She gets up off the bed around three in the afternoon. She hasn’t eaten. She can’t eat. She needs a drink, she realises, whiskey specifically. The craving for that amber liquid, for the warmth of it, is her only sure thing, as if someone had fed her this as medicine, long ago. She pulls on tights, boots, a thick sweater. All black. She feels safer somehow, wrapped in dark winter clothing, the kind that swamps her frame, hides her. She’s glad it’s still raining outside, cannot imagine sunshine or blue skies. The world has shifted in just a few hours. The way it always shifts in just a few hours. It’s not years or decades—that’s simply how we tally the axis-shifts, how we adjust and recover from them. We think in years—How was this year, what’s your New Year’s resolution, I’m so glad to see this year gone—but it’s really the hours that change us.
Ruby was a different person when she got up just a few hours ago.
It is possible, she considers, the girl was still alive back then.
（She thinks of me as the girl. The first of the many new names I will be given. ‘I’m Alice,’ I whisper, but the sound comes out as a rush of rain.）
Taking an umbrella from the front desk, Ruby heads back out into the wet. She makes it down the mostly empty streets quickly, heads toward the dirt-wood floors and fairy lights of a small bar she has walked by many times these past few weeks. Thinking, this will be a place where she will be left alone to drink, but she won’t be alone. She never again wants to be as alone as she was this morning.
The sole bartender is distracted by a TV screen on the wall when she walks in; a basketball replay has his full attention. When he sets down her whiskey, the glass is almost full to the rim. He returns to the game before Ruby can say thank you, and she turns away, relieved he didn’t want to make small talk. Slinking away with her drink, she sees two couches at the very back of the bar, ratty and low to the ground. Choosing the one in the darkest corner, Ruby tucks her feet up underneath her and is grateful for the first burn of whiskey in her throat, the small relief of it. Closing her eyes briefly, she wills for her mind to be as quiet as this corner, this place. Prays for the drink to calm her.
Flesh exposed, like bruised fruit. A hand splayed across the rocks.
She opens her eyes.
The older, serious guy who came later. O’Byrne, the homicide detective. He gave Ruby a card with his name on it, said they would bring her in for a formal interview tomorrow, but she should call immediately if she remembered anything. He said people can go into shock at first, and sometimes, when the shock wears off, they remember the important details better than they did at the start.
‘You were in the park for a good ten minutes before you found her, yes? That’s a real amount of time. You might have seen something, someone, and if you did, we want to know about it. You call me straight away, okay Ruby? If there’s anything you remember better.’
The younger policeman, Officer Jennings, said Ruby did a great job calling 911 and directing the police to the body. He said she did a great job not being afraid. But Detective O’Byrne, he seemed disappointed in her, like she could have given him more.
I didn’t see anything, Detective.
And now all I see is her.
The door to the bar jangles open and a couple stumble through the doorway backwards, shaking raindrops off their shared umbrella. They’re young, laughing, and the boy kisses the girl full on the mouth before he heads to the bar. As the girl sits down on the couch next to Ruby’s, she never takes her eyes off the boy. Even in her current state, it’s easy for Ruby to see the new love shining off this girl. She’s glowing with it, warming the room.
Ruby thinks: this young woman is so clearly in love with this young man today. In the same way it is raining today and she found a dead body today, and she is drinking whiskey in the afternoon. Today. Tuesday, 15 April, four weeks after she arrived in New York City. Tomorrow, these things will only be true of yesterday. Tomorrow, it might be dry, blue-skied out there. Tomorrow, she cannot say I found a dead girl today. And tomorrow this young girl with her shining eyes, with her love-glow, may have loved a boy yesterday. She may have loved him with all the heat a body can generate, until some chance thing he said, some small action—or maybe a large one—took hold of her new love and crushed it, pierced through the cocoon she had created. It only takes a beat, a careless word, a thoughtless admission, for everything to change. So that, tomorrow, this young girl may find herself staring at the wall, wondering how everything is suddenly so different now, when at this very moment yesterday she was sharing an umbrella with a boy who kissed her in doorways, a boy who sheltered her and took such care. She will wonder at how quickly all that care can disappear.