A private theater where a single memory from the past played over and over and over again to an audience of two. I wondered if it would be better or worse for Isabelle than growing up with the spell of silence my mother had cast over our home.
“Some days, it seems obvious that we didn’t produce nine miracles at the Homestead,” Patricia said. “We created one miracle and eight ordinary Girls.” She spoke without malice. “Isabelle is a young woman now. Perhaps I should accept that our one true miracle is long gone.”
“But I’m still here,” Cate said. No apology, no attempt to hide who she was.
I wanted to erase the words. I felt protective of Cate, and I didn’t know how Patricia would react. Patricia absorbed her meaning immediately. She stared at Cate, her expression so reverent that I wanted to look away. At the same time, I understood. I knew exactly what it was like to look at Cate and feel that rush of amazement.
“Catherine,” Patricia said, stepping forward. “You too?” Cate nodded, and Patricia turned her intensity toward me, a question hanging there. I hesitated. What had happened that night at the motel still felt sticky and impossible. Something private. I was torn between standing beside Cate, marking us both the same, and keeping my secret under my control.
Patricia seemed to take my silence as an answer. “What did you do to make this happen?” she asked Cate instead, brisk and intent.
“Nothing.” Cate was startled by her forcefulness. “It happened on its own.”
“There must’ve been some reason,” Patricia insisted, like she was going to turn this into an equation. She reminded me of myself, suddenly, an uncanny mirror. “Something you did. You must’ve encouraged it or—or figured it out. Somehow.”
The blank white of the projector screen hovered in my peripheral vision, a reminder of Fiona.
“Where is Isabelle?” Cate asked gently. “I’d like to meet her.”
23
Everything out here was wild, pure, and green. Even the sunlight was brighter and softer. I’d watched Patricia trying to find Isabelle in the house, her agitation growing, shutting Cate and me out. I’d escaped, mumbling some excuse about checking on Tom. The Volvo was gone, which nagged at me, but I stayed out here, trying to clear my head. I needed space. I needed fresh air.
Walking in the sunlight, I grasped for my own memories of Fiona. Something I could piece together for myself, beyond the video footage, tabloid portraits, secondhand stories. She was only two years old when she died. I was six. I’d treated her with an older-sister mix of jealousy, affection, pompous authority. If I focused, I could remember Fiona being different after her mother died. A haunted quality that made her seem set apart from me, a member of a different world. I’d thought it was just because she was a motherless girl. Now I knew.
It wasn’t until I’d wandered beyond the bounds of the makeshift backyard, lost in my thoughts, that I saw her. The girl in the water. My heart jolted.
A creek ran through the narrow dip of the valley, down at the bottom of the property. There was hair caught in the current, thin and brown, trickling over the rocks. A stark white face in the water, bluish lips. There was one moment when I stood, staring, shocked, before the adrenaline kicked in and I scrambled down the hill, my dress snagging on rocks and outcropping branches as I rushed toward the girl in the creek.
I waded into the water, slipping and clambering, the cold water compressing my breath into a sharp gasp. The water wasn’t so deep, only halfway to my knees, but the girl was floating, so small and still she resembled a sleeping child. The water ran in rivulets over her lips. Abruptly, she opened her eyes halfway, as if my clumsy splashing had bothered her. She had to be gripped with hypothermia already.
I slid my arms underneath the girl, pulled her up out of the water. She didn’t fight. I was pulling her back toward the shore, stumbling against the slick rocks and pebbles at the bottom of the creek, when Isabelle wrenched free of my grasp, her sudden strength surprising me.
She stood and faced me as if we were meeting under normal circumstances. The vein at her temple was a pronounced pulse.
“Are you all right?” I asked, steadying myself in the mild tug of the current. “God, are you okay? Let’s go back to the house, get you warmed up.”
She was a perfect copy of young Patricia in the photographs. Annoyed more than embarrassed, she pressed her lips together. “I’m fine.” She began splashing toward the bank, arms crossed. “What are you doing out here, anyway?”