I can feel Jennifer come and stand beside me, I can smell the perfume she wears all the time. She takes my hand in hers.
“Imagine being locked in here and knowing that San Francisco is right across the bay,” she says. “Hearing people at a party.”
I open my eyes. “But we can walk out,” I tell her. “We’re not in solitary.”
“I know,” she says. “But imagine.”
We are way behind on our tapes now. And we have to fast forward to catch up. Quickly, Jennifer and I go through the prison, poking our heads into cells and rooms, until we find the rest of the tour. We are at the end, listening to a description of escapes from Alcatraz.
There were many that failed, the voice croons in my ears, and only one that perhaps was successful. I listen to the details of that escape, of how the men collected hair from the barbershop floor to use on papier-maché masks of their faces. How they dug for months to get through the prison walls to an air shaft. They were never found, the tape tells me.
JENNIFER AND I stand on the top of Alcatraz, looking out. Her hair is blowing wildly in the cold breeze, but she does not try to control it, to hold it down.
“I know you took all that jewelry,” I tell her. “I know you stole it.”
She doesn’t answer me. I cannot see her face under her blowing hair.
Finally, she says, “I like to think they made it.”
“Who?”
“Those three men who tried to escape. Maybe one of them didn’t drown. Maybe at least one of them is free.”
I gaze down the rock to the water pounding the shore. I don’t agree with her. I think they must have all died down there.
“About that jewelry,” I say.
She turns to me. “Here,” she says. “Take it.” She unclasps each bracelet, letting them drop into my hands.
“I don’t want it,” I tell her. “That’s not the point.”
But she keeps taking them off, until finally she has bare arms, and all of her crooked scars are revealed. She is standing before me, arms turned upward, naked of all the turquoise and amethyst and copper.
I take her wrists in my hands, lightly. There are so many questions I could ask her. So many things I want to know. But what I realize, standing there, feeling the bumps of her skin under my hands, is that there really is no escaping. Not for Sherry, not for Jennifer, not for me. The only thing left to do is to stick it out.
Jennifer’s eyes are set right on me. She says, “If I really wanted to do it, I would have made the cuts deeper. And up and down instead of across. No one understands that I knew the real way. The right way. But I just wanted to see what would happen, to faint or go away for a little while.”
“It’s not worth it,” I say. “Sooner or later you have to come back.”
She nods. There are tears in her eyes, but they could be from the stinging salty air, like mine. The ferry is chugging toward us, and still holding on to each other we slowly make our way down that rock.
We stand in the line, waiting for the ferry to take us back.
Suddenly I turn to Jennifer. “Your father did it,” I say. “He hung himself.”
Her expression doesn’t change at all.
“He was in prison,” I continue. “For drugs. And he killed himself.”
“I know,” she says. “I found the death certificate last year when we moved. I wanted my mother to tell me the truth.”
I say, “That’s the truth.”
The ferry arrives, and we move forward, toward it. Its steps are steep, and we have to link arms for the climb.
LOST PARTS
THE LAST THING Helen remembered before she missed the curve on Thurbers Avenue and sent her white Toyota Celica tumbling forty feet off the embankment until it finally settled roof-side down in a deserted lot, was looking at Scott in the passenger’s seat beside her and saying, “What is wrong with you anyway?” She never got an answer. Instead, the car crashed, jumped, flew, landed. There were no screams or explosions, just the WGBH fund-raising drive, the fake intellectual accent of the classical music announcer asking for just ten more phone calls please. Scott, she was told later, died instantly of multiple head and neck injuries. Helen lost her spleen.