Girl One(46)

Cate, sitting next to me. Hair bundled over one shoulder. Her feet, planted on the floor, rising onto tiptoe, like she was about to launch away. She was perfect. But maybe that weirdness, pushing against the boundaries of possibility, had slipped into her in some other way. An internal strangeness, disarranged where people couldn’t see it. Something beautiful and terrifying alike, caught in her fingertips as she stitched people back together.

“Margaret was delighted when Bellanger wrote back,” Patricia said, returning to the couch. She replaced the lighter and the cigarettes into the shoebox; I noticed that she added the letter, but kept quiet. Let her have this lost piece of my mother. “I was stunned. I hadn’t expected him to take us seriously. But it was hard to be angry with her, looking at all that joy and hope. The two of them wrote back and forth for several months. He helped us as much as he could through letters. I thought it might end there, after all. He recommended some supplements. It was starting to work. Our menstruation was syncing up. Even the girls who hadn’t been taking care of themselves started to feel healthier. I remember my breasts were swollen all the time. I had little pangs in my hip bones, these twitches, like something was settling there.

“Finally, Margaret said it was easier to just let Bellanger come and see us. We had to wait weeks to hear back from him each time. You can imagine what it was like when we decided to have that man actually come to the Homestead. By that point we’d almost forgotten what a man looked like. Then, after he … worked on us, the first of us fell pregnant.”

“My mother,” I said.

“Your mother,” Patricia acknowledged, inclining her head toward me. “Do you know how they used to test for pregnancy? They had to kill a rabbit. You injected that rabbit with urine from the mother and you checked to see if the rabbit’s ovaries had swollen up. That’s how Bellanger discovered that you would be coming into the world, Josephine. Our very first.”

The dead rabbit, Bellanger’s gloved hand glossed red with its blood, its insides exposed, the vulnerable swell of its ovaries mimicking the changes in my mother’s own body. So my life had begun with a small and overlooked death.

“I almost left then,” Patricia said. “I couldn’t bear to watch Margaret bring our vision to life with that man instead of me. The way he named you after himself—but when she gave birth, I couldn’t leave. You were so perfect. A duplicate of your mother. Nobody was going to send Bellanger home after that. It took years for the next baby, and while we waited and waited, it began to feel almost like your mother had fallen pregnant because she was so accommodating. Maybe we all needed to be more welcoming to Bellanger. He’d helped us, after all. And then I had my Isabelle.”

Isabelle had been the next baby after me. Girl Two. I’d mistaken this for random chance and not a conscious connection, Patricia following in my mother’s footsteps.

Cate shifted, impatient. “Sorry, but once the rest of you were pregnant, couldn’t you have shown Bellanger the door?”

Patricia’s face slipped into true vulnerability, collapsing before she recovered. “Do you think he would’ve just walked away? You were his precious creations too. You were his tickets into this realm of scientific acclaim. A world that he both scorned and desperately wanted to be part of. He wasn’t ever going to leave. Not once we’d let him into our midst, and given him full access to our bodies and our hearts and—and our hopes and ambitions. We should’ve known. It was such a powerful thing to want you Girls. But once Bellanger was in our lives, we signed ourselves away.”

“Yes, but it was your idea, and Margaret’s,” Cate pressed. “It was—”

“What do you think they would have done, a group of girls living on their own with babies?” Patricia asked, a sudden bright flare of anger that woke up her face. “Bellanger gave the world something to focus on. He made it scientific progress instead of witchcraft. If it had been just us women there, death would’ve come for us much sooner.”

This new story fit jaggedly over the one I’d already known, rubbing raw at the edges. I remembered Bellanger smiling down at me, my hand in his, the sense of safety and belonging. Patricia and maybe my mother hadn’t wanted any of that—they’d wanted him to arrive and then vanish, unknown to me forever—

“So you see why your mother would never come here. I’ve followed her disappearance on the news, but as far as I’m concerned, she vanished years ago.” Grief moved across Patricia’s face, wince-quick. “I’ve told you everything I know about the letter. The whole ugly story. If there’s nothing else—”

After a silent consultation with Cate, I rose and showed Patricia my mother’s line in the notebook. “It’s not just the letter, Patricia. We were hoping you could tell us more about Fiona. My mother was interested in her, and we think it’s because of what Fiona could do. Her powers.” I spoke steadily. Patricia knew more about the Homestead than anybody else I’d encountered so far; no need to play coy.

As she read, a muscle near Patricia’s eyebrow twitched.

“You were there with Fiona at the Homestead until the very end. You and my mom. If you know what she was talking about—”

“You want to know about Fiona?” Patricia stood, suddenly resolute, and I stepped back. Her small figure was swamped by all that fabric, only her white face and hands exposed. “Come with me,” she said. “I can do better than tell you, Josephine. I can show you.”