‘Yes. I mean, the girl. Jane Doe. Where do you take’—Ruby swallows—‘the bodies you find?’
‘Ah, right. I get you.’ Jennings wonders why he has suddenly started to perspire. ‘She’ll be down on 1st Avenue, I reckon.’
‘First Avenue?’
‘Yeah. At the morgue down there. That’s where she would be. They’ll be hoping to ID her. If no one comes forward to … ah … claim her, they’ll keep her down there for a while, most likely.’
‘And then?’
Ruby needs to know what happens if nobody claims the body.
Jennings rubs the back of his neck, feels a trickle of sweat under his fingertips. He hates thinking about this part. Never gets used to it. The idea of all those cadavers lined up, emptied of organs, lips sewn shut. That ugly ending doesn’t feel right for a girl as lovely as the one they found by the river. He feels a sudden desire to protect Ruby from what he knows. It’s the least he can do for her.
‘You know what, hon? Odds are we’ll find out who she is real soon. It nearly always happens that way, so don’t you worry about it.’
Jennings gives what he hopes is a reassuring smile, and then he is gone, the doors of the precinct closing behind his back, and Ruby is left standing on the street, smiling faces staring up at her from the brochures in her hand. She unfolds the top one, but the print blurs, because she is crying again, fat drops onto the page.
U Ok?
Ash couldn’t even be bothered typing out a full sentence. What room did that leave her to answer? How could she fit in all the things that make her not okay?
She thinks again of the line she has read in so many newspaper reports: Her body was discovered by a jogger.
Why did they never say what happened to the jogger after that?
Someone organises a candlelight vigil in Riverside Park. News of the intended gathering is shared locally, and on Saturday night, four days after the murder, around three hundred people make their way down to the muddy fields near the pier. The mourners are mostly from the neighbourhood, but some women come from across town, from their own dark places, called forth to memorialise one of their ilk, one who didn’t, couldn’t, make it home. The crowd is punctuated by these survivors, their pain red-tipped, fierce, as the faithful from different denominations hold forth, one grasp at comfort after another offered into the night. Candles quiver, wave, and when the talking stops, someone steps forward and softy sings ‘Hallelujah’ into the silent congregation, her head bowed down.
From a distance, three hundred candles held high is a beautiful thing to see. A glow of stars drawn down into people’s hands. Faces are soft, warm, as people lean one lit candle into the wick of another, connecting each new flame, until the field flickers. Until the crowd appears to breathe light, a visible inhale-exhale of grief and prayer.
There is no name to be spoken, but I am recognised by each of the women present, clasped around their lifted hands, heavy on their hearts. I am their fears, and their lucky escapes, their anger, and their wariness. I am their caution and their yesterdays, the shadow version of themselves all those nights they have spent looking over shoulders, or twining keys between fingers. A man speaks to the crowd, entreats his gender to do better; people clap, cheer, but it is the silence of the women that binds up the candlelight, sends it skyward, a flare in search of every lost sister. So that when the man’s passion is spent, it is the quiet rage of women that lingers, can be seen, glittering, from above. Long after all the little fires have been extinguished, and the mourners have moved on.
Ruby does not attend the vigil. She sits alone in her room, just a few city blocks from the park. She has lit her own candle here, a single flame weaving, pulsing in the dark. Cross-legged on the bed, drinking lukewarm vodka, she stares at this candle and feels nothing. Sorrow, she is learning, can be as quiet as a whisper when it wants to be. Whether it all roils inside her, whether the pain spills out like a swollen river breaching its banks, or the waters go still and she floats upon the surface, numbed—it is all the same feeling in the end. One of utter helplessness. Knowing so little is in your control, knowing you cannot claw your way back to the ignorance of safety. Sometimes, these past few days, she has raged against this loss. Tonight, she grieves. She is alone in a lonely city, and nearly as deep as her sorrow for an unnamed dead girl is this wretched thought: should anything happen to her in New York, she herself might end up unclaimed at one of the city’s morgues. Because no one will have noticed she is gone.
The morning after the vigil, Ruby wakes with a vodka-thick head. Remembers blowing out the candle, can recall getting out of bed to lay down on the cool of the bathroom tiles after the room started to spin. A dim recollection, too, of waking, shivering on the floor, a coarse towel wrapped about her shoulders. Self-care of the drunken kind, she thinks with a sigh, the towel now tangled under the bedcovers. She was not in a deep enough sleep to dream, but time has passed, it is now six thirty in the morning. She has managed to shut down the night, at least.
Padding to the bathroom, her head aching, Ruby’s stomach suddenly lurches. A memory from last night dislodges, makes its way to the surface. After the candle, before the tiles. She was righteous, angry again. Ruby sees herself with her phone in her hand, bringing up Ash’s name. The punching of keys, a furious list of sins building, text after text.
You don’t … You never … I hate …
Picking up her phone now, she has to force herself to look at the screen.
Nothing.
She checks for his name.
Nothing.
Still, that memory persists. The feeling she’s said something she shouldn’t have. Never, ever does she let Ash know how much his distance pains her. She has never let him see her anguish, has remained stubbornly proud of this, clinging to impassivity as her only control. Did she let go of all that last night?
Vodka and dead girls have a way of loosening that grip, I want to tell her.
Ash. I was really wasted last night. I don’t remember what I said to you.
Ruby sends this message after composing and deleting a dozen others; the text immediately shows as delivered. An hour of conspicuous silence follows, where Ruby checks her phone compulsively, as if a reply might slip through unnoticed while she blinks. It is late evening in Melbourne. But definitely not late enough for her text to go unread—Ash would still be expecting work-related messages at this hour, he would have his phone within reach. Panic grows as time ticks on. What did she say in her texts last night? How bad did it get? Bad enough for her to delete the evidence after? The photos and words they’ve sent back and forth since she got to New York have all been deleted from her phone, too; later, she will mourn this loss, but for now she feels sick. Has she said something she knew she wouldn’t want to see the next day?
Ruby holds a pillow tight against her chest, tries to quiet her mind. And for the first time considers whether telling the truth might really be so bad.
It must be. How else to explain her nausea, her hollow limbs and heavy chest. This does not feel like liberation.
She sends another message.
I’m feeling really awful about … everything.
Delivered within milliseconds. No response. Ruby lifts the pillow up to her face now, screams into the smooth fabric. A strange, muffled sound, more like the memory of screaming than the real thing. It is too early, she knows, or perhaps too late, for the half-empty vodka bottle next to the bed. But there is no denying her fingers are already twisting toward the smooth, clear glass.
Is this really who she has become? It would be easy enough to say yes. To reach for the bottle, shut down the daylight, too. Those people on Officer Jennings’ brochures wouldn’t blame her for that, surely. Despite their camera-ready smiles, they of all people would understand you can’t survive every situation on your own. That sometimes you need help to get up off the floor.
But she isn’t the one that needs help, is she?
Something she realises now. She went to th
e precinct because she wanted to be around people for whom Jane is the only thing that matters. To stay focused on that body, and to be closer to her, too, the way she was just a few days ago. It doesn’t feel right to have been there first and to just go about her life from then on, as if nothing had happened. She wants to be with Detective O’Byrne, sorting through evidence, looking for clues, finding the missing links.
This really is the only thing that matters.
I could help, she thinks, and then stops herself, feeling foolish. Maybe she has gone a little crazy, after all. Imagining a place for herself at the table like that. Imagining she could make a difference to the investigation.
Ruby hears Jennings now, the way he said it might be good to talk about what she experienced down at the river. Messaging Ash is sure as hell not going to make things better, she knows. Cassie with her gentle scolding, and entreaties to come home, won’t do either. But who does that leave, then? Like a whisper in another room, Ruby gets the feeling there is an important conversation going on without her that contains the answers she is looking for. She senses an invitation, waiting. If she can only figure out where those whispers are coming from.
Unsure what to do with this new concept, floating just out of reach, Ruby turns off her phone, puts it in a drawer, before lying back down on the bed. Eventually, she falls into a fitful, early morning sleep, dreaming of a young woman with a spade as tall as she is, digging at the earth, singing as she works, and when she wakes from this dream it is near on midday. Ruby can hear workmen talking and laughing outside her window, hanging off their planks, swinging on their ropes. They are going about their business. The city keeps moving.
You need to keep moving, too.
These words come through more like a shout than a whisper, catapulting Ruby up and out of bed. She showers and dresses carelessly, ties her wet hair in a knot, and is out the door fast. It is chilly outside, but the April sun is a bright glare in a clear blue sky, and Ruby scolds herself for losing half the day already. Something shifted while she was sleeping. A click and unlock. She does not want to wake on the bathroom floor, or sleep while the sun is out on a Sunday. She does not want to cry on the street, and she does not want to send drunken, unanswered messages across the ocean.
What Ruby wants is to be useful. It might be foolish to think that Detective O’Byrne would have any use for her, but that doesn’t mean she can’t help in other ways. Even if it simply means remembering that every Jane Doe—her Jane Doe—is a real person, with a real name they deserve to get back.
What to do next, then? Who might want to talk with her about dead girls, who might want to climb down into the darkness with her?
The answer, when it comes, seems obvious. There must be other finders of the dead out there. She just needs to work out how to find them. Heading to the nearest coffee shop, carrying her idea carefully, as if it might break, Ruby settles on a high stool at the window and connects her laptop to the free wi-fi. An over-size latte is soon set down in front of her. The comfort of coffee, she thinks, before squeezing her eyes shut, willing inspiration to come.
‘Finding a dead body’ might be a good place to start.
She carefully types these words into the search bar on her laptop, holds her breath as the results appear. This feels like the beginning of something, that whisper from another room getting louder, but the first few search results are all about something called Death Clean-ups, an apparently burgeoning biohazard industry Ruby has never heard of. These grim advertorials for wiping crime scenes clean are followed by list after list of ‘I found a dead body!’ stories, blog posts decorated with words like gruesome and horrifying and nightmare. Ruby gives this content a cursory glance only; she is not looking for titillation.
Finally, three quarters down the page, a headline jumps out at her.
PTSD: When the body gets stuck in fight or flight mode.
So that you don’t, you know, get stuck. Wasn’t this the language Officer Jennings used outside the precinct? This isn’t exactly what she had in mind, but she clicks on the link anyway, letting her breath out slowly as the article loads.
Her coffee is cold by the time she finishes reading. Here, laid out by a well-known doctor from Boston, is the clearest explanation for what trauma does to a person, to their mind and body. The flashbacks, the constant visions of the rain and the river, all the obsessive thoughts swirling around. The way she keeps dreaming about dead girls. Not to mention her sudden paranoia, the idea that any man she encounters might be capable of murder. It’s all explained by the doctor. This hypervigilance, he says, is a mark of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. And danger only has to be perceived, he asserts, for PTSD to be triggered. Encountering a dead body is actually right there on his list. A familiar song about the wonders of New York croons over the cafe’s speakers as Ruby ponders this new information, wonders what to do with what feels, suddenly, like a key in her hand.
And then she remembers her earlier plan. To seek out other finders of the dead. Perhaps this is where they are hidden. Fingers typing fast this time, Ruby is astounded by the number of results that come up for her now, pages and pages of them. New York is apparently teeming with support groups for people in trauma. Feeling—oddly—like she is being guided, Ruby clicks on the link for a Manhattan meet-up offering support and friendship for people with PTSD, including those with ‘non-traditional’ causes.
Discovering a murder victim. Non-traditional? Ruby reads on.
The meet-up brief describes sessions that include individual sharing (optional) and group discussions: We offer a place of non-judgement, where your safety is the priority. No formal diagnosis of PTSD is required to join. The group meets every two weeks, at a Midtown East location. Address to be shared upon RSVP.
The registration form is short. Ruby fills it out and hits the send button before she has time to think better of it. Almost immediately, an email dings through with a generic welcome note from someone named Larry. Congratulations! Know it takes courage to make the first step in your healing process. You should be proud of yourself …
Attached to the welcome email is a list of dates, locations and times for the group’s spring sessions: the next meeting is set for Thursday, four days from now. Ruby barely even asks her big sister for advice, has never considered seeing a therapist. Is she really going to do this?
Over the speakers, a man is still crooning about New York; as he sings about brand-new starts, the lyric sounds out across the cafe, lands right next to her, and the hairs on Ruby’s arms bristle. There is suddenly no question. She will go to this meet-up. She will seek out people who understand. What is the worst that could happen? If she goes the wrong way, she’ll find what she is looking for, eventually. Because you can find anything in New York, right?
Even a dead body, she thinks, alarmed to discover that, for once, this starkest of truths almost makes her laugh.
When I started showing up in her dreams it was an accident, by the way. There isn’t exactly a difference between awake and asleep for me these days. She’s the one who changes when her eyes are closed, she’s the one who becomes more open. Remembering me standing next to her in Riverside Park, understanding that I followed her home—these are things she forgets in the daylight, and I didn’t know there was a way I could remind her of them. Until it happened.
I try not to hold too tight when she does remember. I really am sorry for all the things she has to carry. That’s why I pushed for her to seek help, back there in the cafe. That’s why I placed my fingers over hers, pressed down on the keys.
Well.
Truth is I can’t touch anything, not really. But it makes me feel better to imagine. That it didn’t all just disappear because someone else wanted it to. That I am still here. Even if no one can see me. Even if nobody knows my name.
Yet.
Small things have started happening, see. Important things. At first, they seemed like little accidents. But now, if I concentrate hard enough, it seems I can drop t
he beginnings of a thought into Ruby’s head, cause her mind to ripple. It happened with that PTSD article. Just a small nudge, but she felt it, followed it. Noah told me all about trauma. Explained it almost as well as that Boston doctor. Back when we were talking about shaking memories loose, and I imagined a body full of holes. He told me there’s a chance we inherit trauma, that bad memories can get passed down from one generation to another, and I thought about my mother at the time, all the things I never knew about her. But now I wonder if I’ve somehow passed my memories on to Ruby, accidentally pressed them into her bones. The way Noah made it sound—
But that’s enough talking about Noah. My crow, my death bird. I don’t want to think about him, don’t need to, now that I’ve got Ruby. I should have paid more attention to the things he told me, yes. But that won’t do me any good these days. Besides, when I do remember him clearly, I feel a pain as sharp, as awful, as anything I ever experienced when I was alive.
And what’s the point of being dead if they can still hurt you from the other side.
It’s as if they have forgotten me. The others.
Him.
The problem is, if I don’t fully understand how I manage to push through sometimes, I understand even less about why. Most of the time, it’s like I’m a silver fish, darting through a wave, a shadow too quick to catch. But there are times, when I see them up close—Noah shutting the door to my bedroom; Tammy checking her phone; Mr Jackson hiding a box of photographs in his closet, in the space where the Leica used to be—that the waves get too big, they toss me around, batter me against something hard and unyielding, and the water rushes in.
Is it them or me turned upside down when that happens?
All I know for sure is that Ruby is my only calm sea. When the others make me feel as if I’m dying all over again.
Or worse. As if I never existed at all.
We are getting closer, the quote says.
In the accompanying black and white picture, O’Byrne stares out, looking stern and assured. Looking like the kind of man who is used to being listened to.
Before You Knew My Name Page 13