Girl One(48)

“Fiona. Come back.” The camera tracked her down the hallway, quavering, trembling with the movement of Patricia’s body as she chased after the girl. Fiona was visible in snatches: tangled hair, little feet. She veered off into another room, one I recognized. The room with the big saggy couch, the same one in that photo of pregnant Lily-Anne I’d rescued from Cate’s house. The view panned across the wall, catching the edges of the pictures and artwork, and I spotted the same framed Time cover on the wall. I thought of Lily-Anne standing there heavily pregnant in that Polaroid. Now here was the product of that pregnancy, in that same room years later, trembling and feral.

Fiona stood in the corner, hugging herself. She looked so small. The camera crept closer, and I imagined Patricia approaching this girl the way she’d approach a cornered animal. A hard dread grew in my chest.

Patricia said, “I know you’re hurting, little one. I’m so sorry it’s all so heavy right now. I’m here for you.” A pause. “Remember the candle? Can you do it again? Just show me. One more time.” Fiona’s hair hid her face. Those damp, angry eyes, shining out from behind her matted curls. Which—in the shadowed room—looked as dark a red as dried blood. “Please,” Patricia said. “Show us all what you can do. Our little miracle.”

Fiona was shaking her head again. “Where’s my mama?”

Cate tensed beside me. I felt it too. This desire to reach through that flimsy projector screen, all the way back through the layers of time, and defend this little girl. It was the first maternal instinct I’d ever felt. I was Girl One. The iconic daughter. The one famous for having been mothered. Right now, all I wanted was to help Fiona.

“Mama will come?” Fiona asked. She had gone very still. “I do trick?”

Cate’s hand slipped into mine. Reassuring.

I missed what was happening until it was right there. Fiona was rising—shifting one hip upward, unnaturally high, canting it until it seemed impossible, until her dangling toes were barely touching the floor, even as her other foot was planted firmly. It was like an invisible rope had been attached to Fiona’s left hip, yanking her higher, higher, until her small body was distorted, unnatural. Impossible. Her other foot began to follow until she was hanging there, suspended.

A churning ache of wonder grew in my stomach, trying to reconcile this with what I knew. Of Fiona, of the world around me, of the laws of physics. This was no rumor. It was an observable phenomenon, right here in front of me, and while I felt that hard, clean curiosity—the desire to examine it, understand why—there was also a simple gut reaction. Fear and amazement. An early human seeing fire for the first time.

This was what it looked like when we altered the course of human history. A little girl alone in a room, a camera aimed at her, her body defying everything we knew.

A sharp hiss of electricity, a droning noise, and the camera angled upward, revealing a bare bulb suspended from the ceiling. The hot orange lightning bolt of its filament glowed in the dimness of the room. The hiss came again, and then the bulb exploded, and in its brief dying flash of light I could see the glitter of broken glass. Dark. A textured darkness, the faint pant of breathing. I thought Fiona would reappear. I thought she’d leap out of the darkness, bared teeth, shining eyes, like an animal emerging from the back of a cave. I was tense all over, waiting. But there was just a soft laugh. The picture vanished, showing scribbles of interference, and then the whirring of the projector stopped.

The sudden silence was so loud it echoed.

Behind me, the sounds of Patricia walking over and flicking on the lights. The fluorescent bars lit up section by section, bright strips coming to life across the ceiling. We were here, in 1994, in this cold, artificial light, and I could almost forget everything I’d seen. Already it was turning murky.

“You filmed Fiona?” Cate asked. Her palm against mine was sweat-slick, but when she moved her hand, I missed her touch. “It’s an invasion of her privacy.”

Patricia blinked, like privacy was a meaningless word in this context. “I didn’t know how long Fiona would behave that way. I needed proof. That footage ended up being priceless. You understand, Josephine. Or you would, if you’re anything like your mother.”

“When my mother died,” Cate said, “I wanted time alone, not a camera shoved in my face.”

Cate and Patricia stared at each other, a hot challenge passing back and forth. I was torn. There was something terrible in the way Fiona was trapped at the other end of the camera, unable to escape our eyes and our wonder and our fear, even seventeen years after her death. But I was also grateful that Patricia had the footage. I was glad there was evidence.

“Why would you have kept this a secret, Patricia?” I asked. “This is huge. It could change everything.”

“This is our history,” Patricia said. “Our past. We still live in a world dominated by men. Who knows what they’d do to us if they saw this?”

“But did Bellanger know?”

“Of course he did,” Patricia said, and I exhaled, shaky. “After Bellanger saw who she was, he was very attentive to Fiona. Why do you think he wanted to adopt her after Lily-Anne died? I sometimes think that if Bellanger hadn’t known about Fiona, he wouldn’t have insisted on keeping her so close to him. Maybe she would’ve been with one of us, when the fire started, instead of with him. Maybe—” Patricia cut herself off with a crisp shrug.