The Echo Wife

by Sarah Gailey

  I tried to ask what happened, but Martine had already hung up.

  I stared at the phone in my hand, at the open wine bottle on the counter. I didn’t have to go. What right did Martine have to call on me? What right did Martine have to anything? She wasn’t even legally a human being, much less a friend. But then, I thought, Martine had called me. Even after everything I’d said, Martine had called me.

  Which meant Martine was alone, too.

  I called a car, and by the time I’d gotten my shoes on, it was waiting outside. The afternoon had been freezing. As I stepped out into the thin, pale light of the waning day, sobriety hit me hard in the temple. Not the kind of sobriety that would render me safe behind the wheel of my own car, no—rather, the kind of sobriety that nearly stopped me in my tracks with the weight of reality. It was like waking from a dream, except that the dream and the reality were the exact same thing. Yes, I told myself, forcing my feet to take me to the waiting car. You are walking out of your new town house in order to help the pregnant clone your husband made to replace you. Yes, this is real. Yes, you are doing this.

  The car had complimentary bottled water in the backseat. I drank one fast, trying not to notice the taste of the plastic. I rolled down my window and let the cold slap my cheeks, clenched my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering. It was a twenty-minute drive, just long enough for me to feel stupid. I was reading too much into Martine’s tone of voice, I told myself. I didn’t need to go—it was a bad idea to set a precedent like this, that my clone could call me and I would come running. Besides, I told myself, if Martine has an emergency, she should call Nathan. He’s the one who opened that can of worms. It was uncharitable to think of Martine as a can of worms, but it was the truth. If the clone had problems, they were Nathan’s problems. And if Nathan had problems, they were his own. That was the whole point of the divorce.

  By the time I tipped my driver, I was mentally composing a speech to give Martine. Something about how I regretted losing my temper at the café, a gentle apology for my behavior. Something acknowledging how that had been wrong of me, but also emphasizing the fact that Martine and I simply could not have a relationship. I would prefer if you live your life and I live mine, I rehearsed in my head. It isn’t healthy for the two of us to know each other, and I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to call me again.

  My father’s voice echoed in my memory. There will be no further discussion of this matter. It was the last thing he’d ever said in front of me.

  I kept rehearsing as I walked up the paved path that bisected the dew-shining lawn. It isn’t healthy. I took in the house, a lovely gingerbread-looking thing with leaded windows and climbing ivy and a porch swing. It was one story tall, brick and shingles, an English cottage nestled into an immaculate American lawn. I would prefer if. The house was exactly nothing like the home I’d shared with Nathan, which had been modern and easy to clean and then shockingly easy to leave. This was a house for children to play in, for Martine to work hard at keeping clean. I don’t think it’s a good idea. The front porch was wide enough for jack-o’-lanterns to line up on, and the big bay window right in the front would have made a perfect frame for an enormous Douglas fir, whether or not Nathan had decided to start celebrating Christmas.

  I walked up onto that broad, well-swept porch, my speech pressing against the backs of my teeth. I raised my fist to knock on the richly grained wood of the front door. But before I could land a blow on the house, the door swung open. Martine’s face stared out at me, just like the last time I had visited this place.

  This time, it was not a blank, welcoming smile she wore.

  Martine was gray-faced and trembling and she stared right at me, looking into my eyes with an animal intensity. Her hair hung around her face, one wild tendril swinging a loose bobby pin. A livid bloom of reddish purple mottled her throat. Her right hand gripped the door as though it were the only timber left of her storm-sunk ship.

  Her left hand gripped the rosewood handle of a chef’s knife.

  I had to look down, if only for an instant. That was all it took for me to verify what I knew I’d see: the skirt of Martine’s dress, which clung wet and red to her legs. An arc of blood swung high across her waist and breasts; it had already begun to dry on her calves and ankles. But the skirt—that was saturated.

  When I met Martine’s gaze again, I saw blank horror there, and I knew that I had been right to come to the house after all.

  “Thank you for coming,” Martine said in a throaty whisper, her words coming slow. She cleared her throat, wincing as though it were painful to do so. “Something terrible has happened.”

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  The conditioning of a clone is a process that requires some fortitude.

  The duplicative cloning process is, of course, based on genetics. One hundred days from sample to sentience, and every building block is based on the DNA of the original. Each specimen emerges from amniocentesis at the state of telomeric decay established by the source material: The clone is the exact same age as the original, give or take a handful of weeks. Telomere financing means the clones don’t age at the same rate as the original—clone tissues simply decay quite a bit slower than standard tissues—but no clone is in use for more than a few months at a time, so it isn’t an issue.

  At the end of one hundred days, a perfect double of any human can exist in my lab. It’s all genetics. It’s all growth.

  The problem with the process is that, without intervention, the clone develops according to ideal conditions.

  Humans rarely develop according to ideal conditions. My work, for the most part, has been focused on truly duplicative clones—ones that will look exactly like their originals. A body double for a politician, for example, must be convincing enough to attract a bullet, otherwise the expense involved in creating that double is unjustifiable. The expense in developing the process at all becomes unjustifiable.

  Thus, conditioning is necessary. Nutrient levels during development must be carefully controlled. Light exposure, allergen introduction, heavy metal exposure: all are crucial during the nascent stages of growth and maturation.

  But there are other factors at play. The original subject might have a crooked nose from a poorly healed fracture, or a distinctive burn scar, or a missing limb. A limp from a broken leg that never set quite right. A cracked tooth from a bar fight or a mugging.

  This is the conditioning that necessitates a sense of remove, a steady hand, and a strong stomach.

  Clones aren’t people, legally speaking. They don’t have rights. They’re specimens. They’re body doubles, or organ farms, or research subjects. They’re temporary, and when they stop being useful, they become biomedical waste. They are disposable. With the right mindset, conditioning a clone feels like any other research project. It feels like implanting stem cells under the skin of a mouse’s back, or clipping the wings of a crow so it can’t fly inside a controlled space. There’s blood, yes, and there’s some discomfort, but it’s necessary for the work.

  By the time I knocked on Martine’s front door, I had been conditioning adult duplicative clones for several years. I had been disposing of specimens, both failed and successful, for even longer than that.

  I couldn’t afford to be squeamish. “What happened?” I asked, because I had to say something. I couldn’t just stand there forever. Time would only begin to advance again once I imposed motion. Action was imperative.

  “We had a fight,” Martine rasped.

  There was so much blood.

  “He was angry,” Martine said. “I told him about getting tea with you, and I asked him about the thing you said. About what I was made for.”

  I started to say something—not an apology, never that, only an admission that I’d perhaps spoken too harshly—but she didn’t let me get a word in.

  “No,” she interrupted. “You were right. I was made for something, and I’ve never even wondered about it. I was never asked if I wanted this.”
She gestured to her belly. “So I asked Nathan about it. I said…” She swallowed hard, lifted a hand to her throat as she did so. “What if I wanted something different? What if I didn’t want to be a mother? That’s what I asked him.” She darted a quick glance at me, her eyes fierce. “I do want to be a mother. I want this. More than anything. I just wanted to know whether I had a say or not.”

  I believed her. Nathan would have programmed her, after all, to want this more than anything. But then, he also should have programmed her to not ask questions like “what if.” At least, that’s what I would have done, if I was going to build a perfect, docile version of myself. I couldn’t help but feel a twitch of satisfaction: Of course Nathan would cut that corner. He always was sloppy. “And what did he say?”

  “He got so angry. He kept talking about his failure, saying that he’d overlooked my flaws. I was cooking dinner, and I turned to get a knife from the block, and it wasn’t there, and then I looked over and he was holding it, and.” She stopped talking midsentence and looked down at the knife in her hand. “Oh,” she said, and dropped it as though it had suddenly sprouted thorns. “Oh no, oh no, oh no,” she repeated in an increasingly frantic pitch. “Oh no, he—he came at me with the knife, and I screamed and I knocked it out of his hand, and he put his hands on my throat, and—”

  I clapped my hands once, hard and loud, and Martine startled into silence. “Take a deep breath, Martine,” I said in a low voice. “I can put the rest together, you don’t have to tell me. Just take a deep breath, that’s good. Eyes on me. Don’t look at the floor, look at me.” I was not being gentle with Martine. This wasn’t a moment for gentleness. The trick of the thing was to crush her rising panic. I had done it with a dozen rejected lab assistants, the ones who couldn’t handle the process of conditioning live specimens. “Now, take three steps toward me.” Martine followed my instructions without question, her unblinking eyes locked on mine.

  I took her by the arm. Her skin was tacky with half-dried blood. I led her farther into the house. “Where’s your bathroom?”

  “Down the hall,” Martine whispered.

  “Good. We’re going there.” I kept my voice authoritative. Let Martine think someone was in control of the situation. Let that someone be me. Forward.

  We walked into the bathroom, decorated in muted tones of lavender and sage, all the soaps in decorative glass bottles with brushed aluminum pumps. I spun the knobs in the tub, turned the shower on, and undressed Martine while the water got warm.

  It was like handling a doll. Martine was mute, pale-lipped. Her eyes stared right through the wall in front of her. I unzipped the blood-soaked dress and let it fall to the floor, a stiff puddle around Martine’s ankles. Her underwear was nice, obviously expensive: black lace with white stitching. I heard the echo of my own voice in the tea shop: What are you for?

  I eased Martine’s lingerie off, touching her skin as little as possible in the process. I tried not to look at the gentle swell of her belly, or the way her nipples were the kind of dark and full that comes with pregnancy. I led my clone by the arm, helped her step over the lip of the tub, and guided her under the spray. She shivered, and I turned the hot water a little higher.

  “There,” I said, watching the water around Martine’s feet turn pink, ignoring the water that was soaking my own shirtsleeves. My vision narrowed to the swirl of blood around the drain. I blinked hard. “That’s better. Can you wash?”

  She nodded silently, but she didn’t move until I handed her a bottle of exfoliating soap. She scrubbed at herself mechanically, the dark brown of drying blood giving way to pink skin.

  She didn’t have any of the freckles or scars that I did. Her skin was smooth, unblemished, hairless. She didn’t even have stretch marks.

  I stared at the woman my husband had wanted, and I saw all the ways in which she was nothing like me. Another corner cut: Nathan had neglected her conditioning.

  But then, maybe that wasn’t an accident. Why would he want a wife with a scar on her knee, when he could have a wife without one? Why would he take the time and care to break her wrist and splint it just a little crooked? It wasn’t another me that he was after. Martine was something—someone—else altogether.

  She was the woman Nathan had been looking for. Had he been looking for her all along? Had I been a rough draft?

  She didn’t stop scrubbing until I reached in and laid a hand on her wrist. “That’s enough. You’re all done.”

  Martine turned once in the water, rinsing the last of the soap from her arms and face. She reached down to turn off the tap, her arms and hands moving slowly, her grip weak.

  I wrapped her in a purple towel. She shivered in my arms, trembling under the terry cloth with her eyes squeezed shut tight.

  “I do want this,” she was whispering. “More than anything. I just wanted to know if it was my choice. That’s all. I swear.”

  “I know,” I murmured, using a foot to shove Martine’s blood-soaked clothes behind the toilet and out of sight. They left a faint pink smear across the tile. “I believe you.”

  “I swear,” she said again. “I swear.”

  I left Martine sitting on the edge of her bed wrapped in the towel, staring at her hands. I needed to leave before the crying began. I could deal with a lot of things, but I didn’t have the patience for her tears.

  Martine would need to weep alone.

  When I got to the kitchen, Nathan was still dead.

  I looked at his unmoving back, and I didn’t see the person I’d slept beside for the better part of a decade. So long as he was facedown, he could have been any corpse at all.

  I stepped around the blood on the floor and took it in, the scene somehow absurdly small and simple: an onion next to the cutting board, stripped of its papery skin, waiting for a knife. A plastic-wrapped package of chicken thighs next to the stove. The knife block on its side, knocked over in what must have been Nathan’s haste to stab Martine. And then, of course, the blood.

  When I’m training lab assistants on conditioning, I make them watch as I throw a vial of blood on the ground. Ten cc’s—less than a tablespoon—but when it’s on the floor, it looks catastrophic. I teach them not to freeze at what seems to be a high volume of blood. I teach them how much blood a specimen can lose during conditioning before they should start to worry. I inoculate them to the panic that comes naturally at the sight of blood spreading across cloth, across tile, across steel.

  I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about blood volume in the course of my research. The numbers are always at the front of my mind. Nathan was an adult man: he had twelve pints in him, give or take. He was dead, not just unconscious. Dead, which meant that there were at least six pints on the kitchen floor. Maybe more.

  I thought of the many nights we’d spent at our favorite dive bar in the early days of our relationship, downing pitchers of weak beer and playing darts and talking about the future we were going to shape together. The conversions came so reflexively that they were almost comforting: Six pints on the ground. Three and three-quarters pints in a pitcher. A little less than two pitchers of blood on the ground, then. It doesn’t seem like so much, put that way. Not even two full pitchers.

  Still. He looked so small. He was so empty.

  I looked at him, and at the blood, and I waited for grief to strike me down. I was sure that it would hit me at some point. For all that I was furious at him—for all that I hated what he’d done and who he’d become—he was still my husband. I had stood across from him on a Saturday afternoon, in front of all of our friends and all of his family, wearing a dress and the jewelry he’d given me. I had tied my life to his. I could smell my own grief, distant, like the first hint of smoke on the wind.

  But it wasn’t on me yet. All I could see was his back, and his blood, and the only thing I needed to feel just then was the weight of the task ahead.

  I couldn’t call the police. That much was obvious; the consequences would have been ruinous. At a minimum, my resea
rch funding would be frozen while an ethics committee investigated the fact that the impregnable clone model had been undermined. And I would be publicly humiliated. The scientific community would forget that I had ever been a luminary of the industry, a pioneer, a genius.

  They would instead remember me as the woman whose husband had used her own research to make a better version of her.

  Aside from that, there was the sheer impossibility of proving what had happened. If Martine decided to lie, there was no way for an investigation to show beyond a doubt that she was the one who had murdered Nathan. We had the same DNA. And who, a small voice in my mind asked, has the obvious motive to kill him? Who took a car here? Which of you is crying because he’s dead, and which one is cleaning up?

  No. Turning Martine over to the authorities simply wasn’t a viable option.

  I threw the chicken into the trash—who knew how long it had been sitting out?—and returned the onion to the crisper drawer in the refrigerator, considering my options.

  At the lab, specimens were cremated along with the medical waste, but oversight was too intense down in Disposals for me to toss in an extra corpse. I tried to remember things I’d seen in crime dramas on television, and the mistakes people made in novels, the drunken late-night conversations I’d had with friends about the best way to hide a body. People always brought up the idea of feeding the body to pigs, as though there were a pig farm on every goddamn corner.

  I left him lying on his face as I discarded possible solutions. There was no reason to turn him over. Not until it was time. I was scrubbing the knife when Martine came in.

  “You’re still here.” She stood in the doorway. Her hair was tucked under a kerchief. It made her look more like me. “I thought you’d gone.”

  I blinked at her a few times. It hadn’t even occurred to me. She had called—I had answered. I was here.

  My gut twisted with something that was a cousin to grief, and it took me a moment to recognize it as guilt. It had been there, dull and aching and low enough to ignore, but the naked gratitude on Martine’s face honed it to a razor’s edge and I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there anymore.