Girl One(14)

“Look at this.” Emily lifted the hem of her nightgown up her thigh. Her unshaved legs were downy in the sunlight. I blushed, throat warm, then realized what she meant to show me. A square of flesh, bubbled and shades lighter than the skin around it. A skin transplant. My shyness was swiftly replaced by curiosity. “Like yours,” Emily said.

She gazed at me expectantly, and I rose, unbuttoned my jeans, and pulled them down just far enough to reveal my own small patch on my upper thigh, the size of a postage stamp, that had begun its life on my mother’s body. I’d had it since I was five years old. Emily leaned in close. “These other men, these, uh, doctors and researchers—they were imitating Bellanger’s skin graft?” I asked.

“Yes. One of them gave me the surgery a few years ago.” She reached out one finger and traced the border of my scar, intent and delicate. I waited a second, my blush deepening, then hitched my jeans back up.

Emily’s scar looked painful to me, clumsily transplanted. Back when we were little, my mother and I had received twin skin grafts under Bellanger’s supervision. Proof to the world that I was genetically identical to my mother. No father’s influence to react against her DNA. Under normal circumstances, my body would’ve rejected the foreign graft, but there was nothing foreign about my mother’s skin. My body already knew hers. We were the sole guinea pigs for this method; the skin graft operation was too risky to repeat on the younger Girls. This had made me incredibly smug when I was little. I bragged about it to the younger Girls, showed the scar to any journalist or reporter who was willing to look, until my mother told me in no uncertain terms to stop.

But now, years and years later, another Girl had undergone a graft too. I wasn’t the only one anymore. I imagined the matching scar that must be on Tami’s thigh, underground in a coffin. I wondered where my own mother’s matching scar was, right at that moment, and my stomach clenched.

“I saw you in the paper,” Emily said. “You’re becoming a doctor too?”

“Oh, I’m not like those men,” I said quickly. I was used to explaining my ambitions to professors, to colleagues, to reporters. I’d cataloged the whole range of reactions. The people who congratulated me, both sincere and fake, who lectured me or condescended to me, who doubted me or laughed at me. Those last were my favorites, the ones I could defy. But Emily French just looked at me like she was disappointed in me. There’d only been one other person to react like that so far. My mother.

I had to get to the point. “Emily, I know you saw my mother recently.” Pulling the notebook out of my back pocket, I flipped to the list of names. “I need some help here. What did she want from you? Do you know where she is?”

Emily didn’t react for a few seconds. It was like the soundtrack of a movie falling out of sync with the visuals. “Your mother disappeared?” Her voice sounded dreamy, more like the voice I’d heard when I first entered the attic. “So did mine.”

“I know, and I’m sorry. But look: My mother was interested in Fiona. Our Fiona.” The possessive came easily. “Do you know what she meant by this? Tell the world.”

Emily leaned back on the bed, her knees tenting her nightshirt so that the fabric lit up, translucent with sunlight. “Your mother came and sat by my bed. Just like you.”

I saw myself inside a perfect outline of my mother, the echo left behind.

A sludge of sleep worked its way in at the edges of Emily’s voice. “She remembered things about the Homestead. The little red cup I liked to drink out of. And the cats that would come around, and how our mothers always fought about whether to feed them.”

“So she wanted to reminisce.” A funny sour feeling grew inside my chest: jealousy. I’d never really had to share my mother with anyone else. “Did she say anything about birds?” I asked.

Emily didn’t seem to hear, her gaze blank.

“What about Fiona?”

This got a flicker of a reaction. “Oh. She said Fiona was strange.”

Details floated to the surface of my brain. Fiona before she’d turned into a memorial photo. Her greasy penny-colored hair curling on the pillow next to me, how small she was. I’d been four when Fiona was born in April of 1975. My youngest sort-of sister. “Strange how?”

Emily ran a finger up and down her neck, reflective, her eyes drifting shut. “She could move things. Here and there. Wherever she wanted. Fingers everywhere.” She lifted a hand and made lazy, delicate sweeps in the air.

Something crawled down my spine, even as I felt my curiosity click into a clean buzz at the back of my head.

Emily’s eyelashes fluttered; her breathing was thick and even. Her eyeballs rolled beneath the paper-thin lids. “Emily.” I was louder now. “Emily?”

Her lips parted, a shiny thread of drool webbed between her teeth. She whispered something too low to catch, and I leaned in closer, and then she screamed. Her eyes opened too wide, those pinprick pupils pointed right up at the ceiling, and I looked up too, my heartbeat wild from the hard crack of adrenaline, my ears ringing. Nothing: just the yawn of the rafters. Nothing. I looked back at Emily. She was reaching for me, her hands at my throat, my shoulders, scrabbling. Her grip was too tight. Her fingernails, long, unclipped, pinched my skin.

“You’re bleeding. Josephine, you’re bleeding. They hurt you.”