“Do you know what he did to those poor creatures?” Patricia asked conversationally, still intent on her task, erasing the nicotine like a teenager hiding vices from her mother. “The truth is that the offspring produced by those sheep and rats weren’t right. They were virgin births, but they were barely alive. Just sickly collections of tissue and skin and teeth. Poor beings. So you see why Bellanger’s colleagues warned him against trying his methods on human women.”
“Teratomas. Maybe more advanced than that, but not by much.” I looked at Cate, queasy at the idea of these lost animals, the rats and sheep, their genetic code stirred and warped by Bellanger’s influence into something that couldn’t exist. After having seen the slides of ovarian teratomas firsthand, clumps of tissue with teeth and hair, I understood exactly how unlikely the nine of us were. Fully formed women.
Cate, sitting next to me. Hair bundled over one shoulder. Her feet, planted on the floor, rising onto tiptoe, like she was about to launch away. She was perfect. But maybe that weirdness, pushing against the boundaries of possibility, had slipped into her in some other way. An internal strangeness, disarranged where people couldn’t see it. Something beautiful and terrifying alike, caught in her fingertips as she stitched people back together.
“Margaret was delighted when Bellanger wrote back,” Patricia said, returning to the couch. She replaced the lighter and the cigarettes into the shoebox; I noticed that she added the letter, but kept quiet. Let her have this lost piece of my mother. “I was stunned. I hadn’t expected him to take us seriously. But it was hard to be angry with her, looking at all that joy and hope. The two of them wrote back and forth for several months. He helped us as much as he could through letters. I thought it might end there, after all. He recommended some supplements. It was starting to work. Our menstruation was syncing up. Even the girls who hadn’t been taking care of themselves started to feel healthier. I remember my breasts were swollen all the time. I had little pangs in my hip bones, these twitches, like something was settling there.
“Finally, Margaret said it was easier to just let Bellanger come and see us. We had to wait weeks to hear back from him each time. You can imagine what it was like when we decided to have that man actually come to the Homestead. By that point we’d almost forgotten what a man looked like. Then, after he … worked on us, the first of us fell pregnant.”
“My mother,” I said.
“Your mother,” Patricia acknowledged, inclining her head toward me. “Do you know how they used to test for pregnancy? They had to kill a rabbit. You injected that rabbit with urine from the mother and you checked to see if the rabbit’s ovaries had swollen up. That’s how Bellanger discovered that you would be coming into the world, Josephine. Our very first.”
The dead rabbit, Bellanger’s gloved hand glossed red with its blood, its insides exposed, the vulnerable swell of its ovaries mimicking the changes in my mother’s own body. So my life had begun with a small and overlooked death.
“I almost left then,” Patricia said. “I couldn’t bear to watch Margaret bring our vision to life with that man instead of me. The way he named you after himself—but when she gave birth, I couldn’t leave. You were so perfect. A duplicate of your mother. Nobody was going to send Bellanger home after that. It took years for the next baby, and while we waited and waited, it began to feel almost like your mother had fallen pregnant because she was so accommodating. Maybe we all needed to be more welcoming to Bellanger. He’d helped us, after all. And then I had my Isabelle.”
Isabelle had been the next baby after me. Girl Two. I’d mistaken this for random chance and not a conscious connection, Patricia following in my mother’s footsteps.
Cate shifted, impatient. “Sorry, but once the rest of you were pregnant, couldn’t you have shown Bellanger the door?”
Patricia’s face slipped into true vulnerability, collapsing before she recovered. “Do you think he would’ve just walked away? You were his precious creations too. You were his tickets into this realm of scientific acclaim. A world that he both scorned and desperately wanted to be part of. He wasn’t ever going to leave. Not once we’d let him into our midst, and given him full access to our bodies and our hearts and—and our hopes and ambitions. We should’ve known. It was such a powerful thing to want you Girls. But once Bellanger was in our lives, we signed ourselves away.”
“Yes, but it was your idea, and Margaret’s,” Cate pressed. “It was—”