Confessions on the 7:45(103)

I’m sorry you were hurt.

Cora didn’t know what to say. She, too, felt like she should apologize. Because Pearl had also been hurt. Cora could see that in her. Unlike Cora, who had absorbed blows, and kept quiet all these years, Pearl had struck out in her anger. She’d aimed at her target and hit a bull’s-eye.

You got what you wanted, right? said Cora. Whatever your price was, he paid it. Now leave us alone.

Cora remembered that Pearl looked disappointed. It wasn’t just about that.

No?

I did you a favor, she said, cool and pretty, aloof. One day, you’ll see that.

Now, in her attic office, Selena sought to capture that final encounter between Cora and Pearl on paper. How could Selena describe what that street was like in early fall, her mother’s despair, the beautiful and mysterious Pearl hovering on the street? She remembered how the air always smelled like cut grass, and the blue jays squawked in the trees. She knew what it was like to find yourself face to face with Pearl Behr, who somehow seemed to know more about you than you knew about yourself.

And you know what, Cora told Selena when they talked about that final encounter, Pearl was right. Ending my life with your father was the best thing that ever happened to me, even though it felt like the worst time of my life. I lost everything, but I found myself. I went to work at the shelter, found Paulo.

  Black Butterfly. It was Beth who encouraged her to write the story of Pearl Behr and Grace Stevenson, and how their lives intersected with her own. After two years of research, with the help of Hunter Ross, Selena was nearing the final editorial draft. Beth had brokered a book contract with a major house, and the book was slated to publish next year. What had she been before she met Will, Graham, had children? She was a writer, a dream she let languish and die. Now, through the ashes of her life, she rose.

Write it, said Beth. When we narrate our experience, we take control of it. And in controlling the story of our past, we can create a better future.

  Graham’s trial and conviction for the murder of Jaqueline Carson, his imprisonment, the boys’ therapy, their crushing pain, her own. It had been a long, dark night of the soul where no light was visible at the end of the tunnel. Through it all, she wrote and wrote.

She kept writing as the truth about her husband—all of it—came out.

After years of affairs with coworkers, women he’d met in bars, strippers, and a pattern of escalating violence toward women—the girl in Vegas was just the beginning—the night Selena threw Graham out of the house, he’d killed Jaqueline Carson.

Graham had been harassing Jacqueline via text since she’d gotten him fired from his job. The night Selena hit him with the toy robot, Graham was desperate and enraged, and he’d waited for Jacqueline outside her apartment, forced her inside when she came home, raped and killed her.

He still claimed he didn’t remember the deed, that he couldn’t remember, either, how he tried to kill Selena, his wife and the mother of his children. He’d wept on the stand. And, truly, Selena could see how his rage turned him into a monster, someone she never met until that final night. When he said that he couldn’t remember, she believed him.

But there was video of Graham struggling to put a rolled up rug into his SUV outside Jacqueline’s apartment, captured by a security camera. Later, a picture of him passing through a toll booth on the way to dispose of the body. Finally, a photo of Graham throwing what turned out to be his bloody clothes in a dumpster, apparently taken by Pearl, who was following him.

It still wasn’t clear to Selena how much Pearl had seen—that night or other nights. Why, if she’d followed Graham and knew he was waiting for Jaqueline outside her apartment, she did nothing to stop it.

But this was something that had come up in therapy. Her doctor had said: “You cannot explain or come to understand the actions of deranged people. You can only accept what has happened and try to move forward, grateful that you have survived them.”

And if not for Cora, Paulo, and Marisol, Beth and Will, as well as the resilient strength of her children, she wouldn’t have. And for all her failings, without Pearl, Selena might not have survived Graham.

But she was still writing, still trying to understand, piecing together what she learned from the trial, from the stories of the women who came forward to testify against Graham. She would keep writing until she had told the whole story, the whole truth and all its many facets.

The clock read nearly two, just another hour before she had to pick up the boys from their new school, a tiny private place where they were coddled and sheltered from the ugliness in their world. She answered their questions the best she could, brought to therapy what she couldn’t, promised herself she’d always be honest with them, no matter how much it hurt.

Oliver and Stephen talked to Graham every Sunday. Weirdly, it had taken on a kind of normalcy—they talked to him about school, their friends, soccer. He moderated their arguments, praised them, soothed them when they begged him to come home. Selena had not brought them to see him, though they’d asked. Neither she nor Graham wanted that, not yet. When they were older. Maybe. Selena didn’t think about Graham. Didn’t talk to him. He was more dead to her than if he had died.

Sometimes she dreamed about him, as he loomed over her, crushing her throat and taking the air from her lungs.

The house she’d found for herself and the boys was isolated on five acres of property, not too far from Cora and Paulo, who helped her in every way possible, and closer to her sister’s house. Their relationship had grown stronger, her sister helping with the kids, Selena doing the same for her. As a result, Oliver and Stephen were closer to their cousins. Family gatherings were more peaceful. No more secrets. No more lies.