I tried to distract her and talked about the doctor’s appointment I’d had the day before and about taking the Muni to the hospital in the morning, the electric bus hooked to wires strewn throughout the city. I told her that the doctor had reviewed my files faxed from West Virginia and the nurse had weighed me in at one hundred thirty pounds.
“Is that good?” Stella asked, and behind her I heard Pace barking.
“I’ve gained six pounds. It sure doesn’t feel good, but yeah, it’s average I guess.”
I told her about the heartburn and the Zantac prescription and the blood work, but I didn’t tell her about all the fainting, and she didn’t ask how I’d found a doctor, which I was glad for. I figured knowing I was living with Ryan was hard enough—she didn’t need to know about the girlfriend with perfect chocolate skin and a kick-ass wardrobe.
“School started Tuesday,” she said, but I ignored her and asked if Simon was around and how things were going with them.
“The North Face hired him for another product shoot, so he’s working a lot,” and then she yelled at Pace to shut the hell up, her voice flipping to anger when the barking wouldn’t stop. “I miss having him around. I miss knowing where he is,” she said.
I asked if she’d told him that, and I could almost hear her shrug.
“He knows how much I care about him. And the work stuff is a good thing. It’ll pass,” she said, which struck me as an unusually grown-up perspective for Stella to have when a man wasn’t paying enough attention to her. “I just wish I got to see him more often,” she said.
“Emmy said you’re exercising,” I told her.
“I’m thirty-six years old, Lemon. It’s time for some personal maintenance.” She sighed. “There’s nothing hot about a beer gut, no matter how you slice it.”
“I didn’t know you knew how to exercise,” I said, trying to lighten things.
“Don’t be smart. Aging, unfortunately, is not an option, it’s a guarantee. I figured it was time I tried to make it as smooth a process as possible. Plus, I’m about to be a grandmother—I’ve got to get my shit together. You have no idea how much energy it takes to keep up with a kid.”
It was bizarre to think of Stella as a grandmother, but that was exactly what I was about to make her, and I realized we were both preparing for new roles.
“I’m not okay with this,” she told me, and I wasn’t sure if she was still talking about her getting older or about me living with Ryan, but then she said, “I don’t know why I let you go in the first place. I don’t even know why you left.”
But she wasn’t talking loud enough, her voice was diluted, and I couldn’t tell what she said after that, the words lost between the telephones. I almost told her I went to California to find my father, but that wasn’t really true. He was never lost, since I always figured he was in San Francisco, where she deserted him. And then I almost said I left to find a new home, but that wasn’t true either, because by then I’d realized Stella was home. That her being there, wherever “there” was, made it my home. Maybe I’d left to find her, to find out who she’d been before she became my mother. And I’d left to find me, to figure out what kind of person I hoped to become.
But I didn’t say any of that. “I met a boy,” I said instead, and then I told her about Aiden and about working for a few weeks in a bookstore so I could afford the bus ticket back, which I hoped she’d like the sound of.
“We talk every day until then,” she decided. “From now on you check in every morning. That’s what the cell is for.”
I sat on the air mattress with the ridiculous shiny blue phone to my ear and thought of how much she was worrying and how she needed to know I was safe even though she was angry, how she probably felt so far away, such lack of control. So I told her I would call every day before I went to work, which seemed to settle her.
“Is he taking care of you?” she asked, and I thought of how I hadn’t paid for any groceries, and how every night since I’d gotten there Ryan had left me bus money on the kitchen table before he left for work.
“He’s not that bad of a guy,” I said even though I knew she wanted something else.
“I never said he was.”
But I wouldn’t let her get away with that. “Yes, you kind of did.”
I listened to her breathing, the dog quiet then. “I didn’t leave because he was a bad guy,” she said, her stories getting muddled as I thought of all the things she’d told me through the years. “I was a kid. And he was not a father.”
I realized Ryan was probably just a little older than Aiden when she moved us in with my grandmother.
“We hardly knew each other. I was just a kid,” she said again, tired and slow.
It was almost nine thirty there, her voice separated from mine by three time zones’ worth of space, and I wondered why she was home and not out drinking with her girlfriends.
“I left for me. For me and you, and for what I thought was best then,” she said. “I didn’t leave because of him.”
It seemed to be the most honest thing she’d told me about their past.
“I miss you,” I said.
And I did.
I called her almost every morning from then on. She talked about her painting class, and I talked about my job and about living in the city. I told her about the bacon-wrapped hot dogs, which I’d finally tried with Aiden, and she told me about the views of the Blue Ridge Mountains when she and Simon went snowshoeing. I asked her to paint it, and she asked me to buy a disposable camera and document my time in San Francisco.
“Nothing looks exactly as it does the first time you see it,” she said.
She also asked me to come home. Almost every morning we talked she told me it was time, and I told her I wasn’t ready.
The bookstore was a mellow job, and I spent the rest of the week alphabetizing novels and ringing up customers for eight-fifty an hour, working for a guy named Miller, the keyboardist’s uncle, who Aiden introduced me to on my first day at the shop. The training was nonexistent.
“You know how to run a register?” Miller asked, and I nodded. He looked me over long and hard. “You an honest kid?” I said I was, and then Aiden said I was, then Miller said, “That’s fine, then, she’ll do,” and he disappeared into his office, shutting the door behind him.
“Welcome to the working world,” Aiden said.
“Looks good to me,” I told him, and then I took out the disposable camera I’d recently bought and snapped a photo of the bumper sticker plastered in the center of Miller’s office door: YOU’RE EITHER ON THE BUS OR OFF THE BUS.
Aiden showed me what to do, and I never saw much of Miller after that. It worked just like Aiden said: He paid me, and I assumed the keyboardist paid him.
I liked the routine of stocking shelves, the smell of the books, and the customers who came in with long lists of authors and poets I had never heard of. I picked novels and read them in the back during my breaks, books about musicians and short stories about families in the Midwest living on ranches, trying to survive the storms of the landscape. I read Tom Wolfe because Aiden said that’s where Miller’s bumper sticker quote came from, and I read Kurt Vonnegut because Ryan mentioned liking his books back when he was my age. I also read Flannery O’Connor, since Emmy told me Ms. Ford had assigned them her collection of short stories for class. The job grounded me and gave me a schedule and a place to be each day, and it felt good to engage with the city in that way. I usually met Aiden for dinner after work, and we ate Cuban meals or shared tapas, split leftover pizzas at the shop, or tried different taquerías in the Mission, a place I became more impressed with the longer I stayed there. The days moved quickly, and I rarely saw Cassie or Ryan, since I left for work in the morning and they worked the venues at night.
“You have everything you need?” Ryan asked when we passed in the hallway. “You eating okay?” he’d say. “Getting enough sleep?”
And nothing felt all that significant until the following week, when
I woke to the sound of my cell phone ringing in the kitchen, where I’d left it the night before to charge. I was off the air mattress quickly and picked up on the fourth ring, wondering if I was the only person home.
“Lemon,” she said, “it’s Doctor Harrison.” My heart dropped to my stomach as I moved to the chair at the table and sat down.
Ryan came into the kitchen, nodded groggily, and began searching through the cabinets.
She said she knew that one of the nurses had already called the week before, “but I wanted to follow up and make sure you didn’t have any questions.”
“I haven’t heard from anyone,” I told her, and she mumbled, “Oh, God,” and then, “I’m sorry you weren’t contacted sooner.”
Ryan pulled a box of Honey Nut Cheerios out of the cupboard, and I watched him as he stood in his boxers with his long hair tangled, his face still marked by the crease of his pillow. He turned his back to me, and I eyed the lines of muscles toned and tight, noticed a small scar below his right shoulder blade. It was the first time I’d seen him stripped like that.
“You’re anemic. Your iron count’s too low,” Dr. Harrison said, and I thought of all the dizziness, and of fainting at the concert and at the house that first night. It seemed so long ago. “You should be taking supplements, and you’ve got to pay attention to your diet.”
I vaguely considered looking for a pen and pad of paper to take notes on, but she spoke too quickly, and I missed some of the details.
“Hey, Ryan,” I said after I hung up. He turned from the counter and tugged at the top of his boxers. “Where’s the closest drugstore?”
We sat across from each other while he ate his cereal, and I told him about being anemic, about having to pick up the pills that afternoon and needing to eat more fiber and iron.
“Was she worried?” he asked. “Should you call Stella or something?” he offered.
“I call her every morning before I leave for work,” I confessed. “I use my own cell,” I said, so he didn’t think I’d been racking up his phone bill.
He nodded, and I thought he might be pissed, but he was thinking of something else by then, his forehead wrinkled and his eyes far away. “I missed all that, you know?” he said. “With Stella I never knew if she was sick, if the pregnancy was normal.”
I looked at the leftover O’s, bloated and soggy in the bowl of milk. “She could have called you,” I said even though I kind of thought it should have worked the other way around. He could have called her too, and I decided that, somehow, both of them had failed. The blame didn’t belong to just one of them, it was shared.
He shook his head. “It works both ways,” he said. “I know that now.”
Stella said she’d called him in the beginning, but I wanted to ask how often and why the phone calls stopped, who’d been the one to cut the ties. She was always good at leaving out info she didn’t want to deal with, and I wondered if she’d ever gotten in touch with him during the years we moved around, or if he’d ever asked for updates. But instead I said, “Did you miss her? When she left?”
He pushed the bowl away from him. “She was already gone before she left, you know? It wasn’t good, things between us. Those last months were wasted time.”
I heard Cassie padding down the hallway. She shut the door to the bathroom and turned on the sink.
“I don’t know what she told you,” he said, and I realized he had no idea how little Stella spoke of him or how strong willed she’d been about keeping him a secret. The information Stella gave me was knotted and tangled and as hard to follow as a ball of fishing line in a neglected tackle box, a kink of nylon wire with no beginning and no end. His story was a pile of hooks and weights locked to one another randomly.
“I never cheated on Stella,” he told me, though I hadn’t asked. “Not once. It was months after she left before I thought about women again.” He looked down, and I followed his eyes. His chest was thin and tanned, his stomach lined with muscle and patches of dark hair.
“Cassie and I came a lot later. And we’ve got our own problems too, but with Stella—” He stopped, picking words. “I never knew a woman could make you feel so bad. Watching her walk away was like . . .” But he couldn’t seem to find the words.
“My grandmother used to say Stella was always like that,” I told him. “That she did whatever she wanted—strong willed and determined. Stella thinks I’m the same, that I inherited that from her, and she worries my stubbornness will get me into trouble. When I told her I was leaving, I think she saw herself in me,” I said. “But I’m not sure I want them, those traits of hers in me.”
Ryan ran his fingers along the edge of the table, his words slow when he finally said, “The thing about inheritance is that it has nothing to do with choice. It’s like fear. You don’t always get to pick it for yourself.”
Like fear. Or motherhood, maybe.
AIDEN TOOK ME TO DINNER THAT NIGHT at a Vietnamese restaurant on Sixteenth Street, and even though I’d never eaten Vietnamese food before, I tried to pretend I liked the flavors as I nudged a bundle of tangled yellow noodles around my dish. A pile of green leaves lay buried beneath a mound of red chunky sauce.
“Bánh bao,” Aiden said, and he lifted a pocket of food off his plate and put it onto mine. “Steamed dumplings stuffed with vegetables and ground pork.”
I tore into the soft casing with my fork and watched the meaty brown sludge fall out of its skin, wondering if Aiden would still like me if I ended up yacking at the table, if it would ruin my chance of him ever kissing me. We spent most of dinner talking about how much I liked working at the bookstore and about how things were going for the band, which had left Seattle and was playing a gig in Portland that night. Eventually I told him about Less Than Zero and my mother’s inscription to Ryan, about the books in the house being gifts from Stella to him.
“You know, I’ve never seen my mother with a book. Not once.” I’d seen all kinds of things clutched in her hands: vodka cocktails, skinny menthol cigarettes, suitcases and duffel bags, car keys and road maps. But never a book. “It’s weird I never thought of it before. As much as I like reading, she’s never really encouraged it.” My water glass was empty, so I reached over for a sip of Aiden’s. “I can’t imagine her shopping in a bookstore.”
He took the dumpling back, noticing my half, deserted and uneaten. Somewhere in the restaurant a baby started to cry, and a telephone was ringing.
“So she bought them for your dad even though reading was never her thing?”
A waiter answered the phone by the cash register and began speaking in a language I didn’t recognize.
“But she never bought books for me or for her,” I told Aiden.
I’d seen my mother pack countless times in patterns that had become predictable by then. Our clothes went first, the skirts and sweaters that made her feel beautiful, and the outfits she’d use in the following town to land her next boyfriend. The photos came second, two framed shots of my grandparents and her, back when she was small: a child with big, startling eyes, a father who sold insurance, and a mother who typed medical transcripts for the local hospital. The picture album was always third on the list, the collection of images she kept from our life together, six cities censored down into thirty pages of photos slipped into slots of plastic cellophane. She’d pack the camera and the stereo after that, our small TV, then the microwave wrapped in the bathroom towels. Her makeup and her perfumes came next. But there were never books. She never brought one story with us when we moved away. My love of books was never shared between us; it was shared between me and Ryan. I wondered if that had bothered her all those years, seeing his habits in me even though I’d never met him.
After dinner we sat in Dolores Park, and I told Aiden about Ryan playing on Haight Street and how I thought Ryan loved music as much as I’d seen anyone love anything before. It was dark by then, and the park was mostly quiet, but the city view was lit up by cars and restaurants and all the people moving below
us. In the distance I watched the Pyramid building piercing the skyline while I told Aiden I thought Ryan picked his job at the Warfield and the Fillmore just so he could work with musicians.
“I wish I had something like that,” I said. “Something to latch on to, something I care so much about,” I told him, “that it’d hurt to give it up.”
For me reading was the one thing I could never imagine letting go of, the hours of exploring other people’s lives through the rhythms and tempos of well-written stories. It was an internal reward, though, where making music for Ryan seemed to be his attempt at giving something away, of putting something into the world that felt important, and I wondered if that’s how Stella felt about her painting. I’d never felt like that about anything, not really, and I told Aiden I wondered if that’s what the baby would become. If that’s what being a mother would give me.
“Something I love so much it hurts,” I said, “something that makes me feel like I’m actually contributing in some way,” and I wasn’t even thinking of it, but that’s when he finally kissed me.
His hand was on my knee, his palm grazing my leg, stopping when he squeezed my thigh and leaned in. His tongue was slow and careful inside my mouth as his other hand moved around my back, pulling me to him. His heart hammered against mine through our chests like bass notes of a song, warm and fast and close. It was clean and comforting, a soft bite on my bottom lip, and a rub of his nose against mine before he pulled away. It was everything that being with Johnny Drinko was not, and I knew it was what being with a boy was supposed to feel like when it was a good thing, something right. It felt essential and transformative, like sleep.
We didn’t say much on the walk back to Ryan’s, but just before he turned to cross the street where he’d left his Vespa after work, he said, “I’ve been waiting to do that since the first time I saw you.”
The house was empty when I got back, and the stomach cramps kicked in just after I fed Blue Heaven and settled on the couch with Ryan’s Rolling Stone. I wished I’d skipped all the unfamiliar food at the restaurant and had stuck to rice and vegetables at dinner, but then the pain shifted, becoming strong and sharp as it moved in sheets through my stomach. By the time I made it to the bathroom, the bleeding had started. The heat came in full, ripe bursts, blooming in my belly and flowering out across my body, stretching and engulfing me. I took deep breaths and listened to the room, a room crowded by the realization there was nothing I could do to fix this. There was noise between my ears like a radio caught between stations, the crackling like fizz or soda bubbles growing louder as I unwrapped myself until I was nothing but a collection of nerves, fibers, cells. Water and air. A stagnant space in the bathroom of my father’s home. My mind clenched tight and caged itself in as the sound became white noise. And then it was silent. By the time Ryan and Cassie found me on the floor, I’d settled into the hollowed stillness of sadness.
Fingerprints of You Page 17