One last stop, p.14
One Last Stop, page 14
The detective side of August contemplates a follow-up question, but the side of her that wants to live to see tomorrow decides against it.
“All right,” August says, not looking up from her notepad. “A restaurant in Chinatown that serves dumplings. There are only, like … five million of those.”
“Sorry,” Jane says, returning to her to-go box. “You can narrow it down to the ones that were open in the ’70s?”
“Sure, assuming they’re still operating, and have employment records going back that far, I could maybe get a name for that employee and maybe track her down and maybe she’ll know something.” August puts her pencil down, looks at Jane finally—who is staring at her with cheeks stuffed full of dumpling and a startled expression—and prays she survives this. “Or, we could get you to remember this girl’s name.”
“How’ll we do that?” Jane says through a mouthful of pork and dough.
August looks at her puffy cheeks and swoopy hair and blows right through every piece of mental caution tape to say, “Kiss me.”
Jane chokes.
“You—” Jane coughs, forcing it down. “You want me to kiss you again?”
“Here’s the thing,” August says. She’s calm. She’s totally calm, just doing casework. It doesn’t mean anything. “It’s April. The Q shuts down in September. We’re running out of time. And the other day—when we kissed—that worked. It brought back something big. So, I think—”
“You think if you kiss me, it’ll bring this girl back like it brought back Jenny?”
“Yeah. So. Let’s…” August thinks back to what they said last time. “Do it for research.”
“Okay,” Jane says, expression unreadable. “For research.”
She bundles her takeout back into its bag, and August stands and throws her hair over her shoulder. She can do this. Start with what you know and work from there. August knows this can work.
“So,” August says, “tell me what to do.”
A beat. Jane looks up at her, brow furrowed. Then her face smooths out, and a smile plays at the corner of her mouth, the one with the dimple.
“Okay,” she says, and she spreads her legs apart a few inches, gesturing loosely for August to sit. “Get down here.”
Shit. August supposes she did ask for it.
August settles herself on one of Jane’s thighs and tucks her legs between them, her feet skimming the floor between Jane’s sneakers. If she’s being honest, she’s imagined more than once, more than a few times, what Jane’s thighs feel like. They’re strong and firm, sturdier than they look, but August doesn’t have a chance to feel anything about it before Jane’s fingertips are nudging her chin up to look at her.
“Is this okay?” Jane asks. Her hand squeezes the curve of August’s hip, holding her in place.
August looks at her, letting her gaze drop to Jane’s lips. That’s the whole point of this. It’s mechanics. “Yeah. Is this how you remember it?”
“Kind of,” she says. And, “Pull my hair.”
For a few ringing seconds, August imagines herself melting onto the floor of the train like the ghosts of a million spilled subway slushies and dropped ice cream cones.
Completely under control.
She pushes her fingers into Jane’s short hair, scraping her nails across the scalp before she closes them on a fistful and tugs.
“Like that?”
Jane releases a short breath. “Harder.”
August does as she’s told, and Jane makes another sound, one deep in her throat, which August assumes is a good sign.
“Now…” Jane says. She’s looking at August’s mouth, eyes dark as the pit at a punk show. “When I kiss you, bite.”
And before August can ask what she means, Jane closes the space between them.
The kiss is … different this time. Hotter, somehow, even though it’s not real. It’s not real, August recites in her head as she tries to pretend there’s absolutely anything academic about the way her mouth drops open at the press of Jane’s lips, anything scientifically impartial about the way she pulls harder at Jane’s hair and sinks into it, letting Jane drink her in.
Jane’s words come back to her, syrupy sweet and slow, bite, and so she sucks Jane’s bottom lip between hers and digs her teeth in. She hears her sharp inhale, feels Jane’s hand tighten in the fabric of her shirt, and thinks of it as progress. Results. She moves the way she imagines the girl Jane remembers would have moved, tries to give her the memory with her mouth—bites harder, tugs at her lip, runs her tongue over it.
It lasts only a minute or two, but it feels like a year lost in Jane’s hair and Jane’s lips and Jane’s past, Jane’s hands fisting in her curls, Jane’s thigh warm and steady under her, Jane for hours, Jane for days. It pulls like an undertow, and the case is up on the surface, and August is trying to stay there too.
When they break apart, August’s glasses are crooked and smudged, and an old woman is staring disapprovingly at them from across the aisle.
“You got a problem?” Jane says, arm slinging protectively across August’s shoulders.
The woman says nothing and returns to her newspaper.
“Mingxia,” Jane says, turning to August. “That was her name. Mingxia. I took her back to my place in Prospect Heights on … Underhill Avenue. It was a brownstone. I had the second floor. That was the first place I lived in New York.”
August writes down the street name and the playground across the street and the nearest intersection and spends an afternoon pulling ownership records on every brownstone on the block, calling landlords until she finds the son of one who remembers a Chinese American woman renting the second floor when he was a kid.
The kiss reveals: Jane moved to New York in February 1975.
And so, it becomes another thing they do. The food and the songs and the old articles and, now, the kisses.
There are certain crucial bits of information they still don’t have—like Jane’s childhood, or her infuriatingly elusive birth certificate, or the event that got Jane stuck in the first place—but there’s no way to predict what memory might cause a chain reaction leading to something important.
The kisses are strictly for evidence gathering. August knows this. August is absolutely, 100 percent clear on this. She’s kissing Jane, but Jane is kissing Jenny, Molly, April, Niama, Maria, Beth, Mary Frances, Mingxia. It’s not about her and Jane, at all.
“Kiss me slow,” Jane says, grinning on a Tuesday afternoon, her sleeves rolled up enticingly, and it’s still not about them.
They kiss under the dappled sunlight of the Brighton Beach Station, strawberry ice cream on their tongues, and Jane remembers summer 1974, a month crashing with an old friend named Simone who’d moved to Virginia Beach, whose cat absolutely refused to leave them alone in bed. They kiss with August’s earbuds split between them playing Patti Smith, and Jane remembers autumn 1975, a bass player named Alice who left lipstick stains on her neck in the bathroom of CBGB. They kiss at midnight in a dark tunnel, and Jane remembers New Year’s Eve 1977, and Mina, who tattooed the vermilion bird on her shoulder.
August learns all this, but she also learns that Jane likes to be kissed every kind of way: like a secret, like a fistfight, like candy, like a house fire. She learns Jane can make her sigh and forget her own name until it all blurs together, past and present, the two of them on Manhattan balconies and in damp New Orleans barrooms and the candy aisle of a convenience store in Los Angeles. Jane’s kissed a girl in every corner of the country, and pretty soon, August feels like she has too.
For research.
It’s not like kissing is all August does—the time she spends thinking about the kisses and chasing down leads from the kisses when she’s not actually having the kisses notwithstanding. It’s been three weeks since she worked a single shift. She does have to pay rent, eventually, and so to stave off absolute bankruptcy, she finally calls Billy’s and, with some coughing and begging, convinces Lucie to put her on the schedule.
“Sweet Jesus, she lives,” Winfield says, pretending to faint dramatically over the counter when August returns to the bar.
“You literally saw me last week.” August brushes past him to clock in.
“Was that you?” Winfield asks, gathering himself back up and beginning to change the coffee filter. “Or was that some girl who looked like you but has not been bedridden for weeks like you told Lucie you were?”
“I was feeling better that day,” August says. She turns to see Winfield’s skeptical look. “What? Did you want me to get Billy’s shut down for giving mono to all the customers in tables fifteen through twenty-two?”
“Mm-hmm. Okay. Well. Speaking of. You missed the big news last week.”
“Is Jerry’s old ass finally retiring?”
“No, but he might have to now.”
August whips her head around. “What? Why?”
Winfield turns wordlessly, humming a few notes of a funeral dirge as he heads toward the kitchen and Lucie fills his place behind the bar.
She looks … rough. One of her typically flawless acrylics is broken, and her hair is falling out of its scraped-back ponytail. She shoots August a fleeting glare before setting a small jar down on the counter.
“If you’re not sick, I don’t care,” she says. She jabs a finger toward the jar. “If you are, take this. Three spoonfuls. You’ll feel better.”
August eyes the jar. “Is that—?”
“Onion and honey. Old recipe. Just take it.”
Even from three feet down the bar, it smells lethal, but August is not in a position to talk back to Lucie, so she tucks the jar into her apron and asks, “What’s going on? What’d I miss?”
Lucie sniffs, picking up a rag and descending upon a spot of syrup on the counter, and says, “Billy’s is closing.”
August, who was in the process of sliding a handful of straws into her pocket, misses and scatters them all over the floor.
“What? When? Why?”
“So many questions for someone who does not come to work,” Lucie tuts.
“I—”
“Landlord is doubling rent at the end of the year,” she says. She’s still scrubbing away at the counter like she doesn’t care, but her eyeliner is smudged and there’s a slight shake in her hands. She’s not taking this well. August feels like a dick for missing it. “Billy can’t afford it. We close in December.”
“That’s—Billy’s can’t close.” The idea of Billy’s boarded up—or worse, gone the way of so many po’boy joints and corner stores August frequented growing up in New Orleans, made over into IHOPs and overpriced boutique gyms—is sacrilege. Not here, not a place that has been open since 1976, not somewhere Jane loved too. “What if he—has he asked if the landlord will sell it to him?”
“Yeah,” Winfield says, popping up in the kitchen window, “but unless you got a hundred grand to make up the loan the bank won’t give Billy, this shit is about to become an organic juice bar in six to eight months.”
“So that’s it?” August asks. “It’s just over?”
“That is how gentrification works, yeah.” Winfield shoves a massive plate of pancakes into the window. “Lucie, these are yours. August, table sixteen looks ready to pop off, you better get in there.”
When August clocks out eight hours later, she finds herself back on the Q, looking at Jane, who’s curled up reading a book. She traded the old Watership a couple of weeks ago to some fan of first editions and is now reading a battered Judy Blume. She loves it earnestly. For a punk who knows how to fight, she seems to love everything earnestly.
“Hey, Coffee Girl,” Jane says when she sees her. “Anything new today?”
August thinks of Billy’s. Jane deserves to know. But she’s smiling, and August doesn’t want her to stop smiling, so she decides not to tell her. Not today.
Maybe it’s selfish, or maybe it’s for Jane. It’s getting harder to tell which is which.
Instead, she folds herself into the seat beside her and hands over a sandwich wrapped twice in aluminum foil so the yolk and syrup and sauce can’t leak out.
“A Su Special,” August says.
“God,” Jane groans. “I’m so jealous you get to have these all the time.”
August nudges an elbow into her ribs. “Did you kiss any girls who worked at Billy’s?”
Jane rips off a bit of foil, eyes sparkling.
“You know what?” she says. “I sure did.”
* * *
“I’m sorry, what are you saying?”
The BC offices are small, crammed up against the side of a lecture hall. A woman files her nails at reception. The sludgy rain half-heartedly tests the limits of the old windows, looking the way August’s insides feel: sloshy and apprehensive of what’s happening.
The counselor keeps clacking away on her keyboard.
Stop two on August’s apology tour: figuring out if she’s screwed for this semester. She’s not, it turns out, since she was able to make up the two midterms she missed. She expected to have to grovel, fake a dead relative or something, anything but this: a printed-out transcript on the desk in front of her, almost every little box of requirements checked off.
“I’m surprised you didn’t know,” she says. “Your GPA is great. Slipping a little lately, obviously, but now that you’re back on track, you’ll be fine. More than fine. Most students who perform this well—especially ones who have been enrolled for as many years as you have—” At this, she glances over her cat-eye glasses at August. “Well, you’re usually the ones banging down my damn door all semester asking when you can complete your degree.”
“So my degree is … complete?”
“Almost,” the counselor says. “You’ve got your capstone and a couple of electives left. But you can finish those in the fall.” She finishes typing and turns toward August. “Pull it together for this next month, and you can graduate after one more semester.”
August blinks at her a few times.
“Graduate, like … be done. With college.”
She eyes August dubiously. “Most people are happier to hear this.”
Ten minutes later, August is standing outside under a shabby overhang, watching her transcript slowly wilt in the humidity.
She’s been deliberately not doing the math on her credits, caught in anxiety limbo between another student loan and the inevitable push off the ledge into adulthood. This is the ledge, she guesses. And the push. She feels like a cartoon character in midair, looking down to see the desert floor and a jacuzzi full of TNT five hundred feet below her.
What the fuck is she supposed to do?
She could call her mom, but her mother has only lived in one place, only ever wanted one thing. It’s easy to know who you are when you chose once and never changed your mind.
There’s this feeling August has had everywhere she’s ever lived, like she’s not really there. Like it’s all happening in a dream. She walks down the street, and it’s like she’s floating a few inches off the pavement, never rooted down. She touches things, a canister of sugar at a coffee shop, or the post of a street sign warm from the afternoon sun, and it feels like she hasn’t touched anything at all, like it’s all a place she lives in concept. She’s just out here, shoes untied, hair a mess, no idea where she’s going, scraping her knees and not bleeding.
So maybe that’s why, instead of calling her mom, or crawling home to some blunt truth from Myla or cryptic encouragement from Niko, she finds herself stepping onto the Q. At least here she knows where she is. Time, place, person.
“You look like you saw a ghost,” Jane says. She shimmies her shoulders, jabbing a finger gun in August’s direction. She scored a baseball cap from a seventh grader last week, and she’s wearing it backward today. August pencils in thirty minutes between homework and public records to scream about it. “Get it?”
“You’re hilarious.”
Jane pulls a face. “Okay, but really. What’s up with you?”
“I found out I, uh.” She thinks of her transcript, inevitable, soggy, and folded up in the pocket of her raincoat. “I can graduate next semester, if I want.”
“Oh, hey, that’s great!” she says. “You’ve been in school forever!”
“Yeah, exactly,” August says. “Forever. As in, it’s the only thing I know how to do.”
“That’s not true,” Jane says. “You know how to do tons of things.”
“I know logistically how to perform some tasks,” August tells her, squeezing her eyes shut. That dynamite hot tub is starting to sound very appealing. “I don’t know how to have something that I do, every day, like as an adult who does a thing. It’s nuts that we all start out having these vague ideas of what we like to do, hobbies, interests, and then one day everybody has their thing, you know? They used to just be a person and now they’re a—an architect, or a banker, or a lawyer, or—or a serial killer who makes jewelry out of human teeth. Like, things. That they do. That they are. What if there’s not that thing for me, Jane, I mean, what if I’ve never wanted to be anything other than just an August? What if that’s all there is for me? What if Billy’s closes and nobody else will hire me? What if I get out there and end up realizing there’s not a dream for me, or a purpose, or anything—”
“Okay,” Jane says, cutting her off. “Okay, come on.”
When August opens her eyes, Jane’s standing in front of her, hand outstretched.
“Let’s go.”
“Go where?” August says, even as she grabs on. Immediately, she’s pulled toward the back of the car, tripping over her feet. “I’m trying to have a nervous breakdown here.”
“Yeah, exactly,” Jane says. They’re at the emergency exit, and Jane reaches for the door handle.
“Oh my God, what are you doing?”
“I’m gonna show you my favorite thing to do when I feel like I’m gonna lose it down here,” Jane says. “All you gotta do is keep up.”
“Why do I feel like I’m about to take my life into my own hands?”
“Because you should,” Jane says easily. She winks as if she’s sealing August’s fate in an envelope with a kiss. “But I promise you’ll be okay. Do you trust me?”
