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

to catch her breath. She had been running south along the river. Forgetting she would have to double back until she had gone just that little bit too far, almost as far as the Cruise Terminal. Now she’s got her head between her legs, willing everything to slow down, and she might not have noticed me today, but for Franklin sticking that wet nose of his up against her lowered cheek. His welcome sign.

She jerks up at his touch, startled, but then her face softens into a smile.

‘Hey there, young man,’ she says, scratching behind the grinning dog’s ear.

‘Your dog,’ she laughs, turning to me, ‘is quite forward.’

‘Oh, he’s not mine,’ I start to say, but this no longer feels true. Instead, I smile back at her.

‘Yes, Franklin is a true New Yorker. Knows what he wants.’

‘Something I have yet to master,’ the woman responds.

‘Where are you from, then?’ I ask, struck by her accent.

‘Who knows, sometimes,’ she answers, and we look at each other really, truly for the first time. Sky and earth, meeting.

‘I’m Alice,’ I say, holding out my hand.

‘Ruby,’ she responds, our touch a small spark.

‘I just moved here a month ago,’ she continues, and we soon discover we arrived on the same dusky night, on the cusp of the same rainy spring.

‘I ran away,’ I confess, and she tells me she came here to get away from someone. A man.

‘Me, too!’ I exclaim, finally playing the right kind of snap.

‘You did? How old are you, Alice?’ Ruby asks, her eyebrows raised.

‘I’m eighteen. You?’

‘I’m thirty-six. So, you’re exactly half my age, then.’

‘Or you’re exactly double mine,’ I shoot back, and I know then, in the way she laughs, that we’re going to be friends. We talk on that park bench for at least an hour, Franklin at our feet, shifting his watery gaze between us. We discuss our strange new city, and the places we left behind, and we dance up to the edges of the men we came here to get away from.

‘It’s complicated,’ she sighs.

‘It sure is,’ I reply. Knowing I will get to tell her the full story.

Someday.

We stay chatting so long that when a raindrop unceremoniously plops against Franklin’s head, we are both surprised to see the sky has gone dark. Heavy rain, on its way yet again.

‘I got stuck here in the park recently. On one of those really stormy mornings,’ Ruby says, holding her palm out in front of her, feeling the air. ‘I’ll admit it was kinda scary, being out here alone.’

‘Last Tuesday? With all the thunder and lightning?’ I ask, excitedly. Snap! ‘I was out here too, taking pictures of the storm. Maybe not my smartest idea, but the photos turned out really great! What doesn’t kill you, and all that.’

‘You should be careful—’ Ruby starts, and then shrugs. ‘Actually, you seem like a girl who can take care of herself. And I’d love to see your pictures some time.’ She looks thoughtful now. ‘It’s nice to know I wasn’t out here alone after all, Alice.’

If I had lived. Had somebody else not decided for me that morning, we might have discovered we were looking for each other the whole time.

We might have met and shared our stories in such a different way.

That Ruby should be the one to find my body. This is one of the two most remarkable things. The way she stayed with me, took me home with her. Suffered the nightmares and confusions, lived with my questions, and her own. She pushed through her own wild waves and kept me afloat, there beside her, before she even knew my name.

Strangers can change your life. Isn’t that the truth. I changed the life of Ruby Jones—for the better, I hope. Even though there must have been times when it didn’t feel like it. When she might have preferred to keep that sorrow of hers simmering, instead of having it all boil over the way it did.

And Noah. Placing that ad. Knowing someone like me would come along. Noah with his IOUs, and his small smiles, and his New York lessons, telling me all the things I wanted to know. And some of the things I didn’t.

I changed his life, too. I know it. Pulled him back into the world, right before I was pulled out of it. I only wish we’d had more time together before it happened. That, and I should have known from the start. Noah never stopped waiting for me to come home.

Ruby and Noah. My bookends in New York. Think of all the risks they took when they let me in, how far they had to travel to meet me. So that when the two of them finally came together, all the little pieces of me came together, too.

Pull the world into you—and nothing seems so far away anymore.

‘You need to join Death Club, Noah.’

Ruby repeats the invitation offered up to her a lifetime ago. Before she knew my name. Before they knew each other. And Noah accepts the offer, because he is as lonely as she was back then, and because, sometimes, you get out of your own way. Sometimes you follow yourself home.

The other Death Club members are excited to meet Noah, and agree to this spontaneous meeting at the dive bar near Riverside. My local, Ruby explains, texting the address. Come take part in our memorial for Alice. One rule only—this she will enforce until she and Noah are ready, until the trial and resultant conviction make him impossible to avoid—no speaking about that other man, please.

I watch as each member of Death Club arrives. Lennie, tumbling through the door, the fine dust of every dead person she has ever worked on surrounding her, as close to a nebula as anything I’ve seen on earth. Sue arriving next, all that latent motherlove and concern preceding her. Then Josh, hastening to the bar, thinking of Ruby’s mouth against his, the way she wraps herself around him,