Jane’s quiet, studying the board mapping out stops. “What about a song? Could that work too?”
“Probably,” August says. “Actually, knowing you and music, I bet it could help a lot.”
“Okay,” Jane says, sitting up suddenly, attention rapt. The look on her face is one August has come to recognize as readiness to learn something she doesn’t understand: head cocked slightly, one eyebrow ticked up, part confusion, part eagerness. Sometimes Jane exudes the same energy as a golden retriever. “There’s this one song I halfway remember. I don’t know who it was by, but it goes like, ohhhh, giiiiirl…”
“That could describe a lot of songs,” August says, untucking her phone from her pocket. “Do you remember any of the other lyrics?”
Jane bites her lip and frowns. She sings under her breath, warm and off-key and a little crackly, like the air around her feels. “How I depend on youuu, to give me love how I need it.”
August tries very hard to think only of scientific curiosity as she consults Google. “Oh, okay. When. It’s give me love when I need it. The title of the song is ‘Oh, Girl.’ It’s by a band called the Chi-Lites. Came out in 1972.”
“Yeah! That’s right! I had it on a seven-inch single.” Jane closes her eyes, and August thinks they’re picturing the same thing: Jane, cross-legged on a bedroom floor somewhere, letting the record spin. “God, I wish I could listen to it right now.”
“You can,” August says, swiping through apps. “Hang on.”
It takes her all of three seconds to pull it up, and she unwinds her earbuds from her pocket and hands one to Jane.
The song fades in soulful and longing, strings and harmonica, and the first words come exactly how Jane sang them: Ohhhh giiiiiirl …
“Oh my God,” Jane says, sitting back in her seat. “That’s really it. Shit.”
“Yeah,” August says. “Shit.”
The song plays on for another minute before Jane sits up and says, “I heard this song for the first time on a radio in a semitruck Which is weird, because I definitely don’t think I ever drove semitrucks. But I think I rode in some. There are a few—like, flashes, you know?”
August jots it down. “Hitchhiking, maybe? That was a big thing back then.”
“Oh yeah, it was,” she says. “I bet that’s it. Yeah … yeah, in a truck from California, heading east. But I can’t remember where we were going.”
August sucks on the bud of the pencil eraser, and Jane looks at her. At her mouth, specifically.
She pulls the pencil out of her mouth, self-conscious. “That’s okay, this is a great start. If you remember any other songs, I can help you figure them out.”
“So you can … listen to any song you want?” Jane says, eyeing August’s phone. “Whenever you want to?”
August nods. They’ve been through some pretty rudimentary explanations of how smartphones and the internet work, and Jane has picked up a lot from observation, but she still gets all wide-eyed and awed.
“Would you want me to get you a phone like this?” August asks.
Jane thinks about it. “I mean … yes and no? It’s impressive, but there’s something about having to work for it when you want to listen to a song. I used to love my record collection. That was the most money I ever spent in one place, shipping it to a new address whenever I landed in a new city. I wanted to see the world but still have one thing that was mine.”
August’s pencil flies across the paper. “Okay, so you were a drifter. A drifter and a hitchhiker. That’s so…”
“Cool?” Jane suggests, raising an eyebrow. “Daring? Adventurous? Sexy?”
“Unbelievable that you weren’t strangled by one of the dozens of serial killers murdering hitchhikers up and down the West Coast in the ’70s, is what I was gonna say.”
“Well,” Jane says. She kicks one foot up, crossing her ankle over her knee, and peers at August, hands behind her head. “What’s the point of life without a little danger?”
“Not dying,” August suggests. She can feel color flaring inconveniently in her cheeks.
“Yeah, I didn’t die my whole life, and look where it got me,” Jane says.
“Okay. Point.” August shuts her steno. “That was a big memory, though. We got ourselves a lead.”
* * *
August gives Jane her burner phone and teaches her how to use it and they experiment, like some kind of amnesiac scavenger hunt. Jane texts her snippets of lyrics or images from movies she