The Echo Wife

by Sarah Gailey

  Cupboards, their doors hanging open, their contents disheveled. A box of scalpels on the floor, blades scattered across the linoleum alongside a few loose pipettes.

  Bags of synthetic amnio, clutched in the arms of a short man in a black ski mask.

  I let my hand fall away from the light switch and looked at the man holding my supplies. He stood, frozen, and stared back at me.

  “I can explain,” he said, three words he’d never said to me before. Not in all our years working together.

  Behind me, Martine let out a soft hmph.

  I understood right away, all at once.

  She’d been trying to warn me. She’d been doing it in the best way she knew how—in a way that wouldn’t cause a fight, that wouldn’t force her to directly contradict me, that put the burden of annoyance squarely on her shoulders.

  She’d tried to warn me, and I hadn’t listened.

  She was right.

  We were not, in fact, alone.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  I can admit to having made mistakes in the course of my life, my career, my relationships. Do not mistake this for largesse on my part. I’m a scientist; examination of my own errors is part of my job. Without honest self-assessment, growth is impossible. If I can’t rule human error out of my work, then my results simply cease to matter.

  I try not to make mistakes. I try not to introduce new elements of human error into any environment in which I have a material investment in outcomes. Some might consider this isolating, but I’m not in the business of seeking out chaos simply to appease some arbitrary notion of social nourishment. I was fine as a child with few playground friends and a cold, authoritative father; I was fine when I was alone in a sprawling stone house with my mother and her clean hands; I was fine when I was the only teenager at my boarding school who didn’t get invited home for holidays. And, as an adult with a longer list of successes than failures, I don’t see a reason to force myself to rely on other people.

  Every time I have tried to do it—every time I’ve tried to need someone—it’s been a mistake. I tried to need Nathan, but I couldn’t need him enough to satisfy his hunger to be necessary. Some inextractable part of him wanted to bear my weight, resented me for standing on my own. It’s why he decided to create Martine, I think. She needed him, truly needed him, the way a dog needs someone to put food in his dish. She couldn’t help needing him, because it was the whole function of their relationship: She made him feel essential in a way I never did.

  But I learned early on that no one is necessary. After my father was gone, my mother didn’t have to bear his weight anymore, and she could have taken mine. But she didn’t. She left me to grow on my own, sent me away when she could, never tried to become the kind of mother she could have been in his absence. It was the best thing for me: I learned to breathe in a vacuum, to walk underwater, to be all alone in the world. Because of the solitude she gave me, I learned never to lean on anyone too hard, never to lean on anyone at all. Not even my husband.

  But, as I said, I can admit to making mistakes. I learned my mother’s lesson well, but I am not perfect. There was one exception to my rule.

  Over the years of our working relationship, I began to lean on Seyed.

  * * *

  He wouldn’t look me in the eyes.

  He was wringing his ski mask in his hands, twisting it hard enough that I could hear the creak of the fabric against his palms. I wanted to tear it from his grip, wanted to throw it to the floor and force him to look at me. It didn’t feel like he had a right to regret. I didn’t want to give him the gift of guilt.

  “Student loans,” he said at last, his voice saturated with shame. “It’s just so much, I didn’t know how I’d ever pay it all off. And then someone approached me, they asked if I could sell them some supplies, and it … it seemed like a victimless crime.”

  “How long has this been going on?” I asked. “How long have you been using my funding to subsidize your side business?” He mumbled something in reply. I couldn’t hear him. Rather than asking him to repeat himself, I waited. It was a trick I learned from my father, letting the silence thicken until it was suffocating. It worked as well on Seyed as it had worked on me as a child. After a few seconds, he swallowed hard and spoke again.

  “About a year.”

  I swore, and he flinched. I thought of every time I’d had to fight for funding over the previous twelve months, every time I’d justified how expensive it was to operate my lab, every time I’d explained that marketability would have to wait another fiscal quarter. Every time I’d had to say that we weren’t ready to go mainstream with a product, but that when we did, it would be worth the cost.

  All that time, Seyed had been stealing from me. I fought down a flash of rage at the way he cringed, the way he was acting small and soft now that he’d been caught. Where was the confidence he’d needed to grift me for an entire year? I wanted to make him show it to me, wanted to force him to stand tall in his betrayal. Martine rested a hand on my arm. I looked at her, half to see what she wanted and half to get respite from the sight of Seyed cowering.

  Her face radiated calm. She whispered for me to take a breath. Her mouth was curled up at the edges, the barest hint of a smile. She gave my arm a gentle squeeze.

  It shook me, the expression on her face. The way she instinctively knew how to calm me down. She looked so much like my mother.

  I wonder if, in that moment, I looked like my father.

  I nodded at her, mirrored her smile, and turned back to Seyed. “Okay,” I said. “This is unacceptable. But I can understand why you would decide to steal from me.”

  “I’m so sorry,” he stammered. Martine gently squeezed my arm again.

  “This is unacceptable,” I repeated. I kept my voice level, but still, he flinched. “Who were you selling to?”

  He hesitated. “They came to me,” he said again. “Someone who was trying to reproduce your methods in a collectivized laboratory. They just needed to source some of the supplies we had extras of anyway, and—”

  “Did we have extra?” I interrupted, sharp. “Or did you order extra?”

  He twisted his ski mask again. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  I could hear Martine’s breathing, slow and deep, and I realized that I was unconsciously synchronizing my own breathing to hers. Did Nathan program her to handle situations like this one, to soothe his anger that was so much like mine? Or did she learn how to do it over the year that she and Nathan had together?

  Had he known that he needed someone who could calm him down, before the first time she did it? Or did he feel that cool hand on his arm, feel himself breathing slower, and recognize his own fury for what it was?

  I could feel my own heartbeat pounding behind my eyes, but I breathed with Martine, and I was able to look at Seyed without succumbing to the overwhelming urge to slap him. He must have felt me looking at him, because he finally lifted his eyes to meet mine.

  That’s when he looked at Martine for the first time. He had noticed her before, but he had been so focused on me, so unwilling to look up at me, that he hadn’t really seen her. Not yet.

  He looked from her face to mine, then back again. He stared at her, his lips parted, darting glances at me. Comparing our features. Realizing.

  Predictable and unstoppable as coastal erosion, his gaze dropped to her belly. I watched his expression shift from amazement to alarm to guarded neutrality. He managed to snap on a mask of professional calm—but not before his eyes met mine in an instant of stark horror.

  “Who is this?” he asked.

  “This,” I answered through gritted teeth, “is Martine.”

  * * *

  Seyed had lasted so much longer in my lab than I ever could have predicted. Longer than any of his predecessors had. To tell the truth, I hadn’t expected him to stick around for more than a few months. My assistants rarely lingered longer than that.

  My expectations for him were, of course, h
igh. The position turned over rapidly enough that I’d stopped interviewing candidates—I kept a pile of résumés on my desk and hired whoever was at the top of the pile when my assistants inevitably quit. But Seyed was different. I hand-picked him, rescued him from Nathan’s dead-end postdoc program and brought him into the bright and brilliant light of real research. I saw great intellectual potential in him, and I decided that potential was worth nurturing.

  When I told him to come work for me, I was taking a chance on him. I had a fight with Nathan because of it, a ridiculous fight about whether it had been right for me to “steal” Seyed from him. I told him, of course, that you can’t “steal” a person, short of kidnapping them, which I hadn’t even come close to. It was a stupid, pointless fight, but still—it was a fight, and my marriage never could afford more of those. I dealt with that so that Seyed could have a chance at becoming the thing he was meant to be.

  When I brought him into the lab, I expected him to be bright but naïve, still damp-eared and wobbly-legged under his too-crisp lab coat. I expected him to be just as flinching and nervous and overeager as all the others. I expected him to tumble around underfoot, getting in my way and wheedling me for mentorship. Irritating me until he decided that he needed to find a different lab, one that was less demanding.

  But Seyed was nothing like what I expected. He showed up ready to work, and he absorbed information seemingly by proximity. He listened when I explained things to him, even when they were things he already knew, even when I was only explaining to fill the air with enough noise to cover my own doubt. He asked the right questions. He disposed of his pipette tips properly. He didn’t have to be told to double-layer his gloves to keep frequent changes easy, and he never left them around or, for God’s sake, tried to reuse them.

  He didn’t ever try to attend to my feelings.

  He knew what was important, and he knew what wasn’t.

  Seyed’s judgment was impeccable, and he always seemed to make the same decisions that I would have, given the information available. My fight with Nathan faded in the wake of all the other fights we had, and I was left with nothing but a sense of deep satisfaction. I had been right about Seyed. I hadn’t wasted my time on him, I thought at the time. He was exactly as proficient as I had hoped he would be, and getting better every day.

  It made sense, then, that after he had been in my lab for six months—outlasting the previously held record for assistant longevity—I started to trust him with a brace of unsupervised tasks. He adjusted to the increased workload without hesitation. He seemed to flourish under the added responsibility. We fell into an easy rhythm.

  I hadn’t felt something so close to professional partnership since Nathan left the lab. I trusted Seyed. I learned how to lean on him. I let him become an integral part of my laboratory, which was always more of a home than home was.

  He was the best assistant I ever had.

  * * *

  “She can’t be pregnant,” Seyed stammered, pointing at Martine, his eyes wide. “That’s impossible. That’s—”

  “I know,” I interrupted, not wanting to rehash the fight that had turned Martine into a murderer.

  “Evelyn, what did you do?”

  I realize now that I could have tried to lie to him. I could have told him that Martine was my twin sister. She was unconditioned, so we looked just different enough that maybe he would have bought it. Maybe he would have believed me, and things would have gone differently. I could have fired him on the spot and done the rest of my work alone, and then maybe I could have washed my hands of the whole thing once the work was complete.

  But it didn’t occur to me to lie to him. Even faced with immediate evidence of his deception, I still trusted him enough to tell him the truth. After all, on the scale of lies I had recently uncovered, stealing my lab equipment wasn’t exactly dire.

  And maybe I wasn’t ready to lose the only person left in my life who I trusted. When I left Nathan, I decided not to forgive him. I chose to cut a deep crease into our relationship, a line that divided our life together into the time when I knew him and the time when I didn’t. That choice scooped out the center of me.

  I didn’t have it in me to make that decision again, with Seyed. There are only so many excisions a body can handle. I wasn’t ready to carry both of those betrayals as irreparable.

  So instead of lying to him, I told him everything.

  Martine cleaned up the spilled lab supplies without being asked, making more noise than she needed to. Giving us the space to talk without being heard. I told Seyed who Martine was, and what she was, and what she had done. I told him about Nathan the adulterer. I told him about Nathan the corpse.

  I held his gaze the entire time, trying to read his reactions to what I was telling him. Trying to see if he understood the second chance I was giving him. He glanced between me and Martine several times, but he didn’t say anything. He just listened.

  When I finished talking, Seyed’s eyes fell to the cooler in my hand. I hadn’t set it down since we walked into the room. He stared at it, chewing his lip. I hadn’t told him yet what was inside, but I could see that he knew.

  There was one correct path he could take. There was one direction for him to go, only one, that was safe. Now that he knew everything, the risk involved if he decided to step wrong was much too high to be borne. I didn’t know what I would do if he said anything outside of the very narrow field of good answers available to him.

  I suppose I would have done whatever was necessary.

  He nodded once, decisive.

  “We’ll need a tank,” he said, then paused, thinking. “I think 4896-T is cashed. Her CPK is elevated. Myo, too. I was going to tell you in the morning.”

  Creatine phosphokinase and myoglobin, markers of muscle wasting—both of them waste products released into the blood, two of the louder swan songs of dying tissue. The compartment syndrome I’d feared had come to pass, cutting off blood flow to the subject’s skeletal muscle, leaving those big slabs of tissue to waste. Atrophy. In a different specimen, one that would later be conditioned to muscle weakness or immobility, the subject might remain viable—but this one was supposed to come out of the tank active, ready to run. Ready to fight. She had to be able to demonstrate mobility. There was a choice to be made about what would happen to the specimen.

  Even in the face of the bad news about 4896-T, I was awash with relief, because Seyed had given me the right answer. He was demonstrating that he still knew what was important and what wasn’t.

  The only thing that mattered was how we were going to move forward.

  “Autopsy 4896-T and process the paperwork. Classify her as a standard growth-rate failure,” I said. I looked to the dim rows of tanks, mentally scanning the backups we’d seeded when we created 4896-T. There were at least three fail-safes in the lab, static tissue groups waiting to compensate for the kind of unpredictable failure that 4896-T represented. “Activate 4896-V. I think that one will be close enough that we can play catch-up with it. Moderate the nutrient load this time, give the tissues a little less to work with.”

  Seyed was already tearing open the plastic wrapping on a folded lab coat. When he’d first arrived in my lab, he’d thought he would be wearing them all the time; now, he only wore them when he was working tableside, so I could afford for him to use a fresh one each time he needed the protection. The coat was spotless-white now, but by the end of the evening, it would need to go into the biohazard bin for disposal.

  He pulled the lab coat on, started doing up buttons. The pocket bulged where he’d shoved his ski mask away. He paused on a button, looked up at me. “Do you want me to sterilize the tank first, or start the autopsy first?”

  “Autopsy,” I said. “I’ll prep the tank.” His brow furrowed for a second—I hadn’t bothered with tank preparation in well over a year. I almost always left that kind of task to Seyed, trusting him to be as thorough as I would. Usually, our roles would have been reversed—Seyed dealing with the tank
while I took care of the autopsy, ensuring that I had direct access to the data that would prevent repetitions of failure.

  Then his brow cleared as he understood: the autopsy, this time, was a formality. We already knew what had gone wrong with 4896-T, and she was being discarded without any attempt at solving the issue. The tank preparation, on the other hand—that was too important to screw up. We only had one opportunity to make a new Nathan, to do it the right way, and I needed to know that it would go off without a hitch.

  By making Seyed do the autopsy, I was sending him a message, and he had interpreted it flawlessly, just as he always did.

  The message was this: I could move on from what he’d done. He had my forgiveness.

  But he no longer had my trust.

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  On the day I first saw Martine, Nathan told me he had to work late. I waited up for him at home, sitting at the dining-room table to avoid echoing my mother’s couch-bound vigils. I sat there for hours, long after the wooden dining chair had numbed my thighs. I drank tea and read restaurant reviews, trying to find the most scathing ones to keep my anger alive. I didn’t want to calm down, didn’t want to lose my will to eviscerate Nathan the instant he walked through the door.

  If I’m honest, I was a little excited. It was the first fight in a while where I was certain that I had the upper hand.

  But he came home, and he dropped his jacket across the back of a chair, and the look on his face was so resigned that it took all the heat out of me.

  “So,” he said, “Martine tells me you came to the house today.”

  “I did,” I said. “I met her this morning, but I’ve known for some time now.”

  I wanted him to try to defend himself. I wanted him to get angry, to blame me, to dig up all the old insults he had been slinging at me for years. I wanted him to tell me what was wrong with me so I could counter with this, his betrayal, an inescapable missile in my arsenal.