Ted wanted to keep the logic clear and irrefutable in what he was about to say. “Buck, if just by showing up in court tomorrow and pleading guilty to one of the charges you’ll get Jennifer cleared, why don’t you do it? I’ll go with you.”
Walker didn’t take long thinking about it. “Okay. This is my problem anyway.”
“It’s our problem,” Jennifer said resolutely, as if affirming where her first allegiance lay at this table.
After Sunny and Ted returned to their hotel and Jennifer and Buck went back to the Iola, Ted began to think that he was making the best of a bad situation. He would go to court with Walker to ensure that the charge against his sister would be dropped. That settled, he and his mother would get Jennifer alone and try their damnedest to talk her out of running away with Buck.
Ted found it difficult to understand his sister’s behavior. Actually, they had so little in common and so many years separated them that each might as well have been raised an only child. He was eight years old when his baby sister was born. When their mother and father divorced, it had been more traumatic for Jennifer than for Ted, who had cut himself off emotionally from his troubled father years earlier. Jack Jenkins, a warehouseman on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, never beat his children, but he cruelly neglected them; he would come home too drunk to do anything but pass out in his chair in the living room. Ted had lost all respect for his father and, in college, had chosen the path taken by his mother’s brother, Uncle Buddy, who had made a sizable fortune in sales before going into the resort business. The month Ted graduated from Syracuse with a business degree, he married his college sweetheart, Donna, and they moved to the West Coast, where he began his own sales career. Within ten years, Ted was running his own educational book sales firm, and he and his wife were raising six children in their suburban home thirty miles from San Francisco.
The last time he’d spent any time with Jennifer was a couple of years earlier when she and two girlfriends had “crashed” at his place, camping out for a month in sleeping bags on the living-room floor. Ted, busy as usual at work, was out of the house early every morning and not back until well after nightfall. Donna, stuck at home all day, bore the brunt of the intrusion. “Jennifer and her friends are flower children,” she whispered to Ted late one night in bed. “No bras and lots of pot. I don’t have anything in common with them. They think we’re horribly straight.” Ted had smiled at that. “We are,” he said. One Sunday evening just before the three visitors left, he and Jennifer stood on a bluff overlooking the woods behind the house and compared their differing philosophies of life.
“I see life as kind of a river,” Jennifer had said. “I’m just flowing along with the current, going wherever the river takes me and enjoying the trip.”
“Suppose you don’t like where the current takes you?”
“Then I let the current take me someplace else.”
Ted thought about that for a few moments. He wished they could agree on something. “Each of us is in control of his own fate. We can make our lives better or we can make them worse.”
The sun had gone down and a chill was coming on, but neither made a move to return to the house.
Jennifer explained that she didn’t want to be like most people, “locked into a role” defined by their families’ expectations and their social milieu. “Life, then, becomes a stage where people simply act out predetermined roles.” She wanted to write her own role, her own lines, unshackled from the will of others. “I want to define my own dimensions,” she told her brother.
Of course, Ted knew that lots of young people like Jennifer were leading unconventional lives and taking other chances. Besides using a variety of recreational drugs, many were hitting the streets to protest the unpopular war or running off to Canada to dodge the draft. More couples than ever were openly living together without getting married. Values were changing, and much of society had been caught up in the vortex of experimentation and dissent. He’d done none of it himself—he’d never even tried a joint, not once. He’d been too busy making a living and raising a family for such silliness. Nonetheless, he did feel uncomfortably straight sometimes—particularly around his baby sister. She seemed so certain she had found the right approach to life.
Jennifer smiled almost forgivingly. She had voted for McGovern. Ted had voted for Nixon. What could she possibly say that would bridge such a gap?
“Look, Teddy, I know my life-style isn’t for you. You’ve got six kids to support. You need to get from one point to another, regardless of which way the river is flowing. But I like the river. And for good or for bad, I want to experience it.” Remorse, Jennifer had decided, was better than regret.
JENNIFER HAD been genuinely pleased that her mother and brother had showed up in Hawaii. Though these days she rarely agreed with their priorities or politics, she dearly loved them both. Their purpose in coming was no mystery. So she wasn’t surprised when they invited her to join them at their hotel the following afternoon. Alone, without Buck.
When she got there, Jennifer had to smile. Both Mom and Ted seemed so prepared. They looked like two neophyte actors waiting nervously for the curtain to go up, fearful of blowing their lines.
“Jennifer, I’d like you to come back with me and take over my mail-order business,” her mother began. “I could train you and retire.”
Jennifer was touched. There was a time a few years ago when she would have jumped at the chance to be her own boss and run her own business, but not now.
“Mom, it’s a wonderful offer. I really appreciate it. But I’m committed. For months I’ve been working with one thing in mind—getting our boat ready so we can leave Hawaii. I’ve been putting money into it. Buck’s been working on the boat. This is something we’ve decided to do, and we’re going to do it. I can’t change that course. I can’t desert Buck. He’d probably go without me, but I don’t think he could make it alone. He needs me.”
He needs me. Sunny knew she’d hear those words sooner or later. Since Jennifer had been a little girl, she’d responded to anything or anyone who needed her. A stray dog, an injured sparrow, a neighborhood kid who fell and scratched his knee. It was no accident that Jennifer’s boyfriends had always been losers. She went for men who had two strikes against them, not those born on third base, because she had an overpowering desire to be needed. Maybe it all began in her childhood, when she would have liked to do something to help her father stay sober, but was powerless to do so. Sunny said nothing.
“Jennifer, there are some legal ramifications that need to be addressed,” Ted said dispassionately. “Though there’s no longer a charge against you—”
“By the way,” Jennifer interrupted, “thanks for going to court with Buck this morning. It’s a relief to have my charge dropped.” Buck’s sentencing had been set for the summer.
“Jennifer, if you leave with Buck, you could find yourself facing new charges,” Ted said. “Like aiding and abetting a fugitive.”
Jennifer considered. “If I were his wife, they couldn’t charge me with helping him, could they?”
Ted’s opening salvo had backfired. He didn’t want to give Jennifer reason to marry Buck Walker. “There’s something else to consider,” he said, hurrying on. “Even if they don’t charge you with anything, you would be living the life of a fugitive. Buck could never come back, and neither could you. Are you willing to abandon your family, leave this country with him on a sailboat, and stay away the rest of your life?”
“I’m not abandoning my family,” Jennifer said with conviction. “It’s not like I’m dropping off the face of the earth. Anyway, Buck has promised it won’t be forever. In a few years, he’ll come back and turn himself in. He thinks they’ll go easier on him if he can show that he hasn’t gotten into any trouble since he left.” Even Jennifer had a hard time with that last part. She couldn’t picture Buck actually turning himself in, as he had solemnly promised her one night when they lay cuddled together in their bunk on the Iola. But this
was a problem to be faced down the road.
“Don’t you think they’ll find you?” Sunny asked, unable to keep her voice from rising. “There’s no way you can run from this. The government’s got planes and ships to hunt down fugitives. They’ve got the FBI.”
Jennifer stayed calm. She respected her mother’s right to be upset. “Our plan is to find a secluded spot, off the beaten path, kind of an island paradise,” Jennifer explained. Buck had warned her not to name the island they had picked out. She fully agreed because she wasn’t convinced that her mother or her brother would keep quiet if the FBI showed up on the doorstep with a fugitive warrant for Buck. “He’ll change his name and we’ll start over,” she continued. “I’ll be fine and he’ll be fine and we’ll be happy. I love Buck and he loves me. I know you think my love for him is blind. But that’s not so. I know what I’m getting into.”
“It’s not that love is blind, sweetheart. It’s just that it sometimes refuses to believe what it sees. You’re certainly intelligent and perceptive enough to realize that going off with Buck is a great risk. But you’ve talked yourself into believing there’s no risk at all, just oodles of love and living happily ever after.”
“Mom, I’m sorry. I’m going with him.”
Sunny sat there like a carved figure, holding her chin in one hand, beaten and frightened, wondering how Jennifer could be deaf to the sense in what they were saying. This wasn’t at all like her daughter. Have I lost her? Is Buck Walker controlling her?
Ted realized it was time for his ace in the hole. A friend of his, a deputy district attorney in California, had agreed to run Buck Walker’s name through the state computerized system for criminal records. The result was a lengthy rap sheet, beginning with Buck’s first arrest at age twelve, his escape from a juvenile detention home the following year, and two incidents of joyriding the year after that. The list included two more escapes from juvenile hall, another joyriding charge, and an arrest for grand theft auto, all before his sixteenth birthday. As Walker grew, so did the gravity of his criminal activities. Charges piled one on top of another and revealed a past riddled with much more than everyday hell-raising: robbery (age sixteen), two burglaries (age seventeen), and the armed robbery conviction at age eighteen that had earned him a sentence of five years to life in San Quentin. Seven months after his 1961 parole from state prison, he was at it again, arrested for a Los Angeles burglary. Incredibly, all that information was contained on only the first two pages of Walker’s rap sheet, and there were two more pages left. It wasn’t as if Buck had made one foolish mistake and paid his debt to society. He had been breaking the law throughout his life. Ted didn’t want Jennifer to know he was checking up on Buck, so he did not mention the rap sheet. Still, there was something he was determined to tell her, because it was scary enough to make most people think twice about having anything at all to do with Buck, let alone going off to sea with him.
“Jen, did Buck tell you that seven years ago he was committed to a mental hospital for the criminally insane?”
Jennifer defiantly folded her arms in front of her, unmistakable body language for digging in. “Sure. He was just faking it so he wouldn’t have to go back to San Quentin.”
The answer was so quick, so sure, that Ted Jenkins realized right then that nothing he or his mother could say would deter Jennifer from going to the ends of the earth with Buck Walker. Buck had preempted them by presenting his version of his disturbing past, and Jennifer was intractable. Though Jennifer felt that now and then Buck tried to improve on the truth, she believed he was essentially honest, and had told her the truth about his past.
Ted briskly gathered up his papers and tapped them on the table until the edges were perfectly aligned, then slipped them back into his briefcase. He glanced up at Jennifer, at the tight little smile on her face, and tried not to feel annoyed as well as defeated. He hoped she knew what the hell she was doing.
Though she’d said little, Sunny was emotionally drained. She sighed deeply. Taking off her glasses, she rubbed fatigue-reddened eyes. Like her son, she’d saved her strongest argument for last.
“Jennifer, I’ve been having these terrible nightmares. They’re always the same. You’re on a boat and a huge wave crashes over you. The boat goes over and you are drowning. All I can think is, Jennifer is drowning, Jennifer is drowning. When I wake up, I’m so upset I can’t get back to sleep. Sweetheart, if you go out on the ocean in that little boat, I don’t think you’ll ever come back.”
Jennifer leaned forward and comfortingly clasped her mother’s arm. “I love you for caring so much about me, Mom. But everything is going to be all right.” And so she believed. She was happier with Buck than she had ever been with a man. They would make it. It might take some work, a good dose of luck, and the right push from life’s river, but she was lost in love with her man, and that was all that mattered.
THE NEXT day, Sunny and Ted hugged and kissed each other goodbye at the Honolulu airport and agreed they’d done their best. Sunny boarded a plane for Los Angeles, and her son went to another departure gate to catch a San Francisco flight.
Once in the air, Sunny looked out the window at the vast blue sea stretching over the curve of the horizon. She couldn’t bear the thought of Jennifer down there somewhere on a tiny sailboat, a mere speck in a watery void. She yanked down the shade, blocking the view.
Even if their little boat did not sink on the long sailing trip, Sunny worried about ex-con Buck Walker. His surface charm was probably a tool of survival. Who knew what he was capable of doing? If Jennifer got on his nerves in the middle of the ocean, and he had a short fuse…
Sunny said a prayer she was to repeat countless times, but she placed little faith in divine intervention. Her nightmares were so terrifyingly real. She felt the deep pain of loss, as if she had truly seen her daughter alive for the last time.
A WEEK later, Sunny received a greeting card in the mail. On the front was a drawing of a sailboat skimming the sea and the words Today’s cares can soon vanish. The message concluded inside—into the bright hopes of tomorrow. Enclosed was a handwritten note:
Dear Mom,
In reevaluating my position, as you asked me to do, I find I cannot alter my course.
The upcoming experience is going to be good for me. I’ll do things that I’ve long been ready to do but didn’t because I conveniently found enough diversions to scatter my energies elsewhere, accomplishing little or nothing. Now there will be things which must be done to live our lives—food to be grown, bread to be baked, things to be learned about self-sufficiency.
I have great respect for your intuitions. But when emotions are overrun with apprehension and fear of the great unknown, sometimes intuitions become more dramatic than what is real. Those who ventured to America from the old country went into the unknown in search of something better. Many who set out never reached their goal, but many who remained at home did not survive either. Some who reached their haven found it to be another hell. Others found a better life for themselves.
I feel we will reach our goal. Whether I’ll be totally content with my life there remains to be seen, but that I will become a more self-sufficient, able person, I have few doubts.
I’m glad that you and Teddy came over. It was so nice to spend time together. I love you both.
All my love,
Jennifer
CHAPTER 4
SAN DIEGO
MARIE JAMIESON WAS AMAZED by her friend.
After a hurried and somewhat confusing call in midmorning, Muff had appeared on the Jamiesons’ front porch as edgy and heavy-laden as a refugee. In her arms she held a box that pushed against her chin. Shopping bags hung from her wrists. As usual, she was trying to do too much at once, but the strain visible on her face was not, in Marie’s view, fully explained by the physical load she was carrying.
Half amused, half concerned, Marie helped her good friend bring in the rest of the accumulation of stuff that could not be taken to sea on the upc
oming voyage. She was astonished that it covered the large utility table in the family room and the tiled counters that ringed the kitchen as well.
This kind of pack-rat behavior, as Muff’s friends knew, was indulged by Mac most of the time. He loved to tell people about the time he’d tried to change his wife’s ways. Because the bow of their sailboat was lower in the water than the stern, he had ordered her to throw out some of her hoard. Next time he looked, the stern was lower than the bow. Muff had simply shifted everything to the back. Mac would howl with laughter when he told the story, and Muff would smile shyly. Maybe she’d heard him retell it enough.
This morning, after making some coffee, Marie was touched to see Muff going through some of the odds and ends, as if she couldn’t bear to part with it all. Some boxes held old magazines, newspapers, and other junk that didn’t have obvious value or a personal connection. Others were filled with knickknacks from their cruise around the world. In one ratty old suitcase, there was nothing but a collection of rather ordinary seashells. Muff showed how she had painstakingly cleaned and polished each one; they all brought back a memory of her shared life with Mac.
Scattered throughout were authentic treasures of a comfortable, tasteful life—delicate bone china from England, signature lead crystal stemware and serving bowls, a complete dinner service of sterling silver, and a Tiffany platter.
Unable to resist, Marie picked up one of the brilliantly shining dinner knives and noticed an unusual design on the handle.
“That’s Mac’s family crest,” Muff said.
“Honey, I feel a little nervous keeping things this valuable. I mean, these are family heirlooms. Shouldn’t someone else have them?”