Before You Knew My Name

by Jacqueline Bublitz

“They’re not always monsters, Ruby. Sometimes they’re normal guys, who turn out to be capable of terrible things.” It is a truth so small she almost missed it. So did I. But there it is. Half-hidden by the rocks and the dirt. Just waiting to be found.

What was the last thing she said to him? Thank you, Tom. I appreciate your concern. What neither of us said, what none of us say: You took up all the space. I didn’t know how to say no and you never waited for my yes. I need you to leave me alone now. We swallow the words and the warning bells, so that we take on the doubt, dismiss what we know to be true. We demur, placate. Say just enough and smile just enough and let them touch us just enough, hoping the moment will pass.

He never gave me room to make mistakes, to discover who I was for myself. He needed me to behave in a way that suited him, and even more, in a way that preserved his idea of me. For a while, that had been enough love for me. Not now.

Men like this eventually give themselves away, they betray their own secrets, because they so desperately want to stay at the center of things. Narcissism makes a person careless, no matter how clever they might be.

There will never be enough days to scrub clean the lies Tom Martin has poured all over this woman’s body. Each revelation that will come—the hardcore, underage pornography on his computer, the fake profiles he’s posted on dating sites, the bags of amphetamines hidden in his closet, an ex-girlfriend who said he had stalked her when she left him. And soon enough, the details of how he smashed an eighteen-year-old girl’s head with the lens of her camera, squeezed her throat with his nicotine-stained fingers, and continued his assault on her body as she lay dying on the banks of the Hudson River. How he scooped up her underwear and shoes and jacket and unscrewed the bloody lens from the camera, all the while standing over the battered body of a teenage girl. Though no one else will understand the specificity of her horror, this is the part that will come to haunt his wife 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.

No one ever ends up where they started from, but you do make it home, when the time is right. If you have kept your head while being tossed about. Sometimes it is surrender, not struggle, that saves a life.

It was so close, but she cannot continue to hold on to something already gone. I loved you. She does not send this final truth across the ocean. The words too small for this moment, this ending. Only silence is large enough to hold her sorrow tonight.

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.

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.

They are talking about me in different tones, mystery and urgency have been replaced by sadness, poignancy. If I had lived… but I did not. I was murdered down by a river while I was going about my life, loving the sky and the rain and Noah and this newfound feeling I might get to have a happy life, after all. (If I can make it there. And I so very nearly did.)

The idea that I don’t have to choose. That I can leave and still be here at the same time. I feel the tension of my existence start to slacken.

Down by the river, water laps at a rainbow of brightly colored roses, as gentle waves pick them up and carry them toward the open sea. We do get wearied. Girls like me.