Chapter 12

12

Photo from the archives of The Tulane Hullabaloo, Tulane University’s weekly student-run newspaper, dated June 23, 1973

[Photo depicts a group of young women marching down Iberville Street, carrying signs and banners as part of the third annual New Orleans Gay Pride. In the foreground, a dark-haired woman in jeans and a button-down shirt holds a poster that reads DYKES FIGHT BACK. The following day, the New Orleans gay community would be struck by the UpStairs Lounge arson attack.]

At the entrance to the Parkside Ave. Station, August’s finger hovers over the call button for the tenth time in as many hours.

There was a time when Uncle Augie loomed like Clark Kent in her childhood, this mysterious hero to be chased through squares of public record forms like comic book panels. Her mother told her stories—he was twelve years older, the heir-gone-wrong to an old New Orleans family, the little sister born in his rocky adolescence an attempt at a do-over. He had hair like August’s, like her mother’s, wild and thick and unkempt. He intimidated schoolyard bullies, snuck dessert when their mother said little girls shouldn’t eat so much, hid whiskey and a box of photographs beneath a floorboard in his room.

She told August about the big fight she overheard one night, how Augie kissed her forehead fiercely and left with a suitcase, how he wrote her every week and sometimes arranged late-night calls until the letters and calls stopped coming. She told August about a streetcar ride to the police station, an officer saying they couldn’t waste time on runaways, her parents inviting the chief for dinner when he drove her home and then taking her books away as punishment.

It makes sense now that Augie left and never came back, more than it did when it was only petty family arguments. August understands why he never told his sister he was still in the city, why her grandparents preferred to act as if he’d never existed. He was like Jane, just geographically closer.

She doesn’t know how to tell her mom. She doesn’t even know how to speak to her mom right now.

It’s too much to think about, too much to put into a text or a phone call, so she pushes her phone into her pocket and decides she’ll figure out as much as she can before she tells anyone else.

It’s not until the Q pulls up and she sees Jane that it occurs to her this might have finally been too much for Jane too.

Jane’s sitting there, staring straight ahead. There’s a rip in her shirt collar and a fresh cut on her lip. She’s flexing her right hand over and over in her lap.

“What happened?” August says, rushing onto the car and dropping her bag to kneel in front of her. She takes Jane’s face in her hands. “Hey, talk to me.”

Jane shrugs, impassive.

“Some guy called me some shit I’d rather not repeat,” she finally says. “That old racist-homophobic combo. Always a winner.”

“Oh my God, did he hit you? I’ll kill him.”

She laughs darkly, eyes flat. “No, I hit him. The lip is from when someone else pulled me off him.”

August tries to brush her thumb by Jane’s mouth, but she jerks away.

“Jesus,” August hisses. “Did they call the cops?”

“Nah. Me and some guy shoved him off at the next stop, and I doubt his ego could handle calling the cops on a skinny Chinese girl.”

“I meant for you. You’re hurt.”

Jane knocks August’s hands off of her, finally making eye contact. August flinches at the razor’s edge there.

“I don’t fuck with pigs. You know I don’t fuck with pigs.”

August sits back on her heels. There’s something off about Jane, in the air around her. Usually, it’s like August can feel the frequency she vibrates at, like she’s a space heater or a live wire, but it’s still. Eerily still.

“No, of course, that was stupid,” August says slowly. “Hey, are you … okay?”

“What do you fucking think, August?” she snaps.

“I know—it’s, it’s fucked up,” August tells her. She’s thinking about the fire, the things that drove Jane from city to city. “But I promise, most people aren’t like that anymore. If you could go out, you’d see.”

Jane grabs a pole and heaves herself to her feet. Her eyes are slate, flint, stone. The train takes a curve. She doesn’t falter.

“That’s not what it’s about.”

“Then what, Jane?”

“God, you don’t—you don’t get it. You can’t.”

For a second, August feels like she did that night after the séance, when she put her hand on Jane’s wrist and felt the pulse buzzing impossibly fast under her fingers, when she talked to Jane like she was on a ledge. Jane might as well be hanging out the emergency exit.

“Try me.”

“Okay, fine, it’s like—I woke up one day and half the people I ever loved were dead, and the other half had lived a whole life without me, and I never got a chance to see it,” Jane says. “I never got a chance to be at their weddings or their art shows. I never got to see my sisters grow up. I never got to tell my parents why I left. I never got to make it right. I mean, fuck, my friend Frankie had just gotten a new boyfriend who was so annoying, and I was gonna tell him to dump him, and I never even got to do that. Do you see what I mean? Have you ever thought about what this is like for me?”

“Of course I—”

“It’s like I died,” she cuts in. Her voice cracks in the middle. “I died, except I have to feel it. And on top of that, I have to feel everything else I’ve ever felt all over again. I have to get the bad news again every day, I have to deal with the choices I made, and I can’t fix it. I can’t even run from it. It’s miserable, August.”

Okay. This is it. Jane’s been shockingly casual about her entire existential predicament. August wondered when something like this was coming.

“I know,” August says. The seat creaks faintly as she pushes herself to her feet, and Jane watches her sway closer with wide eyes, like she could bolt at any second. August moves until she’s close enough to touch her. She doesn’t. But she could. “I’m sorry. But it’s—it’s not too late to fix some of it. We’re gonna figure it out, and we’ll get you back to where you’re supposed to be, and—”

“I swear to fucking God, August, can you for once not act like you know everything?”

“Okay,” August says, feeling something defensive prick up her spine. Jane’s not the only one who’s spent the last day in a fighting mood. “Jesus.”

Jane’s teeth work her split lip for a second, like she’s thinking. She backs up another three steps, out of reach.

“God, it’s—you’re so sure there’s an answer, but there’s no reason to believe there is one. None of this makes any fucking sense.”

“Is that why you’ve been acting like you don’t care about the case? Because you don’t think I can solve it?”

“I’m not a fucking case to be solved, August.”

“I know that—”

“What if I’m on the line forever, huh?” Jane asks her. “It’s all interesting and exciting right now, but one day you’re gonna be thirty, and I’ll be twenty-four and here, and you’re gonna get bored, and I’m just gonna stay. Alone.”

“I’m not gonna leave you,” August says.

August sees the riot girl in the way Jane rolls her eyes and says, “You should. I would.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not you,” August snaps.

That stops them both. August didn’t mean to say it.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Forget it.” August twists her hands into fists in her pockets. “Look, I’m not the one you’re mad at. I didn’t get you stuck here.”

“No, you didn’t,” Jane agrees. She turns her face away, hair falling in her eyes. “But you made me realize it. You made me remember. And maybe that’s worse.”

August swallows. “You don’t mean that.”

“You don’t know what I mean,” she says hoarsely. “August, I’m tired. I want to sleep in a bed. I want my life back, I want—I want you and I want to go back and I can’t want those things at the same time, and everything’s too much, and I—I don’t want to feel like this anymore.”

“I’m trying,” August says helplessly.

“What if you didn’t?” Jane says. “What if you stopped?”

In the silence that follows, August remembers how it feels to hit an ice patch on a frigid morning, those few seconds of terrible suspension before you scrape all the skin off your knees, when your stomach drops out and the only thought is, This is about to kick my ass.

“Stopped what?”

“Stopped trying,” Jane says. “Just—just let it go. Get a new train. Don’t see me anymore.”

“No. No. I can’t—I can’t leave, Jane—if I leave, you’re gone. That’s the whole reason September matters. It’s me, it’s us, it’s whatever the hell is happening between us, that’s what’s keeping you here.” She staggers closer, grasping at Jane’s jacket. “Come on, I know you feel it. The first time you saw me, you recognized me—my name, my face, the way I smelled, it made you remember.” Her hand moves gracelessly to Jane’s chest, over her heart. “This is what’s keeping you here. It’s not just fucking dumplings and Patti Smith songs, Jane, it’s us.”

“I know,” Jane says quietly, like it hurts to say it. “I always knew it was you. That’s why I didn’t—it’s why I shouldn’t have ever kissed you. I look at you, and it feels like I’m realer than I’ve ever been, from right here.” She covers August’s hand with hers. “So big it burns. God, August, it’s beautiful, but it hurts so bad.” And, damningly, “You’re the reason I feel like this.”

It connects like a punch.

She’s right. August knows she’s right. She’s been digging Jane’s life back up, but Jane is the one who has to sit on the train alone and live it all over again.

Something in her recoils violently, and her fingers dig into the fabric of Jane’s jacket, bunching it up in her fist.

“Just because you can’t run doesn’t mean you can make me do it for you.”

A muscle clenches in Jane’s jaw, and August wants to kiss it. She wants to kiss her and fight her and hold her down and set this storm loose on the world, but the doors open at the next stop, and for just a second, Jane glances through them. Her foot twitches toward the platform, like she’d have a chance if she tried, and that’s what makes August’s throat go tight.

“You want me to stay,” Jane says. It’s a quiet accusation, a push she doesn’t have the strength to do physically. “That’s what this is, isn’t it? Myla said there’s a chance I could stay. That’s why you’re doing this.”

August still has a fistful of Jane’s jacket. “You wouldn’t be so angry if part of you didn’t want that too.”

“I don’t—” Jane says. She squeezes her eyes shut. “I can’t want that. I can’t.”

“We’ve done all this work,” August says.

“No, you’ve done all this work,” Jane points out. Her eyes open, and August can’t tell if she’s imagining the wetness there. “I never asked you to.”

“Then what?” The part of her that’s all blade is squaring up. “What do you want me to do?”

“I already told you,” Jane says. Her eyes are flashing. A fluorescent above their heads goes out with a loud pop.

If August were different, this is the part where she’d stay and fight. Instead, she thinks viciously that Jane’s idea won’t work. It can’t possibly be that easy to split this apart, not in just a few days. She’ll be back before it’s too late. She’ll leave just to prove it.

They’re pulling into the next stop soon, a big Manhattan one that will bring a rush of people with it.

“Fine. But this?” August hears her voice come out caustic and harsh, and she hates it. “All this? I did it for you, not me.”

The doors slide open, and the last thing August sees of Jane is the stiff set of her jaw. Her split lip. The furious determination not to cry. And then people push on, and August is lost in the current of bodies, dumped out onto the platform.

The doors shut. The train pulls away.

August reaches into her heart for the sour thing that lives there and squeezes.

---

August slams her bag down on the bar within five seconds of stepping into Billy’s for her dinner shift.

“Hey, hey, hey, watch it!” Winfield warns, snatching a pie out of range. “This is blackberry. She’s a special lady.”

“Sorry,” she grumbles, plopping down onto a stool. “Rough week.”

“Yeah, well,” Winfield says, “my super has been saying he’s gonna fix my toilet since last Thursday. We’re all having a time.”

“You’re right, you’re right.” August sighs. “Lucie working this shift?”

“Nope,” he says. “She’s taking the day to yell at city officials about permits.”

“Yeah, about that,” August says. “Myla and I are starting to think we’re gonna need a bigger venue.”

Winfield turns and raises his eyebrows at her. “The capacity of Delilah’s is eight hundred. You think we’re getting more than that?”

“I think we’re gonna get, like, double that,” August tells him. “We’ve already sold eight hundred-something tickets, and it’s not for another month.”

“Holy shit,” he says. “How the hell did y’all manage that?”

August shrugs. “People love Billy’s. And it turns out Bomb Bumboclaat and Annie Depressant are big sellers.”

He grins wide, preening in the grimy glow of the kitchen window heat lamps. “Well, I coulda told you that.”

August smiles half-heartedly back at him. She wishes she could match his excitement, but the fact is, she’s been throwing herself into the fundraiser to stop thinking about how she hasn’t heard from Jane in two days. She wanted to be left alone, so August is leaving her alone. She hasn’t set foot on the Q since Jane told her to forget about her.

“Who’s on the schedule today?”

“You’re looking at it, baby,” Winfield says. “It feels like Satan’s taint outside. Nobody’s coming to get afternoon pancakes today. It’s just us and Jerry.”

“Oh God. Okay.” August peels herself off her stool and rounds the counter to clock in. “I need to talk to Jerry anyway.”

In the kitchen, Jerry’s hefting a bucket of hashbrown shavings out of the fridge and toward the prep station. He gives her a quick nod.

“Hey, Jerry, you got a minute?”

He grunts. “What’s up, buttercup?”

“So, it’s looking like we might end up with double the people we planned for the fundraiser,” she says. “We should probably talk pancake logistics again.”

“Shit,” he swears, “that’s gonna be at least thirty gallons of batter.”

“I know. But we don’t have to make a pancake for every guest—I mean, there have gotta be people who are gluten-free, or low carb, or whatever—”

“So, let’s say twenty gallons of batter, then. That’s still a lot, and I don’t even know how we’d transport that many pancakes.”

“Billy said he has a spare grill in storage. He was gonna sell it, but if he could bring it to the venue, you and some of the line cooks could cook them there.”

He thinks on it. “Sounds like a pain in the ass.”

“But it could work. We can use the catering van to get the batter there.”

“Yeah, okay, it could work.”

Winfield’s head pops up in the window. “Hey, can I get some bacon?”

Jerry glances at him. “For you or for a table?”

“No tables, I’m just hun—”

At that exact moment, the creaky pipe along the wall by the dishwasher finally does what it’s been threatening since long before August started working there: it bursts.

Water explodes all over the floor of the kitchen, soaking through the canvas of August’s sneakers and down to her socks, gushing into the tubs of biscuits under the prep table. She lunges forward and tries to wrap her hands around the split of the pipe, but all it does is redirect most of the water onto her—her shirt, her face, her hair—

“Uh,” August says, kicking a tub of biscuits out of harm’s way with one soggy foot. It tips and biscuits spill all over the tiles, floating away like little biscuit boats. “Can I get some help here?”

“I told Billy it was just a matter of time on that piece of shit,” Jerry grumbles, sloshing through the water. “I gotta turn off the fuckin’ main and—fuck!”

With a colossal crash, Jerry’s feet fly out from under him, and down he goes, bringing a ten-gallon tub of pancake batter with him.

“Jesus titty-fucking Christ,” Winfield says when he throws the door open on the scene—Jerry on his back in a growing lake of pancake batter, August soaked head to toe, hands around the spewing pipe and soggy biscuits swimming around her ankles. He takes one step into the kitchen and slips, tumbling into a stack of dishes, which shatter spectacularly.

“Where the hell is the water main, Jerry?” August asks.

“It’s not in here,” Jerry says, struggling to his feet. “Stupid old fucking building. It’s in the back office.”

The back office—

“Wait,” August says, rushing to follow Jerry. He’s already halfway down the hall. “Jerry, don’t, I can—”

Jerry wrenches the door open and disappears into the office before August can skid into the doorway.

He straightens up in the corner, the main switched off at last, and August watches him finally see the maps and photos and notes pinned on the walls. He turns slowly, taking it all in.

“The fuck is this? We got a squatter?”

“It’s—” August doesn’t know how the hell to explain. “I was—”

“You did this?” Jerry asks. He leans toward the clipping August pulled out of her mom’s file and added to the wall. “How come you got a picture of Jane?”

August’s stomach flips.

“You said you didn’t remember her,” she says faintly.

Jerry looks at her for a second, before the unmistakable jingle of the front door sounds.

“Well,” Jerry says. He turns away, headed for the kitchen. “Somebody’s gotta feed the poor bastard.”

Winfield crunches off through shards of coffee mugs to take the customer, and Jerry salvages the kitchen enough to make a plate of food. He calls Billy to let him know they’re going to have to close until a plumber can come, and even from across the room August can hear Billy swearing about the costs of lost business and new pipes. Another few weeks off the Pancake Billy’s prognosis.

Winfield serves their one customer a shortstack with orange juice and sends them on their merry way, and Jerry tells Winfield to go home.

August stays.

“You said,” she says, cornering Jerry by the walk-in, “you didn’t remember Jane.”

Jerry groans, rolling his eyes and throwing a tub of butter on the shelf. “How was I supposed to know there was a waitress operating a Jane Su shrine out the back of my restaurant?”

“It’s not—” August takes a squishy step back. “Look, I’m trying to figure out what happened to her.”

“What do you mean what happened to her?” Jerry asks. “She left. It’s New York, people leave. The end.”

“She didn’t,” August says. She thinks about Jane, alone on the train. No matter how angry she is, she can’t stop imagining Jane fading in and out of the line, untethering herself. But she doesn’t really think Jane will forget, not after all this time. Maybe, if she can find proof that there’s hope, she can change Jane’s mind. “She never left New York.”

“What?” Jerry asks.

“She’s been missing since 1977,” August says.

Jerry takes that in, slumping heavily against the door. “No shit?”

“No shit.” August levels her gaze at him. “Why did you tell me you didn’t remember her?”

Jerry huffs out another sigh. His mustache really has a life of its own.

“I’m not proud of who I was back then,” Jerry says. “I’m not proud of the friend I was to her. But I’d never forget her. That girl saved my life.”

“What? Like, figuratively?”

“Literally.”

August’s eyes widen. “How?”

“Well, y’know, we were friends,” he says. “I mean, she was friends with everyone, but me and her lived on the same block. We’d give each other shit all day in the kitchen, and then we’d go to a bar after work and drink a Pabst and talk about girls. But one day she comes into work and says she’s moving.”

“She was?” August blurts out, and he nods. That’s new. That’s not on the timeline.

“Yeah,” he goes on. “Said she’d heard from an old friend she never expected to hear from again, and he convinced her to go. Last time I saw her, it was her last day in town. July of ’77. We went to Coney Island, said goodbye to the Atlantic, rode the Wonder Wheel, had way too many beers. And then she dragged my drunk ass to the Q, and let me tell you what a dumbass I used to be—there I was, drunk as my aunt Naomi at my cousin’s bris, and I walked to the edge of the platform and puked my guts out, and when I got done, I fell clean off.”

August presses a hand to her lips. “Onto the tracks?”

“Right onto the tracks. Biggest dumbass move of my life.”

“What happened?”

He laughs. “Jane. She jumped down and got me out.”

“Holy shit,” August exhales. Typical Jane, throwing herself onto the tracks to save someone else like it was nothing. “And then what?”

Jerry gives her a look. “Kid, do you know what happened in New York in July of ’77?”

She runs through her mental files. Son of Sam. The birth of hip-hop. The blackout.

Wait.

Myla’s voice jumps into her head: But let’s say there was a big event—

“The blackout,” August says. It comes out high and tight.

“The blackout,” Jerry confirms. “I passed out on a bench, and when I woke up, it was fuckin’ chaos. I mean, I barely made it home. I guess I lost her in the chaos, and her bus was first thing in the morning. So that was it. I never saw her again.”

“You didn’t try to call her? To make sure she made it out?”

“You do know what blackout means, right? I couldn’t even get down the street to see if she was at her apartment. Anyway, she lost my number after that. Can’t say that I blame her, after I almost got us both killed. Whole reason I stopped drinking that year.”

August gulps down a mouthful of air.

“And you never heard from her again?”

“Nope.”

“Can I ask you one more question?”

Jerry grumbles but says, “Sure.”

“The place she was moving … it was California, wasn’t it?”

“You know what … yeah, I think it was. How’d you know?”

August throws her apron over her shoulder, already halfway out the door.

“Lucky guess,” she says. On her way out, she stops in the back office and plucks the postcard off the wall.

At a tiny electronics shop a few blocks over, she buys a handheld blacklight and ducks into an alley. She shines the light over the postmark, the way her mom used to with old documents where the ink had rubbed off, and it reveals the shadow of where the numbers used to be. She didn’t think the exact date would matter, until now.

An Oakland area code at the bottom. Muscadine Dreams. The hometown Jane told him about, passing wine back and forth on the porch. August can picture him and his red shorts and messy hair, cruising down the Panoramic Highway in golden sunshine.

It’s postmarked April 1976.

Augie didn’t die that night in 1973. He went to California.

---

“This is like an episode of CSI,” Wes says through a mouthful of popcorn.

“I’m taking that as a compliment,” August says.

She finishes taping up the last photo, and she has to admit, it is a little primetime television detective. There’s no yarn yet, though. August is proud of that. Yarn is the one thing separating her from a full-scale conspiracy theorist—also known as the Full Suzette.

(She hasn’t integrated what she figured out about Augie into the timeline yet. There’s not enough dry-erase marker in the world to work that one out, and certainly not enough space in her head. One thing at a time.)

Myla and Niko are out for dinner, but August couldn’t wait, so it’s just Wes and his huge bowl of popcorn watching her pace back and forth in front of the whiteboard in the kitchen. He looks deeply bored, which means he’s having a great time and finding this all very entertaining.

“Okay, so,” she says. She nudges her glasses up her nose with the end of her dry-erase marker. “Here’s what we know.”

“Tell us what we know, August.”

“Thank you for your support, Wesley.”

“My name is Weston.”

“It’s— Jesus, are you a fucking Vanderbilt or something?”

“Focus, August.”

“Right. Okay. We know Jane was on the tracks during the citywide power surge that caused the 1977 blackout. So, my theory: the burst of power on the already super-powerful electrified rail created some kind of … crack in time that she slipped through, and now she’s tethered to the electricity of the rails.”

“C’mon, Doctor Who,” Wes says.

“Myla thinks that if we can re-create the event, we can break her out of the time slip. All we have to do is … figure out a way to re-create the conditions of the ’77 blackout.”

“Don’t you think that’s kind of a dick move?” Wes asks. “I mean, even if we could somehow find a way to do it, which we can’t, the blackout was like … universally considered a bad thing. You’d be throwing the whole city into Purge territory.”

“You’re right. We’d have to find a way to target only Jane’s line. Which is where this comes in.”

August jabs her marker at the photo stuck in the top right corner.

“The New York City Transit Power Control Center. Located in Manhattan, on West Fifty-third Street. These two blocks of buildings manage the power to the entire MTA, with several substations. If we can get access, we can figure out which substation controls the Q, and we can find a way to create a power surge … that might work.”

“Loving this TED Talk,” Wes says. “Unsure how exactly you plan to handle the if.”

As if on cue, there’s the familiar jingle of Myla’s five million key chains as she unlocks the door.

“Hey, we brought leftovers if you—oh my God.” Myla stops halfway into the door, Niko colliding with her back. “You started without me?”

“I—”

“You text me that you, and I quote, ‘scored the clue of a lifetime’ and are ‘about to bust this shit wide open,’” Myla says, throwing her skateboard down in a righteous fury, “and you don’t even wait for me to have a free afternoon to break out the whiteboard. Wow. I thought I could trust you.”

“Look, I can’t talk to Jane about it,” August tells her. “I needed to do something.”

“You’re still in a fight?” Niko asks.

“I’m giving her space.” August extends a dry-erase marker to Myla, who glares as she snatches it up. “She said that was what she wanted.”

“Uh-huh, and this wouldn’t have anything to do with the way you reflexively ice out anyone who even appears to have rejected or wronged you?”

“Don’t answer that, it’s a trap,” Wes calls from the couch. “He’s using his powers for evil.”

“That wasn’t a reading,” Niko says. “It was just a read.”

“Anyway,” August presses on, “she’s gonna come around. And she may not be speaking to me, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s stuck in the nebulous in-between—”

“Aren’t we all?” Wes adds, and August throws a stack of Post-its at his face.

“And we’re the only ones who can fix it. So I’m gonna keep trying.”

Niko gives her a cryptic look before curling up on the couch with his head in Wes’s lap. August gives Myla a quick rundown of what she’s figured out so far.

“You’re missing something,” Myla points out. “Just being near the Q when the blackout happened isn’t enough for her to get stuck. There must have been thousands of people on trains and in stations during that surge, and none of them got stuck. There’s another variable you’re not accounting for.”

August leans against the fridge. “Yeah … shit, yeah, you’re right.”

“You haven’t talked to Jane? Told her what you learned?”

“She told me to leave her alone. But I.… I feel like if I could talk to her about it, she might remember the rest.”

Myla pats her on the shoulder and spins back to the board.

“So, basically, when you have an event like the blackout, and an outage is caused by a power surge—a lightning strike, in this case—there are actually two surges. The first one that overloads the line and makes the lights go out. And the second.” She points at August with the marker. “You know when you were a kid and the electricity would go out during a storm, and then when it comes back, there’s half a second when the lights come on too bright? That’s the second surge. So, if we were … somehow able to do this, we’d have two chances.”

August nods. They can work with that, she thinks.

“And how are we gonna access the substation?”

Myla frowns. “That, I don’t know. I can ask around and see if anyone who was in the engineering program with me has connections, but … I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” August says. She’s already thinking through contingency plans. Do they know anyone skilled in espionage? Or who’d be willing to sleep with a security guard for the cause?

“You have a bigger problem, though,” Myla says.

August snaps back into focus. “What?”

“If all this is right, and it’s an electrical event … when they cut the power in September, it’s not only that you won’t be able to see her. She might just … blink out.”

“What?” August says. “No, that can’t—the train broke down before, when she was on it. She was fine.”

“Yeah, the train broke down,” Myla says. “But there was still power in the line. And maybe it was okay before you, when she never stayed in one time or place for long enough to be there when they cut the power to the tracks for maintenance, but if we’re right about how strong your connection is, you’ve got her pinned, here and now. She won’t be able to avoid it.”

The reality of that spins out: Jane would have been fine if she wasn’t stuck here and now. The Q has probably lost power or had its power cut a hundred times before, but Jane always missed it, until August. Until August fell in love with her and got greedy with kisses and turned herself into a weight holding Jane in one spot.

And now, if she doesn’t pull this off, Jane might be gone forever. Not now. Not then. Nowhere.

Maybe Jane was right. This is her fault.

---

“August,” Myla yells through August’s bedroom door. “August!”

She buries her face in her pillow and groans. It’s seven in the morning, and she didn’t get home from work until four hours ago. Myla is really betting on not getting stabbed.

The door flies open, and there’s Myla, wild-eyed, a soldering gun in one hand and a string of lights in the other. “August, it’s a nerve.”

August squints through a wall of her hair. “What?”

“My sculpture,” she says. “The one I’ve been working on for, like, ever. I’ve—I’ve been looking at it all wrong. I thought I was supposed to be making something big, but it was right in front of me with all this Jane stuff—the branches, the lights, the moving parts—it’s a nerve. It’s what I do! Electricity of the heart! That’s what the point of view is!”

August rolls over to stare at the ceiling. “Damn. That’s … genius.”

“Right? I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before! I have to thank Jane the next time I see her, she—”

August’s face must fold into something tragic, because Myla stops.

“Oh, shit,” Myla says. “You still aren’t talking to her?”

August shakes her head. “Five days now.”

“I thought you were gonna go back after three?”

August rolls back over and curls around her pillow. “Yeah, that was before I knew trying to save her life might get her killed. Now I feel like maybe she was right to want me to leave her alone.”

Myla sighs, leaning against the doorframe. “Look, remember what we said when you first moved in and I made you listen to Joy Division? We’ll figure it out. We have most of a plan now.”

“I think I know everything, but I don’t,” August mumbles. “Maybe I started with a relationship difficulty level too far above my skill set.”

“Oh, we’re in self-pity mode,” Myla says. “I can’t help you with that. Good luck, though! Talk to Jane!”

Myla leaves August in her unwashed sheets, feeling sorry for herself, tasting strawberry milkshake on the back of her tongue.

Her phone buzzes somewhere in the tangle of her bed.

It’s probably another passive-aggressive text from her mom, or Niko in the group chat checking the household rice inventory from the grocery store. She grumbles and fishes it out from beneath her ass.

Her breath hitches. It’s Jane.

Put the radio on.

She catches the outro of a Beach Boys song, fading into warm quiet, before the early morning DJ’s voice picks up over the waves.

“That was ‘I Know There’s an Answer’ from the album Pet Sounds, and you’re listening to WTKF 90.9, your one-stop shop for the new, the old, the whatever, as long as it’s good,” he says. “This next one’s a request from a frequent caller, one with a taste for the oldies. And this one’s a goodie. It goes out to August—Jane says she’s sorry.”

The intro comes up, drums and strings, and August knows it right away. The first song they chased a memory to, the one they played on her clumsy attempt at a first date.

Oh, girl, I’d be in trouble if you left me now.…

Her phone thumps down onto her chest.

The song buzzes over her little speakers and the music wells up wistful and heartsick, and she pictures that seven-inch single Jane told her about. For the first time, she really sees it: Jane, 1977, on her own and alive.

It’s hard to believe colors looked the same back then, crisp and bright and present, not washed-out, grainy sepia, but there it is. Strings and faraway vocals and Jane. There’s her skin glowing golden under crosswalk lights as she carries a bundle of new records home. There’s the stack of books on her nightstand. There’s the Indian place she used to like, the cigarettes she used to bum when she was stressed, the woman down the hall who makes the terrible pierogies, a tube of toothpaste rolled up at the end with CREST in the big block letters of a discontinued font.

There’s the bright red of her sneakers, fresh out the box, and the sun that used to fall across her bedroom floor, and the mirror where she checked the swoop of her hair, and the blue sky over her head. She’s there. Only leaving what she means to leave. Exactly where she’s supposed to be.

Jane’s been on the train thinking of home, and August has been at home thinking of Jane moving in, cooking breakfast, building a life with her. It feels like a million years ago that she sat over a plate of fries at Billy’s and told Myla that they had to help her no matter what. Even if she lost her. She really did believe it.

Another text. Jane.

Come back.

Maybe that’s the worst thing August can do. Maybe it’s the only thing.

She rolls out of bed and reaches for her keys.