Fingerprints of You

by Kristen-Paige Madonia

  Emmy leaned on my shoulder and said, “I like not having to do anything,” before she closed her eyes again.

  Marni laughed, but I agreed. “It’s like we know we’re going to end up exactly where we want to be but we just get to sit here. I like that, not being responsible, getting to relax.”

  Marni asked where we were headed, and I told her Emmy and I were going to visit colleges in California. I didn’t mean to, hadn’t been thinking about colleges at all since I hadn’t even applied, but it just kind of came out since I knew that’s what most kids our age were probably doing over winter break.

  “You girls sure are brave to want to go so far from home for school. I didn’t leave home like that until I was married,” she said, and I had to look at the floor because I was starting to feel crappy about all the lies I’d been telling: the lie to Simon about the baby’s father, the lie to Emmy about not knowing how to reach Johnny Drinko, and the lie to Stella about my plans to return when school started.

  And even worse, we had only another thirty hours or so left before California, and I still hadn’t told Emmy about my one-way ticket or my dad living in San Francisco. I worried the lies would spin out of control and get so knotted together I might get lost inside them, so I promised myself I wouldn’t let us cross the California state line without coming clean.

  Kansas was as flat and vacant as Nelson had made it sound, with nothing but small towns and big grain elevators and dark dirt fields that I imagined Stella would have liked to paint, and when we hit a snowstorm along the way the land turned white and the bus got even colder. Eventually Jonah and Marni nodded off. Outside, the trees were thin and frail, and I watched the sky move into late-afternoon colors of diluted blues and grays, the brake lights in front of us guiding the bus into the evening. By Hays, Kansas, we’d been on the Greyhound for twenty-four hours, and I still hadn’t slept.

  Marni and Jonah woke up around eight that evening as the boy sat up suddenly, stating, “The day before the day before yesterday was Christmas.” Marni turned toward him, still half-asleep, and kissed him on the forehead, and just like that I knew she was the kind of mom I wanted to be.

  “Wanna know a secret?” I asked Jonah, and he nodded and took off the mask. I pointed to my belly. “There’s a baby in here,” I said.

  Jonah was somewhere between three and four years old, with eyes the color of night and skin the color of coffee with a splash of cream, so I wondered if his father was black since Marni was fair skinned and redheaded. He squeezed his face into a tight set of skeptical wrinkles, and it was easy to imagine what he would look like when he became a man.

  “In there?” He looked at Marni as if to ask if he was supposed to believe me or not.

  She smiled. “Like Miss Lisa at school,” she said.

  “Can I touch it?” he asked.

  I turned my body and leaned forward, taking his hand in mine and bringing it to my stomach. At first I thought he might cry, but instead he took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and waited for the baby to do something that might prove itself.

  His hand was small and soft resting on my stomach, and I willed the baby to move, tried to imagine the kicking I’d read about that would start around the eighteenth week, but nothing happened. The book said there would be a distinct and forceful moment when I would finally feel as though my swollen stomach was actually my child, a person all its own, and with Jonah sitting there in his pajamas pressing his palm to my belly, with the land moving by us outside, the weight of my body finally became more than just a heaviness. It became a warm and undeniable evidence of life.

  After a moment or two Jonah pulled away, opened his eyes, and said, “I think he’s happy in there, Lemon. You might want to leave him be,” before he slid back into the seat next to his mother and began playing with a pair of Matchbox cars.

  I nodded. “You wanna see a trick?” I asked him. “Switch seats for a second?” I said to Marni, and she double-checked Jonah’s face for permission, then traded places with me, so I sat next to Jonah. He smelled like little-kid sweat even though it was freezing out.

  “Wanna go walking?” I asked him, mimicking a phrase Stella used to say when I was little and bored in the car.

  He looked at his mother and then shrugged. “Whatcha mean?”

  The window was fogged over with all that cold air outside and our breath and heat inside, so I squeezed my hand into a ball and reached past him to press the side of my fist against the glass. Then I used the tip of my finger to make five toes. I did the same with my other hand and pulled back.

  “You are here,” I said, and drew an arrow to the footprints. “Now you decide where you’re going next.”

  Stella had played the game with me millions of times. She could always tell when I was getting restless in the car, so she would wait until we hit a red light on the road, lean across me, and make the first prints, and then I would take over, marking my own feet up and down the passenger-side window with my tiny hand as I narrated an imaginary journey.

  I looked at Jonah, waiting.

  “Like, I could go . . . ,” he started slowly, hesitant.

  “To never-never land to play hide-and-seek with the Lost Boys,” I said. “Or to Papa Smurf’s house to help him outsmart Gargamel.”

  He was nodding then as he put his fist to the glass and pressed. “Or to Batman’s cave?”

  “Absolutely. Walk on over. Tell me what happens when you get there,” I said, so he did and I sat with him for a while, playing the game for almost an hour while Marni flipped through a magazine, occasionally nodding off.

  Sometime after Colby, Kansas, and before the Colorado line, I remembered the money Stella slipped into my pregnancy book. I was back in my seat by then, so I pulled out my purse and flipped through the pages, hoping for a twenty, or a fifty if she was feeling especially sad about me going away. But there were no bills at all. Instead I found a piece of yellow paper torn from the legal pad she kept in the kitchen, folded and tucked into the page that began the chapter titled “Your Fourteenth Week of Pregnancy,” which surprised me because I’d had no idea Stella was counting.

  Emmy was awake by then, so when I unfolded the paper, she said, “What is it?” and put on those little black reading glasses. She was there looking over my shoulder when I read the name Ryan Cooper followed by a street address in San Francisco. Below it my mother had written one sentence: “I promise this is all I know,” scrawled above a sloppy X and an O, in Byzantine Ceiling Blue ink.

  “Who’s Ryan Cooper?” Emmy asked, and she took the paper and squinted at my mother’s handwriting. “Is it someone you know in San Francisco?” she said.

  But I couldn’t really hear her anymore because my mind was wobbly as I realized Stella knew all along, that even though I’d stopped asking about him years ago, she knew I’d never stopped wondering. She probably knew before I did that my trip with Emmy would end up being all about my dad. I guess sometimes that’s how mothers work.

  “Is it someone we can stay with?” Emmy asked. “Because I don’t think this babysitting fund’s going to last long,” she said. “I don’t mind spending it, but I’d rather not sleep in a shit hole.” She stopped then because I guess she noticed my hands were shaking. “Hey,” she said. “What is it?”

  And then I finally told her about my dad in San Francisco. I told her about Stella leaving my grandmother for California, about her living out west for a year and a half before she got pregnant, and about the way I imagined her and my father falling in love in a city that always seemed so energized and full of possibilities.

  “She was nineteen when she found out she was pregnant, so she moved back to Pennsylvania, which is where I was born. She left him there and decided we didn’t need him.” I folded and unfolded the piece of paper as I spoke. “I’m not even sure he knows about me.”

  “I guess I never thought to ask about your dad,” she said. “I just figured you were one of those kids who only had a mom. I just figured Stella wasn’t
sure,” she said, and I tried to decide what would have been worse, having a mother who didn’t know who my father was or having a mother who knew and just wouldn’t share him, wouldn’t give me any of her memories.

  Emmy said something about history repeating itself, but I told her it was different, that I never really knew Johnny Drinko, and that I believed Stella and Ryan had been in love before she left him. I started to cry a little when I told her how tight-lipped Stella’d been when I was a kid, how little I knew about my father.

  “He was the only thing that made her quiet.”

  Jonah got out of his seat and came over, put one tiny hand on my knee, and held his other fist out, opening it to reveal a red Matchbox car.

  “Take it,” he said, and patted my leg. “This always makes me feel better when I get sad.” And then he crawled into Marni’s lap. “Mommy says when you’re sad you have to cry to get it out of you. That once it’s out, you’ll feel better,” he said. “It’ll be over soon,” and he turned away and began drawing letters in the condensation on the window.

  Emmy was a good listener while I complained about writing my father letters when I was kid and finding them tucked under magazines and food scraps in the trash.

  “That’s so after-school special,” she said, shaking her head. “Jesus, Lemon, that really sucks.”

  “She never gave me any answers, and I was little, you know? I didn’t understand,” I said as we finally crossed out of the flat expanse of Kansas and into Colorado.

  She took off her glasses and squished her eyebrows into a V. “But you’re not little now,” she said, and she pulled her hand into her sleeve and used it to wipe my nose. “She doesn’t get to decide anymore. You’re in control,” she told me, which I liked the sound of even if I didn’t believe it yet. “Maybe that’s what this trip is all about, about taking responsibility,” she said. “You’re actually doing something now.”

  “I wanted to believe she made the right choice for us,” I told her, “but I just couldn’t help being pissed off. It’s like sometimes I blame her for not making a family out of us, but then sometimes I know it was probably better that way,” I said. “He never came for me, so I figured he was a loser, the kind of guy who couldn’t handle being a dad.”

  I thought of Johnny Drinko and how similar he and my father must have been, and I wondered if Stella had recognized similarities too, if she had wanted Johnny Drinko because she’d seen pieces of Ryan in him.

  “But as hard as I’ve tried to write him off, I never stopped wondering,” I said as the bus motored us through the first miles of Colorado. “I just need to see for myself. To know she was right, that we’re better off without him.”

  And Emmy said, “Or even that you’re not,” and I nodded.

  I slipped the piece of paper back into the book and took a deep breath. I apologized for not telling her the truth and for thinking of myself and my father even though he’d been gone all along and I should have been used to it by then. I also apologized for not being able to change the fact that her dad had just gotten taken away.

  “I know this trip is supposed to be about escaping our families, not chasing them down,” I said. “But I was worried it would be my only chance to go, now that I’m pregnant. I just want to find him before the baby comes. I need to see if knowing him would make anything different.” I told her I was an asshole and a crappy friend for lying and dragging her along.

  “But this isn’t about me,” she said, and I couldn’t tell if she was mad or not. Mostly I think she was just glad I’d come clean. “I mean, yeah, you’re a shithead for not being honest, but I would’ve come anyway, even if you had told me.” She moved her hand into mine and left it there, rubbing my fingers with hers. “My dad being gone has nothing to do with you,” she said. “And maybe you’re selfish a little, but it’s still California.” She shrugged. “I’m in,” she said. And then I burrowed down into her lap and shut my eyes, finally falling asleep as the bus moved us toward the mountains, the gears of the Greyhound kicking back and forth.

  IT WAS DARK WHEN WE DROVE INTO DENVER, but it didn’t matter, because the mountains had so much snow on them that it seemed like they were glowing when they exploded in the distance, so I took a photo of the Rockies out the window even though I didn’t think it would turn out. It was late, eleven or so, but I nudged Emmy awake to see the backdrop of the snowy peaks as I-70 carved a path into the city.

  “Jesus,” she said, “is that for real?”

  “You got it,” I said. “The Rocky Mountains, full on.” And we pressed our noses up to the window and leaned our foreheads against the glass.

  Marni and Jonah’s trip ended in Denver, and Emmy offered to grab some snacks and sodas from the terminal when we stopped so I could stay on the bus, and I watched as Marni packed up all their toys and books and empty food wrappers.

  “Put your coat on, muffin,” Marni said to Jonah. “Looks cold as an icebox out there.”

  Jonah told me I could keep his red car for when I got sad again.

  “I don’t know the story,” Marni said, eyeing my belly. “But sometimes the decisions we don’t make for ourselves are the decisions we need the most.” She smiled. “And from where I’m standing, it looks like you’ll be a wonderful mother,” Marni said, and then we showed Jonah how to use the camera so he could take a photo of Marni and me before they got off the bus and headed toward an old minivan waiting for them in the parking lot.

  When we left Denver for Salt Lake City, where our next transfer fell, Emmy ate another Ambien, and I must have nodded off too, because when I woke we were parked in the lot outside the Rock Springs, Wyoming, terminal. There was a man on the other side of the aisle staring so hard across the space between us that his eyes felt like fingers poking me awake. In his lap he clutched an old army-green sac—not a duffel or a backpack but a lumpy, stained bag with a black cord tied in a knot at the top. I could smell whiskey and sweat, stale bacon grease and dampness, as he leaned over toward me. He was older—older than Johnny Drinko, older than Simon, too—and his face was pitted and pocked with acne scars, his voice jumbled and slurred when he narrowed his eyes at me and said, “Hey, girl.”

  I looked at Emmy, who was heavy with sleep, and checked the floor to make sure our purses and backpacks were still there.

  “Hey, girl,” he said again, “you too young to be traveling alone.”

  I elbowed Emmy, but she didn’t budge, and all around us the riders were sleeping; the ones who were awake were stretching their legs outside near the snow banks in the parking lot or getting snacks in the terminal. Below my window a woman in a black ski cap and a puffy white coat smoked a cigarette. Next to her the bus driver talked on a cell phone. I turned to look in the back of the bus for Nelson, but he was gone.

  “Hey, girl,” he said again, but then I felt him on me, his hand squeezing my knee as I looked down at his knuckles, which were covered in wiry black hair.

  Maybe he was harmless. Maybe he thought I was someone he knew, or maybe he wasn’t really touching me at all and I was stuck inside one of those nightmares I couldn’t make myself wake up from. But then he was there again, pressing his thumb into my thigh as he moved his hand up my leg, his body leaning closer and his fingers like spiders crawling across me.

  “Little girls need chaperones,” he said.

  I knocked his hand off, and he slipped and tumbled into the aisle. And that woke Emmy up, the sound of body hitting rubber floor, but no matter how much braver and stronger than me I believed she was, she couldn’t stop him when he hissed, “Teenage whore.”

  He scrambled to his feet and hovered above us, looking.

  Emmy said, “What the hell?” and rose to stand, but it was too late. He spit at me, a white and bubbled glob that landed on my shoulder. And all the time I didn’t move. I sat there looking at his chest breathing heavy and fast, at his eyes glossing over. I sat there and let it happen.

  “Get out of here, you freak show,” Emmy said.


  And then he leaned forward and rubbed his thumb over my cheek and down to my shoulder, where he wiped the spit away.

  “You should take better care of yourself,” he said. He pulled the bag into his arms and added, “This is my stop, baby,” and then he left the bus.

  It was a long time before I could shake the feeling of him, the stripped and simple disdain just because we were girls traveling on our own. I was glad to see him fading from view when we finally pulled out of the parking lot.

  Emmy said, “He was crazy, Lemon, a nut job,” and she nuzzled against me and closed her eyes. “Every road trip is bound to have one—don’t take it personally.” I tried to believe her but couldn’t help thinking it wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t pregnant, if my body hadn’t been begging for attention with all those new curves and slopes.

  I never did get any more sleep after that. We left Rock Springs around six in the morning and drove right through to Salt Lake City. Utah was a quick state covered in snow summits and rolling hills, and soon after, images of Nevada began to fill the windows as the land alternated between wide-open country and white-capped mountain peaks. We passed industrial dumps with cargo trucks lined up out front, storage warehouses set in front of small and spotless mountain crests with flat plains of open land cut into their sides. The buildings in Nevada were squat, square objects that contrasted with the peaks of the mountains, and all along the ground, brittle plants jutted out from under a thin carpet of snow.

  And then Reno finally appeared, all lit up and loud beneath the evening sky, the neon signs and flashing lights, the gold and green and red lit casinos, and the advertisements for keno and stage dancers, buffets and poker tables. The bus stopped around eight o’clock, and as I watched Nelson gather his things and make his way up the aisle I wanted to grab his arm, say, “Ditch boot camp and come to San Francisco with us instead.”