Before You Knew My Name, Jacqueline Bublitz [best book club books for discussion txt] 📗

No wonder she’s gotten used to pushing her feelings way down.

Outside it is pouring, but Ruby barely notices the heavy fall. She heads east toward Central Park, splashing through dark, oily puddles, wiping rivulets of rain from her eyes. When her muscles start to protest, she relishes the pain, pushes herself to go faster. If she’s going to outrun anything, she reasons, it will be that terrible numbness keeping her in bed all these days. Better to feel the ache of tight quads, taste the metal of her heart at work, than to let another day pass her by. Entering the park, feet crunching wet gravel, she heads for the nearest reservoir, the memory of a map in her mind, a look of determination on her face.

Upon reaching the lake, Ruby inadvertently starts running the wrong way. Keeps to the left, runs clockwise as she would back home, and she is soon made aware of her mistake. Joggers coming toward her frown or sigh, a few shake their heads as they pass, and one or two make a show of having to step around her. She starts to say sorry and then changes her mind. Stubbornness prevents her from turning around, running the wrong-right way with the crowd, and something else, too. After years of making herself small, it is exhilarating to take up space for once, to force people out of her way.

Ruby is still on that runner’s high when she returns to her apartment building an hour later. Saturated through, she is so wet she has to stand on the street and twist the rain from her T-shirt before she can go inside. The guy at the front desk shoots her a rueful smile as she passes by him, but she grins and tells him she likes this kind of weather.

‘It’s so refreshing!’

And now the desk guy looks concerned, as if Ruby’s sudden display of positivity has thrown him off (yes, he’s noticed the takeaways and vodka, formed an opinion of this new lodger from her infrequent appearances these past few days, and privately concluded she’d be gone within a week).

‘We’ve got umbrellas to borrow. If … if you want,’ Ruby hears him say unsurely to her back as she steps into the small elevator at the end of the entrance hall, before the doors close between them.

When she steps under the shower a few minutes later, Ruby remembers the alarmed look on the young man’s face and starts to laugh. To be found odd in New York feels like a triumph, the opposite of disappearing. There, under the hot shower water she closes her eyes and laughs so hard she cries, emotions mixing like wet paint, dripping from her skin. This will be the real beginning, she decides. A kind of baptism, from which she will emerge renewed. Getting out of the shower, towel wrapped tight around her tingling body, she pads to her small closet, finds her prettiest dress. Fingering the soft cotton of the skirt, she imagines herself flowing through the streets of New York in the summer, leaving a bright, happy trail of colours behind her.

There is a whole world outside these brick walls, and she’s finally ready to crash her way through it.

This is the thought she is turning over, smiling at, when her phone buzzes from the nightstand. Turning from the closet, Ruby reaches for the phone, checks the glowing screen.

Hi.

Images of pretty dresses, of warm summer days and bright colours disappear. The anchor tugs, and a second text message arrives.

I wish you were still here.

Ash.

Ruby sits down hard on the bed. Holds the phone away from her, brings it back to her chest. She sits a full five minutes like this before, heart hammering, fingers trembling, she begins to craft a reply.

You mustn’t think she’s the only one. I might be having a better time of it right now, but I too have moments where the past feels present, pulls me in. Here’s the thing. You don’t get off a plane or a bus and leave your old self behind. No amount of running or sudden realisation can rewire you like that. Not entirely, not the way those self-help books and daytime talk shows would have you think (I used to watch a lot of those with my best friend Tammy). The way I see it, damage gets packed in your suitcase, people stay on your skin. Some mornings I wake up with Mr Jackson right there behind my eyelids, as if he crept into my bed in the night. And sometimes—it happened yesterday—it is my mother who makes an appearance, the smell of powder and roses, that signature, skin-soft scent of hers inexplicably filling the room. I don’t like it when this happens. Like Ruby, my heart hammers and my fingers tremble. But, unlike Ruby, I do not respond. I wait for the hammering to slow, the trembling to cease, and I stay facing forward. My mother can visit. Mr Jackson, too, if he wants. I just never let them stay too long.

In the beginning, I disappeared on purpose. Extricated myself from a life I didn’t want, just like Ruby did. But unlike Ruby, I didn’t tell anyone where I went. Not even my best friend. I let Tammy think I had stayed right where she left me; I wanted to slip out of my old life unseen. And if certain people stayed on my skin, if they came along in my suitcase uninvited, at least they wouldn’t be able to cause any fresh wounds. That felt like a start, like I would have time to heal from all the ways they had hurt me.

I wanted to start over. I wanted to disappear.

But that’s not the same as being forgotten. To be clear, I never, ever wanted that.

FOUR

WE ARE EATING BREAKFAST ON DAY EIGHT WHEN NOAH offers me a job. The next in a series of unexpected gifts. Over the last few