AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I go there every single morning and order the exact same thing, and they still can’t get my order right. The disrespect. We live in a society.”
“Good luck with that,” August says, shouldering her bag. “I gotta go un-amnesia a ghost.”
“She’s not a ghost,” Niko says, but she’s already out the door.
Wes did give her an idea, though. She doesn’t know how to fix Jane, but rule one is start with what you know. She knows Jane was a New Yorker. So they start there: with her coffee and bagel order.
“I don’t remember,” she says when August asks. “That’s how it is with a lot of stuff. I remember I got here. I know there was stuff before it. But I don’t remember what it was or how I felt, until something sparks. Like when I saw that lady who reminded me of my neighbor with the pierogies.”
“It’s okay,” August says, and she hands over a coffee with one sugar and a plain bagel with cream cheese. “You lived in New York for at least a couple of years. There’s no way you don’t have a coffee and bagel order. We’ll do process of elimination.”
Jane takes one bite and wrinkles her nose. “I don’t think this is it.”
For the next four days, August brings her a different coffee and bagel. Black and an everything with lox. Cappuccino with cinnamon and a toasted parmesan with garlic herb. It’s not until day five (chocolate chip and peanut butter) that she opens the paper bag and sniffs and says, “Oh my God. Chocolate.”
“Jesus,” August says, as Jane downs half of it in one bite like a boa constrictor. “Every New Yorker in a thirty-mile radius just became irate and they don’t know why.”
“Yeah. The guy at the deli always looked so disgusted.”
“Like, at that point, why not eat a donut?”
“Less filling,” she says through a mouthful. And then she grabs August’s hand and says, “Wait. Five sugars!” And that’s how they discover Jane’s incorrigible sweet tooth. She takes her coffee with two creams and five sugars like some kind of maniac. August starts bringing her a chocolate chip bagel with peanut butter and a coffee full of sugar and cream every morning.
She rides the line up and down and back up again. On a Tuesday afternoon, across the East River and over the Manhattan Bridge, alongside all the landmarks she grew up pressing into the corners of envelopes in the shape of postage stamps. On a Saturday morning, down to Coney Island and the arching rafters of the station, jostled by toddlers with floppy hats and sunscreen streaks and resigned parents with beach bags.
“Who goes to the beach in March?” August mumbles as they wait for the train to pull back out of Coney Island, the end of the line. It’s the longest the train is ever stationary. Jane likes to claim you can hear the ocean if you try hard enough.
“Come on, end of winter picnics near the shore?” Jane says, waving her bagel in the air. “I happen to think they’re romantic as hell.”
She glances at August like she expects a response, like there was a joke and August missed the punchline. August pulls a face and keeps eating.
They sit and eat their bagels and talk. That’s all there is to do—August has hit a dead end. Without clues about her family or her life before New York, Jane is the primary source.
Her primary source, and her friend, now.
That’s all. Nothing more than that. That’s all it can be.
August glances at the peanut butter left behind on Jane’s lip.
It’s fine.
On a Wednesday, Jane’s on her third bite of bagel when she remembers her elementary school.
The city’s vague, but she remembers a tiny classroom, and other kids from her neighborhood sitting in tiny desks and tiny chairs, and a poster of a hot-air balloon on the wall. She remembers the smell of pencil shavings and her first best friend, a girl named Jia who loved peanut butter sandwiches, and the foggy walk between their homes, the smell of wet pavement from shopkeepers hosing down their sidewalks at the end of the night.
Another day, she’s just finished her coffee when her eyes light up, and she tells August about the day she got to New York. She talks about a Greyhound bus, and a friendly old man at the station who explained how to get to Brooklyn, winked, and slid a button into her pocket, the little pink triangle pinned below her shoulder. She tells August about paying cash for her first ever ride on the subway, about climbing up from underground into a gray morning and turning in a slow circle, taking it all in, and then buying her first cup of New York coffee.
“You see the pattern, right?” August says when she’s done writing everything down.
Jane turns the empty cup over in her hands. “What do you mean?”
“It’s sensory stuff,” August says. “You smell coffee, it brings back something associated with the smell. You taste peanut butter, same thing. That’s how we can do this. We just have to experiment.”
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…”
