Across the empty lot, a fluttering V formation of birds took off from the telephone wires, darted one way and then another before vanishing up into the sky. It nearly knocked me over, the depth of this anger. Why hadn’t my mother told me? Why hadn’t she let me in? I wanted to understand why she’d done … everything. Why she’d wanted me so deeply, this impossible daughter; why she’d killed Bellanger. How she could have let Fiona die. How she’d felt standing in that courtroom, willingly putting an innocent man behind bars. It was the first time that I’d felt the same ache of loss over my mother that I’d always felt toward Bellanger. I’d lost her, and unlike Bellanger, she’d vanished on purpose.
I didn’t have the space in my heart to mourn both of them. If my mother hadn’t wanted me to carry on Bellanger’s work—if she’d had something to tell me—she should have spoken up.
* * *
“Josie,” Cate said abruptly. “Can I have my mother’s things back? The letter and the photo you took. It’s not like you’re going to be using them.”
I was hunkered low in the passenger seat, gazing out the window. For the past few hours, I’d given in to the grubby luxury of sulking. I’d assumed it would feel good to head back to Chicago, but instead there was an empty space in my gut. I tried to fit myself back into my lecture halls and polite TV appearances, knowing what I did about myself and about my mother. It wasn’t as easy as just turning around and heading the opposite direction on the freeway. I had to figure out how to return to my old life as if my whole understanding of myself hadn’t been ripped apart and put back together. I wasn’t sure I was up to the task.
I unfurled, glancing back at Cate. “Yeah. Of course. Patricia kept the letter, but you can have whatever else—” I reached down for the little marble-bound notebook that had started it all. What if I’d never looked inside the clock? Never found Tom’s number? Never set off to find Emily. Never met Cate. My mother would still be missing, but it wouldn’t be my problem. That should’ve felt comforting, but the emptiness only expanded.
“Just take this whole thing,” I said to Cate. “You’re right. I won’t be using it.”
As I reached back to pass the notebook to her, a photo slipped loose from the inside and dropped onto my lap. Lily-Anne’s bright, knowing smile. Her heavily pregnant belly. The framed images behind her. This time the photo felt more intimate, like it had just been taken a day or two ago. Maybe because I’d seen it during the footage of Fiona. I lifted it up to take a closer look. There was the headline about my birth. There was the framed Time cover. Rows of faces, too tiny to make out clearly. Bold white letters read “OF THE YEAR.”
Cate held her hand out, gently impatient, but I didn’t let go of the photo. “Hey. Does anybody know when the Time Women of the Year cover ran? It was the early seventies, right?”
“I can’t recall—” Tom began, but Isabelle was talking over him.
“It was 1976,” she said confidently.
“How do you know?”
“There was a photo of that cover hanging on the wall,” Isabelle said casually. “I’ve watched that movie every week since I was ten years old. I’ve seen the camera go past that wall hundreds of times. I know that frame. You can see it clear as day. The Time cover is from January of 1976.”
“This cover?” I handed the photo back to Isabelle, who gave me an odd look but accepted it. “Because that can’t be right,” I said. “Fiona was born in April 1975. She was nine months old by the time that cover came out.”
I knew the dates. Lily-Anne had become pregnant in July of 1974. She’d given birth in April 1975, almost exactly four years after my birth. It was the last pregnancy on the Homestead, the last human virgin birth ever recorded, although nobody had known it at the time.
Cate leaned over to take a look. My excitement grew. I was getting too used to this, I realized: having other people around to share my curiosity. I hadn’t experienced this at the University of Chicago yet, where I so often felt hemmed in, uncertain, defensive.
“Maybe you got the date wrong,” Tom said.
“No,” Cate said slowly. “Because 1975 was International Women’s Year. I remember my mom talking about this Time thing. She hated it, thought it was all for show. The article said something about how women’s lib was like ‘discovering a new continent.’ Oh okay, we’ve only been around for two hundred thousand years, but burn a few bras and suddenly you notice us?”