That is to say—as the days since my murder pass, certain people reveal themselves, layer by layer. And others keep holding their secrets tight.
Ruby and Josh show up to the next Death Club meeting, Ruby’s third official meeting in as many weeks, at the exact same time. Walking through the doors of Grand Central Oyster Bar, Josh sees Ruby’s eyes widen as she takes in the amber-lit, terracotta tiles arched over their heads. He had forgotten how iconic the ceiling of this cavernous room is, and Ruby’s reaction makes him feel something akin to pride.
‘It’s a city where you should always look up,’ he says, liking the way Ruby turns to look at him now. When their hostess seats them, the young woman smiles at the pair, the way strangers look at lovers, conspiratorial and approving, so that all three momentarily confuse the occasion. When the other Death Club members arrive, when it becomes clear this is not in fact a date, the hostess finds herself oddly disappointed. Love makes her job easier, diverts the steady stream of workers and tourists arriving each night, their undercurrents of tiredness and resentments buzzing about them. It would have been nice to be in the presence of romance on this spring night.
(She is not the only one who thinks so.)
Seated across the red and white checkered table from each other, with Lennie and Sue still on their way, Ruby and Josh find conversation easier than either would have thought. Soon, Josh is telling Ruby an animated tale about the famous celestial ceiling of the Grand Central Terminal above them, a funny story I already knew, thanks to Noah. How back in 1913, on the day the terminal opened, an amateur astronomer passing through the new building stopped and noticed the blue and gold zodiac mural hung high above everyone’s heads had been painted in reverse, so that east was west, and west was east. Meaning the constellations were not at all where they should be. It is a New York blunder Josh loves; it amuses him to think about the grandeur of that opening day, and the moment one anonymous, practical man looked up and burst the gilded bubble.
‘I never knew that!’ Ruby laughs, admitting she wouldn’t know her Orion from her Pegasus. ‘So, you’re saying the sky is back to front up there?’
‘Either that, or the mural is meant to represent the heavens when viewed from the outside, in,’ Josh answers. ‘The jury is still out on whether the reversal of those stars was deliberate, or a rather ironic mistake for a building dedicated to navigation.’
They are both laughing now, mimicking the consternation of those in charge of festivities on that 1913 opening day. I prefer to think of the lone astronomer just off the train, thumb and forefinger to his chin, scanning the skies, and I see Noah’s face in this moment, and Franklin too, watching from the doorway, almost as if they’re waiting for me. The scene is blurry, as if I’m looking through tears, but the waves don’t come this time. I’m trying to understand what that means, when Lennie and Sue arrive, causing those other faces to shimmer and disappear.
We each take a seat at the table.
It soon becomes clear this will not be a regular Death Club meeting tonight. With Josh and Ruby still laughing, Lennie asks to be let in on the joke, and soon Josh is repeating the tale of the starry ceiling above them. From this beginning, the stories traded across Cape May Salts and martinis and crème caramels remain light, buoyant, and for the most part, I do not mind. Something about seeing Noah and Franklin like that has slipped me into a mood deeper than sorrow, and I cannot begrudge these friends wanting a night to themselves. It feels inevitable even, as I watch Lennie grimace over a raw oyster, and listen to Josh conjuring another story about New York’s quirks and mistakes, while Sue explains the difference between lobster and crayfish to Ruby, biting into her first Maine lobster roll. Nobody says they are not going to talk about life and death tonight, yet they all agree to this armistice. I see this understanding pass quietly between them, and I find myself moving back from the table, letting their conversations fade.
To watch them from a distance is to see arms touching, hands grazing. Broad smiles and secret glances. Glasses clinked together, forks dropped with a clatter. Butter dripping onto the tablecloth and napkins pressed against mouths. Red wine and whiskey ordered, and small, full sighs. I see how they have travelled a great distance together this past week, like the passengers teeming in and out of the terminal above us. If intimacy is exponential, it is opportunistic, too, taking advantage of nights like this to assert itself, lock everyone in place.
I am fascinated by the shift, yet that deeper-than-sorrow feeling persists. Because I know I do not belong at this table. I cannot join the living as they trade their stories, cannot share any part of my day, my past or my now, the way they do. They are discovering each other, moving forward together, while I remain the dead girl, Jane. Riverside, Doe. A month after my murder, without any fresh revelations to stoke public interest, I am a news story already growing old.
Because the people who do know my stories have stayed silent. Friends—and a lover, too—whose fingers might twitch toward their phones whenever the Riverside murder is mentioned, but they never, ever make the call. Just as the members of Death Club can set me to the side tonight, the people who know me, love me, have been doing this for weeks now. Ever since, each on their own, they thought, What if that’s my Alice? And then quickly pushed me away.
When you see it all from the outside, you realise how little of anything is where it is supposed to be. People’s love gets muddled up, too. Reversed. East is west and west is east. Sometimes the reordering is unnoticeable. And sometimes, when you look up, there is a vast, empty space where the stars used to be.
Life is getting better for Ruby Jones. She has, as she told her sister, made friends. New York glitters in their presence, and this is more than she could have hoped for. Some evenings, like this last one, she might even say that she is happy.
At last.
But there is still a dead girl. An unnamed dead girl who shows up in her dreams, asking to be known. There is still that bloodied face, beseeching Ruby when she closes her eyes. This is not something she can ignore.
Ruby knows how to be sad. She knows what to do with her sorrow. But what about happiness? What about joy creeping up on despair, disorienting it with laughter and light. What do you do with that contradiction?
In other words: How do you hold your pain close and let it go at the very same time.
It is Tammy who finally makes the call.
Of everyone, she has been the least able to keep me from niggling at her thoughts, though it took time for her to acknowledge things were not quite right. Unlike Mr Jackson, Tammy did not subscribe to any of the national papers; my friend seldom paid attention to the news in general, so for a while there, she had no idea about the murder over in New York. She really was too busy monitoring her father’s sobriety and keeping Rye out of trouble, both men increasingly using her strength and even temper as their leaning post. Days were full, and nights made up for the days, until she’d let a few weeks, and then a few more go by without checking in with me. Back then, she still thought I was with Mr Jackson, remembered me practically hanging up on her when he came through the door, and if she’s honest, this last phone call had bothered her a little. The way I had seemed so consumed by him. It wasn’t enough to make her angry at me, but it was enough to stop her from messaging on my birthday (though she would say she simply forgot), and enough to keep her attention focused elsewhere.
She’ll reach out if she needs me, she told herself, and that’s it, isn’t it.
That’s how a person slips out of your life so easily. Sometimes forgetting is simply waiting too long.
Time ticked on until one day, as she scrolled through an online fashion magazine, Tammy came across a story about a recent spate of unsolved murders across the country—Is There a Serial Killer on the Loose?—and there was my face. Or a face enough like mine, so that if she closed her eyes and laid the sketch from the article on top of her memories, she could recognise the eyes, and the nose, and my mouth (though she thought at the time
: Alice would never look so prissy). Still, she tried to argue the worry away. This was some random girl in New York, and Alice was back in town with Mr Jackson, still fawning over him, no doubt. The niggle was enough, however, for Tammy to call my cell phone. A month ago, she’d missed a call from me; there had been no further contact since then. When she tried my number after seeing that sketch, it went straight to voicemail.
Hi, you’ve reached Alice Lee. But you probably already know that. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can!
She thought, then and there, about going to the cops. But what would she say? Oh, hey. That picture of a dead girl looks a lot like my best friend. Where does she live? Um … I guess I don’t know these days. Maybe New York City? She was always talking about moving there. Besides, what if the cops came over? There were a lot of things her dad, not to mention her boyfriend and his brothers, would want to keep hidden from someone in uniform. It was easier to believe that some friendships simply run their course.
But last week, as the temperature got higher, and the grey sky pushed down on the lake, Tammy drove back to town. Told Rye she wanted to collect some cash from her mother. Pulling into the gas station on the edge of town, she saw Mr Jackson standing at one of the pumps, looking at his phone. She rolled down her window.
‘Hey, Mr Jac–Jamie. How’s Alice doing?’
Later, in the telling of it, she’ll swear he jumped at the sound of my name. ‘You should have seen the guilty look on his face,’ she’ll say. ‘The way he said I don’t know what you’re talking about! and got out of there as fast as he could.’ But the truth is, it was fear she saw and recognised. She was the one to drive home as fast as she could.
Walking into her old bedroom, she went straight to her collection of silly portraits we’d taken together over the years. And looking at those laughing, oblivious faces, she knew. That Alice Lee would always get back to her. She would never disappear for good.
Not if she had any choice in the matter.
‘Mom!’ Tammy went and lay down in bed with her mother and brought up the story about my murder on her phone. ‘Mom, I think something bad happened to Alice.’
Tammy told her mother everything she knew.
The truth, at that moment, began to unfurl.
I am on my way to being found.
So is he.
EIGHTEEN
THIS IS WHAT I WAS WEARING THE MORNING I WAS MURDERED. Grey sweatpants, fluffy on the inside, with frayed ends and an elastic waist, so I could wear them comfortably low on my hips. Powder blue Victoria’s Secret briefs, cotton, with a little heart and pink VS on the front. The kind of underwear you buy in a set of five for twenty dollars. Everyday underwear. A black bra under a purple T-shirt. A purple parka, light and downy like a quilt. Purple jacket, purple T-shirt. Blue cotton briefs, a plain black bra, and an old pair of sweats. And near-new sneakers, dirt-caked from climbing down onto the rocks, and the struggle. They found me in the bra and the T-shirt. Catalogued me in the bra and the T-shirt. Made an assessment of my social class, my occupation and my intentions that morning, based on my hair and my orange nails, and these few items of clothing he left behind.
The missing clothes are in a backpack, stored in a private locker. In the basement gym of a building downtown. People, hundreds of them, walk past this locker every day. Some have even read about me, followed the Riverside Jane case. One or two went to the vigil that night. Wondering who could do such a thing to a young girl. Looking askance at men on the subway whenever they travelled uptown, walking past that downtown locker twice, five, ten times, a day. Sweats, blue underwear, a pair of sneakers, and a jacket, the blood stains I left behind more like rust these days. And a camera, a vintage Leica. Film and Summar lens missing. An object stolen twice in just a few weeks, now wrapped in plastic inside a basement locker, code: 0415.
Every riddle has an answer. No matter how long it takes to solve, the answer was created at the exact same time as the question. This is what Detective O’Byrne thinks, as he sounds out my real name for the very first time, starts putting the small facts of my life together, with the help of Tammy’s stories, and the results of Gloria D’s DNA test (‘I thought she was with Tammy,’ my former guardian cries, over and over. As if this explains her carelessness).
‘Alice Lee,’ O’Byrne says, thinking about all the people who let me down. ‘Who did this to you, kid?’
I thought my name would be enough. That my identity was the riddle they were all trying to solve. But for O’Byrne, it is just the beginning. My name was only ever a clue. For him, the real puzzle is what happened down there by the river.
At least it’s me the Detective directs his next question to. As if I have a say in the matter:
‘How do we find the bastard, Alice? What is it we’re missing?’
Unlike O’Byrne, Ruby generally tries not to think about him. Has stopped jumping at loud noises, makes an effort to smile back when men say hello as she shops for snacks at the grocery store or purchases another bottle of vodka over on Broadway. She doesn’t want to be the one looking askance at strangers, not in a city where she only needs the fingers of one hand to count the people she actually knows. But he hovers at the edge of her thoughts, all the same. Casts his shadow, slips around the corners of her consciousness, so that she always seems to catch the back of him, disappearing.
She tries not to think too much about him. But, deep down, Ruby knows she is as tied to my murderer as she is to me. That something is unfinished between them. And, sometimes, she wonders what would happen if she followed him around those corners. If she came face to face with the man whose terrible crime she discovered.
I’ll admit, now that O’Byrne has put the idea in my head, this is something I have wondered, too.
Josh is the first member of Death Club to say my name.
Alice Lee.
Tongue against teeth, he sounds out the syllables, tries to draw me out from the scant details he has managed to uncover before they hit the news. My life makes for a small list on this day I am officially identified: small town girl from the Midwest, parentless, no known occupation or address in New York. Nothing yet to help determine motive, nothing to suggest what I was doing in the park alone that morning. But there is a name, and a beginning. This is something. Riverside Jane is in fact Alice Lee.
Alice.
Josh looks at the photograph that will soon be shared with the public. Sees a beautiful young girl with blue-sky eyes and a freckle-dotted nose. Tries and fails to reconcile this with what happened to me. It seems impossible—but then, it’s always unfathomable, isn’t it. What we don’t know of the future when a happy picture is taken.
Josh got the tip from a friend at the Daily News. A woman he slept with once or twice after 9/11, when the whole city was shaking. ‘They’ve identified that girl you’re so interested in,’ she told him on the phone. ‘Some kid from Wisconsin. I’ll text you the photo they’ve sent out. Feel free to thank me over dinner some time.’
But it’s Ruby he asks to dinner that night. Fumbles with how to contextualise the question, and ultimately settles for this: I have something to tell you about Jane. He doesn’t want her to think it’s a date, yet when she walks into the small Italian restaurant near Lincoln Center, heads to where he is sitting at the bar, he holds out his phone toward her as if it is a bunch of flowers.
My smiling face fills the screen.
‘It’s Jane?’
Gripping the bar stool offered to her, Ruby looks at me, the real me, for the very first time. She has imagined this moment for weeks now. The relief of discovering my identity. It doesn’t feel like she thought it would. The pain, suddenly, has become unbearable.
Jane.
Alice.
Ruby, my name is Alice Lee.
When she says my name out loud for the first time and starts to cry, I want to reach out, tell her I’ve been here all this time. But I cannot make the world move in my direction, not even this tiny corner of it. Were
that possible, I would tilt her right into my aching arms.
Knees slanting, coming closer.
They are at another bar now, one of those secret, behind the wall and up the stairs places that never stays secret for long. They share a small couch set behind velvet curtains, the only seating available at this hour, and when they sat down Ruby had a flash of the young couple she saw in that dive bar on the day she found my body. How the girl had her leg draped over the boy, and how pristine their love seemed, glistening in its newness, when she had felt so very tired and afraid. Is it possible she wants that glistening for herself now?
They have talked about me all night long. Passed that photograph of me between them. Imagining a life, sculpting ideas around the few things they know, so that by the third Manhattan—my drink!—they have crafted a dozen versions of me. The memory of cherries in my mouth, I whisper outlandish suggestions to help them along. Girlfriend of a mobster! Heiress on the run! They can’t hear me over the clink of ice cubes, the jazz playing in the background. But I play sculptor just the same. And when Ruby tells Josh she wishes she’d had a chance to meet me, to know who I really was, I wish back just as hard.
Over dinner, Josh admitted he had been investigating the Riverside murder, telling Ruby about the network of friends and industry contacts he’s talked to about me, so that she imagines a map of people across the city, lines connecting pulsing dots all over town. He tells Ruby his interest is clinical, that it’s a fantastic mystery to be solved, but I know the truth. This is his way to her. Ruby Jones. One of the few people to make him feel buoyant again.
Before You Knew My Name Page 19