Stray City

by Chelsey Johnson

  “No. Never.”

  Beatriz shrugged and released Andrea’s shoulders. “See? Not your fault.”

  “Okay. True.” Andrea wiped her eyes. Beatriz went to the dresser and dropped her work pants. Then Andrea had a terrible thought. “But what about this? What if Lucia finds him, and he doesn’t want anything to do with her?” Andrea pulled off her shirt, balled it up, and threw it hard at the hamper. “All this time I’ve been able to protect her from the fact that he ditched us. I didn’t want her to feel abandoned. I wanted her to feel fully wanted. He can’t just fuck that all up.”

  “Who is this guy?” Beatriz said. “Is he that big an asshole?”

  “No, he’s not an asshole. He wasn’t. I mean, I liked the guy. I slept with him, multiple times, which is saying a lot.”

  “Did you love him?” There was a smile on Beatriz’s face, a loaded one. Part skepticism, part suspicion.

  “No.”

  The smile fell. “That sounded more like a question than an answer.”

  “We said I love you at some point, but the feeling was not—for me, it was not that kind of love.” Andrea tried to summon it, to replay the feeling so she could clarify. But all that emerged was a faint nauseous tingle of wrongness. “I honestly can’t even recall what I felt for him,” she said. “It was ten years ago.”

  Ten years ago! Her brain had barely finished forming at that point. And time had seemed endless. She and her friends had joked back then about their quarter-life crisis—which was no crisis at all, and they tacitly knew it, they said the words quarter-life crisis with a capricious false dismay, fully aware they were only halfway to midlife, and twenty-five years on this earth had already seemed forever, eternal, the abundance of time to come unfathomable. Then, they could still remember the details of elementary school, high school intrigue, and every college course they had taken, each house they had lived in and the rent they had paid there. They still remembered every weekend escapade, every teenage prank, the name and face of every person they had kissed. They had not known how much there was to forget, what could be forgotten that you wanted to hold on to, and what you desperately wanted to shed but could never let go.

  Beatriz carefully removed the tiny black hoops she wore in her ears and dropped them on the dresser top. “Do you think that will ever happen with me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You say you love me now, but in ten years maybe you’ll say you don’t even remember what you felt for me.” Beatriz pulled her sports bra up and over her head and Andrea’s breath caught. She still felt unbelievably lucky every time she caught sight of Beatriz in her tight boy-short underwear, a glimpse of her breasts before she turned her smooth tan back toward the dresser.

  “Oh my god, you? In ten years, I won’t remember what it felt like not to love you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “In ten years, Lucia will be nineteen. Nineteen! She’ll be away at school, or on tour or something, and it’ll just be you and me here.”

  “We’ll miss her.” Beatriz came to bed in her boxers and tank top. “But not all her drinking and running around.”

  “We’ll stay up late and play our music as loud as we want,” Andrea said.

  Beatriz lay down and pulled Andrea to straddle her body. She gripped Andrea’s hips. “We’ll fuck on all the furniture.”

  Andrea tipped her head down and whispered, “I won’t have to be so quiet when I come.”

  Beatriz slid her thumb inside the edge of Andrea’s underwear. “You still need practice on that.”

  Andrea’s eyes went hazy. “I do.”

  “You won’t forget this? Not even in ten years?” Beatriz said.

  “Not if you keep teaching me.”

  “Good girl.”

  Search

  SYDNEY’S MOM MADE THESE THINGS SHE CALLED COOKIES: cold damp lumps of oats and raisins, flavored with cinnamon and the barest amount of brown rice syrup, tenuously held together by bananas. Having grown up with them, Sydney was immune and ate them as automatically as kibble. Lucia took one every time, and was disappointed every time. But she loved Sydney’s mom, Mariel, who was tall and fat with long silver-streaked hair and a sparkling nose stud, and who seldom kept track of how much Sydney used the computer. Lucia was only allowed thirty minutes, and it had to be in the living room where Andrea could see.

  They took their plate of cookies to the family room in the basement, where the kid computer was. Sydney lived in a big foursquare house with two floors plus a basement, and a cedar-fenced yard full of garden beds and rain barrels. There were three bathrooms. Lucia tried to use all three on each visit, at first for the novelty, and then because it became a thing.

  As they settled in at the iMac, Sydney said, “It’s kind of cool that the drummer is your dad.”

  That was weird to hear.

  When her mother and Beatriz had told her the evening before, they never called him her dad. Beatriz slipped and said father once, and her mom amended it to bio-father.

  The three of them were seated around the dining table, assembling their own tacos while the new Os Mutantes album played in the background. Lucia loaded her tortillas with black beans, white cheddar shredded so fine and airy it was like poodle fur, and a stripe of pineapple salsa—tacos so fat she could barely fold them. Beatriz kept getting up and going to the kitchen to get another crucial ingredient they’d forgotten. Her mom had only one spindly taco on her plate, and she was eating three beans at a time with her fork.

  “Luz,” she said. “I know you’ve had a lot of questions lately about your guitar. Sorry I’ve been a little flustered about them.”

  “Yeah,” Lucia said through a mouthful. “You’ve been kind of weird.”

  “I know. I’ve been a real freak.” Her mom didn’t even tell her not to talk with her mouth full. “It’s just, well. It sounds like something you’ve been researching a little? Maybe online? I won’t be mad, it’s okay.”

  Lucia said yes, but she’d only been on the Internet with permission. She hadn’t been sneaking.

  “I believe you, baby, it’s okay. It’s that—so it seems you’re getting to an age when you’re curious about things, and you’re old enough to find information on your own.”

  Her mother was speaking to her very seriously now. She was talking to Lucia the way she talked to Beatriz about the immigration application, focused and intent. “So we want to make sure you have all the information you want about—your own history. If you want to know? Maybe you know all you need to know.”

  Lucia suddenly knew what her mom was talking about. “Like who’s my . . .”

  “Your biological father,” Andrea said.

  “It’s John,” Lucia said. Her mother’s friend who moved away and disappeared. Of whom she had no pictures. Lucia had had the occasional bout of curiosity over the years but there wasn’t much to tell of him.

  Her mom shot Beatriz a worried glance. Beatriz set a hand on her wrist and gave it a gentle squeeze. Her mom said, “John is his legal first name. But he actually went by his middle name.” She took a deep breath. “Which is Ryan.”

  Lucia set down her taco. “Ryan.”

  The guitar. Her guitar belonged to Ryan.

  “Ryan Coates?” she said.

  Her mother nodded.

  Until now her father had been an idea, a biological reality as invisible as an atom. Suddenly, he had a face. Lucia’s head went all tingly. “May I be excused for a minute?”

  Bullet followed her into her room. Lucia shut the door behind them and patted the bed to invite her up, but the dog eyed the leap and instead settled with a heavy thump onto the rug. Lucia went to her guitar. Its weight was solid and familiar in her hands. She sat down on her narrow bed and held the guitar. She thought of his hands on it. Maybe his fingerprints still clung to it somewhere. Or maybe she’d smudged them all away with her own.

  She tilted the guitar forward, bent her head, rested her cheek on its smooth back. She pressed her ear to the wood and l
istened. As if the guitar could tell her something. As if it could contain an ocean, like a shell. All she heard, of course, was solid silence. If you wanted a guitar to speak, you had to pluck the strings yourself.

  Lucia had told Sydney only the basic facts. The feelings were under wraps—she needed more time with them. And Sydney calling him her dad sounded wrong. Lucia had a mom, and a Beatriz. It was strange enough that he now had a face. That she played his guitar. That he was the one who had broken it in the first place. She hadn’t told Sydney that part either.

  “He’s not exactly my dad,” she said. “He’s my male biological contributor.”

  “He’s your paternal unit.”

  “He gave my mom one tiny microscopic sperm, and she built the rest of me completely by herself.”

  “Whoa, dude.”

  “That part’s the same for you too.” Lucia dropped her remaining so-called cookie on Sydney’s plate and wrested the keyboard away from her friend. “I get to type this time.”

  ryan coates cold shoulder

  A brief Wikipedia entry about the band: 1996–1999, Portland, Oregon. Jesse Stratton and Mateo Gold linked to pages all their own but the name Ryan Coates appeared in ordinary black type, unclickable. The Cold Shoulder had an earlier record whose back cover photo was harder to parse than the Lost EP photo—he was grainy and blurry, with his hair falling into his eyes while he played.

  They tried an image search and the page came up tiled with a handful of pictures, many repeated multiple times. Live shots, a few publicity shots of the band, a handful of magazine articles. Lucia clicked on a photo of the three men standing on the Broadway Bridge beneath a cloudy sky. Ryan wore a knit beanie that pushed his hair down in waves around his ears, a dark jacket, hands jammed in his jeans pockets. He was looking at the camera here, an easy smile on his face, lips closed but relaxed, a dimple curved in his left cheek.

  “Save that one,” Lucia said.

  Jesse was usually in the center of the photos, and the live shots seldom showed much of Ryan—a face in the background lit red or blue, or a blur of motion. But they found three more worth keeping. One of the three band members chest-deep in a California swimming pool, clothed, dripping wet and looking up at the photographer; one that showed Ryan in profile, laughing, while a grinning Mateo rubbed his eyes and Jesse, front and center as usual, raised a can of beer to the camera; one posed in a posh hotel hallway, all three with silk ties slung loosely around their necks over their regular T-shirts and jeans, with the text, cut off from the other page of the spread:

  THE COLD SHOULDER HEAT UP:

  The Northwest’s Next Great

  Post-grunge, and Touring with

  There were two videos on YouTube, songs from the first album Lucia didn’t know, and they watched them each twice. There was no MySpace or Facebook or Bandcamp or anything that existed in this century.

  Sydney printed out the photos for Lucia, inkjet-spotty and streaked, and asked if they could now watch YouTube videos of a dance called jerking.

  Lucia said sure and excused herself to the bathroom.

  Whenever people told one of her friends that he or she looked just like whatever parent, Lucia seldom saw it. Like, Sydney was sometimes told she looked like her dad. They were both skinny with slightly weak chins, but Sydney’s dad was over six feet tall and had shaggy salt-and-pepper hair and a stubbly face. And he was a man. People used to call Lucia Andrea’s “mini-me,” which was a little creepy, but when Lucia looked into her mother’s face she saw her mother, not herself. The face Lucia saw in the mirror was entirely different. Yet adults were always looking for these traces—like how they couldn’t listen to new bands without identifying all the parts that sounded like the bands their age. Syd looked like Syd. Luz looked like Luz.

  Now she studied her face in the bathroom mirror and tried to isolate any feature that wasn’t at all like her mom’s. Her medium-brown hair. Her hazel eyes, brown at the center and blue-green at the rims, not as round as Andrea’s but slightly longer and narrower. She pressed her mouth into a closed smile like Ryan’s in the bridge photo, and the dimple appeared in her right cheek. But her kid face showed none of the angles of his adult man face—his cheekbones, his strong straight nose. She had her mother’s small, soft nose and full cheeks.

  Back in the family room, she said, “Do you think I look like him?”

  Sydney had already pushed the chairs aside and was bouncing on the balls of her feet, warming up to dance. The iMac screen was cued to a video of teenagers in tight jeans and bright sneakers.

  “Maybe in the eyes?” Sydney said. “Otherwise, I can’t tell.”

  “We both have a dimple, but mine’s in the other cheek.”

  Sydney bent her knees deep and wiggled her skinny rear. “I think you look like a tiny spiny balled-up hedgehog who needs to dance.”

  Lucia slid the printed photos into her school notebook and zipped her backpack shut before she joined Sydney on the carpet. Sydney hit the space bar, and the music blared from the tinny computer speakers. In a minute they were both breathless and laughing. “Is this right?” Lucia said, twisting her feet around in a spiral, and Sydney said, “I don’t know, but it looks good to me,” as she dipped into a deep knee bend and fell to the floor.

  Later, Lucia sat on her bedroom rug and examined the pixelated printouts. She looked longest at the band photo on the Broadway Bridge, the one where his gaze was most direct. She held it up to face her at eye level. She said, “Hi.”

  Videotape

  THAT WEEKEND, NO ONE FELT LIKE COOKING FAMILY DINNER, so they all biked over to the new gentrified pizza place in Woodlawn where Lawrence’s girlfriend, Carson, worked. She’d offered up her employee discount, which was a good thing: “Twenty-three dollars for a pizza?” Andrea said, scanning the menu. “North of Alberta, no less.” Her stomach turned.

  “What recession?” Lawrence said darkly.

  Even with the economy’s recent yearlong plummet, none of them could afford to live anymore in the neighborhoods where they’d come of age. Even Failing Street had shot up far beyond their means. All over town, new earth-toned paint sleeked over old wooden siding—conspicuously and deceptively neutral. Bright cedar privacy fences sprang up where chain-link and open space had left the view clear. Unruly front yards and tangled rosebushes were shamed out by tidy mulched beds, every plant mapped and spaced. Black neighborhoods were becoming white neighborhoods and white neighborhoods were becoming rich neighborhoods. They couldn’t even afford to live in Meena’s Belmont duplex, which she was able to rent out for three times the late-1990s mortgage she was paying, partially funding her new life in L.A. Hatchbacks and hoopties gave way to strollers and Outbacks. One corner of the Pearl warehouse where they’d mounted their queer art show now housed a coffee shop with a $10,000 espresso machine, and the rest contained a store that sold hand-tanned leather couches that cost five figures and decor gathered—no, “curated”—from around the globe: draped hides, $40 candles in somber boxes, carvings by uncredited artists. Even the bands had changed. Less earsplitting, seditious noise and gleeful defiance; more mid-tempo beats, soaring harmonies, introspection, and uplift. Songs you could play in restaurants and television commercials. Bands that changed other people’s lives.

  And yet. It was still home. Most of them had moved farther north, into North Portland and north-er Northeast, and there it still felt familiar: cheap burritos, karaoke seven nights a week at Chopsticks III How Can Be Lounge, video rental stores with the business-sustaining porn corner behind a curtain in the back, strip clubs, dive bars that were not yet Dive Bars™, disheveled houses and cars from the 1970s and 1980s. Restaurants with daily-changing menus cropped up here and there, and baby boutiques now populated Mississippi Avenue, but everything had slowed way down. And though work was hard to come by again, and houses were foreclosing around them, at least there was a sense that the tide of wealth that threatened to drown them all had receded. The bubble had burst. But they were never in the bubble
.

  While they waited at a reclaimed-wood table for what had better be the best pizza of their lives, Andrea gave Lucia a pocketful of quarters and sent her to play the vintage pinball machine in the corner. As soon as the kid was fully absorbed, her shoulders twitching like she was being electrocuted, Andrea laid out what had happened for her friends.

  “She hasn’t brought it up again,” Andrea said. “I don’t know what to do. Should I try to talk to her about it?”

  “She’s probably just absorbing it,” Lawrence said.

  Robin rested her elbows on the table and, winding a long lock of black hair around her hand, asked, “How does it make you feel?”

  Andrea cracked open a beer. “Like, I dealt ten years ago with Ryan’s leaving and thought I was done with it. But no, it’s back. Even in his absence, here he is all over again.”

  Topher’s boyfriend, Mike, shook his head. “Always under the straight man’s thumb.”

  “And I don’t want to tell her that he just bailed like that.”

  “Oh, you can’t,” Robin said.

  “I won’t.”

  Lawrence turned to Beatriz. “How does it make you feel?”

  Beatriz said, “I just want Lucia to be okay. That’s the most important thing.” She took a deep swig of her beer. “I mean, I don’t know the guy. But he seems like an asshole.”

  “He wasn’t terrible,” Lawrence said. Andrea kicked her under the table. “I mean for a straight man.” Another kick. “I mean except for that he evaporated at dawn like a vampire and left you to deal with everything by yourself. Yeah, that was terrible. But at least you got to—” A final kick. “Ow. Yes. Bad.”

  “I keep wanting to explain myself without explaining why I did what I did. But I think I’ll only dig a deeper hole if I try to do that.”

  “Give her space,” Beatriz said. “That’s all we can do.” Andrea suspected Beatriz needed the same. She’d been spending a lot of time in her makeshift wood shop in the garage.