“Seriously.” Bonnie grabbed my arm. “It’s not the same guy.”
“How do you know?” I didn’t hide my impatience.
Bonnie was on the verge of speaking. Then she smiled, an expression I couldn’t read, and rose from the bed. Under her T-shirt, her body was outlined perfectly, and I was struck by her: by the fact that she was an entire human being who existed when she shouldn’t have. Awareness of my own strangeness reverberated through my bones.
“You know, it gets old being the poster girl for shit situations.” Bonnie moved toward the door, languidly unsteady. “Whenever anything bad happens to any of you, you’re all coming to me like I’m the expert.”
“Wait.” I crawled to the end of the bed. “This has happened before? Who’s come to you for help?” I tried to remember if I’d heard anything about the other Homesteaders getting into trouble recently.
Bonnie paused near the door. Her face mask was so cracked that she was like an ancient statue of herself. She balanced one foot in the crook of the opposite knee.
“Who?” I pressed.
“The Bowers.” Bonnie unfolded her leg, stretched her body to one side in a broad arc. Her T-shirt rose over her hip. The Bowers: Tonya and Catherine. Mother Three. Girl Three. “It was a while back. They’d had some guy hanging around their house. Catherine called to ask me for details. Sort of the way you are now. I bet you and Catherine would like each other.”
The air-conditioning left my arms stippled with goose bumps. “And?”
“And—it was nothing. The Bowers are fine, as far as I know.” Bonnie sighed, softened. “I’ll give you their phone number so you can check for yourself.”
“Thank you, Bonnie. Seriously.”
Bonnie faked a yawn. “Hey, anything for my sister,” she said. Then she slipped back into her labyrinth of hallways, leaving only her scent on my pillow.
14
Jittery with impatience, I was out of the car before it came to a complete stop, hurrying to the pay phone that stood near the concrete picnic shelters. I slipped the quarters into the slot, punched in the number that I’d memorized by now. Please pick up; please pick up.
“No response?” Tom asked when I returned to the Volvo a few minutes later, defeated.
“Nope.” I’d told Tom about the Bowers this morning. The decision to stop by Arkansas and seek them out in person was unanimous and obvious. As long as we were heading southeast, we could continue toward the Arkansas Ozarks to meet the Bowers and add no more than a day to our trip. A minor detour.
We pulled back onto the long gray ribbon of the freeway. I reached over to turn down the volume. I was sick of bad news, and all the radio stations were busy discussing Kurt Cobain’s death, the upcoming anniversary of Waco, the hijacked cargo jet.
“I can’t get over what Deb said.” This was a particularly bland stretch of the Midwest. Trees and guardrails dotted with fast-food wrappers, billowing white grocery bags. “My mother reaching out to Bellanger. It doesn’t make sense.”
Tom glanced at me. “I’m going out on a limb and assuming you and your mother never discussed her decision to work with Bellanger?”
I had tried so many times to imagine my mother, a young woman, not pregnant yet, right on the cusp of a whole new future. The world before my conception. I’d wanted to know what it was like to be chosen by Bellanger. The idea of my mother choosing Bellanger instead left me fumbling in the dark.
“She said she volunteered because she wanted a baby. That’s it.” I sighed. “She never seemed interested in scientific progress or fame and fortune. Obviously. Look what our lives were like in Coeur de fucking Lac. My mother, she just—I always thought the only way a person like her would be involved in the Homestead was because Bellanger talked her into it. She didn’t even understand what she was getting into. That’s why this feels so weird. I might be Margaret’s daughter, but I’ve never been her idea.”
We were quiet for a minute. My mother—how she’d managed to unofficially take on new responsibilities at our small library despite not wanting to go to school for a library science degree （“I’m done with all that, Josie,” though as far as I knew she’d never gone to school）。 I remembered her reading me books at bedtime and the subtle changes in her voice for each character, a lower octave there, a hoarseness here, until the whole cast of characters came alive. Watching her bent over crossword puzzles, tapping the pen against the edge of the table for a long time and then suddenly filling out the whole thing in a few minutes, looking at me with a shy pride, like she was checking whether or not I’d noticed.