One last stop, p.36
One Last Stop, page 36
“Ready?” she asks.
“Don’t ask stupid questions,” August tells her. She’s thought about this more times than Jane can imagine.
“I just wanted—fuck, okay, stupid question, sorry—fuck, oh, fuck.”
August thinks about summertime in New Orleans, cups of ice and sugary syrup, satsuma and strawberry and honeysuckle dripping down her chin and sticking to her fingers, the familiar smother of steam and sweat. Jane rolls her hips, chasing the feeling, soft little moans falling out of her mouth faster and faster until she gives herself over. August’s fingernails dig into the flesh of her thighs right where they meet her hips, and she loves this, loves Jane, loves the velvety insides of Jane’s legs against her face, loves the way Jane feels on her lips and her tongue, loves how she moves in waves of desperate instinct without a hint of self-consciousness. August could learn how to live without breathing just to stay like this forever.
When it’s over—not over, not ever really over with them, but when Jane falls over the edge and can’t take any more—Jane kisses her sloppily, drunk and euphoric. She smells like August, and that’s a whole different revelation—her body and Jane’s and all the ways they can linger on each other.
There never seems to be a beginning or an end to this. Before, it was whatever circumstances demanded, but now it’s a mess of touching, one kiss blending into the next, an endless glide, a continuous tide. They both give and take, both have turns gasping and swearing and getting on their knees. It could be hours or days, August thinks, when she has anything in her brain still capable of thought. Jane pushes a pillow under August’s hips and hooks August’s knees over her own shoulders, and August goes under.
Jane draws her out again, deadly with her mouth and fingers. She moves like art. She finds every piece holding August together and works it loose until she feels like she’s spilling out of herself. August’s at sea, she’s clay in the hands of someone who knows how to make a life out of nothing, she’s a girl underneath a girl in a bed they both almost died to get to.
“That’s it,” Jane whispers when August can barely stand to hear the desperate, dizzy sounds coming out of her own mouth. She’s got one hand and her hips between August’s thighs, chasing blindly and relentlessly after whatever August’s body responds to. Jane fucks her like they’re the center of the universe. August is in the stars. “So gorgeous like this, angel, God, I love you—”
August comes again with her hands in Jane’s hair, eyes shut, body shaking, and it’s not just the touch. Down to her fingertips, singing through her synapses, it’s a love too big to be stopped, the unbearable, exquisite fullness of it. Impossible.
Later, when the sun is setting and the streetlights flickering on, August feels Jane’s pulse against her and imagines all the wires running over and under the street synced up with it. That isn’t how it works anymore. But it feels true anyway.
“You know what’s crazy?” Jane says. She looks like she might fall asleep soon.
“What?”
“You’re the most important person I’ve ever met,” she says. “And I should have never met you at all.”
* * *
Time, Myla explains to them later, isn’t perfect.
It’s not a straight line. It’s not neat and tidy. Things get crossed, overlap, splinter. People get lost. It’s not a precise science.
So, Jane didn’t go back to 1977. They opened a door, and August caught a glimpse through the crack, but Jane didn’t stay there. She didn’t magically snap into the exact moment of time she left August in either, though. She ended up in the general area of now, the way her socks end up in the general area of the laundry basket when she throws them across August’s bedroom.
The first few weeks are rocky. Jane’s happy in the way that Jane is often happy—unflappable, gregarious, laughing loud into the night—until suddenly she isn’t. She’s thankful to be there, but there are moments that startle her out of gratitude. Like when she thinks of someone she wants to tell about a horrible pun she makes over dinner and realizes that person is back in 1977, or when she lingers over the picture of Augie that August has added to the fridge. Almost every night, she lies half-naked in bed, running her fingers over the tattoos on her side, again and again.
“I should have died that night, and I didn’t,” Jane says one morning, leaning against August’s windowsill, looking down at the street. She says this a lot at first, like a meditation. “Either way, I was never going to see them again. At least this way, I get to live.”
She’s lucky, she says. She got to come back up from underground. She knew a lot of people who never got the chance.
Days go by, and inch by inch, she settles into her new life. And every day, it gets easier.
Though she loves stealing clothes from them all, Jane consents to a trip to H&M for a wardrobe of her own. In return, she convinces August to stop being so uptight about how many things she owns and get a damn bookshelf, which they start to slowly fill: books, photos, Jane’s cassette collection, August’s notebooks. Myla takes Jane to her favorite record store and starts helping her catch up on contemporary music. She really likes Mitski and Andre 3000.
She dedicates herself to learning everything about life in the twenty-first century and develops fixations on the most random modern inventions. Self-checkout stations at grocery stores freak her out, as do vape pens and almost any kind of social media, but she’s fascinated by the Chromecast and Taco Bell beefy five-layer burritos. She spends a whole week mainlining The O.C. on Netflix while August is at work and emerges with a soft spot for Ryan Atwood and a lot of questions about early 2000s fashion. She buys a dozen flavors of instant noodles at H-Mart and eats them in front of August’s laptop, talking back to mukbangs on YouTube.
They go to brunch with Niko and Myla, dinner with Wes and Isaiah. They spend weeks trying all the foods August never got a chance to bring her on the train—sticky pork ribs, steaming bowls of queso, massive boxes of pizza. Myla’s parents find out her roommate has a Chinese girlfriend and mail her a box of homemade almond cookies, and soon Jane’s on the phone with Myla’s mom every Sunday afternoon, helping her practice her Cantonese. August buys out a whole shelf of strawberry milkshake Pop-Tarts at Target, and they spend the rest of the day dancing around their bedroom in their underwear, shoving pink frosting and sprinkles into their mouths and spreading sugary kisses everywhere.
As soon as Jane gets a MetroCard, she starts spending long days just wandering around Chinatown, occupying a table at a dumpling shop on Mulberry or waiting in line to order bao at Fay Da, observing the old men playing cards in Columbus Park. Sometimes August goes with her and lets herself be led down Mott, but most of the time Jane goes alone. She always comes home late with her pockets full of sponge cake wrappers and plastic grocery bags heavy with oranges.
Jane becomes part of the apartment seamlessly, as if she’s never not been there. She’s the new reigning champ of Rolly Bangs, a fixture at Annie Depressant’s gigs. She and Niko spend hours discussing gender (Myla wants them to start a podcast, which leads to August explaining podcasts to Jane, and Jane becoming addicted to Call Your Girlfriend) and share jeans all the time. One night, August overhears them talking about how far strap-on technology has come since the ’70s and takes herself right back to bed. Five days of shipping and handling later, she wakes up deliciously sore and buys Niko a vegan donut as a thank-you.
Wes brings home a tattoo kit from work, and Jane lets him ink her on the living room couch, squeezing the blood out of August’s hand. He does two bridges in fine black lines on the inside of her arms, just above the creases of her elbows: the Manhattan Bridge on her left, and on her right, below the anchor, the Golden Gate.
It helps, they discover, for Jane to do things that make her feel connected to her old life. She cooks congee for breakfast like her dad used to, hangs out at Myla’s antique shop offering opinions on ’60s-era furniture, joins up with demonstrations, brings August with her to volunteer at HIV clinics. When she finds out that most people August’s age have never even heard of the UpStairs Lounge, she goes on a furious weeklong tear, posting handwritten fliers around the neighborhood until August shows her how to write a Medium post. It goes viral. She keeps writing.
The best nights are when they go dancing. Jane likes music, everything from gigs for half-decent local bands to loud clubs with flashing lights, and August goes along but stringently maintains that she won’t dance. It always lasts about half an hour, and suddenly she’s in the crowd under Jane’s hands, watching her move her hips and stomp her feet and smile up into the haze. She could stay hovering at the bar, but she’d miss this.
Myla pulls some strings she refuses to disclose and matter-of-factly comes home one afternoon with a fake ID for Jane, complete with a photo and a 1995 birthdate. Jane brings it when August takes her to fill out an application at Billy’s, and she starts as a line cook the next week, quickly falling into the rhythm of good-natured barbs and backhanded comments with Lucie and Winfield and the rest of the crew. Jerry gives her a good, long look the first time she steps up to the grill next to him, shakes his head, and gets back to his bacon.
Sometimes, when August walks home from the subway, she looks up at her own bedroom window from the street and thinks about hundreds of thousands of people walking past it. One square inch of a picture too big to see all at once. New York is infinite, but it is made up, in very small part, of the room behind the window with her and Jane’s books crowding the sill.
August scrapes together the leftovers of her last student loan to buy a queen-sized bed, mattress and box spring and all, and Jane looks like she’s in heaven when she flops onto it for the first time, euphoric enough to make August spring for the down comforter too. She’s realizing that she’d give Jane pretty much anything she wants. She finds she doesn’t really mind.
(Jane does finally make August’s dream come true: she assembles the bed. It’s exactly as devastating as August always imagined.)
The first night they sleep in it, August wakes up with Jane spooned up against her back, the broken-in fabric of one of Wes’s oversized T-shirts soft against her skin. She rolls over and burrows her nose into the dip between Jane’s neck and shoulder, breathing her in. She smells sweet, always, somehow, like sugar’s in her veins. Last week, August watched her shout down a guy with a racist sign in Times Square and then snap it in half over her knee. But it’s still true. Jane is spun sugar. A switchblade girl with a cotton-candy heart.
She stirs a little, stretching in the sheets, squinting at August in the early morning light.
“I’m never gonna get sick of this,” she mumbles, reaching out to palm across August’s shoulder, her chest.
August blushes and then blinks in surprise.
“Oh my God.”
“What?”
She leans in, dragging her fingers through the hair fanned out on the pillow. “You have a gray hair.”
“What?”
“Yeah, you have a gray hair! Didn’t you say your mom’s started super early?”
She’s wide awake suddenly, sitting up and throwing off the covers. “Oh, I wanna see!”
August follows her out to the bathroom, the tail of Jane’s T-shirt swinging around her bare thighs. There’s a bruise on the inside of one, rose petal soft. August left it there.
“It’s behind your right ear,” August says, watching Jane lean into the mirror to examine her reflection. “Yeah, look, right there.”
“Oh my God,” she says. “Oh my God. There it is. I didn’t have this before.”
And it’s that, more than anything—more than the new bed, more than the Pop-Tarts, more than all the times Jane has made her sigh into the pillow. It’s a gray hair that makes it feel real, finally. Jane’s here. She’s staying. She’s going to live beside August as long as they want, getting gray hairs and laugh lines, adopting a dog, becoming boring old married people who garden on weekends, a house with windchimes and an untamed yard and a pissed-off HOA. They get to have that.
August nudges up behind her at the sink, and Jane reaches back automatically, tangling their fingers together.
“Brush your teeth,” August whispers in her ear. “We have time for a round before breakfast.”
* * *
Later, August watches her.
There’s this thing Jane likes to do when August kneels over her. August will be a few feet down the mattress, straddling her waist or sitting on her heels between Jane’s legs, trying to work out where she wants to go first, and Jane will do this thing. She closes her eyes and stretches her arms out on either side of her, skims the back of her knuckles across the sheets, arches her back a little, moves her hips from side to side. Naked as anyone in the world has ever been with a silent, broad, closed-lipped smile on her face, wide open and reveling. Soaking it in like it’s the ultimate indulgence to be here in August’s bed and under August’s attention, unblushing, unafraid, content.
It makes August feel trusted and powerful and capable and admired—basically the whole list of things she’s spent twenty-four years trying to figure out how to feel. And so she has a thing she does in return, every single time: she spreads her hands over Jane’s skin and says, “I love you.”
“Mm-hmm, I know,” Jane says, eyes half-open to watch August’s hands on her, and that’s a familiar routine too. A happy, familiar routine.
* * *
A week after she graduates college, August gives Jane a file.
Jane frowns at it, finishing her swig of coffee over the kitchen sink.
“I figured out what I want to do,” August says.
“To celebrate your graduation?” Jane asks. “Or, like, with your life?”
She’s been agonizing over both a lot lately. It’s a fair question.
“Both, kind of.” August hops up to sit on the counter. “So, remember when I had my huge meltdown over trying to figure out my purpose in life, and you told me to trust myself?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about that. What I trust about myself, what I’m good at. What I like to do whether or not it’s marketable or whatever. And I’ve been fighting it for a long time, but the truth is: solving things, finding people. That’s my thing.”
Jane raises an eyebrow. She’s lovely underneath the kitchen lighting, handsome and morning-rumpled. August doesn’t think she’ll ever stop feeling lucky to see it.
“Finding people?”
“I found you,” August says, brushing her fingertips under Jane’s chin. “I helped find Augie.”
“So, you want to be … a private investigator?”
“Kind of,” August says. She hops down and starts pacing the kitchen, talking fast. “It’s like … like when you see a viral tweet where one person is like, ‘Here’s a picture of this girl I was best friends with for three days on a Carnival cruise, I only remember her first name, Twitter, do your thing,’ and three days later it has, like, a hundred thousand retweets and someone manages to find this random person based off almost no information and help two people reunite. People could hire me to do that.”
After a long beat, Jane says, “I understood almost nothing you just said.”
Right. These days, August occasionally forgets Jane grew up on eight-tracks and landlines.
“Basically,” August says, “if someone has a long-lost relative they want to know more about, or a half sibling they never knew existed until their dad got drunk and told them at Thanksgiving, or they want to find that friend from second grade who they only halfway remember … I could do that. I’m great at that. It doesn’t have to be my whole job—I still have Billy’s. But I could do this too. And I think, maybe, it can be a good thing. I could make a lot of people happy. Or … at least give them some closure.”
Jane sets her mug down in the sink and nudges between August’s legs to kiss her on the cheek.
“That’s an incredible idea, baby,” she says, drawing back. She points to the file on the counter. “So, what’s this?”
“Okay, so. That. Is kind of … my first attempt at this finding people thing. And I want to say, before you open it, there’s absolutely no pressure. I don’t want you to feel like you have to do anything, especially not before you’re ready.” Jane picks up the folder and flips it open. “But…”
August watches her face shift as she leafs through the pages. She slides a photo out from its paper clip to examine it more closely.
“Is this—?”
“That’s your sister,” August says, voice only a little shaky. “Betty. She still lives in the Bay area. She has three kids—two boys, one girl. That’s her at her oldest son’s wedding. And that’s … that’s her son’s husband.”
“Oh my God.” She paces over to one of the Eames chairs, sitting gingerly on the edge. “August.”
“I found your other sister too,” August says, hopping down to follow her. She kneels between Jane’s bare feet. “And your parents … your parents are alive.”
Jane stares down at the file, mouth slack, eyes distant. “They’re alive.”
“I know.” August squeezes her knee. “It’s a lot. And I’m sorry if it’s too much. I know you’re still getting used to all this. But … I know you. I can see how much you miss them. And I know what it did to my mom to never know. So, if you think you could do it … well, we were talking about a post-grad road trip.”
Jane looks up at her, finally. Her eyes are wet, but she doesn’t look upset. Nervous, maybe. Overwhelmed. But not angry.
“What would I even say to them? How could I explain this?”
“I don’t know. That’s up to you. You could … you could tell them that you’re Biyu’s granddaughter. You could come up with a story for what happened. Or you … you could tell them the truth and see where that gets you.”
She thinks about it for a long, quiet breath, tracing the shape of her sister with a finger. It’s been fifty years since they saw each other.
“And you’ll come with me?”
