Fingerprints of You (27 page)

Stella said she’d called him in the beginning, but I wanted to ask how often and why the phone calls stopped, who’d been the one to cut the ties. She was always good at leaving out info she didn’t want to deal with, and I wondered if she’d ever gotten in touch with him during the years we moved around, or if he’d ever asked for updates. But instead I said, “Did you miss her? When she left?”

He pushed the bowl away from him. “She was already gone before she left, you know? It wasn’t good, things between us. Those last months were wasted time.”

I heard Cassie padding down the hallway. She shut the door to the bathroom and turned on the sink.

“I don’t know what she told you,” he said, and I realized he had no idea how little Stella spoke of him or how strong willed she’d been about keeping him a secret. The information Stella gave me was knotted and tangled and as hard to follow as a ball of fishing line in a neglected tackle box, a kink of nylon wire with no beginning and no end. His story was a pile of hooks and weights locked to one another randomly.

“I never cheated on Stella,” he told me, though I hadn’t asked. “Not once. It was months after she left before I thought about women again.” He looked down, and I followed his eyes. His chest was thin and tanned, his stomach lined with muscle and patches of dark hair.

“Cassie and I came a lot later. And we’ve got our own problems too, but with Stella—” He stopped, picking words. “I never knew a woman could make you feel so bad. Watching her walk away was like . . .” But he couldn’t seem to find the words.

“My grandmother used to say Stella was always like that,” I told him. “That she did whatever she wanted—strong willed and determined. Stella thinks I’m the same, that I inherited that from her, and she worries my stubbornness will get me into trouble. When I told her I was leaving, I think she saw herself in me,” I said. “But I’m not sure I want them, those traits of hers in me.”

Ryan ran his fingers along the edge of the table, his words
slow when he finally said, “The thing about inheritance is that it has nothing to do with choice. It’s like fear. You don’t always get to pick it for yourself.”

Like fear. Or motherhood, maybe.

A
IDEN TOOK ME TO DINNER THAT NIGHT
at a Vietnamese restaurant on Sixteenth Street, and even though I’d never eaten Vietnamese food before, I tried to pretend I liked the flavors as I nudged a bundle of tangled yellow noodles around my dish. A pile of green leaves lay buried beneath a mound of red chunky sauce.

“Bánh bao,” Aiden said, and he lifted a pocket of food off his plate and put it onto mine. “Steamed dumplings stuffed with vegetables and ground pork.”

I tore into the soft casing with my fork and watched the meaty brown sludge fall out of its skin, wondering if Aiden would still like me if I ended up yacking at the table, if it would ruin my chance of him ever kissing me. We spent most of dinner talking about how much I liked working at the bookstore and about how things were going for the band, which
had left Seattle and was playing a gig in Portland that night. Eventually I told him about
Less Than Zero
and my mother’s inscription to Ryan, about the books in the house being gifts from Stella to him.

“You know, I’ve never seen my mother with a book. Not once.” I’d seen all kinds of things clutched in her hands: vodka cocktails, skinny menthol cigarettes, suitcases and duffel bags, car keys and road maps. But never a book. “It’s weird I never thought of it before. As much as I like reading, she’s never really encouraged it.” My water glass was empty, so I reached over for a sip of Aiden’s. “I can’t imagine her shopping in a bookstore.”

He took the dumpling back, noticing my half, deserted and uneaten. Somewhere in the restaurant a baby started to cry, and a telephone was ringing.

“So she bought them for your dad even though reading was never her thing?”

A waiter answered the phone by the cash register and began speaking in a language I didn’t recognize.

“But she never bought books for me or for her,” I told Aiden.

I’d seen my mother pack countless times in patterns that had become predictable by then. Our clothes went first, the skirts and sweaters that made her feel beautiful, and the outfits she’d use in the following town to land her next boyfriend. The photos came second, two framed shots of my grandparents and her, back when she was small: a child with big, startling eyes, a father who sold insurance, and a mother who typed medical transcripts for the local hospital. The picture album was always third on the list, the collection of images she kept from our life together, six cities censored down into
thirty pages of photos slipped into slots of plastic cellophane. She’d pack the camera and the stereo after that, our small TV, then the microwave wrapped in the bathroom towels. Her makeup and her perfumes came next. But there were never books. She never brought one story with us when we moved away. My love of books was never shared between us; it was shared between me and Ryan. I wondered if that had bothered her all those years, seeing his habits in me even though I’d never met him.

After dinner we sat in Dolores Park, and I told Aiden about Ryan playing on Haight Street and how I thought Ryan loved music as much as I’d seen anyone love anything before. It was dark by then, and the park was mostly quiet, but the city view was lit up by cars and restaurants and all the people moving below us. In the distance I watched the Pyramid building piercing the skyline while I told Aiden I thought Ryan picked his job at the Warfield and the Fillmore just so he could work with musicians.

“I wish I had something like that,” I said. “Something to latch on to, something I care so much about,” I told him, “that it’d hurt to give it up.”

For me reading was the one thing I could never imagine letting go of, the hours of exploring other people’s lives through the rhythms and tempos of well-written stories. It was an internal reward, though, where making music for Ryan seemed to be his attempt at giving something away, of putting something into the world that felt important, and I wondered if that’s how Stella felt about her painting. I’d never felt like that about anything, not really, and I told Aiden I wondered if that’s what the baby would become. If that’s what being a mother would give me.

“Something I love so much it hurts,” I said, “something that makes me feel like I’m actually contributing in some way,” and I wasn’t even thinking of it, but that’s when he finally kissed me.

His hand was on my knee, his palm grazing my leg, stopping when he squeezed my thigh and leaned in. His tongue was slow and careful inside my mouth as his other hand moved around my back, pulling me to him. His heart hammered against mine through our chests like bass notes of a song, warm and fast and close. It was clean and comforting, a soft bite on my bottom lip, and a rub of his nose against mine before he pulled away. It was everything that being with Johnny Drinko was not, and I knew it was what being with a boy was supposed to feel like when it was a good thing, something right. It felt essential and transformative, like sleep.

We didn’t say much on the walk back to Ryan’s, but just before he turned to cross the street where he’d left his Vespa after work, he said, “I’ve been waiting to do that since the first time I saw you.”

The house was empty when I got back, and the stomach cramps kicked in just after I fed Blue Heaven and settled on the couch with Ryan’s
Rolling Stone
. I wished I’d skipped all the unfamiliar food at the restaurant and had stuck to rice and vegetables at dinner, but then the pain shifted, becoming strong and sharp as it moved in sheets through my stomach. By the time I made it to the bathroom, the bleeding had started. The heat came in full, ripe bursts, blooming in my belly and flowering out across my body, stretching and engulfing me. I took deep breaths and listened to the room, a room crowded by the realization there was nothing I could do to fix this. There
was noise between my ears like a radio caught between stations, the crackling like fizz or soda bubbles growing louder as I unwrapped myself until I was nothing but a collection of nerves, fibers, cells. Water and air. A stagnant space in the bathroom of my father’s home. My mind clenched tight and caged itself in as the sound became white noise. And then it was silent. By the time Ryan and Cassie found me on the floor, I’d settled into the hollowed stillness of sadness.

Phone calls were made. First by Cassie while Ryan helped me to the bed, and then by Ryan while Cassie helped me into the taxi. And I sat above the ache of grief and below the fog of shock, in between, with one word racing through my mind as we moved through the city to the hospital. StellaStellaStella.

Tests were done, a haze of movement and machines and voices once I was admitted. I was given pills—“Swallow. Take a deep breath”—and all the while I was floating away, down the hall into the parking lot, pushing out of the city and back over the bridge.

Someone said my mother was taking a plane.

Someone said the baby was gone.

I wanted to know where. “Gone where?” I asked.

“A loss,” someone said. “A miscarriage. He’s gone.”

A boy.
He.
He’s gone.

I wondered exactly where he had gone to and had the vague recognition I’d never seen a cemetery in the city. I wanted to know where all the bodies went.

Maybe I slept, or maybe the fast-forward movement of time erupted at full speed, and then Stella suddenly appeared with her hair loose and hanging, the face of my mother looking down at me: a face of fear and love and memory and hope
and sadness, the face of all the strings that tied me to her. Stella was there the night I lost the baby I never expected to miss as much as I did once he was gone.