Before You Knew My Name (66)

The living cannot see this, of course. They get busy with whatever it is that picks them up off the floor. Soon enough, grief is replaced by other emotions. Anger, despair, disbelief, resignation; all the tools it takes to survive. But that first mix of colours, that fusion of grief, lights up the room. It illuminates the dead, and it reminds us we will not be forgotten; we get to leave our light behind.

Watching these private, poignant moments unfold, I understand something else, too. It matters who remembers you. The people who knew me remain distant from one another, they each carry around their own, unshared memories of Alice Lee, as if I was many things, or nothing, depending on who you asked. Ruby has tried to bring all of these pieces together, bring me into focus, but she can only get so far with their resistance, and a dead girl as her guide.

Maybe this is why I’m still in that tug of war between the living and the dead. Because I am no less broken into pieces than when Ruby found me, down there on the rocks.



They are learning some things. Piecing together the story of a girl called Alice Lee as best they can. But there are still so many gaps. What would they say about me, if I filled in some of those gaps for them?

She once posed for pornographic pictures.

She had an affair with her high school teacher.

She let the old man she lived with buy her things.

Or this. She couldn’t sleep after calling Mr Jackson one last time, got up at 5 a.m. and stumbled out into the heaviest, most beautiful rain she had ever seen. Zipped up her purple parka, her camera tucked under the jacket, pressed up against her chest. Thinking about portfolios and school submissions, and how life was a lot like this storm, washing away the bad things, and some of the good things, too, but that was okay, because there were so many good things to come. And then some man, some man with his series of bad days and disappointing mornings approached her as she tried to take pictures of the storm, and he was angry when she wouldn’t look up, wouldn’t engage with him. He watched her set up those photographs of the river and the rain and felt all those bad days swell up in him like a balloon, until he released the pressure through his fists, through fingers coming down hard on this young woman’s body. Puncturing her as if she were the one who needed deflating. He was angry that she did not smile. Angry at her dismissal. When his cigarette went out, when he asked if she had a light, and she shook her head no, he said she was being rude, and it wasn’t only the sky cracked through when he bore down on her with his righteous indignation.

Such self-preservation all these years, only to find herself unbound by a man who was angry at the light going out.

So, he took hers instead.

Shook her, fists on flesh, struggling, elbows pushing. The split second where she stood a chance, and then she was down, hitting rocks and earth. And he towered over her, enjoyed how large this made him feel, as he smashed that camera lens down on her forehead, over and over. Immediately disgusted by the mess of her face, he wrapped his hands around her skinny, wet throat. Discovered he could destroy the entire city that was this young woman, everything she had been and would be. The rubble of a life, and he was the bomb, exploding. It felt—as he unzipped his jeans, turned her head away so he did not have to look at the unseemliness before him—like he was the most powerful man in the world. That everything was his for the taking.

He never did get that light for his half-smoked cigarette. Had to wait until he got home, rummaging around the all-sorts bowl, looking for matches, careful and quiet. The storm intensifying, a girl’s bloody underwear stuffed in his pocket, the rest of her belongings gathered like gifts.

She should have been nicer to him. He was only asking for a light. It certainly seemed to him, later that morning, as he listened to the rain and the sirens blaring, his fingers quivering toward them, that the calming pleasure of a cigarette might have slowed things down a little. Had she smiled, tried harder, he may even have given her the chance to say yes to his advances.

(This is the world he has created. I’m ready to tell you a little more now. Stay with me as we take that closer look. But don’t you believe a single thing he says about me.)





TWENTY

NOAH WATCHES AS PEOPLE IN UNIFORM FAN OUT THROUGH his apartment, considers the elegance of their movements, their certainty of purpose. The way each member of the investigative unit deftly lifts and dusts and kneels. Alone and all together, a single question in pursuit of an answer. To Noah, observing from his armchair, it looks like a complex, beautiful ballet. Franklin sits mournfully at his feet, unsure of these busy strangers who don’t smile at him, nor his human. All of them overlooking the young girl in the room, watching from her seat at the piano.

Noah went to the police as soon as they released my name. Said he might have details they’d be interested in. Offered up his apartment—‘No warrant necessary’—and consented to the blood tests and swabs, dismissing any offer of coffee or condolence. He was there for one thing, and one thing only. To help them find the man who hurt Alice Lee.

Noah still doesn’t like to think of me as dead.

When I disappeared the very same day they found a young girl’s body in Riverside Park, he refused to think that anything could, or had, happened to me. That first day, he turned away from the sirens and the stories, cancelled all of his dog-sitting appointments, and sat in the living room with Franklin, waiting for me to come home. They sat there together as the hours passed, watching the rain smash against the windows, and they were still there the next morning, this man and his dog, listening for the front door.