Fingerprints of You (20 page)

“Hey there,” she said, and then, “You’re here? I mean, I didn’t expect you to be . . . here,” she stammered. Her eyelashes sparkled with silver dust, and with her legs stretched long and thin under the miniskirt and black fishnets, she reminded me of a peacock, of an ornate and brilliant bird. I tried to imagine what this dark-eyed woman could possibly be doing with a loser like Ryan, a stoner and a deadbeat dad. “You’re not alone, are you?” she asked.

“I came with a friend,” I said, and thought of Aiden upstairs probably wondering where the hell we’d gone to.

“We work for the Fillmore and the Warfield, so we got free tickets,” she said. “We’ve been thinking about you, you know? We want to get together.”

The way she used the word “we” made it seem like it belonged there coming off her lips, stamped on every sentence like a little copyright.

“We’re still at that hotel,” I told her restlessly as I looked up the stairs for Emmy, wanting badly to get out of there, wanting to make our escape before Ryan or Aiden saw us.

I wanted my bed, my body heavy from the music and the heat. And I wanted to call Stella, to hear her voice on the end of a phone connecting us from opposite sides of the country. Suddenly the memory of hovering over the toilet bowl with my mother the year before didn’t seem so terrible. At least with Stella I knew what to expect. Her unpredictability was predictable. At least with her there was a sense of familiarity. I wanted to hear her say everything was going to be okay, just like she always said when bad things happened to us, that none of this really mattered.

“Tomorrow will be better than today,” she liked to say. “That’s the beauty of time. It’s always moving forward.”

I wanted to call my mother and hear her say that she was waiting for me to come home.

“We’ve got tomorrow night off.” Cassie looked straight and focused, concentrating. Behind her a woman on stilts with green glow-in-the-dark pasties moved by us. “Can you come for dinner?” she asked.

I tried to imagine sitting at a table eating a meal with Cassie and Ryan, relaxing on their couch afterward, asking them questions about San Francisco and being comfortable with my father and his girlfriend. But I couldn’t imagine it at all. They were strangers with stories I didn’t know, people navigating the landscape of a city I wasn’t comfortable in yet.

“Come tomorrow for dinner,” she said. “We have to get
together before you leave.” She assumed I was there for a quick visit, an adventure during my vacation from school. “Six o’clock,” she said just before I spotted Emmy heading down the stairs.

I nodded, slipped away, and left her in the foyer with the bass of the DJ down the hall rattling the floor beneath us.

Outside, Emmy and I attempted to walk home, weaving our way through a New Year’s Eve city crowd. We walked the streets for almost an hour and suddenly found ourselves in front of the Regency Center again.

Emmy said, “I told you New Year’s was overrated,” and then we hailed a cab.

It was nearly two o’clock by the time we pushed the door of the hotel lobby open, and the woman behind the counter looked at us and asked, “You two the girls from 546? Some woman with a southern accent’s been calling here all night for a kid named Emmy.”

And the lights fell away again, the floor shifting underneath me, quaking. It was faster that time, and I was seeing blackness when I stumbled, as the weight of my body tipped over and dropped to the ground.

Later, when we were back upstairs and I lay on the bed listening to Emmy moving around the room, she asked, “Is this fainting thing your new trademark? Because I have to be honest: It’s a little too much for me to handle.”

I rolled onto my side and tried to focus my eyes, my vision strained under the fluorescent lights of the hotel room. She was a blurred figure bending down, a hazy shape moving around the bed, squatting on the floor and rising again as she packed her things. I waited and watched her shadow become
the shape of my friend when she finally came into focus.

“He’s coming back,” she said, and even though she was turned away from me, I could tell she’d been crying. “It’s his leg. They’re sending him back next week. I’m leaving today if I can get a flight.”

The night before, while we were eating clam chowder bread bowls and exploring the city, Emmy’s dad was on the road to Bagram Airfield north of Kabul, a base for U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

She stripped off the red pants and folded them. “It was an IED,” she said. “I guess it’s pretty common.” She put the bell-bottoms into her duffel and pulled a pair of jeans off the floor. “His SUV hit a roadside bomb,” she said, shaking her head back and forth quickly. “How does that happen?” She was facing me then, one hand on her hip, her cheeks wet, eyes red and tired. “He lost his leg, Lemon. He’s in some hospital in Germany, but he’ll be at Walter Reed by tomorrow.”

“Shit, Emmy,” I said, which was a pretty lame thing to say to a friend who just found out her dad had been wounded in Afghanistan. I could have said, “I’m sorry,” or maybe, “I’m glad that he’s okay.”

She sat at my feet. “My mom sounded pretty wrecked. I mean, he’s going to be one of those people with a plastic stick for a leg. With a—” But she choked on the words and started crying again, so I moved down beside her and pulled her into my arms. And we must have stayed there for a while, because by the time she moved away, the front of my tube top was stained with tears, stripes of black dampness trailing down the sequined fabric.

“I’m sorry I fainted,” I said even though it wasn’t important anymore.

“I’m sorry I got drunk,” she said back.

Outside, the sky was turning the colors of early morning, and when I looked at the clock it was almost five.

“What else did your mom say?” I asked.

“She was sleeping when I called, so mostly she just told me what happened. I guess she’d been trying my cell phone all night, but I’d forgotten to charge it,” she said. “I’m supposed to call when I figure out my flight. She’s going to pay for my ticket, which kind of makes me feel like an asshole for coming here in the first place, but she wants me home as soon as I can get there.”

I told Emmy we would get a cab to the airport and that I’d wait with her until she got on the plane.

“Do you want to come home with me?” she asked from the bathroom, where I heard her toss the eye shadow containers into her makeup bag. But then she glossed over the question and added, “I know the bus ticket will be cheaper, though. When you buy one,” she said, and my heart fell into my stomach as I realized she’d known all along that I wasn’t planning to leave with her on the Greyhound. Back in the room she tossed the makeup bag into her duffel and said, “I saw your one-way ticket on the way out here. It’s okay, I’m not mad.” She started opening the drawers to the dresser and searching through the piles of clothes inside, stacks of her stuff and mine that we’d thrown together when we first got there. “I mean, I was at first, but now”—she stopped and held up a red long-sleeved shirt, assessing it before she realized it was mine and tossed it back into the drawer—“now it doesn’t seem so important.”

“It was before Stella gave me the address, back when I thought it would take weeks to track him down,” I told her.
“I couldn’t lock myself into a return date. I was going to tell you,” I added.

“But then you didn’t,” she said.

Somehow the information had gotten lost once we made it to California. It was easier that way, maybe because telling her would have made it real, when actually I was scared shitless to be in the city on my own.

Emmy finished packing, and I changed into jeans and a hooded sweatshirt so I could go with her to the airport, but just as I was searching under the bed for my sneakers, there was a knock at the door.

I looked at Emmy, and she looked at me.

I couldn’t imagine who’d be waiting in the hallway, until I heard Aiden’s voice say, “Tell me you’re in there. Tell me you didn’t get kidnapped by mermaids or fairies or Smurfs. I just can’t be held responsible.”

Emmy rolled her eyes, and I went to the door to let him in.

Aiden eyed the mess, the clothes strewn across the floor and the empty containers of take-out food on the dresser top. First he said something about how shitty it was that we left without telling him, and then he looked at me in my jeans with no makeup and at Emmy with her face streaked with tears, and her hair swept into a knotted ponytail. He eyed my backpack on the floor and the copy of
Lolita
on the nightstand, the SIGG bottle on top of the TV and next to it Emmy’s retainer, a plastic and metal mouthpiece she wore at night to avoid getting braces. “How old
are
you two, anyway?” he asked.

“Nineteen,” I lied, but Aiden raised an eyebrow.

“I’m eighteen,” Emmy said. “And she’s seventeen.” She looked at me and shrugged, “Come on, Lemon. Who gives a shit how old you are?”

Emmy picked up her duffel and said something curt about him needing to leave because we were on our way out the door, but Aiden offered to call his buddy who drove a cab, and he waited in the lobby while I told him about Emmy leaving town but about me deciding to stay for a little longer. He didn’t ask why she was going or how long I’d stay, but when the taxi pulled up he borrowed a pen from the front desk and wrote his cell phone number on my hand.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about my age, that I’m only seventeen,” I said while he wrote.

“It’s just a number, right?” he said. He stamped his writing with his thumb so the ink wouldn’t smear and told me to call him when things settled down. “Don’t disappear this time.” And then he kissed me on the cheek before we got into the taxi.

Emmy booked a flight to Charleston, West Virginia, where her sister would have to pick her up to drive her home, but she got a one-way ticket for about two hundred and fifty bucks, which didn’t seem so bad to me, and when I walked her to the security gate I hugged her and told her that I loved her.

“Take care of your dad,” I said, and she said, “Take care of yours,” and then she leaned into my neck and whispered, “Call Stella, Lemon. You need your mother.” I tried to brush it off, but she wouldn’t let me. She pulled back and put both hands on my hips, looking me in the face hard and serious. “You. Need. Your. Mother,” she said. “And she needs you, even if she doesn’t admit it.”

Next to her a man pushed by with a big black suitcase. The intercom announced a departing flight. Last call for boarding.

“He may be your father, but she was your family first. Don’t forget that just because you’re distracted by this,” she
said, and then she kissed me on the cheek. “Life’s too short to walk away from people who love you. Even if that love is flawed and complicated and screwed up,” she said, “it’s still love. And that makes it worth finding a way to hold on to it.”

And then she moved away from me, took off her shoes, and crossed through the metal-detector.

It was hard to watch her go, because losing Emmy felt like being stripped of the brave piece of me that wasn’t scared to be so far away. She made the city safe, and it seemed impossible to stay there without her, so I almost called out to her when she began to move out of sight. I almost asked her to stay, but it would have been selfish because there was nothing more important to her then than being with her family, and thinking about it that way made me want to get in touch with Stella. I watched Emmy go and decided that even though we’d be separated, a little bit of her would stay with me—that bravery and independence. Which I guess is exactly what family is: the pieces of you that you never realized you had.