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

for all you would change about yourself? After his wife left, he packed up what was left of desire, hid it away in the black. Content, he thinks, to leave it there.

(He doesn’t say any of this out loud, of course.)

Amongst the group it is clear that Lennie is the warmth, the home fire. I see bright oranges and golds spark from her fingers, settle on the shoulders of her friends when she talks, relaxing muscles, loosening bones. She has always had this gift, a kind of radiance soaked in by the people around her, from those doting waiters Ruby noticed their first supper after the PTSD meet-up, to Sue and Josh now, any tensions they brought to the table sliding off them as the evening progresses. Ruby cannot see the glow, but she too feels it; despite the intensity of Death Club’s conversations, she soon feels relaxed for the first time in a very long while.

I, on the other hand, cannot relax. On the contrary. I feel a growing sense of anticipation. Waiting as the group comes up against the single question that I want them to ask tonight, watching as they back away from it every time.

What happens after you die?

I could tell them, over this table cluttered with wine glasses and brightly coloured, half-eaten food, that you are indeed aware when it happens. I could explain that the black Josh can remember from the accident is simply where it begins. Death. It doesn’t happen all at once. We are not a switch flicked, a power source turned off. You are still right there at the start, as the pain intensifies, a string plucked over and over, pulled so tight that you flame under the skin, and it’s only after that—I don’t know if it’s choice or necessity at this point—you begin to leave your body. You retreat from the agony and the fire, and when you find yourself in the black, you know, instinctively, that you need to pass through it. The black is your waiting room, a brief pause in the night of your existence, before you stumble forward, searching for walls, a door, to get out. By then, nothing they can do to your body hurts you. Not in the sense of nerve and sinew and bone.

But you are definitely aware that you’re dead. It’s what happens next that I still don’t understand.

Josh came back. I did too, somehow. I know there are others, somewhere in this new distance made of space and time, who do not come back, people who quickly move on. More and more, I can sense their departure, like the click of a shut door, but I don’t know where they go, these dead who do not live here anymore.

What happens if you don’t follow them? What happens after you die, if you’re still aware? Josh had to learn how to walk again, after spending time in the black. Does that mean I can learn to speak and touch and be heard again, too? Do I get to send out that last human flare, to show Ruby I’m still here?

The way I see it, Death Club holds the answers. The truth will reveal itself, soon enough. As long as these four questioning minds, these four sets of past experiences, future hopes and current complications, keep pressing their noses up against death, keep trying to break through the glass.

With Ruby there in the middle.

And me, their fifth member, waiting on the other side.

Best Death Club ever!!! Josh has never talked so much about the accident. And Sue—OMG she loved you! Her turn to host next, will send you the details asap. Thank you. Mwah xoxox

Lennie’s text comes through early the next morning. Ruby, half asleep, smiles as she reads the message.

Ask if the dead can talk to us too, I whisper in her ear. But she has already gone back to sleep, my words sounding like the soft metal clang of the venetian blinds against her open window.

Sue chooses Patsy’s as the next Death Club destination, an Italian restaurant on West 56th where Frank Sinatra used to dine at his favourite table back in the day.

‘Lisa’s favourite movie was On the Town with Sinatra and Gene Kelly,’ Sue explains when they first sit down, ‘and she used to beg to eat here whenever we came into the city. It might not be one of Lennie’s over-priced, over-hyped tourist traps. But there’s a little bit of New York’s history here—and a little bit of mine.’

It is a week since they met at Gramercy Tavern. In that time, with some help from me, the four members of Death Club have thought about each other, gone to sleep with fragments of each other’s stories and felt a peculiar longing for each other’s company, in ways they never would have expected. And though no one is quite sure how it happened, it is Ruby the three original members keep coming back to most of all. So that by the end of the week, Sue can’t stop thinking about how close Ruby is to the age her daughter Lisa would be now if she had lived, rolls the thought around and around until it is shiny, a pearl between her fingertips. Her daughter in New York. Her daughter eating at fancy restaurants and drinking fine wine. Her daughter—but her imaginings are cut off every time, because she does not yet know enough about Ruby, does not know enough about who her own daughter may have become. With so many gaps, Sue finds herself endlessly ruminating, looking for hints, for clues. What does a woman in her mid-thirties make of life these days? Ruby seems to have sprung, fully formed, from Lennie’s forehead, but she must have left a whole life behind. Lovers, family, friends. A career back home in Australia. What movies does she like, what books does she love? What ideas does she have about men?

(If she had lived, who might Lisa