It’s not like I haven’t had to do this kind of thing before. Only this time, if I have to start over, I’ll be starting over in New York City.
Despite my sore feet, I feel a slow fizz of excitement, as if this city is carbonating my blood. I have come back to the place I was conceived. All those years of moving around the Midwest, of not knowing the kids in my class, or the name of my mother’s latest boyfriend, or where she was when she didn’t come home at night—they were merely lessons, preparation. For this. For standing on my own two feet, unnoticed, in the best possible way. Within twenty-four hours of arriving here all those years ago, my mother had come to rely on the sympathies of strangers. I won’t do that with this Noah whoever, even if he turns out to be the nicest person in New York. I won’t do that with anyone here. I have earned my independence, and I won’t squander my future on something so hard won. I have 79.1 years promised to me, that’s the life expectancy they gave to girls born in 1996, like me. 79.1 years—I learned that in second or third grade, in some school, in some town I can’t quite remember, but I’ve never forgotten the number, or how it felt to count out the years I had already used up, subtract them from the life span of a girl, and see what I had left. Here, tonight, on my eighteenth birthday, I have more than sixty years ahead of me. I’m going to make a whole world of those years, starting now.
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.
We will keep coming back to this part. No matter how hard I try, the streets and sounds of Manhattan will fade, the men with their fruits and their flowers will disappear, and we will end up down there on the rocks. It’s inevitable, no matter how much I try to distract you. Because this hopeful, heaving night is just one part of my story. The other story is this: there is the body of a dead girl waiting, down on the banks of the Hudson River.
The man who did this has left her there, gone home. And soon there will be a lonely woman who looks down, across, at the dead girl. I can see this lonely woman coming, or see her already there, and she’s sadder than I have ever been, because her sorrow is still simmering. It hasn’t boiled over and scalded her life, which makes her feel that nothing important, nothing meaningful, has ever happened to her.
I am about to happen to her.
TWO
RUBY JONES HAS NO IDEA HOW OLD SHE IS. OR RATHER, SHE knows her age solely in relation to calendars and dates. The number itself remains foreign, this tally of her years on the page, as if the age she has landed at is an irrefutable place, a landmark plotted on a map. In other words, Ruby Jones does not feel thirty-six years old. This age she notes down on forms, the number of candles on her cake, consistently confuses her. So much so, she has been known to experience a jolt of surprise upon discovering this famous woman or that, someone whose life she has observed from afar, is in fact much younger than she is. She could swear these women, with their multiple careers, with their multiple marriages and multiple babies, are her contemporaries. Maybe even older, with all that life crammed in.
The truth of it is this: Ruby is approximately three years past pretty. Though camera filters are designed to hide the facts of the matter these days, it is a reality she sees in the mirror every morning: the slackening jaw, the fold-down corners of her mouth, the stomach rounded and hips fleshed. She has not had the opportunity to age with someone, has only herself to wake up to each morning, and this is what she sees. A woman well past pretty, still sexy, maybe even beautiful at times, but there is little youth to be found in her features now. She can no longer look young without artifice, and this she cannot deny.
How to be thirty-six, then? How to understand in her bones what this means, when it is nothing like they told her it would be. They. Her mother. Women’s magazines. The authors who wrote her favourite books growing up. People who should have known better. All Ruby knows for sure is that she is suddenly older than she understands herself to be. Which is how it comes to pass that, in the middle of a makeshift dance floor in Apollo Bay, three hours’ drive from Melbourne （and half a world away from where she wants to be）， eighties songs shrieking from cheap speakers in the corner, Ruby Jones makes the decision to throw those thirty-six years she has accumulated up in the air. To close her eyes and see where they scatter.