I’m sorry I haven’t been around as much. Trust me when I say that I’d rather be at the Homestead. Can you imagine Galileo being called away from his telescope to handle a memo? Edison interrupting that first phone call so that he could tell his wife whether he wanted the pot roast or the Salisbury steak? One day, when you are a famous scientist yourself, you may understand these frustrations! Of all the Girls, you’re the most like me, Josephine. You have that same spark in you. That same curiosity. You see the world through my eyes.
But daily life continues with its usual demands. My son has been struggling with an unfortunate medical issue, and so I must attend to my duties at home. But my heart—my heart is with you.
Your loving father always,
Joseph Bellanger
34
“Junior’s trying to kill us?” Isabelle asked. “Or the other one? What was his name? Billy?” She lolled back on the bed, arms straight out, knees in the air.
“Bobby,” I said. “Junior was the younger one.”
During the space of that conversation with Bonnie, the Bellangers had gone from bit players to the people who might have set everything into motion. The ones who’d set the fire at my house, taken my mother, lured me out of my old life and into this.
Marianne, Junior, Bobby. Bellanger’s family. His other family. Even as an adult, I’d never thought that much about them. Their precedence in Bellanger’s life had been mostly symbolic, proof of his wholesomeness as a family man. Proof that he couldn’t want to get rid of the nuclear family because he had one himself.
“How do we know it’s not both of them coming after us? If it’s even one of them,” Cate added, a caveat. I was trying to be cautious too. Still, it made more sense than anything we’d considered so far: The symmetry of it. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Fire for a fire.
Mother for a father.
“Do we remember anything about his sons?” Cate asked. “Josie, you must remember.”
I shrugged, helpless, frustrated by my failed memory. “Bellanger barely ever brought them to the Homestead. I do remember—okay, maybe—there was a time when they were visiting us. It was weird to have these boys running around. I was upset about something, and one of them—I don’t know which one—he helped me. He was actually pretty nice.”
Cate’s eyes narrowed for a second, a flinch of skepticism. “We need more to go on than that if we’re going to take this seriously.”
“We weren’t invited to the funeral,” Isabelle piped up. “None of us.”
Cate and I looked at her, surprised. My mother and I hadn’t attended the funeral. We’d already been in Illinois, and I’d been lost in the haze of grief and confusion. Our absence hadn’t struck me as strange before now. I’d just assumed my mother didn’t want anything to do with the Homestead.
“Maybe they were worried about more attacks,” Cate said.
“But Bellanger wanted us at the funeral.” Isabelle said. “There were empty chairs up front, just waiting for us. The eulogy was about Bellanger’s accomplishments. That’s us. We should have been there, but Mrs. Bellanger barred us.”
It was difficult to picture Mrs. Bellanger at all, that face I’d only ever seen adjacent to Bellanger’s own. She only made sense in a particular context. I tried to take her usual expression, sweet and limp as cake batter, and stir it up into rage, despair, grief. I recalled only an impression of her hair. She’d once dyed it from mousy blond to a darker brown that matched Angela Grassi’s—or my mother’s.
We’d all changed recently. Cate had chopped my hair to my chin, giving me bangs that made my eyes look shadowy, my cheekbones higher. She dyed it an inconspicuous blond, muting the similarity to my mother in a way I’d never quite had the courage to do. I looked in the mirror and saw neither Mother One nor Girl One. Not the original, not the copy. Somebody new. Cate had shorn her own hair to ear-length, leaving it the same color. The shorter length made her curls spring wildly, a thick halo. Isabelle dyed her hair a lusterless black: she was arresting, the mousy girl I’d first met almost entirely erased.
“My mother said Mrs. Bellanger blamed us for taking away her husband. She wanted the funeral to just be hers and the boys’。” Isabelle repeated this in a way both careless and exact, like it was something she’d heard her mother say a thousand times.
We were quiet, imagining it. The dry rage that had been growing, the brittle layer of loneliness, resentment, spread out over the Bellangers’ entire childhood.