One last stop, p.15
One Last Stop, page 15
“What? What kind of question is that?”
“Can you turn that brain of yours off for a second and trust?”
August opens and shuts her mouth.
“I—I guess I can try.”
“Good enough for me,” Jane says, and she wrenches the door open.
There’s barely time to panic about the noise and wind and motion exploding through the open door before Jane’s stepping onto the tiny platform between trains, pulling August with her by one sweaty hand.
It’s chaos—the darkness of the tunnel, the blue and yellow flashes of train lights and flickering wall fixtures, the deafening rattle of the tracks flying past, dirt and concrete rushing out from underneath them. August makes the absolutely terrible mistake of looking down and feels like she’s going to throw up.
“Oh my God, what the fuck,” she says, but she can’t hear her own voice.
The tracks are right there. One wrong step and a few inches of air between staying alive and being scraped off the rails. This is the worst possible idea anyone could ever have, and it’s what Jane does for fun.
“It makes you feel alive, right?” Jane shouts, and before August can yank them both back into the car, Jane steps across the gap to the platform of the next car.
“It makes me feel like I’m gonna die!” August yells back.
“That’s the same thing!”
August is clinging to the car, back pressed against the door, nails scrabbling. Jane grabs the handle of the next door with one hand and reaches out the other to her. “Come on! You can do this!”
“I really can’t!”
“August, you can!”
“I can’t!”
“Don’t look at the tracks!” she yells. “Eyes up, Landry!”
Everything in August’s brain is screaming at her not to, but she drags her eyes up from the rails and to the car in front of her, the tiny platform, Jane standing there with one hand out, the wind whipping her hair around her face.
August realizes, suddenly, it’s the first time she’s ever seen Jane outside of the train.
That’s what makes her do it. Because August doesn’t do this type of thing, but Jane is outside.
“Oh fuck,” August mutters, and she grabs Jane’s hand.
She clears the gap from one car to the next in a breath, a scream caught high in the back of her throat, and then her feet are on metal.
She did it. She made it across.
August crashes into Jane’s chest, and Jane catches her around the waist like she did the day the lights went out, the day August thought she’d blown it for good. Jane laughs, and on a hysterical burst of adrenaline, August laughs too, her raincoat flying around them.
Here they are. Two sets of sneakers on a scrap of metal. Two girls in the middle of a hurricane, tearing down the line. She’s looking up at Jane, and Jane’s looking down at her, and August feels her everywhere, even the places she’s not touching, pressed close as the world roars on.
“See?” she says. But she’s looking at August’s mouth when she says it. “You did it.”
And August thinks, as she tips her chin up, that here, in the space between subway cars, right on the edge of where Jane exists, is where Jane’s finally going to kiss her for real. No pretense. No memories. But because she wants to. Her fingers are spreading on August’s waist, digging into the fabric of her jacket, and—
“Come on,” Jane says, yanking the door open, and they tumble into the next car.
Jane pulls her half-running past unbothered commuters, dodging poles and standing passengers until they reach the next door. They jump from one car to the next, out one door and in another, until it stops being so terrifying to step off, until August barely even hesitates before taking her hand.
“Okay,” Jane says, when they get to their seventh changeover. “You first.”
August turns, eyes wide. That isn’t what she signed up for.
“What?”
“You trusted me, right?” August nods. “Now trust yourself.”
August turns to the next train car. Her brain chooses this moment to remind her that forty-eight people died in subway accidents in 2016. She doesn’t think she can do this without Jane standing there to catch her if she slips, and she’s really not interested in going down in history as a delay on the Q while someone calls the medical examiner.
She trusted Jane, though. She trusted Jane and her time on this train and that cocky grin to get her there safely. Why can’t she do the same for herself? She’s learned this train backward and forward. The Q is home, and August is the girl with the knife picking its stops apart one by one. She doesn’t believe in things. But she can believe in that.
She steps off.
“Hell yeah!” Jane crows from behind when she makes it. She doesn’t wait for August’s hand, hopping across and onto the platform. “That’s my girl!”
Jane slides the door open, and on the other side, August collapses into the nearest seat.
“Holy shit,” August says, panting. “Holy shit, I can’t believe I did that.”
Jane leans on a pole to catch her breath. “You did. And that is what you need to trust in. Because you got what you need. And sometimes, the universe has your back.”
August inhales once, exhales. She looks at Jane, forty-five years away from where she’s supposed to be, and yeah, she guesses in some ways, the universe does have her back.
“So,” Jane says, “let’s take it down to one thing. What scares you the most?”
August thinks about it as her lungs level back out.
“I—” she attempts. “I don’t know who I am.”
Jane snorts, raising an eyebrow. “Well, that makes fuckin’ two of us.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Stop, okay? For five minutes, let’s pretend everything else doesn’t matter, and I’m me, and you’re you, and we’re sitting on this train, and we’re figuring it out. Can you do that?”
August grits her teeth. “Yeah.”
“Okay,” Jane says. “Now, listen to me.”
She crouches in front of August, bracing her hands on August’s knees, forcing her to look into her eyes.
“None of us know exactly who we are, and guess what? It doesn’t fucking matter. God knows I don’t, but I’ll find my way to it.” She rubs her thumb over August’s kneecap, poking gently into the soft part below her thigh. “Like—okay, I dated this girl who was an artist, right? And she’d do figure drawing, where she’d draw the negative space around a person first, and then fill in the person. And that’s how I’m trying to look at it. Maybe I don’t know what fills it in yet, but I can look at the space around where I sit in the world, what creates that shape, and I can care about what it’s made of, if it’s good, if it hurts anyone, it makes people happy, if it makes me happy. And that can be enough for now.”
Jane’s looking up at her like she means it, like she’s been riding these rails all this time on that hope. She’s a fighter, a runner, a riot girl, and she can’t be any of that down here, so she runs between trains to feel something. If she can be here and live with that and have enough left over for this, she must know what she’s talking about.
“Shit,” August says. “You’re good at this.”
Jane smiles wide. “Look, I was gay in the ’70s. I can handle an emergency.”
“God,” August groans as Jane clambers into her own seat. “I can’t believe I made you talk me down from an existential crisis.”
Jane tilts her head to look at her. She’s got this ability to move between pretty and handsome from moment to moment, a subtle difference in the way she holds her chin or the set of her mouth. Right now, she’s the prettiest girl August has ever seen.
“Shut up,” Jane says. “You’re spending your life riding the subway to help a stranger with no evidence she can be helped, okay? Let me do one thing for you.”
August releases a breath, and she’s surprised at the proximity when it ruffles the ends of Jane’s hair.
Jane keeps looking at her, and August swears she sees something move behind her eyes, like a memory does when she’s thinking about Mingxia or Jenny or one of the other girls, but new, different. Something delicate as a spark, and only for August. It’s the same feeling from the platform: maybe this time, for real.
August isn’t supposed to care. She’s not supposed to want that. But the way her heart kicks up into a fever frequency says that she still goddamn does.
“You’re not a stranger,” August says into the few inches between them.
“No, you’re right,” Jane agrees. “We’re definitely not strangers.” She leans back and stretches her arms over her head, turning her face away from August, and says, “I guess you’re my best friend, huh?”
The train eases into another station, and something clenches in the vicinity of August’s jaw.
Friend.
“Yeah,” August says. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“And you’re gonna get me back to where I’m supposed to be,” Jane goes on, smiling. Smiling at the idea of going back to 1970-something and never seeing August again. “Because you’re a genius.”
The train rattles and groans to a stop.
“Yeah,” August says, and she forces a smile.
* * *
“You’ve been doing what for research?” Myla asks. It’s hard to catch the question when she’s got a screwdriver between her teeth, but August gets the gist.
Myla has her own office in the back of Rewind, complete with shelves full of typewriters and old radios and a workstation strewn with parts. She told August she got the job after wandering in halfway through her final semester at Columbia and pulling a pair of pliers out of the owner’s hands to rewire a 1940s record player. She’s a nerd for the oldies, she always says, and it came in handy. She’s clearly good enough at what she does that her boss doesn’t mind her decorating her workstation with a homemade cross-stitch that says BIG DICK ENERGY IS GENDER NEUTRAL.
She’s looking at August through the giant magnifying lens mounted over her station, so her mouth and nose are normal sized, but her eyes are the size of dinner plates. August tries not to laugh.
“Kissing, okay, we’ve been making out—”
“On the train?”
“Don’t think Niko hasn’t told me about the time under the pizza box after Thanksgiving last year.”
“Okay, that was a holiday.”
“Anyway,” August goes on, “as I was saying, remembering kisses and girls that she, you know, felt something for, brings back a lot for her, and the best way to do that is to re-create them.” The grimace Myla pulls is magnified about ten times by the lens, distorted like a disapproving Dalí. “Stop making that face, okay, I know it’s a bad idea.”
“I mean, it’s as if you like to be emotionally tortured,” Myla says, finally sitting back so her facial proportions return to normal. “Wait, is that what it is? Because like, damn, but okay.”
“No, that’s the whole thing,” August says. “I have to stop. I can’t keep doing it. It’s—it’s fucking me up. So that’s why I came here—I have an idea for something that could work instead.”
“And what’s that?”
“A radio,” August says. “Another big thing for her is music. She told me she doesn’t want Spotify or anything, but maybe random songs from the radio might help her remember things. I wondered if y’all had any portable radios in stock.”
Myla pushes back from her station, folding her arms and surveying her domain of deconstructed cash registers and jukebox parts like a steampunk Tony Stark in a leather skirt. “We might have something in the back.”
“And,” August says, following her toward the storage room in the rear of the store, “I saw Jane step outside of the train.”
Myla whips her head around. “She got off the train, and you led with the kissing? God, you are the most useless bisexual I’ve ever met in my entire goddamn life.”
“She wasn’t off the train, she was outside of it,” August clarifies. “She can walk between the cars.”
“So it’s not the train that’s got her trapped, it’s the line,” Myla concludes simply, unlocking the storage room door. “Good to know.”
August leaves fifteen minutes later with a portable radio and a reminder from Myla to pick up batteries, and when she hands it to Jane, she gets to watch her face light up like Christmas came early. Which, she has to admit, is part of why she bought it. The other reason quickly presents itself.
“There’s this thing I’m trying to remember,” Jane says. “From LA. There’s a taco truck, and Coke with lime, and this song by Sly and the Family Stone … and a girl.” She looks at August. And August could—she could get off the train and return with a wedge of lime and a kiss, wants to even, but she thinks about what Jane said about getting out of here, the way she smiled at the thought of leaving.
“Oh, man,” August says. “That, uh—that sounds like a good lead, but I’m—I gotta clock in. I got a double today, you know, need the money so—anyway.” She gathers up her bag, eyeing the board for the next stop. Not even close to work. “Try the radio. See if you can find a funk station. I bet it helps.”
“Oh,” Jane says, spinning the dial, “okay. Yeah, good idea.”
And August dips out of the train with a wave as soon as the doors slide open.
She thinks—she is pretty sure, actually, that she’s figured out a solution to her problem. A radio. That should be fine.
It starts on a Saturday morning when Jane texts, August, Put your radio on 90.9 FM. Thanks, Jane
Obviously, August doesn’t own a radio. And it would never occur to Jane that August doesn’t own a radio. Even if she did, she’s outside for once, sitting by the water in Prospect Park, watching ducks squabble over pizza crusts and stoners pass a joint under a gazebo. She’d be on the train with Jane except Niko personally packed her a sandwich and insisted she take advantage of her Saturday morning off to “recenter” and “absorb different energies” and “try this havarti I got at the farmer’s market last week, it’s got a lot of character.”
But it only takes a minute to download an FM tuner app, and August thumbs through the dial to the station. A guy with a dry voice is reading a list of programming for the next six hours, so she texts back, Okay, what next?
Just wait, Jane replies. I remembered another song, so I called in and requested it.
The guy on the mic switches gears and says, “And now, a request from a girl in Brooklyn who wants to hear some old-school punk, here’s ‘Lovers’ by the Runaways.”
August leans back on the bench, and the harsh guitar and pounding drums start up. Her phone buzzes.
Today I remembered that I dated a girl in Spanish Harlem who liked to get head to this album! XOXO Jane
August chokes on her sandwich.
It becomes the new ritual: Jane texts August day and night, Hey! Turn on the radio! Love, Jane. And within minutes, there’ll be a song she requested. Thankfully, after the first, they’re almost never songs that she used to eat girls out to.
Sometimes it’s one Jane just remembered and wants to hear. One day it’s “War” by Edwin Starr, and she giddily tells August about a Vietnam protest in ’75 where she broke a finger in a fight with some old racist while the song blasted over the speakers, how a bunch of the guys who hung out on Mott Street passed around a coffee can to collect the money to get it set correctly.
But sometimes, it’s a song that she likes, or wants August to hear, a song from the back of her mind or her menagerie of cassettes. Michael Bolton rasping his way through “Soul Provider” or Jam Master Jay spitting out “You Be Illin’.” It doesn’t matter. 90.9 will play it, and August will listen just to feel that under-the-same-moon feeling of Jane listening to the same thing at the same time as she glides across the Manhattan Bridge.
And suddenly August is as handcuffed to the radio as Jane used to be. It’s extremely fucking inconvenient, honestly. She’s busy worrying about what’s going to happen to Lucie and Winfield and Jerry once Billy’s gets shut down. She has trains to catch and shifts to work and classes to catch up on and, on one particular Sunday, a Craigslist ad to answer across Brooklyn.
“Please, Wes,” August begs. He has the night off, so he’s actually awake before sunset, and he’s using his daylight hours to sketch on the couch and shoot deeply put-upon looks at August across the apartment. For someone so determined to never express emotion, he can be incredibly dramatic.
“I’m sorry, how exactly do you expect us to get a desk and an entire bed home from fucking Gravesend?”
“It’s a writing desk and a twin mattress,” August tells him. “We can do it on the subway.”
“I am not going to be the asshole who takes a mattress on the subway.”
“People take obnoxious things on the subway all the time! I was on the Q last week and someone had an entire recliner! It had cupholders, Wes.”
“Yeah, and that person was an asshole. You haven’t been in New York long enough to earn the right to be an asshole with impunity. You’re still in the tourist zone.”
“I am not a tourist. A rat climbed up my shoe yesterday, and I just let it happen. Could a tourist do that?”
Wes rolls his eyes, sitting up and batting a dangling vine out of his face. “I thought you were into minimalism, anyway.”
“I was,” August says. She takes off her glasses to clean them, hoping the blurry shape of Wes doesn’t recognize it for what it is: not having to see someone’s face when she says something vulnerable. “But that was … before I found somewhere worth putting stuff in.”
Wes is quiet, then sighs, putting his sketchbook down on the trunk.
He grits his teeth. “Isaiah has a car.”
Two hours later, they’re picking their way back to Flatbush, August Tetris’d into the back seat with her rickety new writing desk and a twin-size mattress strapped to the roof of Isaiah’s Volkswagen Golf.
Isaiah is saying something about his day job, about Instagram influencers asking if they can write off handcrafted orchid crowns on their taxes, and Wes is laughing—eyes closed, head thrown back, nose scrunched up laughing. August knows she’s staring. She’s never, not once since she moved in, seen Wes crack more than a sarcastic chuckle.
