Before You Knew My Name (62)

(We both had revelations last night.)

There have been no grand gestures today, however. Just another innocuous message from Ash—Hey, you up?—she has thus far ignored. She doesn’t want to tell him about the name she cannot stop saying out loud (and she can’t tell him about Josh, though I wish she would).

If you could see Josh and Ruby from their separate corners as they wait.

People hold their longing in different places. For Josh, yearning lives in his fingertips, so that when it all gets too much, he rubs his thumb and forefinger together to alleviate the pulsing ache, or spans his hands wide, cracks his knuckles and moves his fingers about. Whether reaching for women or words, Josh’s hands give away his desire. For Ruby, longing resides deep within her arms, it comes as a bone-dense feeling she tries to shake off, a discomfort to squeeze out. Neither of them has ever really learned how to sit with this kind of intensity, allow it. To feel desire is to pursue it or to run from it, nothing in between.

Ruby doesn’t know Josh has been waving his fingers about, reaching for her, all day.

His message comes through while she is sitting, arms tightly crossed, on a stoop near her local laundromat, waiting for the dry cycle to finish.

The buzz of her phone makes her jump, though she has been listening for it all day.

Ruby. Thank you for last night. I had a wonderful time, although the ending was a little unexpected. I feel like there’s something I should have told you when it came up, so I wanted to clear the air. I’m still married. Separated. But technically married. If you’re free tonight, maybe we could talk about it in person?

Ruby drops her phone; it lands on the pavement with a clatter.

Not even I saw that one coming.





NINETEEN

HERE’S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THEY KNOW WHO YOU ARE. IT changes. Everything changes. They begin to dig into your life. Because ‘Dead Girl’ needs an even bigger hook to keep people interested. The fact of her loss could never be enough, so they pick through the past, sift through the bones, the reporters and news editors who don’t get this kind of treat nearly enough, the shock and tragedy of pretty, dead girls.

I have made some things easy for these storytellers. No mother (suicide!), no father (who is he?), and there is enough small-town history for people to snack on. Enough colourful people who went to school with me to keep the theories about the cause of my demise coming. But most leads are a disappointment, a dead end, no matter how deep the digging goes. Good student. No record. No serious boyfriend, as far as people could tell. Not a single scandal of my own, until—



Mr Jackson sits in his studio, waiting for the knock. Charcoal fingers twisting, a package of photographs face down in a locked box, hidden in the closet. Knowing he can’t throw the pictures away, perpetually contemplating burial or burning, but never quite able to bring himself to destroy them. He hasn’t looked at a single picture of me, not since the day I left. When he came home and found the house empty. Cooled down, mind cleared, he went from room to room, searching for me. Intending to apologise. To say that it didn’t matter now. That we could finally go out into the world together. Discovering the money and his mother’s Leica gone. His terrible words from earlier in the day, echoing. Assuming I had gone up to the lake with Tammy. And knowing we would never get back what we had.

He sat on the bed and cried when he realised what he’d lost. Just like he sobbed again on a day, some two months later, when my name lit up every television and computer screen across town. Local girl, Alice Lee. Brutally murdered in New York City. No longer able to pretend I had simply stopped calling, no longer able to hide the truth from himself, he finally let himself imagine a stranger pawing at my skin, saw him breaking me open and leaving me there on the rocks. For somebody else to find.

Mr Jackson. Not the only person to wade into the muck of my life, but the only one to know the softness of my skin, the tender flesh, the way I dissolved like snow.

He is certain he will never look at those pictures again. Never revisit the honesty, the beauty he has inadvertently preserved. But he knows, too, they are a ticking bomb, a catalogue of his mistakes. Just like he knows, inevitably, the knock will come.

Still, when they show up at his door in their dark blue uniforms, with their notebooks out and guns tucked, he is unprepared. Sits on that small, sheet-covered couch, shaking. Just a few questions. Not a suspect. Might be able to help with the investigation. If we could just—

And the female detective. Her eyes taking in the books on their crates, the paintings, the coil of his body.

‘What was she doing here with you, anyway?’

The lies come easy. She was a troubled young woman. She had nowhere else to go. She needed a place to sleep, some shelter for a few weeks. She’d been a good student; he’d showed her some care. Maybe she’d spun a story or two to her friend Tammy, tried to make it seem more exciting. ‘This kind of thing can happen with teenage girls, right?’ They should know that Tammy herself was a bit of trouble, and no matter what she might have said, he never touched Alice. She was just a poor kid he was trying to help out of a tight spot. He simply wanted to help her on her way.

It cannot be his fault he never imagined where she’d end up.



Ruby starts running again. Josh’s message, just as she was feeling her way toward him, has set her spinning. For the first time, she considers what she should have said to Ash all those years ago, when he told her he was engaged. Sees a different version of herself, where she went home alone after that first drink with him, bemoaning timing and missed opportunities, another almost in her life. What if she had been that woman instead? One strong enough to walk away, no matter how intense the pull? It does not necessarily feel good to ignore Josh’s texts, to shut him out, but she knows this temporary discomfort is nothing compared to the pain ahead if she falls for another man who can’t decide. Besides, he’d lied to her, hadn’t he? When she said divorce was a kind of death. That’s when he should have told her the truth. That’s when he should have said he was technically still married, because omission is a lie, too; she knows that well enough.