Girl One(32)

“These kids at school? They used to say I was a witch because only witches don’t have fathers,” Cate said. “And no man wants to fuck a witch. So I asked my mother if I was a witch, and she said yes, yes I was. At bedtime she’d tell me stories about a girl who didn’t have to use her hands the way people did, because her hands were in the air all around her.” Cate held up her own hand, bent and flexed her fingers. “One night she let slip that the girl had hair like fire and I thought: Oh. That girl must be Fiona.”

“Did she give you any more details?” I asked.

“She said she was going to,” Cate said. “On my twenty-fifth birthday. The age my mother was when she had me. But her death was so quick. Ovarian cancer is totally quiet until it’s not. I forgot all about that promise. There were so many other things we needed to say.”

I reached into my bag for the notebook, holding it open for Cate. “Okay, well, my mother never talked about the Homestead at all. That’s why this is so weird. I found her notebook at the house after the fire. She’d apparently been tracking everyone down, all the Homesteaders, and she wrote this: Tell the world about Fiona.”

Cate took the notebook and ran a finger over the words. “Fiona,” she said. “Wow. Do you know what your mother wanted to say?”

“Since she didn’t tell me anything, it’s tough to narrow it down,” I said, hoping the wryness masked the bitterness. “It would have to be Fiona’s powers, but why now? After so many years.”

Cate looked thoughtful. “My mother held on to a lot of guilt when it came to Fiona. Because of the custody battle, mostly.”

Tom piped up: “My understanding was that the custody battle was straightforward. Either Bellanger would take Fiona or she’d be adopted by a different family.”

“Okay, let me guess.” Cate squinted one eye at Tom. “You’re writing a book? Big researcher?” She smiled at Tom’s embarrassed nod. “Ah, such a treat for us ladies, another expert ready to explain us to ourselves. Can’t wait.”

I laughed before I could stop myself, and Tom smiled at his feet, acknowledging the barb.

“Anyway,” Cate went on, turning the spotlight of her attention back to me, “there was another option that wasn’t well publicized. Fiona could’ve stayed with one of our mothers.”

It felt so obvious and natural now that Cate had said it. The women of the Homestead had been Fiona’s ersatz mothers already. In the 1970s, there’d been a breathless tabloid piece about how the mothers took turns nursing all of the babies, not caring which infant latched on, as if we’d each been born to zero fathers and nine mothers.

“The world thought Fiona was better off with any random family as long as they had a golden retriever and a white picket fence and an emotionally distant daddy,” Cate said. “Makes about as much sense as her staying with Bellanger’s family. God. Stupid, isn’t it? Bellanger wasn’t even there for his own wife and kids, but he was supposed to make some perfect life for Fiona? Anyway. Poor little girl didn’t go with anybody, in the end.” Cate handed the notebook back. “It always weighed on my mother. She thought that if they’d just fought harder, maybe Fiona wouldn’t have been at the Homestead during the fire.”

“What went wrong?” I tried to imagine Fiona living with us. A third member of our family, someone to side with me against my mother during fights. Once, in first grade, inspired by my classmates’ beamingly pregnant mothers, I’d asked my mother for a little sister, and she’d just laughed: One miracle’s enough for me, Josephine. I can’t afford the grocery bills for two.

“People already saw our mothers as monsters. How many unmarried women were adopting kids back in the 1970s, even the ‘normal’ ones? And…” Cate hesitated. “The Homestead was falling apart. Some mothers were leaving on their own. There was a big disagreement about which mother Fiona should’ve gone with. Your mom? My mom? Patricia? Barbara? My impression is that there was some tension between the women.”

I thought of Deb’s accusations and the pit of my belly tightened. “Cate, what do you know about our mothers before? Did any of them know each other before Bellanger started the Homestead?”

A low moan, rising to a sudden shriek. We all twitched with surprise. The teakettle. Cate turned and went back into the kitchen. Tom and I looked at each other in the silence. My own keen curiosity and impatience was reflected in him.

When Cate returned, she was carrying a misshapen handmade mug. She handed the mug to Tom, so abruptly that hot tea sloshed over the edge and nearly caught his thigh: he jerked his leg aside. “You.” Cate turned to me, beckoning. “There’s something I want to show you.”

I trailed Cate down a narrow hallway and into a room at the end of the house. A bedroom, all windows, the bed untidy. An open cookie jar stuffed with a crunchy blend of what looked like old dandelion blossoms and oregano. A notebook was open, showing indecipherable recipes or poems: espin. colorada? Floripon. Pen. Roy.

Cate went to the bureau, squatted to yank open the bottom drawer. It was filled with a disarray of papers and old magazines. A few photographs fell out, and one caught my eye. Barbara Kim, Mother Eight, her rope-thick brown braid hanging over her shoulder. She sat next to Lily-Anne, who’d stripped herself of a surname as soon as she’d joined the Homestead—a detail that’d only stoked the growing fears of women casting off family names, family ties, becoming self-contained units. Lily-Anne’s hair was a live flame even in the faded photograph. While Barbara sat on one of the many low, molting sofas that had populated the Homestead, Lily-Anne stood and faced the camera proudly. Her belly was round and swollen, and she clasped it like she was holding it aloft. A blurred halo at the edges of their bodies made me think of a self-timer.