Authors: Jenn Bennett
I wanted to say something meaningful and honest in return. Something like “I’ve missed you, too” or “I thought I was going to die if I didn’t see you again.”
But because I was overwhelmed, I settled on “Your button’s chipped.”
As he ducked his head to inspect it, I fit the edge of my finger-nail into the triangular notch.
“Damage inflicted by a flying piece of board,” he said, extending a finger next to mine. “Andy was convinced he could karate chop a wooden piece of shelving that broke off
beneath the counter, but”—his fingertip traced the edge of mine, slowly moving down and around my knuckle, a whisper of a touch that sent a rush of goose bumps over my
arm—“the board didn’t break. It did, however, chip my button, and the corner nearly neutered me. But I was dumb enough to hold the damn thing, so I guess I deserved it.”
I snorted a laugh, meaning to be quiet but failing miserably. Embarrassed, I pulled my hand away. “Ugh, it’s like a library in here,” I complained.
“Shh,” he scolded, ten times louder than my laugh.
I glanced at the cash register. Andy was smiling. Yep, definitely watching us.
“You know, I was just checking the afternoon temp before you came,” Jack said. “It’s, like, sixty-seven degrees out there.”
Which meant it was probably foggy and a good five degrees colder back at home, but that didn’t matter much, since I wasn’t there. “Too bad you’re stuck in here
meditating,” I said.
“Someone already interrupted me. Besides, it’s always better to meditate closer to nature. I know a perfect place. Do you have to work tonight?”
I shook my head.
“Trust me?”
“You ready to give me a reason to?”
“Did I mention the perfect place I had in mind was away from listening ears?” He flicked a glance at Andy and then added, “Far aw ay.”
“All right,” I finally said, like I’d actually considered turning him down.
Jack smiled and held up both hands, walking backward. “Give me five minutes.”
JACK’S FIVE MINUTES WAS MORE LIKE TWO, AND THEN
he was whisking me through the bookstore door and we were out in the sunshine. He looped the
handles of a bulky canvas bag around my wrist as we headed down the sidewalk. “Hold this for a second.”
He stripped out of his cardigan, giving me a peek at the brightly colored fish and lotus tattoos beneath the short sleeves of his T-shirt. “What’s inside the bag?” I asked.
“Vegetarian bacon.”
I made a face. He laughed and took back the bag to stuff his sweater inside it.
“What Muni line are we taking?” I asked as we passed a stop.
“The
me
line.” He pulled a set of keys from his pocket and stopped in front of a shiny black car that was parked in an impossibly tight space near the curb. It was an old
two-seater sports coupe—all curvy and beautiful and compact, with a convertible black top and white scalloped insets in the door that looked like one side of an opened paperclip.
“This is Ghost,” Jack said with unabashed pride.
“Ghost?”
“A 1958 Corvette.” He unlocked the passenger door, which was covered with dings and scratches in an other wise mirror-shiny paint job. “She was stolen last fall and taken for a
joyride, which is why she’s a little beat-up on the outside. I decided to keep her that way for now so she wouldn’t look so showy. Plus it pisses my dad off, and that’s always a
good thing.”
The door squeaked when he opened it. I peered inside at dark red leather seats. A chrome steering wheel jutted from a space-age dash, every bit of it restored. “Holy smokes, Jack. This is
gorgeous.”
“She doesn’t have air-conditioning, and the convertible top leaks when it rains.”
If he was trying to convince me that this wasn’t the coolest car I’d ever seen, he’d need to try harder. “Why do you even ride mass transit?”
“You ever try parking in this city?”
I shook my head. “I don’t drive.”
“Do you ride?” That sounded sort of dirty, and the way he looked at me felt sort of dirty, too. No one ever looked at me like that.
“Why ‘Ghost’?” I asked.
Grasping the top of the car door, he leaned over it and spoke in a dramatic, foreboding voice. “Because she’s so fast she disappears down the streets at night.”
“That sounds dangerous.”
His dimple appeared. “The best things in life are. Hop in, Beatrix Adams.”
I feigned difficulty getting inside the tiny bucket seat. He was right about one thing: It smelled a little mildewy. But apart from that, everything inside the crowded interior was polished and
beautiful. I clicked the seat belt around my waist and exhaled nervously.
After shoving the canvas bag into the tiny trunk, he somehow folded his long legs inside and fired up the rumbling engine. We rolled our windows down to let in a pleasant cross breeze.
“You look pale,” he said as he plucked a pair of sunglasses off his visor. “You okay?”
“Not much cushion between our flesh and another car’s bumper if you wreck.”
He buckled up and put the car in reverse, a smile on his lips and dark shades covering his eyes. “Then I guess I’d better not.”
It had been so long since I’d been in a car other than the paddy wagon or Howard Hooper’s shit-mobile, and I’d never been in anything quite like this. He wasn’t kidding
about the fast thing: The fancy muscle car zipped up and down steep inclines as if the tires and asphalt were an old married couple. But Jack was a good driver, and I felt a little silly that
I’d been nervous.
I propped my bare elbow on the window frame, enjoying the warm breeze that fluttered the split in my short sleeve while the city sailed by. It was exhilarating, being so close to him
again—almost as close as we were in the tea lounge, and more alone. I sneaked a few glances at his face and a few more at his half-tattooed arm as he shifted gears. When he caught me looking
and smiled, I wasn’t as much embarrassed as thrilled.
Despite one minor traffic jam that detoured us through the edge of Duboce Triangle, the drive wasn’t long. When he finally slowed down to find a parking space, it took me a minute to
realize we’d been steadily going uphill, and that hill was Buena Vista Park.
“You live around here, right?”
“Don’t you have a photo of my address?” he teased as he stalked a couple in running shorts heading toward a parked BMW.
“It was blurry,” I said. “Couldn’t read the house number, just the street.”
“I live a few blocks away.”
“Ah. Wait—didn’t someone get set on fire in this park?”
“Someone gets set on fire in
every
park, Bex,” he joked. “Sure, it’s got a few park punks that squat in certain areas at night, but the police sweep through and
kick them out. I come here all the time, especially when I just want to get out of the house and think. And you’ll probably only see Benz-driving families in the day, if that makes you feel
better. Which it shouldn’t. Hello, parking space. It’s our lucky day.”
Maybe it really was.
After some tight maneuvering, Ghost was parked and we were strolling up a wide walkway into the park. Apparently, we weren’t the only people with the bright idea to commune with nature,
because it was pretty crowded: moms with strollers, dads with picnic baskets, teens walking dogs. But a perfect June day was a hard thing to come by in San Francisco, and the best way to enjoy it
was a mass pilgrimage to one of the parks to soak up the sun.
But much like everything else worth doing in the city, the hike to the top of the park put a strain on my calves. Just when I was ready to ask Jack to slow his roll, he grabbed my hand and
pulled me off the paved path and into the woods.
“Hurry before someone catches us,” he said, tugging me behind some trees.
My little legs pumped at double time to keep up with his, and as we dashed through the trees, my head was a balloon, inflating with the singular fact that
Jack was holding my hand!
His
fingers swallowed mine, and his palm was hot and a little sweaty, but so was mine.
One tug beneath a low-hanging branch and we burst out onto a shallow clearing of grass that clung to the side of the hill. I teetered on my tiptoes as Jack threw an arm around my waist to stop
me from falling over the side.
“Oh . . .” I said, breathless.
The city lay at our feet, a dizzying labyrinth of rooftops and white buildings, spread out like a giant patchwork quilt. The Golden Gate Bridge stood in the distance, and the wrinkled coastal
bluffs behind it.
“Right?” he said a few seconds later, as if he could read my mind.
“How did you find this?”
“Exploring, when I was, like, ten.”
I heard people talking from somewhere behind the thick shrubbery that lined the clearing, but they were too far away for me to make out what they were saying.
“It’s just a few yards away from some steps that go to the top,” Jack noted as I glanced around. “So it’s extra-cool, because it’s private, more or less. I
used to hide out here and feel like a total rebel, until one day I found a middle-aged couple out here. I was crushed.”
I laughed. “Well, if they come back today, we were here first.”
“Exactly. Now, help me with this.” He extracted two rolled-up padded black mats from the canvas bag that looked an awful like the ones for sale in the bookstore. I spread out one of
the mats, and he butted the second one right next to it. They were square, and only big enough to sit down on, but I wasn’t complaining. “I’m just borrowing them. Not burgling
them.”
“I swear that’s not a real word, but I haven’t been educated at your fancy-pants private school, so I could be wrong.”
“Be glad. There are a mere fifty people in my graduating class.”
“I’ve only been going to Lincoln for a couple of years—since we moved to the Inner Sunset. But my class is over seven hundred.”
He pulled off his gray Chuck Taylors and socks, and I took off my sandals, and we sat side by side on the mats and stretched out our legs in the warm grass, wiggling our toes.
“I know some people at Lincoln,” he said, passing me a bottle of water from the bag. He named a few names I didn’t recognize. Then he handed me a piece of mottled red fruit I
didn’t recognize, either.
“What is this?”
“Pluot.”
“Plu what?”
“Plum crossed with an apricot. You’ve never had one?”
“I’ve never said it, much less had it.”
“Vegetarian bacon,” he said, squinting at me with merry eyes. He polished one on the hem of his shirt, lifting it up enough to give me a peek at A) a shiny silver belt buckle that
was probably vintage and definitely stamped with the words 4-h club and B) the bottom half of a shockingly well-muscled stomach and an enticing trail of dark hair arrowing into his jeans.
My pluot dropped out of my hand and nearly rolled off the cliff. Jack and his speedy arm caught it.
“Thanks,” I said, concentrating superhard on cleaning off my alien piece of fruit, and concentrating even harder when I bit into the flesh. It was sweet and plum-y and tart.
“Not bad,” I said, trying not to think about the 4-H belt buckle (which made me want to giggle) or the trail of dark hair (which made me want to stick my hands down the front of his
jeans to see where it led).
“The Zen Center has a lot of fruit trees in Marin County,” he explained while I flushed all the dirty thoughts out of my wandering mind.
Fruit trees. Concentrate,
Beatrix.
“So you burgled these, too?” I asked.
“No, these are from my lunch. I hoarded them. That’s completely different.”
We grinned at each other, and his dimpled smile made me beyond glad I’d gone to the Zen Center.
Chatting mindlessly, we polished off the fruit and pitched the pits over the side of the cliff as Jack said, “Make a wish!” and then, “What did you wish for?”
“Not to nail someone on the head,” I said with a grin.
“See? You’re already walking the Middle Path.” He scooted forward until he had enough room for his head on the mat, then settled on his back, using one thrown-back arm for a
pillow. After a few moments I joined him, lying down with my shoulder against his. I didn’t say anything. He didn’t either. We just warmed in the sun and gazed up at the sky. Strangers
chattered on the path beyond the trees.
Silent minutes passed. I closed my eyes. It was so warm I nearly dozed off. His voice pulled me back to the present.
“Have you ever heard of word salad?” he asked.
My heart thudded, but I didn’t open my eyes. “It sounds familiar, but I’m not sure.”
“It’s when your words get all screwed up, and you try to say one thing, but it comes out as gibberish. Like, instead of saying ‘I saw a man walking a dog on a leash in the
park,’ it might come out as ‘I saw a man with a collar and claws walking a tightrope under the trees.’ ”
“Okay.” Where was he going with this?
“People with schizophrenia do it. Especially disorganized schizophrenia, which is one of the worst types. They aren’t as delusional as people with paranoid schizophrenia, but their
reality is distorted, and they have major problems with disorganized thought and speech. Their thoughts get jumbled, and they have a tendency to blurt out weird things and laugh at inappropriate
times. And the longer the disease goes on, the worse their speech gets, and the harder it is for them to communicate, and they can’t do simple things like, I don’t know, take a shower.
Stress builds up; they get frustrated and lash out. Sometimes they try to hurt themselves or other people.”
Oh.
The day I’d gone down to talk to Heath, we’d tried to puzzle out what had happened with Jack at the hospital. We settled on it having something to do with Jack’s mother and
wondered if she—maybe?—had cancer, but I realized now that we’d made the wrong diagnosis.
“The person you’ve been visiting is in the psych ward,” I said softly.
“For the last year and half. She was sick before that and hospitalized once, just for twenty-four hours. But eighteen months ago, she crossed the line.”
He didn’t volunteer what that line was, so I asked, “Family?”
“Yeah. My so-called ‘lady friend.’ ”