said after a long time had passed, “I need you to tell me about it.”
“You knew him before?” Jill asked in a conspiratorial whisper. “Like before he died?”
“Yes, I did. I was a girl your age …” She didn’t know how to avoid the euphemism. It was more honest than anything she could think of. “When he came into my life.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“Yes, I think he did very much. He hurt me more than I understood, perhaps more than I understand even now.”
They were sitting now, facing each other on the Kurdish runner, hunched forward like girlfriends.
“Did he hurt you, Jill?”
“He hurt my mother. Did you know she worked for him? She had an office and managed his money. Not the money he had invested — you know about that. It was money he used for buying things and running his life. She looked after him.”
“Do you know where her office was?”
“I could find it. It’s over a fancy gallery in Yorkville. I was only there once. That’s when I discovered she called herself Eleanor —”
“You knew at the morgue! Of course you knew.”
“Only after I followed her. I just found out.”
“You followed her?”
“We had a really bad fight. She caught me smoking with my friend Alexandria. She said I couldn’t see Alexandria for a month, like that was worse than being grounded. The fight was about that, more than about smoking. I mean, she knew I wasn’t really a smoker.”
“Did she ever smoke?”
“My mother? Are you kidding? She was death on tobacco. She had what I’d call a counter-addictive personality.”
“You would?”
“No way she’d give up control, not to a vice, not to a pleasure.”
“Where did you come up with ‘counter-addictive’?”
“We looked it up, Alexandria and me. We researched our parents.”
“Okay. So you had a fight. And you skipped school and followed her to work.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I was researching, like I said. There was a picture in the paper. I wasn’t supposed to see it, so I knew it was important. She threw it out without reading it, so I dug it out of the garbage. There was a picture of her with some guy I’d never heard of.”
“Robert Griffin?”
“Yeah. She was in the background, but you could see there was a connection between them. Well, it said she was Eleanor Drummond and she managed the Gryphon Gallery. Surprised much? So I didn’t exactly follow her. I just went there. Anyway, he paid a huge amount of money for a paddle with some writing on it.”
“Rongorongo, does that sound familiar?”
“Yeah, maybe. So suddenly I discover she has a whole other life.”
“To protect you, Jill.”
“A life without me. Maybe it was. I think it was. I think she needed to keep me away from him.”
“What happened?”
The girl glanced over her shoulder toward the corridor into the bathroom and cellars as if she were expecting someone to appear. Then she looked back at Miranda. “He was my father. Did you know that?”
“Yes, I think I did. When did you find out?”
“When I went to my mom’s office … to Eleanor’s Drummond’s.”
“Are you mad at your mother for being someone else?”
“Yes.”
“Is that why you won’t let yourself grieve?”
Jill stared at her intently. She seemed relieved to be sharing her secret world and, at the same time, angry that her secrets were being exposed.
“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.
