Fingerprints of You (30 page)

T
HE NEXT NIGHT AFTER WORK
, Aiden picked me up on his Vespa and took me out to the Sutro Baths, the algae-covered remains of six saltwater swimming pools overlooking the Pacific near the top of Ocean Beach. I pressed my chest against his back and wrapped my arms around his waist, noticing the closeness of our bodies as he steered the bike through the streets, the heat rising between us, even in the cold. We parked and left the scooter in the lot among VW buses, Harley-Davidson motorcycles, Zipcars and hybrids, and he took my hand and led me down the trail.

“The westernmost tip of San Francisco’s coastline,” Aiden announced when we settled onto the ground once we’d descended into the ruins. The grass was damp and cold, but that didn’t seem to matter much when Aiden put his arm around me and said, “I’ve been missing you, you know,” since
we hadn’t seen each other since before the hospital. “How you holding up?” he asked, and I shrugged.

“I feel deflated.”

“It’ll get better,” he said, and then, after a pause, “You know what? I take that back. I mean, that’s what everyone says, right? That’s what we’re supposed to tell you, but really it’s just bullshit.”

“If this is your version of a pep talk, you need some serious help,” I told him, but I smiled for the first time since I’d left the hospital.

“I just mean that it’ll be different now, I guess. That it won’t be better or worse, just different, I bet.”

It smelled like salt and mud, and I maneuvered myself to sit between his legs. I shut my eyes and pulled his arms around me, leaned my head back against his chest.

“I can’t imagine anything will ever look the same,” he said. “And that’s not a good or a bad thing, you know? It’s just life.”

He almost made it sound simple, boiled down like that.

“Have you talked to Emmy?” he asked, and I nodded.

“A few days after I left the hospital,” I told him, and I remembered sitting on the bathroom floor in the hotel while Stella watched TV on the other side of the wall in the bedroom. The tile was cool against my legs, and the cell phone was warm in my fist when I dialed Emmy’s number. She already knew about the baby by then, but it was good to hear her voice and have the opportunity to put the loss into my own words.

“What’d she say?”

“She asked if this means we get to go to Senior Week at the beach,” I told him.

“Of course she did.”

We both laughed then. A group of boys walked past us toward the water, nudging one another and shuttling a bottle of liquor between them, rowdy and loud.

Aiden waited until they’d passed before asking, “What about your mom? How’s she doing?”

“I think she’s bored. She misses Simon and her painting classes. I think she’s just biding her time until we leave.”

Aiden pulled his pack of smokes out and asked if it was okay. When I nodded, he lit a cigarette. “It’s hard to imagine you leaving. I hadn’t really thought about it yet. I mean, I guess you’ll have to eventually, but still. Part of me thinks you could stay forever if you want.”

“Me too,” I said. I hadn’t told Aiden yet about the three-week deadline Stella had set, partly because I hoped that I could change it, and partly because I worried that I couldn’t. I knew it wasn’t fair, keeping Stella in San Francisco when she’d finally set up a life she actually liked and wanted back in West Virginia, but at the same time I felt like maybe it was my turn to pick where we lived for a while. She’d been doing it to me for seventeen years.

“It’s like I can’t see anything past you now,” he said.

I shifted my body around to kiss him, soft at first, but then the heat started, the electric, wet warmth spreading over me as my lips parted, letting our tongues loop and weave around each other. One of his hands found its way to my face, and he tangled his fingers in my hair.

When we finally pulled apart and caught our breath I told him, “I don’t think anything will feel the same back in West Virginia now.”

Down by the edge of the cliffs, the boys were taking turns throwing rocks over the ledge as they stood in front of the
pool that puddled on the ridge. One boy pointed out toward the water, and I followed his finger to the full moon hanging in the horizon.

“It’s like I came here wanting to make someone responsible for breaking up my family, but now I can’t blame either of them. No one was all right or all wrong,” I said. “Before the trip I imagined all the bad memories might disappear if I found a place to put the blame, but then I realized it wasn’t that easy.”

I shut my eyes and tried to memorize his voice when he said, “The thing about family is the history, all those memories from your past. Ignoring them is impossible—it doesn’t matter who you decide to blame.” Aiden laced his fingers through mine. “When you leave, you’re still going to take those memories with you. You’ve got even more of them now than when you came here, and there’s no way to let that go.”

“I just hoped that once I met Ryan I might’ve felt more rooted. I guess I wanted to be more than just Stella’s daughter. I wanted a family bigger than that.”

“But you have one,” he said. “All the places you’ve been and the people you’ve met, the images and anecdotes you can’t let go of—all those memories make your family. Those are the people and moments that shape and mark you. It’s like fingerprints. You don’t always see them right away, but they’re there. We leave them on each other all the time.”

I thought of San Francisco with my father and the memories of the city street views from the bay windows at his house, watching him play music on the sidewalk on Haight and the feeling of his hands on my feet in the living room. The books on the shelves with the inscriptions that mattered even though my parents’ relationship hadn’t lasted, the way
the inscriptions were important just because they were there. The words between Ryan and me inevitably insufficient, the apology I was still waiting for. My history and my family—all of the memories of them—were permanent and endlessly linked together. The bus ride and the way the land had stretched out so far in front of me I couldn’t see its end. The hotel with the tiny pink door where Emmy and I had stayed our first days in the city. The Vespa and the taste of unfamiliar spices in loud restaurants, the memory of Aiden finally pressing his mouth against mine for the first time. I’d been marked by all of it, and I couldn’t be defined by just one thing or just one person. I was a compilation, a landscape of all the people and places that had moved through my life.

“And family doesn’t have to be one certain thing,” Aiden said. “It changes all the time.”

Mine was Ryan and Emmy and Aiden, the way they made me feel like I was a better person than I believed I was. It was Cassie in her red boots and my grandmother from all those years ago, the home I shared with her, the first home I ever had. And always Stella, my mother, and the moments when I’d found her traits in me, all the towns we’d lived in, the friends we’d left behind. I realized family didn’t have to be about the links of birth and blood. It was about an innate and immediate connection, too. Love, maybe.

The wind was picking up, so Aiden pulled me in tighter. He smelled like pizza dough and toothpaste.

“If you accept that, then you don’t need someone to blame. All of it, the good and the bad stuff, made you who you are,” he said.

We were quiet for a while, but then Aiden told me everything he could remember about the Sutro Baths.

“It used to be one of the largest indoor swimming areas in the world,” Aiden said, which wasn’t too hard to imagine as I eyed the valley of earth in front of us.

The boys were sitting by then, their bodies just shadows and shapes in front of the sky as they passed the bottle back and forth. Though the pools weren’t filled with much water anymore, I could still see the remains, by the curves that had been scarred into the side of the cliff. Aiden said during high tide they would fill from the ocean, recycling water in an ongoing motion.

“It was too expensive to maintain, so it shut down. The building lasted for years, though, deserted and vacant until a fire in the sixties, when the whole thing went up in flames.”

I eyed the red warning signs posted down near the ledge that separated the ocean from the water puddling in front of us. One of the boys threw the bottle over the edge, and I couldn’t hear the splash, but I imagined the glass hitting the Pacific and slicing through the waves, getting sucked underneath the crests and troughs of the tide.

“Every few years someone dies here, gets swept away by some big wave that pulls them over,” he said.

It was raining by then, drops of water falling relentlessly on us when we kissed again. His mouth was quicker and harder that time, and I felt the warmth between my legs as I led his hand there, the heat on my face as chills spread down my arms. Eventually we stood and headed up the hill. The water plucked our shoulders as we rode back on the Vespa, the raindrops snapping on our faces and the wind blowing through our skin.

Back in the house that night, Ryan was sleeping on the couch, so I took my book, Ryan’s copy of Raymond Carver’s
Where
I’m Calling From
that time, and settled next to him, by his feet. He never noticed me there as I read through the stories, taking a break only to cover him with the blanket when the room cooled down. I even managed to take a photo with the disposable camera, no flash, just the shadows and angles of my father sprawled out after a long night at work. Eventually I got restless and wandered to the kitchen for a glass of water.

I found a note from Cassie on the table, and I wasn’t sure if it was for me or for Ryan, but it said she was closing and that she’d be out late. I tried to imagine how they worked and how much he must have loved her, and I figured that when they were together it felt as good as being with Aiden felt for me. Ryan and Cassie linked, like a braid of black and white.

I’d never been with a black boy before, but back in Virginia, Molly-Warner had hooked up with a senior named Marcus who hung out with us at the pool the summer before I left town. Marcus was a kid we knew from school, a boy who planned to go to Tech in the fall. He had black skin like nighttime and lips, dark and wide, that went on forever when he smiled at us in our lounge chairs. He and Molly-Warner made out a few times, and I always thought she liked him more than she let on, but she called it off after a couple of weeks. She was worried her parents might hear about it over at the factory. Marcus’s mom worked there too, and Molly-Warner figured their parents wouldn’t like it if they found out she and Marcus had gotten together.

It made me sad to think she hadn’t been brave enough to date him anyway. I couldn’t imagine Ryan caring about what other people thought when he was with Cassie. It seemed like he loved her too much to be bothered by the idea that some people may not like it.

I finished my glass of water and wandered down the hallway past the concert posters from the Warfield and a black-and-white photo of Cassie and Ryan standing on the Golden Gate Bridge. And I didn’t plan it, I didn’t mean to be, but then I was in their bedroom, my fingers smoothing out their sheets, my face in their mirror hung above the bed. Cassie had her jewelry in a little wooden box on the dresser by the door, tiny earrings, a silver chain, and a chunky turquoise ring. Ryan and Cassie each had their own nightstand, Ryan’s on the left with a glass of water and an autobiography of Miles Davis on it, and Cassie’s on the right with a mug of milky tea, the bag bloated in the bottom and soaking in the leftover liquid. And then I saw a second dresser, Ryan’s set behind the door, a tall green piece of furniture that matched the first, with half as many drawers as Cassie’s. And then my hands were pulling at the knobs, rummaging through his socks and T-shirts and stacks of pants that smelled like stale beer from the venues and pot smoke from the Haight. I was on my knees digging through the bottom drawer, searching. Looking for Stella—letters I had hoped she’d written or photos of me as a kid I hoped she’d mailed. I wanted proof she hadn’t kept me to herself all those years, needed evidence that she’d tried to share me with him. Maybe I was looking for a hiding spot like the shoes Stella kept those pictures in, for a place he might have buried us. I wanted to know if he had been the one to create all that distance between us and him, or if it had been the other way around. But there was nothing. Just a pair of corduroys, and a sweater full of creases from too much time folded into shape. And I realized then that knowing wouldn’t have made a difference, that those years of separation couldn’t be undone no matter whose fault it was. Like Stella’d always
said, there was only forward movement—I had to put the past behind me.