Chapter 5 Summary and Analysis

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.

Summary

Josephine drives to the Twelfth Street Halfway House, a decaying Victorian building with a concrete sign marking it as a halfway house. She is admitted by Wanda, a sharp-featured woman who immediately recognizes Josephine as Margaret's daughter. Wanda leads her through the close, soupy air of the house to a locked door and up a narrow stairwell to an attic room. There, Emily French lies curled on a cot, tangled-haired and speaking disjointedly about birds falling and burning. Wanda explains that Emily is having a hard day and that she has gotten worse.

Josephine sits at the edge of the bed, and Emily gradually becomes more coherent. She talks about her mother Tami's death and says that the testing—the experiments conducted after Bellanger's death—made her sick. Emily describes how various researchers paid her and her mother for tests, some trying to prove Bellanger a fraud, others trying to replicate his work. She shows Josephine a skin graft scar on her thigh, similar to the one Josephine has from her own childhood surgery. Emily reveals that one of these later researchers gave her the graft a few years ago.

Emily then tells Josephine that her mother, Margaret, visited two weeks ago. Margaret reminisced about the Homestead, mentioned the little red cup Emily liked, and said that Fiona was strange. Emily demonstrates Fiona's strangeness by moving her hand in sweeping gestures, implying Fiona could move objects. As Emily's energy fades, she suddenly screams, grabs Josephine's throat, and speaks of bleeding and dying. Josephine struggles, but Emily releases her and, in a calmer voice, says that someone—