“People already saw our mothers as monsters. How many unmarried women were adopting kids back in the 1970s, even the ‘normal’ ones? And…” Cate hesitated. “The Homestead was falling apart. Some mothers were leaving on their own. There was a big disagreement about which mother Fiona should’ve gone with. Your mom? My mom? Patricia? Barbara? My impression is that there was some tension between the women.”
I thought of Deb’s accusations and the pit of my belly tightened. “Cate, what do you know about our mothers before? Did any of them know each other before Bellanger started the Homestead?”
A low moan, rising to a sudden shriek. We all twitched with surprise. The teakettle. Cate turned and went back into the kitchen. Tom and I looked at each other in the silence. My own keen curiosity and impatience was reflected in him.
When Cate returned, she was carrying a misshapen handmade mug. She handed the mug to Tom, so abruptly that hot tea sloshed over the edge and nearly caught his thigh: he jerked his leg aside. “You.” Cate turned to me, beckoning. “There’s something I want to show you.”
I trailed Cate down a narrow hallway and into a room at the end of the house. A bedroom, all windows, the bed untidy. An open cookie jar stuffed with a crunchy blend of what looked like old dandelion blossoms and oregano. A notebook was open, showing indecipherable recipes or poems: espin. colorada? Floripon. Pen. Roy.
Cate went to the bureau, squatted to yank open the bottom drawer. It was filled with a disarray of papers and old magazines. A few photographs fell out, and one caught my eye. Barbara Kim, Mother Eight, her rope-thick brown braid hanging over her shoulder. She sat next to Lily-Anne, who’d stripped herself of a surname as soon as she’d joined the Homestead—a detail that’d only stoked the growing fears of women casting off family names, family ties, becoming self-contained units. Lily-Anne’s hair was a live flame even in the faded photograph. While Barbara sat on one of the many low, molting sofas that had populated the Homestead, Lily-Anne stood and faced the camera proudly. Her belly was round and swollen, and she clasped it like she was holding it aloft. A blurred halo at the edges of their bodies made me think of a self-timer.
“I’ve never seen this one,” I said, like it was a rare collectible. After so many years of memorizing every available Homestead photo, finding a new one was a thrill. I recognized the room they were in, one of the many communal spaces, the wall wild with framed prints and photographs. There was the cut-off edge of a Time magazine cover, a patchwork of women’s portraits. It tugged at a memory. The year American women had been collectively recognized as Person of the Year.
Next to the Time cover, a framed copy of the tawdry, glaring headline that had announced my birth to the world （“MAD SCIENTIST CLAIMS BACHELORETTE’S BABY HAS NO HUMAN FATHER!”）。 I’d learned to read when I was four, taught by the Mothers, and I remembered sounding out those syllables, not realizing that I knew the people in the headline. That I was the fatherless baby, Bellanger the mad scientist.
“Where’d you get this?” I asked.
“My mother was forward-thinking.” Cate winked. “A nicer word for ‘paranoid.’ People were always trying to buy shit from them back in the seventies. The clothes off their backs. So my mother went through and took photos, letters, whatever, to save them from museums or some weirdo’s sock drawer. But that’s not what I wanted you to see.” Cate plucked something loose, scanned it, and handed it to me. “Maybe it’s your mother’s?”
It was plain notebook paper, yellowy and brittle. I clutched it delicately, afraid the paper might crumble into dust. The writing was loose, with traces of grade school cursive—the lopsided curlicues of a’s and d’s—but it was definitely my mother’s, the same writing I’d seen on receipts, to-do lists, overdue checks. The same writing that came from my own hands.
The date was listed primly at the top right, like a reflex from an etiquette guide. November 10, 1969. A relic of my mother’s life before me. My mother in an undocumented state, the lost years before I’d taken residence in her womb as a lone, moony egg.
Dear Doctor Bellanger:
We are reaching out because we’re huge fans of your wild and wonderful brain! We have some questions for you that are of utmost importance and would love a reply if you are amenable to answering them. You may contact us, if you would like, at the below P.O. Box address. We are not scientists or doctors or anything of that sort but we would really appreciate a response. We promise it will be worth your time.