She’d read once that during World War II many of the Jews had sewn their precious belongings, jewels and watches and things, into the lining of their coats before fleeing, and she’d immediately understood: Gemma was like that, like a secret, precious thing sewed not into the lining of her coat but into who she was deep down, at her core, as a person.
She saw it even before it happened. Saw Gemma’s puffy-coated arms begin flapping frantically, saw her teeter on her tiny skis. And she saw, at the same time, beneath Gemma’s coat and beneath her skin, to the webbing of her narrow bones and all the fragile organs tucked among them, so easily punctured, ruptured, burst; and she was out the door and running, calling for Gemma to stop, be careful, stop, so that Gemma, looking up at her mother, lost her balance and fell.
So Kristina didn’t go to Vail anymore. They had a place in the Outer Banks, but there, too, she rarely went. Gemma loved it, but Kristina could never keep down images of Gemma drowned in the waves, pummeled by sand, her lungs bloated with seawater. And she had another fear—that she would have to bring Gemma to an unfamiliar hospital, that blood would be drawn, or bones x-rayed, and somehow, the doctors would know. That evidence of Kristina and Geoff’s crime might be encoded in every single one of Gemma’s cells, embedded in the filaments of her DNA.
She’d been in the kitchen, rinsing out stray wineglasses that Geoff must have collected from the deck, when the call came in. Sunday: her favorite day. She never minded washing dishes, even though they had help to do that. She liked the sound of rushing water, the soap-steam clouds, the way the glasses chimed when she tapped them with her nails.
“Gemma?” she answered the phone automatically. No one else would be calling so early on a Sunday.
But it was April. And as soon as Kristina heard the sound of April’s voice, she knew.
“Ms. Ives?” That was a tell, too—April never called her anything but Kristina, not since she was in third grade. “I’m worried about Gemma.”
And then, in a rush, April had told her everything: that Gemma had not, in fact, slept over; that she had gone with Pete to see Lyra down in that tragic little shoe box her husband had shoved Rick Harliss into; that she should have been back already.
She wasn’t back, though, and she wasn’t picking up her phone, and Pete wasn’t picking up, either.
By some miracle, Kristina had managed to locate a telephone number for Rick Harliss, scrawled on a notepad and wedged deep in the junk drawer, along with all the other miscellaneous things they couldn’t stand to look at but knew might prove useful someday.
Rick’s home number just rang and rang, and his cell phone went straight to voice mail.
She went right away to Geoff, as she always did, as she had been trained to do. He had the idea to check Gemma’s debit card activity and see whether she had taken out any money. In the very early morning, Gemma had purchased tickets from Knoxville, Tennessee, to Nashville. In the afternoon, she had taken out two hundred dollars from an ATM in Crossville, Tennessee. Around midnight, someone used her ATM card to check into a Four Crossings Motel in Nashville, and although by this morning that proved to be a false lead—the girl and boy in room 22 had obviously stolen Gemma’s wallet, although they claimed simply to have found it.
Still, they must have stolen it from Gemma. Which meant she had gone to Nashville.
But why? For what reason? And why was her phone dead, and Pete’s too?
Where, for that matter, was Rick Harliss?
You promise you know absolutely nothing about this? she had asked Geoff, after a terrible, sleepless night, half drowning in barbiturate dreams. You swear you had nothing, nothing at all to do with it?
Of course not. Geoffrey’s answer was quick. How could you even think that?
And she believed Geoff because that was what she did, what she was compelled to do, the way the earth was compelled to go around the sun. They’d built the belief together, carefully, spinning turrets, ice-thin pillars, delicate vaulted ceilings alive with all the stories they’d made. Even a single crack would make the whole thing come down.
Now she counted: A truck overturned on the other side of the highway. A highway memorial to someone who had died. A sign warning of a nearby maximum security prison. Ugly, ugly, ugly. Concrete sprawl and withered shrubbery baking in the heat. And Gemma, little Gemma, her small, glowing secret, somewhere out there. There weren’t enough pills in the whole world to shave Kristina’s fear into some manageable shape, a small white sphere she could swallow and let dissolve in her stomach.
A sign blinked, and disappeared behind them. Thirteen miles of highway left until they reached Nashville.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 10 of Lyra’s story.
ELEVEN
“WHERE DID IT COME FROM?”
On Monday, those words had pulled Gemma from one nightmare into another: mirrors, she thought confusedly.
Three-dimensional, living mirrors: three Gemmas wore identical expressions of bland curiosity, three Gemmas had been split and fissured from a single central image. Unconsciously, she brought her hands to her face, her arms, her thighs, to make sure they were still intact. To make sure she was still intact.
“Which number are you?” asked one of the mirrors.
“You’re not Cassiopeia,” said another.
The third one said, “Cassiopeia is dead.”
“I’m Calliope,” said the first one. She added: “Number seven.” In her eyes, Gemma was reduced to a narrow reflection. A reflection in a reflection in a reflection. Gemma thought of a double helix that mirrored even as it turned and turned. Symmetry, but a terrible kind. She sat up, half expecting the other Gemmas to move in response. But they didn’t.
“You think it’s dumb?” one of the girls said.
“Dumb how?” one of the others asked.
“Dumb like number eight,” the first one replied, and turned. “Like Goosedown.”
Thud-thud-thud.
Only then did Gemma see another one, a fourth one, even skinnier than all the rest, crouched in the corner not far from them. Her legs were bare and covered with scabs. She was wearing a diaper. She was so thin her head appeared gigantic, her features too far apart, as if they were wrapped around a fishbowl.
Thud-thud-thud. As Gemma watched, she lifted her head and slammed it, once, twice, three times, against the wall; the sun caught a mesh of plaster fine as dust hanging in the air, sifting above her head, before slowly, it began to fall.
The sickest replicas were segregated from the rest of the population, concealed behind rudimentary curtains of burlap, kept mostly unconscious through regular dosages of morphine, at least according to what Gemma overheard. She might have been tempted to peek beyond the curtains and see for herself were it not for the smell.