Girl One, page 20
A police car was approaching, and right behind it a truck, their lights catching me in a glare so blinding that I turned away. The vehicles pulled into the driveway. I stood in the spotlight for a second too long, unable to see anything, the world gone white.
The engines fell silent, the headlights fading, winking out. As I blinked to clear the hectic spots of color from my vision, there came the heavy slam of a car door, echoed by two more. Multiple silhouettes were moving toward us in a slow pack. More men than I’d expected. In this tiny town, I’d pictured one politely beleaguered officer.
“Hello, there.” A voice issuing from the shadows. “You the folks who called about something suspicious going on at the Stroud residence?”
“That’s me. Thanks for coming, gentlemen.” Tom hurried down the steps. Watching him reach out to shake hands with one of the men, I recognized that Tom had an automatic confidence with these strangers, perfectly at ease among them. It gave me a funny envy for a minute: how quickly he took control, seemingly without needing to prove anything to them.
Tom consulted with the others in voices too low for me to catch. Before I knew what was happening, two men had left the group, heading with Tom toward the back of the house. The beam of a flashlight bounced and swayed through the darkness before they vanished.
Two other men stayed behind. One stepped forward into the pool of light. He wore black shoes, so shiny I could almost see myself in them, an elongated and ghostly reflection. The man nodded at me in greeting. “Evening, miss.”
“Where are they going?”
“Your friend is taking some of the boys to show them what you found in the forest,” the man said. “In the meantime, we’re going to need to get your statements. How many of you are in there?”
Isabelle was watching us, her face a pale thumbprint against the glass. “Just the two of us,” I said. “Me and my friend.”
The man started up the stairs toward the Strouds’ small porch, the steps creaking under his weight. His voice was gentle, kind enough that I relaxed. “I hope you don’t mind if we step inside. If there’s somebody out here causing trouble,” he said, “then we don’t want to leave you young ladies all alone.”
* * *
Both men were dressed like they’d just arrived home from office jobs, crisp khaki pants, button-ups. I wondered about that, the lack of uniforms. The younger man, wearing an orange shirt, looked at Isabelle, his gaze catching on the white dress. It was folded over her arm, the bloodstain hidden from view. I caught his flinch of discomfort.
“First things first,” Black Shoes said. “Why are you ladies in the Strouds’ home? Are you friends with the girls who live here?”
That present tense gave me a brief flicker of hope, summoning the Strouds back into the world for a second. “We’re just acquaintances.”
“Acquaintances,” Black Shoes said. “The Stroud girls have lived here for nearly twenty years now. I can’t say they’ve ever had visitors before. Now, your friend out there said that you ladies have been stalked. Is that right? Somebody’s after you?”
Orange Shirt had wandered into the kitchen now, moving toward the fridge. He leaned in close to examine the photograph hanging on the fridge. Vera and Delilah smiling together.
“There’s a man,” I said. “He’s been following us for the past week. We’re worried that he might have gotten to the Strouds first.”
“Why would the same person be after the Stroud girls and after you?” Black Shoes went over to the couch and sat next to Isabelle. The glow of the TV screen flashed hot blue against his throat and chest.
“We come from the Homestead,” Isabelle said. “The same as Vera and Delilah.”
Orange Shirt twisted around at this. Black Shoes nodded, slowly, thoughtfully. “Both of you?” Black Shoes asked, gesturing toward me and Isabelle.
“You’ve heard of the Homestead, sir?” I asked.
“Of course I have,” he said. “You think I’m out of touch just because I’m an old man, is that it?” He laughed, and a cautious warmth spread through me. Something about him reminded me of Dr. McCarter. He had that same good-natured self-assurance, like he could fix everything. “With Vera and Delilah living right here in town, we all tried to learn more about that place. Now what’s that you’ve got there, sweetheart?”
Isabelle let him take the dress from her. He shook it open, fabric hanging in the light of the TV screen. The bloodstain was unmistakable, blossoming dark against the soft, brittle white fabric. “Is this Vera’s dress?” he asked, his voice tightening. “Delilah’s? Good lord.”
“Like I said,” I went on, “we’re concerned that somebody who’s been chasing us found the Strouds and—and hurt them.”
“Can you give us a name? Anything?”
“No,” I said, hating how flimsy it sounded. “We don’t know exactly who’s after us.”
The men exchanged worried looks. “Can you give us a physical description?” Black Shoes pressed. “That’d be a big help.”
“He’s tall,” I said, hearing how inadequate this was. “He has brown hair, I think. He drives a maroon sedan.” And I hadn’t seen him in three days now. I was miles and miles away from the last place I’d spotted him. The stranger wavered, flickered like a phantom.
“People around here know their neighbors pretty well,” Black Shoes said. “We’re a close-knit place. Anybody from out of town would’ve stood out to us right away.”
“They sure would have,” Orange Shirt agreed. He was even younger than I’d first assumed, closer to my own age.
“When’s the last time anybody talked to the Strouds?” I asked. “Maybe that could help narrow it down.”
“That,” Black Shoes said, “is some smart thinking, young lady. We’ll have to get on that, ask around. Not sure it’ll do much good, though.”
“You said you were a close-knit town,” I said, biting down my frustration.
“Those two kept to themselves,” Black Shoes said. “It’s too bad. Maybe if they’d been friendlier, we would’ve noticed sooner. There’s a lesson there for you girls,” he said, like it’d just occurred to him. “You can’t help that you were grown in a test tube. But you can always try to be civil. You don’t have to be like Vera and Delilah.” He made eye contact with me now, steady. “You don’t have to hide away like witches in a storybook.”
Those trees, the word repeating and repeating, hewn again and again. Precise and urgent at once. A litany, an excuse, a justification. A curse and a prayer. W I T C H E S. The work of multiple people, I realized now. Dozens. There’d been too many words spread across the trees for all the writing to have come from one person. I should have recognized that the moment I saw those words ringing the clearing. It hadn’t been the work of just one man, arriving in the shelter of night. It had been a whole town.
And now Black Shoes had brought that word into the room, placed it between us like a dare.
He was watching me. It was a test. Would I swallow the word, pretend it was nothing? Would I smile and agree with him that we could be nicer, sure, of course, recognize the threat, let this go? Leave the Strouds’ fate unexamined, unmourned, and unavenged? If I said something—if I spoke up now—I wouldn’t be able to go back to my old life. I understood that, cleanly and clearly. Choosing between saying something now and letting it go would break my life in half. The freedom to leave and return to my old life, or violence.
I made my choice. “You killed them,” I said, not breaking our eye contact. “It wasn’t a stranger from out of town at all, was it? It was you.”
Saying the words aloud changed me. It reached down into me and altered the shape of who I was. The men were unsurprised; they’d understood the inevitable conclusion of this evening as soon as they had walked in. I’d been the only one in the dark, trying to play along with them.
Ignoring me, Black Shoes held out an arm to Isabelle. “You look uncomfortable over there, sweetheart. Why don’t you come closer?”
Isabelle gave me a searching look, like I was taking on the role of Patricia now, the person who could tell her what to do. But I was frozen. She moved closer, just an inch. Black Shoes shifted closer until he was next to her. His thigh nearly touched hers.
“Has it been you all along?” I asked tightly. “Have you been following us?”
“I haven’t been following anybody,” he said, a contemptuous laugh wrapped around the word. “All of us here in Kithira mind our own business. We never went looking for trouble.”
The dizziness began at the back of my skull, washing forward. Without even thinking about it, I leaned forward, stared directly into his eyes. Those small, dark pupils, little holes in the fabric of his being. I could slip a hook in there and just pull the truth out.
But the night at the motel, I’d been alone. It was a private, impulsive act, an opportunity seen and seized in the dark of night. Even the prison had offered a certain anonymity. Now I was surrounded. Two men in here, two with Tom. I wasn’t sure what the other men would do if they realized what I was, what I could do. And they were watching my every move.
Black Shoes seemed to view my silence as an invitation to explain: “I remember sitting there watching TV, back in the seventies. The Homestead. Every time one of you was born, there were photos and interviews. Front-page headlines at the breakfast table. That doctor fellow went on TV and told the world that this was only the beginning of a bold new future.” He held his hands up, a clownish mockery of wonder. “I looked at him and I thought, does he know what this means? Does he know what this means for him and his wife? For his own father, for his own sons? This man was teaching women how to take over the world, and nobody else seemed to notice. Nobody ever stopped to think exactly what we were progressing to. Thank God for Ricky Peters. That man restored a certain level of moral clarity to the whole conversation.”
“By murdering innocent people?” I asked, a reflex.
“He’s a hero. When Ricky Peters set that fire, he killed one man, sure, but he also short-circuited the wholesale destruction of mankind. That should have been the end of it all. But you girls couldn’t leave well enough alone. You’re from that place, aren’t you?” He directed this question downward at Isabelle. “Then maybe you can explain why you girls couldn’t just take your disease somewhere else. Make another little freak show for yourselves. Why you had to force yourselves on the rest of the world, come and live in good God-fearing towns.”
My rage was a low hum, slowly building.
“Vera, now, she was quiet,” Black Shoes said. “She mostly kept to herself. But that girl of hers was nothing but trouble. A knockout from the time she was little, and she knew it, too. She walked around town like she owned the place. Delilah. You have to wonder why her mother chose a name like that for her. A father would’ve known better.”
That photo on the fridge. Delilah’s long curly hair, heart-shaped face, big dark eyes. Heartbreaking.
“She got tangled up with a young man,” Black Shoes said. “A few months back. A young man who could’ve had any girl in town. Delilah always thought she was better than the rest of us, but going after him like that? I’ve thought about it a lot. Why she’d do that. Delilah wasn’t born of the love between a man and a woman. Love doesn’t mean the same thing to her. Seeing her with that young man, it devastated us all. We should’ve drawn the line sooner. But a woman who’s not part of the normal order doesn’t respect the ties that bind. She takes what she wants. That kind of woman will chew men up, spit us right out. We used to call girls like that sluts. Now they’re supposed to be miracles.” He laughed.
I stood there, the word sluts—the blunt, slick hurt of it—dripping down me, staining me.
“This is a town where we still believe in consequences.” Black Shoes raised his eyes to mine, and I could feel the air leaching away. “I don’t know if you’re aware of this, Madame Scientist, but on the inside, you girls work a lot like God intended you to. You can make a baby the old-fashioned way just fine. No hocus-pocus required.”
“Are you trying to say we can get pregnant by men?” And then the realization formed fully: “Delilah was pregnant.” I tried to wrap my head around it. That was the realm of our mothers—we were too young. We were still the daughters, eternally the Girls. We shouldn’t be pregnant ourselves.
Black Shoes ran a hand over his lower face. “The young man came to his senses and broke things off. But Delilah, she went crazy. She wasn’t anybody’s miracle anymore, just another sob story with a baby and no man. Not long after, that boy got sick. He started throwing up all day long. He lost weight. They thought it was the stress at first. Then they thought it was a stomach bug. Something in the water. A flu. Cancer, maybe, a tumor on the brain. But the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong. You don’t know what it does to you to see a healthy young man wasting away in his bed, and nobody can tell you why. Then it started spreading to all his friends. Then to all the young men. A quarter of the population of Kithira, vomiting, sick, unable to eat a thing. Nice young wives handling things alone. Businesses shut down. Classrooms empty. We were watching our future waste away right in front of us. That was a hard time for all of us. A hard time.”
Goose bumps rose along my arms. “What does this have to do with Delilah?” I asked, even as the awe spread inside my blood. Delilah, retching from her unexpected pregnancy, all alone: Delilah, reaching into the men’s throats and guts, returning the sickness tenfold and then spreading it.
“It was her,” Black Shoes said simply. “I don’t know how, but it was her. I want you to understand that we warned Vera. We went to speak to her, me and some of the other boys from the station. We let her know what was going on with her daughter and with our sons, and asked her if she’d be willing to leave Kithira. This was a chance for her and Delilah to just walk away. But they didn’t. They made a choice. And you know something?” He leaned back. “After what happened to the Strouds, those boys got better and better. The very next morning, my nephew was sitting up in bed, eating a huge breakfast. Bacon and eggs. The greatest thing I ever saw in my life.”
His nephew. The rooms felt suddenly cooler. I thought of De-lilah and Vera, alone, no relatives here, the mutated branches that had twisted away from the family tree.
His voice was so reverent and joyful that it seemed like he expected me to join in. “It’s been three weeks now and every young man is back on his feet.”
The Strouds had made their choice. Now I’d make mine.
30
A knock on the door. Orange Shirt moved to answer. Please be Tom, I thought, my heart knotted up with a mix of fear and hope. Afraid that he’d walk into danger and not be able to help any of us, not even himself; hopeful that he’d make them understand the situation. Maybe they’d treat him differently. I couldn’t get Black Shoes’ words out of my mind. After what happened. The Strouds had bled; they’d burned. The way Black Shoes glided over it, a minor detail on the way to his nephew’s stupid fucking breakfast.
But it was a stranger at the door, one who sized me up with a quick up-down sweep. He consulted with Orange Shirt for a minute, a low mutter, and then the third man was entering the house. The proportion of these men to the two of us, Isabelle and me, had shifted again. I had to act. I had to act. But I didn’t know what to do—there were so many of them—and I still didn’t understand the limits of my power.
“We didn’t think anybody would come looking for them,” Black Shoes said. “Nobody ever had before. This was between us and the Strouds, that’s all. I’m sorry that you young ladies had to come here. I’m sorry you’ve become part of this now.”
“There are more of them,” Orange Shirt said. “One more, hiding somewhere. That’s what he said.”
Tom. Tom had told them about Cate. The betrayal was sharp enough to cut through the panic, a stinging ache.
I watched the stranger vanish down the hallway, adrenaline surging through me. Cate’s hands on Isabelle’s arm, the way the wound had vanished, absorbed back into Isabelle’s body. What would the people of Kithira do to Cate if they found out that she had the same weirdness inside her as Delilah?
“You still have time to let us walk away,” I said, all desperate bravado. “People will come looking for us. Just the way we looked for the Strouds. I’m all over the news right now. There’s no way people won’t notice—someone will come looking—” But whether I was famous, or infamous, I knew that nobody in my life was close enough to come searching.
Black Shoes stood and approached me. “Don’t feel sorry for yourself. This is on you.”
“How so?” I asked, a whisper.
“After Dr. Bellanger died, the world went back to normal. Every day, hundreds of thousands of babies are born, each one with a mommy and a daddy. In the face of that, what’s nine girls? But suddenly you’re all over the TV screen. Josephine Morrow. Girl One, in the papers, claiming that you’re going to finish what Bellanger started. I know it’s a publicity stunt: a pretty girl, trying her hand at being Dr. Frankenstein instead of the monster.” Anger overcame me, hot and acidic. “But it’s got people thinking again. Soon enough, it’ll have them wondering whether women even need men. Whether men have a place in the society that we built ourselves.” His eyes on me had turned flat and heavy. There were fine whitish marks around his eyes, crevices the sun hadn’t reached. “Nature rewards the brave. If you’re going to make men irrelevant, we’ll take back our place in the gene pool by whatever means is necessary.”
Whatever means is necessary. Something about the way he looked at me, up and down—something about the story, Delilah’s pregnancy—
“He raped her,” I said, my rage compressing the words, turning them clear and precise. “Your nephew raped Delilah. To prove that you matter. But it wasn’t enough, was it? She was still so powerful that you had to kill her—”
A scuffle of movement. Orange Shirt came back, Cate with him. Her arms twisted behind her back so that she had to walk in an awkward crouch, fighting against him. Blood ran from her nose to her mouth, thick stripes. My own mouth filled with the taste of rust.
The engines fell silent, the headlights fading, winking out. As I blinked to clear the hectic spots of color from my vision, there came the heavy slam of a car door, echoed by two more. Multiple silhouettes were moving toward us in a slow pack. More men than I’d expected. In this tiny town, I’d pictured one politely beleaguered officer.
“Hello, there.” A voice issuing from the shadows. “You the folks who called about something suspicious going on at the Stroud residence?”
“That’s me. Thanks for coming, gentlemen.” Tom hurried down the steps. Watching him reach out to shake hands with one of the men, I recognized that Tom had an automatic confidence with these strangers, perfectly at ease among them. It gave me a funny envy for a minute: how quickly he took control, seemingly without needing to prove anything to them.
Tom consulted with the others in voices too low for me to catch. Before I knew what was happening, two men had left the group, heading with Tom toward the back of the house. The beam of a flashlight bounced and swayed through the darkness before they vanished.
Two other men stayed behind. One stepped forward into the pool of light. He wore black shoes, so shiny I could almost see myself in them, an elongated and ghostly reflection. The man nodded at me in greeting. “Evening, miss.”
“Where are they going?”
“Your friend is taking some of the boys to show them what you found in the forest,” the man said. “In the meantime, we’re going to need to get your statements. How many of you are in there?”
Isabelle was watching us, her face a pale thumbprint against the glass. “Just the two of us,” I said. “Me and my friend.”
The man started up the stairs toward the Strouds’ small porch, the steps creaking under his weight. His voice was gentle, kind enough that I relaxed. “I hope you don’t mind if we step inside. If there’s somebody out here causing trouble,” he said, “then we don’t want to leave you young ladies all alone.”
* * *
Both men were dressed like they’d just arrived home from office jobs, crisp khaki pants, button-ups. I wondered about that, the lack of uniforms. The younger man, wearing an orange shirt, looked at Isabelle, his gaze catching on the white dress. It was folded over her arm, the bloodstain hidden from view. I caught his flinch of discomfort.
“First things first,” Black Shoes said. “Why are you ladies in the Strouds’ home? Are you friends with the girls who live here?”
That present tense gave me a brief flicker of hope, summoning the Strouds back into the world for a second. “We’re just acquaintances.”
“Acquaintances,” Black Shoes said. “The Stroud girls have lived here for nearly twenty years now. I can’t say they’ve ever had visitors before. Now, your friend out there said that you ladies have been stalked. Is that right? Somebody’s after you?”
Orange Shirt had wandered into the kitchen now, moving toward the fridge. He leaned in close to examine the photograph hanging on the fridge. Vera and Delilah smiling together.
“There’s a man,” I said. “He’s been following us for the past week. We’re worried that he might have gotten to the Strouds first.”
“Why would the same person be after the Stroud girls and after you?” Black Shoes went over to the couch and sat next to Isabelle. The glow of the TV screen flashed hot blue against his throat and chest.
“We come from the Homestead,” Isabelle said. “The same as Vera and Delilah.”
Orange Shirt twisted around at this. Black Shoes nodded, slowly, thoughtfully. “Both of you?” Black Shoes asked, gesturing toward me and Isabelle.
“You’ve heard of the Homestead, sir?” I asked.
“Of course I have,” he said. “You think I’m out of touch just because I’m an old man, is that it?” He laughed, and a cautious warmth spread through me. Something about him reminded me of Dr. McCarter. He had that same good-natured self-assurance, like he could fix everything. “With Vera and Delilah living right here in town, we all tried to learn more about that place. Now what’s that you’ve got there, sweetheart?”
Isabelle let him take the dress from her. He shook it open, fabric hanging in the light of the TV screen. The bloodstain was unmistakable, blossoming dark against the soft, brittle white fabric. “Is this Vera’s dress?” he asked, his voice tightening. “Delilah’s? Good lord.”
“Like I said,” I went on, “we’re concerned that somebody who’s been chasing us found the Strouds and—and hurt them.”
“Can you give us a name? Anything?”
“No,” I said, hating how flimsy it sounded. “We don’t know exactly who’s after us.”
The men exchanged worried looks. “Can you give us a physical description?” Black Shoes pressed. “That’d be a big help.”
“He’s tall,” I said, hearing how inadequate this was. “He has brown hair, I think. He drives a maroon sedan.” And I hadn’t seen him in three days now. I was miles and miles away from the last place I’d spotted him. The stranger wavered, flickered like a phantom.
“People around here know their neighbors pretty well,” Black Shoes said. “We’re a close-knit place. Anybody from out of town would’ve stood out to us right away.”
“They sure would have,” Orange Shirt agreed. He was even younger than I’d first assumed, closer to my own age.
“When’s the last time anybody talked to the Strouds?” I asked. “Maybe that could help narrow it down.”
“That,” Black Shoes said, “is some smart thinking, young lady. We’ll have to get on that, ask around. Not sure it’ll do much good, though.”
“You said you were a close-knit town,” I said, biting down my frustration.
“Those two kept to themselves,” Black Shoes said. “It’s too bad. Maybe if they’d been friendlier, we would’ve noticed sooner. There’s a lesson there for you girls,” he said, like it’d just occurred to him. “You can’t help that you were grown in a test tube. But you can always try to be civil. You don’t have to be like Vera and Delilah.” He made eye contact with me now, steady. “You don’t have to hide away like witches in a storybook.”
Those trees, the word repeating and repeating, hewn again and again. Precise and urgent at once. A litany, an excuse, a justification. A curse and a prayer. W I T C H E S. The work of multiple people, I realized now. Dozens. There’d been too many words spread across the trees for all the writing to have come from one person. I should have recognized that the moment I saw those words ringing the clearing. It hadn’t been the work of just one man, arriving in the shelter of night. It had been a whole town.
And now Black Shoes had brought that word into the room, placed it between us like a dare.
He was watching me. It was a test. Would I swallow the word, pretend it was nothing? Would I smile and agree with him that we could be nicer, sure, of course, recognize the threat, let this go? Leave the Strouds’ fate unexamined, unmourned, and unavenged? If I said something—if I spoke up now—I wouldn’t be able to go back to my old life. I understood that, cleanly and clearly. Choosing between saying something now and letting it go would break my life in half. The freedom to leave and return to my old life, or violence.
I made my choice. “You killed them,” I said, not breaking our eye contact. “It wasn’t a stranger from out of town at all, was it? It was you.”
Saying the words aloud changed me. It reached down into me and altered the shape of who I was. The men were unsurprised; they’d understood the inevitable conclusion of this evening as soon as they had walked in. I’d been the only one in the dark, trying to play along with them.
Ignoring me, Black Shoes held out an arm to Isabelle. “You look uncomfortable over there, sweetheart. Why don’t you come closer?”
Isabelle gave me a searching look, like I was taking on the role of Patricia now, the person who could tell her what to do. But I was frozen. She moved closer, just an inch. Black Shoes shifted closer until he was next to her. His thigh nearly touched hers.
“Has it been you all along?” I asked tightly. “Have you been following us?”
“I haven’t been following anybody,” he said, a contemptuous laugh wrapped around the word. “All of us here in Kithira mind our own business. We never went looking for trouble.”
The dizziness began at the back of my skull, washing forward. Without even thinking about it, I leaned forward, stared directly into his eyes. Those small, dark pupils, little holes in the fabric of his being. I could slip a hook in there and just pull the truth out.
But the night at the motel, I’d been alone. It was a private, impulsive act, an opportunity seen and seized in the dark of night. Even the prison had offered a certain anonymity. Now I was surrounded. Two men in here, two with Tom. I wasn’t sure what the other men would do if they realized what I was, what I could do. And they were watching my every move.
Black Shoes seemed to view my silence as an invitation to explain: “I remember sitting there watching TV, back in the seventies. The Homestead. Every time one of you was born, there were photos and interviews. Front-page headlines at the breakfast table. That doctor fellow went on TV and told the world that this was only the beginning of a bold new future.” He held his hands up, a clownish mockery of wonder. “I looked at him and I thought, does he know what this means? Does he know what this means for him and his wife? For his own father, for his own sons? This man was teaching women how to take over the world, and nobody else seemed to notice. Nobody ever stopped to think exactly what we were progressing to. Thank God for Ricky Peters. That man restored a certain level of moral clarity to the whole conversation.”
“By murdering innocent people?” I asked, a reflex.
“He’s a hero. When Ricky Peters set that fire, he killed one man, sure, but he also short-circuited the wholesale destruction of mankind. That should have been the end of it all. But you girls couldn’t leave well enough alone. You’re from that place, aren’t you?” He directed this question downward at Isabelle. “Then maybe you can explain why you girls couldn’t just take your disease somewhere else. Make another little freak show for yourselves. Why you had to force yourselves on the rest of the world, come and live in good God-fearing towns.”
My rage was a low hum, slowly building.
“Vera, now, she was quiet,” Black Shoes said. “She mostly kept to herself. But that girl of hers was nothing but trouble. A knockout from the time she was little, and she knew it, too. She walked around town like she owned the place. Delilah. You have to wonder why her mother chose a name like that for her. A father would’ve known better.”
That photo on the fridge. Delilah’s long curly hair, heart-shaped face, big dark eyes. Heartbreaking.
“She got tangled up with a young man,” Black Shoes said. “A few months back. A young man who could’ve had any girl in town. Delilah always thought she was better than the rest of us, but going after him like that? I’ve thought about it a lot. Why she’d do that. Delilah wasn’t born of the love between a man and a woman. Love doesn’t mean the same thing to her. Seeing her with that young man, it devastated us all. We should’ve drawn the line sooner. But a woman who’s not part of the normal order doesn’t respect the ties that bind. She takes what she wants. That kind of woman will chew men up, spit us right out. We used to call girls like that sluts. Now they’re supposed to be miracles.” He laughed.
I stood there, the word sluts—the blunt, slick hurt of it—dripping down me, staining me.
“This is a town where we still believe in consequences.” Black Shoes raised his eyes to mine, and I could feel the air leaching away. “I don’t know if you’re aware of this, Madame Scientist, but on the inside, you girls work a lot like God intended you to. You can make a baby the old-fashioned way just fine. No hocus-pocus required.”
“Are you trying to say we can get pregnant by men?” And then the realization formed fully: “Delilah was pregnant.” I tried to wrap my head around it. That was the realm of our mothers—we were too young. We were still the daughters, eternally the Girls. We shouldn’t be pregnant ourselves.
Black Shoes ran a hand over his lower face. “The young man came to his senses and broke things off. But Delilah, she went crazy. She wasn’t anybody’s miracle anymore, just another sob story with a baby and no man. Not long after, that boy got sick. He started throwing up all day long. He lost weight. They thought it was the stress at first. Then they thought it was a stomach bug. Something in the water. A flu. Cancer, maybe, a tumor on the brain. But the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong. You don’t know what it does to you to see a healthy young man wasting away in his bed, and nobody can tell you why. Then it started spreading to all his friends. Then to all the young men. A quarter of the population of Kithira, vomiting, sick, unable to eat a thing. Nice young wives handling things alone. Businesses shut down. Classrooms empty. We were watching our future waste away right in front of us. That was a hard time for all of us. A hard time.”
Goose bumps rose along my arms. “What does this have to do with Delilah?” I asked, even as the awe spread inside my blood. Delilah, retching from her unexpected pregnancy, all alone: Delilah, reaching into the men’s throats and guts, returning the sickness tenfold and then spreading it.
“It was her,” Black Shoes said simply. “I don’t know how, but it was her. I want you to understand that we warned Vera. We went to speak to her, me and some of the other boys from the station. We let her know what was going on with her daughter and with our sons, and asked her if she’d be willing to leave Kithira. This was a chance for her and Delilah to just walk away. But they didn’t. They made a choice. And you know something?” He leaned back. “After what happened to the Strouds, those boys got better and better. The very next morning, my nephew was sitting up in bed, eating a huge breakfast. Bacon and eggs. The greatest thing I ever saw in my life.”
His nephew. The rooms felt suddenly cooler. I thought of De-lilah and Vera, alone, no relatives here, the mutated branches that had twisted away from the family tree.
His voice was so reverent and joyful that it seemed like he expected me to join in. “It’s been three weeks now and every young man is back on his feet.”
The Strouds had made their choice. Now I’d make mine.
30
A knock on the door. Orange Shirt moved to answer. Please be Tom, I thought, my heart knotted up with a mix of fear and hope. Afraid that he’d walk into danger and not be able to help any of us, not even himself; hopeful that he’d make them understand the situation. Maybe they’d treat him differently. I couldn’t get Black Shoes’ words out of my mind. After what happened. The Strouds had bled; they’d burned. The way Black Shoes glided over it, a minor detail on the way to his nephew’s stupid fucking breakfast.
But it was a stranger at the door, one who sized me up with a quick up-down sweep. He consulted with Orange Shirt for a minute, a low mutter, and then the third man was entering the house. The proportion of these men to the two of us, Isabelle and me, had shifted again. I had to act. I had to act. But I didn’t know what to do—there were so many of them—and I still didn’t understand the limits of my power.
“We didn’t think anybody would come looking for them,” Black Shoes said. “Nobody ever had before. This was between us and the Strouds, that’s all. I’m sorry that you young ladies had to come here. I’m sorry you’ve become part of this now.”
“There are more of them,” Orange Shirt said. “One more, hiding somewhere. That’s what he said.”
Tom. Tom had told them about Cate. The betrayal was sharp enough to cut through the panic, a stinging ache.
I watched the stranger vanish down the hallway, adrenaline surging through me. Cate’s hands on Isabelle’s arm, the way the wound had vanished, absorbed back into Isabelle’s body. What would the people of Kithira do to Cate if they found out that she had the same weirdness inside her as Delilah?
“You still have time to let us walk away,” I said, all desperate bravado. “People will come looking for us. Just the way we looked for the Strouds. I’m all over the news right now. There’s no way people won’t notice—someone will come looking—” But whether I was famous, or infamous, I knew that nobody in my life was close enough to come searching.
Black Shoes stood and approached me. “Don’t feel sorry for yourself. This is on you.”
“How so?” I asked, a whisper.
“After Dr. Bellanger died, the world went back to normal. Every day, hundreds of thousands of babies are born, each one with a mommy and a daddy. In the face of that, what’s nine girls? But suddenly you’re all over the TV screen. Josephine Morrow. Girl One, in the papers, claiming that you’re going to finish what Bellanger started. I know it’s a publicity stunt: a pretty girl, trying her hand at being Dr. Frankenstein instead of the monster.” Anger overcame me, hot and acidic. “But it’s got people thinking again. Soon enough, it’ll have them wondering whether women even need men. Whether men have a place in the society that we built ourselves.” His eyes on me had turned flat and heavy. There were fine whitish marks around his eyes, crevices the sun hadn’t reached. “Nature rewards the brave. If you’re going to make men irrelevant, we’ll take back our place in the gene pool by whatever means is necessary.”
Whatever means is necessary. Something about the way he looked at me, up and down—something about the story, Delilah’s pregnancy—
“He raped her,” I said, my rage compressing the words, turning them clear and precise. “Your nephew raped Delilah. To prove that you matter. But it wasn’t enough, was it? She was still so powerful that you had to kill her—”
A scuffle of movement. Orange Shirt came back, Cate with him. Her arms twisted behind her back so that she had to walk in an awkward crouch, fighting against him. Blood ran from her nose to her mouth, thick stripes. My own mouth filled with the taste of rust.
