Before You Knew My Name (63)
She is angry at Josh for being dishonest, when she thought she had found someone who valued the truth. This makes her upset with Lennie and Sue, too. She is certain they knew he was still married, and certain they should have told her, when Sue had readily shared the facts of her own divorce, and Lennie talked about romance all the time. How is it possible that Josh’s wife never came up in conversation, not once? In quieter moments, Ruby knows she is being unreasonable, that separation is not the same as marriage. But it’s not exactly an ending either, so she lets herself feel the sting of betrayal, decides she wants nothing to do with any of them right now. It’s not only Josh’s messages that she leaves unanswered as the week goes by.
When Ruby is adrift, I am adrift. In the days after finding out about Josh, we return to wandering the streets of this city, neither coming nor going anywhere. She considers moving home to Melbourne. I don’t even know where home is anymore. Just when I think I have it figured out, the game changes all over again. I thought that once I had my name back, once those waves stopped crashing around me, I’d know what to do. Maybe even find out where those other girls go.
But here I am, still unseen. Who Killed Alice Lee? is not really a question about me, is it? But it’s the only one people seem to ask now.
At any rate, without Death Club as our compass, we seem to have ended up back where we started. A lonely woman and a lonely dead girl together in New York. Ruby Jones and Alice Lee. Stuck in our tug of war between the living and the dead.
She never goes back to the river. Has avoided the park since the morning of my murder. Won’t even walk along Riverside Drive, there above the Hudson, the promise of summer drawing people from their expensive houses, thawing them out, so that the streets and the fields and the running tracks are never empty these days, at least not until the sun goes down. Ruby has returned to the rocks a thousand times in her head, has pored over photographs of the crime scene, so that it exists as a map in her head, but anytime her feet turn toward the park, something in her rebels, pushes her back. She wishes she could talk to Lennie and Sue about it. Or better yet, Josh, who once told her that he’d had to force himself to return to the scene of his bike accident, how it had taken him weeks to build up the nerve. And how, when he finally got there, he soon discovered he couldn’t recognise a thing. He sat down in what might have been the wrong place entirely, his blood soaked into the soil around some other tree, and realised how inconsequential his accident had been in the grand scheme of things.
‘It’s not as if the place remembers you,’ he had said to Ruby, shaking his head.
If they were still talking to one another, Josh could have walked down to the river with her, he could have held her hand and assured her that—but, here, Ruby stops her train of thought. Josh is not the man she thought he was. They had an interlude and now it’s over, and she simply needs to be more careful with her judgement from now on. Stop giving her heart away so fast.
(Why do people, the good ones, always seem to blame themselves when someone deceives them? Seems to me, when that happens, the bad guys get away with more than just their obvious crimes.)
Perhaps it is her current isolation, so soon after she thought she’d found her people. Maybe it’s a way to evict Josh from her head, to think about something else today. Or perhaps it was merely a matter of time, an inevitability. Whatever it is, on this Tuesday in late May, six weeks to the day after my murder, Ruby finds herself back in Riverside Park, the grounds humming with people now, runners and cyclists and skaters rolling past signs on metal poles that flap ads for the twilight movies and sunrise yoga classes starting soon.
(I would have loved this place in summer.)
On this sunny day, as Ruby cuts through the upper levels of the park and heads down to the waterfront, her recollections of that earlier, stormy morning feel more like a movie than a memory. Dank tunnels and dead ends have been replaced by dappled trees, families strolling, dogs on leashes. Following the river, the running trail is more like a freeway today, people moving fast and slow, back and forth. It seems impossible to Ruby that she had once been down here all alone. Her head moves left and right, taking in every benign marker she passes. Nothing looks familiar in the sunlight; it is like she has never been here before.
It’s not as if the place remembers you.
The morning Ruby found me, the park had pressed down on her, closed her in. Now it all looks blink-bright. Water sloping toward New Jersey on her right, sports fields and banks of stairs on her left. The park is wide open and sprawling, postcard perfect. It’s not until Ruby comes to the exact place, not until she bends over and puts her hands on the metal railing, just like she did that morning six weeks ago, that her body protests. Reminding her, in a rush of adrenaline and heart constriction, that there is no movie in her mind. Instantly, looking down at the water, she is back inside the reality of what happened here. The sky cracks and cars swoosh overhead, rain soaks through her, pools in her eyes, and there is a girl face down at the water’s edge, not getting up, not turning over when Ruby shouts at her. She remembers the body being picked up, carried out from under the path, remembers bright red, and the pale of naked legs. Sirens flashing, the bright colours behind her eyes, silver foil wrapped around shaking shoulders. Men with gloves on, searching. Somewhere amongst these mental images, Josh suddenly appears, and Ash too, as confusing and disorienting to her senses as it is to remember finding the body of Alice Lee.