Fingerprints of You (16 page)

At the counter the kid working the register said, “Hey, Jared, let me check in the back to see what we’ve got.”

The man put the bucket on the floor and began digging in his ear.

“I wonder how long they’ve been together,” I said, and I tried to imagine how many women had moved in and out of Ryan’s life since us.

“She looked pretty comfortable coming out of that house. If you ask me, I bet they’ve been together for a while,” Emmy said.

Which meant Cassie knew what kind of soap he used in the shower, how he liked his coffee, and which T-shirt was his favorite. She knew if he put the cap back on the toothpaste in the mornings or if he left it lying by the side of the sink. She knew his habits, while I hardly knew what he looked like.

At the register the homeless man took a paper plate with two slices of pizza from the boy, said, “Jah be with you, little brown-haired man,” and bent down to pick up his bucket of paperbacks.

“Are we really going back tonight?” Emmy asked, which was the obvious question neither of us had said out loud.

The dreadlocked man walked toward us then, mumbling words I couldn’t understand, but when he got to our table he spazzed into a coughing fit and had to stop to catch his breath, wheezing, before he pulled himself together and headed out the door.

Once he was gone I looked at the boy behind the register, who shrugged and said, “The neighborhood regular. Owner gives the throwaways to Jared, burnt and misorders.” He
shook his bangs away from his eyes. “He mops for us sometimes, takes out the trash or sweeps the back stairs in exchange for slices of pizza.”

I thought of the man tucked inside a doorway with an awning or camped out in Dolores Park on one of the wood benches we saw that afternoon. I tried to imagine what it would be like to live in a place where people slept on sidewalks, the differences between real cities and the small towns Stella had stuck to after we left Philadelphia. I looked up and noticed the boy behind the counter again. I looked, and he looked back.

“We’d better get out of here,” I said. “Head to the hotel and take a nap? I can’t remember the last time I stayed up until three in the morning.”

Emmy tossed the rest of her pizza onto the metal tray. “I’m in.”

And then we left to wait out the small slice of space that separated the time before and the time after I met my father.

I
DIDN’T KNOW WHAT
C
ASSIE TOLD MY FATHER
that night at work, but when Ryan opened the door he had a joint in one hand and a sloppy smirk slung across his lips. “You’re the kid Cassie told me about,” he said. “Come on in.”

He was taller than I expected, but the wavy hair was the same from the photo, and he still wore it long, tangled and hanging down to his shoulders. His eyes were dark and wandering as he looked at the street behind me. I had his nose, the perfect slope I’d always liked, and his cheeks were warm and tan, weathered with fine lines. I figured he was somewhere in his midforties, a little older than Stella. His lips were full and wide when he smiled and turned to head inside.

I’d decided to go to Ryan’s alone, but Emmy had promised to wait at the pizza shop across the street, since I figured I wouldn’t stay long. She’d brought the San Francisco book so
she could read through the section on Muir Woods, where we planned to go the next day.

Cassie and Ryan’s house was a duplex, so he led me up a set of carpeted stairs, past a hand crank that opened the front door from the landing on the second floor. At the top I could see a kitchen down the hall, but we turned in the opposite direction and moved past a row of matted concert posters and into a small living room, where Cassie sat cross-legged on the floor with an old camera that had been stripped and gutted, the pieces spread out between her bare legs like toys. I noticed she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring after all.

“Hey there,” she said.

She wore a pair of frayed and torn cutoff jean shorts that were splattered with green paint, but I saw traces of the gold eye shadow, and her lips were still carefully painted red. The room was decorated with framed black-and-white photos, and a world map spanned an entire wall on the far side. A fall-colored quilt made of rich purple and orange and red squares was draped over an old leather couch, and the overhead light was off, the room lit by candles scattered on furniture armrests and along the floor. I eyed a fishbowl on a bookshelf, set among stacks of hardbacks and magazines, framed photos and odd pieces of pottery and rocks, seashells and stones.

Ryan said, “So,” and he looked at me standing in the door frame while he took a seat on the arm of an upholstered La-Z-Boy in the corner. But then no one said anything for a while after that. I looked at them, and Cassie looked at the camera, and Ryan grabbed a pack of matches from the coffee table and lit the joint he’d been holding all along.

Eventually Cassie said, “Where’s your friend?” which was
a good excuse for me to tell them that my best friend, Emmy, and I had just come into town on a Greyhound.

“She was too tired to come along,” I said, which wasn’t the truth, but it worked to break the quiet while Ryan sucked on the joint, the smoke filling the room and reminding me of Dylan and the lake and Emmy’s truck all the way on the other side of the country, a place that didn’t seem so bad as I stood there staring at my feet. Of all the scenarios I created in my head over the years and all the different ways I imagined the scene might go, I failed to remember any of the words I’d planned as I stood there face-to-face with the man who had been kept a secret for so long.

Somewhere down the hall a stereo played electronic music without words, and it might have been the secondhand smoke going to my head, but it seemed that Ryan’s voice synched with the rhythm of the bass when he leaned down to ash into a mug on the floor and said, “So you’re a friend of the family? Which family is that?”

Cassie had a photo lens in her hand, and she wiped it with a ripped piece of an old stained T-shirt. She looked at me still standing in the door frame, halfway in the hallway and halfway in the room, and asked, “What’d you say your name was? Lemon?” but her words were muffled things rumbling below darkness, a shadow closing in.

Ryan’s jaw slacked open for a moment before he said, “No shit.” He put the joint on the table, stood up, brought one hand to the back of his neck, and stuck the other in his pocket as he looked at me, really looked hard and long at me for the first time. “Lemon?” he said, squinting. And maybe he saw his lips or his nose strung up on my face, maybe he recognized the dark eyebrows Stella always said I got from him, but
maybe he didn’t. I couldn’t tell, because all he said was “no shit” again, his voice strained and sounding far away when he sat back down.

“Do you know her?” Cassie asked like I was somewhere else. “Who is she, baby?” she said, and she pulled a cigarette out from behind her ear, a white tube tucked into her afro. She leaned forward for the matches on the coffee table.

“Lemon,” he said again, “Lemon,” as he sized me up, his gaze unwavering, searching me out. His eyes started at the floor before gliding up and back down again, moving over the lines of my body. Eventually he stopped at my face, exploring, looking for him in me, looking for Stella maybe, for pieces of them merged into a girl he’d never met before.

It felt like the entire world stopped then, with his eyes on me as I tried to catch my breath. I felt stretched thin by those eyes, my image shapeless, floating, as he watched me watching him back.

“You?” he said, a question, and then just “You.”

But the room and the music and the smoke of the joint started to fall out of focus, and I had to lean against the wall to stop from falling over. I was nauseous and sweating a little, the heat of the candles and his eyes pushing on me. The darkness kept getting bigger, diluting the smell of the pot and the incense, shrinking the light of the room down to a pinpoint of whiteness. There wasn’t time to make it to the couch, and the next thing I knew I was on the floor with my back against the wall as I pulled my knees to my chest and tried to make myself smaller.

“Jesus, Ryan, help her to the couch,” Cassie said, so he did, which was embarrassing, it being the first time my father had touched me as he hoisted me up, his hands under my armpits.

“She’s white as a sheet,” Cassie said when he dumped me on the couch.

“I’m fine,” I mumbled. “I’m pregnant, that’s all.” All the movement stopped then as their eyes locked down on me. “Pregnant,” I said again.

“Jesus Christ,” Ryan said before he went to the kitchen, where I heard him turn on the faucet. I tried to pull myself together, but then he was back, handing me a glass of water and asking, “You wanna tell me what this is all about?” He stood with his hand stuck to the back of his neck again.

With him squinting down at me, frowning like that, I figured he was pissed I’d shown up on his doorstep, and I imagined him asking me to leave, abruptly pulling me off the couch and shoving me through the hallway, nudging me down the stairs and using the hand crank to open the door because he couldn’t be bothered to walk me to the stoop. I imagined him telling me he wanted no part of whatever it was I hoped to find there. I figured he was too worn out to deal with me.

And I guess I was pretty close, because next he asked, “Did Stella send you for money?” which I suppose was a valid question, but it hurt my feelings, so I shook my head and looked at the wood floor, my voice stuck somewhere between my chest and my throat.

Cassie was on her feet, asking, “What the hell is going on? Who is she?” but Ryan didn’t look at her, his forehead creased and confused.

He stared at me and said, “If she wants money, she’ll need a lawyer. She’s screwed if she thinks she can send you here like this after all these years.” His eyes were red and glassy, sharp and pointed things.

“Jesus, Ryan,” Cassie said. “Stella your ex, Stella? Shit,” she said, flustered.

The whole thing was slipping away from me, and I couldn’t find the words. All the things I’d imagined I’d say to him were disappearing below my feet, disintegrating somewhere between the bus ride to the city and the little purple house. I wanted to tell him I didn’t need any money, which wasn’t really true. I wanted to say Stella didn’t know I’d come to find him, which wasn’t true either, but mostly I wanted to tell him that I came because I’d decided to have the baby of a man who would never be a father. And something about that made me need to find Ryan first, to find some kind of closure. But even though it made sense in my head I knew I would never get the words right, so I didn’t say anything at all. I let Ryan and Cassie argue about who I was and why I was there, about where I had come from and whether or not I was who I said: his daughter, Lemon, the kid of a woman he loved when he was young.

And then the pieces of the camera slid across the floor in all directions as Cassie jerked her foot at the fragments, the glass slipping over the wood toward Ryan. She hissed, “You’re such a dick, you know that? This is huge, Ryan. A kid? You never said a word.”

And I knew then that in all those years he’d never thought of me. I wasn’t a part of him or his life at all.

I stayed quiet as long as I could and stared at the candles set on saucers along the floorboard, wondering how long it would take the whole place to catch fire if one of us knocked over a flame. She was sucking on the cigarette and ashing on the floor, asking questions he wasn’t answering, not really, and under all the noise, the sound of him stumbling on words and
her trying to piece things together, I heard the music down the hall. I tried to focus on the thump of drums and the space of keyboard riffs that didn’t fit together, the endless drone of sound that could be found in bars and underground nightclubs across the city.