Fingerprints of You (10 page)

“You can call whenever you want. It’s free,” she said. “Not free but, you know, included in the plan.” They’d paid for limitless minutes for calls between my number and theirs but had refused to set up a text plan.

December was the month of Byzantine Ceiling Blue, so
while I was surprised by the gift and happy to finally have a phone of my own, the cell was the kind of shiny blue that made you see spots if you looked at it too long in the sunlight. I would have liked a black or a red one better, but I didn’t complain.

She was in the room then, and she sat on my bed, hovering while I pulled on my black Converse, left foot, then right. She tried not to look at the backpack and the bus ticket resting on top. “I was seventeen when I left for San Francisco, too,” she said, and I nodded because I’d branded every clip of info I knew about her past into my brain like a scar, like a tattoo.

Stella left my grandmother for California the year my grandfather died, and she departed Pennsylvania after his funeral and never looked back. That’s how I imagined it, at least. She said she filled one red suitcase and left her mother behind because she believed grieving alone would make them more strong and independent. When I asked my grandmother about it as a child, she never called Stella selfish or neglectful, words I thought of later when I pictured my grandmother newly widowed and on her own. Instead she told me that, just as she imagined I would be when I was older, my mother was a woman who always followed her instincts.

“She’s a wanderer,” she told me, “a restless explorer. Your mother is who she is. I could never ask her to change.” But that was back when we still lived close by, back before it became clear Stella’s wanderlust would not dissipate just because she had a child, a fact that became a source of tension between my mother and my grandmother in later years.

Stella fidgeted and smoothed out the wrinkles in my bedspread while I pulled on my hooded sweatshirt. “The thing is . . . ,” she started, and I glanced at her, waiting while she
looked for words. “It’s just that there’s a risk every time you leave home.”

I put my hands in my pockets, eyes to the floor as I waited for the moment to pass. I figured she thought I was repeating her mistakes, but I thought I was changing them, attempting to reorganize her past into compartments I could manage and investigate. I believed finding my father would help me understand Stella and the choices she had made for us and would help me discover what kind of person I wanted to become. Maybe she understood why I needed to go or maybe she didn’t. I can’t say for sure what she felt, because I never asked her. It was easier that way.

But she kept talking. “There’s a risk of never seeing things exactly as you did before. And a risk of not going back, of forgetting what you left behind,” she said, and I nodded, wondering if we were running late and if we’d get to the bus station in time to get good seats. I didn’t want to get stuck in the back near the bathroom. “There’s the risk of forgetting who you are and who you are not,” she said, but then she must have recognized my distractedness, because she didn’t say anything else after that. She stood up, shrugged, and almost reached for me, a slight lurch forward, but then she stopped herself and turned away, leaving me as she moved down the hall.

She and Simon drove Emmy and me to Wheeling, West Virginia, to catch our bus that night. Emmy had overpacked, so we took Simon’s Tacoma, and Pace sat curled on top of our luggage in the back. The drive was easy and fast up Highway 79, and when we arrived, Simon unloaded our suitcases, and I gave Stella a copy of our itinerary for the next few days on the road.

“Thanks for the ride,” Emmy said to them, and then to me, “Let’s hit it,” and she moved away from the car and lingered in the parking lot.

Simon gave me a hug, leaned in close, and told me, “I’ll take care of Stella, you take care of you,” and I realized I would miss all the late-night television and the quiet energy he gave our house when he was there. I hugged him again, and then he stood by Emmy to give me some space, so I could say good-bye to my mother.

“Lemon,” she said, “I just . . .” But she stumbled on her words.

I half listened to her stammer as I glanced over her shoulder at my friend and the long Greyhound bus in the background that would move me away from everything familiar.

“Thanks again for the phone,” I said. “And thanks for the painting.”

Besides the cyber-blue cell, Stella also had given me a small four-by-six-inch painting of an ocean-colored house. There was a fence in front, a blue tree in the yard, and four sky-colored shutters lined up above the front door. It looked like a nice home outside of all that blueness, but I couldn’t place it and wasn’t sure if it was a painting of a place we had lived before or of a place she hoped we might live eventually. Either way, I liked it best out of all the other paintings I’d seen of hers and planned to use it as my bookmark on the road.

“I brought it with me,” I told her, and she nodded.

I said something about being excited to see her artwork when I got back, since Simon had paid the tuition for Stella to take a painting class at the university as his Christmas gift to her. And I said something about being sure to call as soon as we got to California.

I did not say “Thank you for letting me go,” and I did not say “I’ll miss you.”

My mother was never good at saying good-bye either, so she hugged me quickly, awkwardly, and then whispered that she left me something tucked into the pregnancy book I had packed in my purse. I hoped that it was money.

“Be good, and don’t do anything stupid. Take care of each other,” she said.

I smiled widely so that later, when I didn’t come back, she’d think of me as being beautiful and brave. As someone she wished had stayed.

I guess I should’ve realized she must’ve felt that not only was she losing me, she was losing the baby as well, the long months that remained of watching its development through the series of ultrasounds, of witnessing the growth of a child from a tiny sack of cells. But all my life, all around me, people had been leaving, moving, and trading spaces: strangers at rest stops when we were on the road; families at the Amtrak station when we headed down the coast; men and women at hotels checking in and out of rooms with paper-thin walls, with stained carpet and X-rated television channels. It’s startling how frequently people shifted in and out of view, the addition and removal into and out of one another’s lives. I’d witnessed it for as long as I could remember, had watched Stella nonchalantly pack our lives into boxes more times than I could count, and at the age of seventeen I discovered I was an excellent mimic.

The bus driver came out of the station and started calling for the passengers, so I told Stella I should get going.

“Don’t forget where you came from, Lemon,” she said in a way that made me wonder if she already knew I’d bought a
one-way ticket. “Take all of that in,” she said, nodding toward all the things that lay beyond my view, “but don’t forget where you came from.”

And then it was over and she was back in the car running her fingers through her hair when Simon leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. As the car began to move away, they became silhouettes, mere lines of shadows shaping out the frame of strangers, two people I may or may not have known. And they were out of the parking lot before I had the chance to tell Stella the reason I was going to California was to see where I had come from.

Emmy brought two disposable cameras, one for the road and one for the city, and she made me pose in front of the bus before we boarded and picked two blue recliners we’d call home for the next three days. We started north, skittering along the highway until our first transfer in Pittsburgh, our dinner-stop layover before we drove west through the night. In Pittsburgh the buildings were checkered with rows of windows, the roads lit by cars and the streets lined with lampposts as we headed downtown toward the station. Snow draped the city from a storm that’d hit the week before, and the air looked heavy.

I hadn’t been in Pennsylvania in a long time, not since we left Denny in Philadelphia, so when Emmy said, “Didn’t you used to live around here?” I looked out the window and tried to decide what I wanted and didn’t want her to know.

“We lived in Harrisburg when I was little, before New York,” I said. “Stella moved us back to Pennsylvania when I was eleven, though, Philadelphia that time,” I told her.

We pulled into the terminal, and Emmy started putting
away the deck of cards, gathering the books and magazines scattered on the floor, and returning them to my backpack at our feet.

“It’s weird, right, having lived in so many places? I mean, I bet in some ways it’s cool to have had all those different experiences, but sometimes, when you talk about it, it seems exhausting,” she said once the bus was parked.

I thought of the Denny years in Philadelphia, when Stella worked day shifts processing Tastykake orders and night shifts bartending at Whiskey Tango on the north side of the city. I was in the sixth grade, and Stella was having a hard time taking care of us, when Denny showed up, a big guy with big plans and a big appetite for Stella and the life she was trying to make for me and her.

“Some of it was good,” I said, thinking of how my mother would pick me up every day after school between her shifts at work. On a good day we’d stop at a coffee shop and drink hot chocolates, or she’d take me to a playground. Sometimes we’d just drive around watching the city and listening to music on the radio, swapping stories about my day at school and her shift at the baking company. “My mom and I used to go to a great park in the city, and we’d rent bikes sometimes or hang around the fountain throwing pennies in the water before her bartending shift at the nightclub,” I told her. “But some of it was bad, too,” I said, thinking of the day she met Denny.

She was waiting for me in the parking lot by her old Geo Metro just as he came out to his truck to get a sheet of metal for the air duct. He’d been hired to fix one of the heating units at my school, and he took one look at her in her tiny white miniskirt and her big hoop earrings and knew, just like that, that he saw something he wanted. His next project, his next scam.

Three weeks later Stella moved us into Denny’s two-bedroom apartment in Levittown. I shared my bedroom with all the boxes of the things he never made room for, the items he decided we didn’t need anymore, like photos from our life before him and toys he said I was too old for. Stella liked that Denny lived outside the city where she thought things would be safer for me. She liked that he didn’t drink, that he drove a big truck, and that he took a job at the club to keep an eye on her. And she loved the gifts. He’d show up at the apartment with lingerie and jewelry and perfume, presents he bought her on South Street when he went to Philadelphia for work. We lived with him for almost two years, moving again just weeks after my fourteenth birthday.

“I liked my sixth-grade teacher in Philadelphia,” I told Emmy as we waited for the other riders to move through the aisle, “but I hated the winters up north, the way the days were so short in December. The darkness seemed longer there than anywhere else,” I said.

I didn’t tell her about the time Denny sold Stella’s car without asking, about the bills he forgot to pay or all the cash he took from the bank account Stella had opened for me with the money my grandmother left when she died. And I didn’t tell her about the black eye the night we left, the hotel room, and our escape to the Jersey Shore, where things got even worse when she met Rocco. I kept waiting for the memories to fade away, but they were threaded into me like DNA, fixed and permanent, consequential to the person I’d become.

It was almost six thirty when we stopped, and I made Emmy pose for a photo in front of the station, her arms and legs stretched out into the shape of an X, and then we headed through the doors. Inside the bus station we ate peanut butter
sandwiches Emmy had brought from home and drank warm Pepsis from the vending machine. We slumped against the wall and watched the other riders move around us. The station was loud and smelled like sweat and winter wetness, the whole thing so overwhelming I didn’t notice when Emmy pulled a small square box out of her backpack. She had wrapped it in newspaper, and she handed it to me.

“I know we said no Christmas presents since we’re blowing all our money on the trip, but I couldn’t help myself. Open it,” she said.

I unwrapped the gift and pulled out a small ornament, a wood carving of a naked woman swollen with pregnancy. “I love it,” I said, holding it up and inspecting the curve of her stomach, the peaks of her nipples, and the wave of her hair that was carved to her waist.