Ruby Jones is my only witness. I understand this suddenly, explicitly, and I grasp at this singular certainty, feel my way along it, until I find myself standing next to her, there on the waterfront path. She couldn’t get to me, but somehow, some way, I make my way to her. I am in awe as I reach out to Ruby, but my fingertips turn to rain, drip down her cheek, and a second truth claps itself out above us:
She can only see the husk of me, left down on the rocks.
Turns out you have to learn how to see a dead girl. To recognise her. For now, I can do nothing but wait, terrified, beside this shivering stranger. Knowing she won’t be able to feel my presence, find me for a second time, until she is ready to see what everyone else has missed.
Ruby is wrapped in something silver. Two kindly police officers keep calling her Ma’am as they take turns with their questions, pressing gently against her confusion. She is trying to cooperate, trying to swim up through her cold, saturated brain, but her eyes keep going to their belts, to the thick, black weapons heavy like rocks. Thinking how easy it might be for someone to reach over and pull one free, grasp a gun or baton and—
She closes her eyes and metal comes down against her skull, smashes through skin and bone, breaks her into a thousand little pieces. She sees blood. Exploding. But it’s just the sirens flashing, and the yellow of a girl’s hair, and the slow, steady stream of uniforms making their way down to the river. She was moved away from the water once the forensics team arrived, but Ruby can still see the rush of activity down there. All the ways they make a crime scene of the body.
She feels like she’s going to be sick.
The officers are staring at her; Ruby’s hand has gone to her mouth. There is metal on her tongue, and it tastes like a gun, the cool, hard sensation of a barrel pushed against her face. Like a fist.
She doubles over and throws up on the gravel.
‘Ma’am. Are you okay, ma’am? Can we get you some water, ma’am?’
And the questions stop as someone pats Ruby’s shoulder, the female police officer perhaps, though Ruby cannot be sure, because rain and tears have blurred everything now.
‘Did you notice anything just before you saw her? Did you see anyone strange in the area? Did anything seem out of place?’
That’s what they kept asking her when they first came down to the river. And she’s said no, yes, um to all variations of these questions, leaving a useless trail of words between her and these people trying to help, because she saw nothing. There was nothing. There was just the rain closing in, and the river churning, and the place she stopped to breathe, before turning for home.
‘What’s going to happen to her?’
Her one question for them. Left unanswered as she shivers in her silver wrap and another siren keens its way toward the river.
Later, Ruby sits on the tiled floor of her shower, water hitting her shoulders, spraying over her skin. She watches as this water pools at her knees. Tries to think of anything but this morning. If she closes her eyes, she’s immediately back there, and the water trickling over her body turns red, covers her in thick, congealed blood. They think she didn’t see; they think she had been moved far enough away from the water, but when my body was turned over, there was bright red at my right temple, or where my temple should have been. Ruby wasn’t supposed to see my face, but those nice police officers were still asking her questions as the others got to work, the ones who lifted the caution tape with their gloved hands, darting under and around it, as if they did this all the time.
She knows she wasn’t supposed to see that my face had been smashed in.
(What she doesn’t know. In that moment, I looked just like my mother. That pretty, destroyed face of hers when I found her on the kitchen floor. I’m sorry, I want to say, the first of many times, for all the things Ruby will have to deal with now. I know what it’s like for the horror to follow you home.)
Ruby was taken back to her apartment in a squad car; she sat in the back and apologised for dripping rainwater onto the seat, and tried not to cry when Smith, the female officer, assured her she’d done a great job today. ‘Truly, you did everything right, Ruby,’ Officer Jennings agreed over his shoulder. Ruby had been so relieved to see their flashing lights approach, to hear the sirens as they got closer. She doesn’t know how long she was alone by the river before they arrived. Five minutes, maybe a little more. She spent that time sitting, standing, crouching, her phone pressed to her ear, a stranger’s voice on the end of the line telling her to stay calm, reminding her that help was on its way. Ruby paced in the smallest circles throughout the call, trying not to look across the water. Careful not to touch or move anything around her.
‘Keep as still as you can,’ they said on the phone. And she knew what they meant by that.
Someone was there before you, Ruby. Please don’t disturb anything they left behind.
They left behind a girl in a purple T-shirt. Face down on the rocks. And it was clear someone hurt the girl, someone did this to her. And maybe, it occurs to Ruby, that someone was still there in the park, watching as she waited for the police to arrive. Maybe that someone heard her stumble as she tried to explain where she was, where the body was in relation to her. When she couldn’t give street names or directions, could only look around and describe her surroundings, trying, desperately, to give the police the help they needed to find her.
‘There’s an overpass. I passed the boats. There are wooden posts sticking out of the water. There’s a road above us. I can’t see any signs. I was trying to find a way out!’
Maybe this someone was watching Ruby the whole time, or maybe they were already long gone, and the girl had been dead for hours. Nobody said. How did the girl get down to the water’s edge, anyway? Ruby had hurt herself trying to climb over the railing, she saw the investigators scrambling, too, slipping on the wet rocks, struggling to find their footing as they approached the body. Was the girl already down by the water when she was killed, or did someone drag her off the walkway and throw her over the railing? How strong would you have to be to do that?
Why would anybody do that?
(We both ask this question over and over.)
The shower has been running so long that the water has gone cold, and Ruby makes herself think of Ash, heads for the only loop in her mind that feels familiar, her one reliable distraction. Remembering when she last saw him in person, she tries to focus on something alive and breathing and real. She has to think of Ash, or the heaving, bone-shaking sobs will start again, the ones that felled her when she first stood under this shower in her muddy running clothes, the water so hot it stung all over. Ruby’s hands were trembling so badly she couldn’t get them to cooperate, couldn’t make her fingers unclasp her bra, or lift her saturated top over her head. As she struggled to undress, the hot, hot water needled at her newly exposed skin, and the sobbing came up out of her as a howl. Something animal and angry, something rage-filled, until it all emptied out, and Ruby was left sitting naked on the shower tiles, hyperventilating. It was as if she couldn’t remember how to breathe. She kept seeing the body, kept feeling the terror of waiting out there alone, with that yellow hair swirling in the water, sky thundering above her. And then, just as suddenly as the crying hit, Ruby clicked over into a kind of numbness, found an empty space behind her eyes she had never known was there, a place where she could stare, unblinking, letting the water cool over her. Just so she could tremble in a different way.
Better to think about Ash, about the mess her life is in, because she can control that, she can live inside a comprehensible drama. She can be that woman. The mistress. The woman with no self-respect. She does not know how to be this other person. How to be someone who discovered a body. She does not know how to be someone who stood across from that body, waiting for the police to arrive, counting to ten over and over, answering the questions the 911 operator asked, and all the while staring at the girl on the rocks, wishing she would just lift her head, say Hey! back at her, even as
Ruby knew, looking at those exposed legs, the twist of the girl, that it was too late. That there was no point climbing down onto the rocks, because the girl was already dead.
I found a dead girl today.
This is the text Ruby sends Ash when she finally gets out of the shower. She types out the words, and then switches her phone to silent, feeling that strange emptiness settle behind her eyes again, before getting into bed, still wrapped in her towel. She stares at the ceiling, listening to the rain outside, not even flinching when thunder shakes through the walls.
She gets up off the bed around three in the afternoon. She hasn’t eaten. She can’t eat. She needs a drink, she realises, whiskey specifically. The craving for that amber liquid, for the warmth of it, is her only sure thing, as if someone had fed her this as medicine, long ago. She pulls on tights, boots, a thick sweater. All black. She feels safer somehow, wrapped in dark winter clothing, the kind that swamps her frame, hides her. She’s glad it’s still raining outside, cannot imagine sunshine or blue skies. The world has shifted in just a few hours. The way it always shifts in just a few hours. It’s not years or decades—that’s simply how we tally the axis-shifts, how we adjust and recover from them. We think in years—How was this year, what’s your New Year’s resolution, I’m so glad to see this year gone—but it’s really the hours that change us.
Ruby was a different person when she got up just a few hours ago.
It is possible, she considers, the girl was still alive back then.
(She thinks of me as the girl. The first of the many new names I will be given. ‘I’m Alice,’ I whisper, but the sound comes out as a rush of rain.)
Taking an umbrella from the front desk, Ruby heads back out into the wet. She makes it down the mostly empty streets quickly, heads toward the dirt-wood floors and fairy lights of a small bar she has walked by many times these past few weeks. Thinking, this will be a place where she will be left alone to drink, but she won’t be alone. She never again wants to be as alone as she was this morning.
The sole bartender is distracted by a TV screen on the wall when she walks in; a basketball replay has his full attention. When he sets down her whiskey, the glass is almost full to the rim. He returns to the game before Ruby can say thank you, and she turns away, relieved he didn’t want to make small talk. Slinking away with her drink, she sees two couches at the very back of the bar, ratty and low to the ground. Choosing the one in the darkest corner, Ruby tucks her feet up underneath her and is grateful for the first burn of whiskey in her throat, the small relief of it. Closing her eyes briefly, she wills for her mind to be as quiet as this corner, this place. Prays for the drink to calm her.
Flesh exposed, like bruised fruit. A hand splayed across the rocks.
She opens her eyes.
The older, serious guy who came later. O’Byrne, the homicide detective. He gave Ruby a card with his name on it, said they would bring her in for a formal interview tomorrow, but she should call immediately if she remembered anything. He said people can go into shock at first, and sometimes, when the shock wears off, they remember the important details better than they did at the start.
‘You were in the park for a good ten minutes before you found her, yes? That’s a real amount of time. You might have seen something, someone, and if you did, we want to know about it. You call me straight away, okay Ruby? If there’s anything you remember better.’
The younger policeman, Officer Jennings, said Ruby did a great job calling 911 and directing the police to the body. He said she did a great job not being afraid. But Detective O’Byrne, he seemed disappointed in her, like she could have given him more.
I didn’t see anything, Detective.
And now all I see is her.
The door to the bar jangles open and a couple stumble through the doorway backwards, shaking raindrops off their shared umbrella. They’re young, laughing, and the boy kisses the girl full on the mouth before he heads to the bar. As the girl sits down on the couch next to Ruby’s, she never takes her eyes off the boy. Even in her current state, it’s easy for Ruby to see the new love shining off this girl. She’s glowing with it, warming the room.
Ruby thinks: this young woman is so clearly in love with this young man today. In the same way it is raining today and she found a dead body today, and she is drinking whiskey in the afternoon. Today. Tuesday, 15 April, four weeks after she arrived in New York City. Tomorrow, these things will only be true of yesterday. Tomorrow, it might be dry, blue-skied out there. Tomorrow, she cannot say I found a dead girl today. And tomorrow this young girl with her shining eyes, with her love-glow, may have loved a boy yesterday. She may have loved him with all the heat a body can generate, until some chance thing he said, some small action—or maybe a large one—took hold of her new love and crushed it, pierced through the cocoon she had created. It only takes a beat, a careless word, a thoughtless admission, for everything to change. So that, tomorrow, this young girl may find herself staring at the wall, wondering how everything is suddenly so different now, when at this very moment yesterday she was sharing an umbrella with a boy who kissed her in doorways, a boy who sheltered her and took such care. She will wonder at how quickly all that care can disappear.
He sits down with her today, this day, and this girl puts her leg over his thigh, easy, proprietary. They are ripe with beginnings and Ruby, already, has prescribed them an ending. What’s wrong with me, she wonders. Why does she assume she knows anything at all about this young couple’s tomorrows? Surely some people find contentment and get to hold on to it. Surely, some people find their person, and stay with that person, and make babies and a life with that person. Not just some people, in fact, but most people.
Ruby is the odd one out, here.
Looking down, trying not to cry in this dingy bar, she sees her phone screen light up. Messages from Ash, three of them in a row. The first two messages must have come through when she was walking to the bar. Opening them now, Ruby sees a series of question marks, and then, time-stamped a few minutes later, a misspelled sentence asking where she was.
His latest message, fresh in her hand, is all in caps.
JESUS RUBY WHATS GOING ON?
Her text to him when she got out of the shower:
I found a dead girl today.
Ash woke up to this.
Curled up on her couch at the back of the bar, ready for another whiskey, Ruby doesn’t know how to respond. What would she say? She was mad at him, at herself, and she went for a run, and then everything changed, and now she doesn’t know what she feels at all. Maybe if she could talk to him—but she knows she can’t call, knows he won’t answer at this time of day, even as her fingers hover over his name. Eventually, she puts her phone away. She can explain what happened some other time. It’s not like he can come to her, shelter her. In the end, it doesn’t really matter.
In the end.
In the end, you can’t get back what you’ve lost. You can’t bring back the dead. There is a girl who died today, and Ruby doesn’t even know her name. She will need to wait for the police or the papers to tell her about this yellow-haired girl in her purple T-shirt, with her orange nails, and her bloody face. This girl, she thinks, would surely have something to say about all there is to lose—in the end.
Ruby’s glass is empty. She heads back to the bar, walks past the nuzzling, love-soaked couple. Wanting, suddenly, to stop and tell them she’s so very sorry. For everything that will surely come their way.
ELEVEN
‘TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED.’
Afterwards, Ruby can barely remember what she said in her official police interview. She knows Detective O’Byrne started by asking her questions about her career, why she came to New York, how often she went running. Understands he was trying hard to make her feel comfortable, mimicking the flow of a casual conversation, but the absurdity of it, sitting and talking to a homicide detective about her graphic design work back home—‘It’s great, but it’s not, um, my passion’—and h
ow she is currently living off money once destined for a house deposit—‘My grandmother, uh, she left me $25,000 when she died’—or explaining that she tries to run every day: the madness of sharing such small details of her life made the words scramble on the way out, rearrange on her tongue, until she found she could not make sense of anything, could no longer tell what was important, and what to leave out.
She understood Detective O’Byrne would get to the river and the rocks eventually, that he was slowly guiding her there through the tangle of what came before, but she also knew she had nothing of value to offer him, no startling insight, no recovered memory pushing through to validate the way he looked at her so intently. Twenty-four hours after finding the body, Ruby had to admit she knew even less than she did when it happened.
When the interview was over, the detective thanked her for coming to the station, crinkled his dark eyes a little, kept his large fingers soft when he reached out to shake her hand. But Ruby was sure she had disappointed him yet again and had to look away. Walking home, she had the strangest feeling that she wasn’t quite there on the street anymore, was not entirely inhabiting her own body. It was like being drunk, but something more, too. A feeling that everyone around her was also drunk, and not in a pleasant end of the night way. Someone behind her coughed and it sounded like a slap. A man smiled at her and it quickly morphed into a leer. Buying fruit at Whole Foods, another man asked if she was having a nice day, and Ruby was certain he was goading her. Turning onto her street, for a brief, disorientating moment, she thought she saw the Financial Manager, the one who sent those explicit, unsolicited pictures of himself. Even the front desk guy at her apartment building seemed altered; she could feel his narrowed eyes stay on her as she waited for the lobby’s elevator doors to open. For a second, she found herself panicking that he knew which floor she lived on, maybe even had a key to her door. How had she not considered this before?
Before You Knew My Name Page 11