(They are right, by the way.)
She too has an unthinking routine on this last morning. Downstairs for coffee, back up to her room for a shower. Shoes on for a run, some stretches, and down to Riverside Park for a change of scenery, terrain shifting under her feet from street, to canopied path, to the pier. Listening to loud music through her headphones, trying to outrun the beat of her thoughts.
Ash hasn’t mentioned coming to visit.
Not since he told her he might come to New York, and she waited hours before replying—I would love that!—and soon enough they were talking about other things, and she couldn’t, wouldn’t ask him about his plans, until a week had passed, and then another. Until her first month in New York was nearly over. A whole month and, still, Ash remained the lump in her throat, the ache in her bones. That was not supposed to happen.
There are things Ruby has tried to do, remedies she’s sought. Like downloading a dating app and engaging in tentative conversa-tions with a few of the men who responded to her profile. One man, a Financial Manager living in Chelsea, seemed pleasant enough, until he sent explicit pictures of himself in the middle of an afternoon, asking Can you handle this? as if they hadn’t just been talking about getting tickets to a baseball game. Ruby blocked him immediately, before shutting down her new profile completely, her cheeks hot with embarrassment, and not a little alarm. She had been this close to asking him to meet her for a drink. The unwanted pictures felt aggressive, sinister even. Would this Financial Manager have been the same way in person? New to online dating, Ruby had no idea whether this kind of behaviour was the norm these days. Perhaps she was supposed to laugh it off or admire the guy’s misdirected confidence. It didn’t make her feel like laughing, though. The whole episode made her feel queasy, and then sad. Ruby had been looking for a reprieve from Ash, a chance to replace the almost of their relationship with something present, real. Instead, she found herself longing for him more than ever, for an intimacy already mapped out.
That was not supposed to happen.
Scratching the navigation of strangers and dating off her list, Ruby kept on running. She started a daily journal. Wary of the words that tumbled out, embarrassed to see her heartache spread naked across its pages each morning, she discarded the journal five days later. She took herself to a talk on self-actualisation at 92Y, and another on guided meditation at ABC Carpet & Home, and she spent afternoons reading or people-watching from the damp wooden benches of the High Line. No longer a tourist exactly, Ruby spent the last days of my life trying on a different New York, and a different version of herself. Nothing worked, of course; anything she tried felt like a misstep, like she was still running the wrong way. Loneliness is disorienting like that; with Ash as her only lodestar, Ruby continued to feel utterly lost.
(She still has no idea where she is headed, the story that awaits her. But she’s so close now. We’re almost there.)
This morning, this very last morning, she is trying—and failing—not to think about her failures, or about Ash. She thuds past boats bobbing on the water as she follows the Hudson River south, before turning and heading up and out of Riverside Park. She relishes the burn of her calves as she takes the concrete steps to the upper levels, two at a time. Ruby has come to appreciate this park, with its statues and boats and wide ribbon of water. There is space here to stretch out, no need to check your speed against the person in front of you; she decides this will be where she exercises from now on.
(There’s Noah, walking the dogs along the upper levels as she runs. He loves this park, too.)
Back in her room, flush from her run, Ruby grabs her phone and sends an impulsive SOS. Types out the sentence that has been swimming in her head for days.
Am I going to lose you, Ash?
His response comes back almost immediately.
Not at all. It’s just getting harder to respond these days. So busy. See you soon!
Then five minutes later: Maybe.
Something bristles in Ruby. Perhaps it’s the post-run endorphins, her perception of pain reduced. A passive dismissal that might normally hurt her turns her top lip to a snarl instead. Despite her best efforts at distraction, she hasn’t been able to stop herself dreaming about Ash coming to visit in the summer, imagining the dark bars she would take him to, the jazz clubs, the train ride to Rockaway for a day on the beach. The simplest of somethings they could experience together. She has let her mind wander to arms linked, necks kissed and, yes, the nights in bed. Hands over lips, gasps silent against these thin walls. Fingers tracing the bedhead, scratching, the way she would come against his mouth. Perhaps they’d never even make it to the bars and the clubs and the beach.
Maybe.
How stupid can she be? Taking one message and spinning up a biography in this way. She re-reads all of his old texts now. Paces her small room like a lioness, frustration growing. It’s getting harder to respond. No! How pathetic can she be? Feeding on every maybe and not at all, feasting on scraps. He is not too busy to respond. He has no doubt made himself available to other people today, turning this way and that to give them whatever they need of him. Never what she needs of him, ever. In this sudden blistering rage at her lover, Ruby wants to kick something. She hates him in this moment, as a large raindrop splatters against her window. Slap against glass, slap against reality. Blue skies can disappear so fast.
Perhaps, just a little, Ash hates her, too. Despises her for leading him down a path he cannot find his way back from. Cannot make up for. He forgets all this in her arms, of course, or when he is alone in another wide, clean hotel bed after a conference and he’s had one too many wines. In these moments, she is all he can think of. His mistress, the one whose body he has traversed and drowned in and drunk from over and over. Sometimes, the ache for her is no different from thirst or hunger. A primal need for her skin and scent. Other times, like now, when she reveals her neediness, her flare across the ocean, he wishes she would leave him be, thinks of life before her—and after her, too, if he could just say the words. Why doesn’t she understand? Why does she keep coming back for more? She cannot lose him, not when he was never hers to begin with. She’s the one who offered herself up. Agreed to their terms. This is not his fault. What is he supposed to do? Break off an engagement to the best woman he’s ever known, give up the glorious future ahead of him? If he’s honest, that was never going to happen.
If he’s honest.
What use is it trying to get into his head, Ruby fumes. As thunder rumbles in the distance, she feels certain Ash has not been honest a single day of his life.
I have left some things out. The days after my birthday party, I begin to relax. Trust. I take more photographs. Spend time with Franklin at his favourite dog run in Riverside Park. Leave a message for the photography school, dog-sit, and write out more IOUs. Soon it will be a full month since I left Wisconsin. I have had two birthdays, and I have plans. I try to call Tammy, something I know I should have done much sooner, but she doesn’t answer her phone. I make one other call, heart in my mouth. The school replies to my message and requests a submission, a portfolio of my work that should include, the form says: A self-portrait, designed to show us the artist you intend to be. I have taken photographs all over this city, and I have four exposures left. I have plans.
And then, one early morning, it ends. There was an I, and it was me. I was at the centre, looking out. Until someone decided to enter the space I had created for myself, take it over.
You think if you hold on tight enough when things try to pull you away, you can still make it. But then someone else takes up all the room, blocks the view, and suddenly you’re pushed right out of your skin.
It’s their turn now.
There was an I, and now there is a he, a him, a his.
The tip of his cigarette. Vivid red extinguished. The ash falls. Little pieces of burnt snow, drifting. A flutter lands on my shoulder. I go to flick it away. His hand comes down on mine and I—
I don’t feel
like telling you anything else right now.
TEN
IN THE HOURS BEFORE I DIE, RUBY JONES HAS SLEPT ON HER anger and wakes up coated in it. Outside it is raining heavily, but she barely notices the weather. It is 5.55 a.m., early for her, but she is already up, pacing back and forth across the small path made between her desk and the bed. God, this studio is too small! Filled up with unnecessary things. She straightens the TV remote, pats down the corners of the bed, shifts her hairbrush to the bedside drawer. Does a 360-degree turn, then removes the hairbrush, turns the remote sideways again.
This is how people go crazy, she thinks. I need to get out of this room.
As she puts on her running shoes, Ruby hears a boom of thunder. Or it could be the hard slam of a car door. She strains against the sound and then shrugs. No matter, she’s not afraid of a storm. A little rain never hurt anybody.
The street is empty as she exits her building and heads west toward Riverside Park, rain spiking across her face. At the first intersection, already saturated, she considers turning back, then remembers the pacing, the locked in feeling she’s had since yesterday.
‘Fuck it!’ she shouts out, and waits to cross with the signal, though there are no cars on this part of the road.
There is no one to startle on the street either, no dog walker with their twist of leashes, no nanny carefully guiding a wobbly-legged toddler. As Ruby reaches Riverside Drive, she finally encounters cars, a row of them stop-starting, gushing by, each one sending up a spray of water as they pass. It is proof, at least, of other people. Even if she is the only one out here running in the rain.
Ruby considers staying on Riverside, but the pavement is narrow, and when car after car sends a muddy shower her way, she pivots and heads into the park. It’s darker than she anticipated, the sky looks as if it is closing in around the trees, but she keeps going, sure there will be other runners and cyclists down on the waterfront trail. As she cuts through the upper levels of the park, Ruby searches for the stairs to take her down to the water, but the thick clusters of trees on either side of her don’t look like she remembered them to be. Perhaps she has entered at a different spot today. Riverside Park is still new to her, and the weather may have turned her around, somehow. She knows from her maps that the park stretches for blocks, street above, river below, so it’s not like she could get lost. She just needs to keep heading south, she tells herself, until she finds a landmark she recognises, something to orient her. Still, she feels a brief flicker of panic.
Thunder claps loudly over her head and Ruby startles, rolls her ankle. Her yelp of pain echoes off the trees as lightning jags across the sky, and she considers giving up, heading home. She is stopped, wiping her eyes and flexing her ankle, when two northbound runners come flying past her. They nod, give her the thumbs up, and she immediately feels foolish for letting her mind run away on her. This is New York, you are never the only one, anywhere!
Feeling less jittery now, Ruby puts her head down against the rain and charges at it, mud splattering as her feet hit the ground. She finally comes to a set of stairs, steps cut into a sloping, wet bank, so that she has to descend gingerly, careful not to slip on the well-worn stone. There is a short tunnel at the bottom of the stairs, graffiti and old urine staining the damp concrete walls. Emerging from the tunnel onto the waterfront path, she lets out her breath—Made it!—and is surprised to discover that, left or right, the path remains empty of people. As lightning shoots above her head, Ruby feels a corresponding flash of alarm, her sense of relief diminishing. There were supposed to be people down here, there are always people down here. How had she not noticed the severity of this storm when she set out?
She stops and leans on a railing at the water’s edge, wills herself to calm down. She’s not going to last long in New York if she lets a little storm scare her. This is just rain, and some thunder and lightning, and a dumb Australian going for a run, when everyone else was smart enough to stay home. Maybe they woke to an emergency message on their phones: Flash flooding ahead. Stay away from waterways, then rolled over and went back to sleep. No matter, she’s not going to get swept into the murky waters of the Hudson today. Antipodean jogger drowns is hardly the way she’s going out.
She might freeze to death however, as ice-cold raindrops run down her neck and soak through her jacket. Pushing away from the rail, Ruby heads toward a pier she can see just ahead. She thinks she remembers stairs just past where all the little boats are docked, a steep set that will take her straight back up to the street, allowing her to avoid the dark thicket of trees she ran through earlier. Calmer now, Ruby gets into a rhythm, watches as her feet slap against the wet path, one stride then the next. To her right, the river makes the same slapping sound against the rocks. Out on the water, boats rise and fall with the wind and waves, and across the river, the lights of New Jersey are filtered through thick, dark clouds. It would be beautiful, she thinks, if she weren’t soaked through to the skin. A rare opportunity to have this view to herself.
She is approaching the marina when her foot cracks down on something round and black. She must have come down on whatever it was with her full weight, because bits of plastic scatter across the path. Some random object, meeting its end under her foot, discarded—or lost—and now shattered. She hopes it wasn’t important, whatever it was, and says a silent sorry to the god of lost things. Running thoughts, she calls this kind of musing. Nonsense passing through her mind, cleaning it out. Already, she is less angry. More herself. Or perhaps, mercifully, less.
It’s after passing another cluster of boats and a flooded ramp—rain falling, river rising—that Ruby notices her access to the upper level of the park is now completely blocked off by a tall chain link fence to her left, running parallel to the water. She’s obviously come further south this morning than she realised, to a part of the park under construction, and now her planned exit is somewhere behind that fence. She is going to have to turn back, after all.
Fuck.
Another clap of thunder, a flash of lightning even closer this time. Lights pulse across the river and the yellowed windows of the buildings on the opposite bank go dark, like candles blown out. The rain is now coming down in one solid sheet, and it’s so cold Ruby can see her breath, ghosts floating before her with every exhale. She has little visibility beyond these apparitions, and she stops to get her bearings, wipes the rain from her face. She can just about see a burnt, black structure out there in the water, behind an uneven row of thick wood posts, partially submerged. This part of the running trail is suspended over the river; just ahead, the track winds back from the shoreline before pushing outward again, creating a small u-shaped beach of moss-slimed rocks and rubbish below her. High above, cars swoosh by on the sodden, concrete freeway, but down here: no one.
Reaching for the railing directly in front of her, Ruby bends, takes a few deep breaths. It is when she straightens up and prepares to kick off that she sees it. Across the tumble of wet stone and weeds, no more than six or seven metres from where she is standing, there is something purple laid out on the rocks, right where the water slaps up against them. As Ruby squints through the rain she sees something else flow out from the purple, yellow reeds, rising and falling with the river.
There is bright orange too, glints of it, and as Ruby blinks through the rain and tries to focus, she understands she is looking across the rocks at fingernails, and a hand, and the yellow is hair, and she knows she is looking at a young girl’s body before she feels it, before her heart punches hard in her chest, and her legs threaten to give way underneath her.
‘Hey.’
Ruby doesn’t know if it’s a whisper or a shout.
‘Hey!’
It’s more like a cry this time, something hoarse and desperate. Face down at the water’s edge, the girl does not turn over.
Ruby is not close enough to see whether the girl is breathing. As her heart starts to sound in her ears, she makes to climb over the railing, but her foot slips on the w
et, her shin cracking down on hard metal. Electric blues and greens flash behind her eyes as she stumbles back, almost falls over. Still, the girl doesn’t move. Trying to ignore the pulsing pain in her leg, panic rising until she can taste it, Ruby pulls her phone from her vest pocket. Her hands are shaking so much, she hits the wrong numbers on her pass code three times over before the screen unlocks.
911. That’s the number you call, right? She needs someone to tell her what to do.
‘Hello? Yes. I think. Help. I can see someone by the water … there’s a girl, and she’s not moving. I think … I think she’s not okay. I don’t know what to do. Hello? Yes. Please—I think she’s hurt. I don’t know if I should go to her. Should I go to her? Please. Tell me what to do.
‘She’s not moving. She’s not responding. She’s not turning over. Please! I’m not close enough to see if she’s breathing. Tell me what I need to do.’
Please.
She’s not close enough. To see that I’m not breathing.
Standing across from my body. All that murky water in my mouth, in my lungs. Stripped below the waist, blood matting my hair. Left on the rocks to flail like a fish, until I stopped moving, eventually. Pulled away, mercifully, as he plunged in. And now a stranger is looking at my dead body. Now we’re both scrambling to understand what it is we’re seeing. What it is that’s been done to me.
I now know that you can cry, scream, howl like the wounded animal you are. And they do not stop. It does not move them. They keep going until there is nothing left, until you are broken apart, obliterated.
Almost like you were never really there at all.
Before You Knew My Name Page 10