Ripper. Isabel Allende

she was born.”

      “Ah!” murmured the old lady, speechless. She stepped closer and stroked the girl’s swollen belly. “The baby you are carrying is a girl. Make sure you give her a good Catholic name.”

      The following day, Bob Martín appeared at the Jackson house on Potrero Hill wearing a dark suit and a funereal tie, carrying a bunch of moribund flowers. He was flanked by his mother and by one of his brothers, who gripped the boy’s arm like a prison warden. Indiana did not come downstairs—she had spent the whole night crying, and was in a terrible state. By now Blake was resigned to the idea of marriage, having failed to persuade his daughter that there were less permanent solutions. He had tried all the usual arguments, though he stopped short of threatening to have Bob charged with statutory rape. The couple was quietly married at City Hall, having promised Doña Encarnación that they would have a church wedding as soon as Indiana—who had been raised by agnostics—could be baptized.

      Four months later, on May 30, 1994, Indiana gave birth to a little girl, just as Bob’s grandmother had predicted. After hours of excruciating labor, the child emerged from her mother’s belly and was dropped into the hands of Blake Jackson, who cut the umbilical cord using scissors given him by the duty doctor. Blake quickly took his granddaughter, swaddled in a pink blanket, a woolly cap pulled down over her eyebrows, to introduce her to the Martín family and to Indiana’s school friends, who had flocked to the hospital, bringing balloons and cuddly toys. When she saw her only granddaughter, Doña Encarnación sobbed as though she were at a funeral—her other grandchildren counted for little, since all were boys. She had spent months preparing, had bought a traditional bassinet with a starched white canopy, two suitcases full of pretty dresses, and a pair of pearl earrings that she planned to put in the little girl’s ears as soon as her mother’s back was turned. Bob’s brothers spent hours searching for him, trying to make sure he was present for the birth of his daughter, but it being Sunday, the new father was off celebrating another win with his football team and did not show up until the early hours.

      As soon as Indiana could hobble out of the delivery room and sit in a wheelchair, her father took her and her newborn upstairs to the fourth floor, where Marianne, the child’s other grandmother, lay dying.

      “What are you going to call her?” asked Marianne, her voice scarcely audible.

      “Amanda. It means bright, clever, deserving to be loved.”

      “That’s pretty. In what language?”

      “Sanskrit,” explained her daughter, who had dreamed of India ever since she was a little girl, “or it could be Latin. But the Martíns think it’s a Catholic name.”

      Marianne only just lived long enough to see her granddaughter. With her dying breath, she offered Indiana one last piece of advice. “You’re going to need a lot of support to raise your daughter, Indi. You can rely on your papa and on the Martín family, but don’t let Bob wash his hands of her. Amanda will need a father, and though he’s a little immature, Bob is a good boy.” She was right.

Sunday, 8

      Thank God for the Internet, thought Amanda as she got ready, because if I’d had to ask the girls at school, I’d look like a complete idiot. Amanda had heard about raves, those secret hedonistic gatherings of teenagers, but could not picture what they were actually like until she looked up the term online and discovered everything she needed to know, including the appropriate dress code. She hunted down what she needed from her wardrobe, ripped the sleeves from an old T-shirt, shortened a skirt with irregular scissor slashes, and bought a tube of luminous paint. The idea of asking her father whether she could go to a rave was so absurd that it did not even occur to her. He would never have agreed; in fact, had he known, he would have shown up with a whole battalion of officers and ruined the party. She told him she didn’t need a ride, that a friend would drop her back at school, and he didn’t seem to notice that she looked more like she was heading to a carnival than back to boarding school—this was how his daughter usually dressed.

      Amanda caught a cab that dropped her at Union Square at 6:00 p.m., prepared to wait for some time. By now she should already have been back at school, but she had taken the precaution of letting the teachers know she would not get back until Monday morning so no one would call her parents. She had left her violin in the dorm, but there was nothing she could do to get rid of her heavy backpack. She spent fifteen minutes watching the square’s newest attraction: a young man smeared from head to foot in gold paint who stood frozen like a statue while tourists posed to have their picture taken. She strolled around Macy’s and, in one of the restrooms, painted luminous stripes on her arms. Outside, it was dark now. To kill time, she went to a hole-in-the-wall that served Chinese food, and at nine arrived back at Union Square, by now empty but for a few dawdling tourists and the beggars who came from colder climates to winter in California, settling in their sleeping bags for the night.

      She sat underneath a streetlamp, playing chess on her cell phone, wrapped in one of her grandfather’s old cardigans, something that always soothed her. She checked the time every five minutes, anxiously wondering whether Cynthia and her friends would pick her up as promised. Cynthia was a girl from school who had bullied her for three years and then suddenly, without explanation, invited her to this rave, even offering her a ride to Tiburon, forty minutes’ drive from San Francisco. Somewhat skeptical, since this was the first time they had included her, Amanda nevertheless immediately accepted.

      If only Bradley, her childhood friend and future husband, were here, she would feel more confident. She had spoken to him a couple of times earlier in the day, though she said nothing about her plans for the evening, afraid that he might try to dissuade her from going. With Bradley, as with her father, it was best to recount the facts after the disaster had occurred. She missed the boy that Bradley had once been, someone warmer and funnier than the straitlaced young man he had become almost as soon as he started to shave. As children they had played at being married and found other convoluted ways to satisfy their childish curiosity, but barely had Bradley reached his teens—a couple of years before she did—than their beautiful friendship began to flounder. In high school Bradley was a high flyer: he was captain of the swim team, and when he discovered he could attract girls whose anatomy was more exciting, he began to treat Amanda like a little sister. But Amanda had a good memory, and had not forgotten the secret games they played at the bottom of the garden, something she planned to remind Bradley about when she went to MIT in September. In the meantime, she did her best not to worry him with minor details like this rave.

      Her mom’s fridge usually contained a few “magic brownies,” gifts from Matheus Pereira, which Indiana would leave there for months until they were covered with green mold and fit only for the garbage. Amanda had tried them just to be in tune with the rest of her generation, but she could not see what was so entertaining about wandering around out of her head. To her it was time wasted that might be better spent playing Ripper. But that Sunday evening, wrapped in her grandfather’s threadbare cardigan, sitting beneath the streetlamp on Union Square, she thought nostalgically about Pereira’s “space cakes”; they would have calmed her down.

      By half past ten Amanda was on the point of crying, convinced that Cynthia had made a fool of her out of sheer spite. When word got around about her humiliation, she would be the laughingstock of the school. I will not cry, I will not cry, she said to herself. Just as she picked up her cell phone to call her grandfather and ask him to come and get her, a van pulled up on the corner of Geary and Powell and someone leaned halfway out the window, waving frantically to her.

      Amanda rushed over, her heart pounding. Inside the van were three boys wreathed in clouds of smoke, all high as kites, including the driver. One of them got out of the passenger seat and gestured for her to sit next to the driver, a young guy with black hair who was very handsome in a Goth sort of way. “Hey, I’m Clive, Cynthia’s brother,” he introduced himself, flooring the accelerator before Amanda even had time to close the door. Amanda recalled that Cynthia had introduced them at the school Christmas concert. Clive had shown up with his parents, wearing a blue suit, white shirt, and patent leather shoes, a very different look from this guy sitting next to her with