43
“Were we wrong about her?” Cate asked, frustrated. “Was there ever an Angela Grassi at the Homestead? Maybe there were only eight women, not nine. It’s been a mass hallucination.”
I responded by grabbing one of the many Homestead books I’d retrieved from Junior’s car and opening it to a group photo. Angela stood at the edge, arranged right next to my mother in this picture, and Cate leaned forward to look closer, brushing my elbow. My heartbeat grew faster. “Huh. She looks a little like you, Morrow. The hair,” Cate said.
I hesitated, not sure if I should say it when we were already stretched thin. “Do you think he already got to them? The driver of the car?”
“God, I don’t know,” Cate said, throwing her arm over her eyes. “That’s a question we can ask him in person if he ever shows up. At this point, I wouldn’t even care. I’d just say, Excuse me, sir, have you seen Angela? Or Gina? Or Margaret Morrow? Anyone we’re looking for. Anyone at all. Fuck. Elvis. Amelia Earhart.”
It was the fifth day in Freshwater. Cate and I had returned to the motel room while Isabelle was still out searching. Cate sat cross-legged among the disarranged sheets and covers, the curtains drawn against the sun’s glare so that the room felt drowsy. Without thinking, I sat down on the bed too, then realized what I’d done. Cate and I had been careful to keep our distance lately. She always slept in the bed with Isabelle and I took the floor, alone, gazing up at the ceiling tiles and the spider building a home in one corner.
“Sorry,” I said to Cate now, rising, but she automatically shifted, making room for me beside her. Cautious, I relaxed back onto the pillows, stretched my legs out long.
“You aren’t the one without a heart,” I said impulsively. “That would be me.”
She laughed. “Okay, Morrow. You’ve lost me.”
“It was a dumb analogy, when I called Tom—Junior, sorry—my scarecrow. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“Well, I already knew it was dumb,” Cate said. “But thanks for acknowledging it.”
I hesitated. I wanted so badly to reach for her. As she lay back on the pillows, her throat was long and bare. Her lips were full and chapped. Those elegant feet, the unpainted toenails. She was beautiful. She licked her lips thoughtlessly, yawned, and my whole body surged. I’d felt it all along, that current running between every interaction, long before she’d kissed me. I hadn’t known exactly what to call it and so I’d let it stay there, unidentified and unexamined.
“My mother might’ve torn the Homestead apart,” I said. “She might never have carried out that vision that she and Patricia had of a world of women, conceiving alone. But she did one really good thing. You talked about women in fairy tales and urban legends, the ones who have been conceiving alone all throughout history. But that’s the thing. They’re all alone. They’re roaming by themselves, lurking at the edges of real life.” Cate nodded, cautious. “But my mother—and maybe Bellanger too, I don’t know—they brought us together. They gave us eight sisters.”
Cate didn’t answer. She shut her eyes.
I paused, trying to collect my thoughts. “When Bellanger arrived at the Homestead,” I said, “I don’t think he realized what he was doing. He didn’t give a shit what he was doing. Taking that wildness spread across generations, hidden in the bodies and brains and fingertips of women—” and I reached for Cate’s hand, and, surprised, she let me hold it, her face blossoming open, vulnerable, her lips parted. “He stole that power; he made it his own. But my mother had already organized us. We lost that for a while, I know, but now we’re getting it back.”
Cate opened her eyes just a fraction, examined me.
“You are the very best part of all of this,” I said. “You are, Catherine Bower. It’s not like I wanted to go looking for my mother under these circumstances, but what if I’d just kept on living my life and you’d just kept on living yours and we never met? I was so stupid to never look for you before. I didn’t know what I was missing. I didn’t even know enough to miss you.”
Cate smiled very slightly. She opened her arms, and I leaned against her, feeling every inch of her warmth, the way her muscles were finely sketched beneath her skin, the softness and give of her. I could barely breathe. She smelled exactly like herself. That herbal scent, as if she carried that garden with her everywhere, deep inside, the delicate vines and leaves twisting around her internal organs.