Jennings gives what he hopes is a reassuring smile, and then he is gone, the doors of the precinct closing behind his back, and Ruby is left standing on the street, smiling faces staring up at her from the brochures in her hand. She unfolds the top one, but the print blurs, because she is crying again, fat drops onto the page.
U Ok?
Ash couldn’t even be bothered typing out a full sentence. What room did that leave her to answer? How could she fit in all the things that make her not okay?
She thinks again of the line she has read in so many newspaper reports: Her body was discovered by a jogger.
Why did they never say what happened to the jogger after that?
Someone organises a candlelight vigil in Riverside Park. News of the intended gathering is shared locally, and on Saturday night, four days after the murder, around three hundred people make their way down to the muddy fields near the pier. The mourners are mostly from the neighbourhood, but some women come from across town, from their own dark places, called forth to memorialise one of their ilk, one who didn’t, couldn’t, make it home. The crowd is punctuated by these survivors, their pain red-tipped, fierce, as the faithful from different denominations hold forth, one grasp at comfort after another offered into the night. Candles quiver, wave, and when the talking stops, someone steps forward and softy sings ‘Hallelujah’ into the silent congregation, her head bowed down.
From a distance, three hundred candles held high is a beautiful thing to see. A glow of stars drawn down into people’s hands. Faces are soft, warm, as people lean one lit candle into the wick of another, connecting each new flame, until the field flickers. Until the crowd appears to breathe light, a visible inhale-exhale of grief and prayer.
There is no name to be spoken, but I am recognised 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. Long after all the little fires have been extinguished, and the mourners have moved on.
Ruby does not attend the vigil. She sits alone in her room, just a few city blocks from the park. She has lit her own candle here, a single flame weaving, pulsing in the dark. Cross-legged on the bed, drinking lukewarm vodka, she stares at this candle and feels nothing. Sorrow, she is learning, can be as quiet as a whisper when it wants to be. Whether it all roils inside her, whether the pain spills out like a swollen river breaching its banks, or the waters go still and she floats upon the surface, numbed—it is all the same feeling in the end. One of utter helplessness. Knowing so little is in your control, knowing you cannot claw your way back to the ignorance of safety. Sometimes, these past few days, she has raged against this loss. Tonight, she grieves. She is alone in a lonely city, and nearly as deep as her sorrow for an unnamed dead girl is this wretched thought: should anything happen to her in New York, she herself might end up unclaimed at one of the city’s morgues. Because no one will have noticed she is gone.
The morning after the vigil, Ruby wakes with a vodka-thick head. Remembers blowing out the candle, can recall getting out of bed to lay down on the cool of the bathroom tiles after the room started to spin. A dim recollection, too, of waking, shivering on the floor, a coarse towel wrapped about her shoulders. Self-care of the drunken kind, she thinks with a sigh, the towel now tangled under the bedcovers. She was not in a deep enough sleep to dream, but time has passed, it is now six thirty in the morning. She has managed to shut down the night, at least.
Padding to the bathroom, her head aching, Ruby’s stomach suddenly lurches. A memory from last night dislodges, makes its way to the surface. After the candle, before the tiles. She was righteous, angry again. Ruby sees herself with her phone in her hand, bringing up Ash’s name. The punching of keys, a furious list of sins building, text after text.
You don’t … You never … I hate …
Picking up her phone now, she has to force herself to look at the screen.
Nothing.
She checks for his name.
Nothing.
Still, that memory persists. The feeling she’s said something she shouldn’t have. Never, ever does she let Ash know how much his distance pains her. She has never let him see her anguish, has remained stubbornly proud of this, clinging to impassivity as her only control. Did she let go of all that last night?