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“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.”
