Before You Knew My Name

by Jacqueline Bublitz

  When the days passed and that door never clicked open, something in Noah closed down. It was easier for him to believe I had become restless and moved on, than to live with the possibility that those things in the news, those terrible things, had happened to his Baby Joan. For the first time in his life, he chose to look away from the facts, something I never would have imagined. Not from Noah, who taught me about dust and stars. Not from the person who always knew how things worked. When he turned away like that, I mistook what it meant; I thought he shut me out because he didn’t care. He wasn’t the first one to leave me, after all.

  Now I see he cared so much that he knew the truth would break him.

  He should have gone to the police earlier. Should have accepted what he already knew, deep in his bones, to be true. But know this of my Noah, please. He was not thinking of his own safety when he stayed away. He was only ever thinking of me.

  Perhaps I should have understood this earlier, too. That he was never going to be like the other men in my life. That I was right to believe in the kindness of strangers. My lack of faith helped keep us apart after I died—but I’m here with him now. Watching as those investigators examine my stack of IOUs, taking the post-it notes down from the refrigerator door, reading them one by one, all the little promises I left behind. A single blue note flutters to the ground, and a young officer bends to retrieve it. Girl Things, it says, a badly drawn smiley face in place of the full stop. $9.87. Recurring. Noah cannot read the note from where he is sitting, but he can see the officer pause, look up at the ceiling, the small piece of paper pressed to his chest. Noah already knows what each of these IOUs say, has memorised every good intention I left behind, and he feels a sudden, fist-tight clench where he knows his heart to be. Recurring. The writer of that note thought she had months and years ahead of her. She had plans.

  ‘Baby Joan,’ Noah says softly, reaching for the note. Funny, sweet, uncouth Alice, in love with New York like the city was a person, and completely ignorant of her poetry.

  ‘Is this middle C, Noah?’

  He hears me ask this, that last night we had together. Clanging down on the piano key as he nodded from this same armchair, muttered something about how noisy I had become, and I had wrinkled my nose at him, laughed, thumping down on as many keys as my fingers could touch.

  ‘Please stop!’

  And now there is a rasping, wheezing sound filling the apartment, sliding down the walls. The lifting and dusting and kneeling ceases, everyone stops what they are doing, orients toward the noise emanating from the armchair in the living room. It is the sound of a man unaccustomed to weeping, as great, wracking gasps shake through his body for the first time in his life. Franklin whines, pushes his nose against Noah’s leg, knowing something has gone very wrong here. Wondering why I am not moving from my seat at the piano, why I’m not coming over to comfort them both. The dog turns from Noah and looks right at me, his chocolate eyes pleading. I push down on middle C, as hard as I can, and he barks.

  Good boy, Franklin. Good boy, I whisper, but I cannot be heard over the sound of Noah’s sobs. The investigators gather around him, their well-practised dance interrupted by the rawness of this grief. Everything I owe this man sits, sealed, in plastic bags on the kitchen table behind them. The brief story of my life in this apartment, this city, and the simple promise of that word.

  Recurring.

  How to let them know this was the safest I had ever been.

  Ruby messages her old colleagues, the ones who said they’d love to see her when she’d settled in. Both text back within minutes. I’m free two weeks from Thursday, says one. Let me see if I can reschedule my spin class next Sunday, says the other, and Ruby puts the phone down, embarrassed.

  This is how you die alone, she thinks.

  You’re not alone, I want to say.

  But I don’t think a dead girl will make her feel any better today.

  I suppose, living with Mr Jackson in secret for a month, I got used to going unnoticed by everyone else. Or perhaps it was all those years with my mother, moving from place to place. Shimmying through the cracks of another town, another coming or going, sliding into new schools or friendship groups so as not to be questioned when I arrived, nor to be missed when I left. Thinking about it, I guess I had already perfected the art of invisibility, and Mr Jackson merely understood how easy it would be to keep me hidden away.

  The problem is, once you get used to going unnoticed, you think no one else can see you either, like a dog with his head under the couch who doesn’t understand his tail is still in plain view (Gambit, Mr Whitcomb’s ancient terrier, does this any time he accidentally pees on the floor). Head down like that, you forget there are those who spend their lives looking for girls who feel unseen. There are men actively hunting such women, they can spot them from a mile away, and they know just what to do when they find them.

  You forget. Or maybe it’s something Ruby never even knew.

  That some men are constantly vigilant. Watching for the girls no one else will think to look for when they’re gone.

  She returns to the park every day now. Without Death Club as her guide, Ruby continues to feel lost, alienated. It doesn’t help that the true crime forums already have another mystery to fixate on, a girl named Beth who was found decapitated in Arizona—Clang! goes the alarm—and the national media has turned its attention to the poor girl, too. The daughter of a city councilman, Beth has already given up her secrets (some of them at least) better than I did.

  What will it take, Ruby wonders, to finally feel like she knows enough about me?

  When she comes down to the river these days, she still takes the time to say my name out loud. Once or twice she even thinks she sees Tom approaching, that broad man with his broad smile, and she can’t quite tell if she’s relieved or disappointed when it never turns out to be him. The return of loneliness will do that to you. Get you all turned about. Make you forget what you know about men and desire.

  What she forgets, down by the river, lost in her thoughts, is this:

  If someone really wants you, they will always find a way.

  TWENTY-ONE

  ‘WE’VE GOT TO STOP BUMPING INTO EACH OTHER LIKE THIS.’

  Ruby is down at the river, the place she has returned to, day after day this week, as May gives way to June. Sometimes people stop beside her, look out across the water like she does, some even smile and say hello, but for the most part, she has been left alone. The place of my murder is now a kind of chapel, a refuge for the loneliest woman in New York City. That’s what she considers herself to be these days, embarrassed at her self-pity, but comfortable with it, too. As if she has finally given herself permission to feel the hurt that propelled her to New York in the first place.

  Last night, Ash asked if she would send him a photo. Something to keep me up, he said in his message, and she knew exactly what he meant by that. This felt more familiar than their recent How are you and Guess what I did today texts, but as she held her phone camera at this angle and that, she couldn’t shake the performance of it, the way it made her feel like an actor in her own life. Not tonight, she said eventually, and for the first time ever, before turning out the lights. As soon as the sun came up again, she took herself back down to the river, as far away from Ash as any place that ever existed.

  It’s as close to me as she can get.

  When Tom shows up in the park today, he places his hands next to hers on that metal rail, his voice so close to her ear that it makes her jump.

  She turns to face him, steadies herself.

  ‘Tom—hi!’

  Perhaps, in the mess of her life, Ruby is happy to see him again, after all.

  ‘I was hoping I might find you here,’ Tom confirms, with his broad, confident smile. ‘I’ve been thinking about you, Aussie.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Ruby flushes at his directness, at the space he immediately takes up, standing so close to her, acting for all the world like he has been invited
to do so.

  ‘Well, I don’t meet a beautiful Aussie woman every day, do I,’ he adds with a wink.

  He is definitely flirting with her this time around, and Ruby is tempted to rally, but she finds herself unable to speak. It feels too light, in this place of heaviness, to flirt back. There is also Ash to consider. And Josh, the memory of his kiss and his betrayal still smarting.

  Oh, go away! she says to these other men in her life, the ones who crowd her thoughts and don’t show up when she needs them. Their absence prompts her to say something—anything!—to this man who clearly likes her, a man now looking at her so intently. She is about to respond to his overture when a gull squawks above them, and a runner, breathing hard, thuds past on the pathway, almost brushing up against her.

  ‘Hey, watch it!’ Tom yells toward the man’s retreating back, putting his hand on Ruby’s arm to pull her close. ‘A whole park and that idiot has to run right up on us. Fuck you! Fuck! You!’

  Swearing loudly at the runner, Tom’s fingers squeeze around Ruby’s forearm, turn white against her skin. It is only a brief pressure before he lets go, but the sensation lingers. Even as Tom runs that hand through his hair, shakes his head, Ruby can feel each finger coming down, the compression of her flesh. She watches as the runner moves further away, becomes less distinct, taking Tom’s sudden display of anger with him. Such a small moment, surely more imagined than real, given how finely attuned to danger she is these days. There is no reason for her heart to start thudding like this. She cannot let her paranoia ruin every moment, every encounter, she tries to tell herself. Not when Tom is only trying to look out for her.

  Isn’t he?

  Ruby tries to relax. People lose their temper every day. Tom was probably just trying to impress her, play the hero, based on what he said about being careful the other day. She has just forgotten what it is for a man to treat her nicely.

  For his part, Tom does not seem to have noticed the shift in her demeanour after he touched her so forcefully, the way she leaned out from his closeness, rubbed her fingers at the spot where his had landed. Instead, the offending runner off in the distance now, Tom is smiling again, his face turned toward the sun.

  ‘Another beautiful day,’ he says, eyes closed. ‘Such a relief after all that rain.’

  Rain coming down like a sheet. Her breath a ghost. Yellow reeds undulating on the water. Ruby physically shakes these intrusive memories away.

  ‘It certainly does change things,’ she says, turning her own face skyward, so they are standing the same way now, side by side, pulling the sun toward their skin.

  After a time, Tom puts his hand on her back.

  ‘I’ll admit I was surprised to find you back in this part of the park, Ruby. After I told you what happened here.’

  She could make a joke. She could tell Tom she came back to this particular spot because that’s where they first met. Finally play the game he seems to be wanting her to play. Ruby decides, instead, to tell him the truth.

  ‘I found the body, Tom. I found Alice Lee.’

  ‘What?’ Tom looks startled, then confused. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Sorry. I know it’s so weird, right. I mean, I’m the jogger who found her body. That’s me.’

  Tom’s mouth falls open for a second, and then a strange look crosses his face. His features seem to sharpen as he stares at Ruby, his expression suddenly eager.

  ‘What did she look like?’

  ‘Huh?’

  Ruby blinks at Tom’s strange question, the barely concealed hunger of it.

  ‘Alice Lee. What did she look like? When you found her.’

  Ruby shakes her head at Tom and backs away, moving into the middle of the path. Away from the metal rails and the water and the way he is looking at her. This is not the response she had expected at all. It is too close to his overreaction when that runner brushed past them, too far from his ready smile and mindless chatter. She feels, suddenly, as if she has made a mistake. No matter the width of his smile.

  She would remember, if she wasn’t so shocked, that she’s felt this way with him before. This, if nothing else, should give her permission to shut the conversation down, but before she can respond, Tom is reaching for her arm again.

  ‘Forgive me Ruby. That is such a clumsy question. What I meant to say is, are you all right? I heard she was in quite the state when they—when you—found her.’

  How many times does politeness keep us rooted to the spot? We stand on the brink, making a choice whether to tip over into trust or disgust, and we remember all our training, the lifetime of it. The doctrine of nice, the fear of hurting someone’s feelings. In this moment, Ruby wants to back away from Tom’s prurient interest, wants to ask this pushy man to leave her alone for good—but she doesn’t know how. Like so many of us, she has never learned the right words, and so she smiles small, accepts his apology, lets his hand continue to rest on her arm.

  ‘Come,’ he says now. ‘Have that wine with me.’ He checks his watch. ‘It’s after eleven. And I’d say you very much deserve a drink, after everything you’ve been through.’

  When Ruby nods, acquiesces, she feels as if someone is trying to move her head in a different direction. It is an odd sensation, but as she once again sits down across from Tom at the crowded cafe, her companion ordering two glasses of pinot grigio—‘Trust me, you’ll enjoy this drop’—the feeling persists. As if her every move is met with a force pushing her the other way.

  You’re being ridiculous, she silently scolds herself. Over-cautious. Hypervigilant, as that PTSD doctor from Boston might say. This is what happens when you don’t trust anybody, least of all yourself. Sitting here with a perfectly nice man, you think everything is a dire warning.

  And that’s no way to live in the world, unless you want to be alone forever.

  With this thought, Ruby shakes her resistance off, visibly, though Tom misses her shiver. She concentrates on things that are tangible, real. The warm metal of the cafe table under her fingers, the smooth plastic of the cup Tom passes to her, the acidic wine she sips, then takes in a gulp. Slowly, purposefully, she comes back to herself.

  ‘It’s good, isn’t it,’ Tom says, tilting his own drink at her, and when she says yes, she almost means it. From here, he makes it easy. Tells her stories, orders more wine any time her cup gets close to empty. Compliments her accent and eyes and bravery for coming to New York on her own, and gets up from his chair when she excuses herself to go to the bathroom a few too many wines in. When she returns to their table, there is another wine waiting and a cheese platter has been set down on the table between them.

  ‘I’m clearly finding ways to keep you here longer,’ he says as she sits back down.

  It is her fourth, maybe fifth drink, and Ruby’s limbs are now feeling loose. The tension coiled at her neck is gone. She considers this might be the New York she would have come to know earlier, had she not gone for a run that fateful morning. An uncomplicated New York, where she can drink wine on a weekday afternoon, sun-basking in the attention of a handsome stranger. This is the New York of romantic comedies and sitcoms on TV: wounded woman meets confident guy, puts up her guard, but he wears it down. A single lens on their responsibility-free lives, while people in the background go to work and do normal, everyday things to keep the city running. Extras making the movie look like real life.

  Ruby bites down on the plastic edge of her cup, thinking about that lens. She is, she acknowledges, now quite drunk.

  ‘That’s an interesting face you made just now,’ Tom says. ‘What were you thinking about, if you don’t mind me asking?’

  ‘Movies,’ Ruby admits, too far gone to be self-conscious. ‘How life in New York seems like a movie. Or is a movie, and I just don’t know it.’

  ‘Interesting. So, what kind of movie would this be then?’ Tom reaches over the table and covers her hand with his. ‘Comedy? Mystery? Romance?’

  Ruby stares at his hand over hers, takes in the yellowed nicotine stai
n of his index finger, and for the first time, the pale circle at the base of his ring finger. She pulls her hand away.

  Tom flexes his fingers toward her, sees what she saw. Bringing his opposite thumb and forefinger to the shadow wedding band, he rubs at the skin and sighs.

  ‘Divorced,’ he says, not looking at her. ‘Only took my ring off over the winter. I guess these things leave a mark.’

  When he looks up, his blue eyes are wet.

  ‘But I won’t depress you with the script for that particular drama.’

  Ruby is unsure how to respond. Allowing herself a brief moment of imagining herself underneath this man, the beckoning of those blue eyes pulling her in. Just as quickly, the image morphs into tangled limbs, clumsy touches, awkward goodbyes. All the leftovers of sex without desire, and she silently berates herself for even considering this an option. The dangers of loneliness, she thinks, offering Tom what she hopes is a stop-sign smile.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Tom. Break-ups are never fun.’

  ‘You experienced your own drama recently, from the sound of it,’ he responds. ‘Finding that murdered girl, Alice Lee. That must have been terrifying for you.

  ‘Sorry!’ he quickly adds. ‘It’s clear you don’t like talking about it. I’ve just never sat opposite someone who found a dead body. In my own neighbourhood, too.

  ‘And to think,’ he continues, not sounding sorry at all, ‘they might never find out who did it. It’s enough to keep you up at night. What people can get away with, especially after what they say he did to her.’

  Ruby thinks of Josh, of his statistics and suppositions, the way she could talk to him all night about the murder, and how he was always so respectful of Alice, and she suddenly resents this man before her. Refuses to offer Alice Lee up to Tom the way he seems to want her to. She realises, with a second jolt, that the wine, the cheese, the compliments, they were just a way to get them back to this. To another man fascinated with dead girls for all the wrong reasons. The realisation sobers her up instantly.