Fingerprints of You (32 page)

“It’s fine,” she said. “I’ll haggle a discount from the guy at the front desk, show him my boobs. You know the drill.” And then she winked at me and told Simon, “I’m fine, Simon. We’re fine.”

I moved her coat and a stack of sketches from the chair so I could sit down, but I couldn’t figure out where to put them. The room suddenly seemed too small. Miniature. Claustrophobic.

“Just put them on the floor,” she said to me, and then, to
Simon, “Listen, I should go, Lemon’s here.” After a quick pause, she said, “Simon says hi, baby.”

“Hey, Simon,” I shouted as I sat down. “Miss you,” I said.

She told him they’d talk soon. That she loved him. Talk soon.

After she hung up she took one look at me and said, “You look better,” and I nodded.

“I feel better.” I glanced around the room. “And you probably feel like a pack rat, or a homeless person, like a kid living in a dorm room.”

“It’s not so bad,” she said, but I said, “It kind of is,” and then we were quiet.

“I’m sorry,” I said finally. “Thank you. For being here, I mean. For letting me stay.”

“Watching you leave on the bus like that, knowing that I had to let you go if you wanted to,” she said as she traced her fingers over the sketch pad in front of her, “it shook me up, I guess. Plus, it’s good that you get some closure before we go back. It’s good that you have some time.”

She asked how work was going, and I offered to use my discount to get her any art books she wanted, and then she asked about Aiden.

“I know it’s superlame, but I’d like to meet him,” she said.

I tried to imagine the three of us sitting at a coffee shop or meeting at a café for lunch, and I knew instantly they would like each other. Just because of me.

“That makes sense,” I said. “I’ll plan something.” And then I took her out to dinner at the Italian restaurant around the corner, where we gorged ourselves on garlic bread and lasagna before I headed back to the Mission.

The next afternoon Ryan and I loaded up a day pack with
water and snacks and extra layers of clothes, and he borrowed a truck from a friend so we could drive to Marin County to take that hike. We left the city, headed over the Golden Gate Bridge, and drove north, traveling past joggers and bikers who were making their way along the path on the side of Highway 101. The bridge was an orange-red color, just like in all the travel books, but I hadn’t imagined the cables so large and looming as they stretched above us while the traffic moved under the steel beams. I would have liked a picture of me and Ryan standing over the water, posed on the path with the arches of wire above us. The shot of him and Cassie in that same spot was by far my favorite photo in their house, but he was too excited to get out of the city for me to bother to ask him to pull over to take a picture. It was the beginning of February, and the fog had burned off in the morning, but even though it was cold out, the sun was warm beating down through the front window of his buddy’s Chevy. We moved out of San Francisco into the brown slopes of Marin, the mountains getting larger the farther out we went. Ryan navigated through the hills and I played with the radio, our conversation casual and unimportant as he drove. Eventually he exited the highway, and turned onto a small road while I watched the buildings of the city growing smaller in the side-view mirror. I rolled down the window and felt the heavy dampness of the air—the winter breeze was wetter and cooler on the other side of the bridge. We parked at a trailhead, and the lot was empty.

“It’s a pretty mellow hike,” he said when we were outside looking up the hill. He grabbed the pack from the truck bed and locked the doors. “If you get tired, just say so. We’ll stop, no big deal.”

The incline was gradual as we began the walk up the dirt path, and the switchbacks were slow and measured as they lifted us away from the truck. There was a rhythm to the back and forth, and I walked behind Ryan and followed his tempo through the trees, staring at his footprints in the dirt. The wind picked up, and we stopped on the side of the path to pull on sweatshirts we had brought in the backpack.

“Look,” he said, and for the first time since we’d started, I glanced behind us and realized that we were high enough to see San Francisco on the other side of the bay.

The water was bluer than I remembered, the white waves spitting foam throughout the surface of the Pacific, and the city was a map of building-covered hills, a chart of colors and angles. The roads looked like ribbons weaving through the peninsula, linking the neighborhoods like lines in a child’s connect-the-dots book.

“Want to go farther?” Ryan asked, and I nodded.

We kept moving up, and the light-headedness came in small waves, but I pushed through until we reached a flat landing littered with cigarette butts, a dirt lot enclosed by trees on three sides but overlooking San Francisco on the fourth. There was a bench with empty beer cans underneath and graffiti spray painted on the seat, and I sat down and tried to catch my breath.

“It’s amazing,” I said, and stripped off the sweatshirt. My skin was a filmy mixture of sweat and dampness from the air, and I imagined my face was red, because Ryan asked if I was all right.

He sat down on the bench too and pulled a bottle of water from the pack, opened it, and handed it to me.

“It feels good to get some exercise,” I said. “How far did we
go?” I asked, realizing the trail continued up from where we were, and that we hadn’t even made it to the top.

He shrugged. “Far enough,” he said, taking the water back and swigging it down. I watched his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. He looked at me and then looked down the hill. Looked back at me again. “You’re pretty sturdy, considering all the shit you’ve been through lately.” He smiled.

The wind was ripping through the trees by then, and the air cooled me down while we rested. In front of us the city looked like a web of wires, a map of ebbs and flows, the streets running into one another like music.

“I hate the thought of leaving,” I said, and I felt Ryan shift on the bench as he crossed and then uncrossed his ankles.

“You’re leaving?” he asked. “When?”

“I can’t stay here forever,” I said, thinking of Stella back at the hotel, stalling her life with Simon because she didn’t want to leave me, thinking of our three-week deal. I could tell Stella had changed just as much as I had since I left West Virginia, maybe because of Simon or maybe because of her painting, and it wasn’t fair that I had asked her to put all those good things on hold while I hung around the city. She’d given up a lot by staying there with me, and I figured it was time I began planning what I was going to do with myself. I knew that whatever it was, it would start by going back home.

“Look how amazing it is,” I said. “All that energy in motion.” I took the camera out from the backpack and snapped a shot of the view. City buildings on top with a vast ocean of blue and white waves below. I turned the wheel on the disposable and watched the number shift from twenty-two to twenty-three.

“I fell in love with that city so long ago I can hardly remember anything from before it,” Ryan said. And then he paused before he said something about wishing we had more time together. “I know I’ve kind of sucked at this father thing, but I promise it’ll only get better from here. And you can always come back,” he said. An empty can of Budweiser rolled out from under the bench, and he kicked it away.

“I’d like that.”

“I should have done more sooner,” he said. “It’s like when you’re a kid and you’re taught that if you work hard enough, you’ll eventually get what you want. That work and success are undeniably entwined. But then you find that one thing you won’t ever be good at no matter how hard you work. Math or football. Writing or art class. It doesn’t really matter what, because everyone has at least one thing. No one can be good at everything, regardless of how hard you try,” he said.

I thought of how Molly-Warner was never good in gym class, and how Emmy never passed Advanced Chemistry. How I was still terrible at Spanish conjugations even though Simon had explained them to me a hundred times.

“I was worried being a parent would be one of those things for me, something I’d never be good at, so I never tried, because I was scared.” Ryan looked out at the view, the waves growing violent under all that wind, and the white crests getting sharper as the clouds blocked the sun. “I didn’t want to risk it, because I didn’t believe I could do it,” he said.

And when I thought about it that way, it made me realize Stella was brave for being scared and doing it anyway, for having faith in the fact that if she worked hard enough at being a good mother, eventually she’d succeed. Because each time she
failed at making things good for us, we moved and tried again.

“I get it now,” Ryan said. “That failure is better than copping out. But Stella’s obviously taught you that.”

I realized that’s what Stella had given me, the recognition that even if I failed to find all the answers, just being in San Francisco, going there with the openness to look, made me brave too.

Ryan’s fingers were tracing the names carved into the wood bench when he said, “I’m sorry, Lemon. For . . .”

But I stopped him before he could finish and told him, “We get to be new now,” and I guess he understood what I meant, because he nodded and didn’t say anything else after that. We stayed there awhile and watched the fog spread away from the hills and over the bridge.

On the way down it started to drizzle, as the smell of the ocean mixed with the smell of trees and dirt, and it was tricky working our way back to the truck. The trail was steeper on the trip down, with gravity pulling at my body and testing the muscles in my legs. I lost my footing once or twice, stumbled midswitchback, and had to stop to catch my balance, but Ryan offered me his hand and let me steady my weight on his before we started down again.

Later that week I set up a time for Stella to meet Aiden since she’d asked me to introduce them. I waited until she had somewhere to be, an art gallery she promised Simon she’d stop by to get the name of a contact he could submit his photos to, and then I told her we could all meet at Stella’s hotel and go to the gallery together. Short and sweet: It would be easier that way.

Stella was wearing skinny jeans, ankle boots, and a snug black turtleneck when she came out of the hotel to meet us. The perm had mostly grown out by then, and her blond hair was twisted into a low, knotted bun. She was wide-eyed and shiny lipped, with just the right amount of makeup. She looked amazing.

Next to me Aiden fidgeted, so I hurried through the introductions and pointed in the direction we’d be walking. The art gallery was about eight blocks away.

Aiden asked about Stella’s trip out and then asked about Simon’s photos, and he even remembered she was an artist too.

“Will you be pitching your work to the gallery also?” he asked, but she shook her head.

“God, no, I’m not ready for that yet. I’m just starting to take some classes,” she told him when we got caught at a crosswalk and had to wait for the light to change. “Being a student again feels like a big enough commitment as it is.”

My mother never went to college and didn’t push it on me like a lot of kids’ parents did, though I knew that after Denny ripped us off, she’d started another savings account in case I ever decided to go. She bought a bottle of champagne when I nailed my PSAT but didn’t harp on it when my SAT scores weren’t as high as I wanted. I figured she knew she had to pick her battles.

We crossed to the other side of the street and moved past a bus stop where a group of retro mod-kids huddled, looking at a map.

I’d missed over a month of school by then, and even though Stella hadn’t asked, I knew she was wondering what
I was planning to do about it. I figured I’d have to repeat my senior year and start researching colleges that summer. I was thinking of a lit major and writing classes, of a small liberal-arts college with a strong art and music scene.

“Lemon says you’re a writer. And a musician?” Stella asked.

Aiden told her about the band he managed, about their tour up north and the gigs he was trying to land them back in San Francisco. He talked about writing music reviews, his love of finding new bands, and discovering new styles and up-and-coming talent.

“It feels good to write a positive review for a band that’s still struggling to make a name for itself. If the band’s sound turns me on, I try to do everything I can to get the word out.”