Fingerprints of You

by Kristen-Paige Madonia

  “Just around the block,” she told me. “And make sure you wear your coat.”

  It had rained that afternoon, so it smelled like water and roasting turkeys and maybe even snow, which made me feel better about it being Thanksgiving and Emmy being so depressed. Snow would be clean and fresh, and I wished for the sky to split open and cover everything in white.

  “I saw Tony Adams yesterday down at the grocery store with his wife,” Emmy said as we walked down the hill past the house with the yellow shutters, and I knew she was thinking of her dad because Tony had worked with Bobby Elder at Ervin’s Auto Repair.

  And Bobby Elder had just died in the same city Emmy’s dad was stationed in.

  “He’s in the reserves too, you know? But there he is the day before Thanksgiving picking up a can of cranberry sauce and a box of mashed potatoes with his wife like nothing’s changed. Like all his buddies didn’t just get sent away on a school bus.” She kicked a stick out of the road, and I watched it disappear into a neighbor’s overgrown lawn.

  We were in front of the house with all the ironweed then, so I picked one out of the yard, which made Emmy smile as she tucked it into her hair. She looked a little less angry with the purple flower peeking out from behind her ear.

  “How come he’s not there?” I asked.

  “I guess he enrolled in the motor pool unit, since he worked at Ervin’s and all,” she said, which didn’t mean much to me because while Emmy had been researching the military during our library period once a week, I’d been alternating between Tom Robbins and childhood development books.

  “Motor pool?” I asked.

  “They work on the war trucks. Bobby Elder and Tony Adams did the exact same thing down at Ervin’s, but Tony joined the motor pool and Bobby was in infantry like my dad.”

  The dogs behind the house with the half-moon driveway were going nuts by then, so we turned on Ashland Avenue and headed into the dark toward Dylan’s neighborhood.

  “Motor pool is a support unit, but they needed boots on the ground, guys like my dad. It’s chance, I guess. They called for infantry and left Tony Adams at home. It’s the luck of the draw,” she said, which reminded me of something Stella told me once when I asked her about my father.

  I was five years old and upset and wanting a normal family like all the other kids in my kindergarten class had: two parents, a child or two. I didn’t understand why some kids had dads and I did not.

  “It’s the luck of the draw, kiddo,” Stella answered. “You got a bad pick.” She said some boys were made to be fathers and some were not, which stopped me from asking about him for a little while. The stories she gave me about my dad were thin and detached anecdotes, sketches of a man who wasn’t good enough or smart enough to be a parent, and back then I didn’t know I had any other option but to accept whatever she told me about him.

  The light was on in Dylan’s room when we got to his house, and we stood in the side yard and threw rocks at his window. Emmy had the beanie rolled up in her back pocket, and when she pulled it out she told me she had kind of screwed up the edge. “I messed up the pattern here,” she said, and pointed to the line where the blue fabric alternated to green.

  “I think it’s perfect,” I told her, and then Dylan appeared at the window.

  “Looks like trouble,” he said when he got the window opened. He smiled at Emmy, and she smiled back and told him she was leaving him a present in the mailbox.

  “I’ll come down,” he said. “Don’t move.” But Emmy told him we couldn’t stay and that we’d see him at school on Monday. And then she blew him a kiss.

  I loved the way he looked at her when she did that, and I figured that was the kind of look I should have waited for before I gave myself over to the pothead in Virginia or to Johnny Drinko in the tattoo shop. I wondered if that was the way my father used to look at Stella.

  On the walk back to my house I promised to start researching bus routes, and Emmy agreed to look up the place with the faces in the mountain just to be sure we knew where it was, and when we stopped in front of my front porch I told her, “Your dad’s going to be okay, Emmy. And screw Tony Adams anyway. Your dad’ll be back before you know it, and I bet he shows up with some kind of medal,” which she must have liked the sound of, because she told me I was beautiful all pregnant and glowy, and then she flicked me on the belly before we headed inside.

  THE WEEK BEFORE CHRISTMAS BREAK, someone called in a bomb threat after lunch, and we all got sent home from school. It turned out to be a prank call from some guys who had graduated the year before and were home from college for winter break, but at the time the school had to follow procedure and move all the students to the football field, where we stood for over an hour freezing our asses off. They literally went through the list of the entire student body and released us individually onto the buses, double-checking all the forms to see who was allowed to drive home and who needed to have their parents called.

  “Everyone must be accounted for in an emergency,” they told us.

  “I cannot wait to get out of this town,” Emmy said when she found me in the crowd. Her small shoulders were shaking, and I could see her breath in the air when she spoke.

  We were supposed to stand in groups based on the first letter of our last name, but the whole thing was a catastrophe, and kids were pretty much doing whatever they wanted while the vice principal stood in the announcers’ booth at the top of the bleachers and called our names out one by one, directing us to the parking lot, where the school buses were and the parent carpool line had started, or releasing us to drive ourselves home.

  Dylan had left by then to spend the vacation in Asheville, North Carolina, with his grandparents, and she hadn’t told me yet, but I was pretty sure Emmy had slept with him before he took off. For me, sex was inadequate and ugly then, so I hadn’t asked her outright. I didn’t want to know if it had been better or worse for her than it had been for me. I knew she wanted it to be important, and I was worried that if they’d done it already, it might have been a disappointment.

  I recognized some of Emmy’s old friends standing in a huddle near us, but she didn’t wave them over, so neither did I. There was a new girl with them I’d never seen with their crowd, so I asked Emmy who the brunette was.

  “A robot,” she said. “Their new recruit. They won’t hang out with Emily Curtis anymore because rumor has it she had an abortion over Thanksgiving break,” she told me, and shrugged.

  I was born just months after the Supreme Court affirmed its Roe v. Wade decision in the Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey case. I only asked about it once, back in the eighth grade, when we were studying the justice system at school. We’d spent the week debating women’s rights, so it was on my mind. Stella and I lived in the apartment in Philadelphia with Denny then, and there was meatloaf in the oven and a vodka tonic in her fist while she waited for him to come home. That day, a girlfriend from work announced she was pregnant, and Stella was reminiscing about what it was like when it happened to her, how frantic she was when she bought the pregnancy test and how scared she’d been when she decided to leave California and move back east to live with her mom.

  “Did you ever think of getting rid of it?” I asked. I had wanted to know for a while, and it seemed as good a time as any to finally say it out loud.

  She turned toward me, dropping the glass in her haste as her cocktail splashed across the cheap linoleum floor. Her eyes flashed like headlights, angry and spinning, and I wondered if she might have slapped me had she been standing closer.

  “Don’t you ever talk to me like that,” she said. “Have you lost your mind?”

  I watched the Preps’ newest addition and wondered how they’d picked her. She was pretty enough, but she looked kind of blank faced and starstruck while she listened to the rest of them talk.

  “She’s a freshman,” Emmy said, “but her dad works in TV. Used to write for the CW network or something awesome like that,” she said sarc
astically, and rolled her eyes with a grunt.

  Mr. Holton was only up to Sheri Anne Coleman, and I eyed the football equipment lying on the side of the field. “I’m pretty sure I might stab myself with one of those orange flags before he gets to Lemon Raine Williams,” I told Emmy.

  “Hysteria?” she asked.

  “Boredom,” I said. “Seriously, can’t they just let us all go?”

  She bounced in place and blew into her hands. “Entertain me, Lemon Raine Williams,” she said. “Tell me about our trip.”

  “Well, obviously there’ll be superheroes and time traveling machines and gruesome battles where we’re the only ones with the magic powers to survive,” I told her, and then immediately wished I had left out the part about battles and survival, thinking of her dad, but it didn’t trip her up a bit.

  “And don’t forget the rock stars that are actually vampires who suck our blood and talk us into riding on their wings all the way to Paris.”

  “Naturally,” I said.

  Next to us, Jenny Myers and the new robot were whispering. Some of the boys had sat down on the grass, lined up their textbooks in a square, and begun playing football with a folded piece of paper they flicked back and forth. Jenny and Allyson Cooper stood behind them, watching.

  “Hey, Emmy,” I said.

  “Let me guess.” She shifted her eyes away from them and back to me. “You’re starving. Jesus, Lemon, I know you’ve got a kid in there, but it’s only a few inches long. It can’t eat that much.”

  Mr. Holton was up to Andrew Lynn Dexter, and a low hum of laughter erupted throughout the football field when someone yelled, “Homo.” Evidently, Andrew Lynn had never told anyone his middle name.

  “I’m not hungry,” I lied. “I’ve got a new idea for our trip,” I said, and she said, “Mermaids in Mexico?” but I shook my head.

  “It might be a little expensive, but I’ve been doing some thinking, and I figured I might as well throw it out there, just in case,” I rambled, and she said, “Jesus, out with it already,” and flicked me on the belly, her newest habit I’d fallen in love with.

  “I think we should go to San Francisco,” I told her.

  My mother lived in California when she got pregnant, and according to her, my biological father worked in a movie theater on Fillmore Street and won her over with free films and supersize boxes of Milk Duds. For a long time this was the only story I knew about her life before me, and later, when I was old enough to ask questions, she said her years in San Francisco were pretty hard to remember.

  “It was a different life, baby,” she told me once. “If it weren’t for you looking back at me the way you do, sometimes I would think I imagined the whole thing.”

  Emmy’s face was hard to read since her lips were turning purple and she was shivering so hard, so I kept talking. “It’ll take forever and the ticket’s more expensive, but Greyhound goes from Wheeling to San Francisco in about three days.” We’d talked about spending a week at the beach in Corpus Christi or at the mountains in Fort Collins, but she didn’t know anything about Stella’s life before me, and I figured she was wondering why I’d picked a place so far away. “But it is San Francisco,” I said. “A real city. West coast.”

  The Preps were all crouched on the grass by then and laughing as if everything they said to one another was the most magnificent and hilarious thing they’d ever heard, begging us to watch them. It was like a car crash. Something about them made it hard to look away.

  “That is a brilliant idea,” Emmy said, and moved her eyes to mine. And then she smiled bigger than I’d seen her smile since her dad left town on that bus.

  I didn’t tell Emmy right away that the Greyhound route wouldn’t take us by Mount Rushmore, and I also didn’t tell her about knowing my dad lived in San Francisco, because I wasn’t sure she’d want to be part of a trip that might get me closer to my father while hers just kept getting farther away. None of it really mattered, though, because once we decided to go she couldn’t stop talking about the snow on the Colorado Mountains or the view of the Pacific Ocean, or how big and hopeful the Golden Gate Bridge was going to look when we pulled onto it. We each bought our tickets that night. Emmy used her sister’s credit card and gave the cash to Margie, and I used cash to get a money order at the grocery store and bought my ticket by mail. We’d depart December 27, and even though we agreed to leave California on January 3, I bought a one-way ticket. I didn’t know how long it would take to find my father, and I decided nothing could limit my trip. Not school or Stella, not even Emmy. It was the most impulsive thing I’d ever done, but once I made the purchase I realized I’d been planning it ever since Emmy and I first started talking about going away, maybe even before that, weeks or months or years earlier even, maybe since I first found out Stella had left my dad back in California before I was born.

  I’d been hoarding details about my father for as long as I could remember, though the information came in clips and fragments.

  “He hated getting haircuts,” Stella whispered once as if offering up an essential piece of information. “He was allergic to mangos and strawberries,” she told me. We were curled on the couch watching Full House reruns together when she said, “He used to say we’d move to Mexico. He used to say he’d buy me a hundred striped bikinis,” and then she put her mug of chamomile down on the carpet. I was nine and wondered why my father had a preference for stripes and if she could remember his favorite color, or whether he preferred stripes that ran from head to toe or side to side, but Stella’s eyes were closed before I had the chance to ask.

  I kept each detail planted in my head, hoping one day she might slip and say something monumental, might confess he sent me letters when I was a kid or might tell me he had, in fact, called on each of my birthdays. But of all the things my mother was, she never was a liar. She may have left things out when she wanted, but she never made them up.

  That weekend, Stella decided we would spend the day at the mall choosing gifts to mail to various friends she’d kept in touch with over the years. Laura Sanders in New York, who worked as a catalogue model and a waitress. Tony Neilson at the Jersey Shore, “my boss with the tattoos,” she reminded me as we got into the car and headed for Morgantown Mall.

  “Julia Reeves was the dancer in Maryland who helped us pack when we decided to leave,” she said as we stood in Victoria’s Secret and searched through a sale bin for bras and underwear. “Don’t you remember?” she asked. “Julia, with the fingernails,” which brought it all back, the long red pressons she used to slice through the tape as we sealed up our belongings in big cardboard boxes.

  In J.C. Penney we picked out a new watch for Simon, and Stella flirted with the guy behind the men’s jewelry counter, testing to see if she could get a discount on the Seiko, but all J.C. Penney made me think of was her job back in Virginia and the smell of witch hazel and skin at the tattoo shop. Eventually we stopped for lunch at a small grill and pub in the mall, so I could eat again.

  “I’d swear you just downed two eggs and a quarter pound of bacon,” she said as she flagged down the waiter.

  “Yeah, like, three hours ago.”

  After she ordered a vodka tonic, I shot her a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-it’s-only-midafternoon look, but she shrugged and said, “What? It’s happy hour a few hours east of here,” which was true, plus I figured she might take the news of my trip a little better after a drink or two. This was the day I had to tell her: I was running out of time. Emmy had broken the news to her mother earlier that week, and even though she flipped at first, eventually she caved. I think she knew how depressed Emmy had been about her dad, how badly she needed to get out of town, to do something exciting. I also think she was too distracted by the holidays and too worn down by having Emmy’s dad stuck in Afghanistan to argue with Emmy for very long.

  I used my thumb to push the last of my mac and cheese onto my fork, a habit I knew Stella hated.

  “Don’t use your fingers when you eat, Lemon. It�
��s trashy.”

  She talked for a while about her and Simon and how he thought it’d be good for her to take an art class at WVU, and then I talked for a while about how bizarre the last week at school had been, how obvious it was the students were cashed and the teachers were too burned out to care.

  “Cliff Granger brought his iPod and a docking station to the cafeteria last week and blasted the Yeah Yeah Yeahs the entire lunch period,” I told her as I pushed my plate out of the way and reached for the dessert menu. “No one batted an eye,” I said, and wondered if she would call me out if I ordered a piece of chocolate cake and a slice of apple pie. “Our whole class has senioritis. It’s like we’re all just waiting to get out.”

  And then I put the menu down, took one deep breath, and finally spit out the news I’d been practicing. I’m not sure exactly how I started, but I remember the words coming quickly once I began.

  I told her about the bus route and about how sad Emmy had been before we started planning the trip, which was true, but it didn’t help to change that angry look pressed on her face when I admitted I’d already bought the ticket for the Greyhound. “I’m practically eighteen, a legal adult,” I said, which was nine months short of being the truth.

  She waved away the waiter when he came by to take our dessert orders and finished her cocktail as she measured me, silent and listening.

  “I promise we’ll be safe,” I said, but she narrowed her eyes as if imagining all the trouble Emmy and I could get into in a place like San Francisco, maybe remembering all the trouble she got into herself. “And we’ve already picked out the hotel,” I told her. “Travelocity gave it five stars,” I said, which wasn’t even close to being true, but we had a budget and had agreed not to splurge on a fancy room since we wouldn’t be spending much time at the hotel anyway.

  I worried she might start yelling before I gave all the excuses as to why we’d chosen California, but she didn’t say a word, not until after I told her how I had wanted to go to San Francisco since I was a kid, since I knew that’s where she’d been when she found out she was pregnant. Finally, I ended with a line about having roots in California, about feeling connected.