Fingerprints of You (23 page)

C
ASSIE ANSWERED WHEN I KNOCKED
, and she was wrapped in a towel, her long legs disappearing beneath a strip of cream-colored fabric that barely covered anything. Her face was dewy, her cheekbones flushed with heat, and her afro was wet and matted to her head.

“I figured it was you,” she said, and then, “I had to shower, and Ryan’s gone to work.” She backed away and made room for me inside. “I don’t usually answer the door half-naked. Just for the record.”

I followed her up the stairs and kept my eyes on the grimy carpet as we moved to the second floor, the stains littering each landing like birthmarks, or scars of nights from the years they had lived there. She left me in the living room so she could get some clothes on, and I put my backpack on the couch and looked through the bookshelves while I waited for
her to return. I ran my hand along the spines of hardbacks written by people I had never heard of: Walker Percy, Henry Miller, Annie Proulx, D. H. Lawrence, Charles Bukowski. I tapped my fingernail on the fishbowl. It didn’t seem right only having one fish there in the bowl moving aimlessly among plastic plants, and I wondered if he was lonely. Cassie came out of the bedroom then and stopped in the doorway, eyeing me by the books.

“I keep meaning to weed through them and get rid of the ones we don’t need, but Ryan won’t let me. He says he wants to keep them, even though he’s read them all a million times.”

I backed away from the shelf and looked at her, nodding as if I already knew about Ryan’s love of books.

“You can borrow any you like. Most of them were here when I moved in.” She shrugged. “Want a tour?”

She showed me their bedroom at the end of the hall, a small space with a bay window, a bed with sheets untucked, and a dresser painted forest green. I could feel the heat of her shower still hovering in the bathroom when we got there, and she pointed out an empty shelf in the medicine cabinet she’d cleaned off for my stuff.

“Towels,” she said when she opened the closet in the corner. “Extra toilet paper and washcloths.”

We passed by the living room and moved into the doorway next to it, a dining room with another bay window facing Valencia Street below us. I stood by the glass and wondered whether, if I looked hard enough, I could see Aiden through the window on the other side of the road, working behind the register.

“We thought you could sleep here,” Cassie said, and she straightened a photo hanging slanted on the wall, a
black-and-white shot of a crowded street market. “We use this room the least. It always felt too big to me.”

I watched two kids wearing leather and spikes standing on the street below us as a woman walked past them, talking on her cell phone. On the other side of Valencia, a man in a wheelchair pushed his way by a heavy-booted hipster walking down the pavement, his head tucked beneath a beanie.

Cassie perched in the doorway behind me, and when I turned around she asked, “You’re in high school, right?”

I nodded.

“Do you like it?”

I liked seeing Emmy at the end of a crowded hallway, and bumping my way through the sea of students so I could spend the three-and-a-half minutes between classes with her talking about nothing, making her laugh. I liked the schedule of being in school, knowing what each day was going to look like even though I’d been just as ready as the next kid for winter break when it finally happened. I liked knowing I was supposed to be somewhere every day and that eventually someone would notice if I stopped showing up. And I liked Chloe Ford, the books she picked for us, the debates she instigated, and the way she could convince me I had something worthwhile to say even when I didn’t think I did.

“I like some of it,” I told Cassie. “I took wood shop in the fall, and I liked that. I made a spice rack. I wanted to take it again next semester so I could make a bookshelf, but you’re not allowed to take it twice.”

“That’s a dumb rule,” she said, and I agreed.

“Ryan made me a step stool once.” She smiled and looked at the floor. “Didn’t make a lot of sense, since I’m just about as tall as he is, but it was sweet. Watching him nail the pieces
together, helping him measure the wood. It broke last summer when a friend of ours borrowed it to build his Burning Man float.” She shrugged and shifted her weight to one leg. “Look, I know this is weird, for me and Ryan too, but it’s probably good you spend some time together. I mean, you’re family, right?” she said, and I wondered if I was supposed to answer, but before I had a chance she added, “I never even knew. He doesn’t talk much about her, about your mom.” She touched the edge of the picture frame again, adjusting. “And he never mentioned you.”

I turned my back to her. “She never talks much about him either.” And then I waited until I heard her move down the hall to the bathroom before I turned around again, the tears like a liquid fog filling my vision. The house was cold, and I suddenly missed my home in West Virginia, the antique desk in my bedroom that Stella and I found at a flea market, and the smell of my mother’s lotions and perfumes in the bathroom. I missed my grandmother’s red and gold quilt that we kept on the couch for winter nights—the fabric now thin and stained from all the moves.

Ryan’s dining room wall was lined with wooden shelves, and I eyed the stacks of CDs, movies, and magazines, and the spines of more books I had never heard of. A glass vase sat empty on the mantel with a shoebox full of sheet music resting next to it. There was a long table pushed against the wall in the corner, and under it I saw the air mattress folded and deflated with a pile of blankets and a pillow stacked on top. I went to the kitchen and sat at the little wood table, flipped through a copy of
Rolling Stone
and read an article on Terence Blanchard that’d been dog-eared and circled. The interview said he was a trumpet player who wrote music for
Spike Lee, that he’d studied with Ellis Marsalis at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. “Ellis Marsalis” was circled in red ink. The photo of Blanchard had been shot on a crowded stage of black musicians, his cheeks puffed up with air as he played the horn.

I wondered if these were the kind of men Cassie dated before Ryan, black men with beautiful lips, long hands, and an appreciation for art and music. I couldn’t imagine what Ryan, the stringy stoner with heavy eyes, could possibly give Cassie, and I wondered what she might have seen in him to love. A man who kept his own kid a secret. A father who didn’t know his daughter’s birthday. A boy who hadn’t figured out how to grow up. Outside, tires squealed, someone yelled in Spanish, and I listened to the sounds of the city leaking through the walls as I pulled my cardigan around me and checked to make sure the window by the fridge was shut. The fire escape looked rusted, unstable, and endless as it disappeared above the windowsill.

“Ryan’s in charge of setup and prepping the bar tonight,” Cassie said from the doorway. She had the red lips on again, and the red leather boots, but this time she wore them over black leggings and a tight gray sweater dress that hugged her hip bones.

She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen up close.

“He’ll be home early, but I’m closing. Help yourself to whatever’s there.” She nodded to the refrigerator. “Oh, and this.” She handed over a key and a business card. “For the front door, and the name of a doctor for the baby. She’s good—I’ve been using her for years,” she said before she turned and disappeared down the hall. Once I heard her lock the door behind her, I sat down. The card listed the address
and number for Lynn Harrison, MD, Gynecology.

I unpacked my backpack in the dining room and stacked my clothes in piles on the table before I took a shower. The towels smelled like mildew, and the shampoo was a generic brand of a summer smell I figured Cassie picked out. I ran the bar of white soap over my body even though it was dented and littered with tiny hairs, and I tried to relax, but the water pressure was weak and cool. I was an intruder trying to piece together a father from the disposable razor on the ledge of the sink and the pint glass full of pocket change on a table in the hallway. All the details of his house—the photos and the magazines and the powdered lemonade in the pantry—none of it made me feel like I knew Ryan any better. He could be anyone. Anyone. And I figured I would leave knowing just as little as when I got there.

I missed Emmy, and the way she always tried to make me laugh when she knew I was sad. I missed the four-leaf-clover necklace, the way it made me feel better when I saw it resting on her skin.

It was still cold when I went back to the living room and sat on the floor, thinking maybe it would’ve been easier if I’d left the past alone, left it behind like Stella always did. She told me once that looking back got you nowhere and that I’d spend my life tripping over shadows if I never moved away from all my questions.

“Forward movement is the only true movement, baby,” she said once with conviction. “Haven’t you learned anything?”

But she was tired and sad when she said it, and I was only thirteen, so I never did believe her. Not until that night, when I began to wonder if meeting Ryan would change anything at all. I would leave San Francisco still pregnant, and he would
stay in California. A nonfather. An absent parent. And the baby would never have a dad, just the same as me.

It was dark by the time I left the house for dinner, but the Mission was filled with cars and restaurants and art kids moving through the streets. I was tired and maybe a little lonely, but I wouldn’t let myself look in the pizza shop for Aiden and decided to find the bookstore where I would start working the following week. I headed toward Twentieth Street, but the neighborhood was darker than I remembered from when I’d explored it with Emmy, so I lost my nerve and ended up sticking close to the house and ducking into a Mexican place for dinner. I’d read that beans were good for the baby, full of folate and iron needed for development, and I figured I probably hadn’t been eating what I should have.

I’d never eaten in a restaurant alone, so I asked for a table near the window and rushed my order, picking the first thing I saw that looked good. There were Christmas decorations on the walls, and a man in a small-brimmed cowboy hat wandered through the rows of tables playing music. Razor-tipped boots, a clean black-and-white suit, and dark eyes. My waitress was a curvy woman, and when she put my food on the table she smiled.

Next to me a family of four spoke Spanish, the syllables flicking off their tongues between noisy laughter. The son pulled a video game from his coat pocket, but the father snatched it from the boy’s hands and gave it to the woman, who put the game in her purse while the little girl rolled her eyes. The son sulked until his food came, and the father drank tequila over ice. Halfway through dinner the mother had to clean salsa from the little girl’s dress where her burrito had leaked onto her lap. I watched them as I ate, but
when the father caught me staring, I looked away.

When I got back to the house, Ryan was asleep on the couch, the quilt thrown down by his feet and a book cracked open across his chest. There was music coming from the bedroom, reggae that time, but Cassie wasn’t there, so I sat in the recliner in the living room and watched him. I looked for things in me that were his and realized Stella was right about the eyebrows—his were full and bushy just like mine. I wondered if Stella had seen him every time she looked at me, if she still missed him or if she’d let him go by the time I’d grown his traits. I figured all that moving, the running to and running from, always had something to do with him.

Eventually I leaned over and took
Less Than Zero
from his chest. The novel smelled like water and sawdust when I flipped the cover open, and then I turned the page and saw the inscription scrawled in pencil. My mother’s messy cursive read, “Happy Birthday, Ryan. Maybe LA next? For now and everything after, ambiguous and infinite, absolute . . .” and next to it the year was neatly printed in a different handwriting: 1991. I imagined Ryan adding the date afterward, wanting to place them somewhere in time. I put the book back and went to the shelf, pulled
The Rum Diary
down, and found her words scrawled on the first page. Upper right-hand corner, my mother claiming it with her writing: “For Ryan, just because I love you. Add San Juan to the list . . .” The next three I checked were all marked by her with similar inscriptions.
Dharma Bums
was there too, one of my favorites. “Matterhorn Peak? I’ll go if you go . . .” Stella’s signature imagining all the places she wanted him to take her, the trips she hoped to make. And I realized I’d been wrong: He hadn’t
erased her by then. My mother was still in every room. All the books were gifts from Stella, pieces of her lined up on wooden shelves, and he’d read every one of them. He hadn’t let her leave him so easily after all.