Here’s what we learn: A disproportionate amount of media attention is given to incidents of violent crime involving middle to upper class white girls. Turns out, when something bad happens to young women, race and so-called class play a part in how, or even if, our stories get told. As she trawls through research papers and political blogs and protest pieces, a bleak reality is laid out for Ruby; it’s likely this Jane is receiving media attention, including the growing interest of national news outlets, because she is young, pretty—and white. As if that combination is the best proxy for vulnerability and innocence. As if skin colour might determine how sorry we should feel for someone, and how much justice they deserve.
Ruby’s stomach churns as she comprehends the significance of this insidious bias; she should have known that even death would have its hierarchies and prejudices.
As she reads into the night, Ruby also thinks about her own complicity here, confronts it, as she recalls those high-profile crimes that have made the front pages not just across America, but back in Australia, too. In every case that has seeped into her consciousness—enough for her to remember a name, a face, a story—the victim is a young white woman.
How had she not noticed that only some people are deemed worthy of having their stories told? There must be so many biographies buried in the ground, she realises, so many unspoken names. All because an arbitrary line gets drawn between the right kind of victim, and the wrong kind. And that ‘wrong’ kind of victim becomes invisible.
Something Ruby Jones starts doing from this night on: she goes looking for the dead. She searches out names and faces, she reads obituaries and crime reports and historical accounts, and the names engraved on statues and park benches. New deaths, old deaths, she does her best not to discriminate, as she stops over the name of every deceased person she encounters, takes the time to speak their names out loud.
The dead, she soon sees, are everywhere. Lost to cancer and school shootings. Police brutality. Domestic violence and drownings. Kidnappings and war, and hearts with too many holes. She finds lists and lists of ways to die and lists of names to say out loud; for the rest of her life she will pay attention. She will let the departed know they matter, especially those whose lives might otherwise be passed over. She will say their names, sound out the syllables of their existence whenever she can.
She has no name to sound out loud for me.
I’m Alice, I whisper to her many times. Alice Lee. But she can’t hear me over the car horns and the sirens and the doors slamming. I’m lost in the buzz of her phone and the sound of the shower running, the hiss of the coffee pot downstairs, and the pad of her feet against the ground. My voice is quieter still when she is laughing or crying or gasping against the memory of Ash’s mouth, or when the slate eyes of a man she has just met flash behind her own, inexplicably replacing Ash’s face when she comes.
The thing is. When the dead speak back, we are seldom loud enough to be heard over the clamour of all that living going on.
Two weeks pass by, and no one has come to claim me. They’ve made their posters, held their press conferences, asked for anyone who knows anything to come forward. They’ve attempted to put flesh around my bones, but all the while, that flesh falls further and further away. And, still, no one comes for me. Still, they call me Jane. To be clear, I don’t think I am a Jane at all. Jane seems like someone older, someone refined, with a real job and an apartment in her own name. Just like the one Noah lives in. Except, without the dogs, and maybe with big white flowers in vases all over the place, and maybe without a piano in the middle of the living room. I don’t think Jane plays the piano. She does the New York Times crossword, and practises mindfulness, and any freckles on her nose were lasered off just before her thirty-fifth birthday, and though she never admits it, she’s had Botox injections every six weeks for the last two years. That’s Jane. She’s successful and polite, and she fits right into the corners of her name. And it isn’t my name.
It isn’t my name.
I want my name back. This name that was mine from the beginning. That’s what I want them to use when they talk about me. I want the news stories to say Alice Lee was a girl who lived in New York City, and she was just starting to fit into the corners of her own name, her own life. Alice Lee was eighteen years old, and she had long blonde hair her lover used to wrap around his fingers, forcing her neck back so he could bear down on her skin with his teeth. Alice Lee loved that, and she loved taking photographs with the camera she stole, and she was starting to love Noah and his quiet kindness, and she loved the silver glitter of the Chrysler Building, no matter how many times she gazed up at its spire.