Before You Knew My Name (28)

‘We’re a pair,’ I say suddenly, on this night when I still have so much to learn, the tang of the Manhattans now an echo in my mouth. ‘Daughterless father, fatherless daughter. If life were a movie, you would suddenly need a kidney, and we would find out—Ah!—that you’re actually my dad. Wouldn’t that be something, Noah. Me showing up on your doorstep, and it turns out it wasn’t an accident. That all along, I was meant to find you.’

I crush another soaked cherry against my teeth, grin red at him.

‘Lord help me,’ Noah says in mock horror, ‘should I find myself responsible for a feral child like you!’

In the next room, on the refrigerator door, the IOUs flutter. Post-it notes documenting my debts. Sneakers. Jacket. Subway fare. And some notes I have added while Noah is not paying attention. There are actually quite a few of these other IOUs collected there now, little messages I’ve left for him, and I don’t know if he ever looks, but the ones I’ve snuck into the pile say: Friendship. Loyalty. Safety. Things like that.

Things I can pay him back sometime.

Because I still think I’m going to make it. On this night of my very first birthday party. I still think there will be a summer and school and people to eat lunch with, me sitting there at the centre of things, laughing, telling stories, making plans. New friendships will grow up around me, a wild garden of them, and it won’t matter when I call Tammy to tell her all about it, that we let so many weeks go by without talking. She’ll be so happy to hear what I’ve been doing, where I am, that she’ll forgive me for not telling her sooner. ‘You did it, Alice,’ she’ll say. ‘You made a life for yourself!’ But I’ll know who really made that life happen, the person I owe it all to. Tonight, at my party, I never doubt there will be enough time to pay Noah back for everything he’s done for me.

Because even when I’m in my mid-thirties, as old as the daughter he said goodbye to, I’ll still have so many years left. I won’t even be close to those 79.1 years promised to me. I’ll be a famous photographer by then; they’ll hang my pictures in galleries around the city, put them on the covers of magazines. And I’ll look after Noah, the way he looked after me. I’ll be the one to keep him safe this time. We have so much ahead of us to be thankful for.

To imagine it any other way would break my heart in two.



I suppose I let my guard down. At the end. When the sky actually did fall. The crack, and the flash of light, and the wet like rain. Air heavy like a boot on my chest. Dirt, and metal, and being pushed down, down into the earth. It surprised me. The shock of how little you can mean to another person. How an entire world can be discarded so quickly. I was right to think I would never be safe, that I needed to be wary.

But it still surprised me. At the end.





NINE

TOMORROW, I WILL BE DEAD.

On this day before I die, where do you want to start? What would you like to look at first? I get up, I have sleep in my eye. I make a pot of coffee, the water hisses over onto the element, spits at me. I can’t get the water temperature right in the shower. Sometimes I think the faucets are switched from day to day, just to confuse me. I eat a banana, the texture struggling in my mouth. I step around dog toys, kick them into the corner of the living room, and open the window to the day. The street is its usual mix of bloated rubbish bags and metal frames. You could swing down them, if they didn’t always seem on the verge of collapse. The sky is blue, later it will rain again. There is dog hair creeping across my big toe. The day is light, bright, ordinary.

I get up. I have sleep in my eye. Make coffee, water hissing. Temperature wrong. Banana slick on my tongue, and the squeak of a rubber bone. Rubbish bags and metal and blue, blue sky. Rain coming. Dog hair itching my toe. The day is light, bright, extraordinary.

The morning passes. Neither slow nor fast. It just passes. I have had near on a month of these mornings and I am used to them now, accustomed. I make a cheese sandwich, leave the plate and knife in the sink next to my coffee mug. I should do more to help out with keeping the place clean, I think. I must not forget to show how grateful I am. I press down on another post-it note and write the word Help, before a large bang outside startles me. My ‘p’ wobbles, shoots off the yellow paper as I drop my pen. I had intended to write: Help more around the apartment but the pen has rolled under the table now, and I cannot be bothered bending down to find it. Help will do, I think, smiling, as I post my final fluttering debt on the refrigerator door.

This last light, bright morning of my life.



On this last, bright morning of my life, Ruby Jones looks out the window. Wrinkles her nose at the black garbage bags lining the street, piled one on top of the other. She imagines the smell of the rotting vegetables and soiled nappies, though the only scent in her room is the vague, musky remnant of her designer candle. She can see a lane of sky made between her building and the apartment opposite. Blue. No rain, but it is coming this afternoon, they say. The promise, too, of a warm summer ahead, once they get past this temperamental spring. Meteorological broadcasts from a future, already laid out.

(They are right, by the way.)

She too has an unthinking routine on this last morning. Downstairs for coffee, back up to her room for a shower. Shoes on for a run, some stretches, and down to Riverside Park for a change of scenery, terrain shifting under her feet from street, to canopied path, to the pier. Listening to loud music through her headphones, trying to outrun the beat of her thoughts.