Girl One(35)

Steadying myself, I leaned back. “How much do you know about my work?”

“As much as you’ve shared with the press, plus my own research,” Tom said, jumping in. “I can follow along with the basics. You’re attempting to finish what Bellanger started.”

“I don’t know jackshit,” Cate said. “I haven’t been following along. We aren’t all fanboys.” But a little glimmer in her eyes, a challenge tucked there, made me wonder if she was telling the truth. “So why don’t you explain it to the rest of us?”

I fidgeted with the tear-damp napkin. “Bellanger wanted to make his research accessible, turn it into something reproducible and tangible. A medication women could take, like clomifene. I’m retracing his steps so I can do that. Or … well. Trying to.”

Cate leaned forward, knees wide, folding her hands underneath her chin. I liked that: someone who listened with her whole body.

“What he did basically comes down to genomic imprinting,” I said. “That’s the way DNA is marked with important genetic data, including paternal or maternal origins.”

“Which is the interesting part,” Tom cut in. “Bellanger was messing with the very ways that certain genes are expressed or silenced during conception. It was revolutionary, what he managed to do—”

Cate held up a hand. “Please. Thomas. Let the lady finish.”

“I guess the easiest way of thinking about it,” I said, “is that whenever a mammal reproduces, the mother is a lock, and the father is the key. Mammals need both the lock and the key to create a functioning, fully formed infant, whether it’s a—a lab mouse or a human being. But you have to realize that the lock isn’t necessary. Other animals—oh, like reptiles, amphibians, fish, insects—they don’t need a key because they don’t have this lock. But somewhere in our evolutionary history, mammals locked the door.”

“So Bellanger invented a key that unlocked parthenogenesis?” Cate asked.

Tom started to answer, fell silent at a look from Cate, pressed his lips together, and twisted his fingers in a my-lips-are-sealed gesture.

“Not exactly,” I said. “Bellanger’s trick wasn’t to make a new key. Because, think about it. If you take away the lock, you don’t need the key at all, right? You can just walk through the door. No key necessary. That’s all Bellanger did. He removed the locks from our mothers, and so a father’s key was no longer needed. But,” I added, deflating a little, “we aren’t sure exactly how he did it, and long story short, that’s why I’m at the University of Chicago.”

I felt that old buzz of focus—a mix of excitement and control. Taking a question and examining it from all angles. Dr. McCarter’s research project was bolstered by the kind of plummy funding I hoped to secure for myself one day. The more I delved into Bellanger’s world, the more impossible it seemed that I actually existed. I hadn’t ended as an arrested blastocyst, noted down in a scientific abstract and then forgotten by the world, but had become a woman, standing in a lab in a scratchy white coat, peering through the microscope to watch the natural world creep closer to what had already been accomplished inside my body.

Inside my mother’s body.

“Well,” Tom said. “If anyone’s going to do it, it’s going to be you, Josie.”

I nodded a quick thanks, but I found myself looking across the table at Cate, who gave me a small smile, a sliver of approval, that ignited in my chest as if a fire had been lit there.





16

Little hands were in the air. All over the air. Little hands, the thumbs interlocking, flapping like wings, like big moths, like pale birds. They pressed into the room so tightly, fluttering so thickly, that the air turned hot. Stifling. The hands were slipping over my mouth. Over my nose. Ssh, ssh. I was sweltering, sweat-sticky, couldn’t draw a breath. Hands over my mouth. Hands on my chest, pressing down, pressing down, and I tried to gasp but couldn’t—

“Morrow.” I opened my eyes, slowly. No hands over my eyes, but the room was dark, dark. My eyes were stinging and gritty. The voice floated above me, urgent. “Come on. We have to get out of here.”

I sat up. The ghostly hands were gone, but I still couldn’t see. Everything was hazy, a strange fuzz across the air even in the dark, and I kept having the impulse to open my eyes again. Like there was a second layer to my eyelids.

Cate grabbed my hand, dragging me out of bed. I stumbled behind her, too surprised to fight back. Smoke, hanging greasy in the air. A primal memory kicked in, my mother’s hand in mine, the two of us running, running. The trees transformed, all that tender summer greenery replaced with red, yellow, the choking blackness of the smoke.

She was there, for a minute. My mother. Hair to her waist. Feet bare, soles flashing. Her long arm reaching back, tethering me to her, and then she turned around and she smiled at me, a bright, hard smile, though the world around us was burning.

“Morrow,” Cate said, voice muffled. “You have to go faster.”

My mother vanished. We passed through Cate’s living room, the front door hanging open, the night visible outside, clean and silver-blue and moonlit. The living room was illuminated with a harsh, unnatural glare, everything weirdly shadowed. The heat was so intense it itched. I looked back at the kitchen as Cate dragged me toward the door, the flames licking their way up the cabinets.