Before You Knew My Name

by Jacqueline Bublitz

  Noah says dogs produce the same kinds of emotions us humans do, but they think like a three or four-year-old at best. ‘Imagine yourself at your most vulnerable,’ he once explained. ‘When you feel more than you can ever make sense of feeling. That’s a dog’s reality, every day.’

  It makes me think about what I was like at four years old. I don’t remember being in my own skin, looking out at the world, but I do sometimes see myself at that age. I think you generally experience memories in this way, from the outside in, like your old life is a movie you once starred in. But sometimes something bad happens, something bad enough to make it feel like you’re perpetually looking out from that bad thing, living inside it, instead of watching the movie version. Then, it gets hard to tell what’s real and what’s not. Noah said you can try to tap those kinds of memories out, shake them loose, ‘But wouldn’t that just leave you with a body full of holes?’ I asked him, and he laughed at that, but not unkindly, and the next day he left a book about something called EFT on my pillow. Unfortunately, the book had a picture of a nebula on its cover, so I put the book in my closet, cover facing the floor, and never looked at it again.

  Anyway, nothing so bad happened to me at four years old. Not that I know of, and I feel certain I would remember. Something better to think about: could you match the kid to the mom, the way I can match dog to owner? How did that small girl mirror her mother back then? Was I always looking for someone to love me, pay attention to me, see me? It is strange that I cannot really know this baby Alice. My clear memories—moving so often, starting at yet another school, the men always hovering—it’s an older Alice who experienced those things, stored them up. Was little Alice waiting at locked doors, too? Pining like Donut does, for a woman who always, eventually, came back?

  Sometimes I wish Noah didn’t tell me all the things he tells me.

  Only sometimes.

  ‘I’ve never had a birthday party,’ I confess when Lucy finally leaves, Donut collapsing into grief at the door. ‘My mother liked to pretend birthdays never happened.’

  If this surprises Noah, he doesn’t show it. I think I would be surprised if someone told me they’d never had a birthday party. I might even be a bit sad about it. But he merely shrugs.

  ‘Would you like to have one?’

  ‘A birthday paaaaarty?’

  ‘Yes, Alice. A birthday paaaaarty. Would you like to have one? Not experiencing something doesn’t necessarily equate to a desire for that experience.’

  I have come to appreciate the way Noah makes things I’ve never even considered seem obvious. I guess that’s why I never feel offended when he talks to me this way.

  I think about his question for a minute, really think about it.

  ‘I would,’ I finally answer, as new visions, possibilities bubble to the surface. ‘I would like to have a birthday party at the very top of the Chrysler Building. I would wear a silver dress, and I would serve Manhattans in fancy glasses, and there would be balloons filled with glitter everywhere. People would pop them over me as I walked past, so that I would be super shiny, all night long.’

  ‘Specific,’ he says, with that small smile of his, before turning back to the day and the dogs. Leaving my birthday fantasy to glimmer, and then fade. But not before I’ve preserved the idea of it, like a memory of something that actually happened.

  It is a measure of Noah’s growing affection that he resists the urge to tell me how the insides of the Chrysler Building spire are in fact nothing more than a mass of concrete and electrical wires, an ugly series of crawl spaces that look nothing like its glittering façade. Nor does he mention the fact that, technically, I have no friends in New York City. No one to invite to my party. So that any balloons tied to the maze of rough cement inside the spire would remain intact, untouched, as I walked underneath them. Glitter floating inside, and me on the outside, looking up, looking in.

  A nice but preposterous idea. Girls like me don’t get fancy birthday parties. I turned eighteen years old on an interstate bus. The click of numbers on a clock, and I was born this many years ago. Never knowing what my mother thought as we were wrenched apart for the very first time.

  Not knowing, either, what she thought when we were separated for the last time.

  A memory of my mother and me. She is in the bathtub, a towel twisted around her head like a turban. She’s laughing as she flicks soapy water at me, puts her hands out for me to join her. I slip into the warm water, lean back as she begins to wash my hair, her long fingers kneading my scalp. Balls of light, tiny planets, dance in front of my eyes as she moves her hands against my small head, and I feel the flesh of her, the fullness of my mother, against my back. ‘You’re my baby,’ she whispers, and this is what I remember, even if I am never sure it happened that way. Even if this was only ever a movie. Starring someone else entirely.

  Of course he does.

  He throws me a birthday party at the top of the Chrysler Building.

  I come back from playing with Franklin in Riverside Park just as the sun starts to settle on the Hudson River. It is the end of my third week in the city, and the living room is filled with floating silver and white balloons. Propped against the window is a person-high cardboard print showing an aerial view of Midtown Manhattan on a rainy, yellow-gold night. I am handed a reddish-brown drink in a sparkling glass, a dark cherry bobbing across the surface. It tastes like an idea I have yet to understand, a promise of adulthood, rolled around in my mouth.

  ‘To your first Manhattan,’ Noah says, and we clink glasses, and though I am not showered with glitter, I gleam all the same.

  ‘Happy birthday, Alice.’

  How strange to think I will never hear those words again.

  We are drunk. Or I am. Three Manhattans in a row, poured from a crystal decanter, sat on top of the piano. I have saved every cherry, and now I bite into one, dark red juice trickling from the side of my mouth. It tastes sweet and bitter on my tongue and I understand this is a different drunk to anything I have experienced before. I am languid—I think that’s the right word. Heavy. But not stuck. Clutched in my left hand is a cheque, made out to that little photography school around the corner.

  ‘Enrolment fees,’ Noah explained when I opened the envelope he gave me, the thin piece of paper falling into my lap. ‘I can’t have you hanging around the house forever, Baby Joan.’

  The cheque feels like a key to a brand-new door. I see myself in the summer, walking up the front steps of the school, see myself entering the building each day, ready for class. I imagine myself growing more and more familiar with this world as the days pass, and if I squint just so, I can even see that future me eating lunch with her friends, using the darkroom to complete her latest assignment, showing newer students how to find classroom B.

  ‘Noah …’ I want to tell him about this older me. I want to express how strange and wonderful the idea of a future is. I want to thank him for making it possible, making her possible. I want him to know that, before, offers only ever came with strings. Conditions. I was always counting down to the end of something, to when it would be taken away. And I want to tell him that I still don’t understand why he would do all of this for me. A girl he met just weeks ago.

  ‘Noah. Who were you before?’

  Aren’t all the answers found in the past?

  ‘Before you?’ he clarifies, putting his own Manhattan down.

  ‘Well, yes, before me. But I don’t mean that exactly. I mean what was your life when you were young. When you were eighteen, like me.’

  Noah tells me he was born across the river. In Hoboken, a name that sounds to me like a candy bar, something soft, with a hard crunch in the middle.

  ‘Baby Joan, you may have just perfectly described my adolescence,’ he says, smiling into the past, seeing his life in reverse, so that his mouth changes on the journey, falters at the corners until I can no longer tell if he is amused or sad.

  ‘I wanted to escape. Much like you did. Only I had a smaller jour
ney to make. I spent my whole youth looking across the river; Manhattan was my north star. I lived, until I arrived here, always wanting to be somewhere else.’

  ‘Tell me about New York back then,’ I say, because I want him to keep talking, and I have learned he often shares pieces of himself inside other truths. Somewhere in the Manhattan of his youth, I will find the man he is now, and why he has chosen to help me.

  ‘Back then, New York was still an idea. The best idea this country ever had. Now, it’s more like a crass reality show. The streets have been cleaned up, the tourists come and come and come, there are half-empty apartment buildings right there in Midtown, whole blocks of concrete owned by people who will never live here, keeping their multi-million dollar condos just in case they visit sometime. In the seventies, you didn’t visit New York. You lived here. You escaped whatever life your parents had made for you, and you landed in a place asking only that you live in it, make of it for yourself.’

  I could listen to Noah talk like this for a year.

  ‘I lived in the Village. Dirty beds, dirty bars, while my parents tried to wash things clean back home. It was dangerous and thrilling and a whole world in and of itself, a city perpetually in motion, and always outdoing itself. I watched those towers go up, they were monstrosities really, but I never minded them, because they reminded me of two giant fingers giving the up to everyone. I lived like that myself at the time, sure of myself and a little crass. I had a lot of friends, and then I didn’t, because the eighties came, and people around me started to die. Lovers, friends, the boy genius who lived in the next apartment. They died, and the city lived, and it changed, because surviving changes everything.’

  (This, I know.)

  ‘The city kept moving. I kept moving. New York is made for second chances, Alice. I eventually met someone who knew someone who knew someone, and they introduced me to money. I made a lot of it. Sent it back across the river to my parents. Bought this place cheap from a man who recognised me from my life before. Even when I didn’t recognise myself.’

  ‘And the girl I remind you of?’ I ask into the silence that follows, feeling we are coming closer to the story now. This night, the Manhattans, have loosened something.

  ‘Ah, yes. Part of my life on the straight and narrow. A remnant if you will. My daughter would be’—he counts on his fingers, a whole life in his calculation—‘in her mid-thirties, now. Hard to imagine. Half of this life of mine lived over again. I hurt her mother very much, the way you can really hurt someone, which is to not love them the way you said you would. So, she left. Took the kid overseas, and my apology for the complication of my orientation was to let them go, no strings, no ties, no questions asked.’

  Noah opens the door and I am standing there with my bags. A little girl turns to see her father one last time. Leaving, and never imagining she won’t ever return to the house with the piano, and the chandelier, will never again see the man who always talks to her as if he is reading her a story. You can’t know how far some goodbyes will take you.

  ‘Do you regret that?’ I ask. ‘How big your sorry turned out to be?’

  Noah tells me he has many, many regrets. That anyone who says otherwise has not lived long enough, or they’ve simply lived too long to remember the truth of things. And, yes, he regrets not knowing his child, not getting to see her grow up. More so now, for getting to know me.

  ‘I don’t know my father,’ I say, wanting to stitch back together the small hole I have opened. ‘He’s somewhere here in New York. At least I think he is. I know nothing about him, except that he was a photographer, too.’

  ‘Is that why you came here? To find your father?’ Noah asks, and I sense he is mapping out another daughter’s journey home.

  ‘No,’ I answer honestly, though I wish, for his sake, I knew how to lie to him. ‘I don’t really think about him. Not in that way. He probably never even knew about me, to be honest. My mom could be like that. I just sort of learned to deal with his absence, you know, until I didn’t notice it anymore. There was no point wishing for what I couldn’t have.’

  Later, the simple absurdity of this sentence will reveal itself. I will come to understand that wishing for what you can’t have is a desire strong enough to compel the dead.

  ‘We’re a pair,’ I say suddenly, on this night when I still have so much to learn, the tang of the Manhattans now an echo in my mouth. ‘Daughterless father, fatherless daughter. If life were a movie, you would suddenly need a kidney, and we would find out—Ah!—that you’re actually my dad. Wouldn’t that be some-thing, Noah. Me showing up on your doorstep, and it turns out it wasn’t an accident. That all along, I was meant to find you.’

  I crush another soaked cherry against my teeth, grin red at him.

  ‘Lord help me,’ Noah says in mock horror, ‘should I find myself responsible for a feral child like you!’

  In the next room, on the refrigerator door, the IOUs flutter. Post-it notes documenting my debts. Sneakers. Jacket. Subway fare. And some notes I have added while Noah is not paying attention. There are actually quite a few of these other IOUs collected there now, little messages I’ve left for him, and I don’t know if he ever looks, but the ones I’ve snuck into the pile say: Friendship. Loyalty. Safety. Things like that.

  Things I can pay him back sometime.

  Because I still think I’m going to make it. On this night of my very first birthday party. I still think there will be a summer and school and people to eat lunch with, me sitting there at the centre of things, laughing, telling stories, making plans. New friendships will grow up around me, a wild garden of them, and it won’t matter when I call Tammy to tell her all about it, that we let so many weeks go by without talking. She’ll be so happy to hear what I’ve been doing, where I am, that she’ll forgive me for not telling her sooner. ‘You did it, Alice,’ she’ll say. ‘You made a life for yourself!’ But I’ll know who really made that life happen, the person I owe it all to. Tonight, at my party, I never doubt there will be enough time to pay Noah back for everything he’s done for me.

  Because even when I’m in my mid-thirties, as old as the daughter he said goodbye to, I’ll still have so many years left. I won’t even be close to those 79.1 years promised to me. I’ll be a famous photographer by then; they’ll hang my pictures in galleries around the city, put them on the covers of magazines. And I’ll look after Noah, the way he looked after me. I’ll be the one to keep him safe this time. We have so much ahead of us to be thankful for.

  To imagine it any other way would break my heart in two.

  I suppose I let my guard down. At the end. When the sky actually did fall. The crack, and the flash of light, and the wet like rain. Air heavy like a boot on my chest. Dirt, and metal, and being pushed down, down into the earth. It surprised me. The shock of how little you can mean to another person. How an entire world can be discarded so quickly. I was right to think I would never be safe, that I needed to be wary.

  But it still surprised me. At the end.

  NINE

  TOMORROW, I WILL BE DEAD.

  On this day before I die, where do you want to start? What would you like to look at first? I get up, I have sleep in my eye. I make a pot of coffee, the water hisses over onto the element, spits at me. I can’t get the water temperature right in the shower. Sometimes I think the faucets are switched from day to day, just to confuse me. I eat a banana, the texture struggling in my mouth. I step around dog toys, kick them into the corner of the living room, and open the window to the day. The street is its usual mix of bloated rubbish bags and metal frames. You could swing down them, if they didn’t always seem on the verge of collapse. The sky is blue, later it will rain again. There is dog hair creeping across my big toe. The day is light, bright, ordinary.

  I get up. I have sleep in my eye. Make coffee, water hissing. Temperature wrong. Banana slick on my tongue, and the squeak of a rubber bone. Rubbish bags and metal and blue, blue sky. Rain coming. Dog hair itching my toe. The day is ligh
t, bright, extraordinary.

  The morning passes. Neither slow nor fast. It just passes. I have had near on a month of these mornings and I am used to them now, accustomed. I make a cheese sandwich, leave the plate and knife in the sink next to my coffee mug. I should do more to help out with keeping the place clean, I think. I must not forget to show how grateful I am. I press down on another post-it note and write the word Help, before a large bang outside startles me. My ‘p’ wobbles, shoots off the yellow paper as I drop my pen. I had intended to write: Help more around the apartment but the pen has rolled under the table now, and I cannot be bothered bending down to find it. Help will do, I think, smiling, as I post my final fluttering debt on the refrigerator door.

  This last light, bright morning of my life.

  On this last, bright morning of my life, Ruby Jones looks out the window. Wrinkles her nose at the black garbage bags lining the street, piled one on top of the other. She imagines the smell of the rotting vegetables and soiled nappies, though the only scent in her room is the vague, musky remnant of her designer candle. She can see a lane of sky made between her building and the apartment opposite. Blue. No rain, but it is coming this afternoon, they say. The promise, too, of a warm summer ahead, once they get past this temperamental spring. Meteorological broadcasts from a future, already laid out.