Girl One(42)

“Maybe the normal routine would’ve worked if I’d been younger,” I said. “Maybe Barbara Kim could convince her daughter that Bellanger never existed. Helen was only two years old when the fire happened. I was six when Bellanger died. I couldn’t forget him if I tried. You know he used to let me help him in his lab? When we ran from the Homestead, I didn’t even believe he was dead. I would wake up screaming for him.”

“Of course you never had a chance to be close to your mom,” Cate said softly. “You were too busy missing him.”

“My mom and I were close,” I said, defensive. “When I was little, she’d stay up all night if I had a nightmare, or sing lullabies to distract me. I woke up crying for him, but she was there instead.” I stared out the window. Nirvana on the radio again: Distill the life that’s inside of me. “She’d always helped me with my school projects. We’d work together to make posters of nineteenth century novelists, or a tornado in a pop bottle. She always knew these random facts about whatever we were working on. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott lived next door to each other, or the F scale for tornadoes is named after Ted Fujita. I looked forward to homework because of her. But in seventh grade I wanted to make a presentation on the Homestead. Bring in Bellanger’s letters for show-and-tell. Mom just shut down. She wouldn’t help me with anything. After that I was so mad, I didn’t ask for her help with any of my other projects. And she stopped offering.”

Cate nodded as if to herself, gazing out the window. I wondered if she understood.

“I always wanted the Homestead to bring us closer,” I said. “But she always made it so the Homestead stood between us. Every choice I made, it felt like I was moving farther from being identical to my mother. She wanted to hide, I wanted to be…”

“Famous?” Cate asked.

I shrugged, nodded. “Something like that. Anyway. It was easier to just fight.”

Cate stretched her arms over her head, clasped hands bumping the ceiling. “Well, now you know your mother had a different role. Maybe she had her reasons to hide that from you.”

“Why hide the truth? I deserved to know. She was just protecting herself.”

“Maybe,” Cate said, “she wasn’t protecting herself. Maybe she was protecting you.”





19

Excerpt from Rolling Stone magazine—September 17, 1993

A Miracle Baby, All Grown Up

On the topic of Dr. Joseph Bellanger, the late genius who masterminded the experiment that led to her birth, Josephine Morrow lights up as if someone mentioned a rock star. “You know how people say we’re his ‘brainchildren’? Then that makes him my brainfather,” she says as we sit in a small Illinois diner. It’s just the kind of delightful neologism you’d expect from a girl who’s an evolutionary neologism herself.

I get a chance to ask the big question that’s on everybody’s mind. When you’re forever connected to the word “virgin,” what is it like to do the deed, bump uglies, knock boots? “I have all the parts, if that’s what you’re asking,” Josephine says. “Yes, sex is physically possible for me. And yes, I’ve done it.”

This is interesting news from a girl who’s studying how to take the sex right out of reproduction. Josephine insists that she’s not trying to create a world without men, contrary to popular belief. “I don’t want to scare anyone away,” she says. “Bellanger is a man, after all, and he’s my biggest inspiration. This is about science, not feminism.”

So if Josephine had the chance to go back in time and work with Dr. Joseph Bellanger—if she was in the same position as her mother, many years before—would she do it? Would she agree to be part of the experiments that made her own mother famous?

Josephine thinks about this for a while. “I’m not sure I’m ready to be a mother,” she says, flipping her long, dark hair over one shoulder. “But I’d love a chance to work with Bellanger as an adult, more than anything. So yes. I’d say yes.”





20

The NO TRESPASSING signs started out small. A modest sign on a tree trunk, discreet, almost quaint. By the time we reached the driveway proper, the signs were cluttered so thickly they felt like a physical barricade. They hung from the low, rustic wooden gate; they were stapled to the trees. NO TRESPASSING. Urgent against what otherwise looked like a scene copied from a rustic promotional brochure. A two-story clapboard farmhouse, weathered white. The Bishops didn’t live on the Homestead grounds. They were on the other side of town, miles away. But its presence seemed to hang in the very air. Leaning out the open window, I recognized a certain quality to the light, a distinct pattern to the birdsong. I remembered.

We parked at the base of a tree, near a broken beer bottle half buried in a tangle of ivy. Brown shards and a torn silvery label. The back of my neck prickled with unease. “The house is still standing, at least,” I said.

Cate glanced backward, and I checked too, half expecting to see the sedan trailing us. But there was nothing, just birdsong, breeze ruffling the trees.

At first I thought no one would come to the door. I was about to return to the car and wait when the door opened. Patricia was small, only five feet, but the imperiousness of her posture made it feel like she loomed over me. Two long fawn-colored braids hung down her back. Her black turtleneck and ankle-length denim skirt covered most of her body. In the background, a dense layer of classical music.