Before You Knew My Name

by Jacqueline Bublitz

  Consider yourself warned, the quote goes on. You will be found. We are learning more about you every day. It is only a matter of time.

  O’Byrne is bluffing, I want to say as Ruby reads this official statement over and over, her heart thumping. He’s trying to lure him out from wherever he is hiding. Trick him into coming forward. They don’t really know anything about him at all.

  I too have tried to get close to him. But the man who murdered me only has to think about what he did that morning for those wild waves to start up again, drag me under the roiling water. It feels like its own kind of warning, every time I come near. That while he is out there, going about his life like nothing has changed, he still has the power to destroy me. To take away what little I have left.

  Is that how it happens, after they kill you? They keep on living their lives, keep getting up for work and eating breakfast and checking the weather and saying please and thank you and you’re welcome, and they smile at their own reflection in mirrors and store windows as they walk down the street. Hiding in plain sight, if they bother to hide at all.

  Thinking no one has the power to stop them. Not the girl then, or anyone now.

  It’s only a matter of time.

  Before they find him? Or before he gets the chance to do it again?

  THIRTEEN

  ‘SIX OR SEVEN PEOPLE COME ALONG, MOST SESSIONS.’

  Larry from the welcome email is talking to Ruby over his shoulder as he sets out a series of colourful cushions on the floor of the community centre. He makes a circle of them, ten large pillows in total. He knows some members of the group will prefer to leave a space between themselves and the next person; then, too, there is the small hope that more people will show up tonight. Find shelter at this meet-up, instead of wandering out there, confused and alone. Larry has been facilitating these support sessions for two years now. It is, as he has now told Ruby multiple times, his ‘life’s calling’—staying open to the many, many ways trauma can present itself, and finding ways to heal the damage that PTSD can cause. It’s a job that never gets old for him. Not when you consider all the ways humans can hurt themselves, and each other, let alone the surprises an impartial planet can have in store. With his own life seemingly safe as a box, he is constantly amazed at what people are asked to endure.

  Congratulations! Know it takes courage to make the first step in your healing process. You should be proud of yourself. We would love to have you attend our group session, where you will have a chance to talk about what is holding you back from living life fully. After twenty years in my own practice, I know that my life’s calling is helping people heal from their trauma to become their best selves.

  Best selves. Life’s calling. To Ruby, that first email was so … American, and she is not at all surprised to discover Larry looks like a magazine ad from the 1950s, with his straight white teeth, and his sandy blonde hair touching the sides of bright green eyes. He looks like a clean slate, something fresh and open. Like all the dirt has been scrubbed away—or deliberately swept out of sight. That’s the other side of America, after all. A country whose history is shiny on the outside, a glossy front, until you realise only one version of the story is being told.

  (Ruby and I didn’t study the same American history. But I think she is right about that part.)

  These last few days, Ruby has almost talked herself out of coming to the meet-up many times over. But her nightmares have intensified since learning about PTSD, as if she has finally given her subconscious permission to have at it. She dreams of floods and gates that won’t open, and yellow reeds wrapped at her throat. Sometimes—most times—she sees that bloodied face, eyes popped open, and wakes in a sweat, convinced she is back at the river.

  (This isn’t me, by the way. When she has this kind of nightmare, I don’t stand a chance.)

  There is something else, too. When Ruby got home from the coffee shop that Sunday afternoon, a message from Ash was waiting for her:

  I’m in London. Jetlagged as fuck. I don’t know what messages you’re talking about, but all okay my end. Don’t know about you though. You ever going to tell me what happened the other day?

  He hadn’t told her he was travelling for work. Crisis constructed. Crisis averted. She called him then and there and told him about finding a dead body. Forgot she was angry with him. And now they’re back on the merry-go-round.

  (I don’t stand a chance there, either.)

  But she’s here now—we’re here now—following All-American Larry around the room as he finishes setting up, chatting over his shoulder about this and that, the weather, an Indian restaurant in her neighbourhood ‘that you just have to try, Ruby. Oh, it’s so good. I never was much for that vegetarian stuff, seemed like something was missing, you know? But they just might have me converted.’ A laugh, a look up, and a quick sign of the cross, before he winks and gets back to loading fresh beans into an old coffee machine. He is excited to have a new person here tonight, feels like a man about to start a race as he wonders what this Australian woman’s story might be. He doesn’t have to do this, give up his free time to help people like her. The practice in Murray Hill, the patients he treats there—it takes more than enough out of him. But he made a commitment to give back to the community outside of those $350 per hour sessions, or rather, because of them. Sharing his good fortune and sound mind twice a month is his penance for making a living out of people’s misery. It really is the least he can do.

  And besides, you never know where the night will take you. Trauma is unruly like that. All the messiness of real life, it’s better than the best TV show. He never did make it as an actor. But listen, when life gives you lemons, you can always find someone to make you lemonade.

  Ruby is busy worrying no one else is going to show up tonight, that she will end up the only attendee, when a young woman half-trips through the door, hair and bag and one shoe flying. After waving at Larry, who beams beatifically as if greeting a dear friend, the girl picks up her wayward shoe and shuffles over to the circle of pillows.

  ‘Oops,’ she says in Ruby’s direction, offering a sheepish smile.

  At Larry’s insistence, Ruby is already seated cross-legged on the floor, and this slight, dark-haired person sits herself down directly across from her. Unable to think of something to say, Ruby starts pulling at a loose thread from the cushion she is sitting on, twisting it tight around her index finger, causing more and more cotton to unravel. Unlike Ruby, this new person appears to be completely relaxed. Despite the somewhat ungraceful entrance, she now sits perfectly upright on her orange cushion, smiling at each person entering the room—they are coming through the door thick and fast now—and she perhaps sneaks a look at Ruby once or twice, though Ruby, keeping her own eyes to the floor, cannot be sure.

  Soon enough, the circle has filled up with people. Larry claps his hands, before sitting down on a spare cushion next to Ruby. With a flash of panic, she realises that instead of being the only one here tonight, she is the only new person in attendance. The only person who doesn’t know the rules. As if on cue, after thanking everyone for returning to the circle, Larry asks Ruby to introduce herself as the group’s newest member—‘And all the way from Aussie, too!’ She sees eyebrows raise at this piece of information, and suddenly wants nothing more than to get up and run.

  As the sessions plays out, nothing feels right. Not all those eyes on her. Not Larry’s barely concealed glee at having a new story to bat around the circle, and definitely not the way she senses others in the group are impatient for her to finish introducing herself—details minimal as they are—so they can have their turn for the night, each person contributing a story seemingly worse than the one before, a Jenga tower of misery just waiting to topple.

  At the base, on Ruby’s right, is a middle-aged woman who, after a home invasion, has had triple locks drilled into every door in her apartment, including the closets. Next comes a man who found his three-year-old nephew drowned in a hotel pool three summers ago.
On top of their stories comes the weight of an elderly gentleman who accidentally put a shopkeeper in hospital when he drove his Mercedes through a grocery store window. One traumatic event teetering on top of another, and though Ruby feels a heart-clench of sympathy for all the pain laid out in front of her tonight, by the time it gets to Tanker, an engineer in his late twenties who had a gun held to his head during a convenience store robbery that turned fatal for the owner, she has to admit she made a mistake in coming here. Her situation is so different, she almost feels foolish. It is as if Tanker and the other members of the group are still deep inside their disasters, struggling for the surface, while she sits outside of the experiences that led her here, watching from a distance. That’s the best she can explain it without the therapy language they all seem so familiar with. The group members might suggest she is repressing her feelings, avoiding them, but really, after listening to the circle of stories tonight, what she wants to say is this:

  I don’t own my pain the way you do. I feel as if I have borrowed it from someone else.

  It is unsurprising that she shakes her head—No—when it’s time for her to speak.

  From across the circle, the girl who fell through the door watches Ruby, her smile never shifting. Like Ruby, she declines to speak when it comes to her turn—‘I’m taking a break tonight, folks’—and her silence leaves Ruby feeling vaguely disappointed. This girl seems so different to the others, almost serene, despite her apparent clumsiness. From her tumble through the door to the curious calm of her smile, something about her makes Ruby feel a sudden pang at the thought of walking out of there alone.

  Had she known anything about the young woman smiling at her from across the circle, Ruby would have understood that Lennie Lau could see her isolation clearly, was immediately drawn to the painful beauty loneliness can wrap around a person. And she would have seen how Lennie was already hatching a plan to unravel that loneliness, to pull at it, like Ruby had pulled at the loose thread of her cushion tonight, only harder, so that with time and care, all that pain would come undone.

  Lennie has already spilled her drink, and twice knocked her fork to the floor. She doesn’t bother to ask for a replacement, just rubs the metal prongs against her ripped jeans and places the fork back on the table. She talks rapidly, gestures wildly, sending anything within elbow radius flying. The staff here smile benignly at her, bring her extra napkins, patting her on the shoulder as they pass. Ruby gets the feeling this girl is treated with affection wherever she goes.

  They are at a small Italian restaurant on 3rd Avenue, a street over from the meet-up. Lennie had grabbed Ruby’s elbow after the session ended, asked her if she’d like to go for dessert, and Ruby had looked around, thinking the invitation was meant for someone else. Strangely, wondrously, it seemed to be directed at her, as if this Lennie had somehow read her mind. The desire for good company felt like the memory of her favourite food, a longing she could taste. To be with interesting people again, to follow a conversation that wasn’t just in her own head—Ruby hoped Lennie had not seen her eyes well up when she vigorously nodded yes to the invitation.

  On the way to the restaurant, Lennie kept the conversation light and breezy, as if they had just walked out of a movie together, but once they sit down at their small table, she fixes her dark, intense eyes on Ruby, and the questions start.

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘What made you choose New York?’

  Finding her tongue fat from weeks of underuse, Ruby can’t quite form the words to answer this last question. She goes for what she hopes is a carefree shrug, a kind of Who knows! But her face flushes red, and she is grateful when the waitress interrupts her floundering to set down a glass of red wine. Give me the whole bottle and perhaps I can explain it, Ruby wants to say. Instead, she takes advantage of the break in conversation to switch the focus to Lennie.

  ‘Were you born here?’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘Are you studying, or working?’

  Her answer to this last question makes Ruby’s mouth pop open in surprise.

  Lennie, a born and bred New Yorker, is an embalmer at a funeral home in Brooklyn. She specialises in reconstruction, which means she works with bodies that come to the mortuary visibly damaged. It’s her job, she tells Ruby, to repair these bodies, to bring each dead person back to how they looked before it happened.

  It. Whatever tragedy reached in and stopped the heart.

  Ruby feels as if she can’t breathe.

  ‘I’m half make-up artist, half magician, I suppose,’ Lennie continues, licking whipped cream from her fork, before waving it like a wand. ‘If I do my job well, you never notice the tricks.’

  Immediately, I can see the care Lennie takes with girls like me. So much of her work has an element of brutality to it; most people would recoil from the tasks she repeats on a daily basis. Puncturing organs, clearing intestines. Packing throats with cotton wool, stitching mouths closed. Inserting eye caps, draining blood, threading wire through jaws. These are just some of her so-called tricks. Dressing the deceased, doing hair and make-up—these gentler moments come after the hard work is done, at which point Lennie is as intimate with her bodies as any person could be. Taking her time, showing her respect, she offers her artistry as the smallest of consolations, and I see how this generosity of hers glows amber from her fingertips when she works, glistens like gold across anything she touches.

  Lennie stumbled into this career a few years back, after failing to get into med school.

  ‘Funny, right? If you won’t let me near the living, I can at least fix the dead!’

  She had been working over the summer, helping at her cousin’s beauty salon, when she started talking with a client seeking treatment for her super dry, red-flaked hands.

  ‘This woman was complaining about how her skin was so damaged from all the chemicals she works with, saying that everything seeps in, no matter how much she tries to protect herself. Turns out she was a mortician. Until then, I’d never met a mortician. I assumed they were all creepy old guys running the family business or something. But this woman, Leila, she was young, and beautiful, and running her own show. I had a gift for doing hair and make-up, and she told me there were other ways for me to use that gift. Ways to make a difference. I mean, at first it was just curiosity. Leila told me some crazy shit about her job, and at the time, I was in the mood for crazy. But then, well, it got important. The needs of the dead, and all that.’

  Ruby nods, then shakes her head. ‘I think I can understand that,’ she says, though it comes out more like a question.

  ‘You know how magicians take people who are whole and saw them in half, Ruby? Think of what I do as a reversal of that trick. I take broken people and put them back together again.’

  Lennie does another wand-wave of her fork, sweeps it across the table—‘Ta-DAH!’—making Ruby jump in her chair.

  Lennie immediately sets her fork down.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Ruby. I don’t mean to be flippant about this stuff. I’ve been doing this so long, I forget it’s not everyone’s idea of normal.’

  Normal.

  Ruby laughs at the word, but the sound comes out brittle, breaks when it hits the air between them. She wants to tell Lennie that normal feels like a foreign country these days. Wants to say she knows why the dead need magicians to put them back together again.

  Tell her the truth, I am thinking, when something bristles on Ruby’s skin, a gust of cool air in this warm room.

  She shudders, and Lennie leans forward in concern.

  ‘Someone just walked over my grave,’ Ruby starts to explain, and then stops, shakes her head, as if to dislodge something.

  Tell her the truth, she thinks.

  ‘Turns out it’s not so abnormal to me, Lennie. I found the girl. The girl who was murdered in Riverside Park.’

  Now it is Lennie’s mouth that pops open.

  ‘Holy
shit. From last week? The case that’s all over the news?’

  Ruby nods, and, with Lennie’s coaxing, she begins to talk, letting out everything she has held in these past nine days. The running and the rain and the fear, and those tangled yellow reeds, and the moment she understood she was looking at a young woman’s body. She speaks haltingly at first, but soon the words tumble out of her, a mouthful of rocks covered in dirt and sodden leaves and brown, brackish water, and Lennie, mercifully, does not flinch at the ugliness set down before her. It took her years, she assures Ruby, to get used to seeing the damage people can inflict upon each other.

  ‘To have it thrust upon you like that. I cannot imagine.’

  With Lennie’s quiet understanding as a guide, Ruby continues telling her story. By the time she gets to her awkward meeting with Officer Jennings outside the precinct, she feels as if something has been extracted. Like a tongue curling against the hole where a tooth used to be, she casts about for what is left, and discovers, to her surprise, it is mostly sadness. She is grieving for the girl on the rocks as if she knew her, as if they were friends.

  ‘It’s so strange, Lennie. The way I can’t stop thinking about her. I thought maybe I was just having trouble processing what happened—it’s why I came to the meet-up tonight, like I might have PTSD or something. But it’s not that, or not only that, at least. I feel … connected to this girl. Deep in my bones. Is that weird?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s weird,’ Lennie answers without pause, her dark eyes glistening. ‘I’ve come to think that intensity, not time, is what connects us. And what could be more intense than being the one to find her? I’d say the weird part would be if you didn’t feel anything at all.’

  They have been talking so long, the lights in the restaurant have dimmed, and chairs have been lifted onto tables. Ruby knows they will have to leave soon, and this new, precious connection will be severed. There is something she wants to know first, something to hold onto when she goes home alone.