Girl One(43)

When Patricia’s gaze touched me, she flinched and looked away too fast. She spoke, addressing some nonspecific point beyond the three of us: “You can’t be here.”

I stepped forward, handed her the letter like it was a ticket, admit one. Patricia took it, still without looking at me. I watched her as she read, seeing the message again in my mind: Dear Doctor Bellanger. When Patricia looked up, her face was completely blank. “You need to go,” she said to Tom, then turned to Cate: “You two. Come inside.”

“Well, wait a second,” Tom said. “It’s important for us all to be here.”

Patricia blinked at him, stony. “It’s not important to me.”

I was torn. “We’ve all come a long way—”

“Morrow,” Cate said. “He can sit this one out.”

“Okay,” Tom said. “Of course. Yeah.” He leaned in close, breath stirring the hair at my temple. “Tell me everything, all right? Good luck.”

We followed Patricia into the house. The exterior reminded me fleetingly of the Homestead, but this was where it diverged. The Homestead had been all chaos inside, a disorderly stretch of discarded clothing, soiled cloth diapers, unwashed dishes. This place was obsessively tidy. Dark, staid furniture. Blinds closed tight. The cool, cutting scent of citrus.

Patricia didn’t invite us to sit. She was wandering the edges of the room, reading the letter again and again. I looked around for Isabelle, Girl Two. No sign of her. I wasn’t sure Patricia could hear anything over the heavy throb of music. Cate finally went to the record player, which was tucked inside a bookshelf, and switched it off, the silence ringing.

Patricia couldn’t take her eyes off the letter. “There’s no name,” she said softly, tracing the bottom of the page with one thumb. “That was clever. As if all of us wrote the letter together. But it was one girl’s choice to reach out to Joseph Bellanger. The rest of us never agreed.”

“You didn’t approve of Bellanger joining you?” I asked, my mind racing. This was verification of what Deb had said. Patricia spoke as if she’d assumed I already knew. Then I came back to myself, my actual purpose here. “Patricia, my mother’s missing. Is she here? Has she been in touch?”

“Of course she’s not here.” Patricia’s grip on the letter tightened. “I’ve always hated the way he hijacked the Homestead. He wasn’t content with you Girls, he had to own the nine of us too. Our whole histories. Our very relationships with each other.”

This was the first time I’d heard somebody close to Bellanger speak about him with that much disdain. I’d heard the bullhorn-loud criticisms, the sanitized slights published in scholarly journals, but not something like this. Up-close, raw hostility.

Patricia went to the somber Persian rug, kneeling to pull it back. The floor beneath was the same glossiness as the rest of the floor. No undercoat of dust. She deftly pulled up a floorboard, revealing a dark cavity, and reached inside, retrieving a small shoebox. Then she sat next to me, settling the box on her lap, and pulled out a crumpled pack of Virginia Slims. She plucked loose the cigarette, reached into the box for a lighter. Her hands were trembling. She exhaled a fog of smoke.

“The year you were born,” she said, “there was an ad for these cigarettes that your mother and I loved. It showed a woman. A superhero. Tall red boots, red cape flowing all around her shoulders. Standing with her chest back and her legs wide. The copy claimed that Virginia Slims were designed for women because women were ‘biologically superior.’” Patricia opened her eyes halfway, examined her own cigarette as if she’d forgotten she’d lit one. “Mere pandering. But that woman was beautiful. She looked exactly like Margaret.”

Patricia stirred the contents of the shoebox with her fingers. I wondered why she’d kept it. The hiding space felt like a soft spot in an otherwise impenetrable suit of armor. I thought of my mother’s hiding place inside the clock.

“Did your mother ever tell you about me, Josephine?” Patricia asked quietly.

“She told me you would steal her cigarettes,” I said, irritable. Her hostility toward Bellanger had set me on edge. “I see you have your own now, at least.”

Patricia laughed, her expression not lightening.

“I’m confused,” I said. “How did you all know each other, if it wasn’t through him?”

I was starting to feel like she couldn’t see me at all. Patricia addressed the room instead: “I met your mother in New York City, both of us arriving there without knowing a soul. We were roommates in a little walk-up. Margaret could barely scrape enough together to pay rent on that place, even with three other girls sharing the space. I had some money—my parents were generous enough with their money, if not with anything else—so I had a bedroom to myself. It was hardly a glamorous place. We had to pass two peep shows every time we went down the block.” But Patricia was smiling as she spoke, the smile of a woman handling precious memories. “New York was a fresh start for both of us. She was waiting tables, and I had a position at the public library.”

“You were a librarian too?” I asked. “My mother—she’s also—” But something in Patricia’s expression stopped me. Cate put a quick hand on my shoulder: Be patient.

“Your mother seemed so sure of herself, she intimidated me,” Patricia said. “Even though she worked long shifts at a diner, I saw her studying in her free time. She’d come to my branch and check out these dense, incomprehensible science books. I began to realize Margaret and I had a lot in common. As beautiful as she was, she didn’t go out with the other girls when they invited us. She had no interest in boys and parties. Eventually, I invited her to split my bedroom with me. She’d been sleeping in a curtained-off nook, but I had room for another bed in there. She started to spend a lot of time in our room. To me, that room soon felt like the safest place in the city. Our little refuge.”