Before You Knew My Name

by Jacqueline Bublitz

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

  I apologise over and over as I cling to him, nails digging into his shoulders, trying to crawl under his skin, wanting to get closer. The separation of this day has terrified me.

  Mr Jackson holds me tight until the sobbing stops. When I’m finally spent, drained, I feel the rocking. The way he is gently moving me, soothing me, as if I am a child.

  ‘I miss my mother so much.’

  I immediately want to suck the words back in, but I push through the ache in my throat. It is a physical pain, knife-sharp, but the words keep coming. I do not want him to be angry at me.

  ‘We looked after each other. It was always just—us. I don’t even know who I am without her.’

  Mr Jackson gently untangles himself from my arms.

  ‘You want a drink for this?’ he asks, and I nod.

  ‘The whole bottle, maybe.’

  I wait for him to come back from the kitchen with the bourbon—somehow, I knew it would be bourbon. He hands me the bottle, and I take a swig, grimacing as I swallow.

  ‘Maybe not like that,’ he laughs softly. ‘Let’s get you a glass, amateur.’

  The familiarity of this pet name is calming. By the time Mr Jackson comes back from the kitchen with an ice-filled tumbler, I can breathe again.

  ‘We had been doing really well. She had a good job, and we had been in the same place for two years. Two years was everything back then. And he … he was in jail, something stupid, I don’t know. Petty something. I never really paid much attention to what he did. Unless it involved my mother.’

  ‘He’—Mr Jackson interrupts me—‘Your father?’

  ‘No. Hell no!’ I shake my head vehemently. ‘I don’t know who my father is. Mike. My mother’s last boyfriend.’

  A memory. Mike is driving me to school and he’s going too fast. There is no seat belt and I have nothing to hold onto, my fingers dig into the seat, tips white, and he laughs at my fear as we speed past the other cars on the road. When he slams on the brakes at a stop sign, he reaches out, puts his fat hand across my chest. ‘Easy there, Alice,’ he says, fingers grazing.

  Another memory. He’s kissing my mother in the kitchen, his hand under her T-shirt. She keeps pushing it away, giggling, and back it goes, and I’m standing in the doorway, watching this dance, feeling sick, because I know this means he’ll be here tonight, and every night, until something bad happens again. They turn, see me watching, and he laughs that same laugh, the one that says he enjoys scaring me. I lock my door that night, push a chair against the frame.

  ‘My mom had terrible taste in men,’ I say, an understatement. ‘And she was really, really beautiful, so there were a lot of men around.’

  I pour another shot of bourbon, ghosts hovering.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ Mr Jackson says, and I want to be mad at him for leaving, I want to tell him I don’t care what he thinks. But that’s not how we do it, is it? When a man punishes us for our resistance, we scramble to make it right.

  My mother, I think, might have warned me about him. Might have told me how all those terrible men said she was beautiful, too. Or perhaps she would have pushed me right into my teacher’s arms, considered this her validation. I am beautiful, just like her. And just like her, I have something this man wants to capture, possess.

  It occurs to me, briefly, as Mr Jackson places his hands on my tear-stained face, presses down, that he finds my total reliance on him the most beautiful thing of all.

  Later, he shows me photographs of his own mother. Before she got sick. He looks like her, in the way that I look like my mother. A shadow version of the real thing, not quite as lovely. He tells me she was an artist, too, and then he carefully takes something from a shoebox in his closet, wrapped in a red silk scarf and no larger than a brick. It is a Leica camera from the 1930s, beautifully preserved. His mother bought it from a second-hand store when she was a teenager, and when she got sick, she gave it to her son and asked him to take care of it.

  ‘It’s not worth a whole lot,’ he explains. ‘Maybe a thousand dollars. But I’ve moved around so much, too, it’s the only thing of hers I have left. Takes great photos, still. Back then, they built things to last.’

  I ask him to show me how the camera works, confused by the unfamiliar dials and levers and discs. He loads a fresh roll of black and white film and gives me a brief lesson. Never letting me touch the Leica itself, as he turns the camera this way and that. We are sitting side by side on the bed when he looks at me through the viewfinder, explains this camera model was one of the first to include a built-in rangefinder. How this feature changes the way you view objects through the glass.

  ‘You start with two images, and this focusing lever helps you bring them closer together … see?’

  He is holding the camera too close to my face, and I duck my head away from him, laughing as I hear the snap of the shutter.

  ‘Silly girl,’ he says, putting his mother’s camera down and pulling me into his arms. ‘You always were impossible to teach.’

  Did I think we could just stay like this?

  Did I think there was a place you could land, and everything else around you would fall away? That nothing and no one else would matter, because you were exactly where you wanted to be?

  Did I think there was such a place, and such a time, and it would all stand still for me, because I was secure in that place, that time?

  How else to explain my surprise when it all came to an end? How else to make sense of my utter confusion to find the earth shifting beneath me once again, spinning me away just as I began to get my balance. When this shift was what I had been taught to expect, my whole life before him.

  He kicks me out on a Sunday morning, one month after he invited me in. It is the day before my eighteenth birthday, and the day my lie about my age catches up with me, surprising us both.

  ‘It’s my birthday tomorrow,’ I tell Mr Jackson, into that place under his arm I fit so perfectly. I lick at the downy hairs of his pit. ‘I just remembered.’

  We’ve been living outside of time. I’ve stopped tracking days. A birthday feels odd to consider, evidence of life going on, when we have retreated so far from the everydayness of it.

  ‘We’ll do something special,’ he says. ‘Oh, to be nineteen again.’

  ‘Mmmm.’ I am drowsy, careless. Forgetting my first lie. ‘I’m turning eighteen, silly. Don’t add another year just yet.’

  I don’t register at first. The way his body tenses, the way he pulls away from me, his body beginning its retreat.

  ‘Alice.’

  ‘Mmmmmm?’

  ‘Alice!’

  He is gripping my shoulders now, his knuckles turning red. Something is charging under his skin.

  ‘What? Ouch. That hurts, Mr—Jamie! Why are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘Alice,’ he says my name slowly. ‘Alice, how old are you?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘How old are you!’

  It is no longer a question, but a command. How could I have thought I had any power over this man.

  ‘I … I’ll be eighteen. Tomorrow.’

  He looks at me for a second, and then he is up out of bed and across the room before I understand what is happening.

  ‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuuuuuck. Jesus Christ, Alice. You’re fucking seventeen?’

  ‘Yes? Why—’

  ‘I took pictures of you! I filmed you!’

  He hurls these words across the room at me, looking like he’s going to be sick, and I still don’t fully comprehend what is going on, why my birthday has caused such a panicked reaction. Then slowly, up through the fog of my brain, I hear Tammy’s voice the last time we spoke, the way she called me jailbait, and I cannot believe I never considered this. The girl so obsessed with the freedom that comes from turning eighteen should never have missed what she was not considered free of, all the days before.

  ‘Jamie, I’m sorry. I thought you knew. And it doesn’t matter. I me
an, I said yes. It was my choice. It wasn’t … you didn’t …’

  That strange, unrecognisable look has solidified, he is now staring at me as if he has never seen me before.

  ‘Jesus Christ! I could go to jail for this!’

  ‘No! I would never. It would never—’

  ‘You have to go!’

  He is pacing the room now, shouting.

  ‘No, Jamie. Don’t be silly. It’s just one more day and we’ll be fine. Just one more day and—’

  ‘Shut up, just shut the fuck up. Get away from me, you stupid little cunt!’

  These are the ugliest words he has ever said to me, worse than anything I could have imagined, and when he does not come to comfort me, I know that he means them. I say Sorry! over and over, but he has already left the room, I can hear him fumbling for his car keys in the hall.

  ‘You need to be gone by the time I get back, Alice.’

  Mr Jackson says this from the front door, and then I hear it open and slam shut behind him. His car revs, skids from the driveway. And I am, once again, on my own.

  My chest is caving in.

  He knows I have nowhere to go. He invited me in, with no real intention of letting me stay. Anger rises up in my throat each time I think of what he offered me, what he held back. This righteousness is a brief respite, before I throw up my sadness all over again.

  I can’t go back to Gloria’s. She texted the other day to say she was out of town for the week. When I get home, we’ll need to talk about your plans, she ended the message, and I knew what that meant: she was expecting me to leave after my birthday. I’m going to stay up here with Tammy through the spring, I had texted back, thinking I was creating space for Mr Jackson and me. I’ll let you know when I’m back in town. Her Cool in response was enough for me to know that she wouldn’t bother checking up on me. As for Tammy, we haven’t spoken since she called me jailbait, outside of a few text messages we each take a little too long to respond to. I’ve been preoccupied with Mr Jackson, and she will no doubt have been busy monitoring her father’s sobriety, and keeping her boyfriend Rye on the straight and narrow; I can see her drinking vodka from a can and rolling her messy smokes, as they huddle together by the water, inhaling harder stuff than whatever she could get hold of back home. I know she is as happy as she expects to be, which makes me happy for her.

  I want more.

  What I need then, if I want to get out of this town once and for all, is money. I can’t believe I let Mr Jackson distract me from the only thing I knew for sure.

  I make a decision that will change my life. Quickly, and with the clarity necessity brings. Going to where Mr Jackson hides the cash he makes from selling his art, I grab every last bill stuffed in that old film canister. Next, I throw my clothes into the duffel bags I brought over from Gloria’s house, just the clean stuff. I know I have left underwear and T-shirts in the bathroom, and I am glad. I want there to be evidence I was here. He will have to consciously discard this proof of me. He’ll have to know what he’s doing as he scoops up my belongings, throws them in the trash. To consider his discomfort at this task is a small satisfaction, like an ice cube on a sting.

  I have almost shut the door to his house behind me, locked myself out, when I turn back. There is something I want to take with me. A gap I want to create in his world. When I lift it from the box, the Leica is lighter than I expected it to be. Having never held it before, it feels even more precious in my hands.

  It was his mother’s camera. I know what this loss will mean to Mr Jackson, and my small satisfaction expands and bursts in my chest. There should be consequences when you hurt someone. I want him to know that I do not care for him, for his art, anymore. He has shown me who he is, and now I will show him the real me, too.

  I close my fist around the money. Press the Leica against my chest. A slut. A thief. A liar. Mr Jackson can cast me any way he likes from here. Because I know what I am. I am a survivor. I will turn eighteen years old tomorrow, and I am leaving on my own terms. Nothing—no one—can hold me back now.

  Ruby Jones is telling herself this very thing as she weighs her suitcases at the airline counter in Melbourne, scans her passport, prepares to board her flight to New York City.

  I’m ready, she thinks, for whatever comes next.

  This optimism, despite everything that came before, is how I know she understands. That if you tell yourself a lie enough times over, you eventually come to believe it.

  EIGHT

  AFTER THAT NIGHT WITH THE BOY ON THE GROUND, THINGS feel different.

  It isn’t that I think the sky will fall. Or that I wouldn’t know what to do if it did. You should understand that I’m still sure of myself at this point. But I was just starting to feel safe, starting to forget. Which is all that safety is, right? A forgetting of what you know. A refusal to remember bad things are only ever just around the corner.

  Your days are numbered. Blood-red, leaking down tunnel walls. It felt like a warning, that subway graffiti. A reminder. Before New York, before Noah, I never truly believed I’d be safe.

  Do you know how aware we have to be? Girls like me. The man ahead who slows down, who disappears into doorways. The man close behind who walks too fast, his encroachment felt on your skin, creeping. Vans with dark windows and streets with alley ways. A park at dusk, or empty lots, eerie, any old time of the day. The friend’s father whose hand lingers, or the group of boys with beer on their breath. The door closing and the room spinning.

  Do you know how aware we have to be?

  Did that kid on the ground ever feel safe? Did he have a small life before something turned, twisted, and he became the kind of person others would step around? Did anyone hug him, love him, miss him when he was gone? There is darkness over my days now, a kind of cloud, and it isn’t just the rain, or the fact that Mr Jackson has never tried to call me, or that no one at all seems to care that I’m gone. It’s the record scratch of my new life. Baby Joan skips across flooded streets, takes photos of crowned buildings, collects facts about sirens and churches and stars. She walks other people’s dogs and two days ago, when one of the dogs stopped to pee, she found herself out front of a photography school. Three blocks from Noah’s apartment, with a sign on the door saying late spring classes were starting soon. She has flyers for the school on her bedside table, and she has Noah. And there, the scratch, the glitch. Once again, just like my mother, my life has grown up around a person, one person, who could get tired of me anytime, could ask me to leave. And then I would be alone again. Homeless, penny-and-parentless, destined for street corners and coins thrown into coffee cups, and signs asking strangers for food. Can I—would I—survive another loss so soon?

  I sit three days with these thoughts, my fears growing hot, until Noah is convinced I have a fever.

  ‘You haven’t been yourself,’ he says at dinner, as if we have known each other for months instead of weeks. ‘Do we need to take you to a doctor, Alice?’

  The ‘we’ sounds out across the table, the simple promise of it. I feel a cool hand at my forehead. Perhaps he is not like the others. I need to know.

  ‘Noah,’ I look at my accidental benefactor sitting across from me, our mosaic of IOUs visible behind him. ‘Why do you have people come stay with you?’

  Franklin skulks at my feet, licks my bare ankle.

  ‘I don’t, usually,’ Noah answers after a time. His smile is small, wry. ‘Most times, Alice, people would show up at the door and I would turn them away. I even paid one or two to leave—for their troubles.’

  ‘Oh!’

  I see myself at the door that first night, bags and camera and hopefulness hanging off me, and watch as the door clicks shut in front of me. No blue eye, no bay windows or piano, or Franklin, knocking against my knees. Turning with my six hundred dollars in cash toward—what?

  ‘I have so much, you see,’ Noah continues, opening out his hands toward me, ‘and I had a thought that someone else might need a little of it. However’—he b
rings his hands back together now, clasps them—‘the people who showed up were never quite what I had in mind.’

  ‘But you made it so easy for me,’ I push. ‘No references needed, no credit card deposit like all the others asked for. You must have known someone like me would come along.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Noah sighs, his expression inscrutable. ‘I suppose, Baby Joan … you were what I had in mind.’

  Then much more quietly, so I am not sure I hear him correctly.

  ‘To be precise, you reminded me of a girl I once knew.’

  Later, I will understand that when he opened the door to me, Noah thought, suddenly, of an open, eager face so oddly like his own. His one improbable, glorious attempt at immortality, many years ago. A girl gone to the other side of the world while still a child, address long since lost. For a time, before, the child used to visit with her mother. They would show up unannounced one day or another and she would clunk down on the piano, and he would give money to the woman for clothes, school, holidays. No room, no desire for a family back then, but he had reserved a pocket of himself for the girl, and when they went away so suddenly, the girl left an echo, an emptiness around what might have been. No life is without secrets, without doors closed. When I showed up at Noah’s front door—young, dirty, hopeful—things inched open again.

  Of course, he doesn’t say this tonight. He merely makes to tip his cap at me, his smile widening to meet mine across the table.

  I breathe.

  ‘Not to mention the fact, Baby Joan, you clearly had nowhere else to go.’

  Lucy Lutens wants us to throw a birthday party for her anxious Schnauzer, Donut. ‘Nothing over the top, just cake and those tiny hats, and perhaps you could send me a few snaps of the festivities!’ She has never missed his birthday before, but her cousin is getting married in Maine, and really, her own mother missed almost every birthday she ever had, and she turned out just fine, didn’t she?

  I am in the kitchen, listening through the wall to this woman’s nervous chitter. I never meet with the clients—‘We don’t want any unnecessary questions,’ Noah said when I first started working—but I feel like I could match owner to dog all the same; it’s as if the animal becomes a mirror of the person, picking up all their quirks and emotional ticks. Franklin for instance, is watchful. Attentive from a distance like Noah is, and then he will surprise me with a gesture that feels like affection. A wet nose against my ankle, or a nudge of his head against my leg. Just a brief touch, and then he’s back to his side of the room. Lucy Lutens’ dog is definitely not fine. Donut is skittery with other dogs, and resentful of me, as if it’s my fault whenever Lucy leaves him. He sits at the door after she goes, little whining noises trembling out of his body, and when he has convinced himself she is never, ever coming back he puts his face against his paws and refuses to look at me for the rest of the day.