Fingerprints of You (12 page)

“So, how’d you get knocked up?” he asked.

“Well, there’s really only one way, Nelson,” Emmy said as she rolled toward us and swung her arm over my stomach, groggily nestling her head on my shoulder.

I didn’t know how long she’d been listening to us, but I hoped she slept through the talk about Afghanistan.

“I mean, you’re so young and all. Are you scared?” he asked.

It was the first time anyone had really asked me about it like that. I was scared when Johnny Drinko and I had sex in the tattoo shop, and I was scared when I stole the pee test from the gas station on the road to West Virginia. Most of all I’d been scared to tell my mom, and then pretty scared about the first appointment with the baby doctor. But once Stella knew about the pregnancy and the doctor made sure the baby was okay, I’d stopped being so scared. I had tried to focus on staying healthy and getting through the end of the semester, so Emmy and I could go away. Now that we’d officially gone away, all I could think about was my dad, and maybe I used that as a way not to think about the baby because thinking about meeting my dad kept me scared enough.

“Are you scared about the birth? All that blood and goop? Are you scared to be a mom? I know I’d be scared shitless, being so young and all,” he said as he tossed the apple core into his bag and looked up, staring.

Next to me Emmy shifted in her seat, pulled herself up, and leaned across me toward him. “Are you scared, Nelson?” Emmy asked. “To leave the Midwest? To go to California? To go to war?” She narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re pretty young too.”

I don’t think she meant to be a bitch, and I don’t think she wanted to sound so rude. Maybe she just wanted to shut him up so she could get some sleep, or maybe she really wanted to know what it felt like to be where Nelson was, to be getting ready to do something that seemed so foreign and far away. Maybe she was trying to understand what her father might have felt too, but I think most likely she’d been listening all along to me and Nelson talking about his training, that it had probably eaten her up, had been tying her stomach in knots as she sat there pretending to sleep. So even though I wished she hadn’t sounded so sarcastic and snobby, I knew she was doing it intentionally because she wanted him to stop talking, because she was tired and was ready to get the hell to San Francisco, because she was strung out on sleeping pills and too many cups of shitty coffee, and mostly because she was scared about her dad even if she wasn’t talking about it much, which I couldn’t blame her for. She’d probably been sitting there all that time thinking about her dad and Bobby Elder and all the other men from Morgantown who’d gotten sent away, and that’s enough to make anyone a little pissed off.

So maybe that’s why her voice sounded the way it did when she looked him in the face and said, “Are you scared you might not come home?”

Either way, Nelson didn’t give me a chance to apologize for her acting like such a bitch, because he didn’t talk to us much after that, and he switched seats when we stopped
in Boonville. When I thought about Nelson later, I always regretted the way things ended. I forgave Emmy, but I always hated the memory of her words and the way she’d put her anger in the wrong place, forced it onto Nelson even though it didn’t belong to him.

A
ROUND NOON WE PULLED INTO
K
ANSAS
C
ITY
, where a small woman about Stella’s age replaced Nelson across from us.

She fussed over a wide-eyed boy dressed in Superman pajamas under his puffy blue snow coat and eventually leaned over and said, “You look starved,” before producing two packs of peanut butter crackers from her backpack. She split the food between me and the child, introduced herself as Marni and her little boy as Jonah, and then launched into a story about the bull statue we were about to pass by, a landmark in Kansas City that, she said, had been a source of controversy since it was placed on top of the American Hereford Building in 1953.

“I guess a lot of people viewed it as an icon, but most folks hated it, figured it detracted from the natural landscape and all that,” she said. “Look.” She hoisted Jonah into her lap and
then tugged me from my seat into theirs and scooted over so I could look out their window to see the giant bull perched in the skyline, solid and serious, a massive hunk of a thing. “Doesn’t suit my taste, but to each his own,” she said with a shrug. “They moved it to Mulkey Square in ’02, but to me it doesn’t matter where you stick it, it’ll always just be a bull with a huge you-know-what.”

She licked her palm and tried to flatten the cowlick that curled at the front of Jonah’s head, and then he looked at me, said, “I’m only allowed to wear costumes on Mondays,” pulled a Superman mask out of his pocket, and slid it over his face before he turned to look out the window.

“We’re on our way to visit my sister in Denver. You like to travel much?” Marni asked after I’d moved back to my seat and settled in next to Emmy.

“I like the forward movement,” I told her and popped the last peanut butter cracker into my mouth. “I like the sound of the asphalt hissing under the bus,” I said, and she nodded.

Emmy leaned on my shoulder and said, “I like not having to do anything,” before she closed her eyes again.

Marni laughed, but I agreed. “It’s like we know we’re going to end up exactly where we want to be but we just get to sit here. I like that, not being responsible, getting to relax.”

Marni asked where we were headed, and I told her Emmy and I were going to visit colleges in California. I didn’t mean to, hadn’t been thinking about colleges at all since I hadn’t even applied, but it just kind of came out since I knew that’s what most kids our age were probably doing over winter break.

“You girls sure are brave to want to go so far from home for school. I didn’t leave home like that until I was married,” she said, and I had to look at the floor because I was starting to
feel crappy about all the lies I’d been telling: the lie to Simon about the baby’s father, the lie to Emmy about not knowing how to reach Johnny Drinko, and the lie to Stella about my plans to return when school started.

And even worse, we had only another thirty hours or so left before California, and I still hadn’t told Emmy about my one-way ticket or my dad living in San Francisco. I worried the lies would spin out of control and get so knotted together I might get lost inside them, so I promised myself I wouldn’t let us cross the California state line without coming clean.

Kansas was as flat and vacant as Nelson had made it sound, with nothing but small towns and big grain elevators and dark dirt fields that I imagined Stella would have liked to paint, and when we hit a snowstorm along the way the land turned white and the bus got even colder. Eventually Jonah and Marni nodded off. Outside, the trees were thin and frail, and I watched the sky move into late-afternoon colors of diluted blues and grays, the brake lights in front of us guiding the bus into the evening. By Hays, Kansas, we’d been on the Greyhound for twenty-four hours, and I still hadn’t slept.

Marni and Jonah woke up around eight that evening as the boy sat up suddenly, stating, “The day before the day before yesterday was Christmas.” Marni turned toward him, still half-asleep, and kissed him on the forehead, and just like that I knew she was the kind of mom I wanted to be.

“Wanna know a secret?” I asked Jonah, and he nodded and took off the mask. I pointed to my belly. “There’s a baby in here,” I said.

Jonah was somewhere between three and four years old, with eyes the color of night and skin the color of coffee with a splash of cream, so I wondered if his father was black since
Marni was fair skinned and redheaded. He squeezed his face into a tight set of skeptical wrinkles, and it was easy to imagine what he would look like when he became a man.

“In there?” He looked at Marni as if to ask if he was supposed to believe me or not.

She smiled. “Like Miss Lisa at school,” she said.

“Can I touch it?” he asked.

I turned my body and leaned forward, taking his hand in mine and bringing it to my stomach. At first I thought he might cry, but instead he took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and waited for the baby to do something that might prove itself.

His hand was small and soft resting on my stomach, and I willed the baby to move, tried to imagine the kicking I’d read about that would start around the eighteenth week, but nothing happened. The book said there would be a distinct and forceful moment when I would finally feel as though my swollen stomach was actually my child, a person all its own, and with Jonah sitting there in his pajamas pressing his palm to my belly, with the land moving by us outside, the weight of my body finally became more than just a heaviness. It became a warm and undeniable evidence of life.

After a moment or two Jonah pulled away, opened his eyes, and said, “I think he’s happy in there, Lemon. You might want to leave him be,” before he slid back into the seat next to his mother and began playing with a pair of Matchbox cars.

I nodded. “You wanna see a trick?” I asked him. “Switch seats for a second?” I said to Marni, and she double-checked Jonah’s face for permission, then traded places with me, so I sat next to Jonah. He smelled like little-kid sweat even though it was freezing out.

“Wanna go walking?” I asked him, mimicking a phrase Stella used to say when I was little and bored in the car.

He looked at his mother and then shrugged. “Whatcha mean?”

The window was fogged over with all that cold air outside and our breath and heat inside, so I squeezed my hand into a ball and reached past him to press the side of my fist against the glass. Then I used the tip of my finger to make five toes. I did the same with my other hand and pulled back.

“You are here,” I said, and drew an arrow to the footprints. “Now you decide where you’re going next.”

Stella had played the game with me millions of times. She could always tell when I was getting restless in the car, so she would wait until we hit a red light on the road, lean across me, and make the first prints, and then I would take over, marking my own feet up and down the passenger-side window with my tiny hand as I narrated an imaginary journey.

I looked at Jonah, waiting.

“Like, I could go . . . ,” he started slowly, hesitant.

“To never-never land to play hide-and-seek with the Lost Boys,” I said. “Or to Papa Smurf’s house to help him outsmart Gargamel.”

He was nodding then as he put his fist to the glass and pressed. “Or to Batman’s cave?”

“Absolutely. Walk on over. Tell me what happens when you get there,” I said, so he did and I sat with him for a while, playing the game for almost an hour while Marni flipped through a magazine, occasionally nodding off.

Sometime after Colby, Kansas, and before the Colorado line, I remembered the money Stella slipped into my pregnancy book. I was back in my seat by then, so I pulled out my
purse and flipped through the pages, hoping for a twenty, or a fifty if she was feeling especially sad about me going away. But there were no bills at all. Instead I found a piece of yellow paper torn from the legal pad she kept in the kitchen, folded and tucked into the page that began the chapter titled “Your Fourteenth Week of Pregnancy,” which surprised me because I’d had no idea Stella was counting.

Emmy was awake by then, so when I unfolded the paper, she said, “What is it?” and put on those little black reading glasses. She was there looking over my shoulder when I read the name Ryan Cooper followed by a street address in San Francisco. Below it my mother had written one sentence: “I promise this is all I know,” scrawled above a sloppy
X
and an
O
, in Byzantine Ceiling Blue ink.