If I had not said anything about my birthday. If I had not gotten on a bus to New York City. If I had not knocked on Noah’s door. If I had not—but it’s foolish to think about these things now. I did not live. Because a certain man had pretended to be someone else for too long, and when he put his hands on me that last morning of my life, it was the truest he had ever been, and if I had not—not—not, it would still be nothing compared to the force of this one man’s revelation.
SEVENTEEN
INTIMACY GROWS EXPONENTIALLY.
Doors unlock, people might pass through them slowly at first, assess their surroundings. But soon enough, windows are thrown open, furniture is dusted off, space is made, and seats are taken. From a slow, careful start, a rapid acceleration occurs. I once had this kind of intimacy with Noah, with Tammy. With Mr Jackson, too. Where suddenly, someone you never knew in the world becomes all you know of the world.
‘I have made new friends,’ Ruby tells Cassie. ‘It only took me seven weeks.’
（And one murder, she silently adds.）
Her sister is relieved. She has been worried about Ruby’s new obsession with death and murder, does not have what she calls the macabre gene, and though she feels bad for what her sister experienced, Cassie’s solution would certainly not include spending hours dwelling on all the terrible things that can happen to women. Making new friends seems like a step in a healthier direction, and Cassie is glad for the opportunity to say yes and actually mean it, the next time their mother asks her whether she really thinks Ruby is doing okay over there in New York City.
An expert in omission, Ruby has not mentioned the specifics of these new friends she has made, or Cassie might pause before answering in the affirmative. Death Club would not, as Lennie might say, be her sister’s cup of tea, and Ruby doesn’t want anything tainting something that suddenly feels so essential. Besides, she reasons, the very existence of Death Club is proof that some conversations are best reserved for the people who understand you. For those who know that proximity to death fundamentally changes you.
Distancing yourself from death changes you too, I could add, thinking of my old friends, what they’ve become.
But I don’t want to give Ruby any ideas on that one.
Here are some things that happen in the week before the next Death Club meeting:
Ruby sees that her local cinema is holding a Gene Kelly retrospective and On the Town is included in the program. Shyly, Ruby asks Sue if she’d like to be her date for the Wednesday night session, and she could almost cry when the answer is yes. After the movie—a light, bright love letter to New York—the pair have a drink in the bar next door to the movie house and talk about Lisa. Sue tells Ruby her daughter was an aspiring actress, spending her summers at theatre camp, winning the lead in every musical since her sophomore year. She was just months off graduating, with plans to attend a performing arts college in upstate New York, when that driver lost concentration and ran a stop sign. Lisa, driving carefully as was her nature, took the full force of the other vehicle.
‘She would be your age now, just over,’ Sue admits this night, and Ruby sees how some grief is fossilised, hardened into stone. This mother will never stop missing her daughter, both as the girl she knew, and the woman she can never meet.
‘It helps to think we might have stayed close,’ Sue says. ‘If you and I can find common ground, become friends—perhaps my daughter would still have wanted me around at this age, too.’ ‘She absolutely would have,’ Ruby says, and means it. They clink their glasses together, and I notice the shimmer of a gossamer thread gently winding around their pinkie fingers, expanding between them as they pull away.
On another night, Ruby and Lennie go to a rooftop bar. There is a swimming pool lapping up to the edges of the patio, and people in expensive-looking clothing stand around in clusters, looking like shiny fruits on a vine. Every so often, one or another drops away, makes for the bathroom or bar to order another round of expensive-looking drinks, their heads turning this way and that, clearly wanting to see and be seen.
‘I brought you here for the view,’ Lennie said when they arrived, and Ruby knew she meant the single men in those clusters, as much as the glittering of Manhattan at dusk. They stood in a corner sipping at their martinis, and talked about many things, but Ruby found she could not form Ash’s name, could not frame the reasons why she barely noticed these men, brushing by in their navy suits and pink-check shirts. The friendship felt too new, too unfolding, to risk Lennie’s potential judgement. And something else, too. She was so used to keeping her relationship with Ash a secret, it almost felt a betrayal to speak about him now. At this time, when she was exposing so much of herself, in the way new friends do, Ash was the one thing she could hold back.