Girl One(82)

“It was the longest Bellanger had ever been away,” Barbara said. “Lily-Anne was so excited for him to come back. She wanted it to be a big surprise for him. She really thought it would be his greatest triumph, the miracle without the medicine. A new stage.” I thought of that triumphant smile in the photograph. “But when Bellanger found out, he was furious. He insisted that she was endangering the baby by carrying it to term without his assistance.” Barbara took a shuddering breath. “Bellanger instantly moved her to his lab, away from the main house, so she was even more isolated. He started her on medications every day, trying to make up for lost time. He wanted that pregnancy under his control, I suppose.”

“Why didn’t Bellanger announce that he was starting a second phase?” I asked. That would have been breaking news, the perfect complement to his plans to share his research, his proposed idea of releasing a medication to induce parthenogenesis. I couldn’t understand why this pregnancy had been hidden away all these years.

“There was no second phase,” Barbara said, impatient now. “Josephine, if I’m going to talk, then you need to listen. Bellanger didn’t have anything to do with that pregnancy.”

“It was a normal pregnancy,” I said. “By a man.” Another layer of reality spread out beneath the known one. A past in which there were men, fathers, hairy and anonymous, who’d brought us to life, provided us with the other half of our DNA, and then vanished.

Cate squeezed my arm, quieting me. “Lily-Anne did it without Bellanger?” she asked. The anonymous men dissolved as easily as they’d stirred to life.

Nobody spoke or moved. It felt like we were held inside this moment, forced to slow down, absorb the meaning, and let ourselves change in response.

“Her own virgin birth,” I said.

Barbara nodded, barely a movement at all. “Yes,” she said at last, a whisper, like she could scarcely bring herself to say it. “Her very own.”

Lily-Anne’s second pregnancy, one that was truly hers, no male influence at all, no test tubes, no hormones, no drugs. Stripped down: just a woman alone, creating life, spinning it to existence in the deepest pit of her being.

The impossible.

“How do you know Lily-Anne’s pregnancy wasn’t caused by Bellanger?” I asked, trying to stay rational about this. It had been one thing to know that my mother was interested in parthenogenesis before ever meeting Bellanger, or to understand the nine women as a sisterhood that preexisted outside of Bellanger’s reach. But the nine of us had still been the result of Bellanger’s work; we’d had a father, even if he hadn’t shown up in our DNA. This—this was different. Behind my skepticism, I felt a steadily building thrill. Pure amazement.

“Like I said, Bellanger had been out of town around the time Lily-Anne would’ve conceived,” Barbara said. “By that point, he was so busy granting interviews and being photographed that he didn’t have time to work with us. But he hoped to present this tenth pregnancy as something he’d planned himself.”

The small, triumphant smile on Lily-Anne’s face in that photograph made sense now. That baby would’ve been different from the rest of us. I could see it perfectly. That baby would’ve been Lily-Anne’s alone. No contracts, no custody, no obligation binding her daughter to Bellanger. A true virgin birth.

I took a steadying breath. What had happened in our mothers’ bodies had been miraculous in terms of the mechanics of conception, the old dance of sperm meeting the egg interrupted, but it had always been presided over by Bellanger. If Lily-Anne could’ve revealed that pregnancy to the world, then her baby would have eclipsed us completely—the ability to self-conceive restored. I remembered my mother and Patricia, bent over their shared books. The women had spent months and months attempting to use that knowledge before my mother had convinced them to contact Bellanger. Maybe that knowledge had just needed to grow in Lily-Anne’s mind, take root, and here it was, a final result Patricia and my mother had never known about. A result that now Patricia would never know about, I remembered with a queasy jolt.

“And this photo was taken in January of 1977?” I asked. Just one month before Lily-Anne’s death. I tried to reconcile these two things. Lily-Anne’s death of heart failure and this pregnancy. They had met in the middle somewhere: secret life and familiar death.

Isabelle leaned forward, her eyes burning. “Where’s the baby now?”

Barbara didn’t answer.

“What happened to the baby?” Cate echoed. “She didn’t just disappear.”

Barbara was stroking her finger down Lily-Anne’s face like she could somehow bring comfort to the woman in the photograph. “It was a hard birth,” she said at last. “Lily-Anne started having contractions three months early, much earlier than we expected. So far, we’d had good births, healthy and safe. I didn’t realize just how precious that was until I saw Lily-Anne in labor the second time. She was sweating and crying, talking to herself. Saying, ‘Save her, please save her.’ It all happened so fast. Lily-Anne was still in Bellanger’s laboratory, hidden away from everybody else. I was the only one allowed in.” Barbara took a deep, shuddering breath. “I kept catching glimpses of Lily-Anne when the door would swing open. She was more and more wild-eyed. And then she was gone. No life in her eyes. I’d never understood, before then, just how obvious it is when somebody dies. There’s just no mistaking it.”