Girl One(12)

Wanda leaned over the bed, and something maternal in her posture made my heart ache. “Emily? You have a visitor, baby. Get up and say hello.” She was speaking in that falsely bright voice I’d heard parents use with stubborn children, more for my benefit than Emily’s.

“The birds.” Emily’s voice slid between sleep-tinged and alert. “They’re falling.”

The birds. The bird outside my mother’s house. The crunch of its bones.

Wanda turned and shot me a told-you-so look, as if she’d proved something we’d been arguing about for a long time. “Think you can do anything?”

“Don’t go down into the basement again. Don’t watch her magic. She’s not you.” The way Emily was talking reminded me of our radio back home when it would accidentally pick up truckers or nearby phone calls. Random voices springing into our lives, then vanishing into the static.

I took a step backward, away from Emily. That tangled clump of hair, the smells of a long convalescence, the clunky way her words fit together. Whenever I’d thought about meeting the other Homestead Girls as adults, I’d imagined a sense of finally coming home. We were the Miracle Babies, after all, only eight of us left. An endangered species. A rare breed. What I hadn’t expected was the uneasiness I felt. For the first time in my life, I was the one who didn’t know how to react, staring at her mumbling body the way other people had always looked at me.

Buck up, Josephine, I thought. My full name had always had a galvanizing effect on me. That name, his name. A reminder of where I’d come from.

“You’re no use at all.” Wanda nodded as if she’d summed up something unsurprising but disappointing about me. “Is Margaret coming soon?” She craned to look around me as if my mother might’ve secretly followed me in.

“My mother’s missing,” I said.

Wanda’s expression was blank. “Missing? Like … gone?”

“Exactly that kind of missing. Yeah.”

“But I just met her,” Wanda said, and my heart jumped. “She came by. Real short visit. I was just glad somebody wanted to see Emily.”

“My mother was here?” So Thomas Abbott had been telling the truth; I felt a brief gratitude toward him. “What did she want?”

“Oh, you’d have to ask Emily. Those two didn’t have much use for me.”

“Yeah, but when was this?” I didn’t hide my urgency. “This week? A few days ago? If she was just here, then do you know where—”

“Lord, no, no, two weeks ago now,” Wanda said. “I haven’t seen her since.”

I exhaled, shaky, my deflation keen as an organ collapsing. My mother was one step ahead of me. I had no idea where she’d gone next or where she was now, and I didn’t have the time to stick around and figure it all out—

“Don’t leave,” Emily said.

Wanda exchanged glances with me, as surprised as I was.

“I’ve always wanted to meet you, Josie.” Emily’s eyes were open, startling and alive inside the chalkiness of her face. She sat up and pushed her hair back, tucking it neatly behind her ears. When she smiled, her chapped lips stretched painfully. “The birds, they’re on the ground now,” she said, half a whisper, as if to herself. “So many.”



* * *



Emily didn’t move from the nest of her mattress, so I perched at the end of the bed, legs crossed awkwardly at the knee like I was at a job interview. Wanda had promised to come back to check on us. I wasn’t even sure which one of us was supposed to be reassured by that.

Emily’s oversized Tweety Bird nightshirt kept slipping off one shoulder. She examined me frankly, her eyes roving over my face like she wanted to commit me to memory. “I don’t know how long I’ll be able to talk,” she said. “It’s been getting shorter and shorter, the time I’m awake.”

I cleared my throat. “Yeah, sure, that’s okay. You’ve been sick?”

“Sick,” she said, like she was testing it out. “I guess so. I barely used to notice it. It’s been a lot worse since my mother died.” She didn’t stumble over the word died, didn’t even hesitate. I admired that.

“You’ve been sick for a while?” I tried to remember whether Tami had any kind of congenital illness, a hereditary condition that might’ve been replicated in her daughter’s DNA.

“My mother says it’s the testing that did it.” And there it was, right on the heels of the easy way she’d admitted to her mother’s death. She’d used the present tense just as instinctively. Like Tami was in Emily’s past and present all at the same time.

The testing: back before Bellanger’s death, we’d been subjected to rigorous tests, the whole world watching to see if our small bodies would betray the sordid truth of our origins. I’d revisited the experiments recently, and though their techniques were pretty primitive, the results were definitive. Proof of the impossible, right there in the serology results: all nine mother-daughter pairs with perfectly matching blood types. A taste test had us sipping tiny cups containing phenylthiourea, which tasted either like nothing or sharply bitter, depending on the genetic makeup of your palate. (My mother and I could taste it, a sting to the tongue.) In test after test, each pair was a matching set.