Before You Knew My Name

by Jacqueline Bublitz

Later, when we get to that next part, it won’t take long for a man with fingers at my neck to prove me wrong. He will mock my sincerity, laugh at the idea of a girl like me making her own world. He will be so sure of his own right to my body, he will leave nothing but the memory of that girl behind.

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.

Maybe the people who appear brave are merely doing the thing they have to do. It’s not a matter of courage, then, to pack up and leave a life. Just a lack of any other option, and the sudden realization you probably don’t have anything left to lose.

The way I see it, damage gets packed in your suitcase, people stay on your skin.

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.

I allow myself to believe I deserve what comes next. The beginning of a life where I take up space, where I belong. In a world where some of that kindness of strangers I’ve so often heard about is finally directed at me.

I am not someone who doesn’t know about corners and turning, after all. I am not someone surprised by the way life can change in an instant, with no regard for how happy you might have been just seconds before, your hand twisting against the handle of the kitchen door.

I hang up the call without saying goodbye, unaware we won’t ever speak again. Sometimes a person slips out of your life so easily, you wonder if they were ever really there to begin with.

This optimism, despite everything that came before, is how I know she understands. That if you tell yourself a lie enough times over, you eventually come to believe it.

There was no point wishing for what I couldn’t have.” Later, the simple absurdity of this sentence will reveal itself. I will come to understand that wishing for what you can’t have is a desire strong enough to compel the dead.

I was right to think I would never be safe, that I needed to be wary. But it still surprised me. At the end.

You think if you hold on tight enough when things try to pull you away, you can still make it. But then someone else takes up all the room, blocks the view, and suddenly you’re pushed right out of your skin. It’s their turn now.

I now know that you can cry, scream, howl like the wounded animal you are. And they do not stop. It does not move them. They keep going until there is nothing left, until you are broken apart, obliterated. Almost like you were never really there at all.

There is evidence of a struggle. Something you should know. I did not want to die. I don’t know if it makes any difference, but when the time came, I fought really hard to stay in my body. I tried my best, but I just couldn’t hold on. I did not want to die. And now I am—

Turns out they don’t teach you how to be out of the world any more than they teach you how to be in it.

There is no name to be spoken, but I am recognized by each of the women present, clasped around their lifted hands, heavy on their hearts. I am their fears, and their lucky escapes, their anger, and their wariness. I am their caution and their yesterdays, the shadow version of themselves all those nights they have spent looking over shoulders, or twining keys between fingers. A man speaks to the crowd, entreats his gender to do better; people clap, cheer, but it is the silence of the women that binds up the candlelight, sends it skyward, a flare in search of every lost sister. So that when the man’s passion is spent, it is the quiet rage of women that lingers, can be seen, glittering, from above.

It’s only a matter of time. Before they find him? Or before he gets the chance to do it again?

The thing is. When the dead speak back, we are seldom loud enough to be heard over the clamor of all that living going on.

Don’t go there. Don’t do that. Skirt’s too short, street’s too dark. Why couldn’t you—who did you—how did you—? When you go around asking for trouble like that. What exactly did you think would happen! Look at all the things they tell us. Listen to the words ringing in our ears as the bodies stack up. As another young woman is added to the pile of limbs and hearts and hopes and dreams, and all the things she’ll never do. Because of all the things she didn’t do. Or all the things she did. That’s the part they seldom make clear. When they decide who gets to be the right kind of dead girl. If they think of us at all.

Tell men not to rape and murder us! Have stronger sentencing for violent crimes! We should not be the ones changing our behavior here! It might even seem that things will get better. But after a while, the city will go back to its rhythms, it will once again become a place where women walk alone at night, and talk to strangers on the street, and avoid only certain places. That girl, the one they marched for, won’t be forgotten, but her murder will stop being a fresh wound, eventually. It will settle on the city like a small, ugly scar. Then, when it happens again, the city will be tired. No one will march this time, or shout in the streets; their anger will be jaded, quiet. Flowers will be laid, and candles lit, but the death of another bright young girl will come more like a reminder from now on, an alarm clock ringing. The city was already weary when her body was found. Time and again they will come with their flowers and candles. From Mexico City to Madrid to Melbourne and Manila, these cities will be bone-tired as they watch the flowers wilt and the candles burn down. Here lies the pain of another woman, another community, the flowers and the candles say. There is silence for a time. And then the alarm sounds out again.

“Don’t confuse liking your own company with doing nothing,”

Is our death fated? Do we have a predestined, inescapable end, or is it all just arbitrary?

No one lives just one life. We start and finish our worlds many times over. And no matter how long or short a time we are here, I’m beginning to realize we all want more than we get.

As the Death Club members continue talking into the night, I leave them be, and return to where we started. A question I had not thought to consider at the time. If my death was indeed fated—was it my fate or his, in the end?

If I had lived. If I had not said anything about my birthday. If I had not gotten on a bus to New York City. If I had not knocked on Noah’s door. If I had not—but it’s foolish to think about these things now. I did not live. Because a certain man had pretended to be someone else for too long, and when he put his hands on me that last morning of my life, it was the truest he had ever been, and if I had not—not—not, it would still be nothing compared to the force of this one man’s revelation.

I am fascinated by the shift, yet that deeper-than-sorrow feeling persists. Because I know I do not belong at this table. I cannot join the living as they trade their stories, cannot share any part of my day, my past or my now, the way they do. They are discovering each other, moving forward together, while I remain the dead girl, Jane. Riverside, Doe. A month after my murder, without any fresh revelations to stoke public interest, I am a news story already growing old. Because the people who do know my stories have stayed silent. Friends—and a lover, too—whose fingers might twitch toward their phones whenever the Riverside murder is mentioned, but they never, ever make the call.

People’s love gets muddled up, too. Reversed. East is west and west is east. Sometimes the reordering is unnoticeable. And sometimes, when you look up, there is a vast, empty space where the stars used to be.

Ruby knows how to be sad. She knows what to do with her sorrow. But what about happiness? What about joy creeping up on despair, disorienting it with laughter and light. What do you do with that contradiction? In other words: How do you hold your pain close and let it go at the very same time.

She’ll reach out if she needs me, she told herself, and that’s it, isn’t it. That’s how a person slips out of your life so easily. Sometimes forgetting is simply waiting too long.

“Mom, I think something bad happened to Alice.” Tammy told her mother everything she knew. The truth, at that moment, began to unfurl. I am on my way to being found. So is he.

Every riddle has an answer. No matter how long it takes to solve, the answer was created at the exact same time as the question.

“How do we find the bastard, Alice? What is it we’re missing?”

What we don’t know of the future when a happy picture is taken.

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.

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.

I’d say: There she is. There is the way she leans forward when she’s listening to you, there is the constant glisten of her eyes when something moves her. There is the curve of flesh under her cotton shirt, and the way she self-consciously pulls at the fabric, unaware that she pulls you in, too.

If the living could see all that light, the city maps drawn under the skin, they’d be awestruck.

Nervousness is rushing water, river mouths, but anticipation is something far more delicate, little bubbles that go pop, one bright burst after another, until the body is a glass of champagne, a million golden beads of air, rising.

This man should be the one thinking about limbs and teeth and hair and bone. Because—the wind hisses, the candle flickers—all that I used to be, all that he took from a girl named Alice Lee, will soon come knocking at his door.

(Why do people, the good ones, always seem to blame themselves when someone deceives them? Seems to me, when that happens, the bad guys get away with more than just their obvious crimes.)

The truth doesn’t always announce itself loudly, see. Sometimes it is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. If you know what you are looking for.

Such self-preservation all these years, only to find herself unbound by a man who was angry at the light going out. So he took hers instead.

(This is the world he has created. I’m ready to tell you a little more now. Stay with me as we take that closer look. But don’t you believe a single thing he says about me.)

When he turned away like that, I mistook what it meant; I thought he shut me out because he didn’t care. He wasn’t the first one to leave me, after all. Now I see he cared so much that he knew the truth would break him.

The brief story of my life in this apartment, this city, and the simple promise of that word. Recurring. How to let them know this was the safest I had ever been.

The problem is, once you get used to going unnoticed, you think no one else can see you either, like a dog with his head under the couch who doesn’t understand his tail is still in plain view (Gambit, Mr. Whitcomb’s ancient terrier, does this anytime he accidentally pees on the floor). Head down like that, you forget there are those who spend their lives looking for girls who feel unseen. There are men actively hunting such women, they can spot them from a mile away, and they know just what to do when they find them. You forget. Or maybe it’s something Ruby never even knew. That some men are constantly vigilant. Watching for the girls no one else will think to look for when they’re gone.

If someone really wants you, they will always find a way.

The place of my murder is now a kind of chapel, a refuge for the loneliest woman in New York City.

She has just forgotten what it is for a man to treat her nicely.

How many times does politeness keep us rooted to the spot? We stand on the brink, making a choice whether to tip over into trust or disgust, and we remember all our training, the lifetime of it. The doctrine of nice, the fear of hurting someone’s feelings.