Before You Knew My Name

by Jacqueline Bublitz

I see what happens when he looks at her now. After that night at Oyster Bar, I can see the bright blue light that starts just below his ear. How it curves under his jaw, travels down his neck, and out into his chest, shooting off in all directions. He thinks there is darkness where desire used to be, but he has been looking in the wrong places. His longing resides somewhere deeper, a vivid blue far below his dark thoughts. It’s supposed to feel like this, I want to tell him. It’s supposed to shake you out of that inertia you’re hiding behind. I want to take my index finger and run it from his ear, down his neck and onto his chest. There, I’d need both hands, I’d need all my fingers, spread like arteries, or an explosion. And every place I touched—here, here, here—I’d say: There she is. There is the way she leans forward when she’s listening to you, there is the constant glisten of her eyes when something moves her. There is the curve of flesh under her cotton shirt, and the way she self-consciously pulls at the fabric, unaware that she pulls you in, too.

  If the living could see all that light, the city maps drawn under the skin, they’d be awestruck. Looking at Ruby and Josh right now, they’d see how nervousness and anticipation might seem the same on the surface, but they’re so very different at the source. Nervousness is rushing water, river mouths, but anticipation is something far more delicate, little bubbles that go pop, one bright burst after another, until the body is a glass of champagne, a million golden beads of air, rising.

  It’s beautiful. To see how much joy the body can hold.

  ‘My friends back home would not understand me anymore,’ Ruby is saying now, those little beads forming. They are talking about Death Club specifically, and their mutual fascination with death and dying more generally.

  ‘I’m not even sure they’d like me these days. I might be too … problematic.’

  ‘I wasn’t the easiest guy to be around after the accident, either,’ Josh admits. ‘Not for anyone who knew me before.’

  ‘Your ex-wife you mean?’ Ruby asks, her eyebrows raised.

  Across the table, Josh pulls a face.

  ‘Let’s just say she didn’t cope so well with the new me. Or I stopped dealing so well with the same old her. Either way, it got messy pretty quick.’

  ‘They say divorce is a kind of death,’ Ruby says tentatively, reaching out to touch Josh’s hand across the table. ‘That must have been tough, when your world was already upside down.’

  Josh opens his mouth as if to say something, and then shakes his head.

  ‘Yeah,’ he finally responds. ‘It wasn’t great. But that’s all in the past. For both of us.’

  There is nothing Ruby can add for now; she removes her hand and steers the conversation back to safer ground.

  ‘I still don’t understand how nobody missed Alice all this time. Why did it take so long for someone to notice she was missing?’ ‘My guess is that the people who knew her best had things to hide,’ Josh answers. ‘Most people do. Or maybe she just knew really shitty people.’

  And just like that, they’re back to the game. Imagining my life. Playing with it. Only this time it makes me mad. Because once again, Josh has come so close to getting it right.

  There are people who chose to push me away. To stop—or never even try—looking for me. Because they wanted to distance themselves from me. Even after it was clear something bad had happened.

  But that’s going to be harder now, isn’t it. With my name on everyone’s lips.

  The night is nearly over. It is the kind of date I should have liked to have had, one day. Manhattans and jazz, and all that electricity under the skin. I decide to play a little game of my own. On behalf of everything I’ve lost.

  Knees, a nudge, more forceful this time. I take my anger at all the people who let me down and reshape it.

  As Ruby runs her forefinger along the rim of her cocktail glass, pulls at her earlobe, Josh doesn’t move, can’t move his leg away from hers. Was that some kind of otherness he felt just now? A push from someone unseen?

  (It makes sense that the guy who died and came back is the first to really feel it.)

  I want to sit myself down in front of them. Show her the nerves that flicker wherever they touch. Shift her fingers from glass to his lips, say, Here, this place, is home, and I think if I whispered this to Josh just now, he might actually hear me. I try my hardest, but the words come out as a saxophone solo, filling the room.

  This is your night. I say it louder this time, and the curtains rustle. Let go! I shout, and the candle between them flickers. My voice is music and flame and velvet, now that I know how to hear it. I am everything that touches lightly, everything that lingers. Less and less like limbs and hair and teeth and bone. More like air and sensation and the spark that shoots a river of blue all through a man’s body.

  This new sensation feels like power. The ability to make the world move in my direction, after all. It is an extraordinary feeling. Formidable. After being tossed about for so long.

  I know exactly where to take it.

  The man who killed me sits at home, just a block or two from the river. Candles flickering, night air whistling. He takes a long drag of his cigarette, watches his breath turn into a spiral of smoke. He thinks of how powerful he was in that moment, down by the river, and his conceit causes me to create a crack in the sky, thunder that shakes him in his chair.

  My sudden, glorious anger fills the room. This man should be the one thinking about limbs and teeth and hair and bone.

  Because—the wind hisses, the candle flickers—all that I used to be, all that he took from a girl named Alice Lee, will soon come knocking at his door.

  The next day. Ruby cannot stop thinking about Josh. The man who gave her the gift of a name for her dead girl. They’d talked well into the night and it was 2.30 a.m. when he hailed her a cab, a light rain falling. Saying goodbye, Josh leaned in and kissed Ruby’s damp cheek, and he stayed close as she turned her mouth toward his. A slide into their first kiss, something soft and careful and quick but, still, she held her hand to her mouth the whole way home in the cab, a little giggle rising out of her, so that the driver laughed, too, said it was nice to see someone having such a good time of things.

  It was a good night. But what happens the next day? Had they unintentionally crossed a line, buoyed by alcohol and the rain and their strange circumstances, and would there be an inevitable retreat from each other when the sun came up? This is not supposed to be so confusing, Ruby thinks, not at thirty-six years old. Josh texted to make sure she got home—a good sign. He hasn’t messaged this morning. Not such a good sign. The kiss brought back butterflies—not just a good sign, but something of a miracle, given how long those wings have remained flightless under her skin. She has no idea if Josh felt their flutter. Definitely a bad sign. She is done with not knowing how a man feels about her. She has to be.

  Scar tissue is never as supple as that which it replaces. Like I’ve said before, you don’t arrive in another city and actually become a brand-new person. It comes with you, the habits, the circular thoughts, the fears; all that baggage comes along for the ride. Last night with Josh, right before they kissed, Ruby felt the pavement tilt beneath her. It lasted a second at most, but it was enough to feel the world was opening up, shifting at last. She had thrown her arms out wide and spun around, face turned up to the rain. A gesture she’d seen in a hundred movies, in a hundred moments like this, and Josh had laughed, grabbed her arm to keep her steady but, really, in that moment she wanted to stay dizzy.

  (We both had revelations last night.)

  There have been no grand gestures today, however. Just another innocuous message from Ash—Hey, you up?—she has thus far ignored. She doesn’t want to tell him about the name she cannot stop saying out loud (and she can’t tell him about Josh, though I wish she would).

  If you could see Josh and Ruby from their separate corners as they wait.

  People hold their longing in different places. For Josh, yearning lives in his fingertips, so that when it all gets t
oo much, he rubs his thumb and forefinger together to alleviate the pulsing ache, or spans his hands wide, cracks his knuckles and moves his fingers about. Whether reaching for women or words, Josh’s hands give away his desire. For Ruby, longing resides deep within her arms, it comes as a bone-dense feeling she tries to shake off, a discomfort to squeeze out. Neither of them has ever really learned how to sit with this kind of intensity, allow it. To feel desire is to pursue it or to run from it, nothing in between.

  Ruby doesn’t know Josh has been waving his fingers about, reaching for her, all day.

  His message comes through while she is sitting, arms tightly crossed, on a stoop near her local laundromat, waiting for the dry cycle to finish.

  The buzz of her phone makes her jump, though she has been listening for it all day.

  Ruby. Thank you for last night. I had a wonderful time, although the ending was a little unexpected. I feel like there’s something I should have told you when it came up, so I wanted to clear the air. I’m still married. Separated. But technically married. If you’re free tonight, maybe we could talk about it in person?

  Ruby drops her phone; it lands on the pavement with a clatter.

  Not even I saw that one coming.

  NINETEEN

  HERE’S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THEY KNOW WHO YOU ARE. IT changes. Everything changes. They begin to dig into your life. Because ‘Dead Girl’ needs an even bigger hook to keep people interested. The fact of her loss could never be enough, so they pick through the past, sift through the bones, the reporters and news editors who don’t get this kind of treat nearly enough, the shock and tragedy of pretty, dead girls.

  I have made some things easy for these storytellers. No mother (suicide!), no father (who is he?), and there is enough small-town history for people to snack on. Enough colourful people who went to school with me to keep the theories about the cause of my demise coming. But most leads are a disappointment, a dead end, no matter how deep the digging goes. Good student. No record. No serious boyfriend, as far as people could tell. Not a single scandal of my own, until—

  Mr Jackson sits in his studio, waiting for the knock. Charcoal fingers twisting, a package of photographs face down in a locked box, hidden in the closet. Knowing he can’t throw the pictures away, perpetually contemplating burial or burning, but never quite able to bring himself to destroy them. He hasn’t looked at a single picture of me, not since the day I left. When he came home and found the house empty. Cooled down, mind cleared, he went from room to room, searching for me. Intending to apologise. To say that it didn’t matter now. That we could finally go out into the world together. Discovering the money and his mother’s Leica gone. His terrible words from earlier in the day, echoing. Assuming I had gone up to the lake with Tammy. And knowing we would never get back what we had.

  He sat on the bed and cried when he realised what he’d lost. Just like he sobbed again on a day, some two months later, when my name lit up every television and computer screen across town. Local girl, Alice Lee. Brutally murdered in New York City. No longer able to pretend I had simply stopped calling, no longer able to hide the truth from himself, he finally let himself imagine a stranger pawing at my skin, saw him breaking me open and leaving me there on the rocks. For somebody else to find.

  Mr Jackson. Not the only person to wade into the muck of my life, but the only one to know the softness of my skin, the tender flesh, the way I dissolved like snow.

  He is certain he will never look at those pictures again. Never revisit the honesty, the beauty he has inadvertently preserved. But he knows, too, they are a ticking bomb, a catalogue of his mistakes. Just like he knows, inevitably, the knock will come.

  Still, when they show up at his door in their dark blue uniforms, with their notebooks out and guns tucked, he is unprepared. Sits on that small, sheet-covered couch, shaking. Just a few questions. Not a suspect. Might be able to help with the investigation. If we could just—

  And the female detective. Her eyes taking in the books on their crates, the paintings, the coil of his body.

  ‘What was she doing here with you, anyway?’

  The lies come easy. She was a troubled young woman. She had nowhere else to go. She needed a place to sleep, some shelter for a few weeks. She’d been a good student; he’d showed her some care. Maybe she’d spun a story or two to her friend Tammy, tried to make it seem more exciting. ‘This kind of thing can happen with teenage girls, right?’ They should know that Tammy herself was a bit of trouble, and no matter what she might have said, he never touched Alice. She was just a poor kid he was trying to help out of a tight spot. He simply wanted to help her on her way.

  It cannot be his fault he never imagined where she’d end up.

  Ruby starts running again. Josh’s message, just as she was feeling her way toward him, has set her spinning. For the first time, she considers what she should have said to Ash all those years ago, when he told her he was engaged. Sees a different version of herself, where she went home alone after that first drink with him, bemoaning timing and missed opportunities, another almost in her life. What if she had been that woman instead? One strong enough to walk away, no matter how intense the pull? It does not necessarily feel good to ignore Josh’s texts, to shut him out, but she knows this temporary discomfort is nothing compared to the pain ahead if she falls for another man who can’t decide. Besides, he’d lied to her, hadn’t he? When she said divorce was a kind of death. That’s when he should have told her the truth. That’s when he should have said he was technically still married, because omission is a lie, too; she knows that well enough.

  She is angry at Josh for being dishonest, when she thought she had found someone who valued the truth. This makes her upset with Lennie and Sue, too. She is certain they knew he was still married, and certain they should have told her, when Sue had readily shared the facts of her own divorce, and Lennie talked about romance all the time. How is it possible that Josh’s wife never came up in conversation, not once? In quieter moments, Ruby knows she is being unreasonable, that separation is not the same as marriage. But it’s not exactly an ending either, so she lets herself feel the sting of betrayal, decides she wants nothing to do with any of them right now. It’s not only Josh’s messages that she leaves unanswered as the week goes by.

  When Ruby is adrift, I am adrift. In the days after finding out about Josh, we return to wandering the streets of this city, neither coming nor going anywhere. She considers moving home to Melbourne. I don’t even know where home is anymore. Just when I think I have it figured out, the game changes all over again. I thought that once I had my name back, once those waves stopped crashing around me, I’d know what to do. Maybe even find out where those other girls go.

  But here I am, still unseen. Who Killed Alice Lee? is not really a question about me, is it? But it’s the only one people seem to ask now.

  At any rate, without Death Club as our compass, we seem to have ended up back where we started. A lonely woman and a lonely dead girl together in New York. Ruby Jones and Alice Lee. Stuck in our tug of war between the living and the dead.

  She never goes back to the river. Has avoided the park since the morning of my murder. Won’t even walk along Riverside Drive, there above the Hudson, the promise of summer drawing people from their expensive houses, thawing them out, so that the streets and the fields and the running tracks are never empty these days, at least not until the sun goes down. Ruby has returned to the rocks a thousand times in her head, has pored over photographs of the crime scene, so that it exists as a map in her head, but anytime her feet turn toward the park, something in her rebels, pushes her back. She wishes she could talk to Lennie and Sue about it. Or better yet, Josh, who once told her that he’d had to force himself to return to the scene of his bike accident, how it had taken him weeks to build up the nerve. And how, when he finally got there, he soon discovered he couldn’t recognise a thing. He sat down in what might have been the wrong place entirely, his blood soaked into the soil aroun
d some other tree, and realised how inconsequential his accident had been in the grand scheme of things.

  ‘It’s not as if the place remembers you,’ he had said to Ruby, shaking his head.

  If they were still talking to one another, Josh could have walked down to the river with her, he could have held her hand and assured her that—but, here, Ruby stops her train of thought. Josh is not the man she thought he was. They had an interlude and now it’s over, and she simply needs to be more careful with her judgement from now on. Stop giving her heart away so fast.

  (Why do people, the good ones, always seem to blame themselves when someone deceives them? Seems to me, when that happens, the bad guys get away with more than just their obvious crimes.)

  Perhaps it is her current isolation, so soon after she thought she’d found her people. Maybe it’s a way to evict Josh from her head, to think about something else today. Or perhaps it was merely a matter of time, an inevitability. Whatever it is, on this Tuesday in late May, six weeks to the day after my murder, Ruby finds herself back in Riverside Park, the grounds humming with people now, runners and cyclists and skaters rolling past signs on metal poles that flap ads for the twilight movies and sunrise yoga classes starting soon.

  (I would have loved this place in summer.)

  On this sunny day, as Ruby cuts through the upper levels of the park and heads down to the waterfront, her recollections of that earlier, stormy morning feel more like a movie than a memory. Dank tunnels and dead ends have been replaced by dappled trees, families strolling, dogs on leashes. Following the river, the running trail is more like a freeway today, people moving fast and slow, back and forth. It seems impossible to Ruby that she had once been down here all alone. Her head moves left and right, taking in every benign marker she passes. Nothing looks familiar in the sunlight; it is like she has never been here before.

  It’s not as if the place remembers you.