Lucia jogged over and asked for more quarters, and then the pizzas arrived, each perched on a stand as if it were too good for the table.
“This is fucking delicious,” Topher said.
“Language?” Mike elbowed him and glanced at Lucia.
Lucia gave him a pitying look. “I’ve heard everything.”
“There’s not much we hide,” Andrea said.
“Not much,” Beatriz said with a meaningful look.
They all looked deep into the pizza. Robin jumped in mercifully: “Luz, tell us what’s up with the Tiny Spiny Hedgehogs. I have a button maker if you want to make some merch.”
The next Monday, a light October drizzle, gray sky, maple leaves orange as lanterns. Andrea and Beatriz drove Lucia to Beach Elementary. Lucia sat in the back seat with her blue backpack in her lap, arms wrapped around it. Her eyes looked out the streaky window but it was clear her mind was elsewhere.
Andrea turned down the radio. “So, Luz. What do you want to do for your birthday this year?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to have a party? Or do something small with Sydney and a couple other friends?”
Beatriz said, “We could see if there are any all-ages shows coming up at Backspace that you guys would like.”
Lucia absently said, “Yeah.”
Andrea and Beatriz exchanged a look. Two options. One, ignore it and play along with Lucia’s distance, and leave her to continue prowling around in private; or two, bring it up. Andrea was naturally inclined to the former, but her commitment to do things differently from her own parents overrode this default setting. Plus, Beatriz was watching. She took a deep breath. “What’s on your mind, baby?”
“I’m not a baby.”
“Sorry. What’s on your mind, Luz?”
“Nothing.”
“For real. Just tell me.”
Lucia tightened her arms around her backpack. “I was just wondering, do you have any pictures of him? Like up in the attic, that maybe you forgot about?”
“Of . . . Ryan?” As if the kid meant any other him.
Lucia nodded. She was trying to look nonchalant, which only made her appear more vulnerable.
Andrea said, “I’ll take a look tonight when I get home. Promise.”
They idled at the curb and watched Lucia walk all the way into school. Her bright backpack bobbed through the sea of other kids, hanging heavy on her narrow little shoulders.
“I hope I did this right,” Andrea said.
“Me too.” Beatriz took her hand, interlaced their fingers, and held tight—whether offering or seeking reassurance, Andrea couldn’t tell.
Andrea hadn’t been in the attic for at least a year. The peaked ceiling, the dusty brown floorboards, the smell of old wood and cardboard, the stillness of the air—like a church. All her archives, all her things lined up along the walls. Everything was still here. All her earlier lives, safely stored.
She could see exactly where the kids had been during their borrowed/blue hunt—boxes pulled out, pushed back, folded awkwardly half-shut. And there in the far corner was the open box of Cold Shoulder EPs that Andrea had forgotten she even owned.
The box she needed was encased inside another larger one, tucked far in the back, and labeled TEXTBOOKS PAPERS ETC. Inside, there were no textbooks, all long since sold off, only her college papers, and under those a medium-sized box. That was the one.
Everything that was left of Ryan lay inside this box. She had long ago shipped off his clothes and checkbook, two crates of records, CDs and tapes, his camera. One of his bandmates came for the drum kit, and Ryan had told her to keep the guitar. He didn’t want anything else. Sell what you can and send me a check. Or actually, keep the money for the kid. At least I can contribute that much. She’d sent him the check. He’d never cashed it.
She turned over the early postcards in her hand. Quaintly out of date even when he’d written them. What talismans they had been. There were a few letters, too, which she let lie in their envelopes. A couple of wristbands and backstage passes whose once-sticky backing was now soft with denim lint. A tiny rubber tiger. An ordinary tortoiseshell guitar pick—what had been the significance of that? A wood-block letter A. A film canister with coins from Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain—more valuable or less for their obsolescence in the euro era? A beer cozy from a dive bar in Vancouver, Washington, where they used to sing karaoke. Folded into a square, a soft First Avenue T-shirt, faded from black to gray, holes around the neckline—a shirt she’d considered too great to get rid of, yet too Ryan to keep in circulation. She sniffed it but it only smelled like storage now, like papers and attic dust and a little musty. Maybe for Lucia? Maybe too much to handle.
Under a plastic videocassette labeled with the name of a long-obsolete late-night show, dated 5-21-99, she found a tattered Kodak envelope with photos inside. There were only a dozen or so—a few Polaroids, disposable-camera snapshots. Andrea, blurred and reaching for the camera; Ryan standing in his old apartment cooking pancakes; Ryan pulling his jacket over his head; a night shot with flash that blew out his face, bright and smooth; throwing a stick for Bullet at the coast (Bullet with no white on her muzzle!); Ryan lying on his back in the grass of Irving Park, a band of skin showing between his T-shirt and jeans, a faint line of gold fur down his abdomen. All photos were gerunds.
On the rare occasion when Andrea thought of him now, these were some of the few images she could conjure. She had come to recall these photos of him more clearly than all the moments she had actually looked at him. Strange to know a face so closely, so intimately, and how that live, indelible thing could degrade into a fragment of a glance. How a real face could be superseded by its own flat image on glossy paper. How did he remember her? He likely had nothing, no photos, no evidence. He’d taken nothing, she’d sent him nothing. Maybe his memory was truer than hers. Or maybe he would hardly recognize her now.
And here were the cassettes: a few mixtapes from Ryan, a microcassette from an answering machine she no longer owned. They had lived such analog lives then. Letters, photocopied zines, videocassettes, mixtapes in a Walkman. It used to take her hours to make a mixtape. That was the art of it—you had to measure your time so carefully, rationing those forty-five minutes per side, and sequence with precise intent since the order of the songs was fixed forever. Time then was more like space—you traveled it like land, minute by minute, mile by mile. You were always stopping by a Kinko’s to copy or print something, or the post office to collect mail and zines (everyone moved around so frequently that they just had PO boxes, the tiniest rented permanent address). You had to go to things, to people. What went on here, in this town, in your orbit, constituted ninety-nine percent of everything that happened. Other news trickled in through word-of-mouth or a zine or the news on the radio. Now it seemed only fifty percent or sixty percent of life happened here—your sense of what was going on flooded in from everywhere, all the time, at the same time, or so it seemed with her friends who used MySpace or Facebook or whatever and filled themselves with information about people they barely knew and would almost never see in real life.
Andrea refused all social media. She didn’t care about queer dance parties in San Francisco, didn’t want people from high school to track her down, didn’t want the stream of Alissa’s child photos and Alex’s Republican politics and even dear Annabel’s cell phone shots of herself making the same picture face every time. And she especially did not want Ryan to find her, to see photos of her or Beatriz or, god forbid, Lucia, her kid, who filled her with a love so euphoric and brutal it sometimes bordered on despair.
She exhaled all the breath she could from her heavy chest. The attic air was too thick with the past. The T-shirt and tapes and everything else went back inside the box, and Andrea took the photo envelope and the videocassette downstairs with her. Down the steps, back into her house, back into the light, back into real life.
That evening, Andrea br
ought the VCR up from the Shelf of Obsolescence in the basement and plugged it into the television. On the couch, Lucia sat on her hands, eyes wide. Andrea inserted the videocassette—the old familiar creak as it slid into place, a click, a pause. She pressed Play and joined Lucia on the couch.
The video quality was so bad then. How grainy and strange everything looked, as if filmed through a screen door. That band, the scab band, was a joke—the lead singer affecting a late-millennium version of seventies glam, the guitarist making superstar moves. Ryan pounded grimly away behind them. The camera landed on him a few times, panned quickly away to the spectacle of the real band members.
Andrea tried to put an arm around Lucia, but Lucia leaned forward, watching closely. Beatriz, who’d been standing behind the couch with her arms folded, set her hands on Andrea’s shoulders and Andrea was grateful for it, wrapped a hand around one of Beatriz’s. The song ended. The host walked over to the band’s stage and shook their hands. The show went to a commercial, which ended abruptly and switched to the remains of a taped-over Buffy episode. The whole thing lasted three minutes. Beatriz reached for the television remote and hit Mute.
“Can we watch it again?” Lucia said.
Andrea knelt and rewound the tape—the VCR remote was long lost—and pressed Play again.
When it ended, Andrea said, “Do you have any questions?”
“Was he famous?”
“Never.”
Lucia twisted the strings of her hoodie. “Do you think he ever comes back to Portland?”
This was one of Andrea’s worst fears. For years, she’d see a tall man with overgrown dirty-blond hair on a bar stool, or bent over the vinyl racks at the record store, or walking down Oak Street, and her heart would start to pound—but it was never him. Sometimes when the doorbell rang, she’d be seized by a false premonition that she’d open it and there he’d be, chastened, or defiant, or both. What would he look like ten years later? Andrea herself had thickened and solidified, no longer the underfed twig she was in her youth; her thighs were strong and her belly soft. She’d traded in the belted and scissor-hemmed men’s Levi’s and cords for jeans that fit her body snugly. She no longer wore frayed bras held together by safety pins. She’d lost her taste for novelty polyester, though she still owned almost every T-shirt she’d ever thrifted—most of them were filed away on the top shelf of her closet, and some in Lucia’s, since many were kid-sized 10–12 or 14–16 anyway. Her hair had long since graduated from the I’m-a-lesbian close crop and was now chin-length with side-swept bangs, and threaded with tiny glints of silver she sometimes colored away, sometimes let grow. Ryan would now be forty. Would his hair have thinned and receded, and would he still grow it out anyway, the wispy halo of the man who hangs on too long? Or would he have cut it short and let it be? Would it have grayed, or lost its sunny streaks and turned ashy brown? Would his belly be thick, his chest soft and saggy? His crow’s-feet would be deeper, maybe his dimple too. Silver stubble along his jaw?
Although Andrea’s address wasn’t listed in the phone book anymore, it wouldn’t be hard to find her. She was pretty sure Ryan’s disappearance qualified as abandonment, but the legal trouble was nothing compared to the ways she feared it would fuck up Lucia to have a man show up calling himself her father. Andrea had always planned to prepare her just in case, yet had never been ready to do it. Now it didn’t matter if she was ready. “He hasn’t come back as far as I know,” Andrea said. “I think he really left for good.”
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know where he is, Luz. I haven’t talked to him since 1999. He was in northern Minnesota then.”
“Where?”
“It was a town called Bemidji. But there’s no way he’s still there.”
“Bemidji?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
“Are you feeling okay?”
Lucia nodded.
“Anything else you want to know right now? We’re here to answer your questions the best we can.”
Lucia pressed her lips together, rolled her shoulders, and said, “Can I have some ice cream?”
Andrea said of course, and Lucia hopped up and went to the kitchen. Buffy and Giles argued mutely in the high school library—only season two, when vampires and the principal were still her primary foes. And you think high school is tough, Andrea thought. Just you wait.
Beatriz turned off the TV. She looked over her shoulder, where Lucia was shoveling a hunk of vanilla out of its tub, and her smile had relief in it. “I guess they live in the moment.”
“They really do,” Andrea said. “Like dogs.” Lucia headed to her room with a heaping bowl and her Harry Potter book, Bullet close behind her sniffing the air.
Lucia’s Search History
ryan coates
ryan coates face
ryan coates cold shoulder face
ryan coates daughter
ryan coates kids
ryan coates cold shoulder family
ryan coates andrea morales
where does ryan coates live
what happened to ryan coates from the cold shoulder
does ryan coates from the cold shoulder have kids
is ryan coates cold shoulder married
how to do the dougie
dougie videos
jerkin videos
soulja boy
animal friends
cat with pancake on its head
rabbit with pancake on its head
dramatic chipmunk
cold shoulder lyrics
cold shoulder video
ryan coates cold shoulder video
ryan coates phone number
ryan coates phone number bamidgie minnesota
The Four-One-One
LATER THAT WEEK, SYDNEY ASKED SHANNON AT ROCK CAMP how you find someone’s phone number that isn’t on the Internet, and Shannon said you dial 411. So that’s what Lucia did, stowed away in their practice room at the back of the warehouse, after Tiny Spiny Hedgehogs practice and before Beatriz finished with her guitar lessons down the hall.
Lucia sent Sydney into the hallway and shut the door.
One wall of the practice room had a giant black-and-white poster of a girl with braces and a lot of eyeliner and curly bangs, singing hard into a microphone, labeled POLY STYRENE. Lucia looked at that poster every time they practiced. She dialed 411 and placed her hand on top of Poly Styrene’s hand clutching the mic.
A woman answered. “Cityandstateplease?”
Lucia didn’t know what she meant. “Hi, I need a phone number for someone?”
“What city and state?”
“I’m not sure.”
The woman said she had to give her something to work with, so Lucia thought she might as well try Bemidji, Minnesota.
They had no listing for the name Ryan Coates there.
Lucia traced her finger over Poly Styrene’s braces. Her mother had told her that his real name was John. “How about John Coates?”
“I have a J. R. Coates on Sumac Road.”
Lucia asked for that one.
“Do you want the number or do you want me to put you through?”
“The number,” Lucia said. Golden luck, there was a Sharpie lying in the cavernous back of an amp. But there was nothing to write on. She leaned against the amp and wrote the number on the brown sole of her sneaker. Then she dialed it.
Lucia was supposed to use her small red flip phone only to text and call her mom or Beatriz, or for emergencies. She hoped they wouldn’t notice. The phone rang six times, then went to voice mail.
In the few seconds of the robot greeting, Lucia wondered whether to leave a message, or what she’d even say, but then the beep hit and there she was, dumped into the dark empty room of voice mail. “Oh, um, hello. This is Lucia. I’m looking for Ryan Coates. So, um, if this is him, um . . . I think you might be my—never mind, don’t call me here, this isn’t my number, I’ll call you back later, bye.”
She
clicked the phone off quickly. The feeling in her chest and head was like she’d sucked helium out of a balloon.
Sydney was waiting in the hall. “Did he answer? What did he say?”
“Nothing,” Lucia whispered. “It was a wrong number.”
“I bet if we get in touch with—”
Lucia shushed her. Beatriz was coming down the hall toward them, stickered guitar case in hand. “I’ll never find him. It’s okay.”
She didn’t know why she’d told Sydney that. Maybe it was because Sydney looked at her like a hungry dog and Lucia didn’t have enough to feed her. She still needed it all for herself.
“Olá, filhotas.” Beatriz gave them each a fist-bump and Sydney turned bashful. “Practice go okay?”
“Yeah,” they said.
“You looked so serious.”
“Like this?” Lucia crossed her eyes and pulled her chin back into her neck. Sydney dissolved. It always worked.
“You little monkey.” Beatriz dove a hand toward Lucia’s ribs and both kids shrieked and leaped back. “Okay, okay, let’s go home.”
In her room, Lucia flipped over her shoe and recited the phone number over and over. She made it into a little song to commit it to memory. Then she grabbed a black Magic Marker from the kitchen drawer and crossed the number out. An inky black rectangle that her steps on the pavement would rub right off.
Lucia lay down on her bed. She stretched out her arms and legs, and wrapped her hands and hooked her feet around the edges. This was her bed. This was her body reaching to all corners of her bed. This was her life. This was where she was born and where she lived, Portland, with her mom and her dog and her aunts and uncles and her friends and her bandmate; this was the whole world she knew. This was her planet. But here was this new moon in orbit, exerting strange gravity. Lucia held on tightly to the covers. She loved her life. She didn’t want to leave it. But what was on the moon? How could she not wonder?
The Voice
FUCK, IT WAS COLD FOR OCTOBER. TWENTY DEGREES COLDER than usual, all month, the coldest fall he’d ever known here. Leaves already weeks gone, and frost on the windshield this morning. Ryan turned down the dirt driveway—the cold made for a harder, tighter crunch beneath the tires—and pulled over to the turnout. Kelly’s pickup rolled in after him and pulled into the garage. He always let her have the garage, a gesture she pretended to refuse only the first time.
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