Girl One(86)

“Josie.” A whisper. The familiarity of it, close to me in the darkness, sent warmth down my spine. “You awake?”

“Ha.” I focused on the neat hyphens of the road markers slipping past my wheels.

“The birds,” she said. “Falling from the sky. And some of them burning. That must’ve been Gina Grassi, right? Her abilities. Something to do with her powers.”

“Well, we have proof that eight of the nine of us aren’t exactly normal. Why wouldn’t Gina be the same?”

“Making birds fall out of the sky like that,” Cate said. “It feels wrong to me. There’s something creepy about it.”

“And there’s not something creepy about what Isabelle can do? Or me? Or Bonnie, or Delilah, or Soo-jin—” I stopped, swelling with both pride and trepidation. “Anyway. Maybe when we talk to Gina, we’ll know why she did that. There’s always a reason.”

A silence. “But I’ve been thinking a lot about Lily-Anne too,” Cate said. “Knowing that she had another baby changes so much. God, so much.” We passed a mile marker. Half an hour until Memphis. On the radio, turned low, a mournful country singer whose voice hummed and sighed beneath our conversation.

“We used to imagine there’d be more of us one day, but it was always reliant on Bellanger,” Cate said. “He could share his research. He could help women reproduce with a medication or a procedure. But it would always be his. It would always be him controlling it, or another doctor like him. What was the difference between reproducing with a man you slept with or a—a man in a white coat injecting you? Bellanger was such a prick about it too. He acted like he’d invented childbirth. Like he’d improved upon it singlehandedly. People like—like Ricky, or like those assholes in Kithira—they thought he’d unleash this world without men. But wasn’t his world always going to include men? Didn’t it put men at the very center of childbirth? Still. Always.”

I was quiet, focusing on the road. She was right. Nothing we’d found out so far had threatened the image of Bellanger I held in my mind as much as Barbara had when she told us about Lily-Anne’s second pregnancy. The other revelations had shifted the pieces of the story, showing an uglier side of him, but this was different. Hiding Lily-Anne’s death. Lying about that lost baby. If it was all true, then Bellanger was a terrible man. Selfish, cruel, a liar. Irrelevant.

All that love I’d poured toward Bellanger—my father, my creator, my guide—had gone in the wrong direction. I didn’t know what to do with it now. It was like an empty spot at my core where all that adoration used to fit. Whenever I thought about him too closely, there was a hollow ache of loss and anger.

“Knowing what we do about the way we are,” Cate said, softer now. The way we are. A quick throb under my rib cage, muscle memory of when she’d eased that bullet from inside me. “Doesn’t it make you wonder how many more of us have been scattered throughout history?”

There weren’t many cars on this stretch of freeway. We were alone.

“All the stories about vampires. Witches. Werewolves, monsters. They had to come from somewhere,” Cate said. “Maybe it was from women like our mothers. Women who didn’t have men in their lives. Women who wanted children more than they wanted men. All those fairy tales about the couple desperate for a child and they magically get one, but the kid is a freak.”

My mother had told me stories like this when I was little. Rapunzel born of cabbages, with her too-long hair. Isis procuring a son, Horus, from her husband’s dead body. Princess Kaguya inside a bamboo stalk. I’d memorized other myths on my own as a kid, desperately intrigued by any story that reminded me of my own. My classmates could make construction paper family trees for Father’s Day, tracing themselves back for generations. I had to rely on heroes, legends, myths, and rumors.

“It must’ve happened before, if Lily-Anne was able to do it back in the seventies,” Cate said. “There must be women throughout history who got pregnant all by themselves, maybe on purpose, maybe accidentally, and they had children like us. And those children ended up dark secrets, but they managed to show up in rumors and fairy tales anyway. The nine of us might not be groundbreaking at all, Morrow. We might just be the first ones to appear in textbooks instead of as bedtime stories.”

“Cate,” I said. “Catherine.” I was tired; it was late. But when she’d talked, just then, I’d seen my own small story expand and expand until it took up everything, until it was everywhere, and I was just a tiny part of something enormous and all-encompassing. I felt wild and full. How many more of us were out there?

“You think it’s stupid,” she said.

“No,” I said. “Never. You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met.”

The very air around me turned warmer with her laugh.

She leaned over the headrest and kissed my cheek. It was so intimate and gentle that I almost shied away; everything about it made me skittish, thrilled and nervous at the same time. Cate, sensing this maybe, pulled back. I turned my head from the road, quickly, just enough to smile at her. Cate murmured my name with an intonation I didn’t quite understand. She kissed my cheek again. She moved down to my neck, pressing her lips against the soft, downy part of my neck just beneath my ear. Right where a vein throbbed. My body came to life, as purely as that night in the motel.