The way I see it, Death Club holds the answers. The truth will reveal itself, soon enough. As long as these four questioning minds, these four sets of past experiences, future hopes and current complications, keep pressing their noses up against death, keep trying to break through the glass.
With Ruby there in the middle.
And me, their fifth member, waiting on the other side.
Best Death Club ever!!! Josh has never talked so much about the accident. And Sue—OMG she loved you! Her turn to host next, will send you the details asap. Thank you. Mwah xoxox
Lennie’s text comes through early the next morning. Ruby, half asleep, smiles as she reads the message.
Ask if the dead can talk to us too, I whisper in her ear. But she has already gone back to sleep, my words sounding like the soft metal clang of the venetian blinds against her open window.
Sue chooses Patsy’s as the next Death Club destination, an Italian restaurant on West 56th where Frank Sinatra used to dine at his favourite table back in the day.
‘Lisa’s favourite movie was On the Town with Sinatra and Gene Kelly,’ Sue explains when they first sit down, ‘and she used to beg to eat here whenever we came into the city. It might not be one of Lennie’s over-priced, over-hyped tourist traps. But there’s a little bit of New York’s history here—and a little bit of mine.’
It is a week since they met at Gramercy Tavern. In that time, with some help from me, the four members of Death Club have thought about each other, gone to sleep with fragments of each other’s stories and felt a peculiar longing for each other’s company, in ways they never would have expected. And though no one is quite sure how it happened, it is Ruby the three original members keep coming back to most of all. So that by the end of the week, Sue can’t stop thinking about how close Ruby is to the age her daughter Lisa would be now if she had lived, rolls the thought around and around until it is shiny, a pearl between her fingertips. Her daughter in New York. Her daughter eating at fancy restaurants and drinking fine wine. Her daughter—but her imaginings are cut off every time, because she does not yet know enough about Ruby, does not know enough about who her own daughter may have become. With so many gaps, Sue finds herself endlessly ruminating, looking for hints, for clues. What does a woman in her mid-thirties make of life these days? Ruby seems to have sprung, fully formed, from Lennie’s forehead, but she must have left a whole life behind. Lovers, family, friends. A career back home in Australia. What movies does she like, what books does she love? What ideas does she have about men?
（If she had lived, who might Lisa have become?）
It took me a little longer to capture Josh’s attention, or rather, to figure out how to direct it. He was not interested in why Ruby came to New York. Did not ponder her living arrangements or how she filled her days, or what she left behind in Australia. Over brunch, he had completely missed the slant of her cheekbones and the map of her mouth, remained unfazed by the smallness of her hands, the way her fingers wrapped around whatever glass she was holding, or her habit of pulling at her earlobe when she was deep in thought. None of this interested him, none of this came home with him when they parted, which wasn’t exactly unusual for Josh, because not much at all about the opposite sex interested him these days. Lennie and Sue were different, he made time for Death Club because he liked the way their minds worked, the things they didn’t shy away from. And because his agent agreed he might get a book out of it someday. Which is how I figured it out in the end. The hook and the reel.
Me.
Riverside Jane.
He had heard about me, of course. But after meeting Ruby, he started paying more attention to the details. And that’s when he began to notice the jogger reference in every blog post or news article he read. The body was found by a jogger. A jogger made the unfortunate discovery, just after 6 a.m. Jogger encounters dead body in Riverside Park. How many times had he read a variation of this sentence and not stopped to think about this ubiquitous jogger, present in so many tales of woe? How, as a writer, had he not considered what finding a dead body must be like, especially if the discovery made the headlines, led to a massive investigation like this one. How odd that Lennie’s new project, this Australian woman she’d insisted he meet, should turn out to be one such jogger. The jogger in fact. Out of this spark of fascination, a small fire for Ruby was started, a wondering, and that is where I came in, tending those flames until they licked at his dreams.
It’s getting easier. How to do it. Because after that last Death Club conversation, I let myself remember something Noah said, one of those things I never understood at the time.