One last stop, p.25
One Last Stop, page 25
It takes thirty minutes on the phone for Winfield to strong-arm Billy into accepting charity, and when he caves, he passes it off to August and tells her she’s in charge of figuring out food. Cut to: Jerry and August swearing up a storm, trying to average out the number of pancakes they need per person and how much it’ll cost. They get there, though.
All along, it hums under the surface—that feeling August felt when she stepped inside Delilah’s, when Miss Ivy calls her by name, when they paraded down to the Q behind Isaiah in his top hat, when the guy at the bodega doesn’t card her, when Jane looks at her like she could be part of her mental photo album of the city. That feeling that she lives here, like, really lives here. Her shadow’s passed through a thousand busted-up crosswalks and under a million creaking rows of scaffolding. She’s been here, and here, and here.
New York takes from her, sometimes. But she takes too. She takes its muggy air in fistfuls, and she packs it into the cracks in her heart.
And now, she’s gonna give it something. They’re gonna give it something.
* * *
It’s the end of the first week, a late night sitting around a pizza talking about flyers, when August’s phone rings.
She slides it out from under the box: her mom.
“Helloooo,” she answers.
A short pause—August sits up straight. Something’s up. Her mother never allows even half a second of silence.
“Hey, August, honey,” she says. “Are you alone?”
August climbs to her feet, shrugging at Myla’s concerned look. “Um, not right now. Hang on.” She crosses to her room and shuts the door behind her. “What happened? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she says. “It’s your grandmother.”
August hisses out a long breath. Her grandmother? The old broad probably called her a test-tube science project baby again or decided to bankroll another Republican congressional campaign. That, she can deal with.
“Oh. What’s going on?”
“Well, she had a stroke last night, and she … she didn’t make it.”
August sits down heavily on the edge of her bed.
“Shit. Are you okay?”
“I’m all right,” her mom says in the tone she gets when she’s leafing through evidence, half-distracted and clipped. “She’d already made arrangements after your grandfather died, so it’s all handled.”
“I meant, like.” August tries to speak slowly, deliberately. Her mother has always been about as emotive as a mossy boulder, but August feels like this should probably be an exception. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, yeah, I’m—I’m okay. I mean, she and I had said everything we were ever going to say to each other. I got closure a long time ago. It is what it is, you know?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m really sorry, Mom. Is there anything I can do? Do you need me to come down for the funeral?”
“Oh, no, honey, don’t worry about that. I’ll be fine. But I did need to talk to you about something.”
“What’s up?”
“Well, I got a call from the family lawyer last night. Your grandmother left you some money.”
“What?” August blinks at the wall. “What do you mean? Why would she leave me something? I’m the shameful family secret.”
“No. No, that’s me. You’re her granddaughter.”
“Since when? She’s barely spoken to me. She’s never even sent me a birthday present.”
Another pause. “August, that’s not true.”
“What do you mean it’s not true? What are you talking about?”
“August, I … I need to tell you something. But I need you not to hate me.”
“What?”
“Look, your grandparents … they were difficult people. It’s always been complicated between us. And I do think they’re ashamed of me because I decided to have you on my own. I never wanted to become the trophy wife with a rich husband they raised me to be. But they were never ashamed of you.”
August grinds her teeth. “They didn’t even know me.”
“Well … they did, kind of. I’d—I’d keep them updated, sometimes. And they’d hear from St. Margaret’s how you were doing.”
“Why would St. Margaret’s talk to them about me?”
Another pause. A long one.
“Because they keep the people paying a student’s tuition updated on their student.”
What?
“What? They—they paid my tuition? This whole time?”
“Yes.”
“But you told me—you always said we were broke because you had to pay for St. Margaret’s.”
“I did! I paid for your lunches, I paid for your field trips, your uniforms, your extracurriculars, your—your library fines. But they were the ones who wrote the big checks. They’d send one every birthday.”
August’s childhood and teenage years flutter into focus—the way kids used to look at her in her Walmart tennis shoes, the things her mom said they couldn’t afford to replace after the storm. “So then, why were we broke, Mom? Why were we broke?”
“Well, August, I mean … it’s not cheap, to pay for an investigation. Sometimes there were people I had to pay for information, there was equipment to buy—”
“How long?” August asks. “How long did they send money?”
“Only until you graduated high school, honey. I—I told them to stop once you turned eighteen, so they did. I didn’t want them to keep helping us forever.”
“And what if I had wanted help?”
She’s quiet for a few seconds. “I don’t know.”
“I mean, based on the will, they would have, right?”
“Maybe so.”
“You’re telling me, I’m sitting here on a mountain of student loans that I didn’t have to take out, because you didn’t want to tell me this?”
“August, they—they’re not like you and me, okay? They always judged me, and they would have judged the way we lived, the way I raised you, and I didn’t want that for you. I didn’t want to give them a chance to treat you the way they treated me, or Augie.”
“But they wanted—they wanted to see me?”
“August, you don’t understand—”
“So, you just decided for me that I wouldn’t have a family? That it’d be just you and me? This isn’t some Gilmore Girls fantasy, okay? This is my life, and I’ve spent most of it alone, because you told me I was, that I should be, that I should be happy about it, but it was only because you didn’t want anyone to come between us, wasn’t it?”
Her mom’s voice comes back sharp, with a bitter, defensive anger that August knows lives in her too. “You can’t even imagine it, August. You can’t imagine the way they treated Augie. He left because they made him miserable, and I couldn’t lose you like that—”
“Can you shut up about Augie for once? It’s been almost fifty years! He’s gone! People leave!”
There’s a terrible moment of silence, long enough for August to play back what she said, but not long enough to regret it.
“August,” her mom says once, like a nail going in.
“You know what?” August says. “You never listen to me. You never care about what I want unless it’s what you want. I told you five years ago that I didn’t want to work the case with you anymore, and you didn’t care. Sometimes it’s like you had me just so you could have a—a fucking assistant.”
“August—”
“No, I’m done. Don’t call me tomorrow. In fact, don’t call me at all. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to talk, but I—I am gonna need you to leave me alone for a while, Mom.” She squeezes her eyes shut. “I’m sorry about your mom. And I’m sorry they treated you like shit. But that didn’t give you the right.”
August hangs up and throws her phone onto the floorboards, flopping back on her bed. She and her mom have fought before—God knows two hardheaded people with a tendency to go icy when threatened in only seven hundred square feet of living space will go at it. But never like this.
She can hear everyone in the living room laughing. She feels as separate from it as she did the day she moved in.
Her whole life, the gnaw of anxiety has made people opaque to her. No matter how well she knows someone, no matter the logical patterns, no matter how many allowances she knows someone might make for her—that bone-deep fear of rejection has always made it impossible for her to see any of it. It frosts over the glass. She never had anyone to begin with, so she let it be unsurprising that nobody would want to have her around.
She slides her hand over the bedspread and her knuckles brush something cool and hard: her pocketknife. It must have slid out when she threw her bag down earlier.
She scoops it up, turns it over in her palm. The fish scales, the sticker on the handle. If she wanted to, she could twirl it between her fingers, flip the blade out, and jimmy a window open. Her mom taught her. She remembers it all. She shouldn’t have had to learn any of it, but she did.
And now she’s using everything she learned to help Jane.
Shit.
You can try, she guesses. You can tear yourself apart and rebuild from scratch, bring yourself to every corner of the map, sew a new self from the scraps of a thousand other people and places. You can try to expand to fill a different shape. But at the end of the day, there’s a place at the foot of the bed where your shoes hit the floor, and it’s the same.
It’s always the same.
* * *
The next day, August takes the file her mother mailed her down from the top of the fridge.
She didn’t open it after the first time, didn’t think about it, but she didn’t dump it in the garbage either. She wants it gone, so she crams it into her bag and climbs onto the Q heading toward the post office. It feels heavy in her bag, like a relic of the family religion.
It’s incredible, really, how the sight of Jane sitting there like she always is, picking at the edge of the seat with her Swiss Army knife, unspools the tension in her shoulders.
“Hey, Landry,” Jane says. She smiles when August leans down to kiss her hello. “Save Billy’s yet?”
“Working on it,” August says, sitting beside her. “Have any epiphanies yet?”
“Working on it,” Jane says. She gives August a once-over. “What’s going on? You’re, like … all staticky.”
“Is that a thing you can do?” August asks. “Because of the electricity thing? Like, can you feel other people’s emotional frequencies?”
“Not really,” Jane says, leaning her face on her hand. “But sometimes, lately, yours have started coming through. Not totally clear, but like music from the next room, you know?”
Uh-oh. Can she feel terrible dumbass love radiating off of August?
“I wonder if that means you’re becoming more present,” August says, “like how the wine worked on you even though you couldn’t get drunk before. Maybe that’s progress.”
“Sure as hell hope so,” Jane says. She leans back, hooking one arm over the handrail beside her. “But you didn’t answer my question. What’s going on?”
August hisses out a breath and shrugs. “I got in a fight with my mom. It’s stupid. I don’t really want to talk about it.”
Jane lets out a low whistle. “I got you.” A short lull absorbs the tension before Jane speaks again. “Oh, it’s probably not that helpful, but I did remember something.”
She lifts the hem of her T-shirt, baring the tattoos that span her side from ribs to thigh. August has seen them all, mostly in hurried glimpses or in semidarkness.
“I remembered what these guys mean,” Jane says.
August peers at the inky animals. “Yeah?”
“It’s the zodiac signs for my family.” She touches the tail feathers of the rooster sprawling down her rib cage. “My dad, ’33.” The snout of the dog on her side. “Mom, ’34.” The horns of a goat on her hip. “Betty, ’55.” Disappearing past her waistband and down her thigh, a monkey. “Barbara, ’56.”
“Wow,” August says. “What’s yours?”
She points to her opposite hip, at the serpent winding up from her thigh, separate from the others. “Year of the Snake.”
The art is beautiful, and she can’t imagine Jane got any of them before she ran away. Which means she sat through hours of needles for her family after she left them.
“Hey,” August says. “Are you sure you don’t want me to…?”
She’s asked before, if she should try to find Jane’s family. Jane said no, and August hasn’t pushed it.
“Yeah, no, I—I can’t,” Jane says, tucking her shirt back in. “I don’t know what’s worse—the idea that they’ve been looking for me and missing me and probably thinking I’m dead, or the idea that they just gave up and moved on with their lives. I don’t want to know. I can’t—I can’t face that.”
August thinks of her mom and the file in her bag. “I get it.”
“When I left home,” Jane says after a few seconds. She’s returned to her Swiss Army knife, carving a thin line into the shiny blue of the seat. “I called from LA once, and God, my parents were furious. My dad told me not to come back. And I couldn’t even blame him. That was the last time I called, and I … I really believed that was the best thing I could do for them. For us. To drift. But I thought about them every single day. Every minute of the day, like they were with me. I got the tattoos so they would be.”
“They’re beautiful.”
“I like permanent marks, you know? Tattoos, scars.” She crosses the letter A she’s been carving and moves on to N with a soft chuckle. “Vandalism. It’s like, when you spend your life running, sometimes that’s the only thing you have to show for it.”
She carves a small plus sign underneath her name and looks up at August, extending the knife. “Your turn.”
August glances between her, the knife, and the blank space below the plus sign for a full ten seconds before she gets it. Jane wants August’s name next to hers in the permanent mark she’s leaving on the Q.
Reaching into her back pocket, August clears the feelings out of her throat and says, “I have my own.”
She flicks the blade of her knife out and gets to work, scratching a clumsy AUGUST. When it’s done, she sits back, holding the knife loosely in her palm, admiring their work. JANE + AUGUST. She likes the way they look together.
When she turns to look at Jane, she’s staring down at August’s hand.
“What’s that?” Jane asks.
August follows her gaze. “My knife?”
“Your—where did you get that?”
“It was a gift?” August says. “My mom gave it to me; it belonged to her brother.”
“August.”
“Yeah?”
“No. August,” Jane says. August frowns at her, and she goes on: “That was his name. The guy who owned that knife. Augie.”
August stares. “How did you—”
“How old is he?” Jane cuts in. Her eyes are wide. “Your mom’s brother—how old is he?”
“He was born in ’48, but he’s—he’s been missing since—”
“1973,” Jane finishes flatly.
August never told Jane any of the specifics. It was nice to have one thing in her life that wasn’t touched by it. But Jane knows. She knows his name, the year, and she—
“Fuck,” August swears.
Biyu Su. She remembers where she saw that name.
She fumbles the fastening on her bag three times, before she finally pulls out the file.
“Open it,” August says.
Jane’s fingers are tentative on the edge of the manila folder, and when it falls open, there’s a newspaper photograph paperclipped to the first page, yellowing black and white. Jane, missing a couple of tattoos, in the background of a restaurant that had just opened in the Quarter. In the cutline, she’s listed as Biyu Su.
“My mom sent me this,” August says. “She said she’d found someone who might have known her brother and traced them to New York.”
It takes a second, but it comes: the fluorescent above their heads surges brighter and blinks out.
“Her brother—” Jane starts and stops, hand shaking when she touches the edge of the clipping. “Landry. That was … that was her brother. I knew—I knew there was something familiar about you.”
August’s voice is mostly breath when she asks, “How did you know him?”
“We lived together,” Jane says. Her voice sounds muffled through decades. “The roommate—the one I couldn’t remember. It was him.”
August knows from the look on her face what the answer is going to be, but she has to ask.
“What happened to him?”
Jane’s hand curls into a fist.
“August, he’s dead.”
* * *
Jane tells August about the UpStairs Lounge.
It was a bar on the second floor of a building at the corner of Chartres and Iberville, a jukebox and a tiny stage, bars on the windows like all the spots in the city used to have. One of the best places for blue-collar boys on the low. Augie was short-haired and square-jawed, shoulders filling out a white T-shirt, a towel over his shoulder behind the bar.
It was the summer of ’73, Jane tells her, but August already knows. She could never forget it. She’s spent years trying to picture that summer. Her mom was sure he’d left the city, but August used to wonder if he was hidden away a few neighborhoods over, if ivy climbed the wrought iron on his balcony, or power lines heavy with Mardi Gras beads dipped into the oak trees outside his window.
Her mom had theories—he got a girl pregnant and ran away, made enemies with the guys who bribed the NOPD to guard their craps games and skipped town, got lost, got married, got out of town and disappeared beyond the cypress trees.
Instead, instead, Jane tells August he was loved. She remembers him at the stove of their tiny kitchen, teaching her how to make pancakes. She tells August how he used to frown at the bathroom mirror and run a wet comb through his hair trying to tame it. He was happy, she says, even though he never talked about his family, even though she heard him through the walls sometimes, on the phone using a voice so gentle that he must have been talking to the round-faced, green-eyed little girl whose picture he kept in his wallet. He was happy because he had Jane, he had friends, he had the job at the UpStairs and guys with sweet eyes and broad shoulders who wanted to kiss him in the streetlamp light. He had hope. He liked to march, liked to help Jane make signs. He had dreams for a future and friends all over the city, tight-knit circles, hands that slapped his back when he walked into a room.
