Before You Knew My Name

by Jacqueline Bublitz

  It was the twelfth film processing lab they checked. A boutique store specialising in analogue photography, just on two hours’ drive from Manhattan. Well-promoted online, easy enough to find via a Google search. When they showed the lab owner a picture of Tom, she bit her lip and said, ‘Yeah, I think I remember him. He was here, maybe a month ago. From out of state, he said. Most people like him mail their film to us, and we send back a CD, but he said he wanted prints. He never came back, actually. I have those prints here, somewhere. And the negatives, too, of course. Some of them didn’t turn out so well …’

  I left behind my version of the city. I took pictures of the strained wire bridges and the Chrysler Building, and people streaming out of the subway. I snapped Lady Liberty from the deck of the Staten Island Ferry, and the reflective rise of One World Trade Center. The disorientation of Times Square, and the statue of my namesake in Central Park, little kids hanging off her like decorations. I was in every one of these places and I captured every moment, and now they exist as proof I was here. Detective O’Byrne thumbs through each photograph, scans every black and white image, and it is the second to last shot that feels like a punch. Heavy rain. Rocks. A swollen river. The lights of New Jersey hazy on the other side of the water. And then the last picture I snapped. Lightning reflected in the flowing river, and because I was still learning, the hint of my purple sneaker in the bottom left of the frame. Here in his hands, he is holding my last moments. He is seeing what I saw, right before a man came out of the rain, and got angry enough to put his hands to my throat. To rip the camera from me and smash it down on my skull. Angry enough to thrust into my dying body, scraping my back against the rocks, heaving over me and pouring into me, and I was not there anymore, I was already outside of myself, but it was still my body as he fell, grunting, over what was left of me. Hot breath and stickiness on cold skin. The wretched sound of him tucking himself back in, zipping himself up. The sound that said he was finished. Done with me.

  O’Byrne was right. Tom couldn’t resist the mystery. Found the memory of what he’d done was not enough to keep him satisfied. So, he carefully removed the film, found a photo lab he thought would be far enough away from the river. He had always intended to come back for the prints, but then they found out my name. And my face was everywhere again. My real face this time, the one he had looked away from as he killed me. Realising how stupid he was, how caught up he’d been, Tom never went back to collect those pictures.

  But he could not stop returning to the river. At first, he was careful to avoid the scene at unusual times, at 5 a.m. and midnight when he felt the strongest pull; he made sure he only ever went down there when he could blend in and remain inconspicuous, himself. When Ruby finally came along, he was there, waiting. And from the moment he saw her leaning over the rails, her eyes closed, muscles flickering, Tom was certain she was aware of what had happened there. He assumed, a strange pride swelling in his chest, this woman was caught up in the drama of the dead girl. He had seen others like this at the vigil, that night of candles and outrage. So many skittish women, foolishly thinking their fear was anger, or that it made any difference in the end. He had bowed his head that night, standing next to his wife, and she had squeezed his hand when she saw a tear wind down his cheek. She thought he was crying for the girl, but he was crying at the beauty of it all, for the magnificence of this grand tragedy he had orchestrated. How could it not fail to move him, after he had felt unseen, unheard, for so long?

  When he approached Ruby and asked her to join him for a coffee, Tom never thought to imagine she was the one who found the body. This incredible news, when she finally told him, was like electricity, a body heat reminiscent of that first moment he struck me. It felt like fate, the way the Australian was delivered to him so easily. Finally, he would have the chance to talk with someone who knew. Someone who was there. After so many weeks, it was beginning to feel like a dream. Talking about it would make it blessedly real again, but she kept refusing, swatting him away, and it was taking all of his energy not to explode. Sitting across the table from him that second time, drinking wine he paid for, eating food he ordered just for her, Ruby was so pious and polite, he had a visceral yearning to strike her, to watch her fall. To fall over her, himself.

  It was too bad the weather had not gone his way that day.

  It was an accident, that verbal slip when he said goodbye to her. He was too caught up in the idea of Ruby out there alone that morning, thinking about how easy it would be to drag her over to the construction site further along the river—metal and dirt for this one, not rocks and water—and he just wasn’t paying attention to his words. Still, the Australian hadn’t reacted at the time, there was nothing in her face to say she had picked up on his mistake, and he never expected the truth of his words to be followed. The breadcrumbs of those pictures, taken all over this city.

  His second mistake, leaving that cigarette butt behind, offering up his DNA when they couldn’t yet take it from him, occurs the same day Detective O’Byrne holds my pictures in his hands. Something carelessly discarded, something found. I like to think it all happens at the exact same time.

  He never expected the knock at the door. The same kind of knock made for Mr Jackson. Only this time, when Tom Martin answers, there are men who stand at attention on the other side of the door. His wife comes into the hallway as they clasp handcuffs around his wrists.

  ‘Tommy?’ At first it is confusion. ‘Tommy!’ Then fear. She lunges toward her husband, but the officers block her way.

  ‘Ma’am,’ they say, holding her back. ‘I’m sorry, ma’am.’

  So polite in these last moments, before they take apart her whole existence, before they deliver a revelation that leaves her gasping on the floor. Her husband arrested for the rape and murder of Alice Lee. She held his hand tight at the vigil. Gently laughed off his concerns about being careful these days, when that man could be anywhere.

  That man could be anywhere.

  There will never be enough days to scrub clean the lies Tom Martin has pored all over this woman’s body. Each revelation that will come—the hardcore, underage pornography on his computer, the fake profiles he’s posted on dating sites, the bags of amphetamines hidden in his closet, an ex-girlfriend who said he had stalked her when she left him. And soon enough, the details of how he smashed an eighteen-year-old girl’s head with the lens of her camera, squeezed her throat with his nicotine-stained fingers, and continued his assault of her body as she lay dying on the banks of the Hudson River. How he scooped up her underwear and shoes and jacket and unscrewed the bloody lens from the camera, all the while standing over the battered body of a teenage girl. Though no one else will understand the specificity of her horror, this is the part that will come to haunt his wife the most. The calmness with which her husband must have packed up the evidence of a young life. The calculation of what to keep and what to leave behind.

  Nothing will ever again be true for this woman. It is never just one life these men destroy.

  Now it’s time for his story to be told. For the papers to sift through his life, figure out why he did what he did. But it doesn’t really matter, does it? You already know enough about him. I don’t want to tell his story. I don’t even want to say his name anymore. I don’t see why he is the one who should be pieced together, remembered.

  I am Alice Lee. And this is my story.

  They got him.

  They got him.

  At first, Ruby is stunned. To live with a question for so long—it takes time for the answer to feel right, to make sense. She stares at that man’s face in the news, goes over her time with him, and it feels as though something is crawling all over her skin, burrowing in. Not the dull, staring-at-walls sadness of finding my body, but a burn, an itch that infects her.

  I do my best to take my memories back, those awful things she could suddenly see and feel, but somewhere, in the haze of her fever, she refuses to look away from what she saw. In the end, I simply sit
with her. Whispering other stories, sweet and soft ones, so Ruby might have more than one truth to remember when the fever breaks.

  The female members of Death Club comfort as they can. Sue delivers food, pies and cakes and muffins, things that are warm and fresh. When Ruby cannot get herself out of bed, Lennie brings flowers, makes sure her windows are kept open. Side by side, they read the onslaught of news stories, confront those terrible truths together, and on the first, fitful nights after the arrest, Lennie stays to help Ruby fall asleep. She calls Cassie when Ruby, sitting next to her, cannot find the words, and provides assurances of safety and care to worried family and friends back home: ‘She’s had a shock, yes, but she’s been brilliant. Really, Cassie, your sister solved a freakin’ crime. I think she may even get a medal.’

  Later, when her fever subsides, Ruby makes three phone calls. First, a conversation with Cassie and her mother to reassure them she really is okay, all things considered. By now, news that the Riverside murder has been solved has crossed the Pacific, made its way into Australian papers and magazines; Ruby is the invisible thread throughout, the unnamed beginning and end of things. Few readers will ever know how she tied this story together, but that’s the way she wants it to be.

  ‘The story,’ she says, ‘always belonged to Alice.’

  After talking with her family—ending the call with a promise to avoid dead bodies from now on—Ruby calls Noah. She guesses, correctly, that he will be tentative about these new developments, will want to know the specifics of how she came to identify the man who killed his friend, but will not want to discuss the man himself. He cannot even look at the mug shots, he tells Ruby. Unaccustomed to rage, to the incessant, vengeful desires evoked by looking at those photographs, Noah instinctively understands men like that feed on such reactions; he resolves to starve my murderer of oxygen, until he is reduced to nothing.

  ‘You brave, brave woman,’ Noah says as they close the call. ‘Thank you for everything you have done for Alice.’

  The last phone call Ruby makes is to Josh. He answers on the second ring, as if he has been waiting for her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ they say at the same time. As if they have been waiting for each other. He tells her Sue’s lecture was fierce, worse than his own mother’s, and that Lennie was furious with him.

  ‘You don’t kiss someone without the full story,’ she told him. ‘You don’t take away that choice!’

  He asks about what happened, expressing his awe and confusion at the events he has missed in such a small amount of time.

  ‘You can tell me anything,’ he says. ‘I’m here for whatever you need.’

  Ruby, tired of saying the same things over, asks Josh for his own full story instead.

  He tells her that his marriage disintegrated after the bike accident. In those first few months of recovery, his body began to feel like a foreign object, something illogically attached to him, and he often felt like one of those walking corpses, neither here nor there in any situation. It was like his real body had gone on ahead without him. Knowing this could not be true, feeling his pulse flicker in his wrist, and the gnawing pain of bones slowly fusing back together, he rationally understood he was still an electric current, alive. But the black kept pulling him in, the tar kept spreading, until his mind was thick with it. The sardonic writer he used to be was trapped in this viscousness, and he was not the only one who wondered if he would ever write—or feel light—again.

  At first, Lizzie had been supportive, staying close to his bedside in the hospital, hovering around him at home. But the longer he lived in the darkness, the more restless his wife became.

  ‘You have situational depression,’ she kept asserting, flicking through websites on her iPad, presenting little facts to her husband each night. ‘It says here that situational depression is common in men who’—and off she would go, reading aloud from this magazine article or that, hunting down expert opinions on why, after leaving the hospital, Josh remained reluctant to get back to his old life, his old self. Trying to resolve why he was suddenly a blank slate, why none of the usual things impressed upon him or moved him and, why—a fact most alarming to anyone who knew how kinetic he had been before the accident—this new state of being did not seem to panic him, no matter how many long days and longer nights had passed.

  It took Lizzie six months to leave him. She’s been out in LA for over a year now, writing for a TV show. At first, she held out hope the old Josh would come back.

  ‘We’ll get you a shaman,’ she had said, around two months after settling on the West Coast. ‘They can go so much deeper than the others. Down to where you’ve gone.’ She sent him meditational videos and links to yoga retreats in Bali. Things to bring him back to her, to the indulgent rhythms of their relationship before he decided to bike home through Central Park one night and his wheel hit a tree root, and everything got rearranged. She missed their rooftop parties, and their drug-hazed fucking, and seeing her husband’s name as a byline in her favourite magazines. But, eventually, her love ran out. Just a little, and then a lot, as if it had only ever come from a limited supply.

  Lizzie has long since stopped talking about smudge sticks and heal-all desert plants, and now her emails and texts reference divorce papers, and selling the apartment on East 97th. He has been avoiding this next step, he tells Ruby, not because he wants to work on the marriage. Rather, he has been happy for things to stay just as they are. Afraid, he admits now, of what another change might bring.

  ‘Things changed the wrong way.’

  ‘I understand,’ Ruby tells him. ‘I really do.’

  She thinks of something she learned when she was very young, growing up on the edge of a wild, open ocean. When you get caught in a rip, you have no choice but to give in, to go where the water wants to take you. The force of the rip will eventually dissipate, but only if you let it carry you far enough out to sea. Safety comes from moving with the current until you are free of it, and then, only then, can you turn and swim like hell for the shore.

  Ruby knows how to navigate the natural phenomena that is a changeable ocean. Why should it be any different with a natural disaster like love, she asks Josh. No one ever ends up where they started from, but you do make it home, when the time is right. If you have kept your head while being tossed about.

  Sometimes it is surrender, not struggle, that saves a life.

  Ruby does not call Ash. He is the one to text her, says he heard a rumour at work suggesting she helped solve a major crime.

  Holy shit Jonesy, what an adventure! I can’t wait to talk to you about it. In NYC, maybe :)

  She knows he means no harm with this cavalier response, but she also wonders when Ash will ever take her seriously. Knowing the answer is implicit in the question. He does not want her to be serious. She is his escape from serious. And this is a part of their bargain she can no longer uphold. Now that the something she has wanted to happen has so thoroughly happened. Now that she is unsure whether she is the same woman who said yes to Ash after she knew he was engaged. That version of herself seems irreconcilable with the strong, capable Ruby who sat in front of Detective O’Byrne and detailed her encounters with the man who killed Alice Lee, offering up enough perceptive information that she will be considered, in the looking back on this crime, to be the steady hand that turned a complex murder investigation toward its conclusion.

  This is not a woman Ash has ever known.

  This is the woman she wants to be.

  I don’t want you to come here, Ash, she eventually responds. You should commit to your fiancée. You’ve made your choice and I don’t want to keep you from it. Go get married. Time for us to let go.

  Ruby stares at the ceiling for a full hour after sending this text. They say it’s the truth that sets you free. But sometimes it’s a lie that does it. There is no reply. Ash will not reply. She lets herself wallow one last time, aches over the images she has crafted of them together in New York. Tastes daydreams of dark bars and glittering
rooftops, rolls them around on her tongue, feels the tang of her yearning for him in her mouth. Swallows. There was a life she did not get to live. It was so close, but she cannot continue to hold onto something already gone.

  I loved you.

  She does not send this final truth across the ocean. The words too small for this moment, this ending. Only silence is large enough to hold her sorrow tonight.

  There was one other print in the pack. The very first snap, long before all those photographs of New York were taken. When that black and white film was loaded, when instructions were given by a teacher to his student.

  ‘Here’s where you look. Because this is a rangefinder, you start with two images, and this focusing lever helps you bring them closer together. It takes a little time to get the hang of it, but eventually, from those two different views, you end up with a single, clear image. See?’

  He was so close, the camera so intimate, that I turned away, right as he snapped the picture. My hair is a silver glow across the frame, phosphorescence in the dark. And though you cannot see my face, I know that I am laughing.

  This is not the kind of thing you forget.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  RUBY TAKES ALONG WALK UPTOWN. ONCE, WHEN SHE WAS running north along the river, she thought she might keep going until she reached George Washington Bridge, but the immense structure seemed to get further away the more she advanced, and it was close to dark when she turned around, began the uneven trek back to her neighbourhood in the West 90s. Today, she starts on Broadway and just keeps walking. Past blocks that look similar enough to her own, taking note of cafes she might come back to next week and consignment stores with last winter’s designer jackets in the window. When she gets to the unmistakable expanse of Columbia, Ruby pushes open a metal gate and steps into the university grounds. It is familiar in the way so much of New York is familiar, the sprawling steps and imposing buildings having appeared in so many films and TV shows she has seen. She crosses the main courtyard, heading east, smiling at the small groups of students sitting alone or in clusters, wondering what they are studying today, thinking she too might like to start classes here in the fall. If she decides to stay. Exiting the university, she turns toward home, following the western boundary of Morningside Park, marvelling at the space this city makes for its people. Knowing there is still so much for her to discover about New York.