I look at where she is pointing, across the bay.
“Alcatraz,” I tell her.
She frowns. “Alcatraz.”
“It was a maximum-security prison.”
“Can we go there?” she asks me. Her eyes are topaz. They remind me of a tiger’s.
“Maybe next week,” I sigh, tired of sightseeing.
“Okay,” Jennifer says, fixing her eyes on the hunk of rock in the water. Around her neck, a charm on a chain catches in the sun. A cable car.
“That’s pretty,” I say. “When did you buy it?”
She looks at me now. “You can have it if you want,” she says. She slips the chain over her head and holds it out to me.
“No, that’s okay,” I tell her.
But she is putting it on me even as I protest. The little gold cable car settles against my collarbone. I feel guilty for not wanting to take her to see Alcatraz and I promise myself we’ll definitely go next week. If she hasn’t gone home to Miami by then.
I GET A LETTER from Luke in New York. It is written on paper with his initials on the top, and sounds like it is from a stranger. He tells me about the weather there, and how difficult it is to figure out the subway system. He signs the letter “Sincerely, Luke.”
“Who’s Luke?” Jennifer asks me.
I did not show her the letter, so I figure she has been looking through my things. Somehow, this does not even make me angry. My tiny apartment on Fourth Avenue has been so lonely that the idea of sharing it and everything in it makes me almost happy. For a while, Luke’s shirts were crammed into my one closet, his deodorant and toothbrush and comb cluttered my bathroom. Now, Jennifer’s things are mingling with mine. When I turn off the bathroom light, her toothbrush glows orange. Her multitude of bracelets are everywhere I look, as if they are actually reproducing.
So I tell her who Luke is without mentioning that she really shouldn’t be reading my letters.
“Did you love him?” she asks me.
I only shrug. “Who knows?” I say.
“Did my mother love my father?” she asks then, suddenly.
I answer, “Yes,” immediately, but then I wonder about my answer. To me, Sherry and David were like Bonnie and Clyde. They were always doing something illegal. Their apartment was filled with an air of danger. Once, in a kitchen drawer, I saw dozens of stolen credit cards. Their cars disappeared mysteriously. They kept scales and spoons and plastic bags where other people kept pots and pans. How do I know that they loved each other? But Jennifer seems satisfied with my easy answer.
Jennifer says, “Some things don’t make sense to me. Like why was my father in a car in Pennsylvania when we lived in Miami? And why aren’t there any pictures of us all together?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I was away at the time.” I don’t fill in the details, that I was living in St. Thomas, serving tropical drinks and soaking up the sun until my skin turned very brown.
She studies my face for a long time, searching for something that I can’t give her.
WHEN SHERRY CALLS I ask her when she will take Jennifer back. “She should go to school,” I tell her.
“She’ll be expelled again anyway. She steals from kids’ lockers, takes whatever she wants. Can you believe it?”
I feel like both Jennifer and Sherry are hiding things from me, giving me little bits and pieces but keeping the big parts to themselves. I try to imagine Sherry in the small pink house she and Jennifer live in. Jennifer has told me that they have orange trees in their backyard, and a plastic pink flamingo on their lawn. I can see Sherry there, in her high-heeled sandals and platinum hair. I used to think she looked exactly like my old Barbie doll, all pointy breasts and tiny waist. Her hair is blond like Jennifer’s, but bleached and molded into a tight bubble. That is how I imagine her as she talks to me now, a Barbie doll in her Florida toy house, surrounded by bougainvillea and orange blossoms, staring blankly at a plastic lawn ornament.
“She is nothing but trouble,” Sherry is telling me. “Stealing and cheating on tests. She actually copied a Time magazine article about Houdini and handed it in as her report on a famous person. Like the teacher wouldn’t know someone else wrote it.”
Jennifer is stretched out on my couch, lazily flipping through a magazine. She does not seem to be listening to the conversation.
“Well,” I ask Sherry, “what’s the problem?”
“Who knows? I’m trying to make a better life for us. Travel agents get discount tickets and hotels. We could see the whole world if we wanted to.”
Over the years, Sherry has learned many skills. She was a licensed electrologist, removing women’s mustaches and shaping their eyebrows. She booked bands for a nightclub and tried her hand at calligraphy. None of it worked as well as her days with David breaking the law.