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