“Oh, I think you knew,” I interrupted, and Cate bit down a sly smile, eyes shining with suppressed laughter. We passed a covered bridge, candy-apple red, nestled among the trees. “Look, I wanted to do it. I never got to talk about the Homestead, growing up.”
“What’d your mother think about it?” Tom asked.
“We weren’t speaking by then.” Pines rose in peaks on either side of the road, casting spiky shadows over half the freeway. The sky beyond was a blue so clean and bright that I wanted to dip my fingers into it. “I actually tried to call her. I was proud of that interview. Rolling Stone! But she never picked up.”
“What could even make you ignore each other for a year?” Cate asked. “I’d give anything to talk to my mom again.”
“We’re stubborn.” That stubbornness, replicated perfectly, not leavened by the genetic influence of a father. “She always wanted me to go along with her and pretend our lives together in Coeur du Lac were all we’d ever known. Coeur du Lac, god. Mom went out of her way to pick the most ordinary town she could. Like I was ordinary too instead of—instead of what I am. What we are.” I gestured at Cate, and she nodded, soberer now, listening. We telegraphed a quiet understanding over Tom’s head.
“Maybe the normal routine would’ve worked if I’d been younger,” I said. “Maybe Barbara Kim could convince her daughter that Bellanger never existed. Helen was only two years old when the fire happened. I was six when Bellanger died. I couldn’t forget him if I tried. You know he used to let me help him in his lab? When we ran from the Homestead, I didn’t even believe he was dead. I would wake up screaming for him.”
“Of course you never had a chance to be close to your mom,” Cate said softly. “You were too busy missing him.”
“My mom and I were close,” I said, defensive. “When I was little, she’d stay up all night if I had a nightmare, or sing lullabies to distract me. I woke up crying for him, but she was there instead.” I stared out the window. Nirvana on the radio again: Distill the life that’s inside of me. “She’d always helped me with my school projects. We’d work together to make posters of nineteenth century novelists, or a tornado in a pop bottle. She always knew these random facts about whatever we were working on. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott lived next door to each other, or the F scale for tornadoes is named after Ted Fujita. I looked forward to homework because of her. But in seventh grade I wanted to make a presentation on the Homestead. Bring in Bellanger’s letters for show-and-tell. Mom just shut down. She wouldn’t help me with anything. After that I was so mad, I didn’t ask for her help with any of my other projects. And she stopped offering.”
Cate nodded as if to herself, gazing out the window. I wondered if she understood.
“I always wanted the Homestead to bring us closer,” I said. “But she always made it so the Homestead stood between us. Every choice I made, it felt like I was moving farther from being identical to my mother. She wanted to hide, I wanted to be…”
“Famous?” Cate asked.
I shrugged, nodded. “Something like that. Anyway. It was easier to just fight.”
Cate stretched her arms over her head, clasped hands bumping the ceiling. “Well, now you know your mother had a different role. Maybe she had her reasons to hide that from you.”
“Why hide the truth? I deserved to know. She was just protecting herself.”
“Maybe,” Cate said, “she wasn’t protecting herself. Maybe she was protecting you.”
19
Excerpt from Rolling Stone magazine—September 17, 1993
A Miracle Baby, All Grown Up
On the topic of Dr. Joseph Bellanger, the late genius who masterminded the experiment that led to her birth, Josephine Morrow lights up as if someone mentioned a rock star. “You know how people say we’re his ‘brainchildren’？ Then that makes him my brainfather,” she says as we sit in a small Illinois diner. It’s just the kind of delightful neologism you’d expect from a girl who’s an evolutionary neologism herself.
I get a chance to ask the big question that’s on everybody’s mind. When you’re forever connected to the word “virgin,” what is it like to do the deed, bump uglies, knock boots? “I have all the parts, if that’s what you’re asking,” Josephine says. “Yes, sex is physically possible for me. And yes, I’ve done it.”