Fingerprints of You

by Kristen-Paige Madonia

  It made me sad to think she hadn’t been brave enough to date him anyway. I couldn’t imagine Ryan caring about what other people thought when he was with Cassie. It seemed like he loved her too much to be bothered by the idea that some people may not like it.

  I finished my glass of water and wandered down the hallway past the concert posters from the Warfield and a black-and-white photo of Cassie and Ryan standing on the Golden Gate Bridge. And I didn’t plan it, I didn’t mean to be, but then I was in their bedroom, my fingers smoothing out their sheets, my face in their mirror hung above the bed. Cassie had her jewelry in a little wooden box on the dresser by the door, tiny earrings, a silver chain, and a chunky turquoise ring. Ryan and Cassie each had their own nightstand, Ryan’s on the left with a glass of water and an autobiography of Miles Davis on it, and Cassie’s on the right with a mug of milky tea, the bag bloated in the bottom and soaking in the leftover liquid. And then I saw a second dresser, Ryan’s set behind the door, a tall green piece of furniture that matched the first, with half as many drawers as Cassie’s. And then my hands were pulling at the knobs, rummaging through his socks and T-shirts and stacks of pants that smelled like stale beer from the venues and pot smoke from the Haight. I was on my knees digging through the bottom drawer, searching. Looking for Stella—letters I had hoped she’d written or photos of me as a kid I hoped she’d mailed. I wanted proof she hadn’t kept me to herself all those years, needed evidence that she’d tried to share me with him. Maybe I was looking for a hiding spot like the shoes Stella kept those pictures in, for a place he might have buried us. I wanted to know if he had been the one to create all that distance between us and him, or if it had been the other way around. But there was nothing. Just a pair of corduroys, and a sweater full of creases from too much time folded into shape. And I realized then that knowing wouldn’t have made a difference, that those years of separation couldn’t be undone no matter whose fault it was. Like Stella’d always said, there was only forward movement—I had to put the past behind me.

  And then Cassie was in the doorway. Cassie in her red boots and a black dress, her afro a perfect globe of hair sprouting above the gold eye shadow and the glossy lips. She was a little drunk. I knew as soon as she slumped against the door frame—I recognized the stance. She looked like my mother when she’d had too many glasses of vodka. She looked like Johnny Drinko searching for his balance when he pulled on his tennis shoes in the apartment that smelled like bread. She watched me put the sweater back, though I couldn’t remember pulling it out, and she waited while I refolded the pair of pants and shut the drawer. My cheeks were red—I could feel it as I stumbled for words. It was worse than the awkwardness of meeting Ryan for the first time, worse even than the embarrassment I’d felt when I fainted at the concert. The shame of being caught like that was suffocating, and I couldn’t shake the feeling of her watching me, of her eyes following my movements while I tried to dodge her gaze.

  I can’t be sure what I said then. I’m sorry. Or maybe not. I might have lied and said Ryan asked me to get him a sweater. He was cold. They should get their heat fixed. There should have been more blankets in the house. It was always cold and damp, the cracks in the brick walls leaking. It didn’t really matter what I said, because she pulled me to my feet, her breath hot and boozy when she yanked me up by my elbows and leaned down, our faces almost touching.

  “Ryan says you’re brave,” she slurred. Or, “Ryan wants you saved.” I wasn’t sure. Her tired eyes were bloodshot, a map of red lines mazing under smeared black eyeliner. “You look like her,” she said. “It’s your eyes.” Or, “I’m not surprised.” She let me go then, and I stumbled backward and had to catch my balance.

  And maybe she just needed a little space between us, because once there was a foot or two of air separating our bodies, she reevaluated the scene. I wasn’t crying, not yet, but I must have looked pretty shook up, because she moved in next to me and sat down on the bed.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “God, what am I doing? You’ve been through so much already.”

  “I’m sorry too,” I said back. For snooping in their bedroom, for showing up out of nowhere, for looking like my mother, and for reminding her that before she was there, there was someone else. There was Stella.

  “It just took a long time,” she said, “for us to get here. I don’t know what I would do if he left,” she said, and all that anger was gone, her voice tender and threatened.

  Just because she was beautiful, just because he was hers then, it didn’t make her immune. It didn’t make her more safe or any different from the rest of us.

  “He’s everything to me now,” she said, which I believed. “I can’t imagine anything without him.”

  I realized she’d felt threatened those last weeks. As much as she wanted to help me, she also knew nothing would be the same once I entered their life, once she invited me into their home. And because of me, Stella was there too.

  “Do you know how long you’re staying?” she asked with her eyes to the floor and her hands pressed on the bed beside her, balancing. “It’s okay. It doesn’t really matter. We want you here.” She paused. “But still.”

  I noticed a tear in her leggings and a black scuff on her right boot.

  I didn’t really know when I’d leave, how much longer I’d be able to convince Stella to let me stay, so I told her, “Until it’s better,” which didn’t really answer anything, but she nodded like something had been made clear. And then she lay down on her side, red boots on the bedspread. And even though she was half-drunk and who knows what else, I still thought she was beautiful when she closed her eyes.

  In the morning I called Emmy while Ryan and Cassie were still in bed.

  “Lemon Drop,” she said when she answered, “you literally just saved my life. I’m in the middle of my WVU application and I was just about to chug a bottle of Drano. Seriously. There’s nothing as painful as college apps.”

  I laughed. “Are you sure you don’t want to call me back?” I asked.

  “You are officially the perfect reason to take a smoke break,” she said, and then, “Give me two seconds,” and I imagined her ditching the stacks of papers at the kitchen table and grabbing her coat from the hall closet.

  The last time we talked I was still staying at the hotel with Stella, so I curled up on the couch and told Emmy about moving back in with Ryan.

  “It feels good here, you know?” I said, and I heard a door close and the flick of a lighter on Emmy’s end of the phone line. “It’s like I can do whatever I want,” I told her, knowing I wasn’t getting the words right but hoping she would understand anyway. “I’m here for me, not for anyone else. It feels like the first time I’ve gotten to make my own decisions.”

  “So it’s good?” she asked. “To be with your dad on a day-to-day basis?”

  “Being with Ryan isn’t perfect,” I said. “He’s sloppy and he’s distant sometimes. He can be moody just like anybody can. I’m not saying I’m living in Leave It to Beaver land here, but still”—I paused and tried to work it out in my head—“knowing him, learning about his life before with Stella and seeing his life now with Cassie, I don’t know. It makes me feel like I don’t have to be so scared to try for the things I really want. That I can be more independent. I can work and date and make my own decisions, and even if they’re wrong, it’s not that big of a deal.”

  “God knows I’m all for the independent-person thing,” Emmy said. “And I’m glad you’ve got a new perspective, I really am. But do you have to stand on your own all the way on the other side of the country? I mean, come on, I’m dying here.” She stopped, and I listened to the inhale and exhale of her smoke. “Don’t get me wrong. You shouldn’t come back until you’re ready. But”—another pause—“I miss you. These are the last months of school—spring fever and senioritis and cutting class. It doesn’t feel right finishing up without you.”

  “But I wouldn’t be in school anyway, Emmy,” I reminded her. �
�Even if I was in town, they wouldn’t let me back now. I’ve missed too many days,” I said, which was true. “I’ll have to repeat my senior year,” I told her.

  “What about Stella?” she said. “She’s got a life here, Lemon. You can’t forget that.”

  “And I’ve got a life here now,” I told her. “I didn’t ask her to stay. She can leave if she wants,” I said even though I knew it wasn’t the truth. If I stayed, Stella stayed. That’s just how we worked.

  “She’s got a job, Lemon. And a real relationship,” she said. “Don’t be selfish.” And I thought of Simon, how nice he’d always been to me and Stella. “You want that for her, don’t you?” she asked, her voice picking up speed, rising. “You want your mother to have those things, right?”

  I’d never fought with Emmy, not really, and I didn’t want to start then, with me being too far away to fix it in person, so I tried to slow the conversation down.

  “I want her to be happy,” I said carefully. “But I want to be happy too. What if West Virginia isn’t the place I’m supposed to be anymore?”

  “Then you wait,” she said immediately. “California isn’t going anywhere. You come back and you finish school. You give Stella time to adjust to the idea. I think you owe her that, don’t you?” she said, and I nodded even though she couldn’t see me. “And then you leave when it makes sense. When your decision isn’t based around a baby or a boy or being caught up in the rush of being in a new place, a big city.”

  I heard Ryan and Cassie’s door open, and the sound of someone’s bare feet on the wood floor, heading toward the bathroom.

  “I love you, Lemon,” Emmy was saying, “but you have to be certain. A road trip is different from a move to the other side of the country. One doesn’t just become the other,” she said. “Not like this. What’s the rush?” she asked.

  “I just want something more, something bigger than what I had before,” I told her, my voice quieter by then. “I feel like I could find that here,” I said.

  “And that’s a good thing,” she said. “But just take your time. That’s all I’m saying. Come home and take your time making the decision.”

  I nodded and flipped the conversation back to her applications, her plans to enroll at WVU in the fall even though I could tell she wasn’t interested in talking about college.

  “I should go,” she said eventually. “Keep calling, though. I want to hear what’s happening. I want to know what’s going on.”

  I told her that I missed her. And then I thanked her. “For being honest,” I said.

  “Someone’s gotta keep your ass in line,” she said. “I miss you too.”

  After we hung up I imagined her huddled on her front porch finishing her smoke, her mom folding laundry, maybe, or grabbing her purse and heading out to Walter Reed. I imagined what it would be like to be there with her, and I knew it would be different. Different from how it was when I was there last, and different from how it was in California, but being with Emmy would always be a good thing: It would always feel like being home.

  ON TUESDAY, AFTER WORK, I headed to the hotel to see Stella, and when I got there she was sitting cross-legged in the center of the bed, with a red colored pencil in one hand and her cell phone in the other. There were papers everywhere: balled-up sheets torn from her notebook on the floor, shredded scraps from her sketch pad on the nightstand, and pieces of poster board littering the love seat and desk by the window. She smiled at me when I let myself in but held up her pointer finger, needing a minute or two to wrap up the call.

  “I know, but—,” she said, stopping to look at me and mouth Simon’s name.

  “Take your time,” I whispered. I eyed a sketch of an Asian family outside the post office on Geary, which Aiden had taken me to when he shipped extra demos up north for the band. Under it was a drawing of a child in a school uniform waiting at a bus stop with headphones in his ears, a black-and-white ink of the Rollerblade stunt skaters in Golden Gate Park, and a pencil drawing of the storefronts on Haight Street. They were good—better than I remembered her being.

  “But that doesn’t make sense,” she said to Simon. “I haven’t been working. You can’t just give me a paycheck if I haven’t clocked any hours.”

  There were take-out food containers spilling out of the trash can, and she had three pairs of underwear and two bras draped over the TV set, drying. The dresser was littered with empty water bottles, snack packs of crackers, and pens and pieces of paper. Beside the bed she had piled her dirty clothes in a heap, and next to it was a CVS bag. I saw that it was full of shampoo and soap and a pack of disposable razor blades, as well as a small bottle of Woolite detergent for washing clothes in the sink, I guessed. I realized she had probably packed quickly when she left for San Francisco, that obviously she never planned to stay for as long as she had. I remembered she only had one carry-on suitcase when we checked into that hotel, and I realized she’d been in the city for over two weeks.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “I’ll haggle a discount from the guy at the front desk, show him my boobs. You know the drill.” And then she winked at me and told Simon, “I’m fine, Simon. We’re fine.”

  I moved her coat and a stack of sketches from the chair so I could sit down, but I couldn’t figure out where to put them. The room suddenly seemed too small. Miniature. Claustrophobic.

  “Just put them on the floor,” she said to me, and then, to Simon, “Listen, I should go, Lemon’s here.” After a quick pause, she said, “Simon says hi, baby.”

  “Hey, Simon,” I shouted as I sat down. “Miss you,” I said.

  She told him they’d talk soon. That she loved him. Talk soon.

  After she hung up she took one look at me and said, “You look better,” and I nodded.

  “I feel better.” I glanced around the room. “And you probably feel like a pack rat, or a homeless person, like a kid living in a dorm room.”

  “It’s not so bad,” she said, but I said, “It kind of is,” and then we were quiet.

  “I’m sorry,” I said finally. “Thank you. For being here, I mean. For letting me stay.”

  “Watching you leave on the bus like that, knowing that I had to let you go if you wanted to,” she said as she traced her fingers over the sketch pad in front of her, “it shook me up, I guess. Plus, it’s good that you get some closure before we go back. It’s good that you have some time.”

  She asked how work was going, and I offered to use my discount to get her any art books she wanted, and then she asked about Aiden.

  “I know it’s superlame, but I’d like to meet him,” she said.

  I tried to imagine the three of us sitting at a coffee shop or meeting at a café for lunch, and I knew instantly they would like each other. Just because of me.

  “That makes sense,” I said. “I’ll plan something.” And then I took her out to dinner at the Italian restaurant around the corner, where we gorged ourselves on garlic bread and lasagna before I headed back to the Mission.

  The next afternoon Ryan and I loaded up a day pack with water and snacks and extra layers of clothes, and he borrowed a truck from a friend so we could drive to Marin County to take that hike. We left the city, headed over the Golden Gate Bridge, and drove north, traveling past joggers and bikers who were making their way along the path on the side of Highway 101. The bridge was an orange-red color, just like in all the travel books, but I hadn’t imagined the cables so large and looming as they stretched above us while the traffic moved under the steel beams. I would have liked a picture of me and Ryan standing over the water, posed on the path with the arches of wire above us. The shot of him and Cassie in that same spot was by far my favorite photo in their house, but he was too excited to get out of the city for me to bother to ask him to pull over to take a picture. It was the beginning of February, and the fog had burned off in the morning, but even though it was cold out, the sun was warm beating down through the front window of his buddy’s Chevy. We moved out of San Francisco into the brow
n slopes of Marin, the mountains getting larger the farther out we went. Ryan navigated through the hills and I played with the radio, our conversation casual and unimportant as he drove. Eventually he exited the highway, and turned onto a small road while I watched the buildings of the city growing smaller in the side-view mirror. I rolled down the window and felt the heavy dampness of the air—the winter breeze was wetter and cooler on the other side of the bridge. We parked at a trailhead, and the lot was empty.

  “It’s a pretty mellow hike,” he said when we were outside looking up the hill. He grabbed the pack from the truck bed and locked the doors. “If you get tired, just say so. We’ll stop, no big deal.”

  The incline was gradual as we began the walk up the dirt path, and the switchbacks were slow and measured as they lifted us away from the truck. There was a rhythm to the back and forth, and I walked behind Ryan and followed his tempo through the trees, staring at his footprints in the dirt. The wind picked up, and we stopped on the side of the path to pull on sweatshirts we had brought in the backpack.

  “Look,” he said, and for the first time since we’d started, I glanced behind us and realized that we were high enough to see San Francisco on the other side of the bay.

  The water was bluer than I remembered, the white waves spitting foam throughout the surface of the Pacific, and the city was a map of building-covered hills, a chart of colors and angles. The roads looked like ribbons weaving through the peninsula, linking the neighborhoods like lines in a child’s connect-the-dots book.