TWENTY
NOAH WATCHES AS PEOPLE IN UNIFORM FAN OUT THROUGH his apartment, considers the elegance of their movements, their certainty of purpose. The way each member of the investigative unit deftly lifts and dusts and kneels. Alone and all together, a single question in pursuit of an answer. To Noah, observing from his armchair, it looks like a complex, beautiful ballet. Franklin sits mournfully at his feet, unsure of these busy strangers who don’t smile at him, nor his human. All of them overlooking the young girl in the room, watching from her seat at the piano.
Noah went to the police as soon as they released my name. Said he might have details they’d be interested in. Offered up his apartment—‘No warrant necessary’—and consented to the blood tests and swabs, dismissing any offer of coffee or condolence. He was there for one thing, and one thing only. To help them find the man who hurt Alice Lee.
Noah still doesn’t like to think of me as dead.
When I disappeared the very same day they found a young girl’s body in Riverside Park, he refused to think that anything could, or had, happened to me. That first day, he turned away from the sirens and the stories, cancelled all of his dog-sitting appointments, and sat in the living room with Franklin, waiting for me to come home. They sat there together as the hours passed, watching the rain smash against the windows, and they were still there the next morning, this man and his dog, listening for the front door.
When the days passed and that door never clicked open, something in Noah closed down. It was easier for him to believe I had become restless and moved on, than to live with the possibility that those things in the news, those terrible things, had happened to his Baby Joan. For the first time in his life, he chose to look away from the facts, something I never would have imagined. Not from Noah, who taught me about dust and stars. Not from the person who always knew how things worked. When he turned away like that, I mistook what it meant; I thought he shut me out because he didn’t care. He wasn’t the first one to leave me, after all.
Now I see he cared so much that he knew the truth would break him.
He should have gone to the police earlier. Should have accepted what he already knew, deep in his bones, to be true. But know this of my Noah, please. He was not thinking of his own safety when he stayed away. He was only ever thinking of me.
Perhaps I should have understood this earlier, too. That he was never going to be like the other men in my life. That I was right to believe in the kindness of strangers. My lack of faith helped keep us apart after I died—but I’m here with him now. Watching as those investigators examine my stack of IOUs, taking the post-it notes down from the refrigerator door, reading them one by one, all the little promises I left behind. A single blue note flutters to the ground, and a young officer bends to retrieve it. Girl Things, it says, a badly drawn smiley face in place of the full stop. $9.87. Recurring. Noah cannot read the note from where he is sitting, but he can see the officer pause, look up at the ceiling, the small piece of paper pressed to his chest. Noah already knows what each of these IOUs say, has memorised every good intention I left behind, and he feels a sudden, fist-tight clench where he knows his heart to be. Recurring. The writer of that note thought she had months and years ahead of her. She had plans.
‘Baby Joan,’ Noah says softly, reaching for the note. Funny, sweet, uncouth Alice, in love with New York like the city was a person, and completely ignorant of her poetry.
‘Is this middle C, Noah?’
He hears me ask this, that last night we had together. Clanging down on the piano key as he nodded from this same armchair, muttered something about how noisy I had become, and I had wrinkled my nose at him, laughed, thumping down on as many keys as my fingers could touch.
‘Please stop!’
And now there is a rasping, wheezing sound filling the apartment, sliding down the walls. The lifting and dusting and kneeling ceases, everyone stops what they are doing, orients toward the noise emanating from the armchair in the living room. It is the sound of a man unaccustomed to weeping, as great, wracking gasps shake through his body for the first time in his life. Franklin whines, pushes his nose against Noah’s leg, knowing something has gone very wrong here. Wondering why I am not moving from my seat at the piano, why I’m not coming over to comfort them both. The dog turns from Noah and looks right at me, his chocolate eyes pleading. I push down on middle C, as hard as I can, and he barks.
Good boy, Franklin. Good boy, I whisper, but I cannot be heard over the sound of Noah’s sobs. The investigators gather around him, their well-practised dance interrupted by the rawness of this grief. Everything I owe this man sits, sealed, in plastic bags on the kitchen table behind them. The brief story of my life in this apartment, this city, and the simple promise of that word.