by Sarah Gailey
I stood at the bottom of the stairs that led up to my bedroom and my office.
When I was four years old, my mother taught me how to use the stairs in our house if I needed to move around at night.
My father had been out at a dinner at the time, gone for hours, sure to come home smelling like juniper and cigarette smoke. My mother walked me up and down the stairs again and again, showing me how to roll each footstep through the balls of my feet. She pointed to the place where each step met the wall, taught me to set my feet there so as to avoid making the wood creak. She made me memorize the boards that groaned or clicked underfoot.
We practiced for what felt like hours, walking up and down the stairs again and again until I could do it as silently as she could.
Once she thought I was ready, she positioned me at the top of the staircase. Then, she waited at the bottom of the steps with her back turned and her hands over her eyes. I remember watching her fingertips tremble against the top of her hairline. “Walk past me without me noticing,” she said. “Touch the front door without me hearing you.”
I got it right on the first try. When my fingertips touched the white-painted wood of our front door, I shouted in triumph, and she scooped me up into a tight hug, laughing into my hair.
I said that I couldn’t wait to show my father what I’d learned, but she shook her head. “We don’t show him this trick,” she said. “This one is just ours.” Her eyes were so serious.
I remember nodding solemnly, satisfied that I had a conspiracy to share with her. Knowing already that I should only use my newfound stealth when my father wasn’t looking.
I didn’t know the why of any of it. I didn’t understand, yet, what would have made my mother learn how to walk through our home without detection—but it was enough for me, at the time, to know that she and I had a secret.
I thought of her as I walked up the dark stairs of my little townhouse.
I walked on the balls of my feet, each step pressed to the place where the stair met the wall.
I didn’t make a sound.
My bedroom door was open just a sliver. It swung into the room under my touch, the hinges quiet.
Martine was curled onto her left side, still fully dressed atop the covers. I was gripped by a surreal certainty that I was someone else, a stranger in this room, watching myself sleep. Her body faced away from me, and it struck me that I now knew, for the first time, what my back looked like when I slept.
I studied the outline of it: the way Martine’s shoulders and hips formed brackets at either end of her spine, the way her vertebrae stuck out at the base of her neck. Her hair was spread across my pillow, the blond bright in the vague wash of moonlight that grayed the room.
She looked so small. Her breath came slow and shallow. One of her hands, the left one, was curled tightly into a fist on the pillow beside her face, the thumb tucked in under the fingers. Her other hand was draped across her navel.
It was a protective posture, guarded.
I had never watched a specimen sleep before. I had seen them unconscious, coiled fetal in their tanks, or splayed out on a table for examination. I had seen them sedated for conditioning. I had seen them dead, their chests thrust skyward by the foam block Seyed put between their shoulder blades to make them easier to dissect.
But I had never watched one sleep.
Did Martine lie down like that because of the way she was programmed, or because of the way her body was shaped? Did she sleep on that side of the bed because Nathan preferred the other side, or was it the one she would have chosen for herself? Did she tuck her thumb in due to some trick of long-term conditioning, or because of a deep-seated instinct?
I wrapped my own fingers over my thumbs and squeezed gently, remembered my father telling me to keep my thumbs outside of my fists if I ever needed to punch someone. He told me to keep my thumbs out, so I wouldn’t break them. I remembered the way he had folded my hands in his, the way he had crushed my fingers shut until I could feel the knuckle in my thumb straining. “See how much that hurts?” he’d said. “Now imagine if you were hitting something, how fast that same compression would happen. Your thumb would snap like a twig.”
I’d nodded, biting my lip to keep from making a sound. If I did, I knew, he would squeeze just a little harder. Just for a second, to make sure I learned what he was trying to teach me.
If he hadn’t taught me, would I have learned to sleep with my thumbs tucked in, like Martine?
I climbed into the bed with all of my clothes on, the fleecy blanket from the couch still wrapped around my shoulders. I turned my back to Martine so our spines faced each other. I tucked my legs up, let the soles of my feet brush against hers. She didn’t stir.
As I listened to Martine’s steady breathing, I let my right hand drift up to my pillow. It curled into a loose fist, close enough to my mouth that my breath warmed my wrist. I traced the contour of my index finger with the pad of my thumb as I waited for sleep, feeling the calluses that bordered each of my knuckles—tiny rough patches that I had earned over a lifetime of using that hand. They were mine.
I brushed my thumb across those calluses, feeling the places where I was my own, and I waited for sleep.
It was a long time coming.
* * *
The worst injury I ever received as a child was a broken wrist. My mother was the one who spotted the way I was hiding my arm, the way I was trying to do everything one-handed. She grabbed my arm from behind my back, her fingers wrapping around my wrist tight enough to make me want to cry out.
It was a narrow thing, my silence.
She made a small surprised sound, studied my face to read the pain. She held a finger to my lips and helped me ease my shoes on in silence so we could go to the hospital, the faraway one where my father didn’t work.
She didn’t ask me what happened.
I remember the doctor showing me the X-ray, pointing out the spiral fracture in my ulna. “Your bones are young, and this is a stable fracture,” he said, “so you’ll heal up fast. Did you fall off the monkey bars?”
I shook my head, and he repeated himself slowly. “You fell, didn’t you? Off the monkey bars, right?” He was staring at me with urgent intensity, not blinking, and he only broke his gaze away from me when I nodded. “That’s what I thought,” he said, and that’s when I first remember thinking that doctors and scientists must all know each other.
I’d stared at the fracture in fascination. There it was: evidence of the pain I’d been hiding for the better part of a day. My father rolled his eyes at the bright-blue cast, but that night in his study, he showed me a diagram of the human skeleton. I asked him what the doctor had meant about my bones being young, and in response, my father taught me about growth plates. I showed him the location of the fracture. He told me that I was lucky: in an adult, a spiral fracture might require surgery. He told me about the pins the surgeons might insert into the bones to try to fix them. He showed me a scar on his own leg, let me feel the bump on his ankle where a pin had been sized wrong.
When the cast came off, my arm was strange and damp and white, like the underbelly of one of the frogs I often found in my mother’s garden. I touched it gently, feeling the ridges of my fingertips on the hypersensitive skin of my wrist. I knew that I was different than I had been six weeks before, that my body was changed forever, in ways that would be visible when I’d died and my flesh had sifted away from my bones. I knew that something inside me had been permanently altered.
I wondered at the power people had over each other, to make lasting changes like that.
I never got the chance to talk about it with my father. By the time my arm had returned to its normal color, he was gone.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
When I woke the next morning, I was alone again.
The other side of the bed—Martine’s side, although I didn’t want to think of it that way—was smoothed over, the pillow fluffed, the bed linens flat. I was still hunche
d up under the living-room blanket with my shoulders around my ears. I was just barely too cold to fall back asleep. The dusty smell of the heater had subsided, replaced by something kinder. Something sweeter. A faint note of vanilla, and the vague, humid scent of hot water.
I left the blanket in the bedroom, embarrassed to have been seen with it wrapped around my shoulders. I didn’t like knowing that she’d seen me clinging to a blanket like a toddler. In fact, now that the crushing fatigue had subsided, I didn’t like the idea that Martine was in my house at all. I tried to think of what else she might have seen in my home while I’d been sleeping.
When I got downstairs, I discovered things were even worse than I’d feared.
My entire living room was unpacked. My books were unboxed, nestled on my previously empty shelves. Lamps were assembled and lit. A tidy pile of folded throw blankets was on one end of the couch, and a candle I’d forgotten I owned was burning in the center of the coffee table—that must have been the vanilla scent I’d noticed. The room was warm and welcoming, arranged with more thought than I ever would have afforded it.
There wasn’t a box in sight. It looked like a place where someone might actually live.
A clatter from the kitchen, a soft exclamation. I crossed the living room on quiet feet and stood in the door to the kitchen. Martine was standing on a chair, a dish towel over her shoulder, stacking a pile of plates in the cupboard. Her arm arched up toward a high shelf, the soft curve of her elbow belying the strength it surely required for her to lift that stack of dishes at such a precarious angle. Her hair was secured under a kerchief. It looked like the same one she’d used to tie her hair back when we buried Nathan, and I wondered if she kept it with her all the time, ready to unpack a house or organize a garage or bury a body.
“You didn’t have to do all of this,” I said. I didn’t mean to be sharp but I didn’t mean to be soft, either. I didn’t keep my voice down, but she didn’t startle, didn’t react to my sudden presence. I thought of the way she always seemed to be listening, waiting. I realized that she’d almost certainly heard me—my uncautious footfalls creaking around upstairs, walking slowly through the living room, pausing in the doorway.
Martine had known I was there. And so she knew she was being watched. It didn’t seem to bother her.
She was probably used to it.
“What else was I going to do?” she said, sliding a final plate onto the stack. She turned to me, wiping her brow with the back of one wrist. “I wake up at six o’clock, remember? I couldn’t just sit there staring at the wall until you woke up too.”
“You could have … I don’t know. Read a book, or watched something on television, or … something.” My voice was a little stiffer than I intended it to be, but I couldn’t seem to make it gentle. “You didn’t have to do all this work.”
She shook her head. “There’s no mending or anything for me to do.” Seeing my face, she clarified. “If I want to watch television, I need to be working on something at the same time. I can’t just sit. It makes me itch. And besides, once I opened a box of books, the shelf was right there. It was no trouble, really.”
I felt a strange, sick kind of anger. It was no trouble, she said, about a task I’d been unable to bring myself to even begin. I couldn’t tell if she was telling the truth about it being no trouble, or if she was trying to remind me that I’d been putting off something that should have been easy. I couldn’t tell what she meant when she said that she couldn’t just sit, either—was it that she got restless, or had Nathan programmed her to be physically incapable of resting? Was there any difference between the two? Was there any way for me to ask?
Did it matter?
A vision of my mother’s disapproving face flashed through my mind. I could almost hear her voice: Someone just did you a favor, Evelyn.
“Thank you, Martine,” I said, and I meant it, in spite of myself. “This was very helpful of you. I shouldn’t have left so much for you to deal with.”
“It’s fine,” she said. “Really. It’s what I’m for.”
There it was again—a note of bitterness, a sharp edge. She climbed down from the kitchen chair and pushed it back under the tiny table in the dining nook before turning to me with a smile. “Besides, I’m all done. With the kitchen and the living room, at least. I can’t speak for the rest of the house.”
We stared at each other for a few seconds. I was bristling, but I didn’t understand why. I felt as though I’d just been scolded, as though I’d lost some small battle. Something in the way she couldn’t speak for the rest of the house felt like a threat. I was in a corner, and I didn’t know how I’d gotten there.
Of course, I was being needlessly defensive.
It was one of the things Nathan had been right about during our fights, when he would tell me about the person he considered me to be—my need to control situations, the way I got irrationally angry when it felt like someone was implying that I didn’t know what I was doing. “You can be a real bitch when you think you’re not in charge,” he’d muttered more than once, usually when I’d been trying to start a conversation about the household budget.
All right, if I’m honest: when I was trying to start a fight about the household budget. It was one of the tasks we divided over the course of our marriage: Nathan structured the budget and ran it, and I made sure that the bills got paid on time. It made sense at the time. It made good use of my ability to follow up on tasks, his passion for steady logistical planning.
It also meant that I didn’t notice when money started disappearing to pay for Nathan’s private lab space, the one I didn’t know about. The one where he had been able to grow himself a new wife. When I did notice money missing—when I tried to confront him about it, tried to ask why our bank account balance seemed lower than it ought to be—he inevitably countered with a completely accurate assessment of the reason I was upset.
“You’re just pissed because I’m not letting you supervise me,” Nathan would say, and he would be right. I didn’t like that he never told me the details of our finances. I didn’t like having to trust his judgment.
The worst part of it is that I was right. I’ve always known that my need to control things to a minute level of detail is unhelpful, bordering on unhealthy. I try to keep it in check as much as I can. But then if I don’t stay vigilant, my husband uses our money to grow a new wife, and my lab assistant uses my grant to support his side hustle, and I wonder why I bother trying.
There’s no winning. Either I’m a bitch who needs to control everything, or I’m an easy mark.
Martine wasn’t just a manifestation of my failure to create a foolproof cloning model. She wasn’t just a symbol of my failure to hang on to a man who had been good when I met him. Before he married me.
She was also a consequence of my failure to keep a handle on things.
And now she was standing in my kitchen, and I didn’t know where she’d put my cutlery, and she was hitting me hard with that cool, flat stare. Assessing me.
That was it, that was the thing I was bristling against. How dare she, I thought, and the thought was loud and sudden because Martine was daring to judge me, just because she had done something without being asked, something I hadn’t even wanted her to do. She had come into my life uninvited, and then she had come into my home and she had interfered with my belongings as though she had any right at all. How dare she?
I was filled with a strange, roiling fury. It swept through me, violent and threatening, rising. It was dark and cruel and familiar, and it nearly choked me to swallow it back, but I did. I decided to meet her on her level: kindness and manners. I decided that I would not be beaten at this game, not in my own home.
I smiled. “Really, thank you.” My mother’s voice came out of my mouth, smooth and low and only a little angry, in that way that it was always at least a little angry. “So kind of you. I never would have expected, certainly never would have asked.”
“It’s no trouble,” she said ag
ain, her face placid.
“Would you like to wash up?” I asked. “I could loan you something of mine to wear, if you’d rather not wear something you slept in.”
The effect of my words was as immediate as an injection delivered directly into spinal fluid. Martine visibly softened. She closed her eyes for a second, let her shoulders droop. She nodded. “I’d like that very much,” she whispered.
Her voice broke halfway through the sentence, and I understood, and the bottom fell out of my belly and that dark roiling rage drained out, leaving me water-stained and empty, a monster with no middle to it.
Half-numb, I showed her to the shower and gave her a towel. Once I heard the water turn on, I let myself sink to the floor. I rested my head in my hands and stared at my knees, unblinking.
It had felt like a standoff, like a battle of wills. It had felt like she was trying to undermine me, trying to shrink me down by pointing out that I hadn’t done a thing that came easily to her. It had felt like a brittle moment in which she was finally going to reveal her true quiet cruelty, because of course she must truly be quietly cruel, because she was made from the same stuff that I was made from.
I’d gotten it so wrong. That whole time, that sense of judgment and interference, that feeling I had like I could have closed my hands over her temples and pressed with all my strength until her skull gave in to the pressure of my rage—it was nothing. It was based on nothing.
Martine hadn’t been playing some kind of passive-aggressive game with me. She hadn’t been trying to saw away at the floor under my feet. She hadn’t been setting a trap or baring her teeth.
She’d been waiting.
That’s all it was. She’d been waiting for me to tell her to stop working. She’d been waiting for me to tell her that she was allowed to use my shower, that she could change out of the clothes she’d been wearing for days. I had fallen asleep the day before without offering her anything to wear, anywhere to wash. Had she eaten, while I’d slept dreamlessly on the couch all day? Had she had water? Or had she been waiting for permission then, too?
