“Bellanger brought in a friend,” Barbara said. “An old colleague from medical school. Dr. Henley. I forget his first name. He’d come by the Homestead a few times. Maybe you remember him. He took them both, mother and baby. I was left to clean up—the lab and the secret. I’d watched my best friend die, and her baby too.” Barbara reached up and pressed both hands to her cheeks, like she was trying to remind herself she was really here.
“The day after Lily-Anne’s death,” Barbara said, “Vera came into the kitchen and tossed down a newspaper. The headline said that Lily-Anne had died of a heart attack. A naked lie. I just wanted the bodies back, to hold a proper funeral for them. Bellanger said he needed to understand what had happened. He needed to run tests. They were just cut open and examined and burned in some anonymous lab.”
“Why did you never share this?” Cate asked.
“Dr. Bellanger said that if I ever told the world about Lily-Anne, or even told any of the other women, he’d have me committed and Soo-jin would go to him, as his own little girl. I left that place as soon as I could. I fled. Fiona distracted everyone. I was able to slip away without too much trouble.”
I had to close my eyes for a second. The first time Patricia had suggested that Bellanger sought custody of the nine of us, it had held a stubborn nostalgia. The way Barbara described the situation now stripped that nostalgia to the bone. It was a threat, naked and uncompromising. Bellanger had been flawed—I’d known that. Nobody succeeded without making a few enemies. But the man she was describing—I didn’t know him. He was a monster.
“I met Bill Yoon at the first job I took,” Barbara said. “Such a kindhearted man. I changed Helen’s name. Bill adopted her and made it legal. People sometimes even say she looks like her father, although—” A quick, unhappy smile. “Maybe white people are going to say that to us no matter what.” She shifted. “You girls think it was hard on your mothers? People claiming they’d bring about the end of the world? They were white girls. What do you think people did when they saw me? The kinds of things they said about me. The fear that I’d overrun the country. An invasion of little fatherless foreigners. That’s the type of thing I had to deal with.”
There was a sudden rift between us. The awareness that even though we’d shared a heritage so particular, so singular, that only a few people on the planet had known what it was like, Barbara’s experience had still been happening on a different plane from my mother’s.
“I could finally give Soo-jin a normal life. I changed her name. When I decided to have a baby with Bill, I wasn’t sure it would even work. Maybe whatever Bellanger had done to me could never be undone. I was so happy when I missed my period, but I didn’t fully heal until I held that little girl in my arms and saw Bill’s eyes looking out at me. I just put everything else behind me. Having a baby with someone you love can be miraculous too, you know.”
I glanced at the clock. Time was up, but nobody seemed to notice. “You mentioned that my mother called you,” I said. “What was it about?”
“Just a short phone call. Margaret wasn’t … she wasn’t well, Josephine. I’m sorry. She was rambling, words spilling out, not making any sense.”
Deborah Clarkson had said something similar, days ago. I latched on to this: the same interpretation from Barbara now. “What did she say exactly? I can handle it.”
Barbara sighed, relented, not looking at me. “She thought she’d seen Fiona alive.”
Somebody walked by outside, shoes disembodied, cut off at the ankle. Whoever it was walked by three windows in a row, shadow flitting into the basement at intervals, before vanishing around the corner. We all exhaled at once. The atmosphere in the room felt so precious and fraught that being reminded of the outside world was jarring.
“It was some news segment from Texas,” Barbara said. “Your mother said that she’d seen a redheaded girl in the background, and at some point the girl turned to the camera long enough for Margaret to recognize her as Lily-Anne’s double.”
“What was the news segment about?” I asked.
Barbara blinked, startled by the intensity of the question. “Birds,” she said slowly. “Something about a flock of birds dropping out of the sky. Your mother was having a hard time explaining it to me. Margaret said she tried to call the station, but of course they hadn’t paid any attention to a girl in the background. So your mother called all of us. She kept asking me if I thought Fiona might somehow be alive. Usually I wouldn’t have even stayed on the phone, but Margaret seemed so desperate, Josephine.”