Tristan's Gap

by Nancy Rue

“You know enough to pray the only prayer that’s going to get you anywhere.” She glanced toward the door. “I couldn’t help hearing you talking to God, but, then, I did have my ear pressed against the crack.”

  “Did I sound like a moron?”

  “No, you sounded like a woman who’s finally come to her senses.”

  “Oh, then do tell me what I said!”

  “You said something about God teaching her, because you screwed up. It was hard to tell exactly with all that bangin’ goin’ on.”

  I surveyed my fist and pressed it against my mouth.

  “You never knew your mother-in-law, Maxina Soltani.”

  “No. She died before I met Nick.”

  “She was quite a woman, that one—better than my nephew deserved, I’ll tell you that.”

  Aunt Pete had never “made any bones,” as she put it, about the fact that she and Nick Soltani Sr. had never seen eye to eye. It still didn’t take much to get her going about his alcoholism, the way he let the family business go, the way he neglected Nick after Maxina’s death. I’d seen Aunt Pete pound a table in the telling more than once.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “I said to her when Nicky was going off to prep school, I said, ‘Aren’t you afraid to let him go? What if something happens to him?’ and she said to me, ‘Aunt Pete, I just pray for God to bridge the gap between what he needs and what I can give him.’ ”

  “Really?”

  “What? You think I’m makin’ it up?”

  “No!” I pushed my back against the wall and looked at my legs stuck out in front of me. My pants looked as if I’d slept in them. The heels of my sandals were worn down, and my own heels were almost as crusty as Aunt Pete’s toenails. Stray dark hairs poked out from my ankles, where I’d missed shaving them.

  “I just can’t believe I’d have the same thought as Mama Maxina,” I said. “I know if this had happened to her, she wouldn’t have been as much of a mess as I am.”

  “You don’t know from nothin’,” Aunt Pete said. “She’d have died right on the spot if Nicky had disappeared. A mother’s a mother. Point is, her prayer did the job. Nicky turned out pretty darn good, even if he is a man.”

  I had to grin.

  “That’s the prayer I think you oughta pray,” Aunt Pete said. “Pray for the good Lord to bridge the gap between what Tristan needs and what you have to give her. And then, you give her all you have.”

  I looked down at the notebook, now resting in my lap, having done its worst to me. “I thought I did.”

  “So maybe she needs somethin’ different. Like you findin’ her.”

  I turned to face Aunt Pete squarely. “That keeps coming to me,” I said. “That I have to find her.”

  “Makes sense to me. You’re the only one getting any real clues.”

  “I just don’t know what to do with them besides take them to Ed.” We both looked at the notebook, and I shook my head. “But not this one.”

  After all, what more could it tell him than he already knew? Tristan Soltani felt trapped by her parents and ran away to find refuge. Sanctuary.

  I didn’t show the poem to Nick, although I tried to cut him some slack over the next few days. I had a deeper knowledge of what it felt like to be informed that everything you’d done for your daughter had made her feel like she was imprisoned in your image of her. We’d both reacted in anger, Nick and I: he at Tristan, I at myself. At least we had that in common.

  So I made Nick a bread pudding from Mama Maxina’s old recipe and scratched his barrier of a back until he fell asleep at night and threw away the daily junk mail so he didn’t have to go through it when he took the rest of the day’s post into the library to read. Those were things I’d always done and always loved.

  But never before had he ignored them completely.

  Thursday night Nick and I were in the family room pretending to watch the news when Max took a couple of long-legged leaps across the floor and landed in front of us. It occurred to me that she’d grown while I wasn’t looking.

  “I made you guys something,” she said. “Well, we did. Me and Sun. It’s our first club project.”

  Nick flipped the TV off and frowned at her. “Sun and I.”

  “What is it, sweetie?” I said.

  With a flourish she produced a notebook from behind her back. Its cover was decorated with a collage of teenage faces. On a strip of paper pasted across it were the words: BRH CLUB.

  “What’s the BRH Club, short stuff?” Nick said. He started to smile.

  “Bring Runaways Home. This is all stuff we got off the Internet. We made it for you guys, but I’m gonna use it for my oral report too.”

  “No, you are not.”

  Nick’s voice cut into me. Max clutched the book to her chest.

  “Why not?” she said.

  “Because I won’t have our family business spread all over the world.”

  “It’s not the whole world, Dad. It’s just my class.”

  “Watch your tone, young lady.”

  It was my cue to chime in with support for Nick, but all I could think was how much I despised it when he called her “young lady.”

  “Who said you could spend all this time on the Internet?” Nick said. “Do I have to go over the rules with you again?”

  “I guess so,” Max said. The sarcasm was barely holding back the tears, I could tell. “I’m not as smart as Tristan; I have to hear them a thousand times before I’m perfect. She only had to hear them once. Oh, wait. Maybe she’s not an angel. I mean, after all, didn’t she run away?”

  Nick’s hand came out of nowhere. Only two words kept it from smacking into Max’s cheek.

  “Nick, stop,” I said.

  Nick closed his eyes. “Go to your room, Max.”

  She fled, sobbing.

  I waited for her door to slam before I looked at him.

  “I wasn’t going to hit her,” he said. He was barely audible.

  “You threatened her.”

  “Because she’s forgetting everything she’s been taught about respect.” His voice rose. “Serena, I am not going to let the rest of my family fall apart because of what we’re going through over Tristan.”

  “Oh, Nicky,” I said, “I think we started falling apart long before Tristan left.”

  The look that gripped his face frightened me, but I didn’t move. He did, away from me, slamming doors behind him as he went.

  Nick didn’t come to bed that night. At one o’clock I crept down the stairs far enough to see that he was on the back porch, head turned stiffly toward the ocean. I went back to bed and spent the rest of the night going through the runaway information Max had printed out for us. Nick had been right about one thing: no ten-year-old should have to become aware of the facts she’d found.

  One out of every seven children will run away sometime between the ages of 10 and 18.

  Over 40 percent of all youths cited family dynamics as the reason they ran away.

  Approximately 75 percent of all runaways are female.

  In the next 24 hours, approximately 2,700 children and teens around the United States will run away from home.

  As if that information weren’t enough to rip my heart right out of my chest, there was more:

  Most runaways living on the street find difficulty earning money to survive. They may panhandle for change and eventually find other means, such as prostitution, pornography, drugs, and stealing. Every year approximately 5,000 runaway and homeless youths die from assault, illness, and suicide.

  I climbed out of bed and stood with one knee on the chaise longue, looking out into the same inky blackness my daughter was in, somewhere. It was impossible to envision her reaching from some corner of it, begging for nickels and dimes or cloaking herself in it to carry some packet of something heinous that I couldn’t imagine because I’d never seen illegal drugs. I’d never even smoked a joint in college. I definitely had nothing to draw from to picture her as a prostitute, yet even the vaguest notion nauseated
me.

  No wonder Nick wanted to deny the whole thing.

  But I couldn’t do it anymore. And because looking at it hurt too much, I buried my face in the back of the chaise longue and said to God, “Please bridge the gap between what she needs and what I have to give, because I have nothing.”

  I must have fallen asleep that way, because the phone woke me when the room was still gray. It rang only twice before I heard Nick’s low voice and then his urgent footsteps on the stairs. I met him at the bedroom door.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Ed Malone. They’ve got Ricky Zabriski at the station. I’m going down there. Why don’t you—”

  “I’m going with you,” I said.

  He didn’t say a word.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been out at four in the morning. Even quiet Bethany Beach had an eeriness about it. The streets were slick from an earlier rain, and the streetlamps dropped patches of ghostly white on the pavement. The only lights inside the shadowy shops were those left on to discourage burglars. I felt the need to glance over my shoulder as Nick and I made our way up the ramp to the front door of the police station.

  Ed let us in. His face had the strained look of sleep deprivation, but he still smiled. The smile didn’t reach his eyes.

  “Sorry to roust you out in the middle of the night,” he said.

  Nick looked past him, as if Zabriski might be standing, unarmed, in a doorway. “I’d have been upset if you hadn’t. I want to see this guy.” His voice was coiled and menacing. I could see the muscles in his neck holding back words he didn’t want to waste on anybody but the individual who had taken his daughter.

  Ed nodded toward a frosted-glass door marked BBPD Personnel Only. Even with Ed’s hand grazing the back of my arm as he gently ushered me into the room, I had the sickening feeling that I wasn’t supposed to be there.

  I wasn’t. None of it should be happening.

  Ed offered me a metal chair with olive green faux-leather cushioning, which I perched on, birdlike, and hooked my feet around the legs. Nick stood.

  “Are they still processing him?” he said.

  Ed sat on a corner of the long table and rubbed his hands together. “We haven’t charged him with anything yet.” He put up his hand as Nick took a step forward. “Right now he’s telling us Tristan wanted to go with him to Baltimore—”

  “He took her across the state line—”

  “At sixteen, she’s considered a consenting adult by Maryland law.”

  Nick’s face darkened into the unshaven shadow of his beard. “He tells you she wanted to go, and you believe him.”

  “I didn’t say that—”

  “Then why haven’t you charged him with kidnapping?”

  “We haven’t finished questioning him, Nick.” Ed folded his hands on his thigh. “So far, he’s being cooperative.”

  “He’s told you where Tristan is?”

  “He’s told us where he last saw her.” Ed looked at me. “A motel in Baltimore.”

  “He left her there?” Nick said. “A sixteen-year-old girl who’s never been away from home without her family in her life?” Nick jerked his head toward the door as if he was ready to tear the station apart until he found Spider.

  “According to his story,” Ed said, “she left him.”

  “And since he’s so credible … What are you thinking?”

  “He hasn’t asked for a lawyer. I’m thinking the longer we question him without charging him, the more information we’ll get out of him.”

  “While my daughter’s locked up someplace.”

  “You got a phone call from her, Nick.”

  “So? He could’ve been holding a gun to her head.”

  “There’s no evidence of that. When the Georgetown police pulled Zabriski over, he was a block from his mother’s house, driving that old Buick down a back street. He wasn’t armed. He made no attempt to elude them.” Ed tapped the table and sat up straight. “The only aggression he’s shown since they turned him over to us was to ask for a Mountain Dew.”

  “Where’s he been all this time?” Nick said.

  I thought of Sarah Zabriski, stowing her son away in that fragile little house. I couldn’t make it work.

  “He told us he took off after he saw the AMBER Alert with his license number on it. Laid low with a cousin in West Virginia.”

  “Instead of coming forward,” Nick said.

  “He was afraid nobody would believe that he thought Tristan had just gone back home.”

  “You don’t believe him, do you?”

  “I do,” I said.

  Nick turned to me as if I’d just appeared on the scene. That wasn’t surprising, since those two words were the first I’d spoken since we’d arrived. I unwrapped my ankles from the chair legs and sank against the leatherette. It was a cold slab through the thin cotton of my blouse, but I was already chilled to my core.

  “I’ve read her poems over and over,” I said. “It’s all right there.”

  “Don’t start with that, Serena,” Nick said.

  “It’s been there, right in front of us, and we couldn’t see it.”

  Nick slammed his hand against the table. “That’s enough!”

  “It’s enough to convince me,” I said.

  “Good grief.” Nick pulled back his tone, his hands, his eyes, and squatted in front of me. The effort it required not to take hold of me and shake me was twitching in his face. “I understand why you want that to be true. It means she’s in less danger—”

  “I don’t want it to be true,” I said. “I don’t want to believe that our daughter felt like our home was such a prison that she had to run away with the first person who told her she could get free.”

  Nick’s face went sour. “And you got all this from two poems.”

  “Three,” I said.

  Nick looked at Ed. “Sorry Let’s get back to this kid—”

  “Reading Tristan’s poems was probably the first time I ever really listened to her.”

  “Serena, just shut up!”

  “No, Nick,” I said. “I will not.”

  Nick turned to the wall and put one hand on it. I shook as I watched him, but I didn’t go to him.

  “All right,” Ed said. “I think it would ease both your minds a little if you met Zabriski.” He looked at Nick’s back. “But only if you can keep your cool. If you go off on him, he’s going to clam up.”

  “Then maybe it isn’t such a good idea right now,” I said.

  Nick glared over his shoulder at me. “I’m fine. Bring him in.”

  Ed gave him a long look before he went to the door and motioned into the hall. Nick kept his back to the door, so I saw Ricky Zabriski first. Although Ed had told us they hadn’t charged him with anything, I was still surprised that he wasn’t in handcuffs and leg irons and guarded by two burly officers packing service revolvers. That wasn’t the only thing that surprised me.

  The boy who walked into the room looked almost nothing like the picture of the worldly tattooed son Sarah Zabriski had proudly shown Hazel and me. This boy had the look of a thirteen-year-old whose heft hadn’t caught up with his height. He had a short, uncombed crop of bleached-out hair and patches of neglected stubble on his chin and jaw line, the only indication on his otherwise boyish, narrow face that he had actually reached puberty. Clad in camouflage-print cargo shorts and a Star Wars Episode III T-shirt with the sleeves cut out, he dropped into the chair Ed pointed him to and folded his hands on the table without looking at anyone. There was absolutely nothing frightening about him, including the spider tattoo on his arm.

  “This is Mr. and Mrs. Soltani,” Ed said. “Tristan’s parents.”

  He didn’t tell Ricky to pay us some passing form of courtesy, but it was in his voice. I’d never heard anything but Ed’s calm, reassuring tone, yet the authority he was commanding sounded as if it belonged there. Ricky obviously sensed it because he looked up at me, not Nick, and
nodded.

  Ed took up his edge-of-the-table position again. “The Soltanis would like to hear what you have to say about Tristan.”

  Nick moved to the end of the table, still standing, but Ricky kept his eyes on me. They were green, framed with lashes too thick and curly to belong on any male. Those eyes were the first glimpse of anything I could imagine Tristan being attracted to. His voice was the second.

  “I didn’t do anything to her,” he said to me. The words came out in a sultry bass that vibrated somewhere in my chest. It was as hypnotic as it was startling.

  “Go on,” Ed said.

  “We been seeing each other all summer—”

  “What do you mean ‘seeing each other’?” Nick said.

  Ed shot him a warning look, but Ricky shrugged again.

  “I hung around Boardwalk Fries. We’d go talk when she went on break. A couple of times I took her to my trailer.”

  I caught my breath. Nick’s seemed to pour out of his nostrils.

  “That’s a lie,” Nick said. “We always knew where Tristan was.”

  Ricky sniffed, possibly his rendition of a laugh. “Evidently you didn’t. She’d tell you she was working till closing when she actually got off at six. I’d take her to my trailer and bring her back in time for one of you to walk her home like she’d been working all night.”

  I thought Ricky’s big lips smiled then, though it was hard to tell because the movement came and went so quickly. Nick didn’t miss it.

  “You think this is funny?” he said.

  Ed held up a hand to Nick and told Ricky to keep talking. I cringed into the fake leather. This was like unfolding one of Tristan’s poems. I didn’t want to know what I had to know.

  “She talked about how strict you guys were with her,” Ricky said. “I felt sorry for her, so I told her she oughta come with me.”

  “Come with you where?” Nick said.

  “I don’t know.” Ricky still hadn’t looked at Nick. His eyes were now focused on his hands on the table, where he picked at a piece of loose skin on his thumb until I felt nauseous. “I didn’t know where I was headed, but she wanted to come with me.”