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

drunk. Sally, the bride, will end up throwing up on the beach as midnight approaches, and Ruby will hold back her hair, soothe her, and tell her what a magical day it was.

‘I wish you had someone who loves you, too,’ Sally will mumble when she’s done, mascara tracking down her face. ‘You’re such a great girl. Our precious Ruby.’

This sentence. This wedding. This late-summer night of clinking glasses and shoeless dancing and misty rain. It has all become too much for ‘precious’ Ruby (or too little, she will decide, when she is thinking more clearly). Her friends in their expensive outfits, drinking their fancy wine, pills popped surreptitiously between the speeches and the band. Sally, drunk-crying, wearing a dress she dieted herself into all summer, marrying the great guy she met on Tinder barely a year ago. The ‘right swipe’, they called it in in their vows, and for the life of her, Ruby couldn’t remember if left or right was the way to say yes.

Later, at the beach house she and her friends have rented for the weekend, Ruby takes a pillow and blanket and quietly pads out to the downstairs balcony. It is 3 a.m. and everyone else has passed out in their shared beds, couples curled into each other or snoring obliviously against each other’s backs. Ruby is, as usual, the only single person in the group. Though she doesn’t exactly consider herself single, not privately at least. There should be a better word to describe the state she has found herself in.

Alone.

That would do it, she thinks, folding herself down onto a damp, wicker sofa. Someone has removed the spongy seat cushions, Ruby can see them stacked under the lip of the second-floor balcony above her, but she does not have the energy to drag the cushions over. It has started to rain in earnest now, and she is glad for the discomfort, for the wet on her face and the unyielding sofa base, pressing into her hip. Back in her room, the world had started to spin. Now, she can see the black of the ocean, hear the inky water of the bay slapping against the sand. The sound seems as if it is coming from inside her, it’s as if she is the one cresting and falling, and it takes a moment for Ruby to realise she is crying, out here on this balcony, alone with the rain and the waves and the starless sky. Soon she is crying as hard as the weather, the accumulations of the past few years rising up out of her. This is not where she intended to be.

Life, she understands in this moment, has stopped happening to her. She has stood in the middle of too many summers and winters, too many dance floors and other people’s parties, and simply woken up the next day older than before. For so long, nothing has changed. She has been on pause, while the man she loves goes about making his life. Offering the tiniest of spaces for her to fit into, asking her to make herself small, so he can keep her right here. Alone.

Alone, here.

She doesn’t want to be here anymore.

The plan is not entirely clear as dawn approaches, waves and rain and tears saturating everything around her. Ruby won’t even really understand, some days later, as she scrapes together her life savings, books her one-way ticket from Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport to JFK, just what she’s doing, or why. She only knows that she cannot stay here any longer. That she needs, desperately, for something, anything to happen to shake her out of her current state, and New York seems as right a place as any for reinvention.

In this way, our worlds are spinning closer every second.

I have an image of her on the plane, coming closer. The way she keeps reaching back toward Australia, folding time in on itself, so that Ruby is both 35,000 feet above her old life and stuck smack in the middle of it. I see her memories playing like an old mixtape, a best-of compilation she has heard many times, but up there in the air even the smallest moments seem tinged with tragedy. The way he looked at her when … the first time they … the last time she … and now she’s pushing her forefinger hard against the small airplane window, blinking back tears. She watches her nail turn white; tiny, perfect icicles forming on the other side of the thick glass. Around her, people have already reclined their seats and started to snore, but I know that Ruby is wide awake for the entire flight, just like I am wide awake that whole bus journey from Wisconsin, this whole same day we make our way to New York City.

And, just like me, Ruby Jones cannot help but spend the journey returning over and over to the lover she left behind. The proof of him. For me it is a stolen camera. For her it is the last message he sent, right before she boarded the plane.

I missed you. Past tense.

I missed you.

As if there are already years, not hours, between them.

We arrive within minutes of each other.

‘Where to? WHERE to, lady?’

The cab driver at the bustling JFK taxi rank speaks louder this second time, half-shouts at Ruby, and she blinks away the vastness of his question, the heart-stopping open space of it. He just wants an address. She has an address—she can give him an address, if her sleep-deprived mind will just remember the details.

‘I … uh …’

Ruby reads a street name and building number from her phone, offers it more like a question. The driver huffs his acknowledgement and pulls out into the snaking line of traffic exiting the airport. It’s getting dark, there is a grey tinge to the air, something glassy over her eyes. She tries to shake off the lethargy of more than thirty hours of travel, tries to find