‘Please go ahead,’ Ruby nods. ‘I need to get going myself, anyway.’
Tom looks disappointed but makes no effort to stop her when she pushes her chair back, stands up.
‘I think,’ she says, ‘I lost track of time.’
‘Well, I’m very glad you did,’ Tom replies, before waving away the cash she attempts to put down on the table.
‘Absolutely not, Ruby. A gentleman always pays. Though perhaps next time we meet in the park, you’ll let me buy you a real drink.’
The suggestion is playful, implicit. He wants to see her again. Ruby feels something pull tight in her chest. The weight, she will think later, of being wanted by the wrong man. For now, she smiles her practised smile and takes Tom’s hand, offered to her across the table.
Strong, warm fingers wrap around hers, squeeze tight.
‘Until we meet again.’ Tom presses down on her hand one last time before letting go. ‘And I meant what I said before. Be careful, Ruby. It’s not as safe out there as it might seem.’
He looks back at her once after they part, turns and offers an exaggerated wave, before taking a set of stairs two at a time, up out of the park, and away. Instead of following him, heading home, Ruby finds herself walking back down to the water, following the winding path until she comes to that little curve of beach again, water slapping up against the rocks.
Lowering her head against the metal rail, Ruby struggles not to cry.
A girl was murdered here in the park. Just a few weeks ago.
I know because I found her.
This is what Ruby could have, should have, said. She should have told Tom the truth about this nice spot down by the river.
But where on earth do you go from there?
She isn’t the only one who has been avoiding the scene of the crime until now. The push-pull for Ruby all these weeks, the coming to the edge of things and then backing away, was me. I kept my hands on her chest, pushed back hard whenever the river called. Because I know how it calls him, too. I see the trail of blood he follows, can hear the rush of it in his ears. He’s careful, of course. Has every reason to be in the park any time he returns to the rocks, no different from any other man on the West Side. This is his backyard, after all. A place he knows.
I’d say I come here almost every day, is how he’d answer, if anybody ever asked.
The truth is, I wasn’t just keeping Ruby from him. When he comes here, when he stands and looks out over the water, I can feel his pleasure, the swell of it in his chest, the fizzing in his fingertips. He bites into the pain he caused, feasts on it as if stripping meat from a bone, tasting those last terrifying moments of my life over and over. It used to overwhelm me.
But I can see him better now, this man. I no longer back away from the world he has created. I’m staying close, as I wait for another chance to bear down, push through. My anger burned bright and fast, that night my name was spoken out loud. It was a brief, beautiful flame. But I’ll get that second chance, I know it.
To make him feel the weight of my remains.
Something Josh left out of the story, when he told Ruby about returning to the scene of his accident. Looking for the tree root that upended his bike, searching for some memory of his pain, and finding nothing was as he remembered it. It wasn’t until he had given up his search, accepted the impartiality of sticks and stones and dirt, that he saw it, gleaming beneath a nest of rotting leaves. The face of his watch, cracked in a hundred places, hands bent and stopped, one on top of the other. As his body hit the ground, the impact must have dislodged it from his wrist, sent the small disc flying. Picking up this remnant, examining the damage, Josh felt a strange kind of relief. He had been looking for proof. Something to validate how totally his world had been rearranged—and there it was. Cupped, now, in the palm of his hand. Passed over in the weeks after his accident, missed by anyone who wouldn’t grasp its significance.
The truth doesn’t always announce itself loudly, see. Sometimes it is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.
If you know what you are looking for.
Sometimes, when Ruby is down at the river, I come sit with Lennie at the mortuary, watching as she tends to her dead. Most of her charges have long since left their bodies behind, but occasionally I can see someone hovering, carefully patting Lennie’s arm, or touching their lips to her forehead as she works. I see the fine hairs on her arm stand up, feel the prickling of her scalp when this happens, and then the person is gone. Her dead girls briefly show up other places, too, following her to restaurants, or standing close by as she scans the racks at her favourite vintage clothing store. I only ever catch glimpses, flickers, but now I know that what Lennie thinks of as her terminal clumsiness, the trips and knocking of glasses, is really just the women who love her accidentally coming too close.