Girl One, page 33
“I’m here,” I said, “for my mother.”
He leaned in close, his breath hot against my ear. He whispered, “I know.”
47
Bellanger’s office felt disorienting. Timeless. Like it could have been early morning, or the middle of the night, or June of 1977—everything held in suspension all this time. No windows, the single halo of yellow lamplight in one corner. Overflowing bookshelves, tables with papers, notebooks scattered widely, some cracked on their spines. If everything else on this desert compound felt functional and impersonal, this space was all Bellanger. I was surprised to see my own adult hands folded in my lap, pressed between my thighs to stop the shake. I felt myself turning back into a six-year-old kid, moony-eyed and hungry for love.
We’d been ushered here, still dusty and tired from the road. Bellanger sat behind his desk with his hands clasped. “My first three daughters.” He nodded at each of us in turn. The light from the lamp caught the sides of his face. “Do you know, I remember each of your births? All these years and I can still recall the distinct sound of each of your cries, nine times in a row. Each one a clarion cry. The very world changing.”
Cate was brisk and firm, speaking before his last syllable had faded. “We need to see Margaret Morrow.”
Bellanger leaned back, a glimmer of surprise, or displeasure, or both. “Of course you’ll see your mother, Josephine,” he said, addressing me as if I were the one who’d spoken. “Of course. You’ll have to forgive us if we aren’t exactly prepared for company at this moment.”
“What is this place?” I asked, softening my question, making sure he had a choice in responding. I was careful not to overplay my hand.
“This? This is home.”
The way he said it, not thinking of the home he’d let burn to the ground. That anger churned in me, so thick I could feel it licking at my throat. “But why are you here, Dr. Bellanger?” I asked, and let the question hold all the implications of that. Why was he here? Why was he alive? Why? “We thought you were dead. We thought Fiona was dead. And you just let us. You never reached out, all this time? You never wondered about us?”
Bellanger examined me, his eyes steady and probing. Having him right in front of me made me feel like everything else was an illusion. Maybe this strange desert outpost would vanish if I traced my finger along the right seam of it.
“Of course I wondered about you.” He sounded almost hurt. “I’ve followed your paths with great interest. I know all about your lives.” He was looking directly at me as he said it, and I realized that Bellanger knew. When I’d appeared on TV, bubbling over with my plans to make him proud, he’d been listening.
“You have to understand,” he went on. “In 1977, I watched my miracle fall apart around me. The pressure placed on me was ugly. I’d achieved the impossible nine times in a row, but the world wanted another miracle, bigger and better and bolder. Something they could hold in their hands. They wanted to take what I’d done and package it into a pill, put it on the shelves of drugstores like—like common aspirin. First they ignored me, then they mocked me, and finally they tried to stop me. But when I succeeded, what did they want? They wanted it for themselves. I was this close to handing over my life’s work so that my colleagues could play God without earning it.”
Bellanger had said similar things in his letters to me. This attitude that I’d always mistaken for confidence, for a maverick brilliance, now sounded petty. I’d always pictured his work as tragically interrupted, but I knew the truth: He’d chosen Fiona over her sisters, over her future sisters. Over everything.
“When I saw Fiona—when I saw that little girl, wielding those powers—I knew what I’d truly accomplished. It may have taken eight attempts before her, but I did it. There she was. A miracle.” Bellanger had grown more animated as he spoke about Fiona, gesturing, face flushed, and he rose to his feet briefly, as if to underscore the magnitude of what he was telling us. “I watched Fiona push a glass off the table without using her hands—gravity itself defied by this tiny girl—I saw her slam doors and start fires without moving a muscle. The entire natural world was bowing down to this scrap of a child. And all I wanted was to protect this miracle at any cost.”
“What about the rest of us? You never saw the rest of us as miracles?” I asked it partially to test him, but there was a stubborn hurt behind the words. Bellanger looked at me with a faint surprise, as if he’d never seen it from this angle.
“You thought the eight of us were just expendable,” Isabelle said.
“Of course not. I merely trusted that you could fend for yourselves.”
“What about the Grassis?” Isabelle asked.
Until now, Bellanger had been studiedly casual, but now I watched as he took some time to compose himself. “So you think you’ve figured some things out,” he said. “But I can promise you don’t understand the full truth.”
Isabelle persisted. “You let them die, and you used their deaths to hide away.”
“Let them die? Angela tried to kill me,” he said. “You want to know what happened that night? Angela came into my lab uninvited. She drew a gun on me in front of Fiona. She said she’d spend the rest of her life in prison to play out some revenge fantasy.”
“Revenge for what?” asked Cate. She squeezed my hand, a signal. I knew that she was thinking of Lily-Anne. Bellanger hadn’t mentioned her yet. She was a clear absence in this story.
“For what? For everything. For paranoid fantasies. Angela had always been an erratic woman. Fiona was getting agitated,” Bellanger said. “I tried to warn Angela. I was the only one who noticed when the fire began on the hem of her dress. One little flame. Tiny enough to pinch out with my fingertips. But before I knew it, the fire had grown out of control. It was no normal fire. That little flame was ravenous, insatiable, inevitable. The heat was enough to blaze your skin away. When I looked back, Angela was already burning—Gina too. I couldn’t save the Grassis or the others, so I fled with Fiona.”
“You didn’t even warn us,” I said, struck by the impersonality of the others. “You didn’t warn my mother and me, or Isabelle, or Patricia.”
“Yet you survived,” Bellanger said. “And I found myself in a strange predicament. If I revealed myself to be alive, I might be accused of murder. If I told the truth about Fiona’s abilities, she’d be reviled as a monster. Fiona had to be my priority. I had to protect her. I had to nurture her unique abilities. And so I went to … a colleague of mine.”
Leland Henley, who doctored the autopsy reports, who lied repeatedly to cover up Bellanger’s obsessions.
“I took Fiona here, a place I knew nobody would search out. I was presumed dead. The media painted me as Icarus, flying too close to the sun. Down I came, in a blaze of fire and ignominy.” For a second his face transformed again, twisted subtly: amusement or regret.
The entire story was a lie. Bullshit. Bellanger had sold the land long before the fire. It was all premeditated. With effort, I made my face soft and receptive, the portrait of a good listener.
Bellanger lifted his voice. “I understand why you resent me, Josephine, but I didn’t ask for any of this. It’s all because of Fiona. You were always my little helper. More than any of the others, you were curious about what we’d accomplished at the Homestead. You grasped its importance, even as a little girl. You grasp its importance now.”
I caught Cate’s nervous glance in my peripheral vision. “I’m not sure I do,” I said. “You don’t know what it’s been like for us. Out there without you.”
“But Fiona is different,” Bellanger said. “She needs me more. Each of you was a miracle, of course, but…” Words seemed to fail him for a moment. “With Fiona’s conception, I achieved perfection. I couldn’t bear to see that success overshadowed and complicated by all the pettiness that had grown at the Homestead. I owed it to her and to the world to rescue her from that.”
“From our mothers, you mean,” Cate said, her voice a low burn. “You were happy to use their bodies, but not so happy that they stuck around afterwards. Is that it?”
I thought he’d be furious, but he didn’t even look at Cate. He folded his hands together under his chin, still addressing me. “Fiona does best with individual instruction. The women—your mothers—they meant well. But Fiona could never have truly thrived under their care, not with her unique needs. I know that now, and I assume they’d recognize it too.”
“And all these people?” I asked. “Your isolation hasn’t exactly lasted, Dr. Bellanger.”
“A light like hers can’t be hidden,” Bellanger said. “Over the years, we’ve drawn followers. People who crave something deeper in their lives. Many of the women are a lot like your mothers, seeking a certain optimism. Our community has become an oasis of sorts. Look at the three of you,” he said. “Pilgrims yourselves. You understand the allure of a place like this.”
“We’re here for my mother,” I said. “You still haven’t told me why she’s here.”
“I blame Freshwater,” Bellanger said, and his voice grew heavier, touched with a sigh. He pressed two fingers into his right temple. “That was our first experiment in venturing beyond the limits of this place—to pay respects to the Grassis. Leaving the home we’ve created here was hard on Fiona. She lashed out. Unfamiliar environments take a toll on her. The world’s exactly the way I remember it, hungry to record any irregularity. Pass it around and stare at it. But they’ve gotten quicker. I wasn’t prepared.”
Bellanger sounded old. He’d been hiding for seventeen years. He’d missed out on personal computers, VCR players, camcorders, MTV. He probably didn’t know about Kurt Cobain’s death, or who he even was. The Berlin Wall toppling. The Challenger exploding. Joseph Bellanger had once been a household name, synonymous with progress and change, the bright knife’s blade of the future. But now he was outpaced. I felt a strange twist of guilt at seeing him diminished like this, as if I were somehow responsible.
“It was all over the news,” Bellanger said. “Then I heard from an associate who told me that Margaret had been contacting him and asking after Fiona.” Henley, again. It was Henley who’d set my mother up. Bellanger smiled, baring all his teeth. “I know how stubborn Margaret can be when she sets her mind to something. When we visited her, she begged to come with us. She wanted to see what we’d accomplished.”
“But she hadn’t packed. She hadn’t even let me know she’d be gone,” I said carefully. I had the distinct impression that Bellanger was looking at me and seeing someone stupid, willing to accept any lie he handed me.
“She couldn’t wait. You know that your mother was never fit for a conventional life.”
“And the fire?” I asked, keeping my voice innocent and curious, all light, no dark shadows for accusations to hide behind.
“Well. Fiona’s nervous habit again. A parlor trick that went a little out of control, that’s all.” Bellanger gave a brusque laugh, as if in spite of himself. “I’m sorry that we didn’t stay for questioning. In our situation, that’s not exactly an option. It felt more important to focus on your mother, and on Fiona.”
“Of course,” I said, offering a sweet smile. “I get it.”
My mother had been fucking kidnapped.
“I never considered the possibility that you’d come after your mother, Josephine,” Bellanger was saying. “I thought you two were … estranged.” A weight on this word that made me inhale, defensive. “But one of our brothers stayed behind to ensure there was no more trouble after Margaret came with us. As Mathias followed you, he understood the pattern. That you were seeking out the others, one by one by one.”
“Mathias? Mathias tried to kill us in our sleep,” Cate said. “Real charmer you’ve got there.”
“You must understand, the people here are deeply protective of Fiona. They worship her, but they see her fragility too. Especially now that she’s with child. Mathias made a well-intentioned mistake. He thought that setting a fire, an act of arson with ordinary causes, might conceal Fiona’s hand in the first fire. Perhaps police would assume the fires were due to some follower of Ricky Peters.”
And it had worked. How much time had we wasted chasing ghosts? Bonnie’s attacker. Ricky Peters. Bobby and Junior. All that time, I could’ve been focused on finding my mother.
Bellanger shifted, cleared his throat. “When I learned that you were contacting the others, I decided that I’d neglected my other daughters long enough. Fiona is precious to me, yes, but the eight of you are still my creations. I was going to reach out to you soon. But here you are already. A welcome surprise.” He smiled, a bright tension caught behind his eyes. There was something cloying and appeasing about the way he offered this to us, a compensating brightness. Bellanger was still stuck back in 1977, assuming that the lightning had only struck in one of our nine bodies. He thought we were the throwaways that had finally led to Fiona’s spark of magic. “You do remind me of your mother, Josephine. Always one step ahead. Such a sharp mind.”
A sudden tug deep in my breastbone, a longing. I’d always imagined what it would be like if we’d stayed at the Homestead; a glimmer of it had sprouted here, in this lonely desert, just waiting for me. “What have you been doing here?” I asked. “Just … working with Fiona?”
“Well, yes. Fiona is the raw material. I’ve taken this girl, an unformed child, crippled by powers she can’t understand, and I’ve helped her grow. Edison didn’t create light—he gave it form, he brought it into people’s homes until we couldn’t function without it. He may as well have invented light. I’m doing the same with Fiona.”
“Her pregnancy,” I said slowly. “Is she—it’s parthenogenetic?” I had to ask if she was a virgin, though both possibilities made me feel sick to my stomach. Beside me, Isabelle stiffened slightly, as if she too were considering the implications.
Bellanger frowned, offended. “You didn’t expect me to abandon my work, did you? You of all people, Josephine, can appreciate the true scope of this accomplishment. You can’t imagine what a special time this is for us, and here you are—you’ve arrived right in the middle of it. I want you to consider something,” Bellanger said. “If Fiona is powerful, coming from an ordinary woman, what will her child be like? Coming from the womb of a goddess.”
Isabelle gave a little gasp next to me. The hairs along the back of my neck and my arms rose.
“Well, it’s been nice chatting with you, Dr. Bellanger, but we’re here for Margaret. We’d like to speak to her now, if you don’t mind,” Cate said, slapping her hands down on her thighs. Her sudden briskness was startling, like laughter inside a church.
“I do mind.” Bellanger finally acknowledged Cate, face chilly and amused, like a parent dealing with a tantruming child. “Catherine, you seem to misunderstand your role here. You’ve come to my private land uninvited and unannounced. You’ve intruded on my property, and now you’re making demands of me?” His eyes moved to each of us in turn, a calculation that seemed swift and automatic. Like he could reach into us by sight alone and measure our dimensions. Know our worth. I stared right back at him.
“You three could eventually be an important part of what we do here,” he said. “But for now, you’re strangers.”
Worry stirred, dark and slick, in the pit of my belly. A part of what we do here.
“So you’re not letting us speak to Margaret,” Cate said flatly. “How do we even know she’s here? How do we know she’s all right?”
“No harm has come to Margaret, trust me,” Bellanger said, but he’d grown cooler now. He rose and crossed the room. When he opened the door, I noticed the stranger—Mathias, apparently—standing right outside. He was cradling something diagonally across his chest, and when he turned, I realized with a sick jolt that it was a military rifle.
He glanced around as Bellanger opened the door, and the two of them gave each other quick nods, wordless, before Mathias left. I turned around before Bellanger could see me observing this exchange. My heart was wild inside my chest. Why station a guard outside? Could our conversation have gone a different way? But my fear felt borrowed: the remembered fear of the woman Bellanger thought I was, defenseless and powerless.
“Let’s continue this conversation later. Emotions are running high. Catherine and Isabelle, my friend will show you to your quarters so you can rest. You’ve come a long way.”
Cate looked at me. “What about Josephine?”
“I’d like to have a quick word with our Girl One,” Bellanger said. “Alone.”
I smiled, trying to signal to her that it was okay. I wasn’t eager for us to be separated, but maybe Bellanger would let me speak to my mother, or to Fiona. It was a little risk I had to take. Cate must’ve sensed the same thing. She smiled back. Isabelle’s expression was complacent, observing everything as it unfolded. I watched the two of them follow Mathias and my heart clutched. They would be all right, I told myself. They could take care of themselves.
Bellanger didn’t move back to his desk. He came to sit near me on the couch. I was constantly surprised by his physical presence. Not just the shock of him existing at all, but how much smaller he was now that I was an adult, so different from the towering presence in my memory. He wasn’t any taller than me. The room felt more intimate now that it was just the two of us, like I was in his bedroom. Somewhere I shouldn’t be.
“You are very single-minded,” he said. “Aren’t you? I admire that in you, my Girl One. I’ve received word of what you’re doing, and it makes me quite proud. My colleague shared it with me when we spoke. Dr. Josephine Morrow. Born of scientific ingenuity, now changing the world.” Bellanger leaned forward, his voice more familiar. “I’m curious to know: Did you keep any of the letters I wrote you?”
I hesitated, not sure whether I should give him the satisfaction. “Yes,” I admitted. “I have them all. Every single one.” Confessing this was like unclenching a fist I’d been holding for too long, releasing those memorized words from my heart.
