I wish I could have been aware of when Jennifer arrived, but alas we were all babies. The early years have a way of compressing into a single texture rather than a clear sequence of events. What I remember more clearly is the quality she brought into the house with her. A brightness. Jennifer's brightness had an edge to it even then. Purposeful. Like she'd decided early that brightness was the strategy and she was going to execute it thoroughly.
She worked harder than most of us. That's the thing I keep coming back to. Some of the siblings had power that announced itself — impossible to miss, impossible to suppress, forcing the father's attention by sheer virtue of existing loudly. Jennifer's relationship with water was extraordinary, but it required something from her. Effort, practice, a particular kind of stubborn commitment to improvement. She put the work in. Consistently, visibly, in the way of someone who has correctly identified the currency and is determined not to run short of it.
The public loved Liquidator. I watched that from a distance after I left — the occasional headline, the coverage that came with being one of the more photogenic members of the remaining Academy. She had a facility with the heroic persona that some of the others didn't, or didn't care to develop. She knew how to be seen. I think she'd probably been practising that since before she knew she was practising it.
What I wonder about, on this train, is the gap between the smile and whatever is behind it. The smile I remember was real — she was a child, it was real — but the smile in the later photographs has a quality to it that I find difficult to read from a distance. Too present. Too consistent. The smile of someone who has decided the smile is load-bearing and cannot be put down.
I understand the logic. When the thing you actually wanted — the second glance, the acknowledgement, the father actually seeing you — proved difficult to attain, you find the next available thing and you work for that instead. Public admiration is real. It counts for something. I'm not going to diminish what she built.
I just keep thinking about the smile. About what it costs to hold an expression that permanently. About what's resting underneath it waiting for somewhere safe enough to put it down.
I don't know if the mansion is going to be that place. I suspect it isn't. But I'm going to pay attention.