But it’s Ruby he asks to dinner that night. Fumbles with how to contextualise the question, and ultimately settles for this: I have something to tell you about Jane. He doesn’t want her to think it’s a date, yet when she walks into the small Italian restaurant near Lincoln Center, heads to where he is sitting at the bar, he holds out his phone toward her as if it is a bunch of flowers.
My smiling face fills the screen.
‘It’s Jane?’
Gripping the bar stool offered to her, Ruby looks at me, the real me, for the very first time. She has imagined this moment for weeks now. The relief of discovering my identity. It doesn’t feel like she thought it would. The pain, suddenly, has become unbearable.
Jane.
Alice.
Ruby, my name is Alice Lee.
When she says my name out loud for the first time and starts to cry, I want to reach out, tell her I’ve been here all this time. But I cannot make the world move in my direction, not even this tiny corner of it. Were that possible, I would tilt her right into my aching arms.
Knees slanting, coming closer.
They are at another bar now, one of those secret, behind the wall and up the stairs places that never stays secret for long. They share a small couch set behind velvet curtains, the only seating available at this hour, and when they sat down Ruby had a flash of the young couple she saw in that dive bar on the day she found my body. How the girl had her leg draped over the boy, and how pristine their love seemed, glistening in its newness, when she had felt so very tired and afraid. Is it possible she wants that glistening for herself now?
They have talked about me all night long. Passed that photograph of me between them. Imagining a life, sculpting ideas around the few things they know, so that by the third Manhattan—my drink!—they have crafted a dozen versions of me. The memory of cherries in my mouth, I whisper outlandish suggestions to help them along. Girlfriend of a mobster! Heiress on the run! They can’t hear me over the clink of ice cubes, the jazz playing in the background. But I play sculptor just the same. And when Ruby tells Josh she wishes she’d had a chance to meet me, to know who I really was, I wish back just as hard.
Over dinner, Josh admitted he had been investigating the Riverside murder, telling Ruby about the network of friends and industry contacts he’s talked to about me, so that she imagines a map of people across the city, lines connecting pulsing dots all over town. He tells Ruby his interest is clinical, that it’s a fantastic mystery to be solved, but I know the truth. This is his way to her. Ruby Jones. One of the few people to make him feel buoyant again.
I see what happens when he looks at her now. After that night at Oyster Bar, I can see the bright blue light that starts just below his ear. How it curves under his jaw, travels down his neck, and out into his chest, shooting off in all directions. He thinks there is darkness where desire used to be, but he has been looking in the wrong places. His longing resides somewhere deeper, a vivid blue far below his dark thoughts. It’s supposed to feel like this, I want to tell him. It’s supposed to shake you out of that inertia you’re hiding behind. I want to take my index finger and run it from his ear, down his neck and onto his chest. There, I’d need both hands, I’d need all my fingers, spread like arteries, or an explosion. And every place I touched—here, here, here—I’d say: There she is. There is the way she leans forward when she’s listening to you, there is the constant glisten of her eyes when something moves her. There is the curve of flesh under her cotton shirt, and the way she self-consciously pulls at the fabric, unaware that she pulls you in, too.
If the living could see all that light, the city maps drawn under the skin, they’d be awestruck. Looking at Ruby and Josh right now, they’d see how nervousness and anticipation might seem the same on the surface, but they’re so very different at the source. Nervousness is rushing water, river mouths, but anticipation is something far more delicate, little bubbles that go pop, one bright burst after another, until the body is a glass of champagne, a million golden beads of air, rising.
It’s beautiful. To see how much joy the body can hold.
‘My friends back home would not understand me anymore,’ Ruby is saying now, those little beads forming. They are talking about Death Club specifically, and their mutual fascination with death and dying more generally.
‘I’m not even sure they’d like me these days. I might be too … problematic.’
‘I wasn’t the easiest guy to be around after the accident, either,’ Josh admits. ‘Not for anyone who knew me before.’