Fingerprints of You (29 page)

“But I’m not ready,” I said.

She shifted her purse from the right shoulder to the left and reached out to nudge me off the sidewalk and onto a small patch of grass where visitors and patients mulled around
scattered benches smoking cigarettes and exchanging news. Deaths and babies, I guessed, diagnoses and tests results. In front of us lunchtime traffic clogged the street.

“I know this is hard, Lemon, but it’ll be easier if you’re at home. You need time to adjust to what’s happened,” she said, but I was shaking my head.

“What does that even mean? You have no idea what’s happened since I’ve been here,” I said, which wasn’t really fair, but I was angry she’d made so many assumptions. I would stay with her. We would leave tomorrow. My road-trip stunt was over, and it was time to go back east. I took a deep breath and reminded myself the conversation would go much better if I remained calm. “It’s too soon, and I know you’d understand that if you just tried. You remember. This city is too big to leave so quickly.”

“Lemon,” she said.

“Stella,” I said back. By then I knew there were things that could be changed and things that could not. My mother’s job as a decision maker for me was not a permanent role, and I was ready to take over. “A horrendous thing has happened, and I don’t even know what it means yet,” I said. I’d spent the night thinking about all the things I’d left behind and all the things I missed from back east, and then I thought about how inspired I felt in San Francisco, with Ryan and Cassie and Aiden, how good it felt to be in a place with so many opportunities. I couldn’t be certain if the new energy I’d been feeling those last weeks came from the exposure to all those books, from the gritty street scene and from listening to Ryan’s music, or if it had come from the baby, and finally being able to make my own decisions. Either way, I’d realized how important it was to not walk away too soon. I couldn’t
desert the opportunity to spend more time with my father.

Stella was talking about school and Simon then, about the people in West Virginia who loved me, and how I’d feel better once I got home, but I stopped her.

“What if,” I began, but Stella was shaking her head and a car was honking a horn, and behind us an ambulance siren was screaming in the ER parking lot. So I waited. And then when it was quiet again I said, “What if West Virginia isn’t home anymore?”

Losing the baby made me realize how important it was for me to cultivate my relationship with Ryan, to give him a chance. “He’s my father,” I said. “And I like it here. I have a job. And a boyfriend,” using the word for the first time.

“You’re grieving,” she said, and I told her that was exactly why I wanted to stay.

“I want more time. I just don’t think West Virginia is where I belong right now.”

She sulked for a while, and then, finally, she said, “If you stay, I stay. Ten days. That’s it, though.”

“Six weeks,” I said. “I need at least a month,” but she was shaking her head.

“Are you crazy? No way. Two weeks, tops. You’re still a minor. I get to decide.”

But two weeks didn’t sound nearly long enough. “Four?” I asked, and then I added, “Please, Stella. I need to do this.
Please.
”

“Three, Lemon. That’s it. Take some time, get some closure, but then we leave. You have to go back and finish school. You’re just a kid,” she said, which I didn’t agree with, but I settled for three weeks and figured I’d try to talk her into longer when the time came.

Instead of the hotel by the hospital, we found a long-term, low-budget efficiency housing unit which seemed like a fancy way of saying a hostel for adults, and we moved in that evening. I mostly just slept the first few days. We ordered take-out Chinese and pizza delivery, watched made-for-TV movies, and even sprung for tickets to a comedy club one night, but the area wasn’t nearly as gritty or interesting as the Mission. I missed the taquerías and the bacon-wrapped hot dogs, I missed knowing Aiden was across the street tossing pizza dough, and I missed the air mattress even though I knew I should be staying with my mom. But I was going crazy thinking about the baby and the things I could have done differently. I catalogued my eating habits during the pregnancy, tried to count up all the cups of coffee I’d drunk, and even numbered the afternoons I’d spent in the truck with Emmy breathing in her secondhand cigarette smoke. I wondered about the anemia and blamed myself for not doing something earlier, for not telling the doctor about all the fainting. Maybe I could have fixed it, if I’d eaten better food and gotten more sleep, if I’d been more careful. The doctors said there were a million reasons miscarriages happened and none of them had anything to do with anything I could have changed, but I couldn’t help but wonder. Some nights I locked myself in the bathroom and cried in the tub, certain I could have stopped it from happening if I had tried harder, but Stella never had much of a tolerance for self-pity.

“You’re becoming a Lifetime movie in there,” she’d say from the other side of the door. “Come on, baby, come out. You need some fresh air. Some food, maybe.”

There was a small café on Van Ness that we liked to go to in the mornings, and about two weeks after I’d left the hospital,
she finally put her foot down. “We’re here because of you. You remember that conversation, right?” she asked. “You love your job. And you have a boyfriend. You can’t leave the city until you spend more time with your father,” she said. She blew on her coffee, waiting for it to cool while I stirred raw sugar into my latte. “But it’s been nine days, Lemon.”

“You’re counting?”

“Look, I know that’s not long for such a terrible loss,” she said carefully, “but you’re not working. You’re not spending time with the boy. And five-minute phone calls to Ryan don’t count as father-daughter bonding. I love you, Lemon, but there’s only so long we can sit in that hotel room. Movement,” she said. “That’s why we’re still here. Do. Some. Thing. Three weeks, remember? Use the time you have left.”

I moved back into Ryan and Cassie’s house that afternoon. Stella and I had been sharing a bed at the hotel, and between the heavy walker renting the room above us and Stella’s night-owl habits, I hadn’t been sleeping well, so she agreed to let me go back. There was more space at Ryan’s, and the house was close to the bookstore, and close to Aiden. Stella took the bus over with me and stood on the sidewalk watching as Ryan hauled my backpack up the steps. At the front door he turned and invited her in.

“I can make coffee. You can poke around,” he said, but I knew she wanted to leave her image of the house inside her head just as she remembered it from seventeen years earlier.

“I gotta get back and straighten up,” she told him. “You wouldn’t believe how quickly Lemon converted our room into a junk dump. Takeout cartons, magazines, and trash all over the place,” she said. “Thanks, though.”

I told Ryan I’d be in in a second, and then I went back
down to her on the sidewalk. “You sure you’re okay with this?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “Please. A little time alone will do me good. You need to sort some things out, and sitting in the hotel room wallowing isn’t going to cut it.” She leaned in and pressed our foreheads together, locking her eyes with mine. Her breath smelled like coffee and the lavender scones from the café. “As long as you know this residence isn’t permanent.”

“This residence isn’t permanent,” I told her.

“Agreed.” She leaned back and adjusted her coat, ran her hand through her hair, and pulled her sunglasses out of her pocket. “Simon’s shipping some sketch pads and drawing pencils. It’ll be good to get some of the old haunts down on paper.” She adjusted her purse and reached out, ran the back of her hand over my cheek. “Don’t be a stranger,” she said, and then she turned and headed down Valencia Street.

I called Aiden that afternoon and told him I was ready to take the bookstore shifts back since he’d asked another friend to cover them when I went to the hospital.

“To be honest, Miller didn’t even notice my buddy had picked them up,” he said.

“Can I see you?” I asked, talking into my blue cell as I sat on the air mattress back at Ryan’s.

“Anytime you want. You name it.”

“I want a few days of downtime with Cassie and Ryan. How about this weekend?” I asked. “You can pick me up on your cute baby blue scooter.”

“You mean my masculine motorcycle? You got it.”

“Does a Vespa really qualify as a motorcycle? It’s a sport-bike, right? A cruiser?”

“Ouch,” he said.

“I’m kidding,” I said back.

“I’ve missed you,” he said.

That Friday, David Byrne played at the Fillmore, and Ryan came in late from work, two or so in the morning, when he found me pacing the dining room, wearing grooves into the floor as I tried to quiet my thoughts. Cassie had gone to bed after three rounds of Scrabble and Steven Sebring’s documentary of Patti Smith on PBS.

“You all right?” he asked. He was in the hooded sweatshirt and the jeans he wore to work, and I could smell the sweat on him from the doorway where he stood.

“I don’t really know what I’m doing,” I said. I was sweating a little, and maybe crying, too. The sadness came at me like the morning sickness had, unexpected and unwavering. “I feel like I’m biding time,” I said, “like I’m running in place.” I stopped as he moved into the room.

He told me to sit down, and he took Jay McInerney’s
Bright Lights, Big City
off my chair—Aiden’s recommendation that time. “You’re just like me,” he said. “I usually read three at a time. Stella used to say I’d read one for each mood,” he told me, shaking his head but smiling. He pulled out another dining room chair, and we sat across from each other. “Here.” He tugged my feet into his lap.

I leaned my head back and felt my calf muscles stretch from my body to his, connecting us. The ceiling was white and edged with crown molding, the nooks and crannies strewn with cobwebs. I closed my eyes and felt his palms fit into the curves of my arches, as he threaded his fingers through my toes. He pulled the balls of my feet toward him, stretching my muscles.

“I’m just restless,” I said, and I wiped my eyes on my
shirtsleeve. “It’s not really that bad, I’m just . . .” But I wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence.

“Grieving,” he said. “And trying to get your bearings, trying to figure things out.” He asked if it felt good to be back working at the bookstore, and if I was still spending time with the boy on the Vespa.

I told him yes.

“He’s a good kid?” he asked, and I nodded.

I realized Aiden had become the most important boy I’d ever been with, the first one who liked me in the way I wanted to be liked. With Aiden I didn’t have to worry about being anyone other than who I was. Kind of how it felt when I was with Emmy.

“There’s somewhere I want to take you,” Ryan said. He used his thumb to knead the arch of my foot and work out all the knots. “A hike in Marin—the views of the city are amazing,” he told me. “If you feel up to it, we’ll go next week.”

I took a deep breath and tried to memorize the size of his hand against my foot, the way his fingers felt on my skin. I wanted to take the moment and pack it somewhere safe, somewhere constant and reliable.

We stayed like that for a while, me with my feet in his lap, and I almost fell asleep sitting in that chair. It was suddenly more comfortable than the hotel bed or the air mattress, more comfortable than anywhere I’d been in a very long time.

In the morning I overheard them in the kitchen, rummaging through the cabinets and making coffee.

“I think we should offer her our room,” Ryan said to Cassie before the shutting of a drawer, the clang of a spoon or a fork. “She’s not comfortable,” he said, “and she’s not sleeping. I’ve got my kid crashing on the floor in there,” he said.
“My daughter’s going through a really rough time, and we’ve got her lying under a dining room table,” but then someone started the blender or the coffee bean grinder, something loud and drowning, and the conversation was done by the time it turned off.

They never did offer to let me use their room, but it didn’t matter so much since I knew he had tried.