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Jane considers this. “That’s kind of cool, actually.”
August pushes her glasses back down, blinking Jane into focus and checking her face for the warning signs she didn’t pay enough attention to the last time they brought back something big. She doesn’t see any.
She holds a breath. There’s one more thing.
From her pocket, she pulls out the postcard from California. She hands it to Jane, pointing at the signature.
“There’s something else,” August says. “This might sound crazy, but I… I think Augie sent you this. I just don’t understand how. Do you remember it at all?”
She turns it over in her hands, touching the paper like she’s trying to absorb it through her skin.
“He’s alive,” she says slowly. It’s not a recitation of a fact she already knew. It sounds fresh. August has shown this postcard to her a dozen times, but this is the first time she’s looked at it with recognition.
“It came out of nowhere,” Jane says. “I don’t… I don’t even know how he found me. I was fucking terrified when I got it, because I was sure he was dead and I was getting mail from a ghost. I almost didn’t call the number, but I did.”
“And it was him?”
“Yeah,” Jane says with a gradual nod. “Something happened, on his way to work that night. I don’t even remember—some neighbor needed help, someone had a flat tire or something. He missed his shift. He was supposed to be there when the fire happened, but he missed his shift. He wasn’t there. He survived.”
August releases a breath.
He told her, Jane says, that he couldn’t bear that he lived when his friends didn’t, so he left, sick and blind with grief. He borrowed a car and drove out of town and woke up three days later strung out in Beaumont and decided not to come back. Started drinking too much, started hitchhiking, lost himself for a year or two, until a truck driver dropped him off in Castro, and someone pulled him off the sidewalk and told him they’d get him some help.
“He was doing well,” Jane remembers, smiling a little. “He was sober, he’d gotten his life together. He had a steady boyfriend. They were living together. He sounded happy. And he told me he thought I should come home, that San Francisco was ready for people like us now. We’ll take care of each other, Jane.”
“Jerry said,” August says, “well, he said you were supposed to be moving back to California.”
“Yeah, it was… the way Augie talked about his family… that’s what did it for me,” she says. “He felt like he missed his chance with them, and I—I saw through the guilt for a second. I realized I didn’t have to miss mine.”
She swallows, palming her side, the dog inked there for her mother. August waits for her to go on.
“New York was—it was good. It was really good. It gave me a lot of stuff I hadn’t had since New Orleans. It was like I finally figured out who I was. How to be who I was,” Jane says. “And I wanted my family to know that person. So, I mailed Augie my record collection, and I was gonna call him when I got into town.”
“Did they know?” August asks. “Your family, did they know you were coming back?”
“No,” Jane says. “I haven’t talked to them since ’71. I was too nervous to call.”
August nods.
“Can I ask you something else?”
Jane, still examining the handwriting, nods without looking up.
“Did he say… did Augie tell you why he stopped writing home?”
“Hmm?”
“He used to write my mom every week, until summer 1973. She never heard from him again after that.”
“No, he—he told me he was still writing to her. He said she hadn’t written back in years, and he didn’t think she wanted to hear from him anymore, but he was still writing.” Her eyes move from the card to August’s face, studying her. “She never got them, did she?”
“No,” August says. “She didn’t.”
“Shit.” It hangs unsaid in the air: someone else must have gotten to those letters first. August has a pretty good idea who. “What a fucking mess.”
“Yeah,” August agrees. She slides her hand over Jane’s at her side and squeezes.
They ride in quiet for a few stops, watching the sun set behind apartment blocks, until Jane stands and starts pacing the aisle in that way she does, like a tiger in captivity.
