Fingerprints of You (6 page)

“Rushmore,” I said as I waved her smoke away from my face.

“I need to see Mount Rushmore,” she said. “Shit.”

It was hard to imagine what it would be like to have stayed in one place growing up, to know the same town and the same group of people for so many years that things became predictable. Stella never let us stay in one place for longer than two or three years before she’d pick a new destination and announce we were moving again. I never got a say about where we went: Each uprooting was always nonnegotiable. I figured I would be a different kind of mother than Stella, and I thought about the way she was still trying to control me even though I would be a mother myself soon. But then I heard Emmy breathe in wet and heavy, and I realized she was crying, so I took her hand and leaned over to rest my head on her shoulder.

“Did you hear about Bobby Elder?” she asked when she pulled away. She leaned down to put the flask on the floor.

I nodded and said, “Yeah, I heard,” because everyone in Morgantown had heard about Bobby Elder by then. Emmy and I just hadn’t talked about it yet.

Bobby was a twenty-three-year-old kid who’d worked on cars down at Ervin’s Auto Repair on Kingwood Street and gotten killed by a roadside bomb near Kabul a week earlier. The local paper did a feature story about his family and his childhood, about how he was supposed to play football at WVU but lost his scholarship after a knee injury. He joined the Army Reserve instead to help pay his tuition. He wasn’t a soldier, the paper wrote. He was a kid. A linebacker and a mechanic. He was a college student who was studying physical therapy. It was the most miserable thing Morgantown had been hit with in a while, and everyone was talking about it except for me and Emmy because I wasn’t sure what to say to her about Bobby Elder.

“He was, like . . .” She turned her head away from me, so I could barely hear her say “so young.”

I nodded and looked at the shadows being thrown around at our feet by the porch light on the wall behind us. It had rained that afternoon, so the air was thick with the smell of mud and bugs and water, and I couldn’t catch my breath. I couldn’t look at Emmy either, sitting next to me feeling so shitty and depressed. It made me crazy because I didn’t have the words to turn the conversation into something good.

“My dad and Bobby were at Camp Dawson together.” She turned her face to look at me. “I think he helped my mom out once when her car broke down on Interstate Sixty-eight.”

We sat there for a while, but eventually I found the nerve
to ask her if she’d heard from her dad since he left.

“Just an e-mail,” she said as she ashed her cigarette on the wood-slatted floor of the porch.

“How’d he sound?” I wanted her to tell me that he sounded good. I wanted her to say he made some jokes and wrote about how the war wasn’t really that bad after all. I wanted her to say the e-mails were light and cool and easy, just like I remembered her dad being.

“Hot,” she said instead. Emmy took a long, hard drag from her smoke. “He sounded hot and thirsty. I guess there’s a lot of sand.”

Her dad was a thick-necked man I’d met a handful of times when I’d gone to her house to avoid Stella after she found out about the baby. He was a sunburned, T-shirt-wearing kind of man who smelled like wood chips and drank Budweiser after he got home from work at the landscaping company. He liked to watch
Dirty Jobs
and
This Old House
and another show about fishermen in Alaska risking their lives to catch crab in the Bering Sea. He also liked to tell knock-knock jokes that weren’t very good. I remember him saying once that Emmy’s mom’s homemade spaghetti sauce was the best he had ever eaten.

“Ever,” he said, and then he winked at me over his bottle of beer as he raised it to his lips.

“I don’t think he’ll be able to get to a computer very often,” Emmy said, and she tossed the cigarette over the railing. “Dylan wants to write a poem about it for the spring issue of the lit mag.” The butt hit the ground and sizzled on the damp grass. “He wants to title it ‘Sandstorms.’”

My stomach got all fluttery then, and I wondered if the baby could hear me and Emmy talking about the things that were closing in around us.

“What if he never comes back, Lemon?” Emmy asked. “What if he’s gone? I can’t stay here for the rest of my life and take care of my mom and my sister.”

And she was right, she couldn’t get stuck in Morgantown, stagnant and sad forever, just like I couldn’t get stuck inside Stella’s world, running and restless, endlessly unhinged.

“I’m going to take you somewhere amazing,” I told her, and I took her hand and lowered our entwined fingers to my knee. “We’re going to take a trip over Christmas break, and when we get back you’ll be happy again,” I promised. “And I bet your dad will be home safe and sound soon, Emmy,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure he was ever coming back, wasn’t sure safe and sound was really ever possible.

My first official prenatal appointment was scheduled for that Monday, and Stella took off from work early and picked me up from school so we could go to the hospital for the exam.

“If you go, I go,” Stella said, which I was glad for. I always got nervous around doctors. I think it was the white coats: The clean, stiff fabric made me feel like they were hiding something. The white coats and the smell of all that sanitation.

Dr. Stines asked a ton of questions about my medical history and decided to do an ultrasound to check for the heartbeat of the baby and to figure out exactly when my due date was. I lay on a table, eyes closed while the technician did the test, and all the while Stella stood next to the bed waiting for good news or bad, we weren’t sure yet.

The tech tilted the monitor toward us. “Look.”

And then the image showed up on the screen, and nothing mattered after that because I finally saw the thing I’d been so worried about, this tiny lump of shadow flickering on the
monitor. The technician was talking about the fetal heart rate and the amniotic fluid volume, but all I could think of was this child I’d made in a tattoo parlor with a guy I’d probably never see again. This child who would be with me forever.

I thought of Johnny Drinko, of how he’d probably never thought of me again after that day at the shop and how his life was probably no different now than it was before. And then I thought of my own dad, a man I’d never met, living somewhere far away in California, not thinking of me or Stella or the little heartbeat thumping in my stomach.

But mostly I thought of my mother doing the same thing over seventeen years earlier all the way in San Francisco. I reached over and took her hand, and in the dark like that it was easy to imagine her just like me, laid out on a table watching the screen as her entire life changed, as she realized, just like I did, that nothing would ever be the same again. For her it was the moment that the vision of her life and what she thought she would become transformed into an unrecognizable image.

I cocked my head a little and looked her up and down in her tight blue jeans, her low-cut shirt and high-heeled boots. I remembered our shitty house with the stained carpet and the worn-out couch waiting for us on the other side of town, and I realized I’d spent most of my childhood being angry at her for making us live like that, for not having enough money for us to rent a nicer home, and for refusing to pick a place to settle down in. I looked at Stella’s face, the wrinkles and tired eyes camouflaged by the darkness of the room, and I wondered if she would go back if she could, wondered what she would change and how things would go the second time around if she had a chance to fix the choices she regretted.

And before we left I found out that I would be having a baby the first week of July. Just like that. A person unlike all the other people who had drifted in and out of my life with my mother. A person who would stay. A child who would be bound to me in the same way I was bound to Stella.

W
E GOT OUT OF SCHOOL EARLY
the day before Thanksgiving, so Emmy and I sat on the porch at my house, enjoying the freedom of our mothers being stuck at work. Stella was at Simon’s studio taking calls and organizing his portfolio, while Emmy’s mom served coffee at a diner near the mall. We complained about the weather turning too cold too fast and about finals just around the corner and about our mothers and the way they still treated us like children.

“I miss my dad,” Emmy said as she fingered her four-leaf-clover necklace. “Mom never paid as much attention to me and Margie before he left. It’s like she’s worried if she’s not careful, we’ll up and disappear too.”

She was smoking, and I was watching the road in front of our house where the neighborhood kids played: two brothers on dirt bikes in matching black sweatshirts, a little sister who
couldn’t keep up on her red and white scooter as her brothers sped out of view. On the other side of the street a woman in slippers walked to her mailbox and yelled for her dog, a honey-colored mutt that had jetted next door to rummage through a pile of trash bags tossed on the lawn.

“I swear if she asks me one more time if Dylan and I are having sex, I’m going to say yes.” Emmy flicked her butt over the railing and pulled her hands into the sleeves of her shirt, shivering. “I can’t imagine why she keeps asking.”

“Because your best friend’s knocked up and she wants to make sure I’m not rubbing off on you,” I told her. “Hello.”

She nodded, reached into her purse, and lit another cigarette as we talked about our trip, picking the departure and return dates as if everything was planned even though neither of us had bought a ticket and neither of us had told our mothers yet. The semester started the second week of January, so if we left two days after Christmas, we’d have ten days out of town, which sounded like a lifetime as we sat on the porch.

She said, “Let’s go west,” and I said, “Obviously.”

“I hear Lake Michigan’s pretty badass,” she told me.

“In the winter? Way too cold,” I said, shaking my head. “Plus, I want to see the Mississippi River.”

“Fair enough. What about those big heads?” she asked. “I think they’re in Nevada?”

But I was pretty sure they were carved in a mountainside somewhere in South Dakota, and besides, even though I hadn’t told Emmy yet, I was hoping we’d head all the way to California.

“We should pick a day, a time that we both have to tell our mothers by, a deadline,” she suggested, since we still hadn’t figured out how to talk Stella and her mom into letting us go.

“It doesn’t matter when I tell her,” I said. “Stella will have a shit fit. She’ll try to stop us. I want to tell her when Simon’s around,” I said, thinking he could balance out her anger with all that calmness he always had. “And I think I’ll buy the bus ticket first. If I use my own money, she won’t be able to do anything about it,” I said, because in addition to my allowance and the fives I’d been sneaking from her purse, Simon had started slipping me ten-dollar bills after he found out about the baby, and I hadn’t spent a dime of it, just in case.