Ruby is smiling, imagining herself completely unfettered, when her phone vibrates in her jacket pocket. Someone waking up on the other side of the world, she thinks. Probably Cassie, whose children generally have her up at ungodly hours. Taking the phone out of her pocket, shielding the screen with her palm, it takes three reads before she fully comprehends the message. Even then, sentences fully formed, she struggles to make sense of the arrangement.
Work is sending me to New York in July for a conference. Can you believe that shit? Start finding the best rooftops, babe.
Ash. Following her to New York. Two months before the wedding. Two months before he will marry his perfect girl.
The chain in Ruby’s stomach twists. The rain suddenly feels like a slap.
To think she was this close to floating away.
FIVE
AT DINNER ONE NIGHT, PART WAY THROUGH OUR SECOND week, I ask Noah to tell me about the city. Now that we’re working together, we have taken to sharing meals and stories, too. Where our first conversations were like trading cards, each of us collecting basic information about the other, trying to make a set, now we talk over cereal or sausages about science, and politics, and religion, and all the things that come into my mind that I want to know more about. He says I must have had a pretty poor education, and when I think about all the different small-town schools I went to, and where I ended up, I can’t disagree. I don’t mind so much when Noah tells me the truth, which he does quite often, now that we spend a lot of time together. The idea that truth is hurtful puzzles me. Seems like lying to a person does all the damage.
‘I had to teach myself most things,’ I told him the other day. ‘From library books and TV shows, mostly. Or watching what other people do.’
‘An autodidact, then,’ he answered, and when he explained what that word meant, I said there should probably be a nicer sounding word for something as important as growing yourself up.
‘Indeed,’ he said with a smile, because he seems to like truth from me, too.
When he asks me what it is exactly that I want to know about New York, I shrug and say whatever it is he thinks I should know. Things that might not be so obvious when I look left, right, up.
Here are some interesting things he shares with me over take-out Chinese: there are 472 subway stations operating around the city, transporting five and a half million people from here to there each day. It is in fact important to stand back from the platform like the announcement says, because each year something like a hundred and fifty New Yorkers get struck by the 400-tonne trains whizzing by.
‘How many don’t make it?’ I ask, and Noah says around a third of the people hit by trains are fatally injured, which makes me wonder about the ones who survive.
There are plenty of hospitals to help with that, he assures me. Ambulances are dispatched from city-run and private operators, hurtling toward traffic accidents and fires and all kinds of private disasters a thousand times a day. A person dies every nine minutes in New York City, but two babies are born in that same amount of time, so you never know if that ambulance is speeding toward life or death when you hear it pass by.
‘I’m getting used to the sirens,’ I say, and Noah nods.
‘Best that you do, Baby Joan. Lest they become the only thing you hear.’
When he tells me there are more than six thousand places of worship across the city, we stop to consider all the leaps of faith people make, the deities they pray to. I am feeding the last of my egg roll to Franklin when Noah says that if you could hear all that praying, you’d be listening to eight hundred different languages at once, everything from Yiddish to Urdu to French Creole, and this makes me question how New Yorkers ever understand each other. ‘That’s the magic of living inside a three hundred square mile “melting pot”,’ Noah responds, before telling me at least half the city’s population comes from some other country, or a different part of America.
‘How many come from Wisconsin?’ I ask, but Noah says he doesn’t know anything about Wisconsin, except that the architect Frank Lloyd Wright was born there, and he himself has no desire to visit.
‘I don’t miss it,’ I say quickly, just in case he thinks I might.
Eventually, with all this talk of ambulances and people and prayers, I ask Noah about the two holes in the ground. The ones downtown, where those giant buildings used to be. I was small when it happened, too small to understand, but yesterday I went to the memorial, and as I traced the names of all the people who died that day, felt the grooves of their existence under my fingertips, I knew something irretrievable had been lost in this place. I did not take a single photograph, although some people were taking selfies by the twin pools, posing at the edge of all those names.
‘Nearly three thousand people died at Ground Zero on 9/11,’ Noah tells me. ‘And we’ve lost many, many more rescue and recovery workers since then. Turns out all the debris down there, all that dust and ash, was toxic. Enough to cause cancers that are still being diagnosed today.’
I shudder. Thinking of dust and ash and feeling, suddenly, as if I can taste the dead in my mouth. Noah stares at me and then smiles softly.
‘You know something? When a star dies, the dust and gases left over can form a nebula. Which is truly one of the most beautiful things you’ll ever see. But nebulae get even more interesting, because they also signify regions where bright, new stars are formed. Stellar nurseries, they call them. Stardust, then, is both the end and the beginning of things. A galactic reminder that birth and death are not so very different.’
‘I didn’t know,’ I tell him, truthfully, ‘that stars could die.’
I suppose I thought some things are just always there. Thinking back now, it seems so obvious. That everything changes. When Noah shows me images of nebulae on his laptop, he is right that stardust is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. But the thought of stellar nurseries and dying stars make my chest tight. It is a reminder that nothing is constant, when I so desperately want everything to stay exactly as it is right now. Eating dinner with Noah, waiting for two short, fat corgis to be dropped off tomorrow, and knowing where I will be, not just tomorrow, but the day after that.
This too. I am tired of beautiful things making me sad. I should like to love something without turning it over and discovering exposed wires, cheap parts on the other side. For the first time, I wish he wasn’t so insistent on telling me the truth of things.
But I thought you wanted to know how things work, Baby Joan.
I can almost hear Noah say this in response to my sudden melancholy, and as we clear the table and prepare for bed, I force a smile for all he is teaching me, all that I am learning about the world. I don’t tell him that I never want to look at nebulae or those holes in the ground ever again.
Something happens on Day Thirteen, the same day Ash tells Ruby he is coming to New York. I decide to take photographs of the Empire State Building, which I don’t like nearly as much as the Chrysler Building, but they’re going to project paintings onto the building’s façade once it gets dark, an exhibition of some artist I don’t know, but would like to, because you must be something when they let you use the Empire State Building as your very own art gallery. I catch the 1 train and most of the cars are half empty tonight, so I have my pick of where to sit. As we wind our way downtown, I read the subway adverts for life insurance policies and community colleges and try to catch the graffiti slogans whizzing by outside the window, all the obscure messages sprayed across the subway tunnel walls. Who writes these things all the way down here? How do they get over the sparking tracks to paint their thoughts across the broken, dirty concrete? As the train slows between stations, I look to my left and see a blood-red sentence dripping, fresh: Your days are numbered. I stare at the bleeding letters running down the wall and feel that tightness in my chest again, before the train hisses beneath me and we’re jolted forward, away. Just a stupid message, left by someone making their art amongst the rats and the rubbish but, still, it
makes me think of dying stars and holes in the ground, and suddenly I don’t feel like taking pictures of a building anymore.
It is as if, here on this train, I have suddenly been reminded to not lose sight of the other me, the one who knows that life and people play all sorts of tricks on the unsuspecting. I am not someone who doesn’t know about corners and turning, after all. I am not someone surprised by the way life can change in an instant, with no regard for how happy you might have been just seconds before, your hand twisting against the handle of the kitchen door.
When we get to 28th Street, I’m tempted to stay on the train. To just keep going. As people exit onto the station platform, I reluctantly follow their lead, like I’m some kind of fish, and there is no choice but to swim the same way. The crowd is thick, and I am careful not to adjust my stride or break the rhythm as I am picked up in this swell of people and propelled forward. We move up the stairs in formation—one, two, three, four, five—I look down to watch my now-smudged sneakers as they slap down on one step at a time. Then a turn onto a landing, before the next set of stairs. This is where the crowd usually disperses; there’s room for us to spread out. I’m still watching my feet when I start getting knocked by people passing on my left. It’s as if they’re doing it on purpose, leaning into my path, one after the other, and I soon realise each person butting up against me is in fact shifting away from an obstacle on their own left. I look over, around them, and catch a glimpse of something on the ground.
It takes me a few seconds to comprehend that this obstacle people are moving around and away from is in fact a man, lying on the ground. He is flat on his back and his shirt is unbuttoned, exposing a smooth, dark chest that I catch in flashes between legs, shopping bags, coats. I soon see he is young, more a boy than a man, and I push back against the people rushing by, shift sideways through the crowd, until I’m standing right in front of him. Over him. His eyes are closed, his lips pressed together, and I can’t tell if he is breathing. I want to lean down and put my hand to this boy’s mouth, feel for warm air, but I can’t seem to make my arm move. People continue to move around us, some look over their shoulders once or twice, but nobody else stops. It’s as if my body is listening to their unspoken warnings. Danger! Stay away! This is not safe for you! But, up close, he looks like a sleeping child; if my arms won’t move toward him, my feet won’t let me walk away.
Soon it’s just the two of us. A young man laid out on his back, and me, hovering over his body, unsure of what to do next. His feet are bare, dusky pink soles caked in mud. He must be freezing. I think this at the same time I reach down, remove my sneakers and then my socks. They are white, thick and new, and I’m thinking of Noah as I wrestle one of these socks, then the other, onto this young man’s feet. I would give him my shoes next, if his feet were small enough. He doesn’t stir as I touch him, but I can feel the warmth of his skin. I know what dead bodies feel like. Not like this. Emboldened, I kneel down and pull his shirt closed, fumble with a middle button to fasten the threadbare material across his chest. And then I lean back on my now-bare heels and start to cry. Is this all I can do? Give him my new socks, cover his chest?
This is someone’s baby.
Someday soon—it’s coming—I will think, Doesn’t he know I’m someone’s baby? Doesn’t he know that I was loved? But right now, I’m fighting back tears for this child lying on a slab of concrete halfway underground, walked around, walked over, as if he’s not even there. As another train arrives and I hear people swarm toward the stairs, I take a ten-dollar bill out of my purse and gently tuck it into the pocket of the boy’s shirt. And then I turn, run up the subway stairs, out onto the crowded street, as if I am being chased. It’s dark, but you wouldn’t know it from all the illumination up here. The brightness of the city hurts my eyes. I walk a block or two with a sneaker in each hand, the soles of my own bare feet picking up the dirt and grime of a city where no one gives me a second glance, no one asks if I am okay. People walked around the boy and now they walk around me, as if I am not really here.
I want to go home.
Where would that be? I feel like I have been living inside a dream these last two weeks, and now I’m waking up to the same cold, hard bed, to the same cold, hard wall pressed against my nose. I’m fourteen and my mother is dead on the kitchen floor, and I’ve still got my schoolbag in my hand when I call 911, her blood all over my fingers. I’m fifteen, shunted to another small town, to live in another small house, with my mother’s cousin. I’m seventeen, and Mr Jackson has his camera pointed at my trembling, naked body, and I’m eighteen years old, alone on a bus from Milwaukee to New York City, putting twenty-seven hours between me and this man, this life.
Your days are numbered. What would the exact equation be to leave that life behind? What calculation of time and distance would enable me to safely move away from the edge of things, from the danger of being pulled back in? Noah shook my hand, bought me sneakers, tells me stories about New York, but would he miss me if I never came back to him tonight? Would he find another stray to fill up the lonely parts of his life, all the corners I have seeped into these past thirteen days?
Does Mr Jackson miss me? Did he ache to find me gone? I miss him. That I should not feel this way doesn’t make it any less true. I have been facing forward for days now, hiding from my old life, but the way everyone walked around that young boy tonight, the way he didn’t seem to matter, this has wrenched me back. A yank at the core of me, turning me around, as if a rope is being pulled. I am at one end, and who—what—is at the other?
If I leave again, would anyone miss me when I’m gone?
SIX
THIS STORY REALLY STARTS IN A SMALL TOWN, SIXTY-SOME miles west of Milwaukee. The first steps toward now, toward here, begin with the waving of a scrap of paper in my face.
‘Go on, Alice. You know you want to call him. Or’—Tammy pulls a face—‘you’re gonna have to work something else out quick. There’s no room up at the cabin and, besides, Dad’s …’
She doesn’t have to finish the sentence. Tammy’s father is drying out. Again. Only this time, he says he has God on his side. Something about a new church by the frozen lake, and being reborn for Jesus, which means he’s ready to repair his relationship with his daughter, too, if she’ll come keep house with him. He wants her there before St Patrick’s Day, thinks she’ll help keep him steady, but he doesn’t know her new boyfriend, Rye, lives one town over from that church, peddling everything from oxy to heroin out of his basement.
Tammy thinks one man will make up for the other.
She is my best friend, but I wouldn’t go to the lake with her, even if I was invited. There is nothing good waiting for me in those cabins and churches, in the basements full of boys who will probably never leave the county, let alone the state, unless it’s to go to jail. It’s been nine months since Tammy and I graduated, a new year has turned over, and I am more certain than ever that small towns are not for me. I wasn’t conceived in one, and I sure as hell don’t want to die in one, either. What I need, then, is a job. The kind that pays well, or well enough, so that the distance between stuck and leaving is shortened, narrowed to an end point I can see.
If I was eighteen already, I could work clearing tables at Jimmy’s bar; Tammy’s cousin has always been nice to me, and the tips alone would buy me a ticket out of here. But my birthday is still four whole weeks away, which also means Gloria D, my guardian, still has signing rights to my bank account, and therefore to my freedom. A regular job just isn’t going to cut it.
‘I promised your mom I’d look after you until you’re eighteen,’ she used to say. But I think it’s more about the government cheques that will stop when I age out of the system.
I stare at the piece of paper in Tammy’s hand, the potential of it.
‘I don’t know, Tam …’
We’re sharing her lumpy double bed, tucked up inside another cold, grey-sky morning. Lying so close to my best friend, I can smell the remnants of last n
ight’s Marlborough lights on her skin, mixed with years-old Chanel No. 5, a powdery scent so familiar I want to bury my face into her neck. Knowing she’ll be gone by tomorrow makes me want to cry. But crying won’t help my situation; feeling sorry for yourself gets you exactly nowhere.
Nowhere. I’m already in the middle of nowhere. Worse—I’m trapped within it. In this town where the sky pushes down on you. Air all heavy and close to your nose, as if the pollution from other, nicer towns has been diverted here, set down right over our heads. I’m not sure what my mother was thinking when she came back to her home state. Why she couldn’t just stay in New York City.
Tell me about where I was made.
I would ask her this all the time. I never tired of her stories about New York, loved learning that Manhattan was an island—‘Not all islands are tropical, Alice’—and knowing there was a place where you could catch trains at any hour, where restaurants never closed, and people from the movies walked right by you on the street. I thought it all sounded so romantic, even if I didn’t really understand what romantic meant back then, just liked the sound of the word, the click of it in my mouth.
From what I know, a man brought us back to the Midwest. Some guy and some promise, both of which ended up broken. My mother stayed because it was a thousand times cheaper than anywhere else, and there were other men and other promises waiting, but mostly, in those early years, it was just her and me, making a home wherever we found ourselves. To be honest, each time we packed up and moved, I mostly felt relief. Knowing another man had gone, and we’d be back to the two of us again. It was always better when it was just the two of us.
Before You Knew My Name Page 5