Confessions on the 7:45(87)

God. What was she doing here? Why had this seemed like the right thing to do?

“I need to talk, Dad.”

He rubbed at his thinning hair. “Selena, it’s the middle of the night.”

She pushed her way into the towering foyer. A pile of mail sat by the door, a stack of newspapers tilted near the table where everyone used to put their keys and pile book bags, purses. The air smelled musty and still, making the inside of her nose tickle. She heard Marisol’s voice: He’s letting the place go. He’s letting himself go. Don’t you care about him at all? I mean, I get it, he’s made some huge mistakes. But none of us is perfect.

She spun to look at him. “This can’t wait, Dad.”

Her father, too, seemed smaller. Always a big man, athletic, powerful, he was suddenly shrunken and gray. His striped pajamas hung off of him. The pocket of his robe was ripped.

Some of the anger she held against him dissipated. Some. Before her was an old man, not the powerhouse he had been. But someone frail and suffering. She told her own boys, Parents are just people. We make mistakes.

Selena often forgot about that when it came to Doug and even Cora.

She softened, put a hand on his arm. “I need to talk to you about Pearl.”

He drew in a breath, closed his eyes a moment. Then he waved her toward the kitchen. She followed him over floors that needed cleaning, into the kitchen, where dishes were piled in the sink, potted plants wilted on the windowsill. Marisol said that the woman he was seeing had moved out a few months ago. I think he’s clinically depressed, Marisol had said. Selena hadn’t even cared enough to call.

“Everything okay here, Dad?” she asked now. There was a smell, something in the garbage.

He looked around at the mess. “The cleaning lady comes tomorrow,” he said.

“The yard’s kind of a wreck, too.”

“I fired the service,” he said gruffly. “They were ripping me off.”

“I can call around for you,” she said. “Find someone else.”

His thinning hair was a wild tangle; he seemed to catch sight of it in the reflection of the window over the sink, moved to smooth it out.

“Did you come here in the wee hours to discuss my home maintenance skills, Selena? Because that can wait until morning.”

“No,” she said. “That’s not why I’m here.”

“So, tell me about Pearl,” he said. “What’s she done?”

She pulled out a stool at the island and her father put on a pot of coffee, while she told him everything that had happened. When she was done, they were both silent. The coffee he brewed and put in front of her was strong. She drank it gratefully, felt the caffeine pulse through her veins.

“I’ve made mistakes in my life, Selena,” he said. “Big ones. I know that won’t come as news to you.”

He’d taken a seat beside her.

“Pearl is my daughter,” he said. “By a woman named Stella Behr. Stella—was a fling, an affair I had when I was married to your mother.”

His candor surprised her. They’d never talked about the things he’d done, or why. She never wanted to hear his side or understand why he’d been the kind of husband and father he’d been. She just wanted to put as much distance between herself and the mess her parents had made as possible.

“I supported the child financially,” he said. “But then Stella was murdered, and Pearl went missing. And it was years before I heard from her again.”

He delivered the information so flatly that she wondered if she misheard him. His indifference now was chilling; Selena shifted away from him.

“I’m sorry—you said her mother was murdered?” she breathed.

“That’s right,” he said, looking into his cup. If he felt anything at all about this, he didn’t show it.

“Who—who killed her?” Selena asked.

He shrugged. “Stella was, you know, a loose woman. There were a lot of men in and out of her life. It could have been any one of those.”

“Did you ever look for Pearl? Or try to find out what happened to her mother?”

“No,” he said. He looked down into his cup. “I was concerned that the police would find out I was her father and come looking for me. But that never happened. My name wasn’t on her birth certificate. And Stella, for a price, promised she’d never tell Pearl who I was.”

Selena thought of Stephen and Oliver, how loved they were, how wanted. She tried to imagine turning away from one of her children. She couldn’t. The silence between Selena and her father expanded. The distance that had grown between them increased. Who were these men in her life?

“When Pearl turned up years later,” he said finally, “I figured she just wanted money.”

“And did you give it to her?”

“I did,” he said. “I paid her a large sum of money with the agreement that she leave me alone for good.”

He paid his daughter to go away—forever. Did that hurt Pearl? Selena called up the memory of Pearl’s face—Martha’s face. Was there pain there, longing? A desire to belong? Is that what drew her to Selena? Was this whole thing just her twisted way of trying to connect, to be part of a family?

“But she was your daughter,” said Selena. “Didn’t you want to know her?”