And the Sea Will Tell (4 page)

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.

J
ENNIFER 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.

T
HE 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: