There are lots of people out and about on this clear day, as Noah and Ruby weave around children and dogs and fields with baseball games in their fifth and sixth innings. Ruby is once again struck by the idea that people actually go about their lives up here. Neighbourhoods full of children and families and sports teams and pets, hours spent together in a communal backyard.
They walk past one of the dog runs. Off their leashes, a clamour of pups and old mutts rush around, chasing balls and tails and each other. Ruby stops for a moment at the fence, thinks of me, considers how she might have jogged right past me at this very spot someday. Imagines the striking, yellow-blonde girl calling back a wayward beagle or pug, lunging for a designer leash, dogs circling around her. Noah sees this, too, the might-have-been of this meeting, and gives Ruby a gentle nudge with his shoulder.
They keep walking toward the water.
Both Ruby and Noah grow silent as they approach the little beach. The river is calm today, the view clear across to New Jersey. To Ruby, those wooden posts poking up out of the water still look eerie, a reminder of hidden depths. But aside from these markers, she acknowledges there is nothing extraordinary about this place, nothing good or bad or mysterious. This place would have remained one small, innocuous part of a sprawling city park, were it not for an angry, entitled man, and an April morning when life stopped and started, all at the same time.
‘Are you all right?’ Noah asks, bright, beautiful flowers framing his face.
Ruby nods.
‘I was just thinking. How this place is really nothing special.’ She looks down at a discarded juice wrapper, fluttering on the rocks. ‘I could have run past here a thousand times and never given it a thought.
‘And yet,’ she turns to Noah, her fingers pressed tight around the padlock, ‘this is also the most incredible place. It’s where I found Alice. I felt so guilty at the time. Like I should have done more. But what if I’d kept on running that day? What if I never stopped. Can you imagine what I would have missed?’
‘Can you imagine?’ Noah repeats, before taking one of his roses and tossing it into the river.
They watch as the flower bobs around, a bright yellow star dancing across the murky water. Silently, they throw the remaining roses over the railings, one by one, bright, beautiful colours suffusing the dark surface of the Hudson. As the last of the flowers land on the water, Ruby crouches down and clips the padlock around a wire at the base of the metal railing. Feeling the click as it closes shut, tracing her index finger over the letter A engraved on its shiny surface.
On the path behind them a child shrieks, giggles, and Ruby stands up, takes a deep breath, New York City filling her lungs.
‘Thank you, Alice Lee,’ she says quietly, and then she turns from the rocks, from the river, and walks away.
If I had lived.
The woman sits down on the park bench next to me, tries to catch her breath. She had been running south along the river. Forgetting she would have to double back until she had gone just that little bit too far, almost as far as the Cruise Terminal. Now she’s got her head between her legs, willing everything to slow down, and she might not have noticed me today, but for Franklin sticking that wet nose of his up against her lowered cheek. His welcome sign.
She jerks up at his touch, startled, but then her face softens into a smile.
‘Hey there, young man,’ she says, scratching behind the grinning dog’s ear.
‘Your dog,’ she laughs, turning to me, ‘is quite forward.’
‘Oh, he’s not mine,’ I start to say, but this no longer feels true. Instead, I smile back at her.
‘Yes, Franklin is a true New Yorker. Knows what he wants.’
‘Something I have yet to master,’ the woman responds.
‘Where are you from, then?’ I ask, struck by her accent.
‘Who knows, sometimes,’ she answers, and we look at each other really, truly for the first time. Sky and earth, meeting.
‘I’m Alice,’ I say, holding out my hand.
‘Ruby,’ she responds, our touch a small spark.
‘I just moved here a month ago,’ she continues, and we soon discover we arrived on the same dusky night, on the cusp of the same rainy spring.
‘I ran away,’ I confess, and she tells me she came here to get away from someone. A man.
‘Me, too!’ I exclaim, finally playing the right kind of snap.
‘You did? How old are you, Alice?’ Ruby asks, her eyebrows raised.
‘I’m eighteen. You?’
‘I’m thirty-six. So, you’re exactly half my age, then.’