Girl One(119)

“I’m here to get you out. But you have to tell me, Mom.” The word Mom felt so right, clicking my world back into a recognizable pattern. “What was he planning to do to us?”

She searched my eyes. “He didn’t tell you. Of course not. That fucking coward.” She exhaled heavily. “Joseph wants to find the others. All of you Girls. Bring you back together again, on his terms. He’s fixated on the fact that you’re returning to his work, Josie. It hurts his pride to see you getting all the attention. I don’t think he predicted the possibility that you would displace him. He thought we’d just vanish once he abandoned us. And now he wants you to be the next phase of his experiment.”

My blood ran cold. Not the scientist, then, but the guinea pig.

My mother continued, “He’s been trying on the women here and it hasn’t worked. There’ve been so many losses. So much blood and pain. Terrible problems. He can’t do it.”

My lower belly cramped, an awareness of my dormant uterus. The size of a fist. His offer to make me his successor had been an empty ploy—his brusque examination of Isabelle, sizing up her body, was closer to the truth. It’d been a long time since I’d been the subject. That Bellanger would do this to me—that he saw me as a means to an end, saw me no differently than the men in Kithira had—

“But Fiona,” I managed. “She’s pregnant. It worked with her.” Half a question.

“Yes,” my mother said, urgent. “Exactly. Fiona’s pregnant, and only Fiona. He’s convinced that he can only create virgin births in certain bodies. Our bodies. The nine bodies he lost. And how does he get those bodies back? Through—”

“Through the daughters,” I finished for her.

“Exactly.”

I’d seen our mothers’ past resurrected in our identical bodies over and over during the past few weeks. The heartbreak and disgust hit me so hard that for a second my own body was heavy around me. Bellanger hadn’t wanted my brain or Cate’s heart. He only wanted what lay inside us, all the tangled hope and beautiful fearsomeness of our interiors. I knew how much people wanted to control what we held inside ourselves, and how much people feared it running wild.

I’d feared it too. I’d wanted to control it too.

“Why did you never tell me about him, Mom?” I heard my childhood self creep into my voice, that old sadness and earnestness. “I know everything now. If you’d just trusted me sooner—”

“Joseph had such a hold over you. He was cradling you in his arms before the umbilical cord was cut. That was the first time I really thought: What have I done? I was so na?ve.” Her voice dropped lower. “I hurt those women. The Mothers. I brought a wolf right into our midst. The guilt nearly drove me crazy sometimes. What he did to Patricia Bishop, especially…” In the flickering light of the votive candle, she flushed. “He was so cold to her. He was jealous of her, knew how important she was to me. Bellanger took every opportunity to make her feel excluded.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about you and her?”

“Back then it wasn’t so easy to be open about loving another woman. But Bellanger knew. He dangled it over my head that he could always tell the press about our relationship. It could’ve made it much harder to fight his custody claims, if he decided he wanted you or Isabelle. I just learned to keep quiet. I didn’t want to expose Trish like that.”

“But you could’ve told me,” I said. “He was dead, as far as we knew.”

“You were just a kid, and it was hard on you, and I—I felt so guilty for abandoning her. I could barely let myself think about it. Then years pass, and it’s easier to just let things lie, and suddenly you’re turning into a young woman who’s starry-eyed over Joseph. Just like watching a younger version of myself brought to life. When I pushed back, I came across as bitter. I’d done so much to have a daughter of my own, and here I was, with a child who loved her fake father more than me.”

I began to protest, then realized how flimsy and insulting it would sound. Any time my mother had even brushed against a disapproval of Bellanger—even her silence, the absence of praise—I’d been a little more willing to see her as resentful, sour, unable to appreciate his glowing greatness.

I fumbled in the dark for her hands and traced the hinge of her fingers.

“Even your name,” my mother went on. “He asked me to name you after him, and how could I say no? He’d helped us. So you were Josephine. His namesake. I’d wanted to give you the name Trish and I loved the most.”

“Isabelle,” I said softly. At some point, I’d have to tell my mother about Patricia’s death, but not now. Not while she was this vulnerable. “But in the end, he never wanted any of us except Fiona,” I said.

“His want is a dangerous thing,” my mother said.

“I thought you were the one who killed him. I thought you burned the whole place down.” That image of my mother that had haunted me for weeks: her eyes shining as we ran, that wild joy.

“I wanted to,” my mother said. “I could see a future where all nine of you belonged to him. Destroying the whole damn place seemed like the best way, but I couldn’t do it in the end. It was a relief when the fire happened anyway. We could start over. Anywhere at all. I thought I was protecting you by never revisiting the past, but my silence only protected Joseph. Josephine, I failed you.”