Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz (books to read for teens txt) 📕

sure of myself and a little crass. I had a lot of friends, and then I didn’t, because the eighties came, and people around me started to die. Lovers, friends, the boy genius who lived in the next apartment. They died, and the city lived, and it changed, because surviving changes everything.’

(This, I know.)

‘The city kept moving. I kept moving. New York is made for second chances, Alice. I eventually met someone who knew someone who knew someone, and they introduced me to money. I made a lot of it. Sent it back across the river to my parents. Bought this place cheap from a man who recognised me from my life before. Even when I didn’t recognise myself.’

‘And the girl I remind you of?’ I ask into the silence that follows, feeling we are coming closer to the story now. This night, the Manhattans, have loosened something.

‘Ah, yes. Part of my life on the straight and narrow. A remnant if you will. My daughter would be’—he counts on his fingers, a whole life in his calculation—‘in her mid-thirties, now. Hard to imagine. Half of this life of mine lived over again. I hurt her mother very much, the way you can really hurt someone, which is to not love them the way you said you would. So, she left. Took the kid overseas, and my apology for the complication of my orientation was to let them go, no strings, no ties, no questions asked.’

Noah opens the door and I am standing there with my bags. A little girl turns to see her father one last time. Leaving, and never imagining she won’t ever return to the house with the piano, and the chandelier, will never again see the man who always talks to her as if he is reading her a story. You can’t know how far some goodbyes will take you.

‘Do you regret that?’ I ask. ‘How big your sorry turned out to be?’

Noah tells me he has many, many regrets. That anyone who says otherwise has not lived long enough, or they’ve simply lived too long to remember the truth of things. And, yes, he regrets not knowing his child, not getting to see her grow up. More so now, for getting to know me.

‘I don’t know my father,’ I say, wanting to stitch back together the small hole I have opened. ‘He’s somewhere here in New York. At least I think he is. I know nothing about him, except that he was a photographer, too.’

‘Is that why you came here? To find your father?’ Noah asks, and I sense he is mapping out another daughter’s journey home.

‘No,’ I answer honestly, though I wish, for his sake, I knew how to lie to him. ‘I don’t really think about him. Not in that way. He probably never even knew about me, to be honest. My mom could be like that. I just sort of learned to deal with his absence, you know, until I didn’t notice it anymore. There was no point wishing for what I couldn’t have.’

Later, the simple absurdity of this sentence will reveal itself. I will come to understand that wishing for what you can’t have is a desire strong enough to compel the dead.

‘We’re a pair,’ I say suddenly, on this night when I still have so much to learn, the tang of the Manhattans now an echo in my mouth. ‘Daughterless father, fatherless daughter. If life were a movie, you would suddenly need a kidney, and we would find out—Ah!—that you’re actually my dad. Wouldn’t that be some-thing, Noah. Me showing up on your doorstep, and it turns out it wasn’t an accident. That all along, I was meant to find you.’

I crush another soaked cherry against my teeth, grin red at him.

‘Lord help me,’ Noah says in mock horror, ‘should I find myself responsible for a feral child like you!’

In the next room, on the refrigerator door, the IOUs flutter. Post-it notes documenting my debts. Sneakers. Jacket. Subway fare. And some notes I have added while Noah is not paying attention. There are actually quite a few of these other IOUs collected there now, little messages I’ve left for him, and I don’t know if he ever looks, but the ones I’ve snuck into the pile say: Friendship. Loyalty. Safety. Things like that.

Things I can pay him back sometime.

Because I still think I’m going to make it. On this night of my very first birthday party. I still think there will be a summer and school and people to eat lunch with, me sitting there at the centre of things, laughing, telling stories, making plans. New friendships will grow up around me, a wild garden of them, and it won’t matter when I call Tammy to tell her all about it, that we let so many weeks go by without talking. She’ll be so happy to hear what I’ve been doing, where I am, that she’ll forgive me for not telling her sooner. ‘You did it, Alice,’ she’ll say. ‘You made a life for yourself!’ But I’ll know who really made that life happen, the person I owe it all to. Tonight, at my party, I never doubt there will be enough time to pay Noah back for everything he’s done for me.

Because even when I’m in my mid-thirties, as old as the daughter he said goodbye to, I’ll still have so many years left. I won’t even be close to those 79.1 years promised to me. I’ll be a famous photographer by then; they’ll hang my pictures in galleries around the city, put them on the covers of magazines. And I’ll look after Noah, the way he looked after me. I’ll be the one to keep him safe this time. We have so much ahead of us to be thankful for.

To imagine it any other way would break my heart in two.

I suppose I let my guard down. At the end. When the sky actually did fall. The