Before You Knew My Name (26)

Anyway, nothing so bad happened to me at four years old. Not that I know of, and I feel certain I would remember. Something better to think about: could you match the kid to the mom, the way I can match dog to owner? How did that small girl mirror her mother back then? Was I always looking for someone to love me, pay attention to me, see me? It is strange that I cannot really know this baby Alice. My clear memories—moving so often, starting at yet another school, the men always hovering—it’s an older Alice who experienced those things, stored them up. Was little Alice waiting at locked doors, too? Pining like Donut does, for a woman who always, eventually, came back?

Sometimes I wish Noah didn’t tell me all the things he tells me.

Only sometimes.

‘I’ve never had a birthday party,’ I confess when Lucy finally leaves, Donut collapsing into grief at the door. ‘My mother liked to pretend birthdays never happened.’

If this surprises Noah, he doesn’t show it. I think I would be surprised if someone told me they’d never had a birthday party. I might even be a bit sad about it. But he merely shrugs.

‘Would you like to have one?’

‘A birthday paaaaarty?’

‘Yes, Alice. A birthday paaaaarty. Would you like to have one? Not experiencing something doesn’t necessarily equate to a desire for that experience.’

I have come to appreciate the way Noah makes things I’ve never even considered seem obvious. I guess that’s why I never feel offended when he talks to me this way.

I think about his question for a minute, really think about it.

‘I would,’ I finally answer, as new visions, possibilities bubble to the surface. ‘I would like to have a birthday party at the very top of the Chrysler Building. I would wear a silver dress, and I would serve Manhattans in fancy glasses, and there would be balloons filled with glitter everywhere. People would pop them over me as I walked past, so that I would be super shiny, all night long.’

‘Specific,’ he says, with that small smile of his, before turning back to the day and the dogs. Leaving my birthday fantasy to glimmer, and then fade. But not before I’ve preserved the idea of it, like a memory of something that actually happened.

It is a measure of Noah’s growing affection that he resists the urge to tell me how the insides of the Chrysler Building spire are in fact nothing more than a mass of concrete and electrical wires, an ugly series of crawl spaces that look nothing like its glittering fa?ade. Nor does he mention the fact that, technically, I have no friends in New York City. No one to invite to my party. So that any balloons tied to the maze of rough cement inside the spire would remain intact, untouched, as I walked underneath them. Glitter floating inside, and me on the outside, looking up, looking in.

A nice but preposterous idea. Girls like me don’t get fancy birthday parties. I turned eighteen years old on an interstate bus. The click of numbers on a clock, and I was born this many years ago. Never knowing what my mother thought as we were wrenched apart for the very first time.

Not knowing, either, what she thought when we were separated for the last time.



A memory of my mother and me. She is in the bathtub, a towel twisted around her head like a turban. She’s laughing as she flicks soapy water at me, puts her hands out for me to join her. I slip into the warm water, lean back as she begins to wash my hair, her long fingers kneading my scalp. Balls of light, tiny planets, dance in front of my eyes as she moves her hands against my small head, and I feel the flesh of her, the fullness of my mother, against my back. ‘You’re my baby,’ she whispers, and this is what I remember, even if I am never sure it happened that way. Even if this was only ever a movie. Starring someone else entirely.



Of course he does.

He throws me a birthday party at the top of the Chrysler Building.

I come back from playing with Franklin in Riverside Park just as the sun starts to settle on the Hudson River. It is the end of my third week in the city, and the living room is filled with floating silver and white balloons. Propped against the window is a person-high cardboard print showing an aerial view of Midtown Manhattan on a rainy, yellow-gold night. I am handed a reddish-brown drink in a sparkling glass, a dark cherry bobbing across the surface. It tastes like an idea I have yet to understand, a promise of adulthood, rolled around in my mouth.

‘To your first Manhattan,’ Noah says, and we clink glasses, and though I am not showered with glitter, I gleam all the same.

‘Happy birthday, Alice.’

How strange to think I will never hear those words again.



We are drunk. Or I am. Three Manhattans in a row, poured from a crystal decanter, sat on top of the piano. I have saved every cherry, and now I bite into one, dark red juice trickling from the side of my mouth. It tastes sweet and bitter on my tongue and I understand this is a different drunk to anything I have experienced before. I am languid—I think that’s the right word. Heavy. But not stuck. Clutched in my left hand is a cheque, made out to that little photography school around the corner.

‘Enrolment fees,’ Noah explained when I opened the envelope he gave me, the thin piece of paper falling into my lap. ‘I can’t have you hanging around the house forever, Baby Joan.’

The cheque feels like a key to a brand-new door. I see myself in the summer, walking up the front steps of the school, see myself entering the building each day, ready for class. I imagine myself growing more and more familiar with this world as the days pass, and if I squint just so, I can even see that future me eating lunch with her friends, using the darkroom to complete her latest assignment, showing newer students how to find classroom B.