I didn’t want to imagine him with a buzz cut in San Diego, so I almost stopped him on his way off the bus and told him to bail on the war and wait for something safer to do with his life, something that would move him closer to that dream of growing grapes and rhubarb, but I didn’t say a thing. I watched him get off the bus, zip up his jacket, and head toward a revolving hotel doorway under a blinking gold sign that read THE BIGGEST LITTLE CITY IN THE WORLD.
The trip from Reno to California passed quickly, and we crossed the state line around nine thirty that night. Emmy celebrated by pulling up her shirt and pressing her boobs against the window at anyone on Highway 80 who wanted to look, and then she took out the disposable camera and tried to get a shot of the WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA sign.
“Smile,” she said, so I squished against the window and did as she said. “You’ll never forget this exact moment.”
I imagined the image: blurry, words in motion, a rush of lines moving behind me in the background.
Truckee and Soda Springs were gorgeous covered in snow late at night like that, but Donner Pass slowed us down and pushed us off schedule by a few hours when we had to pull over onto a snow bank and wait for the driver and a crew of men in Carhartts and ski coats to put chains on the bus tires. There were two men in flannel shirts with matching bushy beards sitting across from us by then, and even though they said they’d seen worse coming into Tahoe, I was pretty sure the snowstorm qualified as a blizzard. I looked out my window and saw all the cars that had pulled off the road, all the people who decided to wait out the storm.
“I’m pretty sure we’d get there sooner if we walked,” Emmy said, but I was glad the bus driver had decided to keep going even if we had to drive super slow.
All I could think of was the Golden Gate Bridge and the city I’d been waiting so long to see. I thought of Ryan Cooper too, a man in San Francisco not thinking of me, not knowing how close I was to him, how soon I’d find him. I imagined Valencia Street, him opening the door and seeing me on his front stoop, his daughter, a stranger he wouldn’t recognize.
We had twenty minutes in Sacramento, so we found a quiet corner in the parking lot where Emmy could smoke while I squatted on the curb and called Stella with my new blue cell phone. It was almost two in the morning there, but I wanted to call because I missed her and suddenly felt like I knew my mother a little better than before just for having crossed the state line. She answered after the third or fourth ring, but it was hard to hear her over the bar on her end and the bus terminal on mine.
“Stella, it’s me, it’s Lemon. Can you hear me?” I yelled.
She was at Gibbie’s Pub with a girlfriend, and she sounded high on booze and the feeling of being out on a Friday night. I imagined her in the red miniskirt she liked to wear, her hair soft and curled around her shoulders, her eyes smeared with black liner.
“Baby,” she said. “Where are you?” she asked before she leaned away from the phone and said, “It’s my kid calling from California.”
I asked if Simon was with her, but she said something like, “Don’t get me started.”
“Are you two okay?”
“We’re fine,” she said. “He’s just busy, that’s all, working on the deadline for The North Face and submitting his new photos to galleries.”
I could tell she didn’t want to talk about Simon, so I filled the air with details from the trip.
I told her the ride was long, that I wanted a shower and clean clothes, that I hadn’t gotten much sleep. “I like the looks of California already,” I said even though I’d only been there for an hour or so.
“I remember that,” she said. “It just feels different, doesn’t it? It changes you as soon as you arrive.” She sighed, and I wasn’t sure if she thought that was a good thing or a bad thing for me or for her all those years ago.
“How are you feeling?” she said to me, then, “Hang on, I can’t hear a thing.”
There was a rustle, the noise level dropped, and I heard the hum of a hand dryer and women’s voices in the background before she asked again, “How are you feeling?” Her voice sounded warm through all that distance even though I figured she was probably still mad that I left.
“I feel fat,” I told her. “And obtrusive. Like a road sign. Like an advertisement for birth control or condoms,” I said, which made her laugh.
“You’re barely even showing yet, Lemon,” she said. “Just wait. Give it a few more weeks, and then you can tell me about feeling fat.” Behind her I heard water running.
“Are you in a bathroom?” I asked.
“It’s fine,” she said. “Good God, at least it’s quiet. It’s amazing how loud drunk people are.”
I told her I’d found the paper in the pregnancy book.
“Listen, Lemon, don’t get your hopes up,” she said. “I don’t even know if he’s still there. Ryan . . . Who knows where Ryan is now. What’s done is done.”
Behind her voice I heard the flush of a toilet, and then she mumbled, “Sorry,” and I imagined her tucked in the corner of a stall, her cell phone cupped between her ear and shoulder as she hid from the sounds of the bar.
Emmy was beside me then and whispered, “Two minutes, boss. It’s colder than a witch’s tit,” and she moved onto the grass and began bouncing on the balls of her feet to keep warm in the snow. On the other side of the parking lot, passengers were climbing onto the bus.
“Does he know”—I paused, held my breath—“about me, about . . .”
“We didn’t speak much after I left California,” Stella said, and I hoped she’d offer some kind of significant excuse.
I wanted her to take responsibility, to say she loved him too much, that it hurt too bad to keep in touch once she left him behind. Or maybe I wanted her to say it’d been his decision, that he asked her not to contact him because he didn’t want to be involved.
But all she said was, “I called a few times after you were born to tell him we were okay, but it’s been years since we’ve talked.”
“So he knows,” I said, not sure which would have been easier, him knowing and never looking for me, or him not knowing at all.
“Just don’t get your hopes up,” she repeated.
But I’d read the city was seven miles wide by seven miles long, and after seventeen years without him, forty-nine miles seemed like nothing, the last simple and conquerable distance that separated us. I was determined to find him.
Then Emmy was back by my side again, the camera raised to her face. “Say ‘California,’” she whisper-screamed, so I smiled and mouthed the word before she took the shot.
We left Sacramento, and the bus was packed with stringy men and women with bloodshot eyes, snagged leather sneakers, and baggy sweatshirts. We rode into the city on the Bay Bridge, which wasn’t the same thing as the Golden Gate, but Emmy and I were happy all the same because even though it was the middle of the night San Francisco looked like magic when we drove over the water and into the lights, the sound of the metal bridge clicking beneath the tires of the bus.
“Look at all that movement,” Emmy said as we stared out the bus window at the lights of cars and flicks of lampposts and blinks of signs too far away to read. “It’s like the city’s dancing.”
The skyline was jagged and quick, buildings that burst out of the ground and sat stacked and pieced together like a puzzle. We moved toward the Transbay Terminal, and I was nauseous the whole way in, my palms sweating. We were there. And suddenly all the things behind us felt truly far away.
The bus driver announced we were heading into SoMa, which I’d read was a neighborhood near the Embarcadero, by the water, and he said the next terminal would be our final stop, that everyone must exit the bus once we arrived.
“Please collect all your personal items,” he shouted over the murmur of the passengers. “This is our final destination.”
The Transbay Terminal was a multistory bus depot, and the area around it was filled with brick buildings, high-rise condos, and small c
hain-link-fenced parking lots scattered along the streets. The driver told us the 6 and 31 bus lines ran just out front and that we could catch the Muni train a few blocks away, but we picked up our luggage and nudged our way out of the station to hail a cab. We didn’t really know where we were, and we decided we deserved a taxi after the last three days on a bus, three days of having to smell the chemical blue liquid from the bathroom, of substituting hand sanitizer for hand soap because we didn’t have running water on the Greyhound.
Eventually a cab slid up to where we waited under a NO STOPPING ANYTIME sign, and we told the driver, Ari, to take us to the hotel address where we’d booked our room. He took us down Howard Street toward the Mission district, and from the window I could see warehouses and tattooed kids in tight pants leaning on lampposted corners, bars and restaurants and signs advertising stores and happy-hour specials, sales on used CDs and books. In the Mission, the streets were littered with people, and everyone—the homeless slouching by cardboard boxes, the artsy kids in beanies and brown leather jackets, and the women in slim dark jeans and ballet flats—they all looked distant and unfamiliar as we headed through the neighborhoods. We drove past flea markets and taco stands and nightclubs while the cabbie talked nonstop about the city and the Mission and the bacon-wrapped hot dogs he swore we could smell from the street if we’d only roll down our window. He said he didn’t know where we came from, but it was a cold winter in the city that year. He hoped we brought jackets. He hoped we had hats and gloves. I lowered the window, and the smell of cheap, hot meat hit us hard as we watched swarms of people stumble out of the bars and hover in front of Mexican men grilling hot dogs on flat burners right there on the sidewalk.
“With the bacon wrapped around them and the onions and mayo like they do, I was pretty sure I’d died and gone to heaven first dog I bought on Valencia,” he told us. “I’ll never forget it. Was the week me and my partner found our apartment down on Folsom Street. Been almost thirteen years now,” he said, and shook his head like he could hardly believe it.
Emmy took a slow, deep, dramatic breath of air. “I could eat nine of those. Right. Now.”
“It’s drunk food, girl,” Ari said. “The bars are letting out and the cats are starving.”
He said our hotel was a good spot for two kids who weren’t sure what was up yet, that most of the people there were transits and hipsters passing through town with not a lot of money but not a lot of reason to leave the city. When we pulled in front of a pink slot door squished between a café window and a storefront advertising burritos and sangria, I wished we’d sprung for a place with a higher rating on Travelocity.
But Emmy said, “Looks like home,” and opened the car door.
The cab was inexpensive, and even though the hotel entrance didn’t look like it led to much, we got our stuff out of the trunk, paid Ari the fare plus a five-dollar tip, and headed into the hotel.
OUR FIRST FULL DAY IN SAN FRANCISCO opened with rain and wind rattling the window panes, and Emmy muttered, “I feel disgusting,” and stumbled into the shower before I had the chance to remind her that we were, in fact, in San Francisco for the next four days with nothing to do but whatever we wanted and no one to keep tabs on us, no one to answer to.
I lay in bed listening to the couple staying next to us thump and groan on each other on the other side of the wall while I waited for Emmy to finish in the bathroom. I was grimy from all the time on the bus and my head was pretty groggy, but I also felt the particular sense of freedom that comes the first time you leave home.
It was almost noon by the time we left the hotel, so we ducked into a small café on Valencia Street and bought coffee and scones and small cups of fruit. We sat by a window and watched the sidewalk wanderers while we created a plan of attack. We had about seven hundred dollars between the two of us, but we were confident that a city like San Francisco could be explored cheaply, so we planned to be extra frugal. And I knew I needed some of my share to get the bus ticket back when I was ready, so we made a list of all the things we wanted to do that wouldn’t cost much. We wanted to see Alcatraz and ride a trolley, and we wanted to take a bus up to Muir Woods to see the redwoods. We wanted the nude beach and Golden Gate Park and the shopping we couldn’t afford, the food we had never tasted and the music we had never heard of and the museums we had read about in books. We wanted all of it.
“I want to eat sourdough bread and Ghirardelli chocolate,” Emmy said, and she plucked a red grape from her fruit cup and forked it into her mouth. “I want to see the Japanese Tea Garden and the place where all those rock stars used to eat acid.”
“The Fillmore,” I told her, remembering the pages she dog-eared in the travel book we bought before we left.
We watched the weather outside turn from rain to sun to rain again, the back-and-forth tug-of-war that happened in a matter of minutes.
“I know you’ll be distracted until we look for him,” she said. “And I’m okay with that.” She picked at the oatmeal chocolate-chip scone on the plate sitting between us. “We should get it over with, though. In case it doesn’t go well. We should try today,” she said, which seemed okay to me.
I figured it was hard for Emmy to think about my dad while hers was so far away. Plus, if we didn’t find him immediately, I would have time to keep looking once Emmy left.
We stayed in the Mission for the day and planned to find Ryan’s house around five o’clock, when most people would be heading home from work. We window shopped and people watched and walked from one end of the neighborhood to the other, stopping to rest in Dolores Park and again at a small hole-in-the-wall eatery where we bought green tea and homemade granola bars. The air was wet and cool, so we both picked out new scarves at a used-clothing store: Emmy chose one that was a deep purple, and I picked a knitted green one with silver specks that Emmy said matched my nose ring. We shopped at secondhand stores, and I dragged her to the pirate shop that fronted the office where they made the literary magazine Ms. Ford had been published in. We roamed past bookstores and nightclubs and more taquerías than I could count.
According to Stella, Ryan lived on Valencia Street down near Twenty-first, and it was almost dark when we found the building, a tall, skinny house the color of eggplant that sat across the road from a Laundromat and an all-night pizza shop. We tried the doorbell, but it didn’t work, so we parked ourselves on the front steps and huddled together to stay warm, inhaling the smells of marinara and car fumes and something dank and wet seeping from the street drains. Emmy slung her arm around my shoulder, and I rested my head on her chest, tugging and twisting the fringe that lined the bottom of my scarf.
“Tell me this won’t ruin our trip. Tell me that if he’s not here or if he’s a total asshole or if he doesn’t want to see you . . .”
“Emmy, stop,” I said.
“Tell me it won’t ruin our trip,” she repeated.
“It won’t ruin our trip.”
“Are you scared?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m excited. And worried. But I’ve got nothing to lose, I guess.”
She squeezed me tighter while the wind pushed brown, damp leaves around our feet. Five o’clock came and went, but we stayed on the stairs because I’m not sure we had anywhere else to go. I must have nodded off for a while, tucked under Emmy’s arm like that, because she nudged me around six thirty to ask if I was hungry.
“We can go,” I said groggily. “We can leave.”
I was thinking of food and warmth, somewhere dry and bright. I wanted fajitas or those bacon-wrapped hot dogs or maybe even a beer. My head hurt, and my stomach was gassy and nauseous. I wanted to sleep. For a very long time. But just as we stood up to leave, I heard the door behind us open.
I froze, stopped breathing, still and scared on the front steps of the house I’d hoped was my father’s, but Emmy took my hand in hers and said, “Three. Two. One.” Then we turned around.
The woman pushing her bike out the door was tall and slim
and had skin the color of chocolate caramels and a perfect black afro framing her face. She wore snug bell-bottom jeans with red leather boots, and a tight white T-shirt under a small brown leather jacket. She was beautiful. After leaning her bike against the wall, she pulled a set of keys out of her bag and locked the door behind her. When she turned to carry her bike down the stairs, she noticed me and Emmy standing on the sidewalk staring up at her.
“You’re not Ryan,” I said, and I scanned her face, the pointed nose, the long black eyelashes thick like caterpillars, and the shiny red lips. Her eyes were brushed with shimmery gold makeup, and her lids were lined with thick black strokes that made me think of the Chinese symbols we’d seen written on the signs of so many restaurants that day.
“I’m not Ryan,” she said back. “He picked up a shift and won’t be home until three or so.” She stopped halfway down the stairs with her bike hoisted over her shoulder. “Who’s asking?”
I scanned a list of possible responses. I was Stella’s daughter. I was a friend, a friend of a friend, maybe. Finally I settled on, “I’m Lemon. My mom used to know him.” And then, “A friend of the family.”
She shrugged. “He won’t be home until late.” She was on the sidewalk by then, and she swung her leg over the bike and propped herself on the cracked leather seat as she adjusted the red bag slung across her chest. “I’m Cassie,” she said, and next to me Emmy mumbled, “Sassy Cassie,” right before I turned my head and shot her a shut-the-hell-up look. Emmy lit a cigarette and stared at Cassie parked on her bike in front of the purple house.
“I like that,” Cassie said, and then she reached over and took the cigarette out of Emmy’s hand to take a drag.
I thought that was pretty cool.
“You want to leave a message? I’m heading there now. We’re working together tonight—it’s a sold-out show,” she said.
I wasn’t sure what to say to that, but it didn’t matter because she looked us up and down again, and then she said, “You can come back around three thirty if you want. It takes a while to unwind after work, so we’ll be up.” And then she took one more drag, handed the smoke back to Emmy, and pedaled down Valencia.
Fingerprints of You Page 9