Fingerprints of You (28 page)

I would like to say I don’t remember any of it, but that’s not true: I remember being cold under the thin hospital gown and blankets. I never stopped being cold. I remember the sound of strangers’ voices reading numbers from machines hooked into blue bruises on my arms. I was given medicine, and I was told to wait, it would pass. Pass. I remember Dr. Harrison’s breath smelled like coffee and cinnamon, bitter but sweet. I wish I’d found a way to block the feeling of something part-mine and part-not-mine slipping away from me. But I remember the sound of losing the baby and the bright and brilliant ache as my body let go of something that never really fit there in the first place. A baby that wasn’t made from all the things children should be made from: love and hope and faith. A baby that happened by accident with a man who scarred skin for a living, the colors of the ink a permanent camouflage. No one would look at me, their eyes stuck to the floor and the machines as I shuttled myself between the hospital bed and the bathroom, their eyes on their hands and their lab coats and their files of paper. Except Stella, whose eyes never left mine.

Afterward I slept, and when I woke she was there just like I knew she would be, sitting in a chair next to the window. It was early morning, and the sun had painted the sky behind her the muted pastel colors of things soft.

“You’re okay,” she said. And then she repeated it twice.

I looked over her shoulder and wondered if she was right.

“When you were a baby, you hated to sleep,” she started. “You’d scream to keep yourself awake, to fight being tired. I
half expected your grandmother to kick us out,” she said, and then she moved to the bed, sat on the edge, and looked down at me. “Eventually I realized you would sleep in loud places. Restaurants, concerts and clubs, the food court at the mall. I thought it meant you were unshakable. That you needed movement, and that you were born with endurance. I thought it meant I could take you with me wherever I wanted to go and you’d always be able to keep up.”

The hospital room was tiled white, the walls around us painted a fresh cream color that made her blue eyes bright, and I thought of ocean waves in summertime heat. She’d cut back on all the boozing since I’d left, and her skin was clear and cool. She looked more beautiful that day than I’d ever seen her look, even under all that sadness.

“I know now that really it meant you longed for assurance, that even as you slept you needed verification the world continued around you. You needed the sounds of voices to prove you were safe.” She ran her hand down my arm and circled her fingers around my wrist, covering my hospital bracelet. “But I didn’t know how to be a mother, and it took me a long time to realize children need assurance just as much as they need independence.”

Outside, a bus went by, strung into the system of wires that stretched across the city. In the cold the cables sounded dry. Like bones or sand.

“I know it’s been hard on you,” she said, “the way I never put down any roots for us.” I looked at her fingers and at the ID bracelet peeking out from underneath, the one bracelet where there should have been two. One for me, and one for the baby, too. “The thing about roots, though, is they tie you down, and I never wanted that for you. I wanted you to
feel that you were never bound, that you were limitless, free to change and grow,” she said, and she looked around the room as if everything important in the world was shut inside that tiny space. “I never found a place good enough for you. I always wanted something better than where we were, so when things got bad, I would make us leave.”

And I tried so hard to believe her, to let her excuse for all that movement make sense, but it didn’t really matter if I believed, because after all that time she was finally tearing down the walls and trying to explain why things had been the way they’d been. And that mattered more than the truth.

“You probably think this is for the best, that I didn’t become a mom. That it’s better this way,” I said.

She squeezed my wrist hard then, and I could feel the edge of the bracelet cutting into my skin.

“Nothing was better for me than you,” she said. “I finally understood what people meant when they talked about the rewards of responsibility, about perspective and purpose.” Her eyes were stripped and wide when she said it. “And the same thing will happen to you when it’s your turn. You’ll see. It won’t be easy, but it’ll be worth it.”

I loved her too much then, for showing me all that honesty and finally giving me something I could hold on to.

“Emmy sent you something,” she said. “I ran into her at the gas station on my way out of town, and when I told her what happened, she gave me this.” Stella pulled out a picture from her purse, the photo Emmy took on the trip out to San Francisco: my image pushed up against the bus window with a
WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA
road sign blurred behind me. I looked happy, a little nervous too, but ready for all the things in front of me. It was the first time I realized I could look beautiful like that.

“You will feel this good again, Lemon,” Stella said, but I turned my face away from the picture.

“I feel like a jack-in-the-box. Like my parts are all sprung out and busted,” I told her.

She took my chin and turned my face back to the photo. “You
will
feel this good again,” she repeated, and I finally let the tears come.

“How can you be sure?” I asked.

“Because you’re mine. You know by now the most important thing is to fight for something better than what you have.”

And that was her way, that was the reason for all the running. Stella had always wanted something more and had believed we deserved better.

She told me Simon had wanted to come with her, but she’d decided it was best he stayed in West Virginia. “He asked me to tell you that he’ll be there when you get back, though, waiting to help take care of you again,” she said. “He really cares about us, Lemon.” She smiled and shook her head. “God knows how he has the patience for it.”

There was a knock on the door, and then Ryan moved into the room, shuffling his feet and chewing on his bottom lip.

“Hey, kid,” he said. He had a duffel, and he dropped it on the floor and told me, “I brought some of your things. Stella said to bring clothes. Your toothbrush and stuff.”

And then he looked to Stella. “You,” he said.

She nodded.

They had spoken by then, on the phone I guessed, a quick call to Stella from his cell when we first left for the hospital, and I tried to imagine him giving her the news, telling her to get a flight.

I’m here
, he probably said. Or maybe,
I’m here, but you should be too
.

I watched them watching each other and tried to imagine the thoughts passing back and forth. They were older—it was over seventeen years since they’d last been together—but there was something familiar between them. It was in the way he smiled when she told him to sit down, or maybe the way the room sounded with their voices filling up all that space. Small talk about her flight, questions about my recovery. The cadences of their conversation bouncing off the wall sounded like a memory or like a puzzle putting itself together.

And I guess she could sense the ties between us, because she thanked Ryan for taking such good care of me those last weeks. “It’s good that she came here,” Stella said. “I’m glad for it.”

The three of us sat in that hospital room for an hour or so, and they talked about his job and about the house in West Virginia, her hikes along the Blue Ridge Parkway and his occasional gigs at a neighborhood bar. Stella said she’d finished her first art class and had enrolled in the advanced course for the spring. Ryan told her he’d been writing some of his own music and had gotten interest from a producer he met through the Fillmore. He said he’d been improving.

“One step at a time,” he said.

Ryan offered to let Stella stay at the house, but she told him she’d found a hotel near the hospital, that she’d stay the night there and be back when they released me in the morning.

They didn’t talk about the past, and they didn’t talk about Cassie or Simon.

Eventually Ryan had to get going, needed to stop by the house before his shift that night, but he said he’d swing by in the morning and then, to her, “It’s good to see you, Stella. I’m
glad you’re here.” He squeezed me on the shoulder and put the back of his hand against my cheek, leaving it there when he told me, “It makes me sick you had to go through this.”

Afterward I asked if she was okay.

“It’s funny, the roles we play, the way we have to give up the old ones before we have room for the new ones. The first-love stuff never goes away in here,” she said, pointing to her head. “It makes you who you are. But in here,” putting her hand on her chest, “time lets that grow and change. You’ll see.”

“He kept all the books you gave him,” I told her. “All the novels with the inscriptions. How come you didn’t take any with you when you left?”

She shrugged. “They were his, not mine. You know reading’s not my thing. And when I left I wanted to give him something to mark our time together. It seemed important to leave part of me behind with him. The inscriptions . . . I wanted him to know I had meant them, even if I did leave in the end.” She looked at the floor. “The books were always his, not mine,” she repeated.

I wanted to tell her he didn’t need a room full of books to remind him of their life together, but I didn’t. I figured she knew that by then.

She let me sleep for a while, and she watched bad television and picked at the pasta and cookie the nurse brought on a tray for dinner, but eventually I just wanted to be alone.

“I’ll be fine if you want to head to the hotel,” I said. “It’s okay. You can go. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Okay.” She nodded reluctantly. “But there’s one more thing,” she said, and she pulled her purse from the floor to her lap and began digging inside. She handed me a four-by-six painting just like the one I’d been using as a bookmark. It
was a picture of a carnival setting, with blurry strokes framing a Ferris wheel painted prominently in the center. The ride was red and the background was yellow.

“Two colors,” I said.

“Yellow for you, and red for me.”

“But two?” I asked.

“It’s been snowing a lot since you left,” she told me. “And I started paying attention. People think snow is white, and it is, obviously. But when the light changes and the sky is clear, it can be blue, too.” She smiled. “A brilliant blue. Nothing is really just one color. There are filters and reflections, influences. I wanted to acknowledge that.”

I looked closer and saw she’d actually used yellow on the ride and red in the background as well.

“You know why I named you Lemon?” she asked.

“The color that month, the paint.”

“That yellow looked like hope to me,” she said. She was on her feet then, bending over to kiss me on the forehead. “Don’t you forget.” And then she was gone.

I
N THE MORNING
S
TELLA SHOWED UP
talking taxis and flights, but by then I had decided I wasn’t going back to West Virginia.

We stood outside the hospital as I listened to her tell me Simon had been trying to track down the cheapest rates for direct flights into D.C., where he was pitching his photos that week. “He’s got a meeting this afternoon with a gallery owner, but he drove up and will be finished with work stuff tonight. You need to pack your things,” she said. “We’ll go to Ryan’s to get your stuff. You can stay with me at the hotel, and then we’ll leave tomorrow.”