One Last Stop, page 11
The next few days go like this:
August’s alarm goes off for class. Her shifts come up at Billy’s. Her essays and projects and exams stay looming over her like a cave full of bats. She ignores all of it.
She goes back in to work exactly one time, to hang the opening day photo back up on the wall and waylay Jerry as he passes it on his way out of the bathroom.
“Hey,” she says, “I never noticed how cool this picture was. The seventies seem like a hell of a time.”
“That’s what I’ve been told,” Jerry says. “I barely remember ’em.”
“I mean, you must remember this, though, right? Opening day? All the original Billy’s crew?”
She holds her breath as he leans in to squint at the photo. “Buttercup, any one of these sons of bitches could walk in here and sock me in the face and I wouldn’t even know it was them.”
She pushes it. “Not even the one who invented the Su Special?”
“I was what you might call an alcoholic at the time,” Jerry says. “I’m lucky I can remember what goes in the sandwich at all.”
“Are you sure?”
Jerry raises a bushy eyebrow at her. “Y’know people in New York mind their business, right?”
He trudges back to the kitchen, August frowning after him. How can he have forgotten Jane?
She flags down Lucie on her way out, asking about the last time Billy himself visited the restaurant, thinking maybe she could ask him—but, no. He’s mostly retired, lives in Jersey now with his family and almost never comes in, just signs the paychecks. He’s put Lucie and Winfield in charge and doesn’t seem to be welcoming phone calls from rookie servers new to the city.
So, she leaves. She skips class. She calls in sick to work. She listens to Lucie tut at her over the phone, like she knows August is faking. She doesn’t care.
Instead, she shoves her legs into jeans and her feet into Vans and her heart deep, deep down into her chest where it can’t do anything stupid, and she swipes her way into her station.
Every morning, Jane’s there. Usually the seats are a cool, clean blue, the lights shiny and bright, but occasionally, it’s an old train, burnt orange seats with FUCK REAGAN scrawled down the side in faded marker. Sometimes there are only a few sleepy commuters, and sometimes it’s packed with finance guys barking down their phones and huskers singing into the morning rush.
But Jane’s always there. So August is too.
“I still don’t understand,” Wes says, when August finally manages to wrangle everyone into the same room. He’s just stumbled home from the tattoo shop, bagel in hand, while Niko blearily pours himself coffee and Myla brushes her teeth over the kitchen sink. The bathroom plumbing must be acting up again.
“She’s stuck on the train,” August explains for what feels like the five hundredth time. “She’s lost in time from the ’70s, and she can’t leave the Q train, and she doesn’t remember anything before she got there.”
“And you, like,” Wes says, “definitely ruled out the possibility that she’s making it up?”
“She’s honest,” Niko mumbles. He looks perturbed at having to open his third eye before eight in the morning. He’s barely opened his two regular ones. “I met her. I could tell. Honest and sane.”
“No offense, but you said the same thing about the guy who moved in downstairs, and he stole all my weed and ghosted me and moved to Long Beach to be stoned all the time. Less honest and sane and more comatose in California.”
Myla spits in the sink. “Comatose in California is my favorite Lana Del Rey album.”
“He’s right,” August cuts in. “I believe her. She’s never not on the train when I get on, even if it’s a different train a minute later. I don’t see how she can do that unless she’s not living by the laws of reality.”
“So, what are you gonna do? 50 First Dates? Girlfriend with no memories?”
“First of all,” August says, gathering up her bag and sweater, “that movie was about short-term memory loss, not long-term memory loss—she remembers who I am. Second of all, she’s not my girlfriend.”
“You’re wearing that red lipstick for her, though,” Myla points out.
“I—that is a style choice.” August maneuvers her sweater over her head so nobody can see what color her face is and talks through the wool. “Even if she wanted me to be her girlfriend, I can’t. We don’t even know who she is. Figuring that out is way more important.”
“So altruistic of you,” Wes says, unwrapping his bagel. “I—Oh goddammit, they got my order wrong. How absolutely dare they.”
“Criminal,” Myla says.
“I go there every single morning and order the exact same thing, and they still can’t get my order right. The disrespect. We live in a society.”
“Good luck with that,” August says, shouldering her bag. “I gotta go un-amnesia a ghost.”
“She’s not a ghost,” Niko says, but she’s already out the door.
Wes did give her an idea, though. She doesn’t know how to fix Jane, but rule one is start with what you know. She knows Jane was a New Yorker. So they start there: with her coffee and bagel order.
“I don’t remember,” she says when August asks. “That’s how it is with a lot of stuff. I remember I got here. I know there was stuff before it. But I don’t remember what it was or how I felt, until something sparks. Like when I saw that lady who reminded me of my neighbor with the pierogies.”
“It’s okay,” August says, and she hands over a coffee with one sugar and a plain bagel with cream cheese. “You lived in New York for at least a couple of years. There’s no way you don’t have a coffee and bagel order. We’ll do process of elimination.”
Jane takes one bite and wrinkles her nose. “I don’t think this is it.”
For the next four days, August brings her a different coffee and bagel. Black and an everything with lox. Cappuccino with cinnamon and a toasted parmesan with garlic herb. It’s not until day five (chocolate chip and peanut butter) that she opens the paper bag and sniffs and says, “Oh my God. Chocolate.”
“Jesus,” August says, as Jane downs half of it in one bite like a boa constrictor. “Every New Yorker in a thirty-mile radius just became irate and they don’t know why.”
“Yeah. The guy at the deli always looked so disgusted.”
“Like, at that point, why not eat a donut?”
“Less filling,” she says through a mouthful. And then she grabs August’s hand and says, “Wait. Five sugars!” And that’s how they discover Jane’s incorrigible sweet tooth. She takes her coffee with two creams and five sugars like some kind of maniac. August starts bringing her a chocolate chip bagel with peanut butter and a coffee full of sugar and cream every morning.
She rides the line up and down and back up again. On a Tuesday afternoon, across the East River and over the Manhattan Bridge, alongside all the landmarks she grew up pressing into the corners of envelopes in the shape of postage stamps. On a Saturday morning, down to Coney Island and the arching rafters of the station, jostled by toddlers with floppy hats and sunscreen streaks and resigned parents with beach bags.
“Who goes to the beach in March?” August mumbles as they wait for the train to pull back out of Coney Island, the end of the line. It’s the longest the train is ever stationary. Jane likes to claim you can hear the ocean if you try hard enough.
“Come on, end of winter picnics near the shore?” Jane says, waving her bagel in the air. “I happen to think they’re romantic as hell.”
She glances at August like she expects a response, like there was a joke and August missed the punchline. August pulls a face and keeps eating.
They sit and eat their bagels and talk. That’s all there is to do—August has hit a dead end. Without clues about her family or her life before New York, Jane is the primary source.
Her primary source, and her friend, now.
That’s all. Nothing more than that. That’s all it can be.
August glances at the peanut butter left behind on Jane’s lip.
It’s fine.
* * *
On a Wednesday, Jane’s on her third bite of bagel when she remembers her elementary school.
The city’s vague, but she remembers a tiny classroom, and other kids from her neighborhood sitting in tiny desks and tiny chairs, and a poster of a hot-air balloon on the wall. She remembers the smell of pencil shavings and her first best friend, a girl named Jia who loved peanut butter sandwiches, and the foggy walk between their homes, the smell of wet pavement from shopkeepers hosing down their sidewalks at the end of the night.
Another day, she’s just finished her coffee when her eyes light up, and she tells August about the day she got to New York. She talks about a Greyhound bus, and a friendly old man at the station who explained how to get to Brooklyn, winked, and slid a button into her pocket, the little pink triangle pinned below her shoulder. She tells August about paying cash for her first ever ride on the subway, about climbing up from underground into a gray morning and turning in a slow circle, taking it all in, and then buying her first cup of New York coffee.
“You see the pattern, right?” August says when she’s done writing everything down.
Jane turns the empty cup over in her hands. “What do you mean?”
“It’s sensory stuff,” August says. “You smell coffee, it brings back something associated with the smell. You taste peanut butter, same thing. That’s how we can do this. We just have to experiment.”
Jane’s quiet, studying the board mapping out stops. “What about a song? Could that work too?”
“Probably,” August says. “Actually, knowing you and music, I bet it could help a lot.”
“Okay,” Jane says, sitting up suddenly, attention rapt. The look on her face is one August has come to recognize as readiness to learn something she doesn’t understand: head cocked slightly, one eyebrow ticked up, part confusion, part eagerness. Sometimes Jane exudes the same energy as a golden retriever. “There’s this one song I halfway remember. I don’t know who it was by, but it goes like, ohhhh, giiiiirl…”
“That could describe a lot of songs,” August says, untucking her phone from her pocket. “Do you remember any of the other lyrics?”
Jane bites her lip and frowns. She sings under her breath, warm and off-key and a little crackly, like the air around her feels. “How I depend on youuu, to give me love how I need it.”
August tries very hard to think only of scientific curiosity as she consults Google. “Oh, okay. When. It’s give me love when I need it. The title of the song is ‘Oh, Girl.’ It’s by a band called the Chi-Lites. Came out in 1972.”
“Yeah! That’s right! I had it on a seven-inch single.” Jane closes her eyes, and August thinks they’re picturing the same thing: Jane, cross-legged on a bedroom floor somewhere, letting the record spin. “God, I wish I could listen to it right now.”
“You can,” August says, swiping through apps. “Hang on.”
It takes her all of three seconds to pull it up, and she unwinds her earbuds from her pocket and hands one to Jane.
The song fades in soulful and longing, strings and harmonica, and the first words come exactly how Jane sang them: Ohhhh giiiiiirl …
“Oh my God,” Jane says, sitting back in her seat. “That’s really it. Shit.”
“Yeah,” August says. “Shit.”
The song plays on for another minute before Jane sits up and says, “I heard this song for the first time on a radio in a semitruck Which is weird, because I definitely don’t think I ever drove semitrucks. But I think I rode in some. There are a few—like, flashes, you know?”
August jots it down. “Hitchhiking, maybe? That was a big thing back then.”
“Oh yeah, it was,” she says. “I bet that’s it. Yeah … yeah, in a truck from California, heading east. But I can’t remember where we were going.”
August sucks on the bud of the pencil eraser, and Jane looks at her. At her mouth, specifically.
She pulls the pencil out of her mouth, self-conscious. “That’s okay, this is a great start. If you remember any other songs, I can help you figure them out.”
“So you can … listen to any song you want?” Jane says, eyeing August’s phone. “Whenever you want to?”
August nods. They’ve been through some pretty rudimentary explanations of how smartphones and the internet work, and Jane has picked up a lot from observation, but she still gets all wide-eyed and awed.
“Would you want me to get you a phone like this?” August asks.
Jane thinks about it. “I mean … yes and no? It’s impressive, but there’s something about having to work for it when you want to listen to a song. I used to love my record collection. That was the most money I ever spent in one place, shipping it to a new address whenever I landed in a new city. I wanted to see the world but still have one thing that was mine.”
August’s pencil flies across the paper. “Okay, so you were a drifter. A drifter and a hitchhiker. That’s so…”
“Cool?” Jane suggests, raising an eyebrow. “Daring? Adventurous? Sexy?”
“Unbelievable that you weren’t strangled by one of the dozens of serial killers murdering hitchhikers up and down the West Coast in the ’70s, is what I was gonna say.”
“Well,” Jane says. She kicks one foot up, crossing her ankle over her knee, and peers at August, hands behind her head. “What’s the point of life without a little danger?”
“Not dying,” August suggests. She can feel color flaring inconveniently in her cheeks.
“Yeah, I didn’t die my whole life, and look where it got me,” Jane says.
“Okay. Point.” August shuts her steno. “That was a big memory, though. We got ourselves a lead.”
* * *
August gives Jane her burner phone and teaches her how to use it and they experiment, like some kind of amnesiac scavenger hunt. Jane texts her snippets of lyrics or images from movies she snuck into dollar theaters to watch, and August tears through thrift stores for records familiar to Jane’s hands and a vintage Jaws lunchbox. August brings every food she can think of to the Q: sticky buns, challah, slices of pizza, falafel sweating through its paper wrapper, steamed sponge cakes, ice cream melting down her wrist.
“You know, this train used to be called the QB,” Jane remembers casually one day. “I guess it’s just the Q now. Weird.”
Things start coming back slowly, in pieces, one moment at a time. A box of greasy pepperoni split with a friend on a patio in Philly. Walking down the block in her sandals on a hot July afternoon to buy soft green tea cakes with nickels from the couch. A girl she loved briefly who drank three Arnold Palmers a day. A girl she loved briefly who snuck a bottle of wine out of her family’s Seudat Purim because they were both too poor to buy one. A girl she loved briefly who worked at a movie theater.
There are, August notices, a lot of girls that Jane loved briefly. There’s a secret set of tally marks in the back of one of her notebooks. It’s up to seven. (She’s completely fine with it.)
They go through Jane’s backpack for clues—the notebooks, mostly filled with journal entries and recipes in messy shorthand, the postcard from California, which has a phone number that’s disconnected. August takes pictures of Jane’s buttons and pins so she can research them and discovers Jane was something of a radical in the ’70s, which opens up a whole new line of research.
August digs through library archives until she finds copies of pamphlets, zines, flyers, anything that might have been pinned up or pasted or crammed under a door into a seedy bar when Jane was stomping through the streets of New York. She digs up an issue of I Wor Kuen’s newspaper, pages in Chinese and English on Marxism and self-determination and escaping the draft. She finds a flyer for a Redstockings street theater performance about abortion rights. She prints out an entire issue of the Gay Liberation Front’s magazine and brings it to Jane, a bright pink sticky tab marking an essay by Martha Shelley titled “Gay Is Good.”
“‘Your friendly smile of acceptance—from the safe position of heterosexuality,’” Jane reads aloud, “‘isn’t enough. As long as you cherish that secret belief that you are a little bit better because you sleep with the opposite sex, you are still asleep in your cradle … and we will be the nightmare that awakens you.’”
She folds the page down and licks her bottom lip.
“Yeah,” she says, smirking. “Yeah, I remember this one.”
To say that the papers unlock new parts of Jane would be a lie, because they’ve always been there. They don’t reveal anything not already spelled out by the set of her chin and the way she plants her feet in the space she takes up. But they color in the lines, pin down the edges—she thumbs through and remembers protests, riots, curls her hands into fists and talks about what made the muscle memory in her knuckles, hand-painted signs and black eyes and a bandana tied over her mouth and nose.
August takes note after note and finds it almost funny—that all the fighting only conspired to make Jane gentle. Fearsome and flirty and full of bad jokes, an incorrigible sweet tooth and a steel-toe boot as a last resort. That, August is learning, is Jane.
It would be easier, August thinks, if the real Jane weren’t someone August liked so much. In fact, it’d be extremely convenient if Jane was boring or selfish or an asshole. She’d love to do one piece of casework without the whole halfway-in-love-with-her-subject thing getting in the way.
In between, when Jane needs a break, August does the thing she’s done her best to avoid most of her life: she talks.
“I don’t understand,” August says when Jane asks about her mom, “what does that have to do with your memories?”
Jane shrugs, touching the toes of her sneakers together. “I just want to know.”
Jane asks about school, and August tells her about her transfers and extra semesters and her freshman roommate from Texas who loved Takis Fuego, and it reminds Jane of this student she dated when she was twenty and couch-surfing through the Midwest (tally mark number eight). She asks about August’s apartment, and August tells her about Myla’s sculptures and Noodles barrelling through the halls, and it brings back Jane’s neighbor’s dog in her Brooklyn apartment, one door down from the Polish lady.
