Girl One(20)

I took a stab at answering his question: “Ever since we left the Homestead, she’s wanted to settle down and forget everything. That’s not me. It might sound strange for a Girl without a father, but I take after Bellanger more than I’ll ever take after my mother.”

I’d said this exact thing on the phone to a reporter once, the line earning an appreciative laugh. I remembered turning around to see my mother in the doorway, hanging back, a stack of clean towels clutched to her chest like a shield. The look on her face: that betrayal, like she’d been slapped unexpectedly. I hurried past the memory. “Listen. If this conversation’s going to end up all over newsstands, you need to give me warning. Especially with my mom missing like this.”

I wasn’t exactly allergic to journalists and reporters. After growing up in the carefully guarded silence of my home, I’d found it thrilling to dole out quotes and interviews over the past year since I’d left my mother’s orbit. I had, admittedly, been surprised by the questions, which verged between fluffy and too nosy, sometimes both at once. Reporters interested in my body, my relationship with my mother, which lipstick shade Girl One preferred (orange-flavored ChapStick). It was a challenge to keep the focus on Bellanger’s interrupted work and my attempts to restore his legacy, but I persevered. Usually with a smile. Flies, honey: all that.

“I’ll be discreet,” Tom said. “Of course. I honored your mom’s request for privacy. I see no reason to stop now.”

I considered this. I hadn’t seen any evidence of the phone call between Tom and my mother splashed across the headlines. I let that thought comfort me.

“Besides, I’ve pulled back from my work at the paper lately. I’m working on my own thing. A book,” he said, unable to keep the pride from his voice. “About you. Well, not you. About Bellanger’s work at the Homestead. The greatest scientific breakthrough of our time.”

The sky smoothed from pink to blue. A book. That explained why Tom had been hunting down the Homesteaders. “How’s that been going for you?”

“Fine,” he said, in a voice that suggested otherwise. I waited. Sure enough: “Hard to get interviews. A lot of you won’t even answer the phone.”

“Six,” I said, staring out the window at a distant pump jack nodding at the edge of a field like a huge bird pecking at the ground. “There are six books about the Homestead and Dr. Bellanger. That’s probably why they don’t want to talk to you.”

I’d been especially aware of my own presence in textbooks lately. Sitting in lecture halls, I’d gotten used to people turning and looking at me, some openly, some surreptitious. Because there I was, my baby picture, my little wailing face and wet, dark hair printed below headers like “Reproductive Anomalies: Parthenogenesis.” Tamping down my pride, I’d always try to focus on the lesson like an outside observer, ignoring the fact that my mother appeared in the books too. Her face a perfect copy of my own, eyes boring into me from across the layers of time.

In a seminar on reproductive technologies, we’d devoted half a day to Bellanger and his legacy. I’d sat in the back row, and by the end I was vibrant, more certain than ever that I was in the right place, doing the right thing. Afterward, a classmate had looked at me as the other students filed out. I’d smiled at him. “You know you didn’t inherit Joe Bellanger’s genius, right?” he’d said. “That’s the whole point of you. You don’t even have a father. You’re descended from the guinea pig, not the scientist.”

I’d spent the next week seething, spinning out increasingly elaborate comebacks in my head. I waited until our next exam, lingering after class, waiting till I caught a glimpse of his grade: 56 percent. “Not bad for a guinea pig,” I’d said, flashing my 85 percent. A grimy pleasure that sustained me for weeks.

The world won’t greet us as friends, Josephine, but we must stay bold in our convictions. There were so many lines from Bellanger’s letters that felt prescient, like he’d known exactly what I’d need as an adult.

Tom was talking: “I’m not reinventing the wheel. But Bellanger might be the single most important scientific figure that my generation sees. How many scientists have been murdered for their work? Galileo was jailed—Bellanger was killed.” He’d gone somewhere else, his eyes intent behind his glasses. “Bellanger died before he ever got the chance to share his research. His legacy has been fading for years and I want to offer new insight into what he truly accomplished.”

I shifted in my seat, feeling that familiar annoyance, a prickling territoriality that reared up inside me sometimes. Everyone wanted to sniff out some overlooked juicy detail from my past, find some sharp, shiny new angle that would reflect its light back on their careers. I felt like I was alone in wanting to build something new. To move Bellanger into the future. “Funny, that’s what I’m doing too,” I said. “I’m going to re-create Bellanger’s original work. But I’m sure your book will be nice too, Tom.”



* * *



The Clarkson home was a creamy mansion, lined with puffy shrubs. It suited the Clarksons so well it was almost comical, the way some people resembled their pets. The home was mostly hidden behind a high wall of honey-blond brick. Harmony Springs itself was less a neighborhood than an uneasy coalition of walled-off mansions and sprawling grounds, everyone maintaining a haughty distance from each other.