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

the most. The calmness with which her husband must have packed up the evidence of a young life. The calculation of what to keep and what to leave behind.

Nothing will ever again be true for this woman. It is never just one life these men destroy.

Now it’s time for his story to be told. For the papers to sift through his life, figure out why he did what he did. But it doesn’t really matter, does it? You already know enough about him. I don’t want to tell his story. I don’t even want to say his name anymore. I don’t see why he is the one who should be pieced together, remembered.

I am Alice Lee. And this is my story.

They got him.

They got him.

At first, Ruby is stunned. To live with a question for so long—it takes time for the answer to feel right, to make sense. She stares at that man’s face in the news, goes over her time with him, and it feels as though something is crawling all over her skin, burrowing in. Not the dull, staring-at-walls sadness of finding my body, but a burn, an itch that infects her.

I do my best to take my memories back, those awful things she could suddenly see and feel, but somewhere, in the haze of her fever, she refuses to look away from what she saw. In the end, I simply sit with her. Whispering other stories, sweet and soft ones, so Ruby might have more than one truth to remember when the fever breaks.

The female members of Death Club comfort as they can. Sue delivers food, pies and cakes and muffins, things that are warm and fresh. When Ruby cannot get herself out of bed, Lennie brings flowers, makes sure her windows are kept open. Side by side, they read the onslaught of news stories, confront those terrible truths together, and on the first, fitful nights after the arrest, Lennie stays to help Ruby fall asleep. She calls Cassie when Ruby, sitting next to her, cannot find the words, and provides assurances of safety and care to worried family and friends back home: ‘She’s had a shock, yes, but she’s been brilliant. Really, Cassie, your sister solved a freakin’ crime. I think she may even get a medal.’

Later, when her fever subsides, Ruby makes three phone calls. First, a conversation with Cassie and her mother to reassure them she really is okay, all things considered. By now, news that the Riverside murder has been solved has crossed the Pacific, made its way into Australian papers and magazines; Ruby is the invisible thread throughout, the unnamed beginning and end of things. Few readers will ever know how she tied this story together, but that’s the way she wants it to be.

‘The story,’ she says, ‘always belonged to Alice.’

After talking with her family—ending the call with a promise to avoid dead bodies from now on—Ruby calls Noah. She guesses, correctly, that he will be tentative about these new developments, will want to know the specifics of how she came to identify the man who killed his friend, but will not want to discuss the man himself. He cannot even look at the mug shots, he tells Ruby. Unaccustomed to rage, to the incessant, vengeful desires evoked by looking at those photographs, Noah instinctively understands men like that feed on such reactions; he resolves to starve my murderer of oxygen, until he is reduced to nothing.

‘You brave, brave woman,’ Noah says as they close the call. ‘Thank you for everything you have done for Alice.’

The last phone call Ruby makes is to Josh. He answers on the second ring, as if he has been waiting for her.

‘I’m sorry,’ they say at the same time. As if they have been waiting for each other. He tells her Sue’s lecture was fierce, worse than his own mother’s, and that Lennie was furious with him.

‘You don’t kiss someone without the full story,’ she told him. ‘You don’t take away that choice!’

He asks about what happened, expressing his awe and confusion at the events he has missed in such a small amount of time.

‘You can tell me anything,’ he says. ‘I’m here for whatever you need.’

Ruby, tired of saying the same things over, asks Josh for his own full story instead.

He tells her that his marriage disintegrated after the bike accident. In those first few months of recovery, his body began to feel like a foreign object, something illogically attached to him, and he often felt like one of those walking corpses, neither here nor there in any situation. It was like his real body had gone on ahead without him. Knowing this could not be true, feeling his pulse flicker in his wrist, and the gnawing pain of bones slowly fusing back together, he rationally understood he was still an electric current, alive. But the black kept pulling him in, the tar kept spreading, until his mind was thick with it. The sardonic writer he used to be was trapped in this viscousness, and he was not the only one who wondered if he would ever write—or feel light—again.

At first, Lizzie had been supportive, staying close to his bedside in the hospital, hovering around him at home. But the longer he lived in the darkness, the more restless his wife became.

‘You have situational depression,’ she kept asserting, flicking through websites on her iPad, presenting little facts to her husband each night. ‘It says here that situational depression is common in men who’—and off she would go, reading aloud from this magazine article or that, hunting down expert opinions on why, after leaving the hospital, Josh remained reluctant to get back to his old life, his old self. Trying to resolve why he was suddenly a blank slate, why none of the usual things impressed upon him or moved him and, why—a fact most alarming to anyone who knew how kinetic he had been before the accident—this new state of