Harliss looked up at her with those sad-dog eyes. “Well, that’s where they made you, isn’t it?”

Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 13 of Lyra’s story.

FOURTEEN

SHE WAS DIMLY AWARE THAT Harliss was still talking. She felt as if a hole had opened inside of her and she was dropping into it.

Made there. She’d been made there.

Just like that girl on the marshes . . .

Gemma wasn’t the original. She, too, was a replica.

Impossible, she wanted to say. She remembered all those baby pictures with her mom in the hospital. Could they have been staged? No. No one could fake her mother’s look of exultation and exhaustion, the sweat standing out on her forehead, the look of bewildered joy. Impossible. But she couldn’t make her voice work, and it was Pete who said it.

“That’s impossible,” Pete said. He was staring at her and she turned away, too numb even to be embarrassed. He sounded horrified. Why wouldn’t he be?

“. . . took me a long time to put it together,” Harliss was saying. “I had nothing else to do, sitting there in state for twelve years. Not saying I didn’t deserve it. I did. I used to do work around your house, you know, before they brought you back from that place. But I was all banged up. Got hooked on the shit they gave me for my back. I was out of my mind half the time.”

“You’re out of your mind now,” Pete said. “It’s not possible.”

If Harliss heard Pete, he gave no sign of it. He was still looking directly at Gemma. “My ex-lady used to do some cleaning. Your mom was in real bad shape then. Real bad. She’d just lost her baby. SIDS. That’s sudden infant death syndrome, you know. Poor thing was only six months old.”

Gemma’s heart stopped. “What baby?” she managed to whisper. She’d never heard her parents mention another baby.

But Harliss just barreled on. “Aimee—that’s my ex—used to say it was funny, all the money in the world but still you can’t buy your way out of that. When Aimee got pregnant with Brandy-Nicole, your mom would just sit there with her hand on Aimee’s belly, trying to feel the baby kick. She started cutting out articles, you know, how Aimee should be eating, how she was supposed to be laying off booze and cigarettes. Even bought us some stuff, a crib and a stroller, some baby clothes. You could tell she was all broken up. Your mom said she couldn’t get pregnant again. Something about what had happened when the first was coming out.”

There had been another one, a sister, a baby Gemma had never known about. Kristina had lost a baby. And somewhere deep in Gemma’s mind an idea was growing, thoughts like storm clouds knitting together before they burst.

“When Brandy-Nicole was ten months old, I got picked up for holding and was sent to Johnston for eighteen months. That’s a state prison near Smithfield. Reduced to twelve for good behavior. The day I was out I started using again.” He touched his neck once, briefly, as if amazed to find a pulse still there, to find himself alive. “Your dad was decent. He knew I’d been sent away but he gave me the job back. I told him I was cleaned up. He believed me.”

Life doesn’t hand out second chances. Wasn’t that what her father was always saying? But at some point he’d thought differently.

There was another baby. . . .

“Well, Aimee was still going over sometimes to clean. You were home by then, and only six months younger than our Brandy-Nicole. But your mom didn’t like you two to play together. She hardly let anyone near you. We thought it was because she was worried you’d get sick like the first one.”

The first one. The first daughter. The original. And she, Gemma: a shade.

“Funny, though, Aimee said to me. They look just the same. Could have been twins, she said, except for Emma had a birthmark on her arm. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Only later, when I started figuring what Haven was for and what your dad had paid them for, I put two and two together.”

Emma. She had a name, this phantom sister who was so much more than that. Gemma closed her eyes and thought of her mother, sweaty and exhausted and triumphant, a baby nestled in her arms. Not Gemma. Emma.

All these years, Kristina had lived with a reminder of that first, lost daughter. Emma. What a pretty name; much prettier than Gemma. She was the original. Gemma was the copy. And everyone knew copies were never as good. Was that why her mom had started taking so many pills? Oxycontin and Pristiq and Klonopin and Zoloft? An A–Z array of pharmaceuticals, all so that she could forget and deny.

All because Gemma was a monster.

“The Frankenstein mask.” She opened her eyes. “You threw the Halloween mask.” She remembered what her father had said about Frankenstein: In the original story, in the real version, he’s the one who made the monster. She’d thought he meant it because she was awkward, and sick, and fat. But he’d meant it literally. Truthfully.

Harliss tugged at his shirt collar, and she saw a small cross tattooed on the left side of his neck. “I was mad,” he said. “I tried to talk to your dad. Went to his office. He said he’d call the cops on me if I came around again. Said I was harassing him. But you’ve got to understand. I just want answers. I need to know.”

Pete stood up, cursing. “This is crazy,” he said. He moved toward the door, and Harliss didn’t try and stop him. Gemma thought he might try to leave, but instead he just stood there. “This is crazy, you know that?”

Gemma didn’t bother responding. It wasn’t crazy. In fact, for the first time, everything made sense. The fact that her father could hardly stand to look at her. The strange tension between her parents, as if they existed on either side of a chasm, a secret that had fissured their world in two. Gemma’s memory of the statue and all those early hospital visits—she was probably fragile because she’d been engineered. She wondered if this was God’s way of getting vengeance on the people who’d been made so unnaturally. He was always trying to unmake them.