“How did he hurt you?” she asked Miranda.
Miranda wanted to keep the focus on Jill.
“The same way he hurt me?” asked the girl, answering her own question. “The same way he hurt my mother. That’s why I was born, you know. Because he hurt my mother. I wasn’t a love child.”
“I’m sure your mother loved you very much,” said Miranda, feeling the words hollow in her mouth. It was more complex than love.
“Which mother? Molly Bray was my mother. Eleanor Drummond was my mother. Victoria is my mother. You want to be my mother?”
Miranda flinched. “I want to be your friend.”
“Okay,” said Jill. “That’s reasonable.”
Miranda almost laughed. Reasonable wasn’t a word sufficient to the relationship, but perhaps it would do for now. “Tell me about going to the gallery. This was just a few days ago, right?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not listed under your mother’s name. I put a trace on her name and only came up with Griffin’s address here. The gallery was in his name.”
“I think the building was in my name, and maybe the business was in his.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because that’s what she’d do. Because I went through her files.”
“You went through her files! Is that how you found out about Griffin being your father?”
“She wasn’t in her office when I went there. She was in a smaller room at the back of the gallery. She didn’t see me. I went upstairs. As soon as I opened the door, I knew it was Molly Bray’s space, whatever she called herself. You know how everyone has colours? I mean, the decoration wasn’t the same as at home, but I could tell from, you know, the arrangement of things, textures and colours, the feel of the place, that it was hers.
“So I snooped. I found letters. Nothing compromising, but they showed an unhealthy connection between them. So he was a mystery. I couldn’t figure out who he was. But I knew from the way his name was in my mother’s files that he was my father.”
Miranda continued to be amazed by Jill’s use of words such as compromising and unhealthy connection and found herself scrutinizing the girl-woman seated on the carpet in front of her, searching for a sign of childishness to balance the preternatural maturity. But right now Jill seemed composed. “You knew, like there it was, a paternity file?”
“Sometimes a connection that doesn’t make sense, makes sense,” the girl said.
“Point taken.”
“So she didn’t come up to her office for a long time. At first I was just doing research, making mental notes to share with Alexandria. But there was more stuff than I wanted. And then my mother came in. She seemed hurt rather than angry … that I had discovered who she really was.”
“Jill, she was Molly Bray, you know that.”
“Do I? Okay. So you don’t get to be my age without wondering about your parents. I think real kids wonder if they were adopted, or maybe exchanged at birth. In my case it was my mother who was exchanged, and at my birth, not hers.”
Miranda thought of the same quip passing less poignantly between Morgan and her on their trip to Waterloo County. “And you’re not a real kid?” she asked.
Jill ignored her and continued. “I knew, just the way she was upset, that he was my father. Her files were proof positive. She cried. I never saw my mom cry before, and the way she cried, I knew he had hurt her. My father wasn’t a nice man. But there she was, running an office or gallery or whatever. She was his partner. Only I wasn’t part of the equation. I was off living in a bubble in Wychwood Park.”
“She was the one in the bubble, Jill — Eleanor Drummond. When she went home to you and Victoria, that was the real world. She was Molly Bray. That’s what was real. You can see it in the furniture, the art, the loving attention to detail and design in your home. You can see it in you, Jill, how you’ve turned out to be you.”
Jill smiled sweetly. Miranda figured the girl wanted to believe her, needed to reconcile with her natural mother.
“Did she know you thought Griffin was your father?” Miranda asked. “Did you rush over here directly from Yorkville?”
She wanted to let the revelations come without being forced, to suppress the urgency welling inside her, generated perhaps from the inextricable connections between herself and this girl. She wanted to know everything.
Miranda recognized the name of the gallery. She had browsed there a few times, trying to look prosperous, not at all sure she was carrying it off. The staff — they could hardly be called clerks — had treated her with unwavering cordiality. But the time she had gone in with Morgan they were almost obsequious. It must have been the way Morgan subverted snobbery, wearing quality clothes as if he dressed in the dark.
Morgan had almost bought a bronze sculpture, then had decided against it, possibly because they were asking the price of a new condo. She didn’t remember seeing Eleanor Drummond, but then she would have had no reason to deal with management in the little back room with the Salvador Dali on the wall, or in the office upstairs. If they had met, she would have remembered.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?” she asked Jill.
“Nothing happened.” The girl rose from the Gabbeh and started pacing, fingering books on the shelves. Suddenly, she withdrew a fat book and tossed it onto the floor beside Miranda. “Have you read any of these?”
Miranda picked up the book. It was a collection of international short stories. She knew there would be a story by Yukio Mishima. Miranda expected Jill to say the book was her mom’s. She opened the volume to the Mishima story and wasn’t surprised to find that passages detailing the grisly procedures of seppuku had been underlined in ballpoint. With a different pen someone had put a large exclamation mark beside the brief description of the wife’s modest death.
The book felt familiar. Miranda opened it to the flyleaf. “Miranda Quin.” Her name leaped out at her. Underneath were the words “Annesley Hall.”
Grasping for an explanation, she realized this must have been one of the books she had sold when she moved into her apartment at the end of her first year at university. The bastard had followed her, gone through the bins, bought her old books.
She recalled being deeply disturbed back then that her own reading of Mishima’s story, according to her professor, was diametrically opposed to the author’s intent, which had acquired awesome authority by his real-life disembowelment. Seeing into Mishima’s world from such a different perspective had disrupted her moral equilibrium, far more than the obscenity of his pleasure in the details of death. It was a book she had gladly discarded.
“I read that,” said Jill, “about the warrior’s wife.”
Miranda waited for her to continue. Instead she walked to the corridor exit. Miranda assumed she was going to the bathroom. The girl stopped outside the door, waiting for Miranda. Together they went into the bathroom. Jill slumped onto the shower ledge; Miranda sat squarely on the toilet, curious about the unusual intimacy. Jill stared at the drain in the tile floor.
“I was bleeding. I had a shower, and then because I didn’t have a towel I jumped around to get warm, and blood came out, so he gave me a towel and I dried myself off.”
“Griffin?”
“My father.”
“He brought you down here?”
“I came to the front door in a rage, all confused. I didn’t know what I wanted.”
“You