I remember of it.” She eyes August with some unreadable significance. “Better company too.”
But Jane still doesn’t know who she is, or why she is, or what happened to get her stuck.
August looks at her as the train reverses past Gravesend rooftops, this girl out of time, the same face and body and hair and smile that took August’s life by the shoulders in January and shook. And she can’t believe Jane had the nerve, the audacity, to become the one thing August can’t resist: a mystery.
“Okay,” August says. “Time to figure out who you are.”
The afternoon sun falls in Jane’s brown eyes, and August thinks she’s going to need more notebooks. It’ll take a million to hold this girl.
* * *
When August was eight, her mom took her to the levee.
It was right after the Fourth of July. She was turning nine soon and really into her age that year. She’d tell everyone that she wasn’t eight but eight and a half, eight and three-quarters. Going to the levee was one of the few things they ever did without a case file between them—just a gallon-size bag of watermelon slices and a beach towel and a perfect spot to sit.
She remembers her mother’s hair, how the coppery brown would glow under the summer sun like the wet planks of the docks. She always liked how it was the same as hers, how they shared so many things. It was in those moments that August sometimes pictured how her mom looked when she was younger, before she had August, and at the same time, she couldn’t begin to imagine a time when they didn’t have each other. August had her and she had August, and they had secret codes they spoke in, and that was it. That was enough.
She remembers her mom explaining what levees were for. They weren’t made for beach towel picnics, she said—they were made to protect them. To keep water out when storms came.
It wasn’t long afterward that a storm too big for the levees came. 2005. Their apartment in Belle Chasse, the Idlewild place, got eight feet of water. All the files, maps, photos, all the years of handwritten notes, a wet pulp shoveled out the window of a condemned building. August’s mom saved one tupperware tub of files on her brother and not a single one of August’s baby pictures. August lost everything and thought that maybe, if she could become someone who didn’t have anything to lose, she’d never have to feel that way again.
She turned nine in a Red Cross shelter, and something started to sour in her heart, and she couldn’t stop it.
August sits on the edge of an air mattress in Brooklyn and tries to imagine how it would feel if she didn’t have any of those memories to understand what made her who she is. If she woke up one day and just was and didn’t know why.
Nobody tells you how those nights that stand out in your memory—levee sunset nights, hurricane nights, first kiss nights, homesick sleepover nights, nights when you stood at your bedroom window and looked at the lilies one porch over and thought they would stand out, singular and crystallized, in your memory forever—they aren’t really anything. They’re everything, and they’re nothing. They make you who you are, and they happen at the same time a twenty-three-year-old a million miles away is warming up some leftovers, turning in early, switching off the lamp. They’re so easy to lose.
You don’t learn until you’re older how to zoom out of that extreme proximity and make it fit into the bigger picture of your life. August didn’t learn until she sat knee-to-knee with a girl who couldn’t remember who she was, and tried to help her piece everything back together.
The next few days go like this:
August’s alarm goes off for class. Her shifts come up at Billy’s. Her essays and projects and exams stay looming over her like a cave full of bats. She ignores all of it.
She goes back in to work exactly one time, to hang the opening day photo back up on the wall and waylay Jerry as he passes it on his way out of the bathroom.
“Hey,” she says, “I never noticed how cool this picture was. The seventies seem like a hell of a time.”
“That’s what I’ve been told,” Jerry says. “I barely remember ’em.”
“I mean, you must remember this, though, right? Opening day? All the original Billy’s crew?”