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

Unlike O’Byrne, Ruby generally tries not to think about him. Has stopped jumping at loud noises, makes an effort to smile back when men say hello as she shops for snacks at the grocery store or purchases another bottle of vodka over on Broadway. She doesn’t want to be the one looking askance at strangers, not in a city where she only needs the fingers of one hand to count the people she actually knows. But he hovers at the edge of her thoughts, all the same. Casts his shadow, slips around the corners of her consciousness, so that she always seems to catch the back of him, disappearing.

She tries not to think too much about him. But, deep down, Ruby knows she is as tied to my murderer as she is to me. That something is unfinished between them. And, sometimes, she wonders what would happen if she followed him around those corners. If she came face to face with the man whose terrible crime she discovered.

I’ll admit, now that O’Byrne has put the idea in my head, this is something I have wondered, too.

Josh is the first member of Death Club to say my name.

Alice Lee.

Tongue against teeth, he sounds out the syllables, tries to draw me out from the scant details he has managed to uncover before they hit the news. My life makes for a small list on this day I am officially identified: small town girl from the Midwest, parentless, no known occupation or address in New York. Nothing yet to help determine motive, nothing to suggest what I was doing in the park alone that morning. But there is a name, and a beginning. This is something. Riverside Jane is in fact Alice Lee.

Alice.

Josh looks at the photograph that will soon be shared with the public. Sees a beautiful young girl with blue-sky eyes and a freckle-dotted nose. Tries and fails to reconcile this with what happened to me. It seems impossible—but then, it’s always unfathomable, isn’t it. What we don’t know of the future when a happy picture is taken.

Josh got the tip from a friend at the Daily News. A woman he slept with once or twice after 9/11, when the whole city was shaking. ‘They’ve identified that girl you’re so interested in,’ she told him on the phone. ‘Some kid from Wisconsin. I’ll text you the photo they’ve sent out. Feel free to thank me over dinner some time.’

But it’s Ruby he asks to dinner that night. Fumbles with how to contextualise the question, and ultimately settles for this: I have something to tell you about Jane. He doesn’t want her to think it’s a date, yet when she walks into the small Italian restaurant near Lincoln Center, heads to where he is sitting at the bar, he holds out his phone toward her as if it is a bunch of flowers.

My smiling face fills the screen.

‘It’s Jane?’

Gripping the bar stool offered to her, Ruby looks at me, the real me, for the very first time. She has imagined this moment for weeks now. The relief of discovering my identity. It doesn’t feel like she thought it would. The pain, suddenly, has become unbearable.

Jane.

Alice.

Ruby, my name is Alice Lee.

When she says my name out loud for the first time and starts to cry, I want to reach out, tell her I’ve been here all this time. But I cannot make the world move in my direction, not even this tiny corner of it. Were that possible, I would tilt her right into my aching arms.

Knees slanting, coming closer.

They are at another bar now, one of those secret, behind the wall and up the stairs places that never stays secret for long. They share a small couch set behind velvet curtains, the only seating available at this hour, and when they sat down Ruby had a flash of the young couple she saw in that dive bar on the day she found my body. How the girl had her leg draped over the boy, and how pristine their love seemed, glistening in its newness, when she had felt so very tired and afraid. Is it possible she wants that glistening for herself now?

They have talked about me all night long. Passed that photograph of me between them. Imagining a life, sculpting ideas around the few things they know, so that by the third Manhattan—my drink!—they have crafted a dozen versions of me. The memory of cherries in my mouth, I whisper outlandish suggestions to help them along. Girlfriend of a mobster! Heiress on the run! They can’t hear me over the clink of ice cubes, the jazz playing in the background. But I play sculptor just the same. And when Ruby tells Josh she wishes she’d had a chance to meet me, to know who I really was, I wish back just as hard.

Over dinner, Josh admitted he had been investigating the Riverside murder, telling Ruby about the network of friends and industry contacts he’s talked to about me, so that she imagines a map of people across the city, lines connecting pulsing dots all over town. He tells Ruby his interest is clinical, that it’s a fantastic mystery to be solved, but I know the truth. This is his way to her. Ruby Jones. One of the few people to make him feel buoyant again.

I see what happens when he looks at her now. After that night at Oyster Bar, I can see the bright blue light that starts just below his ear. How it curves under his jaw, travels down his neck, and out into his chest, shooting off in all directions. He thinks there is darkness where desire used to be, but he has been looking in the wrong places. His longing resides somewhere deeper, a vivid blue far below his dark thoughts. It’s supposed to feel like this, I want to tell