“Want to go farther?” Ryan asked, and I nodded.
We kept moving up, and the light-headedness came in small waves, but I pushed through until we reached a flat landing littered with cigarette butts, a dirt lot enclosed by trees on three sides but overlooking San Francisco on the fourth. There was a bench with empty beer cans underneath and graffiti spray painted on the seat, and I sat down and tried to catch my breath.
“It’s amazing,” I said, and stripped off the sweatshirt. My skin was a filmy mixture of sweat and dampness from the air, and I imagined my face was red, because Ryan asked if I was all right.
He sat down on the bench too and pulled a bottle of water from the pack, opened it, and handed it to me.
“It feels good to get some exercise,” I said. “How far did we go?” I asked, realizing the trail continued up from where we were, and that we hadn’t even made it to the top.
He shrugged. “Far enough,” he said, taking the water back and swigging it down. I watched his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. He looked at me and then looked down the hill. Looked back at me again. “You’re pretty sturdy, considering all the shit you’ve been through lately.” He smiled.
The wind was ripping through the trees by then, and the air cooled me down while we rested. In front of us the city looked like a web of wires, a map of ebbs and flows, the streets running into one another like music.
“I hate the thought of leaving,” I said, and I felt Ryan shift on the bench as he crossed and then uncrossed his ankles.
“You’re leaving?” he asked. “When?”
“I can’t stay here forever,” I said, thinking of Stella back at the hotel, stalling her life with Simon because she didn’t want to leave me, thinking of our three-week deal. I could tell Stella had changed just as much as I had since I left West Virginia, maybe because of Simon or maybe because of her painting, and it wasn’t fair that I had asked her to put all those good things on hold while I hung around the city. She’d given up a lot by staying there with me, and I figured it was time I began planning what I was going to do with myself. I knew that whatever it was, it would start by going back home.
“Look how amazing it is,” I said. “All that energy in motion.” I took the camera out from the backpack and snapped a shot of the view. City buildings on top with a vast ocean of blue and white waves below. I turned the wheel on the disposable and watched the number shift from twenty-two to twenty-three.
“I fell in love with that city so long ago I can hardly remember anything from before it,” Ryan said. And then he paused before he said something about wishing we had more time together. “I know I’ve kind of sucked at this father thing, but I promise it’ll only get better from here. And you can always come back,” he said. An empty can of Budweiser rolled out from under the bench, and he kicked it away.
“I’d like that.”
“I should have done more sooner,” he said. “It’s like when you’re a kid and you’re taught that if you work hard enough, you’ll eventually get what you want. That work and success are undeniably entwined. But then you find that one thing you won’t ever be good at no matter how hard you work. Math or football. Writing or art class. It doesn’t really matter what, because everyone has at least one thing. No one can be good at everything, regardless of how hard you try,” he said.
I thought of how Molly-Warner was never good in gym class, and how Emmy never passed Advanced Chemistry. How I was still terrible at Spanish conjugations even though Simon had explained them to me a hundred times.
“I was worried being a parent would be one of those things for me, something I’d never be good at, so I never tried, because I was scared.” Ryan looked out at the view, the waves growing violent under all that wind, and the white crests getting sharper as the clouds blocked the sun. “I didn’t want to risk it, because I didn’t believe I could do it,” he said.
And when I thought about it that way, it made me realize Stella was brave for being scared and doing it anyway, for having faith in the fact that if she worked hard enough at being a good mother, eventually she’d succeed. Because each time she failed at making things good for us, we moved and tried again.
“I get it now,” Ryan said. “That failure is better than copping out. But Stella’s obviously taught you that.”
I realized that’s what Stella had given me, the recognition that even if I failed to find all the answers, just being in San Francisco, going there with the openness to look, made me brave too.
Ryan’s fingers were tracing the names carved into the wood bench when he said, “I’m sorry, Lemon. For . . .”
But I stopped him before he could finish and told him, “We get to be new now,” and I guess he understood what I meant, because he nodded and didn’t say anything else after that. We stayed there awhile and watched the fog spread away from the hills and over the bridge.
On the way down it started to drizzle, as the smell of the ocean mixed with the smell of trees and dirt, and it was tricky working our way back to the truck. The trail was steeper on the trip down, with gravity pulling at my body and testing the muscles in my legs. I lost my footing once or twice, stumbled midswitchback, and had to stop to catch my balance, but Ryan offered me his hand and let me steady my weight on his before we started down again.
Later that week I set up a time for Stella to meet Aiden since she’d asked me to introduce them. I waited until she had somewhere to be, an art gallery she promised Simon she’d stop by to get the name of a contact he could submit his photos to, and then I told her we could all meet at Stella’s hotel and go to the gallery together. Short and sweet: It would be easier that way.
Stella was wearing skinny jeans, ankle boots, and a snug black turtleneck when she came out of the hotel to meet us. The perm had mostly grown out by then, and her blond hair was twisted into a low, knotted bun. She was wide-eyed and shiny lipped, with just the right amount of makeup. She looked amazing.
Next to me Aiden fidgeted, so I hurried through the introductions and pointed in the direction we’d be walking. The art gallery was about eight blocks away.
Aiden asked about Stella’s trip out and then asked about Simon’s photos, and he even remembered she was an artist too.
“Will you be pitching your work to the gallery also?” he asked, but she shook her head.
“God, no, I’m not ready for that yet. I’m just starting to take some classes,” she told him when we got caught at a crosswalk and had to wait for the light to change. “Being a student again feels like a big enough commitment as it is.”
My mother never went to college and didn’t push it on me like a lot of kids’ parents did, though I knew that after Denny ripped us off, she’d started another savings account in case I ever decided to go. She bought a bottle of champagne when I nailed my PSAT but didn’t harp on it when my SAT scores weren’t as high as I wanted. I figured she knew she had to pick her battles.
We crossed to the other side of the street and moved past a bus stop where a group of retro mod-kids huddled, looking at a map.
I’d missed over a month of school by then, and even though Stella hadn’t asked, I knew she was wondering what I was planning to do about it. I figured I’d have to repeat my senior year and start researching colleges that summer. I was thinking of a lit major and writing classes, of a small liberal-arts college with a strong art and music scene.
“Lemon says you’re a writer. And a musician?” Stella asked.
Aiden told her about the band he managed, about their tour up north and the gigs he was trying to land them back in San Francisco. He talked about writing music reviews, his love of finding new bands, and discovering new styles and up-and-coming talent.
“It feels good to write a positive review for a band that’s still struggling to make a name for itself. If the band’s sound turns me on, I try to do everything I can to get the word out.”
By the time we got to the art gallery I was pretty sure he’d won Stella over 100 percent. Insid
e, Aiden and I wandered through the small room, eyeing the artwork: black-and-white photographs of mountain ridges, desolate campgrounds, and stark landscape shots of fire damage in the hills of Southern California. Stella worked her magic and flirted with the lanky young guy sitting behind a mahogany desk in the back corner, an art student manning the gallery part-time, I guessed. Eventually she landed a contact name, and a business card for the owner, who also worked as the curator for most of the shows.
Back outside we lingered on the sidewalk by the door. Stella had planned to visit the San Francisco Botanical Garden, but Aiden and I decided not to go.
“Thanks for keeping me company,” Stella said when we realized we were heading in opposite directions from there. “And thanks for being so good to Lemon since she’s been here,” she said to Aiden, which was kind of embarrassing but also kind of nice. “I would’ve felt a lot better about her being out here if I’d known she had you keeping an eye on her,” she said.
Afterward, Aiden and I hopped on a bus and headed to a coffee shop on Fillmore Street near the venue where Ryan worked. Ryan had scheduled a meeting there that afternoon to introduce Aiden to the events manager. Aiden was hoping that if all went well, he’d be able to line up a gig for his friends’ band in the spring.
We sat on a window bench facing the street, and Aiden bought us green tea and blueberry muffins even though I said I wasn’t hungry.
“I’ve kind of got bad news,” he said, and then he told me the band would be back by the end of the week. “You’re officially unemployed.”
“I figured I’d have to give up my shifts soon anyway,” I said. I didn’t tell him I’d already used my discount to buy the rest of the books I wanted and that I’d said good-bye to Miller after my shift the day before, had thanked him for the job, and told him I was leaving town soon. My three weeks were up.
Aiden and I talked about the music review he’d been working on, and then we talked about Emmy, how she’d been spending most of her weekends in D.C. visiting her dad in the hospital.
“Emmy says he’s quieter now, that it’s like he’s lost his stories and he can’t remember any of his jokes,” I said, thinking of the rotten knock-knocks. “It must be terrible,” I told him. “It’s good I’m going back soon. I figure it’ll be easier for Emmy if I’m around.”
Outside, the sun was shining, and I could feel the window warming up against my back. A woman walked by with a blue-eyed husky. A tall, lanky kid sped through the sidewalk crowd on a skateboard.
“I wish you never had to leave. I wish you could take me with you,” he said.
“No you don’t,” I said, but it didn’t sound right when it came out that way. “I just mean that you have a good life here. That you shouldn’t walk away from the band and the writing gig, all the things you’ve worked for. You belong here,” I said, wondering if I’d be able to get the words right and then knowing I wouldn’t. “We can make it be okay, though,” I told him, wanting to believe it. And I knew that Aiden would always be a part of me but that our relationship would most likely never be as big as we would have liked it, though I also believed it would never fully fade away. Because of him, I would never give myself to people like Johnny Drinko again.
“We’re, like, train-wreck tragic, you know that?” he said, and pushed the mugs of tea out of the way so he could reach my hands across the table. He brought them to his face and rubbed his nose across my knuckles, serious then.
“Say you’ll be back to visit,” he said.
“I’ll be back to visit.”
“Say you won’t forget this.”
I looked straight into those green eyes. “I could never, never forget,” I told him.
That weekend, I went to the Palace of Fine Arts before Stella and I left for West Virginia. I didn’t take her with me, though. I went alone, but it seemed better that way, to be on neutral ground. The monument was set in a park with a small lagoon near the giant rotunda with colonnades and statues scattered about. The grounds were decorated by Roman-style sculptures and flower beds planted around the edge of the lawn. It was the middle of the day and it was quiet, the sun cutting into the water in strips of white light. The pond smelled fresh like mud, like nature, unfiltered and hopeful. It was one of those days when the sun was shining strong but the wind blew steadily. It was warm and cool at exactly the same time. Inside and out.
Aiden told me the Palace of Fine Arts was originally built for the 1915 Panama Pacific International Expo, or the World’s Fair, and the Roman-style constructions, the renditions of ruins from another era, were created to represent the mortality of material beauty and the vanity of human desire. Like all the other structures at the fair, it was supposed to have been torn down at the end of the exhibition.
“The city saved it from demolition because it became a symbol of hope to people in San Francisco. It represented the gathering that welcomed the city back to the world after the 1906 earthquake,” he explained one night while we paged through a historical book about the Bay Area. “Hosting the World’s Fair was a public acknowledgment the city had survived.”
“So they saved it,” I said, eyeing the photos in the book.
He nodded. “To remind themselves and the rest of the world that as bad as the disaster was, they’d recover. They couldn’t be ruined.”
I wandered from the lawn into the rotunda, and the structure looked just like the pictures, though the columns were layered with traces of moss and the walls were cold and shadowed with age. Kids had tagged parts of the building with spray-painted names and quotes, and I ran my fingers over the splits in the walls, thinking of all the other people who had been there before me. I knew from the book that it was a popular place for brides and grooms to go for postwedding photos and that art students often visited to study the architecture and to photograph the winged statues and gargoyles, the columns and arches. The towers were originally made from plaster and wood, but in the sixties San Francisco raised the money to cast them in concrete and make the structure permanent. I pressed my body into the coolness of a shadow and looked up to watch the birds above me dodging in and out of view.
I’d said good-bye to Ryan and Cassie that morning and had left Aiden the night before. The leaving part was terrible, and I’d searched for the right words to let them know how important my time there had been, but in the end the words weren’t all that significant. We knew what had passed between us.
I’d left Stella at the hotel and gone to the purple house to say good-bye, and while Cassie went to the bedroom for a gift she said she had for me, Ryan nudged me into the living room and showed me a plane ticket he’d bought for that fall.
“I talked to Stella, and we decided I should come in September. For your birthday,” he said. “Eighteen years old. I know now.” He smiled and handed me the ticket. He’d booked a five-day trip and said he wanted to come alone the first time, but that next time around he’d like to bring Cassie.
“We’re getting married in May,” he told me after he took the ticket back. “Figured it’s time I make an honest woman out of her,” he joked. “One more year and it’d be common law, but I want to do it the right way,” he said, which sounded good to me.
I imagined Cassie in a white dress, something simple and elegant, and my father in a suit with that goofy smile slung across his lips. It was easy to picture it, the two of them making a promise I figured they’d have no problem keeping.
“It’ll be small. Just us out near the water somewhere, but I think it’s important,” he said. “It’s good we make it official.”
And then Cassie came into the room and handed me two small packages wrapped in newspaper.
“Nothing fancy,” she said, “but you know, something to take with you, a little reminder.”
The first was a framed copy of the picture of them in front of the Golden Gate Bridge, their heads tucked together and their lips open and laughing. The second was an unlabeled CD.
“It’s the New Year’s show,” she s
aid. “I downloaded it. I figured you’d like a copy.”
I thanked her.
“Your friend’s band is good,” Ryan said. “I hope my boss gives them a shot.”
And I hadn’t told them yet, but Aiden and I had agreed to split the cost of a plane ticket if he landed the band a gig at the Fillmore. I’d fly back for the show so I could finally see where Ryan worked.
But I wasn’t really thinking about plans for the months ahead that afternoon in the ruins; I was thinking how Aiden had been right: I didn’t notice when it happened, but as I got ready to leave California, I realized I’d let go of all that blame and fault I’d been carrying around like a suitcase. I’d gone to San Francisco looking for someone to hand it to, thinking once I had somewhere to put it, all the sadness and anger wouldn’t be mine anymore. The funny thing was that I never did pass it off to either of them, to my mother or my father. Instead it got lost somewhere between them, really. Somewhere between West Virginia and the grounds of the Palace of Fine Arts the suitcase had emptied itself out. The loneliness had faded, and the anger had finally disappeared. Maybe on the bus with Emmy, on that wide-open road that led me from one place to another. Or maybe in the Mission, in that purple house, or out on Haight Street. I’d been dropping pieces of all that weight in the rooms I’d moved through during those past weeks, and later, when the fog lifted and I looked for it, it was gone.
I’m extremely thankful to have had the opportunity to work with an incredible team at Simon & Schuster, who amazed me by the attention and care they devoted to Fingerprints of You. From copyediting to design to publicity, I couldn’t have imagined a more compassionate group of people to turn my manuscript over to: Krista Vossen, Jenica Nasworthy, Michelle Kratz, and Lara Stelmaszyk. I am especially grateful for the generosity and guidance of my brilliant editor, David Gale, and his assistant, Navah Wolfe—while I know it certainly was not true, they made me feel as though this book was their only project in process during their time working with me. And, of course, to my feisty friend Gail Hochman—your energy and passion are an inspiration, and no writer could ask for a better agent than you.
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