This was the closest I’d come to piecing together the time just before my mother’s disappearance, that broad gap between the time I left her and the night she vanished. My mother, alone, day after day, month after month, in a town where she’d never quite belonged. What would it have been like to see a familiar face appear in the middle of a crowd? Was she afraid, seeing this dead Girl resurface from the past, or was it a pure relief to see someone she knew? Somebody to look for when she couldn’t bring herself to come looking for me.
I remembered what Deborah Clarkson had said to me back at the start of this journey, my mother resurrecting dead dreams that nobody needs. My mother must’ve also told Deborah about the girl.
“I’ve imagined Fiona too,” Barbara said. “I’ve seen Lily-Anne in a crowd before I realized it was just a stranger. I’ve had dreams about that baby. I understand what it’s like to be haunted by the past. I pray for Margaret to find some peace.” And then Barbara rose, movements definitive and efficient as she picked her scissors up again. “My time’s up. I’ve told you all I can. Good luck, Josephine. I do hope you find your mother. Margaret always did adore you. You were the light of her life.”
* * *
We walked back up the stairs and out into the sunlight. My head was spinning, too full. Another pregnancy. No intervention. Nothing to do with Bellanger. I’d dedicated my life to unlocking his secrets and restoring his research to its rightful place in the scientific community, and Lily-Anne had done it all by herself.
I wanted, desperately, viciously, to talk to Lily-Anne. She’d torn apart my history. Her death had always been blanched of tragedy by time and repetition. Now I wanted to knock on a door and find Lily-Anne waiting behind it. I wanted to question her, yell at her, poke around inside her brain.
The sunlight was deep and bright and dazzling, like we’d walked out into a new world. The Volvo sat across the street. I stood for a moment, digging my hands into my hair, which felt stiff and weird from the dye, too short, not my own. I heard Cate exhale sharply. I opened my eyes, instantly alert to any sign she was in trouble.
Someone hung back in the shadows of the alleyway next to the storefront, beckoning to us. Soo-jin. The three of us looked at each other, a wordless consultation, before we went to her.
Soo-jin glanced around, walking backward, making sure we were following, until we were just hidden from view. “I wanted to give you this.” Soo-jin reached for my hand. She pressed something into my palm. A newspaper clipping. “It might help you find your mom. I’ve been keeping up with that story. If it were my mother missing, I’d do anything.”
I examined the paper: the Dallas Morning News. From March 15, 1994, just over six weeks ago. “Shower of Dead Birds Leaves County Officials Scratching Heads.” It was such a silly headline that I wouldn’t have paid attention under other circumstances. Now it felt like a bomb going off.
The birds. Emily talking about the birds. The little dead bird with its singed wing outside my house, a lifetime ago.
Soo-jin went on: “I heard my mother on the phone to Margaret. I tried to remember the details and I found this in a newspaper at the library. Do you think it has something to do with Fiona? Do you think it’s the same thing your mother saw on the news?”
I was too busy reading to answer her. It was a brief piece, skeptical, almost wry. Overnight, a thousand starlings had fallen out of the sky, scattered across lawns and parks and fields, stuck in tree branches, rooftops, rain gutters. A single grainy photo showed the feathery bodies splayed like ink drops on the side of the road, a child’s bicycle in the background. Most confusingly, some of the birds had been burned. Just charred skeletons. The phenomenon had occurred in a small town not far from Amarillo. Freshwater, Texas.
“Soo-jin,” Cate said. “Your mother thinks that you don’t know about the Homestead at all. You acted like you didn’t know us earlier. Is that—”
“I couldn’t say anything in front of my sister,” Soo-jin said, as if it should be obvious. “She’d tattle.” Then, more seriously: “My mother doesn’t realize how much I know about my past. I’m not going to hurt her. It’s important to her that I don’t know.”
“But the Homestead’s where you come from,” I said.
Soo-jin looked at me evenly. “My mother is where I come from.”
Isabelle hugged herself, looked down. I took a deep breath, defensive and galvanized at once. My mother. My mother, who’d changed the world just to get to me.