One last stop, p.34
One Last Stop, page 34
16
Letter from Augie Landry to Suzette Landry
Postmarked from a P.O. Box in Metairie, LA
4/28/73
Hi Suzie,
How have you been? I’m so sorry I haven’t had a chance to stop by the house. I got the birthday card you sent—thank you so much!!! I loved the picture you drew me. What kind of bird is that?
I’m doing really well! I have a good job and my coworkers are like family. Not as much as you are my family, but it’s nice. Sometimes when my customers talk about their kids, I tell them about you. They all agree you’re the smartest kid they’ve ever heard of. Don’t forget what I told you: don’t listen to Mom and Dad, go to the library and read whatever books you want.
I think you’d really like my roommate. She’s smart and funny, just like you, and she doesn’t take any crap from anyone. Maybe one day I’ll introduce y’all.
I’m so proud of you, Suzie. I’m sorry I can’t be home. I think about you every day, and I miss you so much. When you’re older, I’ll tell you everything, and I hope you’ll understand. Knowing you, I think you will.
All my love,
Augie
There’s a moment, in between.
August wakes up on the trash couch in the living room, surrounded by a swampy fog of burning sage and lavender, ears ringing, whole body sore. Jane’s jacket is draped over her like a blanket.
She can remember the tracks, the look on Jane’s face, something white-hot flashing through her. And then she wakes up.
But there’s a moment in between.
Myla touches her hair gently and says that Wes and Isaiah got to the station first and found her on the platform. At the end of the couch, Wes hugs his knees to his chest. He’s got a black eye—apparently August didn’t want to go without Jane. Apparently, she fought.
They brought her back here, and as soon as Niko and Myla could leave the party, they caught the Q home. It was running again. They didn’t see Jane.
She’s gone. She was gone by the time Wes and Isaiah got to the station.
But there was a moment. Right after August kissed her.
It didn’t hurt, somehow. It was a heat that blazed through her, wrapping around, like standing on wet, hot asphalt on a hundred-degree day and feeling a breeze whip the warmth from the ground around her legs. Her eyes were squeezed shut, but for a moment, before everything went black, she saw something.
She saw a street corner. Boxy brown cars parked along the road. Graffiti on buildings that aren’t there anymore. She saw, for a second, like looking through the slats in the blinds before they flutter shut, Jane’s time. The place where Jane belongs.
And now August is here.
“It worked,” August says, half-hysterical, before she rolls over and throws up on the rug.
* * *
The thing about life without Jane is, it does go on.
There’s rent to pay, shifts to pick up. The dog needs to go outside. The MetroCard needs to be refilled. School starts, and August has to register for graduation and get fitted for a cap and gown. The Q shuts down for maintenance. They count the money they managed to raise—sixty grand. Forty away from saving Billy’s, but they’re working on it.
The city moves, trudges on, lights up and shouts and spits steam up through the grates the same as always. August lives here. That finally feels real all the time, even when nothing else does. This is the city where she got her heart broken. Nothing anchors a person to a place quite like that.
The first week, she keeps the radio on. She convinces Lucie to let her put it on at Billy’s, plays it in her headphones on her commute, takes the boom box home when she packs up the office and plays it in her room. Jane’s not going to call in, but sometimes August swears she can feel her on the other side, humming at the same frequency. The station has added enough of their songs to the rotation over the past year that sometimes she’ll hear one, Michael Bolton or Natalie Cole, and it’s a comfort to know Jane was there. It all really happened. Here are the things she left behind: songs and a name scratched into a train and a jacket that August keeps over the chair at her desk but never wears.
On Saturday morning, the DJ’s voice comes over the speakers as she’s folding laundry in her room.
“All right, listeners,” he says, “I’ve got something special for you this morning. Normally we don’t take requests in advance, but this particular caller has been so loyal to us that when she called last week and asked if we’d play a song today, we decided to make an exception.”
Oh. Oh, no.
“This one’s for you, August. Jane says, ‘Just in case.’”
“Love of My Life” starts to play, and August drops her socks on the floor and climbs into bed.
The next day, she takes a different train to Coney Island, the last place she saw her. The arched ceilings, metal and glass sprawling over her head. She gets off at the same platform but walks down the steps instead, out to the street and the shadow of the Wonder Wheel.
At the edge of the beach, she takes her shoes off, ties the laces together, and throws them over her shoulder so she can walk out into the water with bare feet. It’s almost fall, but there are still hundreds of families and teenagers and sun-starved twenty-somethings sitting on beach blankets drinking nutcrackers. She walks past them all and sinks onto the wet seat of the tide in her jeans.
Water rushes over her feet, and she contemplates the horizon of the Atlantic Ocean, thinking of Jane standing there with a backpack full of contraband beer a lifetime ago.
She thinks of the Gulf Coast back home, generations of her family soaking it into their pores, storms in the streets and in the tiny two-bedroom apartment she grew up in, what it took from her, what it gave her.
She thinks of the Bay, of Jane’s family. The Sus. She wonders if Jane’s made it home yet, if she’s tripped through the doorway of the apartment above the restaurant in Chinatown and found the candy in the tin atop the fridge, if she and her sisters have tugged each other down to the edge of the water under the Golden Gate. Maybe when Jane was a kid, she’d look out at the Pacific and wonder what got left behind when her great-great-grandparents left Hong Kong, what came with them.
August hasn’t been able to bring herself to check the records yet to find out what happened to Jane after 1977. She’s not ready to know. Whatever she did, wherever she’s been, August hopes she was happy.
She’s learned grief through her mother, and through Jane. She looked in their eyes and learned that what she’s feeling right now is worth spending time with: a distance, but a fresh one, when someone who’s far from you can still feel close.
It won’t take long, she thinks, for the farness to feel like wrongness. It was only eight months. They only knew each other for eight months. A year and a half, and she’ll have lost Jane for longer than she had her. That’s the worst part. Eight months shrinking away into nothing. Never being the exact person she was with Jane again. Jane, somewhere else, but the exact person she was with August gone. Those two exact people ceasing to exist, and nobody else in the world even feeling the loss.
When she gets home that night, sand in her hair, Niko’s waiting for her.
He pours her a cup of tea like he did the day they met, but he adds a splash of rum. He puts a record on, and they sit cross-legged on the living room floor, letting the incense he lit burn until it smolders out.
Niko usually lives along a y-axis, getting taller and taller the more he talks, but when he turns to her, there’s nothing big or expansive about him. Only a soft sigh and the downturn of his mouth as he takes her hand.
“You remember when you came to meet me and Myla before you moved in? When I touched your hand?”
“Yeah.”
“I saw this,” he says. “Not—not that this would happen. But I saw that you had something in you that could reach across. That could make impossible things happen. And I saw … I saw a lot of pain. Behind you. In front of you. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”
“It’s okay,” August tells him. “I wouldn’t have changed anything.”
He hums, rotating his teacup slowly.
The record switches to a new song, something old, strings and brassy vocals in a slow, heavy melody, like it was recorded in a smoky room.
She’s not really listening, but she catches a few lines. I like the sight and the sound and even the stink of it, I happen to like New York …
“I like this song,” she says, leaning her head back against the wall. Her eyes are rubbed pink and raw. She’s been making a lot of exceptions to her “no crying” rule lately. “Who’s it by?”
“Hmm, this?” Niko leans his head on top of hers and points to the sculpture in the corner. “This is Judy Garland.”
* * *
Her mom comes to visit in October.
It’s tense, at first. When she talks, it’s clipped, audibly struggling to stay even, but that makes August appreciate her more. She can hear the old razor-sharp Suzette defenses trying to cut through, but she’s fighting them. August can appreciate that. She’s learned a lot in the past year about how much of that is in her too.
Her mom has never really traveled, and she’s definitely never been to New York, so August takes her to see the sights—the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty. She takes her to Billy’s so she can see where August works, and she immediately takes a shine to Lucie. She orders French toast and pays the ticket. Lucie brings August a Su Special without her even asking.
“I’ve missed you,” her mom says, dragging a piece of toast through a pool of syrup. “So much. Just, like, the pictures of ugly dogs you used to text me. The way you talk too fast when you have an idea. I’m really sorry if I made you feel like I didn’t love all of you. You’re my baby.”
It’s more sentiment than she’s handed August since she was a kid. And August loves her, endlessly, unconditionally, even if she likes to play at being August’s friend more than her mom, even if she’s difficult and stubborn and unable to let anything go. August is all three of those too. Her mom gave her that, just like she gave her everything else.
“I missed you too,” August says. “The past few months … well. It was a lot. There were a lot of times I thought about calling you, but I—I just wasn’t ready.”
“It’s okay,” she says. “Anything you want to talk about?”
That’s new too: the asking. August imagines her going to work at the library and digging through the shelves, pulling out books on how to be a more emotionally supportive parent, taking notes. She bites down on a small smile.
“I was seeing someone for a few months,” August tells her. “It, uh. It’s over now. But it wasn’t because we wanted it to be. She … she had to leave the city.”
Her mom chews thoughtfully and swallows before she asks, “Did you love her?”
Maybe her mom will think it’s a waste of time and energy, to love somebody as hard as August does. But then she remembers the file burning a hole in her bag, the things she’s going to have to tell her later. Maybe she’ll get it after all.
“Yeah,” August says. Her mouth tastes like hot sauce and syrup. “Yeah, I did. I do.”
That afternoon, they walk through Prospect Park, under the autumn sun dappled through the changing leaves.
“You remember that file you sent me earlier this year? The one about Augie’s friend who moved to New York?”
Her mom stiffens slightly. Her lips twitch in the corners, but she’s physically holding herself back, trying not to look too eager or anxious. August loves her for it. It almost makes her change her mind about what she’s about to do.
“I remember,” she says, voice carefully neutral.
“Well, I looked into it,” August says. “And I, um … I found her.”
“You found her?” she says, abandoning pretense to stop in the middle of the path. “How? I couldn’t find anything beyond, like, two utility bills.”
“She was still going by her birth name sometimes when she knew Augie,” August explains, “but by the time she got here, she’d started using a different name full-time.”
“Wow,” she says. “So, have you talked to her yet?”
August almost wants to laugh. Has she talked to Jane? “Yeah, I have.”
“What’d she say?”
They’ve drawn up to an isolated bench perched near the water’s edge, quiet and separate from the runners and the geese and the sounds of the street.
August gestures toward it. “Wanna sit?”
There on the bench, she pulls out her own file, a new one.
In the weeks since Jane left, August hasn’t looked for her, but she has looked for Augie. Everything she’s found is in the manila folder she hands to her mom. A postcard in Augie’s handwriting, from California to New York. A phone number, which she finally managed to match to an old classified ad that led to a storage facility with blessedly stringent record keeping. The name of the man who shared Augie’s number and apartment in Oakland, now happily married to another man but struck momentarily speechless when August told him over the phone that she was Augie’s niece.
A copy of a fake driver’s license with Augie’s photo, a few years older than the last time her mom saw him, a different name. He’d gotten in some trouble on his way to California, and he’d stopped using his legal name. It was all behind him by 1976 when he wrote to Jane, but it meant they never could find him after ’73.
The last item is a newspaper clipping about a car accident. A twenty-nine-year-old bachelor with an Oakland address wrecked his convertible in August of ’77. He was driving the Panoramic Highway.
He died, but not the way Jane thought. He died happy. He died chasing a dream, loved and sober and sun-drenched in California. The man he left behind still has a box in his attic filled with photos—Augie smiling in front of the Painted Ladies, Augie hugging a redwood, Augie getting kissed under the mistletoe. There are copies of those in the folder too, along with a carbon copy of a letter Augie wrote to his kid sister in 1975, proof that he never stopped trying to reach her.
Her mom cries. Of course she does.
“Sometimes … sometimes you just have to feel it,” August tells her. She looks out over the water as her mom hugs the file to her chest. It’s over. It’s finally over. “Because it deserves to be felt.”
Her mom sleeps on the old air mattress that night, tucked in on August’s bedroom floor, and in the dark, she talks about what she might do with her time now that the case is solved. August smiles faintly at the cracked ceiling, listening to her toss around ideas.
“Maybe cooking,” she says. “Maybe I’ll finally learn how to bake. Maybe I’ll get into ceramics. Ooh, do you think I’d like kickboxing?”
“Based on the number of self-defense classes you made me take when I was thirteen, yeah, I think you would.”
She reaches for August’s hand where it’s dangling over the edge of her mattress, and August pictures her doing the same when she was a kid and shaking through a nightmare. She has always loved August. That’s never not been true.
“One thing, though,” her mom says. “This … Biyu person. The one who lived with Augie. Could I meet her?”
And suddenly August’s throat is almost too thick to answer.
“I really wish you could,” she manages. “But she doesn’t live here anymore.”
“Oh,” her mom says. She gives August’s hand a squeeze. “That’s okay.”
And, somehow, it actually sounds like she’s done asking questions.
August lies awake for another hour after her mom falls asleep, staring at the moonlight on the wall. If, after all these years, Suzette Landry can let the case go, maybe one day, August can let Jane go too.
* * *
There are a lot of impossibilities in August’s life. A lot of things that transpire despite the odds, despite every law of this world and the next saying it shouldn’t work out.
It’s November, and Pancake Billy’s House of Pancakes is still $14,327 dollars away from shuttering for good, when her mom calls to tell her that her grandmother’s estate has been settled and she should get a check in the mail next week. She doesn’t think much of it—after all, her mom said there hadn’t been that much left.
She has to sign for the envelope when it arrives, and she gets so distracted arguing with Wes over what to order on tonight’s pizza that she almost forgets to open it altogether.
It’s light, thin. It feels inconsequential, like a tax return when you work minimum wage and you know the IRS is sending you a bullshit check for thirty-six bucks. She slides her finger down the seam anyway.
It’s written out to August. Signed at the bottom. Right there, in the total box: $15,000.
“Oh,” she says. “Oh.”
* * *
Three months after Jane vanishes, August’s grandmother’s money—the money from a woman August met twice, who paid her tuition for thirteen years in adherence to tradition but who couldn’t be fucked to look for her own son—silently makes up the difference.
She holds the check in her hands, and she thinks of the box her mom found in her grandparents’ attic, all of the unopened letters from Augie, and it feels dirty. She didn’t earn it. She doesn’t want it. It should go where it can be transformed into something good.
So, she digs the account numbers up from the office in the back, and she wires the money to Billy anonymously, and she clocks into work just like she does every day. She takes her table assignments, fixes herself a coffee. Slaps palms with Winfield when he clocks in. Puts in an order of pancakes for table seven. Stares at the spot on the wall by the men’s room where she’s returned the opening day photo she stole.
The front door flies open, and there’s all six-feet-something of Billy filling the doorway, eyes wide, a sheen of sweat across his expansive, bald forehead.
