Before You Knew My Name (48)
The dead, she soon sees, are everywhere. Lost to cancer and school shootings. Police brutality. Domestic violence and drownings. Kidnappings and war, and hearts with too many holes. She finds lists and lists of ways to die and lists of names to say out loud; for the rest of her life she will pay attention. She will let the departed know they matter, especially those whose lives might otherwise be passed over. She will say their names, sound out the syllables of their existence whenever she can.
She has no name to sound out loud for me.
I’m Alice, I whisper to her many times. Alice Lee. But she can’t hear me over the car horns and the sirens and the doors slamming. I’m lost in the buzz of her phone and the sound of the shower running, the hiss of the coffee pot downstairs, and the pad of her feet against the ground. My voice is quieter still when she is laughing or crying or gasping against the memory of Ash’s mouth, or when the slate eyes of a man she has just met flash behind her own, inexplicably replacing Ash’s face when she comes.
The thing is. When the dead speak back, we are seldom loud enough to be heard over the clamour of all that living going on.
Two weeks pass by, and no one has come to claim me. They’ve made their posters, held their press conferences, asked for anyone who knows anything to come forward. They’ve attempted to put flesh around my bones, but all the while, that flesh falls further and further away. And, still, no one comes for me. Still, they call me Jane. To be clear, I don’t think I am a Jane at all. Jane seems like someone older, someone refined, with a real job and an apartment in her own name. Just like the one Noah lives in. Except, without the dogs, and maybe with big white flowers in vases all over the place, and maybe without a piano in the middle of the living room. I don’t think Jane plays the piano. She does the New York Times crossword, and practises mindfulness, and any freckles on her nose were lasered off just before her thirty-fifth birthday, and though she never admits it, she’s had Botox injections every six weeks for the last two years. That’s Jane. She’s successful and polite, and she fits right into the corners of her name. And it isn’t my name.
It isn’t my name.
I want my name back. This name that was mine from the beginning. That’s what I want them to use when they talk about me. I want the news stories to say Alice Lee was a girl who lived in New York City, and she was just starting to fit into the corners of her own name, her own life. Alice Lee was eighteen years old, and she had long blonde hair her lover used to wrap around his fingers, forcing her neck back so he could bear down on her skin with his teeth. Alice Lee loved that, and she loved taking photographs with the camera she stole, and she was starting to love Noah and his quiet kindness, and she loved the silver glitter of the Chrysler Building, no matter how many times she gazed up at its spire.
Alice Lee was someone who missed her best friend Tammy, and once, when she was six, a man pulled up in front of her house and tried to get her into his blue car, beckoning from the driver’s seat, saying he had a special secret to share. Alice Lee was the girl who froze for a full minute before she ran inside, and she was the girl who never told anyone about that minute and that man in the blue car.
This was Alice Lee. She never broke any bones and her teeth were straight and strong, and her mother died, and so did she. Not the same way, but not so differently, either. She liked fish tacos and fairy lights and hated the taste of licorice. She hadn’t read nearly enough books, and she was busy falling in love with the world, when she was yanked right out of it.
Smile. Is that what he said to her, just before? Or during? There were sounds he made she couldn’t hear, wouldn’t hear, but she’d made him angry, hadn’t she? By not answering his questions. She froze instead, just like that day when the strange man in his blue car tried to tell her a secret. She knew not to go toward him, could smell the danger between them, but for a full minute, she forgot how to move. And this time, Alice Lee remembered too late.
I will go to Hart Island. If no one claims me, my body will join a million others on that speck of land in Long Island Sound. A pretty sounding name for a mass of dirt, endlessly churned, bones buried on top of bones. Three persons deep, they say. When they remember those bones belong to people.
They might loan my body out to a university first, before they take me to the island. I wouldn’t mind that so much; I like the idea that some parts of my body might help fix other bodies, other warm, kinetic beings in need of repair. I have no further use for this mass of calcium and marrow, for the hair and fingernails and those blue, blue eyes. I don’t get to coil my muscles; I don’t get to taste something before it reaches my mouth or come so intensely that I’m flying. I don’t suppose it really matters what they do to my body now.
There used to be an asylum on Hart Island. There was an asylum here, too, next to the mortuary. The dead and the damaged, side by side, out of sight. When a famous person dies, a princess or a politician, say, the public gets to see it. Their funeral is kind of like a celebration. There are flowers and candles and photographs, and songs that tell you something about who the person was before they died. The ones left behind stand up and share their memories, they take the life that was lived, and they put a frame around it. So that people don’t forget. I will not get flowers and candles and songs. If I am buried on Hart Island, no one will even know my favourite song. It’s ‘Try A Little Tenderness’, by the way. Otis Redding. The first time my mother played me that old record, I cried. I loved his soulful voice so much. And those lyrics—it seemed like he was singing to me, about me. Because we do get wearied, girls like me. Not the kind of song you’d play at a funeral, I suppose. But at least I would be there. Present at my own mourning. If they take me to Hart Island, it’s all gone. My favourite song, and my favourite word (sarsaparilla), and my first ever crush (Michael from Mrs O’Connor’s class, fourth grade). People mourn the future that is lost when someone dies. But what about the past? What about all that is bound up in a person, and all the things that disappear when they die?