I take her to Candlestick Park for the Giants’ last game of the season and sit shivering under an old blanket I bought in Mexico long ago. Jennifer does not understand baseball, but I try to explain it to her. Three outs to an inning, nine innings to a game, the importance of a good shortstop. But she does not get it. When Chris Sabo of the Reds strikes out she says, “Caryn, why is it still their turn? You said three outs to an inning.”
“But three strikes,” I tell her, “is just one out.” Jennifer shakes her head and closes her eyes for the rest of the game. Even when I nudge her and say, “Look! A home run!” she keeps her eyes closed, does not move.
We spend an entire day at the Esprit factory outlet. Jennifer fills a shopping cart with bargains. She is tall, like her father, my brother, was. She is fourteen and already almost six feet, and so thin that her hip bones poke out from her faded blue jeans. She does not have to wear a bra. She keeps her hair long, so that it flies around her head like a golden cloud. One of the saleswomen asks Jennifer if she is a model. “Me?” Jennifer says, confused, embarrassed. She slouches even more than usual and shakes her yellow hair. Then she walks away. But when we go into the dressing room and she sees that there is no privacy, no curtains or doors, that everyone is standing half-naked in front of mirrors, Jennifer leaves her shopping cart and walks out of the store without trying on a thing.
What I do not do is mention Jennifer’s arms. Tiny uneven scars creep up her wrists like a child’s sloppy cross-stitch. She wears long-sleeved blouses, and dozens of tiny bracelets, but still the scars peek through. I pretend that Jennifer’s wrists are as smooth as the rest of her. That the scars are not even there. I don’t ask her any questions about it. Instead, I take her to the Top of the Mark at sunset. I bring her to Seal Rock where we stare through telescopes at the sea lions sunning themselves.
RIGHT BEFORE JENNIFER came to stay with me, my boyfriend, Luke, left. He said he needed to try his luck in New York. Maybe, he said, he’d become really famous there. Like Laurence Olivier. That was in August and I haven’t heard from him since.
Sherry, Jennifer’s mother, called me on a Saturday morning in late September and said, “You’ve got to take her. She’s been kicked out of school. Sell her. Adopt her. I don’t care. Just take her. I’m going nuts.” I looked out my window at the California sky, a bluer, higher sky than anywhere else in the world. Since Luke left, I hadn’t done much of anything except swim two miles a day, go to work at the tiny magazine office on Polk Street where I’m a copy editor, and dream of where to escape to next. Sometimes, I rented old movies, ones with Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford in them. Ones that forced me to cry.
While I looked at the sky I thought about my life as a flat straight line like a dead person’s heart on a monitor. Sherry told me that Jennifer was really out of hand now. “And I have my studies to worry about,” Sherry added. She was in travel-agent school. On weekends, she got to take junkets to Puerto Vallarta and New Orleans.
I had not seen Jennifer in almost two years when Sherry called me that day. My brother David had been dead for almost ten years. So I’m still not sure what made me say yes, I’ll take her for a while. Except for maybe the thought of sharing that ultrablue sky with someone seemed so appealing, and the thought of a few bleeps and peaks in my life seemed like a good idea.
Before she hung up, Sherry said, “Don’t feel compelled to talk about her cutting her wrists or anything. She wants to put that behind her.”
“What?” I said. Had I missed something here? I thought. Jennifer had cut her wrists? They say suicide is contagious and David had done it, hung himself in his jail cell where he was serving time for dealing drugs. “I thought you weren’t going to tell her,” I told Sherry. We had invented a story when it happened to David. He was in a car accident, we’d decided. He fell asleep at the wheel.
“I didn’t,” she said. “It must run in your family or something.”
“It does not,” I said, wishing I had not agreed to take Jennifer. What did I know about teenagers? Or suicide? Or anything at all?
ON FISHERMAN’S WHARF, Jennifer buys more bracelets. They are copper or gold, with tiny beads in the center or chunks of stones, turquoise and amethyst. I wait, bored, gazing at the Golden Gate Bridge while she chooses them from the street vendors that line the sidewalks. She has been with me for two weeks and shows no signs of leaving. Yesterday, she got a postcard from Sherry in Acapulco, written entirely in Spanish. She read it, her face a blank, then tossed it in the trash. “I didn’t know you could read Spanish,” I told her.
“I can’t,” Jennifer said.
Jennifer loves all the tourist trap things around the wharf. She spends hours in the souvenir shops and pushing her way through the crowds. She does not smile much, but here her face softens and I almost expect her to break into a grin. David was a great smiler. And so was Sherry. But their daughter’s face is set and hard. A mask.
“What’s that?” she asks me as we eat our crab cocktails at the crowded food stall. We are crushed against a family of tourists wearing identical pink-and-blue-striped sweatshirts, all fresh-faced and blond.