Confessions on the 7:45(97)

She skittered away from him, moving again for the door, coughing. That’s when she saw the blood trailing down the side of his face from a wound on his head.

Standing behind him was a woman she knew.

She held their gun in her slender, manicured hand—the weapon she’d obviously just used to hit Graham in the head. She must have hit him hard, a spray of blood across her blouse. She, too, wore a stunned expression, her breath ragged, hair wild.

Martha. Pearl. Her half sister. The stranger on the train.



FORTY-ONE

Selena

Pearl was saying something that Selena couldn’t make out over the roaring in her head. The unreality of the moment spun and pulled. Was she dreaming? She struggled to hold on to consciousness, the lack of oxygen making her loopy and heavy with a strange fatigue.

Pearl moved in close to her, pushed back a strand of Selena’s hair. Her face—the pale of her skin, the abyss of her eyes. It was so familiar, like they’d always known each other. Selena almost reached for her, and Pearl helped her climb to her feet, the other woman far stronger than she looked. Together, they staggered to the couch. Selena sat heavily, sinking into the softness of the cushion. She could still feel Graham’s hands on her throat, a terrible burning pain, sharp, acidic.

Pearl put the throw blanket on Selena’s lap, staying close.

“Is he dead?” Selena whispered, glancing over at Graham, who lay still on the floor of the hallway.

“No,” said Pearl, but she didn’t seem sure.

Selena kept her eyes on Graham. Pearl still held the gun.

“Why did you do this to me?” she asked Pearl. Her voice sounded faint, breathless. “To us?”

Pearl stayed quiet.

“We would have welcomed you in,” said Selena. She didn’t know if it was true, that she and Marisol would have brought Pearl into their family. If Cora might have accepted her. But she wanted to believe that about herself. That she could have found room in her heart, in her family, for someone who had been so badly wounded.

“No,” said Pearl. She was level. There was no emotion. No heat. A coolness that Selena had sensed in their last two encounters. “You wouldn’t have.”

“How can you say that? You don’t know us.”

“Because I know people,” she said easily. “I would just be a reminder of your father’s flaws, his mistakes, his betrayals. Our father.”

Selena regarded the other woman, still aware of Graham, of the pain that was starting to radiate in her body.

“So then you decided to hurt us,” said Selena. “You didn’t believe you could be a part of this family, so you sought to destroy it. Or what? Is there something else? Do you want more money?”

She took the money from her pocket—a meager couple of thousand—and held it out. Pearl looked at it, a small smile on her face.

“I know it’s not enough,” said Selena. “But I have more. What’s your price? What do I need to do to make all my problems just go away?”

She let the cash drop to the floor and it fell like leaves. It was too late for Selena’s problems to just go away. They were, of course, just beginning. Graham issued a groan from the floor. She fought the urge to go over and kick him hard in the gut. She didn’t have the strength anyway.

Distantly, Selena heard sirens. She wondered if Pearl heard them, too.

“Maybe it was about money, at first,” said Pearl. She sat on the chair across from Selena. “Maybe it was about revenge. Or both. I looked for a way into your life. And I found it.”

Selena pushed herself up, pain rocketing up her neck, down her arms, her back.

“I thought your life was perfect,” Pearl went on. “But it’s not.”

“Far from it,” Selena said.

“Your husband is a bad man, Selena. I didn’t know how bad he was until I started following him. He’s a monster.”

Selena’s head started to clear, the situation coming back into focus. She had so many questions. How had she found her way in? When? Was it Pearl who had been texting Graham? What did Pearl know about Graham that even Selena didn’t know? It all came out in a tumble.

But the sirens were growing louder, and Pearl didn’t answer. She rose and started backing toward the door.

Selena wanted to reach for her, ask her to stay. But she couldn’t. They weren’t friends; they couldn’t be now. Maybe Pearl was right, maybe they never could have been anything to each other but reminders of how flawed life was, how imperfect, how painful.

“Did he kill Jacqueline Carson? Or did you?” Selena managed.

“I’ve never hurt anyone,” said Pearl. “Not like that.”

It was an echo of what Graham had said, both of them qualifying how much pain they were willing to inflict upon others.

“I saw him,” Pearl said. Selena didn’t know who to believe, what to believe. Who hurt who? Who killed who? These were not questions she wanted to be having about her life. “I know what he did.”

“No.” The word came out weak and breathy. It was a single syllable of protest—to all of it.

So many questions. She wanted to know what the other woman had seen, how. She wanted to know everything that Pearl knew. But she barely had a voice. Or maybe, really, she didn’t want to know.

The sirens grew louder. Selena’s phone rang and rang. Graham was still and silent on the ground. Maybe he was dead.