by John Moss
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 got the address from your mother’s files?”
“I practically ran from the subway, and when he answered the door, he didn’t look like my father. I could hardly breathe. He knew who I was. He brought me down to the den. I kind of walked around. He watched me. Neither of us had anything to say. What do you talk about when you first meet your father, like, when you’re already grown up?”
Grown up? Miranda at about the same age had lost her own father, and there were parts of her that would never grow up.
“I kept mumbling ‘bastard,’ over and over, so I guess I did say something. Bastard, bastard.” She seemed almost amused. “I didn’t know if I meant him or meant me. He asked if I wanted to see his fish.”
“His fish!”
“I think I screamed. He brought me into the cellar. He didn’t drag me, but he made me walk through the big door.”
“Into the old part?”
“Yeah, in through there.” She got up and thrust out her trembling hand to Miranda. “Come with me.”
They pulled the huge door open and entered what seemed even more than previously like a vast and intricate crypt. Jill’s grip was as dry as soot, but her forehead glistened. They walked slowly, purposefully, the girl feeling her way into the past. “Here,” she said, stopping in front of the wine cellar.
“Here?” Miranda was puzzled and apprehensive. “It’s locked.”
The girl reached overhead into the deep shadows of the joists above one of the dangling light bulbs and took down a key. “He didn’t care if I saw where he kept it. It didn’t make any difference.”
When the thick thermal door swung open, revealing on the other side a dented sheet-metal panel, the looming darkness was palpable. Miranda hesitated, then reached for the external light switch, but it flicked against her finger with no effect.
“Here,” said Jill, “let me do it. It’s tricky.”
The girl fiddled with the switch, a loose connection made contact, and an austere vault gaped radiantly behind the shower curtain with the wine cellar motif. Miranda stepped forward, pulled the curtain aside, and gasped with a sharp intake of breath that for a moment wouldn’t release so that she felt asphyxiated. The chamber contained no racks of fine wine but, instead, a bed, larger than a cot but not full-size, made up with a pillow, flannel sheets, and a blanket. A wooden chair, a small table, and a stainless-steel bedpan on the floor by the table were also in the room. Two bright lights were recessed into the ceiling. It was a cell.
Miranda turned to look behind her at Jill. The girl was fingering the shower curtain.
“This
is the privacy barrier,” Jill said. “He didn’t care if you ripped it down, but you didn’t. It was all you had.”
“Jill, what do you mean ‘you’? I need you to explain. Were you a prisoner here?”
“Yes.”
Horrified, Miranda stared at her. The girl’s face was expressionless. They sat side by side on the edge of the bed, then Miranda stood, moved over to the chair, and took a seat facing Jill.
“Is this where he …” She wanted to avoid the brutality of a certain word.
“Is this where he …” The word rape was hard and trite and ominous. “Is this where he did things … to you?”
“Yes.”
“He made you bleed?”
Jill looked into Miranda’s eyes.
“He fucked me.” Miranda reached out to her, but the girl didn’t respond. “He kept you prisoner here?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“Until my mother came.”
“How long was that?”
“Maybe three days. I slept a lot. I slept when he wasn’t here, and I read.”
“Did he come back? Did he do it more than once?”
“Yes.”
“How many times, Jill?”
“I don’t know. Three times, five times? He let me go in and take showers. One time he watched. The next time he left me alone, but I couldn’t leave. The exit doors were locked. He had the key, so I came back to my room.”
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“Jill, did you make the bed like this?”
“Yes.”
“Before your mother came?”
“No, after.”
“Where was Griffin when she came?”
“He was dead.”
“How do you mean?”
“You know, not breathing. Lying very still. Dead.”
“Where?”
“In the den.”
“In the den?”
“She came and got me out. I tried to shout where the key was through the door. She couldn’t hear me, but she knew where it was, and she unlocked the door and got me out.”
“And he was in the den and he was dead?”
“He called me Shiromuji. He said it’s a kind of fish. He said I wasn’t his real daughter. That things didn’t work like that. He told me he fucked my mother. I tried to scratch him. He said she was a girl like me, only she was better. She was only a girl. He said he liked her better, but I was okay. He said Shiromuji means you’re only okay. I was too young, he said. I wasn’t purebred, he said. I said, ‘That’s because you’re my father.’ He laughed at me. We both laughed. He called me his Shiromuji girl. I think he liked me. He just didn’t want to say it. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t have the right words.”
“Jill, when you went out into the study, where was he?”
“He was lying on the floor, on the carpet.”
“On the carpet that’s out there now?”
“No, on the thick one with all the colours.”
“The rug at your place by the front door?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you take it home?”
“Because … it had blood on it, just little specks, and they came off. But my mom didn’t want to leave it, just in case.”
“In case what?”
“Well, she killed him.”
“She killed him?”
“We couldn’t just leave him lying there.”
“He didn’t die from a blow, Jill, not from bleeding.”
“No. He died from sleep apnea, my mother said. Only Molly Bray helped him along. When he died, he slipped off his chair and bumped his head a little. There wasn’t much blood, but my mom’s fastidious.”
“Yes,” said Miranda, enjoying the girl’s vocabulary in spite of the gravity of their conversation.
“Can you die from sleep apnea?”
“You can,” said Miranda.
“Especially since he took Valium and he wasn’t used to it. It would relax his throat muscles. It’s possible if he already had problems. Yes, he could die that way.”
“Sitting up in his chair?”
“Possibly.”
“She said she held a pillow over his face. He didn’t struggle or anything. He just, you know, expired.”
Miranda thought it was more likely that Griffin had been stretched out on the sofa, possibly with his legs up over one end and his head low on the cushions. If he had truly suffered from apnea, he probably didn’t need help dying.
Perhaps Eleanor or Molly — she wasn’t sure whether they were separable at that point — just said she had smothered him. Maybe he was dead when she arrived and she hadn’t come to find Jill at all. Perhaps when she discovered Jill, she needed to murder a man who had already “expired.” She needed to take responsibility for what he had done by co-opting his death as murder.
“Jill, how did your mother know you were here?”
“My cigarettes. There was a package out on the table. He wasn’t a smoker. He bought them for me. He let me smoke in the bathroom. I don’t really like smoking. It’s just to bug my mom. In here it made her seem close, knowing she’d really be, you know, pissed off. Did you ever listen to a Zippo? Clickety-click-click. Like a gun. Very Quentin Tarantino.”
“You like guns?”
“No. That’s why I carry a lighter.”
Jill reached for the lighter in her pocket, then realized she had lost it. “I think smoking’s dumb really. I’m giving it up.”
“For your mother’s sake?”
“No, it’s just dumb. It wasn’t that big a deal between us. But she saw the cigarettes and figured I must be here, since she thought that was what our fight was about. You know, about smoking.”
“But it wasn’t?”
“No.”
“Did she know how much you saw in her files?”
“She knew I discovered who she was. She didn’t know I had discovered who I was! She didn’t know I knew about him.”
“Did you and your mother have lots of fights?”
“I think it was because we’re the same. It’s easier when you’re different.”
“You know that from your research?” asked Miranda, smiling.
“No, just from life. It’s something I’ve learned. It’s harder to be the same than different.”
“I’ll have to think about that.”
“Okay.”
“Wasn’t your mother worried if you were away for three days?”
“Yes, she was. And no.”
“Explain.”
“I’d run away before. I lived at a Sally Ann hostel one time for a week.”
“What did she think of that?”
“It terrified her, me being on the street. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t walking the streets, or streetwalking. I was living with the Salvation Army, for God’s sake.”
“So to speak. She must have been worried sick.”
“I guess that was the point. But when I realized how much, I felt bad.”
“Bad, as in wicked? Or badly?”
“Both. You like words, just like me and my father. I promised her I’d never do it again. She should have known I wouldn’t.”
“Jill, your mother might not have killed Robert Griffin.”
“I didn’t do it. I was locked up in here.”
“No, no. It’s just that he might have, well, let himself die.”
“She said he didn’t struggle.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“She didn’t want anyone to know she did it except me. She said the police would find him. They’d think it was suicide, especially if they didn’t know we’d been here. She left me with his dead body. I sat beside him on the floor. He didn’t seem like my father and yet he did. She came back with the long carpet from the hall upstairs. She said we’d have to hurry. It was almost time for the old woman next door to switch from spying out front to spying from her attic at the back. Before we rolled him up she turned on an air bubbler thing
that was on the bar. It’s for fish. And she really gently put the tube in his mouth and blew air in until he burped. My mother said she didn’t want him sinking out there — polluting and killing the fish.
“So we rolled him sideways in the underpad. My mom said it was top quality, or it wouldn’t take his weight, but we didn’t need the rug like she’d thought. So we carried him out through the big doors, sort of lifting him over the sill, and then we hauled him over to the pond in broad daylight, holding his weight off the ground so we wouldn’t leave marks. Then we slipped him in. One big fish, all brassy and crinkly, came up too close just to watch, and Mr. Griffin, my dad, landed right on top of him. Mom said it would be okay. It would just go to the bottom for a while.”
Miranda listened as the gruesome account fell open before her in the strange, dispassionate voice of a young girl talking about her family reunion.
“So then we went home.”
“That was it?”
“Well, my mom spread out the carpet from upstairs on the floor, and we took that other one. It’s called a Gabbeh. She placed books, big ones with pictures of koi, open on the sofa. She took the Gabbeh and its underpad to the car —”
“And the pillow?”
“The one she killed him with. We took it. She rolled it up in the underpad, which wasn’t that smudged from the grass and flagstones, and we threw them into a dumpster on the way home. Oh, yeah, before we left she sent me back in here to clean up this room. That’s when I made the bed. And I took the book back out to the den and put it in the bookshelf where it belongs.”
“The short-story book? He let you read?”
“Yeah, I told you. Mostly, the lights were on full blast. But I slept a lot, anyway. She was outside already, so I locked the door. Then we went home.”
“And you forgot your cigarettes?” Eleanor Drummond must have created the inept smoking business as an excuse to tuck the pack into her purse. She didn’t want anybody to know Jill had been there.
“Yeah, I guess I did. And I lost my lighter. Maybe at the morgue. It wasn’t for smoking, just a souvenir.”