Girl One by Sara Flannery Murphy
To my parents, for everything, for always
1
April 24, 1972
My dearest Josephine,
I’ve just taken a call from President Nixon, who asked me to pass on his fondest birthday regards to you. Right now, I’m in my hotel room in New York City. (The Pierre, can you imagine? Last time I was in the city, I stayed in a closet and counted roaches scuttling across the ceiling.) Strangers have stopped me on the sidewalk to ask that I wish you a happy first birthday. Yet all I want right now is to be with you, little one. Back in Vermont, surrounded by wilderness, the two of us picking wild marigolds and watching the clouds.
Every proud papa believes his child is singular and astonishing, but in my case, it’s the truth. Your birthday will forever be remembered as the anniversary of humanity’s greatest scientific breakthrough. I’m ever so sorry to miss our big day, but I hope you will instead accept this letter, scribbled on this beautiful hotel stationery in my clumsy handwriting. So many words will be written about the two of us over the years, by so many people, but today I want you to have something private. Just for you.
Tonight, I will dine with the very men of science who used to snub me, and they will toast me. Us. One day, you’ll understand just how bitterly I fought for your mere existence. But no words of praise can ever be as sweet to me as the sight of you. Ten fingers and ten toes, each one miraculous. Happy Birthday, Girl One.
Your loving father always,
Joseph Bellanger
2
April 15, 1994
I learned about my mother’s disappearance from the evening news. I looked up from my textbook when I overheard my surname and recognized the exact cypress tree that grew outside my bedroom window. From that point on, my life turned into a stream of simple equations. How long my mother had been missing (one day). How long since I’d had an actual conversation with her (just over a year). The cost of a bus ticket back to Coeur du Lac, my adopted hometown ($15). The amount left in my bank account after spending fifteen dollars ($110.67). How doomed I would be if I abandoned Chicago for longer than three nights (very: I had four exams looming within the next few weeks).
For a while I lost myself in these calculations and the illusion of stability they offered. This was my standard coping mechanism: turn everything into problems on a checklist to be neatly solved, then filed away. If I pulled it off just right, I could focus on the question of how many pairs of jeans to pack (three) and keep my growing panic at bay.
But when I arrived back in Coeur du Lac, Illinois—Heart of the Lake, with no lake and no discernible heart—I stood in front of the shell of my childhood home in the balmy twilight and everything in me crumpled. Something bad had happened here. Something bad had happened again, and this time it involved my mother.
The footage on the news and the photos in the papers hadn’t prepared me. The wreaths of yellow caution tape around the porch railings looked weirdly festive, like an interrupted birthday party. The porch still stood, but a narrow gash through the living room wall exposed blackened brick, hanging guts of insulation, snaky wires. The rest of the house looked more or less the same. That was almost worse: the untouched parts. I took a deep, shuddering breath.
The house felt both totally vulnerable and like a fortress. Thanks to my mother’s long-standing paranoia, there was no spare key hidden near my home. I went around to the side door and tried the knob. Locked, of course. A small window was set into the door. My mother kept the glass panes covered with a frilly gingham curtain, more for the privacy than for any kind of aesthetic value. She’d hated that window, always eyeballing the distance between the pane and the doorknob, forever imagining a fist smashed through the glass, a hand reaching for the lock. I’d dutifully shared the fear as a little kid, but as a teenager I’d finally snapped. “Who even wants to get in here, Margaret?” I’d demanded, world-weary, contemptuous. “There’s never anything going on in this house.”
I stepped back now and examined the wilderness at the sides of the house, looking for a likely candidate, my pulse already surging with what I was about to do. Everything was weedy and overgrown, thistles blooming to calf-height. I grabbed a large rock, tested its weight in my palm with a few quick bounces. Good enough. Feeling wild, like I was inside a dream, I brought the rock hard against the glass: once, twice, watching the glass splinter into a spiderweb of cracks. The glass was cheap and brittle, hadn’t been replaced since we’d moved in seventeen years ago. It shattered with a satisfying clatter. Then I sobered up, looking around. The block was dark and empty in the rapidly spreading dusk. Our street had always been lonely, occupied by a steady stream of short-term renters, our two-person household the only stubborn fixture.
I snaked my arm through the hole, avoiding the jagged crust at the edges. For a second the realization that I was vandalizing my own house hit me with a lurch of guilt. I was doing exactly what my mother had worried about, all those years. But screw it. The whole house was so ravaged that this broken pane didn’t matter. I’d replace it for my mother myself. I’d replace every window in the house if I just found her safe.
Grappling for the doorknob, I felt the familiar wedge of the lock and twisted it. So many times I’d clicked that lock into place before bedtime, double-checking it to quell my mother’s nervousness. Withdrawing my arm, I stepped into my house, glass crunching under my soles.