?”
The hairs on the back of my neck bristled. “You’re making club T-shirts?” I said to Max.
“And secret cards. Our club’s gonna be way cooler than Ashley’s.”
“Way cooler,” I said. “Sure. Go for it.”
“Excuse me,” Max said to Nick. She stepped around him.
“I don’t like her attitude,” Nick said when she was gone.
I stepped around him too.
Chapter Twelve
Nick and I spoke very little over the next few days. I went through Tristan’s room several more times but didn’t uncover any more poems, so I spent a lot of time studying the two I had. I used the iron to press the wrinkles out of the one Nick had crumpled.
“Now what are you doing, Serena?” Aunt Pete said when she found me at the ironing board in the laundry room on Thursday.
I told her. After all the ways she’d supported me, she had a right to know. I even let her read both poems.
“It doesn’t surprise me at all,” she said when she was through. “Nicky runs those girls like a Gestapo.”
“He’s not that bad!” I said.
“Look out, now. You don’t want to burn that.” Aunt Pete pulled up the corner of her bathrobe and put it over the paper. “Now press,” she said. “And no, he’s not that bad, but he doesn’t need to be so hard on Tristan. She’s the closest thing to perfect in a kid I ever saw. I told her that too.”
I pulled up the iron and stared at her. “I didn’t know you had conversations like that with Tristan.”
Aunt Pete shrugged. “She was sitting down there on the beach one day, writing something in a notebook. You could practically see the smoke comin’ out of her pen.”
“Did you see what she was writing?”
“She didn’t offer to show me, and I didn’t ask. Matter of fact, she stuffed it in her bag like she was afraid I was gonna grab it from her.”
Aunt Pete pulled her bathrobe off the ironing board and held it out from her until it cooled. Her legs, spindly and white and veined in purple, were exposed, and it struck me how very old she was.
“I told her,” she went on, “ ‘I’m not gonna pry into your business,’ and she kind of grunted and said, ‘You’d be the only one.’ ”
My insides sagged.
“She said her father had to know everything she was doing and who she was with every second. She said it probably ticked him off that he couldn’t read her mind. I said to her, ‘I bet it’s a good thing he can’t,’ and she said, ‘Yeah.’ ”
I set the iron down. “You knew and I didn’t.”
“Yeah, well, don’t go beatin’ yourself up. The question is, what are you gonna do with this?” She nodded toward the poem. “Did you call that detective?”
“No. I’m afraid if he thinks this is evidence that she ran away, he’ll call off the search. We still have to find her, even if she did go because she wanted to.” I yanked the iron’s plug out of the outlet.
“If you’re not calling that detective just because you think Nicky’s going to be mad at you, forget it,” Aunt Pete said. She wandered into the kitchen, and I followed her. She poured us each a cup of coffee. “It isn’t gonna hurt him, and it’s not gonna hurt you, either. You should be mad at him, the way he’s acting.”
“I know he’s scared.”
“He’s terrified! But he’s too stubborn to admit it, and that’s gonna keep him from seein’ things you’ve got your eyes wide open to now.” Aunt Pete gave me the Soltani squint over the top of her mug. “Which is why you should be the one talkin’ to Malone.”
I considered that. “I could just ask him what they would do if we discovered Tristan really had run off with Spider Zabriski.”
“You got nothin’ to lose,” she said.
“Where’s the number?” I said.
“It’s 555–0102,” Aunt Pete said.
I looked at her.
“I’ve just been waitin’ for you to ask,” she said.
Ed Malone wasn’t at the station when I called, but the officer I talked to, who spoke as if he
had something heavy attached to his tongue, said he’d have Ed get in touch with me. Ten minutes later Ed was knocking on the front door.
“Is this a good time?” he said when I opened it.
He looked thinner than the last time I’d seen him, and the tiny lines around his eyes were more pronounced, the eyes themselves set deeper into their golden greenness. And yet he still managed a smile.
“Coffee’s hot,” Aunt Pete squawked from the kitchen.
“Shovel me out a cup,” Ed called back to her as I led him into the library.
He grinned at me and waited while I perched, one leg under me, on a chair before he sat in the other one. “I could stand a little more hair on my chest,” he said.
Aunt Pete brought the cups in on a tray and left, to my surprise, closing the french doors behind her.
“You have news?” Ed said to me.
“I have a question.” I looked down at my toes poking out of my sandals.
“Hope I have an answer,” Ed said. His voice was so kind it hurt.
“I just want to know,” I said, “if we found out that Tristan ran away with that Spider guy—you know, if he didn’t drag her off—”
“Right.”
“Would that mean that you—the police—would stop looking for her?”
“Absolutely not.” Ed blew into his coffee. “It would just mean we’d change her classification on the NCIC, identify her as a runaway.”
“Oh,” I said.
The fight against tears was pointless. Ed handed me a napkin from the tray.
“I’m not going to stop looking for Tristan, Serena,” he said. “Because if she did run away, by now I’m sure she’s forgotten what prompted her to do it and she wants to come home.”
“Then why doesn’t she?”
“We don’t know, and that’s why we’ll keep looking—in case it’s something she has no control over.”
“Like what?”
Ed laced his fingers together and put them behind his head. He kept his eyes on me.
“Maybe Spider, if he’s still with her, won’t let her come home. Not that he’s abusing her or anything, but he might not give her the means to get back here or let her use a phone—that kind of thing.” He waited for me to nod again. “Maybe she’s not with Spider anymore. Maybe she tried to get back home and got into some other trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
Ed brought his hands down to his knees and looked at them. “It’s rough out there on your own when you’re sixteen, especially when you’ve never had to fend for yourself. She might have trusted somebody who offered to help and wound up in a deeper trap.”
“What kind of trap?”
Ed’s eyes grew quizzical, and I couldn’t blame him. Until that day I’d done almost nothing except nod at him. But now the questions were popping from me as if something inside me was snapping its fingers.
“Drugs, maybe,” Ed said. “Not necessarily taking them but running them, for food and shelter.”
“She could be living on the street?” I said.
Ed leaned toward me. “Serena, if you have reason to think she ran away, please tell me, because that will change the nature of our search. We’ll stand a better chance of finding her if we have all the information.”
Shoulders shaking, I pulled the folded poems out of my pocket and handed them to him. While he read, I curled up in the chair and closed my eyes.
It was a while before he said, “Serena.”
I looked up. The veins in his eyes were red and blurred.
“I’d like to make copies of these,” he said. “They don’t prove that she ran away, but they’re enough to warrant broadening our search. There’s a good chance she’s gone to a shelter. Plus there are other places where runaways congregate.”
I touched the pages in his hand. “These were her secrets,” I said.
“I’ll take good care of them. In fact, do you want to come with me to the station? I’ll make the copies while you’re standing there, and you can have them right back.”
I shook my head. “I trust you. I think … I don’t know!”
Ed squeezed my hand before he stood up. “You’re doing the right thing,” he said.
I half hoped Nick would think so. The other half of me didn’t care whether he did or not. I wanted my unhappy daughter home, where maybe we could start over.
Now that Nick was back, there was no way to get out of going to church that Sunday, as much as I wanted to avoid Rebecca and her mother. Lissa hugged me before I went into the sanctuary and whispered, “You don’t have to be embarrassed about what happened that day at your house. None of us have told anybody.”
I just looked at her.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said. “We need you.”
I sat through the service between Aunt Pete and Max, wondering what I had to give at that point. Before the final hymn was over, I escaped to the rest room. I’d barely started a good cry when Hazel filled the doorway.
“Want a ride home?” she said. “Sun’s watching Tri and Desi, and I’ve got the getaway car outside.”
It wasn’t until I was in the front seat of her Suburban with Regis and Kelly drooling on my head that it occurred to me to ask, “Were you in church, Hazel?”
“I’ve been there the last two Sundays. Somebody had to keep the rumors from getting out of hand. Those church ladies can be vicious.” Hazel fumbled in her purse for something as she drove and then gave up. “Lissa, now she’s not bad. But I think she’s scared of them. What, do they give a lot of money to the church or something?”
I surprised myself by laughing. It was as much of a pain reliever as crying.
“So what did Nick say when you told him you showed the poems to Ed?”
“I didn’t tell him.”
Hazel took her eyes from the road to stare at me. “Okay, who are you, and what have you done with Serena?”
I laughed again, but it wasn’t the first time over the last few days that I’d thought about how easy it was not to share information with Nick. Why wouldn’t it be? I realized that I never told him I always kept Max quiet in church by feeding her clandestine candy or that I let Tristan stay up until ten to study when he was out of town.
“I guess sometimes I just take the easy way out,” I said.
“Huh,” Hazel said. “So it’s going to be easy to explain why you just skipped out on the fellowship hour?”
I shrugged. Maybe it was getting easier to argue with Nicky too.
When we got in the house, Hazel put her purse on the kitchen counter and pulled out her cell phone. “This stupid thing,” she said. “Battery’s dead again. Can I see if Sun left a message on your phone?”
“Already?” I said. But then I nodded. She was watching Desi, after all.
Hazel pushed the button while I pulled a pitcher of orange juice out of the refrigerator. When I heard Tristan’s voice on the machine, I let the pitcher slip to the floor, where it shattered.
“Hi, Mama. Hi, Daddy. It’s me.”
I tore for the phone and skidded on the wet floor, crashing sideways into Hazel. She pushed me the rest of the way to the answering machine. The voice coming from it was fragile and thin, but it was her. It was Tristan.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call before,” she said. “But I’m okay. I just wanted you to know.”
“Where are you?” I said.
Of course there was no answer. There was only her trembling close: “Well, I guess that’s all. I have to go.”
“No! Don’t go! Tristan, where are you?”
I fumbled with the buttons until Hazel pulled my hand back.
“Let me. You’re liable to erase it doing that.” The tape rewound, and she played it again.
“Hi, Mama. Hi, Daddy. It’s me. I’m sorry I didn’t call before. But I’m okay. I just wanted you to know. Well, I guess that’s all. I have to go.”
I played it again and counted the words. There were thirty of them. Thirty fragile words fro
m my daughter—who was alive.
“Thank you, God,” I said over and over. “Oh, Tristan. Baby girl.”
I made Hazel play it at least ten times while I strained to hear what she didn’t say, what might be hiding in the creases of her voice. We were on our eleventh round when the front door slammed, and Nick was suddenly there.
His face was a livid scarlet until he registered what he was hearing. His angry eyes went from me to the machine where Tristan was speaking to him. “Hi, Daddy. It’s me.”
“Is that Sissy?” Max said from behind him.
Nick waved her to silence and leaned over the machine, just as I’d done. I cried as I watched him swallow hard.
“She’s okay,” I said.
“Where is she, Mom?” Max said.
“I don’t know,” I said. I pulled her off her feet into my arms. “But she’s okay!”
“I can’t hear,” Nick shouted at us.
Hazel hustled Max out of the kitchen, nearly knocking Aunt Pete over. I heard them whispering in the foyer.
Nick let the tape rewind and slowly straightened.
“Nicky,” I said, “this is good news.”
“Yeah,” he said. His face was ashen as he ran his hand down the back of his head. “This means she’s alive.” He shook his head and swallowed again, and I was sure he was going to cry. But before I could get my arms around him, he drove his fist into the snack bar. The salt and pepper shakers jittered in their places.
“She knew we’d be at church,” he said. “She purposely called when she knew we wouldn’t be here.”
My thoughts ran into each other.
“I don’t think she did it on purpose,” I said. “Maybe it was the first chance she had to call. She said she was sorry—”
“She said she was sorry she didn’t call sooner. She didn’t say she couldn’t. Why didn’t she tell us where she is? Or how we can reach her?”
When the words “star six nine” formed in my head, I was still way behind Nick.
He was already pounding the keys on the phone as if they alone were responsible for what Tristan didn’t say. He listened for a few seconds and then slammed the phone down. “The number can’t be reached that way,” he said.