Chapter 17

17

Photo from the archives of New York Magazine, from a photo series on Brooklyn diners, dated August 2, 1976

[Photo depicts a plate of pancakes with a side of bacon in the hands of a waitress, illuminated by the blue and pink glow of the neon lights that wrap the underside of the bar at Pancake Billy’s House of Pancakes. Though the waitress’s face is out of frame, several tattoos are visible on her left arm: an anchor, Chinese characters, a red bird.]

August takes her home.

The sky splits open the second they step out of Billy’s, but Jane just turns to her under the onslaught of rain and smiles. Jane in the rain. That’s something new.

“Which way we goin’, angel?” she asks, raindrops sliding into her mouth.

August blinks water out of her eyes. “I don’t guess you wanna take the subway?”

“Fuck you,” she says, and she laughs.

August grabs her hand, and they throw themselves into the back of a cab.

As soon as the door slams shut, she’s in Jane’s lap, swinging a leg over to straddle her hips, and she can’t stop, not when she thought she was never going to see Jane again. Jane’s fingers dig into her waist, and hers twist into Jane’s hair, and they kiss hard enough that the days they missed all fold together like a map, like the pages of a notebook shut, like it was no time at all.

Jane’s mouth falls open, and August chases after it. She skims that soft bottom lip with her teeth and finds her tongue, and Jane makes a low, hurt sound and holds her tighter.

The first time Jane kissed her for real, it felt like a warning. This time, it’s a promise. It’s a sigh of relief in the back of her throat. It’s a string of fate August never thought she’d believe in, pulling tight.

“You wanna give me an address or what?” the driver says from the front seat, sounding absolutely bored.

Jane laughs, wide and bright, right up against August’s mouth, and August leans back to say, “Parkside and Flatbush.”

On the curb outside the Popeyes, August drops her keys, and a moving truck trundles through a deep puddle of sludge on the street and drenches them both.

“Fuck,” August says, taking her dirty glasses off and plucking her keys out of the gutter. “I pictured this a lot more cinematic.”

She turns to Jane, dripping and soaked through and slightly blurry, covered in mud and grinning, still there. Just continuing to be there, somehow, despite every goddamn law of the universe saying she shouldn’t be.

“I don’t know,” Jane says, reaching out to thumb at the mascara raccooning under August’s eyes. “I think you look great.”

August breathes out a delirious laugh, and at the top of the stairs, she pushes Jane through the front door of the apartment.

“Shower,” August says, “I’m covered in street juice.”

“So sexy,” Jane teases, but she doesn’t argue.

They stumble toward the bathroom, leaving a trail of shoes and wet clothes. August turns on the faucet—somehow, miraculously, for the first time since she moved in, the water is hot.

Jane pins her to the bathroom sink and kisses her, and when August is finally down to only her wet bra and underwear, she opens her eyes.

She keeps having these moments, where she has to stare at Jane, like if she looks away for too long, she’ll disappear. But here she is, standing in August’s bathroom, hair damp and sticking out in every direction from where August has been tugging at it, in a black bra and briefs. There are her hipbones, and her bare thighs, and the rest of her tattoos—the animals up and down her sides.

August reaches down and trails her fingers over the snake’s tongue just below Jane’s waist. Jane shivers.

“You’re here,” August says.

“I’m here,” Jane confirms.

“What does it feel like?” August asks.

There’s a pause as Jane’s eyes sweep open and closed, her fingertips grazing over the porcelain of the sink behind August’s back.

“Permanent.” She says it like a complete sentence.

August’s hand slides up her back, to the clasp of her bra. “We need to talk about what this means.”

“Yeah,” Jane says. “I know. But I…” She leans back down, kissing the top of August’s cheekbone. She’s moving again, restless, finally let off the leash. “I can think later. Right now I just want to be here, okay?”

And August, who has spent every minute of the last few months wishing she could touch Jane one more time, says yes.

They manage to work wet underthings off wet bodies and then, in the shower, they dissolve into each other, graceless and messy. August loses track of who washes whose hair or where the suds are coming from. The whole landscape of the world becomes golden-brown skin and fluid black lines of ink and a feeling in her chest like flowers. She kisses, and Jane kisses back, again, forever.

It’s supposed to be just a shower—August swears—but everything is wet and warm and slick and it’s too easy and natural for her hand to slip down between Jane’s legs, and Jane’s pushing back into her palm, and it’s been so long. What else is she supposed to do?

“Missed you so fucking much,” August breathes out. She thinks it’s lost in the rush of the shower, but Jane hears it.

“I’m here,” Jane says, licking water from the hollow of August’s throat. August replaces her hand with her thigh, bearing down on Jane’s in return, and they move together, one of Jane’s hands on the wall for balance. Her breath hitches when she says it again: “I’m here.”

They’re kissing, and Jane’s grinding against her, and she feels herself sinking into a fog of want, molten skin, a mouth on hers. It’s too much, and it’s not enough, and then they’re stumbling out of the tub and August’s back is on the bathmat, on the bathroom floor, and Jane is kissing her like she wants to disappear into her, hands roaming.

“Hang on,” Jane says, moving to pull back. August grabs her wrist.

“Why—ah—” August gasps at the change of angle before Jane takes her fingers away completely. “For God’s sake—why would you ever stop doing that—”

“Because,” Jane says, pinching August on the hip, “I don’t want to fuck you on the bathroom floor.”

“We’ve fucked on the subway,” August says. Her voice comes out pouty and petulant. She does not care. “The bathroom floor is an upgrade.”

“I’m not against the bathroom floor,” Jane says. “I mean, there are a lot of places in this apartment where I have every intention of fucking you. I just want to start with the bed.”

Oh, right. The bed. They can have sex in a bed now.

“Hurry up, then,” August says, clambering to her feet and pulling a towel with her. It’s a testament to all they’ve been through together that she doesn’t even think to care what her body looks like as she wrenches the door open and crosses into her bedroom.

“You’re so annoying,” Jane says, but she’s close behind, shutting the door and pulling August into her, throwing the towel across the room as carelessly as she threw August’s glasses that night on the Manhattan Bridge.

She backs August toward the bed, and August can feel warm, shower-fresh skin everywhere, and she’s going crazy over it. Jane’s waist and hips, the tight swells of her ass and thighs, ribs, breasts, elbows, ankles. She’s losing it. She’s a lifelong heretic suddenly overwhelmed with blissful gratitude for whatever made this possible. Her mouth is watering, and it tastes like honey, but maybe that’s because Jane tastes as sweet as she smells.

Jane gives her a little push, and she lets herself fall into the sheets.

She lies there, watching Jane look around the room—the tiny writing desk stacked with textbooks, the basket of carefully folded laundry by the closet, the potted cactus on the windowsill that Niko gave her for her birthday in September, the maps and timelines that she hasn’t yet brought herself to unpin from the walls. The jacket on the chair. August’s room is like her: quiet, unfancy, gray in the stormy afternoon, and filled up with Jane.

“Yeah, this’ll do,” Jane says. “I have some suggestions about decor, but we can talk about that later.”

She’s still standing a few feet from the bed, naked and never shy, and August doesn’t bother pretending not to look at every inch of her for the first time. Jane is obviously, always, inevitably stunning, all long legs and gentle curves and sharp hipbones and tattoos. But August finds that she loves things it never occurred to her to love. The dimples of her knees. The knots of her shoulders. The way her bare toes touch the scuffed floor.

“What?” Jane asks.

“Nothing,” August says, rolling over to lay her cheek against the pillow. Jane’s eyes track the way her damp hair tumbles down her shoulders and back. “It’s cute how you just invited yourself to move in with us.”

“Four’s unlucky anyway,” Jane says, “might as well make it five.”

She throws herself at the bed, and August bounces and laughs and lets Jane push her onto her back, already gasping.

“You’re always so,” she says, kissing the patch of skin behind August’s ear, her right hand finding its way, “sensitive.”

“Don’t—don’t make fun of me.”

“I’m not making fun of you.” She moves one of her fingers in a teasing little circle and August gasps again, one hand fisting in the sheets. “I love that about you. It’s fun.”

When August opens her eyes, Jane’s hovering over her, face gentle and awed. At August. She’s looking at August like that. August can literally split time open, apparently, but she still can’t believe the way Jane looks at her.

“You know I still love you, right?” August tells her. It falls out of her mouth readily. Losing her made it easy to say. “Even though it’s been months for me. I never even came close to stopping.”

Jane presses her lips to the center of August’s chest.

“Tell me one more time.”

August lets out a quiet, eager sound when she moves again. “I love you. I—I love you.”

And Jane presses her into the mattress and says, “I’m here. I’m not leaving.”

It’s luxury. The most basic parameters of privacy—a door, an empty apartment, an afternoon stretching out before them—and that’s luxury. No train schedules or nosy commuters. No fluorescent lights. Just touching for the luxury of touch, greedy because they can be. Jane keeps watching her face, and August can’t imagine what her expression is doing, but Jane’s smiling, and it only winds her up more to know that Jane’s getting off on getting her off. August wants more, wants everything she can possibly have, wants to bury herself in it and never come back.

The first one goes quickly—it’s been too long and she’s missed Jane too much for it to take much more than a hand and a few minutes—and when she’s finished shivering through it, Jane kisses her back to her senses.

“God,” August says, breaking off, “come up here.”

“I am up here,” Jane says. “I’m kissing you.”

“No.” August licks her lips and reaches up to drag one fingertip across the bottom one. “Here.”

“Oh,” Jane exhales. “Oh, okay.”

Jane kisses her once more, and then she’s moving up August’s body, shifting on her knees until she’s even with August’s shoulders, bracing herself with both hands against the wall. August can feel the heat radiating off of her like wet sunlight.

“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?”

“Yes,” August says gently. Jane’s hand slides over the back of hers. “Of course I will.”

---

A week later, just in time for Christmas, Isaiah drives them to the bus station, Wes in the front seat and the rest of them crammed four-across in the back.

“You’re gonna do great,” Myla says, leaning across Niko to pinch Jane’s cheek. The silver band flashes on her third finger; she and Niko wear matching plain engagement rings now. “They’re gonna love you.”

“Of course they’re gonna love her,” Niko says knowingly. “Did you guys pack snacks?”

“Yes, Dad,” Jane and August monotone in unison.

“Bring me a souvenir,” Wes calls from the front seat.

“Salt and pepper shakers,” Isaiah adds. “We need salt and pepper shakers. Shaped like the Golden Gate Bridge.”

“We don’t need those,” Wes says. He’s been spending more and more time across the hall at Isaiah’s. When he does come home, it’s usually to wordlessly leave a dozen homemade cupcakes on the kitchen counter and vanish back into the night.

“But I want them,” Isaiah whines.

Wes pulls a face. “Okay. Salt and pepper shakers.”

They roll into the bus station ten minutes before the bus is set to depart, Jane’s hand clenched around their tickets. The other four kiss them sloppy goodbyes and wave them off, and they haul their backpacks up and head for the bus doors.

Jane hasn’t worn her ripped jeans or jacket for weeks, settling instead into black skinnies, billowy button-downs, crew neck sweatshirts. But today, her skinnies are paired with the leather jacket from ’77, laid across her shoulders like a second skin. She hasn’t mentioned it, but August thinks she’s hoping it’ll help.

“So, this guy,” Jane says, “Augie’s old boyfriend—he really has my records?”

“Yeah,” August says. She called him when Jane bought the bus tickets, and he’s agreed to meet up with what he’s been told is Jane Su’s second cousin. He’s also meeting August’s mom, who’s flying up to spend the holiday in California and get introduced to August’s girlfriend. It’s a big week. “He said they came in the day Augie left. He never got rid of them.”

“I can’t wait to see them,” Jane says, bouncing restlessly on her heels. “And meet him. And meet your mom.”

“I’m personally looking forward to this life-changing crispy chicken family recipe you keep telling me about,” August replies. Jane’s parents’ restaurant in Chinatown is still open, it turns out. Jane’s sister Barbara runs it.

Jane bites her lip, looking down at the toes of her boots. They’re new—heavy black leather. She’s still breaking them in.

“You know,” Jane says. “My family. If they … well, if it goes okay, they’re gonna call me Biyu.”

August shrugs. “I mean, it’s your name.”

“I’ve been thinking lately, actually.” Jane looks at her. “What would you think about me going by Biyu all the time?”

August smiles. “I’ll call you anything you want, Subway Girl.”

The line keeps shuffling forward until they’re the last ones outside the bus, clutching tickets in clammy palms. Maybe it’s insane to try this. Maybe there’s no way to know exactly how anything will turn out. Maybe that’s okay.

At the door, Jane turns to August. She looks nervous, a little queasy even, but her jaw is set. She lived because she wanted to. There’s nothing she can’t do.

“There’s a very big chance that this could be a disaster,” Jane says.

“Never stopped us before,” August tells her, and she pulls her up the steps.

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Letter from Jane Su to August Landry.

Handwritten on a sheet of lined paper ripped from August’s sex notebook, which Jane was definitely not supposed to know about, secretly tucked into a jacket pocket the night of the Save Pancake Billy’s House of Pancakes Pancakepalooza Drag & Art Extravaganza. Discovered months later on a bus to San Francisco.

August,

August August August.

August is a time, a place, and a person.

The first time I remember tasting a nectarine, my sisters were too small to be allowed in the kitchen. It was only my dad and me in the back of the restaurant, me propped up on a prep table. He was slicing one up, and I stole a piece, and he always told me that was the moment he knew I’d be trouble. He taught me the word for it. I loved the way it felt in my mouth. It was late summer, warm but not hot, and nectarines were ripe. So, you know. August is a time.

The first time I felt at home after I left home, New Orleans was dripping summer down my back. I was leaning against the wrought iron railing of our balcony, and it was almost hot enough to burn, but it didn’t hurt. A friend I hadn’t meantto make was in the kitchen cooking meat and rice, and he left the window open. The steam kept kissing the humid air, and I thought, they’re the same, like the Bay is the same as the River. So, August is a place.

The first time I let myself fall, it wasn’t hot at all. It was cold. January. There was ice on the sidewalks—at least, that’s what I’d heard. But this girl felt like nectarines and balconies to me. She felt like everything. She felt like a long winter, then a nervous spring, then a sticky summer, and then those last days you never thought you’d get to, the ones that spread themselves out, out, out until they feel like they go on forever. So, August is a person.

I love you. Summer never ends.

Jane

new york > brooklyn > community > missed connections

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Posted December 29, 2020

Looking for someone? (Brooklyn)

We all have ghosts. People who pass through our lives, there one moment and gone the next—lost friends, family histories faded through time. I’m a freelance researcher and investigator, and I can find people who’ve slipped through the cracks. Email me. Maybe I can help.