Before You Knew My Name (67)

When the days passed and that door never clicked open, something in Noah closed down. It was easier for him to believe I had become restless and moved on, than to live with the possibility that those things in the news, those terrible things, had happened to his Baby Joan. For the first time in his life, he chose to look away from the facts, something I never would have imagined. Not from Noah, who taught me about dust and stars. Not from the person who always knew how things worked. When he turned away like that, I mistook what it meant; I thought he shut me out because he didn’t care. He wasn’t the first one to leave me, after all.

Now I see he cared so much that he knew the truth would break him.

He should have gone to the police earlier. Should have accepted what he already knew, deep in his bones, to be true. But know this of my Noah, please. He was not thinking of his own safety when he stayed away. He was only ever thinking of me.

Perhaps I should have understood this earlier, too. That he was never going to be like the other men in my life. That I was right to believe in the kindness of strangers. My lack of faith helped keep us apart after I died—but I’m here with him now. Watching as those investigators examine my stack of IOUs, taking the post-it notes down from the refrigerator door, reading them one by one, all the little promises I left behind. A single blue note flutters to the ground, and a young officer bends to retrieve it. Girl Things, it says, a badly drawn smiley face in place of the full stop. $9.87. Recurring. Noah cannot read the note from where he is sitting, but he can see the officer pause, look up at the ceiling, the small piece of paper pressed to his chest. Noah already knows what each of these IOUs say, has memorised every good intention I left behind, and he feels a sudden, fist-tight clench where he knows his heart to be. Recurring. The writer of that note thought she had months and years ahead of her. She had plans.

‘Baby Joan,’ Noah says softly, reaching for the note. Funny, sweet, uncouth Alice, in love with New York like the city was a person, and completely ignorant of her poetry.

‘Is this middle C, Noah?’

He hears me ask this, that last night we had together. Clanging down on the piano key as he nodded from this same armchair, muttered something about how noisy I had become, and I had wrinkled my nose at him, laughed, thumping down on as many keys as my fingers could touch.

‘Please stop!’

And now there is a rasping, wheezing sound filling the apartment, sliding down the walls. The lifting and dusting and kneeling ceases, everyone stops what they are doing, orients toward the noise emanating from the armchair in the living room. It is the sound of a man unaccustomed to weeping, as great, wracking gasps shake through his body for the first time in his life. Franklin whines, pushes his nose against Noah’s leg, knowing something has gone very wrong here. Wondering why I am not moving from my seat at the piano, why I’m not coming over to comfort them both. The dog turns from Noah and looks right at me, his chocolate eyes pleading. I push down on middle C, as hard as I can, and he barks.

Good boy, Franklin. Good boy, I whisper, but I cannot be heard over the sound of Noah’s sobs. The investigators gather around him, their well-practised dance interrupted by the rawness of this grief. Everything I owe this man sits, sealed, in plastic bags on the kitchen table behind them. The brief story of my life in this apartment, this city, and the simple promise of that word.

Recurring.

How to let them know this was the safest I had ever been.



Ruby messages her old colleagues, the ones who said they’d love to see her when she’d settled in. Both text back within minutes. I’m free two weeks from Thursday, says one. Let me see if I can reschedule my spin class next Sunday, says the other, and Ruby puts the phone down, embarrassed.

This is how you die alone, she thinks.

You’re not alone, I want to say.

But I don’t think a dead girl will make her feel any better today.



I suppose, living with Mr Jackson in secret for a month, I got used to going unnoticed by everyone else. Or perhaps it was all those years with my mother, moving from place to place. Shimmying through the cracks of another town, another coming or going, sliding into new schools or friendship groups so as not to be questioned when I arrived, nor to be missed when I left. Thinking about it, I guess I had already perfected the art of invisibility, and Mr Jackson merely understood how easy it would be to keep me hidden away.

The problem is, once you get used to going unnoticed, you think no one else can see you either, like a dog with his head under the couch who doesn’t understand his tail is still in plain view (Gambit, Mr Whitcomb’s ancient terrier, does this any time he accidentally pees on the floor). Head down like that, you forget there are those who spend their lives looking for girls who feel unseen. There are men actively hunting such women, they can spot them from a mile away, and they know just what to do when they find them.

You forget. Or maybe it’s something Ruby never even knew.

That some men are constantly vigilant. Watching for the girls no one else will think to look for when they’re gone.



She returns to the park every day now. Without Death Club as her guide, Ruby continues to feel lost, alienated. It doesn’t help that the true crime forums already have another mystery to fixate on, a girl named Beth who was found decapitated in Arizona—Clang! goes the alarm—and the national media has turned its attention to the poor girl, too. The daughter of a city councilman, Beth has already given up her secrets (some of them at least) better than I did.