“As far as I know, the Grassis are still there,” Tom said. “But they were difficult to track down. They’ve never answered a single phone call or letter, not even to tell me to back off.” He paused. “Wait, why do you ask?”
Isabelle and Cate were both turned toward me, and I could tell at a glance that they were on my side, my eagerness and resolve reflected in their faces.
“We’re going to Freshwater,” I said. “My mother is there.”
37
April 24, 1977
My lovely Josephine,
Your sixth birthday. I look at you and I no longer see a little child. You reach my waist now. You are playful and serious in equal measure. You show flashes of a stubborn pride that delights me. A reporter was quite taken aback when you corrected him: “I do have a father, and he’s right there.” What a happy papa I was that day!
But there are blessed few reasons to be happy these days, I am afraid. The loss of our beloved Lily-Anne has been a terrible shock, and the unkindness of the world only makes things all the more painful. I know you miss your aunt Lily-Anne, and I hope you will continue to show kindness to poor Fiona, who now misses her mommy very much.
So many of the bright faces that once made this place feel like home have now vanished. Women who owe everything to me insisting on breaking ties. I fear that one day these sweet girls will no longer know me. Miracles stolen from the miracle-worker. I can only hope that your own mother will not follow suit, for I couldn’t bear to say goodbye to my precious Girl One.
I pray you hold this letter one day and laugh at me. Laugh at my silly pessimism. Laugh at my despair. I hope you bring me this letter and we can smile together, seeing how dark those days were, celebrating the lightness that has thrived instead. We move onward into the future.
Your loving father,
Joseph Bellanger
38
Bats fluttered around each underpass, the streetlights a yellow fuzz against the bruise-dark dusk. Tom snoozed next to me. I was glad to drive. I couldn’t sleep anyway. My curiosity was a hard engine pushing me forward, forward, forward.
“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.