First Avenue (39 page)

As she led
Maria
to her car, she had to walk with rapid steps to keep ahead of the girl. Inside the car
Maria
edged close to the door although
Katherine
had more room than she needed.

“I have some aspirin in my apartment,”
Katherine
said. “That will take away some of the pain.”

Maria looked at her briefly, and
Katherine
thought she would say something. She did, but not with words.

“Some of the pain,”
Katherine
repeated. “We’ll stop at your place first and pick up a few things. You’ll feel better to get out of those stained clothes. I’m afraid I don’t have any clothes that will fit you.”

The girl’s eyes lost some of their detachment.

“I’m staying in a motel in the University District,” the girl said. “I haven’t been in
Seattle
very long. My room is probably a mess.”

“A girl has other things to do than clean her room.”

“I don’t do many things.”

“We won’t worry about that. We’ll just pick up a few clothes and leave.”

Maria was staying in an old motel in the University District on
Northeast 45th Street
. Her room was on the second floor.
Katherine
followed the girl up the exterior stairway.

“I couldn’t afford anything else,”
Maria
said apologetically as she opened the door.

“I understand,”
Katherine
said. “When I was going to the University, I lived just a few blocks from here.”

Maria picked up loose clothes from the floor and stuffed them into a dresser drawer. Then she pulled an overnight case out of the closet and carried it into the bathroom.

Katherine remained at the door so that
Maria
would not think she was intruding. She remembered what her apartment had been like when she was
Maria
’s age—the old, worn-out furniture, the brown stove, and the green bathtub. She even remembered the first picture she hung on the wall. It was a photograph of her father standing in front of the horse barn squinting into the sun with his seed corn hat pulled down low on his forehead. She had taken the picture herself with a Brownie camera won in 4-H.

Maria had no pictures on the wall, but
Katherine
could not help noticing one that was on the nightstand beside the bed. Even from where she stood, she recognized the boy in the picture. She walked over to it and picked it up carefully like a piece of evidence on which she didn’t want to leave fingerprints.

Maria started to come out of the bathroom, but froze in the doorway when she saw
Katherine
with the picture.

“It’s
Sam
, isn’t it?”
Katherine
asked.

“That picture wasn’t supposed to be out,”
Maria
said softly.

“It’s out. And who is this?”
Katherine
pointed to a young woman in the photograph beside him.

“My mother.”

Katherine studied the picture—a boy in a lumberjack shirt holding hands with a girl, unwrinkled smiles, a beach with driftwood behind them. In love, almost certainly in love.

“When was this picture taken?”

“Before I was born.”

It was not difficult to add or subtract the years. Still standing motionless in the doorway with a small suitcase in her hand,
Maria
looked as if her trip had just been canceled.

“
Sam
is your father?”

Maria put the overnight case down but didn’t move from the bathroom doorway. A mask, one part from the girl, one part from the lumberjack in the picture, covered her face.

“Does he know?”

Without voice and with barely perceptible movement,
Maria
’s bruised face and tightened mouth said no.

Katherine marveled at how long this girl must have held the mask in front of her. Still holding the picture,
Katherine
sat down on the edge of the bed and patted the spot beside her. They would talk here, she decided.

Silently she waited while
Maria
complied with her invitation—an uncertain first step and then several of firmer resolution. She didn’t sit where
Katherine
’s hand had touched, but she didn’t move all the way to the opposite end of the bed either.

“I wish you would tell me about it,”
Katherine
said. “I think we both have an interest in this boy.” She held the picture up as a prompt for
Maria
.

“My mother gave me that picture before she died,”
Maria
said. “I was eight years old. She had cancer, and she wanted me to know who my real father was in case I wanted to find him. It was up to me, she said. He never knew anything about me, about her having a baby. It just happened, she said—that summer when the picture was taken. My mother told me she had loved him. She thought he had loved her, too, in a certain way.

“He fished in my mother’s village in
Alaska
. Boys would come for a year or two to work on the boats or in the cannery. Sometimes they would get a boat of their own. He never came back after that summer.

“I don’t know why she never tried to find him. That was her way, I guess. She heard a little about him through the village. She knew he had become a policeman. Somehow she got a book of poems he had written. She was in some of those poems, but she never tried to find him. She said I was to keep the picture and the poems for myself.

“My mother was very intelligent, not what most people think of an Indian girl in a fishing village—not what most people here think, anyway. She went to the university in
Anchorage
and got a scholarship after her first year. She took me with her. My grandparents were unhappy that she wouldn’t let them keep me, but then she didn’t do anything they wanted.

“She met my father, my stepfather, in college. He was a teacher there. I can barely remember him before they got married. I don’t think I was very nice to him. I didn’t see why my mother needed to find somebody else. My stepfather was divorced and had two daughters. I think they were ashamed to have me around. They’re white, like my stepfather—like my father. I don’t know if I should have come here.”

“Oh,
Maria
,”
Katherine
said, moving closer to the girl and reaching for her hands. “I have a feeling you should have come a long time ago.”

Her face, her poor face,
Katherine
thought, showed how badly she wanted to believe.

“He wants to know. I’m sure of that,”
Katherine
said.

“Do you think so?” The mask was disappearing, line by line.

Katherine had to say yes, but how could she be sure? She hardly knew this man, this unknown father, any better than the girl. It didn’t matter, not anymore.

“Yes,” she said, then pounded
Maria
’s clasped hands onto the bed. “I’m sure of it.”

The vigor of her actions surprised both of them, and they lost their balance for a second.

“I wish I could tell you more about
Sam
’s family,”
Katherine
said after releasing the girl’s hands. “He has no other children—at least none that I know about. His mother is no longer living. His father, your grandfather, is in a nursing home. He has uncles. I know he has uncles.”

“What about you?”

“Me? I have a big family.”

“I mean, you and
Sam
. You like him, don’t you?”

“Of course I like him, but that’s not important right now. Does your stepfather know where you are?”

“Yes, he knows. After my mother died, he did the best he could. He tried to like me.”

“I’m sure he did like you.”

“It wasn’t easy for him, you know. He got me because of my mother, and then he lost her.”

“I’ll bet he was glad to have you.”

“He didn’t want me to come to
Seattle
alone, but I wanted to do this myself. I went to the police station when I got here. I thought I would meet him there, but I got scared. What if he didn’t want to see me? At the police station they said he spent a lot of time in the Donut Shop, so I got a job there. I thought if I could see him while he was working, I would know if I had done the right thing by coming. It didn’t work out the way I thought it would.”

Her voice thickened as though she had a cold, and she struggled with the words so much that
Katherine
wished she could help them come.

“I thought maybe he would just know. After my mother died, I would put on a pink dress she had given me and walk down to the post office and stand there and watch the people go in and out. I thought maybe my father would see me, would see what a pretty girl I was in that pink dress. It didn’t make any sense, but that’s what I did. It was stupid to think he would know me, but I had come so far.”

And could go no farther. She put her hands up to her mouth to stop the quivering of her lips, then brushed tears from her eyes, but there was too much for her hands to do.

“Don’t worry,”
Katherine
said. “We’ll work it out somehow.”

Brave words.

“Do you have a pink dress like the one you used to wear?”

“I brought some dresses,” the girl said. “I don’t know if there’s anything like that.”

“Let’s take a look,”
Katherine
said. “I’m sure it won’t matter, but it wouldn’t hurt to knock him off his feet just once.”