“I would think she’d want to travel,” I say. It was all that I used to want, my way of getting out of tough spots, of leaving men and looking for new ones.
Sherry laughs. “All she wants is to make trouble. But you say she’s being good there, so let her stay for a bit more.”
I want to explain that I am tired of Jennifer being here. That she is not really helping me decide what to do next. That I have an urge, once more, to pick up and go. To L.A., maybe. Or even Hawaii. Luke signed his letter “Sincerely” and I want to run.
But I say none of these things. I just stare at Jennifer and wonder how she could have actually done it to herself. How she felt when it didn’t work. From Miami, Sherry makes excuses for having to hang up. She doesn’t ask to speak to her daughter, and I don’t offer.
“WOW,” JENNIFER SAYS when I take her to my tiny, cramped office. “Look at all of these places.” She touches the photographs that line my desk and walls and shelves. Pictures of Peru and British Columbia, of people climbing a frozen waterfall and of seals in the Galápagos Islands.
From my window, I can see hookers on the corner, a man drinking something from a paper bag. They call this area of the city the Tenderloin. That sounds gentle to me. Tender loins. This is not a gentle place.
“Have you been to all these places?” Jennifer asks me. She holds out a picture of a dense jungle. She has on a new ring, a thin gold one with two hearts dangling from it.
“No,” I tell her. “I just put them in the magazine.”
“If I could,” she says, still clutching at the jungle photograph, “I would go everywhere. Around the world. I’d even volunteer to go on the space shuttle.”
I frown, thinking about Sherry. “When your mother finishes travel-agent school—”
Jennifer laughs. “She’ll never finish. She never finishes anything.”
“She told me you were expelled from school,” I say softly.
Now Jennifer sighs. “I was. I’d rather stow away on a ship than go to school every day. There’s nothing there.”
“She told me—”
“Whatever she told you is true,” Jennifer says firmly.
“Oh.”
My eyes drift to her wrists, to her bracelets and beneath them, to her scars.
“Caryn,” Jennifer says, “what was he doing in Pennsylvania? What was his job?”
I hesitate. His job was dealing drugs, I say in my mind.
Jennifer laughs again. “My mother says I’m a wild thing. She says I’m like my father.” She leans out the open window, too far out. My heart seems to slow down, to freeze. I think, she is jumping from this fifth-floor window but I can’t reach out in time to grab her. Then she pulls herself back in, and looks at me as if she didn’t just dangle five stories.
“I like looking out,” she says. And then she smiles. A smile that makes her face look like it hurts.
SOMEWHERE, I HAVE a map of Hawaii. I will find it, I decide, and study it. I will make plans for a new life in the shadow of a volcano. I’ve served drinks before at seaside resorts. I can do it again. The names of the islands are magical. Maui and Kauai. For days, the fog here in San Francisco has been thick as mashed potatoes and it is starting to depress me. Every morning, Jennifer is staring at me, waiting for answers. It’s time, I think, to move.
I search my drawers, but the map is gone. What I find instead are handfuls of jewelry: the bracelets Jennifer likes to wear, and thick ropes of rose quartz and yellow jade, and earrings made of dangling crystals and rings in all sizes. There is no way that Jennifer could have bought all of this jewelry. Where would she get the money? I lay everything out across my bed, and it sparkles and winks at me in the late afternoon light. Then I put it all away.
THE FOG IS still thick on the day we go to Alcatraz. We wait in line, then crowd onto the ferry. I have paid an extra dollar for us to get the recorded tour, which comes from a bright yellow Walkman and clunky headphones that make us look like Martians. Jennifer is wearing a Cal Berkeley sweatshirt and a boy asks her if she goes there.
“I’m in ninth grade,” she tells him.
The boy walks away.
On the island, we walk through the steps that the tour instructs us to take. Stop at the sign that says DINING HALL, we are told. Take a right on Michigan Avenue. Stand under the clock. Look at the pictures on the wall. We do whatever the voice tells us, like robots. Jennifer’s tape is two steps ahead of mine, and every time I approach her it seems she has to walk on to somewhere else.
The recorded voice tells us how on New Year’s Eve, the prisoners could hear music and laughter from a yacht club across the bay.
We step inside a cell and pretend we are in solitary confinement. All around us, families snap pictures of each other behind bars. I stand in my cell in the dark and close my eyes. The voice tells me about the cold, damp air here. About all the tricks inmates used to help them get through solitary. Throw a button on the floor and try to find it in the dark. Imagine entire movies.