One Last Stop, page 10
“Oh!” he says, sounding genuinely surprised. Sometimes August wishes she could know for even a second what goes on in Niko’s head. “Yeah, no, I don’t think so.”
Her heart does an uncomfortable sort of parkour maneuver. “You—you don’t? You’re sure?”
“Mostly,” he says. “She’s really, like, present. Solid. She’s not a ghost. She’s corporeal. Do you think I should try the seitan this time?”
August blows straight past his question. “So, she’s an alive person?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” he says. The crystals around his neck bounce against his chest as he walks. “Yeah, I’m gonna do the seitan.”
“Then what is she?”
“She’s alive,” he says. “But … also not? I don’t think she’s dead. She’s sort of … in between. Not here, not on the other side. She feels really … distant, like not totally rooted here and now. Except when she touched you, then she felt super here. Which is interesting.”
“Is—is there any other way to test this?”
“Not that I know of,” Niko says. “Sorry, babe, it’s not really an exact science. Ooh. Maybe I should do the shrimp instead.”
Right. Not an exact science. This is why August has never consulted a psychic before. Her mom always said, you can’t start with guesses. The first thing she learned from her: start with what you absolutely know.
She knows … Jane was in 1976, and Jane is here. Always here, on the Q, so maybe …
The first time August met Jane, she fell in love with her for a few minutes, and then stepped off the train. That’s the way it happens on the subway—you lock eyes with someone, you imagine a life from one stop to the next, and you go back to your day as if the person you loved in between doesn’t exist anywhere but on that train. As if they never could be anywhere else.
Maybe, with Jane on the Q, it’s actually true.
Maybe the Q is the answer.
Maybe the Q is where August should start.
She glances over to the opposite platform, and she can just make out the arrival board. Brooklyn-bound Q, incoming in two minutes.
“Oh,” August says. It’s punched out of her, involuntary. “Oh, fuck, why didn’t I think of it before?”
“I know,” Niko says, “shrimp, right?”
“No, I—” She spins around, lunging for the stairs, shouting over her shoulder. “Go get your taco, I’ll meet you at home, I—I have an idea!”
She loses sight of Niko as she throws herself downstairs, skittering into a trash can and sending a pizza box flying. There’s one way she can prove totally, definitively, that Jane is more than she seems. That this isn’t in her head.
August knows this route. She memorized it before she started taking it, determined to understand. It’s a two-minute ride between Canal and Prince, and Jane left in the opposite direction. There’s no physical way Jane can be on the next train to pull up, even if she ran for it. She should still be on her way through Manhattan. If she’s on this train, then August knows.
One minute.
August is alone. It’s nearly four in the morning.
The rush of the train comes, headlights spilling onto the toes of her sneakers.
The brakes grind, and August pictures the night fifty feet above, the universe watching as she tries to piece together one tiny corner of its mystery. She stares down at her shoes, at the yellow paint and chewed-up gum on the concrete, and tries to think about nothing but the place where her feet touch the ground, the absolute certainty of it. That’s real.
She feels unbelievably small. She feels like this is the biggest thing that’s ever happened in her entire life.
She lets the train cruise past until it coasts to a stop. It doesn’t matter if she chases down a particular car. The outcome will be the same.
August steps through the doors.
And there she is.
Jane looks exactly the same—jacket slouched, backpack at her side, one shoe coming untied. But the train is different. The last one was newer, with long, smooth blue benches and a ticker of stops along the top next to the advertisements. This one is older, the floors dustier, the seats a mixture of faded orange and yellow. It doesn’t make any sense, but here she is. She looks as confused to see August as August is to see her.
“When I said not to be a stranger,” Jane says, “I didn’t think you’d be back quite so soon.”
They’re the only two people in the car. Maybe they’re the only two people alive.
Maybe one of them isn’t alive at all.
This is it, then. Jane did the impossible. She is, whatever she is, impossible.
August crosses over to her and sits down as the train sways back into motion, carrying them toward Coney Island. She wonders if Jane has ever, even once, gotten out at the end of the line and sunk her feet into the water.
August turns to her, and Jane’s looking back.
There’s always been a schematic in August’s head of how things are supposed to be. Her whole life, she managed the noise and buzz and creeping dread in her brain by mapping things out, telling herself that if she looked hard enough, she’d find an explanation for everything. But here they are, looking at each other across the steady delineation of things August understands, watching the line blur.
“Can I ask you something?” August says. Her hand fidgets up to her ear, tucking her hair back. “It’s—uh. It might sound weird.”
Jane eyes her. Maybe she thinks August is going to ask her out again. Jane’s beautiful, always improbably beautiful under the subway fluorescents, but a date is the last thing on August’s mind.
“Yeah,” Jane says. “Of course.”
August curls her hands into fists in her lap. “How old are you?”
Jane laughs softly, relief flashing in her eyes. “Easy. Twenty-four.”
Okay. August can work with that.
“Do you…” She takes a breath. “So what year were you born, then?”
And—
It takes only a second, a breath, but something passes over Jane’s face like the headlights of a passing car over a bedroom wall at night, gone as soon as it was there. Jane settles into her usual sly smile. August never considered how much of a deflection that smile was.
“Why’re you asking?”
“Well,” August says carefully. She’s watching Jane, and Jane is watching her, and she can feel this moment opening up like a manhole beneath them, waiting for them to drop. “I’m twenty-three. You should have been born about a year before me.”
Jane stiffens, unreadable. “Right.”
“So,” August says. She braces herself. “So that’s … that’s 1995.”
Jane’s smile flickers out, and August swears a fluorescent light above them dims too.
“What?”
“I was born in 1996, so you should have been born in 1995,” August tells her. “But you weren’t, were you?”
The sleeve of Jane’s jacket has ridden up on one side, and she’s tracing the characters above her elbow, digging her fingertips in so the color flows out of her skin under the ink.
“Okay,” she says, trying on a different smile, her eyes dropping to the floor. “You’re fucking with me. I get it. You’re very cute and funny.”
“Jane, what year were you born?”
“I said I got it, August.”
“Jane—”
“Look,” she says, and when her eyes flash up, it’s there, the thing August glimpsed before—anger, fear. She was half-expecting Jane to laugh it off, like she does her cassette player and her backpack full of years. She doesn’t. “I know something’s … wrong with me. But you don’t have to fuck with me, okay?”
She doesn’t know. How can she not know?
It’s the first time Jane’s let it show, her uncertainty, and the lines of her are filled in a little more. She was this dream girl, too good to be true, but she’s real, finally, as real as August’s sneakers on the subway platform. Lost. That August can understand.
“Jane,” August says carefully. “I’m not fucking with you.”
She pulls out the photo, unfolds it, smooths out the crease down the middle. She shows it to Jane—the washed-out, yellow-tinted booths, the faded neon of the sign above the to-go counter. Jane’s smile, frozen in time.
“That’s you, right?”
It comes over Jane in a breathless rush, like the train blowing August’s hair back as it hurtles into the station.
“Yeah … yeah, that’s me,” Jane says. Her hands only shake a little when she takes the photo. “I told you. I got a job there right after it opened.”
“Jane.” The train trundles on. The word is almost too quiet to be heard over the noise. “This photo was taken in 1976.”
“That sounds right,” she says distantly. She’s stopped tracing the tattoo on her arm—instead tracing the shape of her chin in the photo. August wonders what the distance is between the person in front of her and the one in the photo. Decades. No time at all. “I moved here a couple of years ago.”
“Do you know what year?”
“God, probably.…’75?”
August concentrates on keeping her face and voice calm, like she’s talking to someone on a ledge. “Okay. I’m gonna ask you something. I swear to God, I am not fucking with you. Try to hear me out. Do you remember the last time you weren’t on this train?”
“August…”
“Please. Just try to remember.”
She looks up at August. Her eyes are shining, wet.
“I—” she starts. “I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s—it’s blurry. It’s all blurry. As far back as I can remember. I know I—I worked at Billy’s. 1976. That’s the last thing I remember, and I only know because you reminded me. You—you brought that back, I guess.” Her usual confidence is gone, a shaky, panicked girl in its place. “I told you, I think, um. Something’s wrong with me.”
August settles a hand over Jane’s wrist, bringing the photo down into her lap. She’s never touched her like this before. She’s never had the nerve before. She’s never ruined somebody’s life before.
“Okay,” August says. “It’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with you. But I think something happened to you. And I think you’ve been stuck on this train for a long time. Like, a really long time.”
“How long?”
“Um. About forty-five years.”
August waits for her to laugh, cry, cuss her out, have some kind of meltdown. Instead, she reaches for a pole and pulls herself to her feet, her balance practiced and sure even as the train takes a curve.
When she turns to August, her jaw is set, her gaze steady and dark. She’s heartbreakingly gorgeous, even now. Especially now: squared up to the universe.
“That’s a long fucking time, huh?” she says flatly.
“What, um,” August attempts. “What can you remember?”
“I remember…” she says. “I remember moments. Sometimes days, or only hours. I knew I was stuck here, somehow. I know I’ve tried to get off and blinked and opened my eyes in a different car. I remember some people I’ve met. That half the things in my bag are something I traded for, stole, or found. But it’s—it’s all fuzzy. You know when you drink too much and black out except for random pieces? It’s like that. If I had to guess, I would’ve said I’ve been on here for … maybe a few months.”
“And before? What do you remember before you were on the train?”
She fixes August with a flat gaze. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing but a flash of Billy’s.”
August bites down on her lip. “You remember your name.”
Jane looks at her like she feels sorry for her, one side of her mouth pulling into a joyless approximation of her smile. She takes her jacket off and flips it around, inside-out. The worn fabric tag sticks out from the inside of the collar, block letters embroidered in careful red thread.
JANE SU
“I know my name because this jacket says it’s my name,” she says. “I have no fucking idea who I am.”
6
Bunch of Punks
Jayne County, New York Dolls, and the teeming life inside Max’s Kansas City, a punk haven in Gramercy
* * *
“I left a bloodstain on that booth over there. I kissed that bartender. That one slept on my couch last week. Anybody who says punk isn’t queer doesn’t know what punk is.”
—Jane Su
“Okay, now!”
Jane jumps, and—
She’s gone, again.
August sighs and steps onto the train before the doors close, making a note on the miniature steno she’s started keeping in her jacket pocket. Bergen Ave.: nope.
“This is getting repetitive,” says Jane’s voice, her chin suddenly on August’s shoulder. August yelps and stumbles back into her.
“I know,” August says, letting Jane right her, “but what if one of these stops is the one you can get off at? We have to know what we’re dealing with.”
They try it at every stop, starting at the shiny Ninety-sixth Street Station on the Manhattan end. Every time the door opens, August steps out and says, “Now!” And Jane tries to get off.
It’s not like she sees Jane physically disappear or reappear. Jane will take a step or a hop or—once in a moment of delirious frustration—a running leap through the open doors, and nothing happens. She doesn’t smack into an invisible barrier or vanish with a pop. She’s just there, and then she’s not.
Sometimes she resets to the place where she was standing when she started. Sometimes August blinks and Jane’s on the other end of the same car. Sometimes she’s gone completely, and August has to wait for the next train to find her waiting against a pole. Not a single passenger notices her sudden presence; they continue their audiobooks and mascara applications like she was there all along. Like reality bends around her.
“So, you really can’t get off the train,” August finally admits under the glass and steel arches of Coney Island, the very last stop on the line. Jane can’t get off there either.
That’s the first step, figuring out how trapped Jane is. The answer is: very completely trapped. The next question is, how?
August has absolutely no fucking clue.
She’s only ever dealt with hard facts. Concrete and quantifiable evidence. She can reason her way through this right up to the point of understanding how it is happening, and then: dead end. A wall made of things that aren’t supposed to be possible.
Jane, ultimately, is a good sport. She’s adjusting remarkably well to being forty-five years from home and doomed to take the same subway ride every minute of every day—she grins and says, “Honestly, it’s nicer than my first apartment, according to the 0.5 seconds I remember of it.” She eyes August with some unreadable significance. “Better company too.”
But Jane still doesn’t know who she is, or why she is, or what happened to get her stuck.
August looks at her as the train reverses past Gravesend rooftops, this girl out of time, the same face and body and hair and smile that took August’s life by the shoulders in January and shook. And she can’t believe Jane had the nerve, the audacity, to become the one thing August can’t resist: a mystery.
“Okay,” August says. “Time to figure out who you are.”
The afternoon sun falls in Jane’s brown eyes, and August thinks she’s going to need more notebooks. It’ll take a million to hold this girl.
* * *
When August was eight, her mom took her to the levee.
It was right after the Fourth of July. She was turning nine soon and really into her age that year. She’d tell everyone that she wasn’t eight but eight and a half, eight and three-quarters. Going to the levee was one of the few things they ever did without a case file between them—just a gallon-size bag of watermelon slices and a beach towel and a perfect spot to sit.
She remembers her mother’s hair, how the coppery brown would glow under the summer sun like the wet planks of the docks. She always liked how it was the same as hers, how they shared so many things. It was in those moments that August sometimes pictured how her mom looked when she was younger, before she had August, and at the same time, she couldn’t begin to imagine a time when they didn’t have each other. August had her and she had August, and they had secret codes they spoke in, and that was it. That was enough.
She remembers her mom explaining what levees were for. They weren’t made for beach towel picnics, she said—they were made to protect them. To keep water out when storms came.
It wasn’t long afterward that a storm too big for the levees came. 2005. Their apartment in Belle Chasse, the Idlewild place, got eight feet of water. All the files, maps, photos, all the years of handwritten notes, a wet pulp shoveled out the window of a condemned building. August’s mom saved one tupperware tub of files on her brother and not a single one of August’s baby pictures. August lost everything and thought that maybe, if she could become someone who didn’t have anything to lose, she’d never have to feel that way again.
She turned nine in a Red Cross shelter, and something started to sour in her heart, and she couldn’t stop it.
August sits on the edge of an air mattress in Brooklyn and tries to imagine how it would feel if she didn’t have any of those memories to understand what made her who she is. If she woke up one day and just was and didn’t know why.
Nobody tells you how those nights that stand out in your memory—levee sunset nights, hurricane nights, first kiss nights, homesick sleepover nights, nights when you stood at your bedroom window and looked at the lilies one porch over and thought they would stand out, singular and crystallized, in your memory forever—they aren’t really anything. They’re everything, and they’re nothing. They make you who you are, and they happen at the same time a twenty-three-year-old a million miles away is warming up some leftovers, turning in early, switching off the lamp. They’re so easy to lose.
You don’t learn until you’re older how to zoom out of that extreme proximity and make it fit into the bigger picture of your life. August didn’t learn until she sat knee-to-knee with a girl who couldn’t remember who she was, and tried to help her piece everything back together.
