Fingerprints of You (15 page)

I lay in bed listening to the couple staying next to us thump and groan on each other on the other side of the wall while I waited for Emmy to finish in the bathroom. I was grimy from all the time on the bus and my head was pretty groggy, but I also felt the particular sense of freedom that comes the first time you leave home.

It was almost noon by the time we left the hotel, so we ducked into a small café on Valencia Street and bought coffee
and scones and small cups of fruit. We sat by a window and watched the sidewalk wanderers while we created a plan of attack. We had about seven hundred dollars between the two of us, but we were confident that a city like San Francisco could be explored cheaply, so we planned to be extra frugal. And I knew I needed some of my share to get the bus ticket back when I was ready, so we made a list of all the things we wanted to do that wouldn’t cost much. We wanted to see Alcatraz and ride a trolley, and we wanted to take a bus up to Muir Woods to see the redwoods. We wanted the nude beach and Golden Gate Park and the shopping we couldn’t afford, the food we had never tasted and the music we had never heard of and the museums we had read about in books. We wanted all of it.

“I want to eat sourdough bread and Ghirardelli chocolate,” Emmy said, and she plucked a red grape from her fruit cup and forked it into her mouth. “I want to see the Japanese Tea Garden and the place where all those rock stars used to eat acid.”

“The Fillmore,” I told her, remembering the pages she dog-eared in the travel book we bought before we left.

We watched the weather outside turn from rain to sun to rain again, the back-and-forth tug-of-war that happened in a matter of minutes.

“I know you’ll be distracted until we look for him,” she said. “And I’m okay with that.” She picked at the oatmeal chocolate-chip scone on the plate sitting between us. “We should get it over with, though. In case it doesn’t go well. We should try today,” she said, which seemed okay to me.

I figured it was hard for Emmy to think about my dad while hers was so far away. Plus, if we didn’t find him immediately, I
would have time to keep looking once Emmy left.

We stayed in the Mission for the day and planned to find Ryan’s house around five o’clock, when most people would be heading home from work. We window shopped and people watched and walked from one end of the neighborhood to the other, stopping to rest in Dolores Park and again at a small hole-in-the-wall eatery where we bought green tea and homemade granola bars. The air was wet and cool, so we both picked out new scarves at a used-clothing store: Emmy chose one that was a deep purple, and I picked a knitted green one with silver specks that Emmy said matched my nose ring. We shopped at secondhand stores, and I dragged her to the pirate shop that fronted the office where they made the literary magazine Ms. Ford had been published in. We roamed past bookstores and nightclubs and more taquerías than I could count.

According to Stella, Ryan lived on Valencia Street down near Twenty-first, and it was almost dark when we found the building, a tall, skinny house the color of eggplant that sat across the road from a Laundromat and an all-night pizza shop. We tried the doorbell, but it didn’t work, so we parked ourselves on the front steps and huddled together to stay warm, inhaling the smells of marinara and car fumes and something dank and wet seeping from the street drains. Emmy slung her arm around my shoulder, and I rested my head on her chest, tugging and twisting the fringe that lined the bottom of my scarf.

“Tell me this won’t ruin our trip. Tell me that if he’s not here or if he’s a total asshole or if he doesn’t want to see you . . .”

“Emmy, stop,” I said.

“Tell me it won’t ruin our trip,” she repeated.

“It won’t ruin our trip.”

“Are you scared?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m excited. And worried. But I’ve got nothing to lose, I guess.”

She squeezed me tighter while the wind pushed brown, damp leaves around our feet. Five o’clock came and went, but we stayed on the stairs because I’m not sure we had anywhere else to go. I must have nodded off for a while, tucked under Emmy’s arm like that, because she nudged me around six thirty to ask if I was hungry.

“We can go,” I said groggily. “We can leave.”

I was thinking of food and warmth, somewhere dry and bright. I wanted fajitas or those bacon-wrapped hot dogs or maybe even a beer. My head hurt, and my stomach was gassy and nauseous. I wanted to sleep. For a very long time. But just as we stood up to leave, I heard the door behind us open.

I froze, stopped breathing, still and scared on the front steps of the house I’d hoped was my father’s, but Emmy took my hand in hers and said, “Three. Two. One.” Then we turned around.

The woman pushing her bike out the door was tall and slim and had skin the color of chocolate caramels and a perfect black afro framing her face. She wore snug bell-bottom jeans with red leather boots, and a tight white T-shirt under a small brown leather jacket. She was beautiful. After leaning her bike against the wall, she pulled a set of keys out of her bag and locked the door behind her. When she turned to carry her bike down the stairs, she noticed me and Emmy standing on the sidewalk staring up at her.

“You’re not Ryan,” I said, and I scanned her face, the
pointed nose, the long black eyelashes thick like caterpillars, and the shiny red lips. Her eyes were brushed with shimmery gold makeup, and her lids were lined with thick black strokes that made me think of the Chinese symbols we’d seen written on the signs of so many restaurants that day.

“I’m not Ryan,” she said back. “He picked up a shift and won’t be home until three or so.” She stopped halfway down the stairs with her bike hoisted over her shoulder. “Who’s asking?”

I scanned a list of possible responses. I was Stella’s daughter. I was a friend, a friend of a friend, maybe. Finally I settled on, “I’m Lemon. My mom used to know him.” And then, “A friend of the family.”

She shrugged. “He won’t be home until late.” She was on the sidewalk by then, and she swung her leg over the bike and propped herself on the cracked leather seat as she adjusted the red bag slung across her chest. “I’m Cassie,” she said, and next to me Emmy mumbled, “Sassy Cassie,” right before I turned my head and shot her a shut-the-hell-up look. Emmy lit a cigarette and stared at Cassie parked on her bike in front of the purple house.

“I like that,” Cassie said, and then she reached over and took the cigarette out of Emmy’s hand to take a drag.

I thought that was pretty cool.

“You want to leave a message? I’m heading there now. We’re working together tonight—it’s a sold-out show,” she said.

I wasn’t sure what to say to that, but it didn’t matter because she looked us up and down again, and then she said, “You can come back around three thirty if you want. It takes a while to unwind after work, so we’ll be up.” And then she took one
more drag, handed the smoke back to Emmy, and pedaled down Valencia.

Afterward, Emmy and I sat at the pizza shop across the street and split a large pie with green peppers and sausage.

“They must work at a bar,” Emmy said, and she reached for her second slice and covered it with parmesan cheese and red pepper from the glass shakers on the table.

“Do you think they’re roommates?” I asked.

She raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think grown-ups have roommates,” Emmy said.

It was a wish, something I should have known better than to say out loud.

“Right. Stella never did,” I said, and she nodded.

I thought of the different men my mother had brought into our homes over the years, the one-night stands before I knew what one-night stands were, the losers like Denny and the drunks like Rocco who thought using women as ashtrays made them strong and cool. I wanted to ask Emmy if she’d seen anything like that before, if her mom had brought any men home since her dad got deployed, but I figured I already knew the answer, so instead I said, “She might have been the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen up close,” and I tried to wrap my head around the fact that Cassie was, most likely, my father’s wife. And that made her better than my mom and me. She had something Stella did not, something worth working for, which made me feel sorry for myself and pissed off at Stella that she wasn’t smart enough or pretty enough or confident enough to have stayed in California with Ryan and made a family out of the three of us. “I bet he loves her, you know? Like, long-term loves her. I bet they’re the kind of couple that—” But Emmy cut me off, shaking her head.

And for the first time since the pizza came, Emmy looked up from the food. “Let’s get one thing straight,” she said, pushing her plate away from her and leaning over the table toward me. She looked me straight in the face. “You don’t get to do that now, Lemon,” she said. “You don’t get to make him something different than he is.” She leaned back and shrugged. “Maybe he’s a good guy and maybe he’s not, but you don’t get to decide. He gets to show you—that’s why you’re here. You quit that game when we got on the bus.” And then she tapped her finger on the table and said, “Quit.”

And I knew she was right. None of the versions of Ryan that I created through the years would turn out to be him. Being in California made him real, and I wouldn’t get to make-believe him into someone different if he wasn’t who I wanted.

“Your dad,” Emmy said with slow, careful words. “He’s white, right?”

“He’s white.” I nodded and nudged a piece of pizza crust around my plate. “His mother was half-Mexican, but that’s all,” I told her, remembering Stella’s explanation one summer at the shore when I asked why my skin tanned so much easier than hers.

When I was a kid back in Philadelphia, I’d sit in my mother’s closet while she was at work, hiding from the empty house, maybe, shutting out all that vacancy. Eventually I found two photos jammed inside a pair of black chunky shoes with leather straps and towering wedge heels. They were tattered and blunted from wear even though I never once saw her wear them. They were artifacts she used to hide the only images of Ryan I had ever seen, and once I found them, I’d sit beneath her clothes, her pants and skirts draped over me like
curtains, and spend hours studying the pictures tucked inside the heels. The first was a Polaroid of my mother during what I assumed was the summer she arrived in San Francisco. She was laughing behind purple sunglasses that were too large for her face, and next to her a man with shoulder-length hair stood with his arm slung around her waist, his finger hooked into one of the belt loops on her blue jeans. The two of them stood on the street, below a movie-theater marquee, and it looked cold and windy, Stella’s long blond hair flapping around her face in wild strings and knots.

The man—my father, Ryan—wasn’t looking at the camera. In fact, it looked like he didn’t know the photo was being taken, because he seemed so distracted by my mother. He wore a white T-shirt and pants with a black leather belt, and he was leaning in toward Stella’s neck, maybe whispering. When I was a kid the photo made it easy to imagine he loved her very much. It made it easy for me to blame her for ruining whatever it was they shared. And though the photos were dulled by distance and time, Stella seemed brighter in that picture than I’d ever seen her. It was difficult to equate the image of that girl with the mother I had grown up with. The restless woman who yanked us from town to town, an impulsive mother bound by bitterness, a woman boarded in by secrets, or regrets.

The second photo was of Ryan alone. He sat on a blond hardwood floor with a drum between his legs, and he wasn’t looking at the camera as he hunched over the instrument, but it was a clear shot of his body: the shaggy brown hair that hung over his face and the narrow shoulders, the tan fingers blurred with movement as they banged out the rhythm to a song.

“My sister dated a black guy once,” Emmy said. “My dad flipped his shit.” She reached over and pulled a green pepper off one of the two remaining slices of pizza.

I’d never imagined my father with a black woman, though when I did imagine him with Cassie, I realized I’d never envisioned him with anyone but Stella, which only proved how limited I’d been in my imagining. Of course he had someone. A woman with silver hoop earrings, a red smile, rich skin.

“I thought my dad might kick Margie’s ass when he first found out about it, but the relationship didn’t last long. The guy was a football player, and he ended up dumping my sister for some girl at WVU who ran track. The whole thing was clichéd and dramatic.” Emmy looked down at the table. “It was back when we had to worry about getting my dad’s approval if we liked a boy,” she said, and I did the math and figured it had been over a month since Emmy’s dad left.

I tried to think of something encouraging to say, but a man with honey-colored dreadlocks entered the pizza shop, distracting me, and the moment was polluted and lost. He carried a green plastic bucket filled with books, and his thick beard matched the shade of his hair and the chaos of his knotted mustache. His blue T-shirt had a topless mermaid printed on the back and read
CATCH OF THE DAY
, and a plastic coffee cup hung from the belt loop of his black jeans by a big metal hook that looked like it could be used for rock climbing. Emmy shifted in her seat and reached for one of the slices of pizza as he moved from the door toward the counter in the front of the restaurant. I couldn’t see the man’s eyes behind the dark sunglasses, but I imagined them to be blue. Blue like a swimming pool lit up at nighttime.

“Homeless,” Emmy said before she took a bite. “I can smell him from here.”