Before You Knew My Name

by Jacqueline Bublitz

  It’s getting easier. How to do it. Because after that last Death Club conversation, I let myself remember something Noah said, one of those things I never understood at the time.

  ‘You have a rich inner world, Alice. Populated with people and places that suit your liking.’

  What he meant was this: we all exist in our own little worlds, our own private universes. We don’t have to see a person in the flesh to think about them; it’s enough that they’re there in our heads, which is where we do most of our looking, anyway. It doesn’t therefore matter if I’m aware. What matters is that the original members of Death Club can now see Ruby, even when they close their eyes. I just need to show them what’s already there.

  Of course, there are limitations. I can’t, for example, make Josh think about Ruby while he’s brushing his teeth or talking on the phone, but I can help turn his head when he passes the proliferation of Australian coffee houses near his workplace, or encourage him to pause over an Aussie Rules football game when he’s flicking through sports channels late at night. Songs on the radio make it even easier. AC/DC. INXS. He hums along to his favourite bands from Down Under, and his mind wanders to Ruby on its own from there. My work is basically done.

  Lennie, by contrast, doesn’t take much work at all. That’s mostly because she falls in love with people on the spot. Not romantic love, exactly, but something similar, a kind of euphoric curiosity that propels her to unravel the mysteries of a person, get to know who they really are. She had been right about Ruby’s acute loneliness, the night she watched her from across the room at the group therapy session. And right, too, that loneliness, like any kind of suffering, cloaks a person, hides their endearing quirks and funny stories and good intentions. There’s always someone super interesting under that cloak, Lennie is sure of it, and she’s determined to help Ruby shed her layers. Knowing, without any help from me, that something happened before Ruby found a dead body, that her tangible grief owes itself to more than the death of an unnamed girl.

  Essentially, they have positioned themselves perfectly. Taken their individual stories and found a way to place Ruby at the centre of them, a new glue to hold Death Club together. This is exactly what I wanted, a bind to ensure they keep meeting, keep talking, keep asking and answering their questions, so that, eventually, those questions lead back to me. The real me, not Riverside Jane, interesting as she might be, but the girl who was going to live more than seventy-nine years. Until a man took all those years away.

  Is our death fated? Do we have a pre-destined, inescapable end, or is it all just arbitrary?

  This is the question they ask tonight at Patsy’s, as pasta is twirled around forks, the red sauce from Lennie’s Bolognese staining the crisp white tablecloth between them.

  How I might ask it: Was he always going to kill me?

  Sue, the first at the table to speak, is emphatic.

  ‘I’ve always thought that fate is simply a construct designed to help us make sense of things after they’ve happened. It’s how we survive the random after-effects of living.’

  ‘My parents have God for that,’ Lennie says. ‘“The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord”, isn’t that the saying? Either way, they seem pretty sure he’s the one calling the shots.’

  ‘I prefer to put my faith in the Moirai,’ Josh responds, flashing white teeth in a sardonic grin. ‘Three old women weaving our fate, spinning, measuring, cutting. Life hanging by a thread. Much more evocative than some old guy who is or isn’t his own son pulling the strings.’

  Lennie returns Josh’s grin.

  ‘Alas, a lifetime of Catholic education makes it hard for me to shake that old guy off completely. Still, I can’t say for sure what I think about the idea of having a specific kind of death sitting out there, waiting for me. It’s not the most comforting notion.’

  ‘Maybe it could be,’ Ruby offers. ‘Maybe if we knew when we were going to die, and how’—but she stops, as the memory of my battered body comes back to her, clear as a picture. ‘Never mind, I don’t know where I was going with that. Imagine if Jane had known, that morning …’

  ‘Did he, then?’ Lennie asks, biting her lip, as if unsure of asking her own question. ‘The guy who murdered Jane. Do you think he set out that morning to kill her?’

  (Waves crash. Water drums in my ears. I know I could help answer this one, if I really wanted to. I am there, in his universe, too.)

  ‘From what I’ve read, it seems more like a crime of opportunity,’ Josh answers, as Ruby goes pale. ‘A case of wrong place, wrong time for the poor kid. Some asshole saw a chance to play God, and he took it. Not so much destiny as delusions of grandeur, then. Let’s just hope—or pray, Lennie—that he made enough mistakes for the police to catch up with him, eventually. Although something like forty per cent of murders go unsolved, so—’

  ‘I used to pray a lot when I was little,’ Lennie interrupts, catching Ruby’s alarmed look and changing tack. ‘I truly believed I could wind all the world’s terrible things back on themselves, stop them from happening. Maybe that means I do indeed believe in destiny. Or the idea you can control your fate, if you ask the right way.’

  Sue nods at this, the small diamonds at her ears sparkling.

  ‘I prayed for a while, after the accident. I prayed for us to go back to that night we were headed to the movies, so that I could be in the driver’s seat instead, be the one to absorb the impact of the crash. I used to lie in bed and try to bend time, fold it back on itself. I prayed, I bargained, I pleaded. And sometimes, when I finally managed to fall asleep, it would happen. The whole night would play out differently. It would snow so much that the roads closed, or we would find out the 8 p.m. show was sold out, or Lisa would ask me to drive, and I would slide into the driver’s seat, and that man looking down, changing his CD, would hit me, take me, not her.’

  She pauses, before continuing.

  ‘Those prayers changed nothing, naturally.’

  ‘What do you think your life would be like now, if it had snowed, or the movie was sold out?’ Lennie asks softly, and I know they are done talking about me tonight.

  ‘If Lisa had lived? I think’—Sue looks to the ceiling, takes a deep breath—‘I think I would still be living in that nice, big house in Connecticut, and she would live here in New York, and my unhappy marriage to her father would have lasted, and I would be living a relatively unremarkable, albeit privileged life. Summers on Martha’s Vineyard, instead of visiting Auckland and Paris and Marrakesh. Ladies’ Book Club instead of Death Club. That’s how it would have played out for a woman like me.

  ‘But, ultimately, I don’t know what Lisa’s life would have been like’—Sue looks at Ruby now—‘because, at seventeen, she went too soon for me to really get to know her, or what I would have been like as her mother as she grew into a woman.’

  For the first time, I understand it’s not only the dead who have lives they don’t get to live out. The people left behind have as many versions of themselves unexplored, as many possible paths that close off. Some versions are better, and some, no doubt, are worse. There is a Sue outside of Lisa’s death. A woman Sue understands she will never get to be, because of a night when it didn’t snow, and a movie was not sold out, and a man looked down to change his CD, and entire worlds were lost and begun again before he had a chance to look up and take note of where he was headed.

  No one lives just one life. We start and finish our worlds many times over. And no matter how long or short a time we are here, I’m beginning to realise we all want more than we get.

  As the Death Club members continue talking into the night, I leave them be, and return to where we started. A question I had not thought to consider at the time.

  If my death was indeed fated—was it my fate or his, in the end?

  If I had lived.

  If I had reached for Mr Jackson the last morning we were together, stopped my mouth against his, kept the words down. If I had let the fact o
f my impending birthday slide down his warm skin, dissolve into nothing as important as our bodies and the snow outside and the heaviness of him, wrapping over and around me like a sheet. If we had made love that last day of me being seventeen, and if the next day I had decided birthdays weren’t important to anyone but your own self, and asked him to paint me instead, so I could have something of my new, adult self to keep—would I have lived?

  Would I have added years in this way, silently slipping into a life with Mr Jackson where I was twenty, thirty, forty years old, waking up next to him before another birthday and thinking: I have made it another year closer to 79.1! Would we have emerged after that first winter as a real couple, and made a real life together, one that included a wedding, and children, and a house in another town where he could teach art and I could—

  Here, like Sue when she imagines Lisa, I don’t know how to see the world that might have grown up around us. Would I have gone to college? Stayed home with the beautiful babies we made? Helped Mr Jackson sell his art and remained his muse, even when I passed my own mother’s age and kept going, getting older and older, with him immortalising every new line on my body?

  No lines, I don’t want lines. He said this before our very first afternoon together. Would he still have loved me when my body turned into a well-read map?

  If I had lived.

  If I had not said anything about my birthday. If I had not gotten on a bus to New York City. If I had not knocked on Noah’s door. If I had not—but it’s foolish to think about these things now. I did not live. Because a certain man had pretended to be someone else for too long, and when he put his hands on me that last morning of my life, it was the truest he had ever been, and if I had not—not—not, it would still be nothing compared to the force of this one man’s revelation.

  SEVENTEEN

  INTIMACY GROWS EXPONENTIALLY.

  Doors unlock, people might pass through them slowly at first, assess their surroundings. But soon enough, windows are thrown open, furniture is dusted off, space is made, and seats are taken. From a slow, careful start, a rapid acceleration occurs. I once had this kind of intimacy with Noah, with Tammy. With Mr Jackson, too. Where suddenly, someone you never knew in the world becomes all you know of the world.

  ‘I have made new friends,’ Ruby tells Cassie. ‘It only took me seven weeks.’

  (And one murder, she silently adds.)

  Her sister is relieved. She has been worried about Ruby’s new obsession with death and murder, does not have what she calls the macabre gene, and though she feels bad for what her sister experienced, Cassie’s solution would certainly not include spending hours dwelling on all the terrible things that can happen to women. Making new friends seems like a step in a healthier direction, and Cassie is glad for the opportunity to say yes and actually mean it, the next time their mother asks her whether she really thinks Ruby is doing okay over there in New York City.

  An expert in omission, Ruby has not mentioned the specifics of these new friends she has made, or Cassie might pause before answering in the affirmative. Death Club would not, as Lennie might say, be her sister’s cup of tea, and Ruby doesn’t want anything tainting something that suddenly feels so essential. Besides, she reasons, the very existence of Death Club is proof that some conversations are best reserved for the people who understand you. For those who know that proximity to death fundamentally changes you.

  Distancing yourself from death changes you too, I could add, thinking of my old friends, what they’ve become.

  But I don’t want to give Ruby any ideas on that one.

  Here are some things that happen in the week before the next Death Club meeting:

  Ruby sees that her local cinema is holding a Gene Kelly retrospective and On the Town is included in the program. Shyly, Ruby asks Sue if she’d like to be her date for the Wednesday night session, and she could almost cry when the answer is yes. After the movie—a light, bright love letter to New York—the pair have a drink in the bar next door to the movie house and talk about Lisa. Sue tells Ruby her daughter was an aspiring actress, spending her summers at theatre camp, winning the lead in every musical since her sophomore year. She was just months off graduating, with plans to attend a performing arts college in upstate New York, when that driver lost concentration and ran a stop sign. Lisa, driving carefully as was her nature, took the full force of the other vehicle.

  ‘She would be your age now, just over,’ Sue admits this night, and Ruby sees how some grief is fossilised, hardened into stone. This mother will never stop missing her daughter, both as the girl she knew, and the woman she can never meet.

  ‘It helps to think we might have stayed close,’ Sue says. ‘If you and I can find common ground, become friends—perhaps my daughter would still have wanted me around at this age, too.’ ‘She absolutely would have,’ Ruby says, and means it. They clink their glasses together, and I notice the shimmer of a gossamer thread gently winding around their pinkie fingers, expanding between them as they pull away.

  On another night, Ruby and Lennie go to a rooftop bar. There is a swimming pool lapping up to the edges of the patio, and people in expensive-looking clothing stand around in clusters, looking like shiny fruits on a vine. Every so often, one or another drops away, makes for the bathroom or bar to order another round of expensive-looking drinks, their heads turning this way and that, clearly wanting to see and be seen.

  ‘I brought you here for the view,’ Lennie said when they arrived, and Ruby knew she meant the single men in those clusters, as much as the glittering of Manhattan at dusk. They stood in a corner sipping at their martinis, and talked about many things, but Ruby found she could not form Ash’s name, could not frame the reasons why she barely noticed these men, brushing by in their navy suits and pink-check shirts. The friendship felt too new, too unfolding, to risk Lennie’s potential judgement. And something else, too. She was so used to keeping her relationship with Ash a secret, it almost felt a betrayal to speak about him now. At this time, when she was exposing so much of herself, in the way new friends do, Ash was the one thing she could hold back.

  (Which works just fine when all is going well. But what do you do when they break your heart?)

  They left the bar around 8 p.m., when the line to buy another drink got too long, moving on for mac ‘n’ cheese at a half-empty diner a world away from New York’s rooftops. As they ate, the conversation returned to men and relationships. Lennie was laughing at Ruby’s recent, disastrous foray into online dating—‘God, dick pics are the worst!’—when she suddenly stopped and waved her fork at Ruby.

  ‘What about Josh, then?’

  ‘What—what about him?’ Ruby felt her cheeks go hot.

  ‘You said before that you don’t really notice guys these days. But Josh is a little hard to miss, don’t you think?’

  ‘He’s handsome, sure,’ Ruby admitted, and in doing so unwittingly cemented this observation into fact, so that she will feel an odd sense of anticipation the next time she sees him, a nervous flutter at the heft of him. It might be nice, she reasoned over her bowl of pasta, to have someone else to think about from time to time. Which is how her own locked doors started to inch open, slowly but surely. Sometimes it really is as simple as saying a thing out loud, turning it into your newest truth.

  (What? You thought desire was more complicated than that?)

  What Ruby doesn’t know: Lennie met Josh that very afternoon for coffee. He told her that he’d been spending time researching the Riverside Jane case, had even tried to call in a few journalistic favours from his mates at the precinct, but so far—nothing.

  ‘It’s like this girl never existed, Lennie,’ he said. ‘Or it suits certain people to have it seem that way.’

  (When I think about the continued silence of those who do know the details of my existence, Josh comes as close to the truth as anyone has so far.)

  As they continued talking about me, Lennie noticed how often Josh brought the conversation back to Ruby. />
  ‘She’s a bit of a mystery herself, isn’t she,’ Lennie couldn’t help saying when Ruby’s name came up yet again, and Josh’s shrug was too casual, too considered, to indicate anything other than agreement.

  ‘Kind of exotic, too,’ she added slyly. ‘With that accent and her big, brown eyes, and the way she came here on her own, just jumped right into the unknown.’

  ‘Not sure what her eyes have to do with that,’ Josh had retorted, but he was grinning, and Lennie realised she’d never seen that particular look on his face before. Something almost bashful. It was enough for her to get her arrows ready, draw back her bow. For nothing is more intoxicating to a fixer than bringing two people together. This one would take some creativity, she knew; both her targets were openly wary of romance. But she had no doubt there was potential in this match, and that afternoon Lennie determined she would do all she could to bring Ruby and Josh together, as if this had been the plan all along.

  It could easily have been her life’s work, by the way, playing matchmaker to the damaged like this. If she hadn’t accidentally bound herself to the dead, instead.

  In this week of small and significant moments, a week where those posters with the approximation of my face tatter on poles, and my real name stays locked inside people’s mouths, Noah walks past the precinct on West 82nd Street four separate times. DNA from the crime scene once again comes back: No match. Neither victim nor perpetrator are anywhere to be found in any local or national databases; question marks remain where both of our names should be written.