“I’m sorry.” Rebecca wiped her face with one hand, the other steadying the child on her lap. “She’s just so beautiful.” And happy. Becca’s sister—now named Delilah—was happy. She was healthy. She was loved.
And unlike Charity’s biological daughter, Delilah was old enough to know her mother. To depend upon Charity specifically. To smile in response to her voice and reach up for her with both hands.
Which was why, as she blinked away fresh tears, Rebecca gave her sister back to Charity Marlow. To the only mother she’d ever known. “Thank you,” she said. “She’s a lovely, sweet child. And I’m glad she has you.”
Then Rebecca took the infant back and headed across the park toward her car. When she was sure she was far enough away and that Charity and her friend had returned to whatever conversation she’d interrupted, Rebecca let herself truly cry.
Then she buckled the baby into her car seat.
During the ten-hour trip back to Tennessee, on the fifth stop for a fresh diaper and a bottle, nineteen-year-old Rebecca Essig realized it was time to give her daughter a name.
Delilah
When I was a little girl, I used to wonder whether I’d look like my mom when I grew up. I would put on her shoes. I’d stand in front of the mirror in my parents’ bathroom and try on her lipstick. If I turned my head just right, I thought I could see a hint of the shape of her nose echoed in mine. The curve of her chin peeking through the point of mine.
On my twenty-fifth birthday, when I’d found out that she wasn’t my biological mother, I’d been more worried about surviving the next day in chains than about living long enough to inherit the laugh lines she’d damn well earned. In the menagerie, I’d worried about getting free. At the Spectacle, I’d worried about getting free and getting even. And since our escape, I’d been almost solely focused on bringing my child safely into a world that would not, by any stretch of the imagination, be safe for her.
Yet it had never once occurred to me until the afternoon that I saw photos of “myself” being arrested in Oklahoma that, while I knew exactly what Gallagher had contributed genetically to our child, I had no idea what I’d be bringing to the hereditary party.
On the forty-minute drive to the Pine Bridge Sonic, I could think about nothing else.
Would my daughter inherit anything from me? How could she, if I’d somehow been glamoured to look like the infant I’d been exchanged for? If that theory were true, I had no idea what I was actually supposed to look like. Thus, no idea what features I could be passing on to my child.
I told myself that what I looked like didn’t matter. But that wasn’t entirely true. I knew the face I saw every day in the mirror. I knew the body I saw every day in the shower. Despite platitudes about beauty being only skin-deep, a person’s physical appearance actually carries significant importance, if only because others identify us by our faces and voices.
Because of that fact, there could be no better time for me to reclaim my own face—if I wasn’t, in fact, wearing it—than while Elizabeth Essig’s was front page news. But even if my face wasn’t actually my face, I had no idea how to restore the one I was born with.
And the larger question posed by that dilemma was: If I couldn’t trust that the face in the mirror was my own, what could I trust?
“Delilah?” Gallagher leaned forward from the backseat and put one heavy hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Because you’ve been staring at that picture of ‘you’ for the past twenty miles.” Lenore let go of the steering wheel long enough to make air quotes with both hands.
“I’m just...” I clicked the button to put the phone screen to sleep, then dropped it into the center console. “I never really thought about the fact that I’m not actually my mother’s daughter until I saw the real me. The real her. Or whatever.”
Was Elizabeth’s mother actually my mother? That’s how the trade would work, right? Baby Delilah for Baby Elizabeth? But if that were true, how could Elizabeth Essig be a year younger than I was?
“You’re still Charity’s daughter,” Gallagher said. “In every way that counts.”
“Except that I have no idea what I’m passing down to our child from my biological family. Heart disease? Breast cancer? A propensity toward nose-picking in public?”
Lenore laughed, but Gallagher only gave my shoulder another reassuring pat. “My people have never suffered from any of those afflictions. It’s entirely possible that my superior genes will shine through and redeem our child.”
I twisted in my seat—as best I could—to raise both brows at him. “Superior? Has anyone ever told you that you have a real way with words?”
He shrugged. “Not that I can recall.”
“Gee, I wonder why.” I rolled my eyes and turned to face forward again, where I could only see him in the rearview mirror.
He looked distinctly less comfortable in the cramped backseat of the sedan than he ever had in the middle row of the panel van. “Superior is an accurate descriptor. Redcaps don’t typically die of disease or infirmity.”
Lenore snorted. “Could that be because they all live lives of violence virtually guaranteed to kill them before disease can take hold?”
His inarticulate grumble actually made me smile.
“Okay, I think that’s our exit.” Lenore flicked on the right blinker, then smoothly exited the highway. “If I’m remembering this right, the Sonic is...there!” Her swerve into the right-hand lane was less smooth that time, but we made it into the Sonic parking lot in one piece, and without being pulled over.
“We should park at the back.” I pointed at the third row of parking spots—the only row that faced away from the building. “That corner one’s open.” And it was also the closest to the Starbucks parking lot, which was separated from Sonic only by a concrete curb and a height difference of about a foot and a half.
“How does this work?” Gallagher stared in consternation at the touch screen to the left of the car playing a looping advertisement for the current specialties and items on sale.
“You’ve never been to Sonic?” That shouldn’t have surprised me. Gallagher’s particular glamour abilities made it easier for him to blend in among large carnival workers at places like Metzger’s than in fast-food restaurants and other well-lit venues.
“What’s a Chicago dog?” he asked, eyeing the ad as it started over.
“It’s exactly what your daughter’s craving right now. Pickle spear and all.”
“Get her one,” Gallagher ordered with a glance in the rearview mirror at Lenore.
“We don’t have the money for that,” I insisted. “But it’s happy hour, so drinks are half-price. I have to see Gallagher try a grape soda with Nerds.”
“What’s a Nerd?” He scowled at the menu, evidently frustrated that the ads played too quickly for him to catch all the details.
“There’s a printed menu above the screen,” I told him. He had to duck his head to see that high up through the rear window, because the top of his cap nearly brushed the ceiling of the car.
Lenore and Gallagher studied the menu while I used our phone to search for Wi-Fi signals within range. There were three. Two of them were locked hotspots, likely coming from other cars. The third was from Starbucks.
Relieved, I logged in as a guest and was already tapping like mad on the keyboard when Lenore pressed the red button and began ordering. Absorbed in my search for Elizabeth Essig’s social media accounts, I wasn’t really listening, so when a carhop on actual roller skates showed up ten minutes later, I was surprised to see her hand Lenore a hot dog wrapped in a foil envelope.
Lenore handed it to me. Then she accepted three drinks and tipped the carhop.
“Oh, you shouldn’t have done that!” I said, even as I ripped the foil wrapper from my snack. “We can’t afford it.”
She shrugged. “What good is freedom if you can’t enjoy it every now and then? Eat your hot dog.”
“Thanks. Want a bite?” I asked. She started to shake her head. But she was as sick of rabbit stew as I was—I could practically hear that in her voice. “Here. Take a big bite.”
I handed her the hot dog and twisted until I could see Gallagher in the rear driver’s side seat. Holding his huge Styrofoam cup between his knees, he ripped the wrapper from his straw, then shoved it through the hole in the lid. Then he took a long drink.
“Wha—” He crunched into something and made a face. “Lenore, this is not root beer. It seems to be shards of glass floating in cough syrup.”
The siren giggled. “That would be Delilah’s grape soda. With Nerds.”
I smiled as I traded cups with him and set mine in the center console. Then I took a big bite of my hot dog and went back to the search engine on my phone.
Elizabeth Essig’s social media accounts were unlocked and full of photographs. It would not take the police long to realize they had the wrong woman. And it wasn’t hard for me to imagine myself living her life based on her pictures. She seemed to have lots of friends, and to truly like the guy I could only assume was her boyfriend.
Would he still be her boyfriend now that she was under arrest? Or would he abandon her—as my own boyfriend had—to avoid being labeled a cryptid sympathizer. Or being accused of beastiality.
There were no comments from him on her pages or his own since she’d been arrested.
Other than pictures of her setting up her classroom for the new school year and celebrating various birthdays and holidays with her friends—never in any manner that might sully the reputation of an elementary school teacher—there was little else to be learned about Elizabeth from her accounts.
So as I devoured my hot dog, I turned my attention to the dozens of articles that had already been published about “my” capture. Most of them were full of background information, including details of my original arrest and months in Metzger’s Menagerie, then subsequent recapture and sale to the Savage Spectacle. Several of them showed the burned-out husks of the Spectacle’s buildings after the national guard had bombed the entire compound.
I’d seen those images many times, and I never got tired of staring at the ashes of the most loathsome place I’d ever been forced to call home.
The Oklahoma Daily had the most useful information, at least for my purposes. The reporter had interviewed several of Elizabeth’s friends and coworkers, who all expressed shock and anger over her arrest. No one seemed to believe the claims that she was a cryptid outlaw, but no one seemed surprised by them, either.
“You guys, Elizabeth Essig’s best friend told a reporter that last year all of her friends were worried this would happen when ‘the real Delilah Marlow’ was arrested at Metzger’s and my picture was all over the news. This says they all noticed the resemblance then, and they were all—quote—‘mystified’ by it.”
“I bet they were,” Lenore said.
According to the article, literally dozens of people were willing to swear to the paper—and to a court of law—that Elizabeth Essig was human, and that she’d hardly left Clinton, Oklahoma, in at least three years, except for a yearly girls’ trip to Dallas during summer vacation.
However, at the end of the article one of her coworkers admitted to finding it a bit odd that the daughter of a—
“Holy shit,” I mumbled around the last bite of my Chicago dog.
“What?” Gallagher turned away from the rear windshield, where he’d been eyeing the other customers in brooding suspicion.
“Elizabeth Essig’s mother was a survivor of the reaping.”
Lenore leaned over to look at my phone. “I thought only the surrogates survived the reaping.”
“There were a few kids lucky enough not to be home that night. Willem Vandekamp was one of those.” No doubt the murder of his siblings had helped fuel the Spectacle owner’s hatred for cryptids. “Rebecca Essig, Elizabeth’s mom, was another. This coworker of Elizabeth’s thinks it’s ‘beyond coincidental’ that the daughter of a survivor of the reaping has now been arrested as a cryptid. First Rebecca’s sister—I think he’s talking about one of the surrogates—and now her daughter.”
“He thinks the two are related?” Gallagher asked.
“He’s jumping to conclusions,” Lenore insisted.
“I agree. Still...” I couldn’t afford to leave any theory unexplored.
So while Lenore and Gallagher sipped from their Styrofoam cups and stared out at the world to make sure we weren’t being noticed, I went back to Elizabeth Essig’s social media and scrolled through her pictures until I found one where a woman named Rebecca Essig was tagged.
The photo was of a woman about my age, though the clothing said the picture was at least fifteen years old.
I saw only a passing resemblance between mother and daughter. Between her mother and me. No more than I might see in any stranger of similar hair and skin tone passing by on the street.
We could be related. Yet we could just as easily be genetic strangers.
However, Rebecca Essig did look familiar. But even after staring at her picture for two straight minutes, I couldn’t figure out where I’d seen her before. Maybe on some “remember the reaping” video they’d made us watch in school. Or in college...
I ran a search for “Rebecca Essig survivor of the reaping.” The results were fewer than I’d expected, until I remembered that there’d been no internet in 1986. Still, after a few clicks, I found what I was looking for in an article written years before by someone studying the long-term psychological effects of the reaping on its few survivors.
Though a certain newly minted PhD named Willem Vandekamp was listed as a prominent contributor, a woman named Rebecca Essig had declined to participate in the study.
“Delilah.”
“Huh?” I didn’t look up from my phone until Lenore began loudly slurping what little remained of her cherry limeade.
“We’ve been sitting here for an hour. The carhop is starting to give us dirty looks on her way to and from the building.”
“You’re saying we should leave?”
“No. I’m saying we should splurge on a couple more hot dogs so we can legitimately sit here a little longer. They’re two-for-one for the next couple of hours, and I’m so sick of rabbit stew.”
“Yes. Order them. Do whatever you have to do.”
I searched for “Rebecca Essig family reaping” and scrolled through a bunch of only tangentially related links before it finally occurred to me to click on the image results. The very first image was an ’80s vintage department-store-style family photograph.
A tap on the picture brought up a post from one of Elizabeth Essig’s social media sites from much farther back than I’d scrolled on my earlier visit. She’d captioned the photo, which she’d evidently found when she was helping pack up a storage unit.
“Grandma Nat, Grandpa Will, Mom (RIP) and my uncle John and aunt Laura, who were killed in the reaping by the six-year-old monster masquerading as my aunt Erica. #RememberTheReaping.”
Erica Essig. The surrogate had a name.
I zoomed in on the picture, but it was a photo of a photo, and the resolution was not good. Still, it was unnerving to realize I was looking at the pixilated image of a six-year-old murderer.
“Here you go!”
I glanced up to see that the carhop was back, and this time she had two hot dogs and what appeared—based on the whipped cream smooshed into the top of the dome-shaped lid—to be a milk shake.
“Thanks.” Lenore handed her a ten-dollar bill and told her to keep the change.
“We really can’t afford this,” I lamented as the siren handed Gallagher one of the hot dogs.
Lenore shrugged. “It’s cheaper than buying another data plan. Or a
nything at all from Starbucks.”
She was not wrong. “Thanks. I think I’m on to something.” I hadn’t expected to find many pictures from the 1980s on the internet, but where the reaping was concerned, I was dead wrong. Sociologists, crypto-biologists, crypto-anthropologists, historians and conspiracy theorists had practically filled the internet with everything related to the nation’s greatest tragedy. My only challenge was figuring out which search words would trigger the results I needed.
On my third try, I typed in “Erica Essig surrogate,” and stumbled onto a public, user-driven database of photographs of the three hundred thousand-plus surrogates who’d been taken into custody by the FBI, at the age of six.
“We don’t know who or what they really are,” the paragraph at the top of the page read. “We don’t know where they are. And we have no idea what these little monsters look like now. But what we do know—what we can know, anyway, with the public’s help—is what the faces of evil looked like when they attacked. May we never forget that terror can wear a facade of innocence. May we always remember the reaping.”
Below that simple paragraph was a searchable database of photographs, which could be narrowed by state or by name. I tapped on the letter E.
“Essig, Erica” was near the top of the list, and when I clicked on the thumbnail, the image opened at its full size.
“Oh my God.”
“What?” Lenore asked around a mouthful of what could only have been the New York dog, based on the slaw hanging over her lip.
“I found Erica Essig.”
“Who’s that?” Gallagher asked from the backseat.
I wedged myself sideways in the front passenger seat so I could include him. “Elizabeth Essig’s youngest aunt. She was taken into custody by the US government in 1986, as the surrogate responsible for the slaughter of her own siblings, John and Laura Essig, ages twelve and ten.”
“When you say you found her...?” Lenore left the question hanging.
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