Girl One, page 11
“We’ll call the Bishops first, then,” Tom said. “Just see what they know. If it’s a dead end, we’ll just get you back to Chicago. Deal?”
“Deal,” I agreed.
* * *
During dinner that night, I kept my mother’s letter right next to my plate, picking at the fresh salad Cate had prepared to complement an assortment of whatever she’d had on hand. Sugary cereal, crackers, half-eaten blocks of cheese, canned ravioli. “I’m not much of a cook,” she’d explained. “But I can at least force you to eat your vegetables. I doubt you’ve been eating well on the road.” The salad was shockingly fresh compared to the bagged lettuce I’d always eaten, the big, crisp leaves garnished with a sheen of olive oil and delicate edible flowers.
Cate had allowed the two of us to spend the night, an invitation she’d extended with what I was recognizing as her usual mix of sarcasm and warmth. “Better than wasting your money on some cheap Goulding motel that’ll either be full of tourists or drug deals or both,” she’d said. But now our meal was tense with an awkward silence. I couldn’t calm my mind, my thoughts swirling, bumping up against each other.
“Do you think I’m crazy?” I asked at last. “For going after my mother like this?”
They both looked at me, startled. Tom frowned. “What? Of course not.”
“She’s your mother,” Cate said, as if that alone explained it.
“I’m so worried about her,” I said, my eyes stinging with sudden tears. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why she has this notebook, or why she was reaching out to the others. I’m worried that the man who attacked Bonnie came back for her, or maybe another one of Peters’s followers. I want to know she’s safe, and I want to know what she’s looking for, and then I also…”
“Also what?” Cate asked gently, when I paused for too long. She twirled her fork, which impaled the bright yellow of a dandelion.
“My mother never wanted me to do this. Any of this. She didn’t approve of the letters Bellanger left me. I used to beg her to read them aloud to me when I was too young, and she wouldn’t. I had to wait till I was older. If she caught me reading the letters, she gave me the silent treatment. She thought it was all a phase. When I told her I wanted to pursue experimental embryology, she barely spoke to me for a week. So the fact that my mother has disappeared right at the worst possible time for me? Right at the end of the first year?” I hesitated, not sure if I could put it into words. “What if it’s all on purpose?”
Cate examined me, still twirling the fork. The watercolors in here were deeper tones, reds and purples, stormier and richer than the greenery in the living room. I looked down, flicking away my half-angry tears. Tom waited, then grabbed one of Cate’s mismatched cloth napkins and handed it to me. I accepted, a little embarrassed.
“It feels like I have to choose,” I said. “My mother, or Bellanger. I never wanted to make that choice. She’s the one who turned it into a competition.”
“I can only imagine how weird this all is for you, Josie,” Tom said.
Cate bit her lip, then clattered down her fork decisively. “That seems pretty ungenerous to your mom, Morrow,” she said. “The woman’s clearly in trouble, I don’t think she was doing this to mess up your exams.”
I prickled. “It just seems strange, that’s all. And my work is important. It’s not only about the exams, you know, it’s—it’s restoring a legacy that’d been lost, it’s trying to change the world for—for other women—”
Under Cate’s intent gaze, I found myself tongue-tied and defensive, but also, weirdly, excited at the prospect of proving myself to her. “Oh yeah?” she asked. “How so?”
Steadying myself, I leaned back. “How much do you know about my work?”
“As much as you’ve shared with the press, plus my own research,” Tom said, jumping in. “I can follow along with the basics. You’re attempting to finish what Bellanger started.”
“I don’t know jackshit,” Cate said. “I haven’t been following along. We aren’t all fanboys.” But a little glimmer in her eyes, a challenge tucked there, made me wonder if she was telling the truth. “So why don’t you explain it to the rest of us?”
I fidgeted with the tear-damp napkin. “Bellanger wanted to make his research accessible, turn it into something reproducible and tangible. A medication women could take, like clomifene. I’m retracing his steps so I can do that. Or … well. Trying to.”
Cate leaned forward, knees wide, folding her hands underneath her chin. I liked that: someone who listened with her whole body.
“What he did basically comes down to genomic imprinting,” I said. “That’s the way DNA is marked with important genetic data, including paternal or maternal origins.”
“Which is the interesting part,” Tom cut in. “Bellanger was messing with the very ways that certain genes are expressed or silenced during conception. It was revolutionary, what he managed to do—”
Cate held up a hand. “Please. Thomas. Let the lady finish.”
“I guess the easiest way of thinking about it,” I said, “is that whenever a mammal reproduces, the mother is a lock, and the father is the key. Mammals need both the lock and the key to create a functioning, fully formed infant, whether it’s a—a lab mouse or a human being. But you have to realize that the lock isn’t necessary. Other animals—oh, like reptiles, amphibians, fish, insects—they don’t need a key because they don’t have this lock. But somewhere in our evolutionary history, mammals locked the door.”
“So Bellanger invented a key that unlocked parthenogenesis?” Cate asked.
Tom started to answer, fell silent at a look from Cate, pressed his lips together, and twisted his fingers in a my-lips-are-sealed gesture.
“Not exactly,” I said. “Bellanger’s trick wasn’t to make a new key. Because, think about it. If you take away the lock, you don’t need the key at all, right? You can just walk through the door. No key necessary. That’s all Bellanger did. He removed the locks from our mothers, and so a father’s key was no longer needed. But,” I added, deflating a little, “we aren’t sure exactly how he did it, and long story short, that’s why I’m at the University of Chicago.”
I felt that old buzz of focus—a mix of excitement and control. Taking a question and examining it from all angles. Dr. McCarter’s research project was bolstered by the kind of plummy funding I hoped to secure for myself one day. The more I delved into Bellanger’s world, the more impossible it seemed that I actually existed. I hadn’t ended as an arrested blastocyst, noted down in a scientific abstract and then forgotten by the world, but had become a woman, standing in a lab in a scratchy white coat, peering through the microscope to watch the natural world creep closer to what had already been accomplished inside my body.
Inside my mother’s body.
“Well,” Tom said. “If anyone’s going to do it, it’s going to be you, Josie.”
I nodded a quick thanks, but I found myself looking across the table at Cate, who gave me a small smile, a sliver of approval, that ignited in my chest as if a fire had been lit there.
16
Little hands were in the air. All over the air. Little hands, the thumbs interlocking, flapping like wings, like big moths, like pale birds. They pressed into the room so tightly, fluttering so thickly, that the air turned hot. Stifling. The hands were slipping over my mouth. Over my nose. Ssh, ssh. I was sweltering, sweat-sticky, couldn’t draw a breath. Hands over my mouth. Hands on my chest, pressing down, pressing down, and I tried to gasp but couldn’t—
“Morrow.” I opened my eyes, slowly. No hands over my eyes, but the room was dark, dark. My eyes were stinging and gritty. The voice floated above me, urgent. “Come on. We have to get out of here.”
I sat up. The ghostly hands were gone, but I still couldn’t see. Everything was hazy, a strange fuzz across the air even in the dark, and I kept having the impulse to open my eyes again. Like there was a second layer to my eyelids.
Cate grabbed my hand, dragging me out of bed. I stumbled behind her, too surprised to fight back. Smoke, hanging greasy in the air. A primal memory kicked in, my mother’s hand in mine, the two of us running, running. The trees transformed, all that tender summer greenery replaced with red, yellow, the choking blackness of the smoke.
She was there, for a minute. My mother. Hair to her waist. Feet bare, soles flashing. Her long arm reaching back, tethering me to her, and then she turned around and she smiled at me, a bright, hard smile, though the world around us was burning.
“Morrow,” Cate said, voice muffled. “You have to go faster.”
My mother vanished. We passed through Cate’s living room, the front door hanging open, the night visible outside, clean and silver-blue and moonlit. The living room was illuminated with a harsh, unnatural glare, everything weirdly shadowed. The heat was so intense it itched. I looked back at the kitchen as Cate dragged me toward the door, the flames licking their way up the cabinets.
The night was clear and cool. It was like stepping into cold water at first. I gasped. Cate let go of my hand and I nearly fell into her. The wind chimes cast long-fingered shadows onto the road. I was trying to understand, to shake off the last of sleep. Another fire. Cate’s house was on fire.
“Your friend’s still in there.” Cate had something—a dishrag, damp—clamped over her mouth and nose, but her exposed eyes were raw and red, watering. Before I could say anything, she’d vanished back into that hot and airless space.
I stood in my T-shirt and underwear, legs exposed, the ache in my eyes and throat ebbing slowly. The moon was a fat crescent. In patches, the clouds broke to reveal brilliant clusters of stars. I patted myself down, panicky. The letter and notebook must still be where I’d left them when I fell asleep, tucked under the pillow in Cate’s spare room. Shit. My mother’s handwriting was going to be lost in the blaze. I’d gotten her back, even in such a tiny form, and now she was being tugged down into the same fate.
A light prickle across my shoulder blades, like I was being watched. The houses on this shady street were spaced far apart, no lights on in any windows. I turned. There, down the street—in a little dip, where the shadows collected more thickly under an outcropping of tree branches. A silhouette. Someone tall stood, motionless, watching me. For a minute I was sure it was my sleep-soaked mind playing tricks. A tree trunk or a pole, transfigured into a person by darkness and paranoia.
He began walking toward me, a few steps.
I moved toward him too, unhesitating. He stopped.
Behind me, a flurry of movement as Tom and Cate lurched through the open doorway, Tom bent over as he wheezed, Cate awkwardly angled beneath his body to keep him upright. I noticed that Tom was holding something—the notebook, my mother’s notebook, thank god—and then returned my attention to the shadowed figure.
I took another step forward, and adrenaline hit me in a woozy rush. The man took a step backward now. Too quickly, he turned and launched himself into the shadows, racing up the steep curve of the hill. I took off after him. The man was up ahead not fifteen yards.
I heard nothing but the pavement slapping beneath my feet, the scattered rhythm of my heartbeat. I was out of shape, my lungs turning tight, and I couldn’t go too fast without shoes—already my soles were burning. I tried to memorize all the details I could. He wore a dark suit. The jacket flapped open when he passed one of the bright pools cast by a rare streetlight. I tried to make out his features, but he was focused, never once looking behind him. I couldn’t close that gap that hovered between us.
Most of all, I wanted to look into his eyes. To feel that dizziness that I now associated with reaching into the world and getting what I wanted from it. “Stop,” I called, but it came out thinned and unconvincing, and the stranger’s footsteps didn’t falter.
At the top of the hill, he intersected with the trees and the shadows in a way that hid him for a second too long, and I stopped, scanning desperately. There was a flicker of movement. Just a squirrel racing across the road. I limped to the top of the hill, seeing only trees and road, pavement lacy with the shadows of the branches. Nobody else. Nothing else.
Down the street, a sudden slam. Lights blazed on, twin circles. A car separated from the deep darkness at the side of the road, hiccupping as it went over the curb, too fast for the narrow road. The license plate in the front, shiny white, caught the moonlight and I tried to memorize the plates, but it was too dark, I only caught the bright red logo near the top, the chipper cursive loop of a state name. A V or a U—
The headlights engulfed me completely, a chemical glare of white, like a surgery light bearing down. In my wildness, I considered standing there until he either stopped or ran me over. But at the last second my instincts took over and yanked me back, and the car was gone before I’d blinked the starbursts from my eyes. The maroon sedan I’d seen outside my mother’s house the night after the fire.
* * *
At sunrise, the three of us were in the backyard. Cate couldn’t keep still. She wore a loose tie-dyed T-shirt that reached her knees, a faded stir of blues and greens. With her half-tangled hair clouding out around her, rage burning in her eyes, she paced the perimeter of the yard. Tom and I both sat stunned on the dew-damp grass. Back here, in the garden, things felt safer. The flowers were a protective shield all around us. The air was filled with birdsong, the sky lavender and then hot orange and then a cleansing yellow.
“The work I do here,” Cate said abruptly. “The work I do here is with women who need safety. And protection. I can’t ask them to come here. Not when someone is trying to kill me. Not when he knows where I fucking live.”
The fire had been mostly contained within the kitchen, which was destroyed now. The official diagnosis was that a dish towel had caught on fire, spreading to the clutter on the counter nearby, the tea boxes and oven mitts. The firefighters had efficiently lectured us, believing it was one of us who’d left the burner on and then drifted to sleep. An unfortunate but unremarkable household incident. I hadn’t brought up the sedan until the firefighters had left.
“Maybe he was a rubbernecker.” Cate was bargaining, turning a gaze toward me that was equal parts accusation and pleading. “Just the typical gawker.”
“I don’t think so, Cate.” I didn’t see any point in comforting lies right now: not with her house behind us, a deep hole puncturing the roof above the kitchen. “Why would his car have been hidden way up the road? Why would he have run away instead of calling for help? And…” I had to tell them. “I’ve seen his car before. He may’ve been following us for a while.” I quickly explained, noting Tom’s honed interest.
“Did you get the plate numbers?” Tom asked.
“No, but I saw a V or a U.”
“Not from around here, then. That’s a long way to come just to rubberneck,” Tom said.
“Think about it. He’s like Bonnie’s attacker in two ways. He ran away immediately, and he acted after dark, when nobody could identify him.” I ticked these off on my fingers.
“Then why not attack us in our beds?” Cate asked. “He could’ve just—” She made a quick slicing gesture across her throat, the blade of one finger pressing into her skin. I flinched.
“This attack might not be exactly like Bonnie’s,” I said, “but it’s exactly the same as my mother’s.”
“But your mother vanished,” Tom said. “We’re still here.”
I was still here. I was sitting with the sun moving hot across my skin, with the wet grass piercing my thighs.
“My home is ruined. My business is gone. Nothing is safe,” Cate said, a dull litany. “And, what?” Cate turned on us. “You two come into my life, you raise hell, and now you’re just going to fuck off into the horizon.” She flung her hand upward, a sweeping gesture that didn’t conceal the surprising ache in her voice. She was hurt. I hadn’t expected this; I’d thought she’d be relieved to see us go.
“I don’t know where we’re even fucking off to.” Tom sounded tired. The Bishops hadn’t answered our calls. We’d spent all evening calling and reached only their brisk, chilly answering machine. This is Patricia Bishop, please leave a message. It was Wednesday morning and I didn’t feel much closer to figuring out where my mother had gone. I could be home by tonight, back in the lab by morning.
Cate dropped to the ground in a low crouch, kneeling with her head bent. She groaned.
“If I go back to Chicago,” I said suddenly, “what will you do, Tom?”
He blinked, lifted his glasses to scrub at one pink-rimmed eye. “I’ll go to Vermont. I still want to talk to the Bishops for my book, if nothing else. I’m not ready to walk away from this.”
Tightness clamped around my heart; I felt territorial, jealous. Tom going on without me, hunting through my history. Now I was torn. I did truly want to return to Chicago. I wasn’t at the school as a publicity stunt. I was there because I belonged, using the brain that Bellanger had created to make him proud.
But I looked down at the notebook that Tom had managed to retrieve from Cate’s house last night. What if Cate was right? What if finding my mother’s notebook inside her cheap broken clock hadn’t been an accident but a message? Come find me, Josephine. It was the first time I’d felt my mother actively pulling me into our past. Inviting me in. How long had I waited for this?
“Okay,” I said. “Maybe I have time to go to Vermont. I mean, who knows—what if my mother is there? With Patricia. She visited Emily, she visited Deb—”
Tom looked at me like he didn’t quite believe me, though already a smile was building at the corners of his mouth. “Yeah?”
“Do you think there’s any hope of returning to Chicago by the weekend if we do this?”
“We’ll drive all night if we have to.”
“One last stop,” I said. “What’s one more?”
Cate straightened. She stood, swaying, looking down at us. Her face was calm and unyielding now. “If you’re going, then I’m going with you,” she said.
