The morning Ruby found me, the park had pressed down on her, closed her in. Now it all looks blink-bright. Water sloping toward New Jersey on her right, sports fields and banks of stairs on her left. The park is wide open and sprawling, postcard perfect. It’s not until Ruby comes to the exact place, not until she bends over and puts her hands on the metal railing, just like she did that morning six weeks ago, that her body protests. Reminding her, in a rush of adrenaline and heart constriction, that there is no movie in her mind. Instantly, looking down at the water, she is back inside the reality of what happened here. The sky cracks and cars swoosh overhead, rain soaks through her, pools in her eyes, and there is a girl face down at the water’s edge, not getting up, not turning over when Ruby shouts at her. She remembers the body being picked up, carried out from under the path, remembers bright red, and the pale of naked legs. Sirens flashing, the bright colours behind her eyes, silver foil wrapped around shaking shoulders. Men with gloves on, searching. Somewhere amongst these mental images, Josh suddenly appears, and Ash too, as confusing and disorienting to her senses as it is to remember finding the body of Alice Lee.
Ruby is trying to breathe through these jumbled memories when a man comes up beside her and offers a friendly smile.
‘Nice spot down here, isn’t it,’ he says, so tall and broad shouldered that for a second, he blocks the sun.
‘I …’ Ruby blinks at the vastness of him. He is wearing neat shorts and a polo top, and he smells of something woody, expensive. His eyes are bright blue, sparkling, and if this spot isn’t nice at all, if it is the place Ruby found the body of Alice Lee, this man is at least something clean, fresh, separate from the horror. It might be nice to forget for a moment, she thinks, almost desperately. To ignore what she knows about this place.
Ruby turns away from the river to face him, turns away from Josh, from Ash. From me.
(I should have known she’d do that, eventually.)
‘It is pretty special, yes,’ she says to the blue-eyed man.
‘Whoa! What is that accent?’ he shoots back, coming closer.
Ruby tries to widen her smile.
‘I’m Australian. I guess I haven’t picked up the New Yorker accent yet.’
And, so, it begins. He asks her how long she’s been in the city, tells her he lives in the neighbourhood. Asks if she likes this part of town. As they talk, Ruby can tell the man is well looked after, from his tanned skin and bright eyes, to the inconspicuous designer labels stitched everywhere from his shirt to his shoes. Those straight American teeth. Dressed in her worn-through running gear, she does not miss how he glances at her body between sentences, assessing her, too.
‘I’m not bothering you, am I?’ he asks at one point in their conversation.
‘No, not at all,’ she says, and almost believes it. ‘It’s nice to have someone to talk to.’
‘Would you like to join me for coffee, then?’ he asks. ‘I’ve always thought about visiting Australia, and I’d love to ask you some questions about it.’
If Ruby feels a heart-patter of wariness, it gets lost in that desire to forget where she is, what she knows.
‘Sure. That would be nice,’ she responds, and before she has time to think better of it, she is following the man to the crowded patio of a small cafe, taking the seat he holds out for her. His name is Tom. He tells Ruby he works in finance—‘Yes, down on Wall Street!’—and his style of conversation is breezy, brash, so that she only has to nod at his commentary or answer his questions directly, rather than come up with something new or interesting to say. As Tom chatters away in this fashion, Ruby finds her thoughts drifting to Death Club, missing the way her new friends listened as well as they talked. There is so much she could tell them, especially after coming back to the park today. It is a week since she learned about Josh. At first, they sent messages about the next meet-up, which she didn’t reply to. Then individual ones, to her. And now, the unanswered messages have stopped coming, and Ruby is unsure how to reach across this newly created divide. Something, she fears, has been irretrievably lost in the distance Josh’s revelation has opened up between them.
She is sipping at her latte, trying to put Death Club out of her head once and for all, when Tom puts down his coffee cup and looks out across the water, appears to weigh something up before he speaks.
‘You know, Ruby. A girl was murdered here in the park. Just a few weeks ago, back in April.’
Ruby feels her cheeks grow hot.
‘I did know that, yeah.’
Tom is still staring into the distance, his eyes squinting against the sun.
‘Such a terrible thing to happen. And it’s usually so safe around here. I only bring it up because you said you’re here in New York on your own.’
He turns, looks into her eyes. ‘As a woman on her own, you need to be careful, Ruby.’
(They want you to be grateful. When they show off their care in this way. Ruby understands this, and she bristles at this man’s concern, no matter how well-intended she thinks it might be.)
‘I’m careful enough, Tom,’ she says, her smile stopping half-mast. ‘Most women are, actually. I can only assume Alice was trying to be careful, too.’
‘I wouldn’t say being alone in a city park in the dark is careful,’ Tom responds, an arch in his voice, as if Ruby has offended him, but then he sighs, shakes his head. ‘Sorry. What could I know about such things? About what it’s like to be a woman. It’s just—I have sisters, nieces. And I feel sick thinking of anything like this happening to them. At any rate’—Tom shakes his head again, as if reshuffling his thoughts—‘what a terrible conversation to have on such a nice day. Tell me more about why you decided to come here. Like I said, I’ve always wanted to go to Australia. I think Sydney first, then …’
And he’s back to his sunny side up conversation, just like that.
For Ruby, however, the spell has been broken. He knows about the murder. There’s no way he wouldn’t, when it’s still all over the news. She had thought, hoped, she could escape it, even for an hour, but what did she expect, coming down to the river like this. She scolds herself for her optimism, even as she feels that sense of prickling unease return. Tom, so light and breezy just moments before, now settles on her skin as an irritation. How can he be so blithe, so unaffected by the things going on around him, she wonders? He has not even noticed the change in her mood.
Ruby knows she is being unfair. Understands she shouldn’t resent this cheerful man’s lack of complications, but the absence of her Death Club friends feels even more stark, as he launches into another glib story, this one about the time he met Mel Gibson at a bar downtown.
‘Top bloke,’ Tom is saying, mimicking an Australian accent poorly, and Ruby forces a smile, but all she can think of is excusing herself, getting away from this failed attempt at normalcy as soon as she can. Back home in Melbourne, they used to say there could be four seasons in a day, temperatures dropping rapidly, sunshine giving way to hail with no warning. She thinks now that she has become the weather.
Her reprieve comes when Tom’s phone, face down on the table, buzzes.
‘I might have to get that,’ he says.
‘Please go ahead,’ Ruby nods. ‘I need to get going myself, anyway.’
Tom looks disappointed but makes no effort to stop her when she pushes her chair back, stands up.
‘I think,’ she says, ‘I lost track of time.’
‘Well, I’m very glad you did,’ Tom replies, before waving away the cash she attempts to put down on the table.
‘Absolutely not, Ruby. A gentleman always pays. Though perhaps next time we meet in the park, you’ll let me buy you a real drink.’
The suggestion is playful, implicit. He wants to see her again. Ruby feels something pull tight in her chest. The weight, she will think later, of being wanted by the wrong man. For now, she smiles her practised smile and takes Tom’s hand, offered to her across the table.
Strong, warm fingers wrap around
hers, squeeze tight.
‘Until we meet again.’ Tom presses down on her hand one last time before letting go. ‘And I meant what I said before. Be careful, Ruby. It’s not as safe out there as it might seem.’
He looks back at her once after they part, turns and offers an exaggerated wave, before taking a set of stairs two at a time, up out of the park, and away. Instead of following him, heading home, Ruby finds herself walking back down to the water, following the winding path until she comes to that little curve of beach again, water slapping up against the rocks.
Lowering her head against the metal rail, Ruby struggles not to cry.
A girl was murdered here in the park. Just a few weeks ago.
I know because I found her.
This is what Ruby could have, should have, said. She should have told Tom the truth about this nice spot down by the river.
But where on earth do you go from there?
She isn’t the only one who has been avoiding the scene of the crime until now. The push-pull for Ruby all these weeks, the coming to the edge of things and then backing away, was me. I kept my hands on her chest, pushed back hard whenever the river called. Because I know how it calls him, too. I see the trail of blood he follows, can hear the rush of it in his ears. He’s careful, of course. Has every reason to be in the park any time he returns to the rocks, no different from any other man on the West Side. This is his backyard, after all. A place he knows.
I’d say I come here almost every day, is how he’d answer, if anybody ever asked.
The truth is, I wasn’t just keeping Ruby from him. When he comes here, when he stands and looks out over the water, I can feel his pleasure, the swell of it in his chest, the fizzing in his fingertips. He bites into the pain he caused, feasts on it as if stripping meat from a bone, tasting those last terrifying moments of my life over and over. It used to overwhelm me.
But I can see him better now, this man. I no longer back away from the world he has created. I’m staying close, as I wait for another chance to bear down, push through. My anger burned bright and fast, that night my name was spoken out loud. It was a brief, beautiful flame. But I’ll get that second chance, I know it.
To make him feel the weight of my remains.
Something Josh left out of the story, when he told Ruby about returning to the scene of his accident. Looking for the tree root that upended his bike, searching for some memory of his pain, and finding nothing was as he remembered it. It wasn’t until he had given up his search, accepted the impartiality of sticks and stones and dirt, that he saw it, gleaming beneath a nest of rotting leaves. The face of his watch, cracked in a hundred places, hands bent and stopped, one on top of the other. As his body hit the ground, the impact must have dislodged it from his wrist, sent the small disc flying. Picking up this remnant, examining the damage, Josh felt a strange kind of relief. He had been looking for proof. Something to validate how totally his world had been rearranged—and there it was. Cupped, now, in the palm of his hand. Passed over in the weeks after his accident, missed by anyone who wouldn’t grasp its significance.
The truth doesn’t always announce itself loudly, see. Sometimes it is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.
If you know what you are looking for.
Sometimes, when Ruby is down at the river, I come sit with Lennie at the mortuary, watching as she tends to her dead. Most of her charges have long since left their bodies behind, but occasionally I can see someone hovering, carefully patting Lennie’s arm, or touching their lips to her forehead as she works. I see the fine hairs on her arm stand up, feel the prickling of her scalp when this happens, and then the person is gone. Her dead girls briefly show up other places, too, following her to restaurants, or standing close by as she scans the racks at her favourite vintage clothing store. I only ever catch glimpses, flickers, but now I know that what Lennie thinks of as her terminal clumsiness, the trips and knocking of glasses, is really just the women who love her accidentally coming too close.
Back at the mortuary, I’ve also been there in the private viewing rooms, watching family and friends sit with their loved one’s body. I’ve looked on as each grieving person brings their love and memory and pain into the room, seen the way it all mixes together, before flowing out in a stream of colours. To see this grief up close is to look at light passing through a prism, like a rainbow, but so much brighter. It is the most glorious thing, this arc of remembrance, as if the beginning and end of a person was only ever light.
The living cannot see this, of course. They get busy with whatever it is that picks them up off the floor. Soon enough, grief is replaced by other emotions. Anger, despair, disbelief, resignation; all the tools it takes to survive. But that first mix of colours, that fusion of grief, lights up the room. It illuminates the dead, and it reminds us we will not be forgotten; we get to leave our light behind.
Watching these private, poignant moments unfold, I understand something else, too. It matters who remembers you. The people who knew me remain distant from one another, they each carry around their own, unshared memories of Alice Lee, as if I was many things, or nothing, depending on who you asked. Ruby has tried to bring all of these pieces together, bring me into focus, but she can only get so far with their resistance, and a dead girl as her guide.
Maybe this is why I’m still in that tug of war between the living and the dead. Because I am no less broken into pieces than when Ruby found me, down there on the rocks.
They are learning some things. Piecing together the story of a girl called Alice Lee as best they can. But there are still so many gaps. What would they say about me, if I filled in some of those gaps for them?
She once posed for pornographic pictures.
She had an affair with her high school teacher.
She let the old man she lived with buy her things.
Or this. She couldn’t sleep after calling Mr Jackson one last time, got up at 5 a.m. and stumbled out into the heaviest, most beautiful rain she had ever seen. Zipped up her purple parka, her camera tucked under the jacket, pressed up against her chest. Thinking about portfolios and school submissions, and how life was a lot like this storm, washing away the bad things, and some of the good things, too, but that was okay, because there were so many good things to come. And then some man, some man with his series of bad days and disappointing mornings approached her as she tried to take pictures of the storm, and he was angry when she wouldn’t look up, wouldn’t engage with him. He watched her set up those photographs of the river and the rain and felt all those bad days swell up in him like a balloon, until he released the pressure through his fists, through fingers coming down hard on this young woman’s body. Puncturing her as if she were the one who needed deflating. He was angry that she did not smile. Angry at her dismissal. When his cigarette went out, when he asked if she had a light, and she shook her head no, he said she was being rude, and it wasn’t only the sky cracked through when he bore down on her with his righteous indignation.
Such self-preservation all these years, only to find herself unbound by a man who was angry at the light going out.
So, he took hers instead.
Shook her, fists on flesh, struggling, elbows pushing. The split second where she stood a chance, and then she was down, hitting rocks and earth. And he towered over her, enjoyed how large this made him feel, as he smashed that camera lens down on her forehead, over and over. Immediately disgusted by the mess of her face, he wrapped his hands around her skinny, wet throat. Discovered he could destroy the entire city that was this young woman, everything she had been and would be. The rubble of a life, and he was the bomb, exploding. It felt—as he unzipped his jeans, turned her head away so he did not have to look at the unseemliness before him—like he was the most powerful man in the world. That everything was his for the taking.
He never did get that light for his half-smoked cigarette. Had to wait until he got home, rummaging around the all-sorts bowl, looking for matches, careful and quie
t. The storm intensifying, a girl’s bloody underwear stuffed in his pocket, the rest of her belongings gathered like gifts.
She should have been nicer to him. He was only asking for a light. It certainly seemed to him, later that morning, as he listened to the rain and the sirens blaring, his fingers quivering toward them, that the calming pleasure of a cigarette might have slowed things down a little. Had she smiled, tried harder, he may even have given her the chance to say yes to his advances.
(This is the world he has created. I’m ready to tell you a little more now. Stay with me as we take that closer look. But don’t you believe a single thing he says about me.)
TWENTY
NOAH WATCHES AS PEOPLE IN UNIFORM FAN OUT THROUGH his apartment, considers the elegance of their movements, their certainty of purpose. The way each member of the investigative unit deftly lifts and dusts and kneels. Alone and all together, a single question in pursuit of an answer. To Noah, observing from his armchair, it looks like a complex, beautiful ballet. Franklin sits mournfully at his feet, unsure of these busy strangers who don’t smile at him, nor his human. All of them overlooking the young girl in the room, watching from her seat at the piano.
Noah went to the police as soon as they released my name. Said he might have details they’d be interested in. Offered up his apartment—‘No warrant necessary’—and consented to the blood tests and swabs, dismissing any offer of coffee or condolence. He was there for one thing, and one thing only. To help them find the man who hurt Alice Lee.
Noah still doesn’t like to think of me as dead.
When I disappeared the very same day they found a young girl’s body in Riverside Park, he refused to think that anything could, or had, happened to me. That first day, he turned away from the sirens and the stories, cancelled all of his dog-sitting appointments, and sat in the living room with Franklin, waiting for me to come home. They sat there together as the hours passed, watching the rain smash against the windows, and they were still there the next morning, this man and his dog, listening for the front door.
Before You Knew My Name Page 21