Fingerprints of You (33 page)

By the time we got to the art gallery I was pretty sure he’d won Stella over 100 percent. Inside, 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 said. “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.

This novel would never have come to be without the invaluable gift of time and space from the following organizations: Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, Millay Colony for the Arts, the Studios of Key West, and the Key West Literary Seminar. In truth, this book belongs to you. I am also grateful for the wisdom and encouragement of my mentors and colleagues who supported the writing of this novel in more
ways than I can count: Stephen Cooper and the California State University, Long Beach MFA faculty; James Blaylock of Chapman University; Josh Weil; Jill McCorkle; and Hope Mills. But above all I would like to thank Judy Blume, the most generous and insightful mentor a young writer could ever hope for.

I can’t imagine having embarked on this journey without the continuous inspiration of my families, the Madonias, the Lomases, and the Gordons, but particularly my sister, Lisa, whom I admire and appreciate equally for the ways that we are different and the ways we are the same. This book could not have existed without the love, support, and patience of my husband, Christopher Gordon, who has always provided me with the invaluable gift of both roots and wings. And finally, I’ve dedicated the novel to my mother and father, who consistently said I could when I worried that I couldn’t, then helped me find a way to prove them right.