The Echo Wife

by Sarah Gailey

  I wanted more than anything to grab her never-broken wrist and wipe her unfamiliar hand on that blue couch. I wanted to ruin the upholstery. I wanted to make her ruin it.

  “Why can’t I ever fall asleep before nine thirty?” Martine asked the water glass.

  I couldn’t tell if she knew she’d spoken aloud until she looked up at me with wide, dazed eyes. “No matter how hard I try. I’m so tired all the time, with the baby and all. I can wake up any time in the night, but I can’t take naps. I can’t sleep. I can never sleep. Not until nine thirty, and not past six in the morning. Why?”

  I drank my wine, winced at the sound of myself swallowing. “It’s your programming, probably. He must have given you a noncircadian rhythm. It’s—that’s an early method, one we stopped using a couple of years ago.”

  “Can you fix it?” Martine whispered.

  “I don’t know,” I answered.

  “Why don’t you know? You stopped using that method. You must know how to undo it.” There was a note of desperation in her voice, high and wavering. Her grip on her cup of water was so tight that I heard the glass creak under her fingers.

  “I don’t have any remaining specimens from that generation.” Martine’s eyes tightened at the corners when I said the word specimens. “I’ll look into it, though. I can look into it.”

  Martine set her water glass onto a coaster on the coffee table and stood. “I should make up the guest bedroom for you,” she said smoothly. “You must be so tired, after the day you’ve had.” Before I could say anything, she disappeared into the back of the house.

  I drank my wine and waited. I ran my fingers over the piping on the edge of the arm of the couch. I dug my fingernails under the edge of that piping, squeezed until it hurt, didn’t let go until I heard the soft pop-pop-pop of stitches giving way.

  I pulled my hand away fast. I told myself that I was letting go to avoid doing more damage, but the truth is that I was satisfied by that tiny, invisible bit of harm I’d caused. A furious, animal part of me—a part I didn’t want to think about or look at too closely—hoped that, in a few months, the piping would come free altogether. I hoped Martine would blame herself, never knowing that I’d been the one to pull the seam loose in the first place.

  I wanted her to feel that bewilderment, the sudden fear that comes with something falling apart that had seemed so secure. I wanted her to wonder what else she’d neglected. I wanted her to wonder what else would fall away beneath her without warning.

  It wasn’t fair of me. Martine wasn’t her own fault. She hadn’t been the one to ruin my marriage. But I wanted her to hurt anyway.

  Nathan was too dead to hurt anymore, and I wanted someone other than me to bear the weight of what had happened to my life.

  I moved away from the arm of the couch, distancing myself from the piping. I tried hard to occupy myself by setting my mind to the problem of reprogramming a clone—fixing the problem, instead of just disposing of the specimen and starting over. It had occurred to me before as an obvious next step in my research, and there was no reason not to pursue it, but I could never seem to focus on it as a problem that needed solving. Specimens were always disposable. Trying to hang on to them felt foolish, indulgent. I had never been able to think of a reason to bother.

  But something low in my belly kept twisting at the way Martine had asked why she couldn’t sleep. I imagined her lying there in the dark—newly pregnant, exhausted, knowing that she wouldn’t get an extra minute of rest no matter how hard she tried. Knowing that, when the baby arrived, there would be no promise of respite.

  No specimen was ever meant to live for as long as Martine had. No specimen was ever meant to endure this kind of responsibility. Clones were intended to be created for a purpose, and when that purpose was fulfilled, they were supposed to be finished.

  The twist in my belly wasn’t guilt. I don’t regret that—why would it have been guilt? Martine’s continued existence was wrong. It was an insult to the very science that had created her. It was a perversion of her own programming. And now, because of that—because of Nathan’s decision to twist my work and make a woman who would live and live and live—I had a failure to contend with. A product was being used in a way it was never designed to be used, and that misuse was highlighting a weakness in my work. It couldn’t stand.

  It wasn’t guilt. But it wasn’t far removed from guilt, either.

  I drained my wineglass and returned to the kitchen for the bottle. I listened hard, but I couldn’t hear Martine. I wondered if Nathan had programmed her to work silently, to cry silently.

  I wondered if he had programmed her to be able to cry at all.

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  I would have loved to experience some kind of relief after leaving Martine’s house. But I went back to a place that was only barely mine. The town house fit me like a brand-new shoe, and it grated at me, knowing that Martine was ensconced in creaseless linens and fragrant soaps while I stumbled around in my nest of boxes and packing paper.

  I suppose that kind of place is my natural habitat. The house I grew up in was only ever a house, not a home. It had looked older than it was, stonework on the outside with climbing ivy that my mother dutifully guided onto trellises, to prevent it from ruining the foundation. There were exposed beams on the inside, dark wood and white walls and more fireplaces than really made sense. The rooms were huge and drafty, the ceilings low, the doorways small. Every closet was lined with built-in shelves that were a little too shallow and a little too close together.

  I remember that house as being huge and baffling, full of dark corners and hiding places. I suspect now that my memory is shaded by the kind of life I had there. It was a place that could have been charming, if only it had been entirely different.

  * * *

  My father’s study was a mystery to me when I was a child. It was a whole room in that house that was dedicated only to his work. The rest of the house was connected—the living room and kitchen both led into the dining room via open arches, doorways with no doors in them, and the bedrooms were isolated upstairs, ranged along a narrow hallway at the top of the stairs. But my father’s study was its own room, set back under the stairs with a huge, heavy oak door.

  When that door was closed, my mother and I were to stay quiet, to avoid disturbing his work. When it was open, we stayed quiet for altogether different reasons.

  There were two chairs in the study—the one behind his desk, where I was not permitted to tread, and the one in front of his desk. That second chair existed for one purpose: our appointments. Once a week, and once a week only, I was invited to sit in that chair and ask my father a question.

  My mother told me later that these appointments began as a result of my incessant childhood curiosity. I was relentless, she said. I wanted to know why everything was the way it was, and how it might be changed. By establishing a time during which I was permitted to interrupt his work, my father kept me from being too constant a nuisance. He corralled the disruption I represented, turned it into a discrete period of time during which I was allowed to demand his attention.

  That was my mother’s story. My father said that the appointments began because he saw “great intellectual potential” in me. He liked to maintain narratives like that, ones that portrayed him as having keen insight.

  My father also said that I was allowed to ask him any question, any at all. This, of course, was a lie. I learned what kinds of questions were actually acceptable when I was six years old. It’s an appointment I will never forget.

  He was telling me about the science behind magnets that day. I sat across from him, my feet swinging off the edge of my chair. I picked at my fingernails, one of the only things I could safely pick at in his presence, one of the only fidgets he wouldn’t notice so long as I kept my hands in my lap. His explanations were concise and direct, thorough, never condescending. He was a good teacher.

  He had been speaking and drawing diagrams for close to thi
rty minutes—I know, because he kept a thirty-minute hourglass on his desk to ensure that each of my questions received an appropriate amount of answering, and the top half of the glass was nearly empty.

  My father stopped at the end of a sentence about polarity, looked at me, and asked if I had any additional questions. He always asked this, and I was intended to respond that I did not, because the hourglass was nearly empty and there was not time for further discussion. But I hadn’t yet come to understand that unspoken rule, and so, foolishly, I said that I did have another question.

  I asked him why my mother had been in bed all day.

  I wasn’t trying to be impertinent—I hadn’t understood my weekly meetings with my father to be limited to scholarly discussions. There were so many things I didn’t understand yet. He said that I could ask him anything, and so I thought it was all right to ask about her.

  His flat, gray eyes stared into mine. Anger flashed behind his veneer of calm like the scales of the fish that darted under the surface of the pond in my mother’s garden.

  He reached across the table and gripped my jaw in one hand. His fingers dug into the soft edges of my chin until they found the resistance of bone. In that moment, I became aware of the baby fat that was still on my face, and I felt a mortifying flush of relief at the way it still cushioned me.

  “Try that again,” he said, and the danger in his voice made my blood go still. I remember watching his face, trying to figure out where I’d gone wrong. Was it the way I’d asked the question? My tone of voice? Had I said a bad word?

  I swallowed hard. My jaw ached in his grip. I tried again, my words flattened by immobility. “I’m sorry,” I said, and at last, he let me go. I hesitated before deciding on how to proceed. Try again, he’d said, and so I knew that I must try again, and I must get it right this time. Trying again and failing was not an option. Heat began to flood the lower half of my face, and I knew that it would be red where his fingers had dug into my skin.

  I tried again. “Could someone reverse the polarity of a magnet?”

  When he favored me with a smile, my stomach sank with the weight of relief: I’d gotten it right. He turned the hourglass again, and spent another thirty minutes or so explaining various theories around polarity manipulation, the scale of experiments on the subject, concerns within the scientific community about the risk of increasing the scale of those experiments. I listened well enough to ask a few more questions—well enough that later, when he quizzed me, I would remember what I was supposed to. But fear hissed in the back of my mind. Fear of the grip he’d had on my jaw. Fear of the promises made by that barely restrained anger in his eyes.

  When he sent me to bed, he grabbed my jaw again, gentler this time, though I still flinched. There was no anger in his touch this time. He looked into my eyes to make sure I was paying attention.

  “Never apologize just because you think someone is mad at you,” he said. “Never let anyone make you say that you’re sorry just to appease them.” His eyes darted between mine, back and forth, faster than I could follow. “No one respects a coward, Evelyn. Never apologize. Do you understand?”

  I nodded, and he let me go. Even then, I could admit that I knew why my mother hadn’t gotten out of bed. It wasn’t really that I’d wanted an explanation for that. It was that I’d wanted an explanation as to why it couldn’t go another way. Why did they fight, even when my mother bent to his every demand? Why was it inevitable that, after they fought, my mother had to be in a condition that rendered her unable to speak to me for a whole day?

  That was the question I’d really wanted the answer to. That’s what I’d wanted to learn. And after that conversation with my father, I’d learned that some questions simply weren’t for asking.

  Not every child learns that lesson. It’s unspeakably galling, having to talk to people who never learned, who never felt the pain of a wrong answer, who never saw that fish-flash of rage in the eyes of the only adult who could tell them the truth.

  In the months after I left Nathan, while I was staying in a temporary apartment, before I signed the lease on my bare-walled town house with its wall-to-wall carpet and cement-slab patio, I swam in that anger. I fielded countless questions from friends and colleagues and acquaintances, questions about what had happened and why things fell apart and who was to blame. Every time, I felt those same fish flashing behind my own eyes.

  I couldn’t tell my well-meaning friends and colleagues to try again, I couldn’t grip their faces until their bones creaked, I couldn’t make them understand that they shouldn’t ask.

  They weren’t afraid of me.

  They had no reason to be.

  So I had to give polite, no-one’s-fault answers that stuck in my throat like a sliver of bone. I’d tried so hard to structure my life in a way that would prevent me from ever having to swallow that kind of pain again, but I don’t suppose Nathan considered that when he put me in a position to protect his reputation. Once he had Martine, I don’t suppose he ever thought of me at all.

  * * *

  In the week following Nathan’s death, I left those bones to lodge in the flesh of Martine’s throat. She was the one who had to answer questions about why Nathan hadn’t returned his colleague’s calls, hadn’t attended their lectures. But no one ever taught Martine to be angry when people asked the wrong questions. She was young and soft and afraid. No one had ever shown her how to access contempt for them and their savage curiosity.

  I will confess that I misunderstood Martine’s fear, when she called me the evening after we put our husband in the ground.

  A friend of his had called to confirm dinner plans, and she had to cancel on Nathan’s behalf. “They thought I was his secretary,” she said, her voice shaking. “They usually think that. I told them Nathan was unavailable. Was that the right way to do it?”

  “Sure,” I said, distracted. The HGH issue with specimen 4896-T was intensifying, and I was deeply embroiled in trying to find a solution I could explain to the director of the lab, next time he asked me why things took as long as they did, why they couldn’t happen faster and cheaper. I remember thinking that I didn’t have time to coddle her, that she should have known by now how to deflect curiosity.

  She had, after all, remained hidden for a year and a half. Surely she could stay that way without my help.

  “Does it always feel like this?” she asked. “I’ve never done it before.”

  “What, murder? I can’t say as I’ve ever done it either, Martine.” I was snappish, impatient. I didn’t like the idea that Martine was asking me for advice about murder. I’d neutralized specimens before, but I’d never killed a person.

  “Not murder,” she hissed back. “Lying.”

  I froze.

  She’d never told a lie before. She’d never had cause to. She’d stayed hidden, she’d allowed people to believe untruths, but she’d never actually spoken falsely.

  When I was married to Nathan, our days together were pocked with small lies, the kinds of lies that made it possible for us to reach the end of the day intact. What must it have been like for her, I wondered, being unable to lie to him? Never knowing that it was an option? What measures had he used to teach her to think what he wanted her to think, so that she never had to mislead him about her opinions and ideas?

  How many times had she learned to fear what would happen if she tried again and got it wrong?

  She’d never lied before, to him or to anyone. I ached with impatience at the thought of the learning curve she’d need to scale in order to survive.

  “It gets easier,” I told her. “You’ll get used to it.”

  * * *

  Martine called me frequently in those first two weeks, telling me about people who were calling the house to ask about Nathan. Most of them thought they were talking to his secretary, and Martine didn’t disabuse them of the assumption. It seemed to be the thing that kept her hidden: Nathan hadn’t told anyone that she existed, and it didn’t occur to them that he would
have a secret wife who happened to keep his calendar for him.

  She told all of them that he was sick. His teaching assistant, who had covered five days of classes when Nathan didn’t show up to teach, and who wanted to know when to expect him back. His department chair, with whom he’d missed a lunch. A friend who waited at a golf course for an hour for a round that Nathan had scheduled. All of them heard the same story: Nathan was on a trip to the mountains, he would be gone for a while, he would call them as soon as he returned.

  After the eighth phone call from Martine—nearly as panicked as the first phone call, and no less disruptive—I decided that enough was enough, and I returned to her home. I strode up the front walk with my coat unbuttoned and billowing, the wind biting at me, making me sharp and alert. Maybe that’s a lie; maybe I would have been sharp and alert anyway, and I just liked the way the cold hurt the skin of my face and throat.

  When Martine opened the door, I pushed my way inside. Her hair swung loose around her face; she twisted her fingers together in front of her, the knuckles overlapping in a way that was painful to watch. I tried not to look at her belly, but even so, I could see how much it had grown. She was more obviously pregnant than the last time I’d seen her. She was unavoidably, unquestionably pregnant. Somehow, that baby was still growing. That baby that shouldn’t have existed at all, much less been viable.

  She hadn’t miscarried. She should have miscarried.

  The baby should have been a tumor. It should have been a lie. It shouldn’t have been growing. It shouldn’t have been possible.

  I forced myself to swallow the how and face the immediate problem. How was a question that could be answered later, I reminded myself; there were more pressing matters at hand.