The Echo Wife

by Sarah Gailey

  “We need his schedule,” I said. “You can’t just keep telling people he’s on a trip forever. You can’t keep calling me.”

  Martine bolted the door behind me, shaking her head. “I don’t know where he keeps it.”

  “Where’s his desk?” I asked, and she showed me to the little dining nook off the kitchen. There was Nathan’s old rolltop, an antique we’d found together one weekend in the first year of our marriage. Back when we still went out adventuring on the weekends, when we still found things together, when we still got excited about furniture. I opened the left-side drawer and pulled out one of the black notebooks Nathan used to track his appointments. “Here.” I handed it to her. “Go through there and find the appointments he’s made. Find out what he’s going to miss. Call people and tell them…”

  “What?” Martine asked.

  I stared at her blankly. I hadn’t thought that far. Get the schedule, find the appointments, cancel the appointments.

  But what excuse would cover the breadth of those cancellations? And what would we do later, when the expiration date on that excuse came and went? Each excuse would only last for so long. What then? Would we report him missing? Would someone else? And when the police came to investigate the missing Nathan—when they saw pregnant Martine—would they know what they were looking at?

  She didn’t even have an identity, as far as the law was concerned. She didn’t exist. But given how easy she had been for me to find, it seemed obvious that even the most perfunctory police investigation into Nathan’s disappearance would land them right where I was standing.

  There was no keeping Martine hidden, if we didn’t figure out how to prevent anyone from looking for Nathan. And there was no protecting my research—my legacy—if she was discovered.

  “Shit,” I whispered. “This isn’t going to work.”

  “What isn’t going to work? Why not?” Martine asked.

  Reflexive fury swam under my skin at her questions. I breathed deep, forced it down. “We can’t just cancel his plans. We need a longer-term solution.” Martine stared at me, waiting for me to tell her what to do.

  I closed my eyes, overcome by fury. I didn’t begrudge her that instinctive submission, that obedience. She was waiting for instructions because she’d been programmed to be docile. But when I pushed down the flash of anger I felt at her questions, at her inability to come up with her own answers, something deeper had surfaced.

  Fucking Nathan.

  Martine couldn’t do this on her own because of his cowardly programming. I couldn’t abandon her or turn her in, because his baby, if discovered, would annihilate my career. All of this was his mess, and it was left to me to clean it up, and no matter what happened, I would bear the consequences.

  It was just the same as it had always been. The years we worked in the lab together, before the pregnancy and the fight and the ring and his escape to stability—they’d been marked by similar disappointments. He’d always cut corners, always accepted easy answers. Our shared research was pocked with fights about his sloppy techniques, his inability to question his own results if he happened to like the answers he got. He called me a nag, accused me of micromanaging his data, but if I hadn’t been there to check his numbers, he would have dragged me down with him.

  Just like he was now. I hadn’t been there to babysit his lab work when he made Martine, and now I was dealing with the results. More work for me, as always. Because of Nathan.

  I allowed myself a few seconds of unadulterated rage. When I opened my eyes, Martine was still watching me, still waiting. I spoke to her with what felt like an absurd measure of patience.

  “Martine. Did Nathan ever…” I stopped just short of the phrase use you for. “Did Nathan ever ask you to help with brainstorming?”

  “All the time,” she said easily. “I’m good at it.”

  Of course she was. Nathan couldn’t handle a wife who was smarter than him, but one who would help him whittle his own ideas into useful shapes? He would have needed that.

  “Open a bottle of wine,” I said. She started toward the kitchen immediately, and I felt a shameful flare of satisfaction at the speed of her obedience. “We’ve got some thinking to do.”

  * * *

  In the end, Martine turned out to be a valuable thought-partner. It is with great reluctance that I will credit Nathan that far: He crafted himself an excellent assistant. We talked through the angles of the problem at hand—talked for hours, drifting from the living room to the kitchen, Martine interrupting to point out holes in my logic or connections that were underpinning my ideas. She didn’t voice her own opinion until dawn.

  “We need Nathan,” she said.

  I lifted my head from my hands, felt the ghost of my lifeline imprinted on my brow. “We don’t need him,” I said. “We’re smart enough to figure this out on our own.”

  Martine shook her head at me. She picked up my long-empty wineglass, took it to the sink, and started to wash it with a soapy sponge. She scrubbed the glass in a smooth, steady rhythm, her wrists rolling under the water. “No. We don’t need him in order to find the solution to this. We need him as the solution.”

  I threw my hands up in a caricature of exasperation. This woman, this clone of mine, whose brain should have been shaped precisely like mine, who had all the same potential that I had at birth—I couldn’t believe that she had come out of her tube this stupid. This useless. “Well, yes, Martine,” I said, my tone keen-edged, “it would be very useful to have Nathan. It would, in fact, solve all of our problems. If only Nathan wasn’t a corpse, we wouldn’t be in this pickle.”

  Martine didn’t flinch at the acid in my voice. She turned off the running water in the sink. She grabbed a dish towel and began to dry my glass, turning a slow half-circle toward me. “Yes,” she said. “If only there was a way for us to obtain a living Nathan.”

  She held the glass up to the light for an inspection. I realize now that she was taking her time deliberately, waiting for me to understand. Waiting for me to catch up. At the time, I wanted to throttle her. As she rubbed a nonexistent smudge from the lip of the glass, her idea came into focus at last.

  My initial response was one of horror and disbelief. “No.”

  “All right,” Martine replied mildly, folding her dish towel with immense care.

  “We can’t,” I said, my palms flat on the table.

  She nodded, running a fingernail along the crease in the dish towel. “I understand.”

  “Under no circumstances—”

  “Right.”

  “Martine, you have no conception of what would be involved in something like that.”

  Martine hung the dish towel on the handle of the oven, tugged at the edges of it until it was perfectly centered over the glass in the door. She didn’t say anything for a few seconds. When she finally spoke, her voice was so soft that I almost instinctively asked her to repeat herself—but she was so clear, so careful, that I understood every word.

  “You’re right. I don’t have any conception of what’s involved. Perhaps you could explain it to me.”

  I stared at her, my head swimming. She stared back at me with a patience I’d never practiced. Her face was placid. She stood, cool as cream, looking like she could wait forever and never need to so much as sigh about it.

  “Well,” I said at last, buckling under her steady gaze, “I suppose the first thing is, we would need to dig up the body.”

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  In interviews, I sometimes say that science was my first love. That is a friendly kind of lie. The truth is that I’ve never loved science. Loving science would be like loving my own fingernails, or my lungs, or my lymph. I’ve always had science, always lived it and leaned on it; I’ve never had reason to love it or hate it any more than a mushroom loves or hates the soil it grows in.

  My first love was Nathan, and he made a fool of me long before he created Martine.

  He was smart and funny and I loved the wa
y he touched me, like his hands had questions and my skin could answer all of them at once. We met each other’s friends, went to the beach, watched movies, spent hours reading together.

  We talked about our work constantly, borrowing ideas from each other, slowly building a dream of changing the world together. I told him about my budding ambition to develop a system of hormonal conditioning, and his face lit up, and he said I was most beautiful when I was being unabashedly brilliant.

  It didn’t feel like flattery. It felt like love.

  And it was easy, being in love with Nathan. It was easy being around him—he never made me feel afraid, never left me wondering whether I’d said something wrong. Even our fights were easy back then, a matter of unraveling miscommunications and reassuring each other of our good intentions.

  It didn’t occur to me at the time to be irritated by how quickly he folded when we had those easy fights. I thought he was being reasonable.

  It didn’t occur to me to suspect the way he talked about loving my mind.

  I was young, and I was accustomed to a very different kind of man.

  It didn’t occur to me to watch for cowardice the same way I watched for anger.

  * * *

  It should have been simple enough to clone Nathan. A matter of routine sequencing and reproduction, no different from any other subject. It should have been easy.

  It was not easy.

  Sampling wasn’t an issue. Once we dug up the body, there was an abundance of tissue available to work with, and taking the sample was even easier than usual, since he was dead. There was no need to take care with the sample size or location, no need to be cautious or conservative.

  It was the easiest sample I ever took, even though I took it while standing in a damp hole in Martine’s backyard, choking on the awful sweet-rot smell of decay and turned earth. Two weeks in the ground had rendered Nathan soft, overripe. His skin hung loose and wet, drooping like worn-out nylons. I took a large sample, large enough that I felt confident about our ability to get a full sequence. Martine turned away when I took the sample, so she wasn’t looking while I did it, but she flinched violently at the sound Nathan’s flesh made when I cored his abdomen. She also refused to look at the cooler I used to transport the cylinder of tissue.

  The sample was only about four inches in diameter, and I packed it tightly to keep it from bruising in transit. Martine handed me zip-top bags filled with cold water—better than ice for packing the delicate, decaying tissue, less likely to cause accidental damage—but she kept her eyes on the sink the entire time we were preparing the sample for transport. She wouldn’t look at any of it, even though it was all her doing.

  I suppose Nathan didn’t program her to have a strong stomach.

  Getting into the lab went just as smoothly as taking the sample did. We arrived in the middle of the night, when I anticipated the only other people on-site would be security staff, underpaid guards who would recognize my face and ignore my guest. All we had to do was get into the lab, prepare the equipment, sequence the sample. Dispose of the excess material. Leave the incubation accelerator to do its work overnight. I should have returned the next morning and found a toddler-sized lump of loose tissue floating in a sea of synthetic lymph and amnio.

  It was a perfect plan, and it should have been easy to execute. Get the sample, process the sample, develop the specimen.

  But it wasn’t that simple. Of course it wasn’t.

  I pulled into my reserved parking space a few minutes after midnight. The empty parking lot felt liminal and vast, deshabille in its stark vacancy. Martine sat silently in the passenger seat, her hands in her lap. She stayed there as I got out of the car and popped the trunk. She didn’t unbuckle her seat belt until I tapped on her window and raised the soft-sided cooler to eye level.

  When I tapped on her window, she didn’t startle. Her face didn’t snap from blank distance into focus, the way it would have if she’d been far off somewhere, lost. She simply lowered one hand to her seat belt buckle, gently guided the band of the belt over her shoulder and out of the way.

  I opened her door. She stepped out of the car with easy grace, smoothed her skirt, and looked at me with placid, patient eyes. Waiting to be told what to do, where to go. Waiting for permission.

  I swallowed a gout of irrational fury at her. Martine couldn’t help her programming; she’d been designed for this. She’d been made to wait for permission. It was there in every smooth hesitation. The way she watched for me to drink before taking a sip of her own drink, the way she stood in doorways until I made eye contact with her and nodded before she would enter a room. The way she sat in the passenger seat, belt buckled, until she knew for sure that I wanted her to get out of the car.

  I remembered walking into the living room to find her sitting on the couch in her pajamas, listening for my footfalls.

  I shook my head. It wasn’t her fault that she was like this. It wasn’t her fault that this was what Nathan had wanted. I couldn’t hold it against her, no matter how frustrating it was. I couldn’t hold it against her any more than I could resent a bulldog for breathing heavily.

  She was made this way, and the only thing for me to do was deal with her until I could get her out of the way.

  She followed me through the empty halls of the lab building, her kitten heels quiet on the industrial carpeting. I tried to see the building through her eyes, but it was too familiar to me. I couldn’t distance myself from the way this place felt like mine.

  Martine flinched at the beep that sounded when I swiped my card across the matte-black scanner outside the door to my lab. Normally I would have reflexively rolled my eyes at her twitchiness, but this time I had only barely managed to repress a flinch of my own. That beep seemed much too loud, much too sudden. I couldn’t imagine how I’d managed to hear it every day for so many years without realizing how disruptive a sound it was. I had an impulse to ask the building manager to have it silenced, the same way I’d asked Seyed to felt the clipboards—but of course, the lab was soundproofed. That beep was only audible to people outside the airlock, and there was no way for me to explain why I would want to be able to enter my own lab unnoticed by other people in the building.

  “It’s okay,” I murmured. “No one’s here.”

  “You’re sure?” she asked, her shoulders tight.

  “I’m sure,” I hissed. “There are no night shifts in this wing, and I’m the only one with after-hours access to my lab. We’re alone.”

  “You’re really sure?” she asked again as I opened the outer door of the airlock.

  I fought the urge to grab her by the wrist and yank her in behind me. “I’m absolutely certain,” I said, keeping my voice soft in the hope that my volume would convey some illusion of patience. “Please trust me.”

  She stepped into the airlock behind me. I warned her about the positive-pressure ventilation, the blast of air she should expect to encounter. I told her that it was to reduce the risk of particulates and contaminants that might enter the lab space. I explained the risk of spores and seeds. I was talking fast and low, delivering a continuous stream of information, more information than she could possibly want.

  It was a nervous habit, teaching by reflex, one I’d picked up the instant I’d hired my first lab assistant after Nathan stopped working with me. I didn’t have a partner to talk to, so I wound up talking to my assistant, walking her through my process whenever she was observing my work. Describing my actions and reasoning had come naturally to me, and I found myself falling easily into a rhythm of action and explanation.

  My heartbeat slowed as I talked. The sense of fear that had crept into me in the hall ebbed. As long as I was teaching Martine about her environment, I was the one who knew what was going on. I was trustworthy. I was in control.

  She stood patiently, listening to me talk, and waited as the cycle began. The air lifted tendrils of blond hair away from her face. She blinked rapidly several times, but didn’t close her eyes. Her lips
moved, but I couldn’t hear her over the sound of the air cycle.

  “What did you say?” I leaned close, a few strands of my own hair falling into my face.

  “I said, are you absolutely sure that we are completely alone?”

  I gritted my teeth. “Yes, Martine, for God’s sake,” I said, not bothering to temper my voice this time. The air cycle finished in the middle of my sentence, and the words “for God’s sake” echoed in the airlock, unnaturally loud. Martine’s brow furrowed for an instant, but she didn’t say anything further. Her lips tightened. I wondered if this was what Martine looked like when she was angry.

  I told myself that it didn’t matter. Martine didn’t have a right to be angry at me. I hadn’t meant to shout, and even if I had meant to shout, this was her mess. It was her mess, and I was cleaning it up. What she was asking of me—the risk I was assuming on her behalf—was immense.

  I had a right to shout.

  And besides any of that, I’d told her so many times not to worry. I’d told her so many times that we were alone. I’d told her, and she just wasn’t listening.

  In that moment, I felt an animal kind of impatience, like there was a rope around my neck I’d have to chew through to get free. I’ll make her listen, that impatience whispered, and I tried hard to ignore that whisper, even though it felt terribly, terribly right. I hoped she wouldn’t ask again whether or not we were alone, because I didn’t know how loud the whisper would grow if she persisted.

  I tried to ignore it. I told myself that it didn’t matter, and I opened the inner door of the airlock and stepped past Martine into the lab. I threw a hand out, reaching for the light switch by instinct.

  Behind me, I heard Martine close the airlock door. The latch clicked gently in the same instant that the light switch did. The fluorescents flickered to life, illuminating my lab.

  Tungsten lab tables. Tall, insulated tanks filled with amnio and specimens in various stages of development. The autopsy table, the gutters extra-deep to accommodate potential tissue liquefaction. My enormous fume hood. Whiteboards.