Fingerprints of You

by Kristen-Paige Madonia

  It was almost six thirty when we stopped, and I made Emmy pose for a photo in front of the station, her arms and legs stretched out into the shape of an X, and then we headed through the doors. Inside the bus station we ate peanut butter sandwiches Emmy had brought from home and drank warm Pepsis from the vending machine. We slumped against the wall and watched the other riders move around us. The station was loud and smelled like sweat and winter wetness, the whole thing so overwhelming I didn’t notice when Emmy pulled a small square box out of her backpack. She had wrapped it in newspaper, and she handed it to me.

  “I know we said no Christmas presents since we’re blowing all our money on the trip, but I couldn’t help myself. Open it,” she said.

  I unwrapped the gift and pulled out a small ornament, a wood carving of a naked woman swollen with pregnancy. “I love it,” I said, holding it up and inspecting the curve of her stomach, the peaks of her nipples, and the wave of her hair that was carved to her waist.

  “I think it’s great, Lemon. I know it’s hard and weird and not what you planned,” she said, and she looked at the tan and cream checkered floor. “But I think you’re going to be a kick-ass mom,” she said, raising her eyes to mine. “And this way, every Christmas you’ll have to think of me and this trip when you and your little boy or girl decorate your tree.”

  And I knew then that Emmy didn’t think any less of me for what I’d told her about Johnny Drinko, about the rushed and rude sex that got me into so much trouble. Emmy was a better friend than that. By then I could have told her about Denny and Rocco and everything else, too, and she would have loved me anyway.

  WE TRANSFERRED TO A DIFFERENT BUS in Pittsburgh, and Emmy said, “Smells like cat piss,” when we got on, but I nudged her down the aisle and tried to not think of clogged shower drains and musty basements, tried to ignore the smell seeping out from behind the bathroom door in the back of the bus.

  She stopped in the middle, said, “This okay, boss?” and then we settled into the pleather blue seats we stayed in while we moved through our next two stops: Columbus, Ohio, at midnight and Indianapolis at three in the morning.

  “Hungry?” Emmy asked, and she opened her fist and revealed two little white tablets, Ambien sleeping pills she’d taken from her mother’s medicine cabinet. She popped one in her mouth and threw her head back, but I wouldn’t take one because of the baby.

  I felt swollen and couldn’t get comfortable enough to sleep, so I watched the miles move by us while the sky turned dark and then light again as day broke. For the most part the bus was quiet from Ohio to Illinois, but around five in the morning, Poplar Street Bridge sprang out of nowhere from the maze of twisting roads, and if it weren’t for the nausea that kept me awake as we crossed through the turns of the up-and-down stretches of highway, I might have missed my first sighting of the Mississippi River. The bridge was a narrow shred of concrete, and the water lay still and resting under a film of gray-blue ice. In the distance, I could see St. Louis’s Gateway Arch standing silver and tall on the other side of the Mississippi, and above the city the sky began its slow transition into early-morning dawn. It was fast, a hundred or so feet of water that passed in less than a minute before the bridge dumped us into downtown. I didn’t have time to wake Emmy so she could see it, and I never mentioned it after.

  The sun rose over Missouri as we moved into St. Louis for our second transfer, and I nudged Emmy awake so she wouldn’t miss the view of the arch.

  “What’d I miss?” Emmy said. She rolled toward me and took The Red Tent from my lap, where I’d been clutching it since I’d finished it over an hour earlier.

  “A long-haired kid with a guitar and dimples,” I said. “A nun passing out plastic glow-in-the-dark rosary beads.”

  “No shit.” She turned the book over in her hands. “How’s the book?”

  “Completely kick-ass,” I told her. I’d devoured The Red Tent before we got to Effingham and was already thinking of reading it again.

  “Because . . .” She waited for me to fill in the blank.

  “Because the main character is this incredible girl who endures all these horrifying things.”

  Emmy rolled her eyes. “That’s original.”

  “Some seriously horrendous stuff happens to this girl. But,” I continued, “even in the worst circumstances, after all her grief and her anger and pain, she survives. It’s—” I hesitated. “It’s kind of amazing, actually.”

  She opened the front cover. “Lesson learned,” she said.

  Outside, the sky had shifted to the light blues and oranges of morning, and long patches of snow were scattered along the highway, but inside, the bus windows were sweating.

  She pulled her glasses from the crevice between our seats, where she’d been keeping them when she slept, and she read the first sentences out loud: “We have been lost to each other for so long. My name means nothing to you. My memory is dust.” She mouthed the last sentence a second time. “That’s depressing,” she said finally. “Like eventually we all just get forgotten? Our stories just get lost?”

  “Or maybe just that it’s impossible to really know another person’s story,” I told her. “That our stories and memories are misinterpreted, and mangled, by time.”

  “Or maybe she means our past doesn’t matter,” Emmy said. “That eventually it becomes unimportant.”

  “But her story was important. The character’s voice needed to be heard, her past needed to be acknowledged.”

  Emmy closed the book. “And not all do?”

  “It’d be nice,” I said, “if you could pick and choose which parts to leave behind. The stories to forget and the memories you want to keep.”

  Emmy shrugged. “Just doesn’t work like that, though.”

  It was almost seven by the time the Greyhound moved into the lot of the station, a large scaly building in the heart of downtown. We had forty minutes to stretch our legs, and Emmy and I each bought a cup of coffee from a vendor in the food court even though I wasn’t supposed to have caffeine.

  “I need oxygen,” she said, so we drank our coffee outside under a wall of multicolored windows and waited to board the bus that would take us through Kansas City and Junction City, the bus we’d stay on all the way to Denver later that night. The area was vacant and seemed weighted down by a winter of snowstorms and wind.

  Emmy lit a smoke and asked, “Think I have time?” while I stretched my back and checked out all the other riders. “Tell me a story, Lemon Raine,” she said, so I told her about the old lady on the bus who yelled at a little girl for taking too long in the bathroom. “I swear she called the kid a ‘snot-nosed brat.’ The girl couldn’t have been more than six years old.”

  “No shit?” Emmy said. She bounced in place to keep warm. “What a hag. It must be miserable to be old,” she said, and then we promised never to get old and crabby. “I will never let you get wrinkles,” she said.

  “What about stretch marks?” I asked, and she said, “Life is what it is.”

  “Worse things have happened, I guess,” I said, looking down at the new curves of my body. My chest was twice its normal size, and my belly felt a lot fuller even though the pregnancy book said the baby was only the size of a jumbo shrimp.

  Eventually Emmy flicked her smoke on the ground and said, “Let’s go, fat lady,” as she headed toward the bus.

  The transfer landed us with a redheaded boy sitting across the aisle, and while I half expected Emmy to ask to change seats with me, so she could spend some time flirting, she mouthed, “He’s all yours,” kicked off her Chuck Ts, and rolled toward the window after we ate another peanut butter sandwich for breakfast.

  Nelson was nineteen and wildly talkative, all zipped up in his blue North Face jacket and on his way to San Diego to start basic training for the marines. He smelled a little like chicken wings and wore a St. Louis Cardinal’s baseball cap pulled low on his head. He paid a lot of attention to his cell phone, texting and taking pictures of all the things that
we drove past, which made me think he might have left someone important back where he came from in Missouri.

  We coasted up I-70, and all around us the land was dull and vacant, the power lines strung above us linking the cities and towns.

  “You know what I-70 is really called?” Nelson asked. “The Mark Twain Expressway, Mark Freaking Twain, right? All the way up through Columbia and Kansas City. Missouri’s so wild,” he said, though I wasn’t sure I believed him as I looked at the blunt, flat setting moving outside our window.

  We passed Motel 6s and IHOPs and gas station signs that read BUY OLD STYLE BEER. We passed small roadside diners advertising award-winning cherry pie, pork barbeque, and homemade apple cobbler, and Dairy Queens that had closed down for the winter. The farther we moved from St. Louis, the larger the patches of snow became, until eventually it felt as though the highway were an island stretched through a sea of white foam.

  I asked him about living outside St. Louis, and he asked me about West Virginia, a place, he said, he imagined was dry and slow and hot.

  “We’re in it for the long haul,” I told him, “all the way to San Francisco,” then I slapped my palms together and swooshed my right hand out fast like it was taking off for flight.

  He told me he’d never been farther west than Kansas, where his sister had moved with her boyfriend. “Took the Greyhound out a year ago, and if it weren’t for her and the baby, I wouldn’t care if I never went to Kansas again. All that flat space and nothingness during the ride almost made me crazy,” he said, which made me worried for the seven hours ahead. “I brought a book for this time around.” He winked at me and pulled a paperback out of his coat pocket. John Green’s Looking for Alaska.

  We played Uno and gin rummy and War and a dice game called Farkle, and eventually I told him about the pregnancy, but I never caught him staring at my stomach like the kids at school did once news of the baby had gotten out. I told him about some of the great books I’d been reading, and he told me about his older brother who worked at a cemetery a few blocks from his house, how they didn’t talk much anymore even though they both lived at home. He said he wanted to be a snowboard instructor one day, wanted to own a German shepherd and move to Colorado.

  “One day I’ll have my own farm where I can ride horses and grow grapes, maybe even rhubarb,” he said. “You have any idea how many different things you can make with rhubarb?” he asked. “It’s like a vegetable from the gods. There’s nothing like a crisped rhubarb tart.” He also said he wanted to be sure he never had to live in St. Louis again. “There’s just some people that never want to go back home,” he said, and I realized if I had said the sentence myself, I wasn’t sure what home I would have been referring to. There’d been so many, and really there’d been none at all. “I want trees and mountains, and towns with log houses, wildflowers and vegetable gardens,” he said. “The air is too heavy in St. Louis.”

  I told him about Pace, my mom’s boyfriend’s mutt, and that one day I wanted to find a place where I could settle down and get my own dog, that Stella had moved us around so much those last years all I craved was standing still. “I feel like I’ve been tired for the last year and a half,” I said. “My mom is impossible to keep up with.”

  Nelson said he’d never lived anywhere but St. Louis, and he couldn’t believe he’d finally gotten out.

  “I’m getting off in Reno. Bought a fake ID and plan to have some fun before I head out. No one stands still in Reno, I bet,” he said with a smile.

  When I asked him about training in San Diego, he said he was worried he was going to miss the change of seasons so much it might make his heart stop, and that he’d never been much of an ocean swimmer because he didn’t like not being able to see what was underneath him.

  “San Diego graduates more than twenty-one thousand marines a year,” he told me in a way that made me think he’d practiced saying the sentence out loud. “I’ll be there thirteen weeks, then maybe four more of combat training in North Carolina. Who knows where I’ll be stationed after that, but I’m betting I’ll end up in Afghanistan,” he said, and I could tell he figured he wouldn’t be back for a while.

  Someone from the recruiting office told him San Diego had sand dunes the size of mountains, which I’d never heard of, but I didn’t say anything because he seemed to like the sound of it.

  “My dad says the sunsets there are always red. That red in San Diego is so bright it hurts to look at sometimes, fire red. Bloodred in the sky.” He pulled an apple out of his duffel and took a bite. “In the wintertime you can see whales swimming south,” he said, spewing bits of the fruit into the aisle between us. “I’ll miss the seasons of the Midwest, how different each month makes the land look, but whales are pretty damn cool.” He held out the apple so I could take a bite.

  “So, how’d you get knocked up?” he asked.

  “Well, there’s really only one way, Nelson,” Emmy said as she rolled toward us and swung her arm over my stomach, groggily nestling her head on my shoulder.

  I didn’t know how long she’d been listening to us, but I hoped she slept through the talk about Afghanistan.

  “I mean, you’re so young and all. Are you scared?” he asked.

  It was the first time anyone had really asked me about it like that. I was scared when Johnny Drinko and I had sex in the tattoo shop, and I was scared when I stole the pee test from the gas station on the road to West Virginia. Most of all I’d been scared to tell my mom, and then pretty scared about the first appointment with the baby doctor. But once Stella knew about the pregnancy and the doctor made sure the baby was okay, I’d stopped being so scared. I had tried to focus on staying healthy and getting through the end of the semester, so Emmy and I could go away. Now that we’d officially gone away, all I could think about was my dad, and maybe I used that as a way not to think about the baby because thinking about meeting my dad kept me scared enough.

  “Are you scared about the birth? All that blood and goop? Are you scared to be a mom? I know I’d be scared shitless, being so young and all,” he said as he tossed the apple core into his bag and looked up, staring.

  Next to me Emmy shifted in her seat, pulled herself up, and leaned across me toward him. “Are you scared, Nelson?” Emmy asked. “To leave the Midwest? To go to California? To go to war?” She narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re pretty young too.”

  I don’t think she meant to be a bitch, and I don’t think she wanted to sound so rude. Maybe she just wanted to shut him up so she could get some sleep, or maybe she really wanted to know what it felt like to be where Nelson was, to be getting ready to do something that seemed so foreign and far away. Maybe she was trying to understand what her father might have felt too, but I think most likely she’d been listening all along to me and Nelson talking about his training, that it had probably eaten her up, had been tying her stomach in knots as she sat there pretending to sleep. So even though I wished she hadn’t sounded so sarcastic and snobby, I knew she was doing it intentionally because she wanted him to stop talking, because she was tired and was ready to get the hell to San Francisco, because she was strung out on sleeping pills and too many cups of shitty coffee, and mostly because she was scared about her dad even if she wasn’t talking about it much, which I couldn’t blame her for. She’d probably been sitting there all that time thinking about her dad and Bobby Elder and all the other men from Morgantown who’d gotten sent away, and that’s enough to make anyone a little pissed off.

  So maybe that’s why her voice sounded the way it did when she looked him in the face and said, “Are you scared you might not come home?”

  Either way, Nelson didn’t give me a chance to apologize for her acting like such a bitch, because he didn’t talk to us much after that, and he switched seats when we stopped in Boonville. When I thought about Nelson later, I always regretted the way things ended. I forgave Emmy, but I always hated the memory of her words and the way she’d put her anger in the wrong place, forced it onto Nelson
even though it didn’t belong to him.

  AROUND NOON WE PULLED INTO KANSAS CITY, where a small woman about Stella’s age replaced Nelson across from us.

  She fussed over a wide-eyed boy dressed in Superman pajamas under his puffy blue snow coat and eventually leaned over and said, “You look starved,” before producing two packs of peanut butter crackers from her backpack. She split the food between me and the child, introduced herself as Marni and her little boy as Jonah, and then launched into a story about the bull statue we were about to pass by, a landmark in Kansas City that, she said, had been a source of controversy since it was placed on top of the American Hereford Building in 1953.

  “I guess a lot of people viewed it as an icon, but most folks hated it, figured it detracted from the natural landscape and all that,” she said. “Look.” She hoisted Jonah into her lap and then tugged me from my seat into theirs and scooted over so I could look out their window to see the giant bull perched in the skyline, solid and serious, a massive hunk of a thing. “Doesn’t suit my taste, but to each his own,” she said with a shrug. “They moved it to Mulkey Square in ’02, but to me it doesn’t matter where you stick it, it’ll always just be a bull with a huge you-know-what.”

  She licked her palm and tried to flatten the cowlick that curled at the front of Jonah’s head, and then he looked at me, said, “I’m only allowed to wear costumes on Mondays,” pulled a Superman mask out of his pocket, and slid it over his face before he turned to look out the window.

  “We’re on our way to visit my sister in Denver. You like to travel much?” Marni asked after I’d moved back to my seat and settled in next to Emmy.

  “I like the forward movement,” I told her and popped the last peanut butter cracker into my mouth. “I like the sound of the asphalt hissing under the bus,” I said, and she nodded.