The Echo Wife

by Sarah Gailey

  Regardless of all that: if something was wrong with her impossible baby, I couldn’t help her with it. “We should probably call your obstetrician.” She looked at me blankly. “Your doctor?”

  She shook her head again, turned her attention back to lathering dish soap on the surface of the fabric. “I don’t have one of those,” she said. “I’m sure it’s fine, though.”

  I reached past her and gently turned off the water. I took her hands in mine and eased the underwear out of her grip. “It’s not normal to bleed a lot when you’re pregnant,” I said, gentling my voice as best I knew how. “And I don’t know how much is okay when you’re this far along. Did you ever go to a class or anything?”

  She shook her head, and I felt a far-off pang of culpability. I had never asked. I hadn’t asked if she had appointments to get to, if there were books she should be reading. I had been thinking of the baby as her responsibility, as her problem. It never occurred to me to ask about it, because in spite of myself—in spite of all evidence to the contrary—some part of me kept thinking of Martine as though she were an actual adult. As though she were more than two and a half years old.

  She didn’t even know that she should be worried about the blood. Nathan had never told her, had never offered her the tools to learn. She didn’t have a cell phone or a computer. I wasn’t even sure if she knew about the internet. She had trusted that he would tell her what she needed to know, and he had failed her.

  And now, so had I.

  “Okay,” I said, pushing the guilt aside for later. “How are you feeling now?”

  “Fine,” she said. “A little bit of cramping, maybe.”

  I was still holding her underwear. I looked down at it again, let my mind click into the clinical perspective that would let me dodge the strange, invasive intimacy of looking at someone else’s underthings. The bubbles of soap foam had already subsided, and it was immediately apparent that most of the crotch of the garment had soaked through with blood. I tried to calculate how many cc’s of blood she’d lost, but I didn’t have experience with the relative absorbency of lace. “Are you still bleeding?”

  “A little,” she said. She answered without hesitation, without embarrassment. She didn’t seem troubled by my questioning. The first few weeks of her life had almost certainly been defined by questions like this, Nathan trying to figure out if he’d gotten it right. Her eyes slid away from mine. “I took a pad from under the bathroom sink. I hope that’s all right. I didn’t—”

  I cut her off. “Of course that’s fine. Anything you need here is yours, let’s just make that a rule, and if you’re ever not sure, you can ask.”

  I wasn’t being kind to her. It was just simpler this way, not having to worry that she was suffering because she was afraid to take something of mine. That’s all.

  I took Martine to a clinic downtown, the kind of place where I would have expected to see protestors holding picket signs and screaming about murder. As though they knew anything about murder. There were none, but Martine still looked nervously at the camera next to the buzzer at the outer door.

  “Is this another lab?” she whispered. I shook my head and told the person on the other end of the camera that we were there for a walk-in appointment. We entered the clinic through a set of nesting doors. It did feel a lot like the airlock at the lab, once I thought about it—except that my airlock wasn’t bulletproof.

  “This is a doctor’s office,” I said. “They’ll be able to make sure the baby’s okay.”

  It was perfect. The woman at the front desk assured me, without being asked, of the confidentiality of our visit. I reflexively told her that I was Martine’s sister, realizing even as I said it that she hadn’t asked. We’d brought cash; I had coached Martine on my salient medical history in the car. I didn’t need to tell the woman taking our fake names anything at all. She was going to make a point of not remembering me. She looked between us briefly, her face unreadable, and gave me paperwork to fill out.

  I stayed with Martine during her appointment. I held her hand during the ultrasound. When the doctor said that she wanted to perform a manual examination, Martine placed her feet into the stirrups at the foot of the bed without flinching. Her eyes unfocused, and her grip on my fingers went loose.

  She’d told me that she’d never visited a doctor’s office before, but she seemed to know how this kind of exam would go. I hated Nathan more in that moment than I had hated him in any other moment since the day I’d met him.

  After the exam was complete, the doctor asked me to step out of the room.

  “Please don’t go,” Martine whispered.

  “I’m sorry,” the doctor said, looking at me as though she meant it. “Martine and I have to do this part alone.”

  It was only five minutes or so before the doctor walked out. She smiled at me as she passed, the smile of someone who had seen a hundred of me before and would see a hundred more of me before her next day off. It was a comforting feeling, one I would later reflect was almost certainly intentional. It was her job to make me feel as though I’d been seen, but wouldn’t necessarily be remembered. She was giving me the gift of as much anonymity as I wanted.

  Martine came out of the exam room a few minutes later, fully dressed. The hair at her temples was damp, smoothed down, and I pictured her standing at the sink with water on her fingertips, arranging herself before leaving the room. She told me that the doctor had promised results within a couple of days, and that she was supposed to rest in the meantime.

  I waited until we were in the car to ask how she was doing.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  I turned out of the parking lot, more carefully than usual. I kept my eyes forward, not looking at Martine. “What did she do while I was gone?”

  Martine’s voice was taut. “Just asked me questions. She wanted to know if I was safe. Asked if I was being forced to do anything I didn’t want to do.”

  “How did you answer?” I asked, tracing the stitching on the top of the steering wheel with my fingertips.

  “Yes and no,” she said brusquely. “Respectively.”

  I don’t know why I couldn’t seem to believe her. It felt too simple. I was sure that she was holding something back. “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure you want the baby?”

  She sighed. “Yes, Evelyn.” She sounded irritated, and something in me flared hopeful and defensive at the same time. “I want the baby.”

  I chewed on the inside of my cheek. Ultimately, I said the thing that I couldn’t imagine not saying. “Why?”

  Martine erupted with fury the like of which I’d never seen from her before. She whipped off her sunglasses—the oversized mirror shades Seyed had loaned her after our first visit to the lab—and threw them against the passenger-side dashboard. “Because I want it, okay? I want something that’s mine. I’m sorry if that’s stupid or simple or obvious or whatever you think I am, but I just want to be allowed to want something!”

  She crossed her arms for a few seconds before folding awkwardly forward to pick up the sunglasses from the place where they’d landed, half-folded over the gearshift.

  “Okay,” I said, slowly, softly. It took no effort at all to recall the way I’d spoken to Nathan during our fights, when his volume rose, when he began to throw things. I made myself into the most reasonable person in the world, someone who would never engage in anything resembling provocation. “I understand. I didn’t mean to imply—”

  “Oh, of course you didn’t mean to imply,” she snapped. Her voice held only the barest hint of venom. Her heart wasn’t in this fight, I suddenly realized—it was something that she was trying on. That was why she had thrown her sunglasses. She was imitating the anger she’d seen before, seeing if it fit the way she was feeling. “You didn’t mean to imply what you really think. You would never want me to know that.”

  I couldn’t decide if the right thing to do would be to throw her over, forcing he
r to admit that she didn’t want the conflict, or if I should give her the chance to stretch her legs. “What is it that I really think?” I asked, keeping my voice reasonable.

  “You think I’m…” She paused, her face turned to the window. Her voice dropped low again, soft, almost ashamed. “You think I shouldn’t. Want this baby, I mean.” I didn’t answer her, didn’t know how to. She wasn’t wrong. It felt more complicated than that, but she’d summarized things accurately enough. I didn’t think she should want the baby.

  And was it more complicated than that, really? I told myself that it was a question of choice, of agency. A clone getting pregnant wasn’t just wrong because it felt strange. It was wrong because, no matter how much Martine developed her own personality and desires, she didn’t have a right to them. She was a made thing. She was a tool, and tools don’t have the right to decide how they’re used.

  Nathan shaped Martine’s brain to make her think that she wanted a child, and then he used her accordingly. Legally, she couldn’t advocate against being used to incubate a child, regardless of what she thought she wanted—and she couldn’t advocate for it, either. Because of that simple fact, there was no ethical excuse for what Nathan had done. There was no way to square that circle and make it okay, even if Martine said she was happy with the life he’d given her.

  I didn’t think she should want the baby. I didn’t think she should be able to want the baby.

  “This should never have been an option for you,” I said at last. “Nathan made you into someone who wouldn’t say no to him, and he took advantage of you.”

  “Is that what you think?” she asked, the pitch of her voice rising. “You think he took advantage of me? I want this, Evelyn. I’ve always wanted this. I’ve never been as happy as I was the day Nathan let me hear my baby’s heartbeat. I know you can’t understand that.”

  I shook my head at her, braked a little harder than necessary. “You only felt happy that day because you were programmed to feel happy. You only want this because Nathan designed you to want it. I know you can’t understand that, because it’s part of the base we use to build a clone’s brain. You’re designed to not resent the way you’re made. It’s wrong that Nathan used you the way he did, but—”

  Martine unbuckled her seat belt and told me to stop the car.

  “What?” I glanced between her and the fast-moving traffic. “No, Martine, we’ll be home in a few minutes. Put your seat belt back on.”

  “No,” she said, her voice shaky. “Let me out. Pull the car over and let me out.” In the same moment that she reached for the door handle, I activated the child-safety locks. She yanked at the handle over and over, making frantic animal sounds as she did.

  “Put your fucking seat belt back on,” I said. My voice came out quiet and dangerous. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her go still. She buckled her seat belt again slowly, quietly, and stared at the dashboard for the rest of the ride home.

  When we got to my house, I unlocked the door. She stayed where she was, her hands in her lap, until I told her that it was time to get out of the car.

  “You don’t understand,” she whispered, still in the passenger seat. “This baby made it worth everything Nathan put me through. It’s—I could survive him, because I knew I had this.” She touched the rise of her belly with featherlight fingers. “I can get through all of it,” she whispered.

  We sat in the car in silence, Martine staring down at her lap, me struggling to figure out a way to talk to her. Trying to decide if I was supposed to argue or apologize. When it felt like the oxygen in the car was depleting faster than I could bear, I opened my door. By the time I was on my own doorstep, Martine was behind me.

  She spent the rest of the afternoon in the bedroom, folding laundry and putting it away. I checked on her twice—once to see where she had been, and once to tell her that the clinic had called.

  “They said nothing seems wrong,” I said. “They said you should probably take it easy, and to come back in if there’s more bleeding. For now, though, everything seems fine.”

  “I’m so glad,” Martine said, smiling at me as she slowly folded a shirt. Her hands moved smooth, rhythmically. She ran her palms across each fold, leaving a tidy crease.

  When she had finished, she put the shirt onto a pile that seemed much too tall to have been that week’s laundry. Then, she reached into my dresser and pulled out a shirt I hadn’t worn in weeks. She shook it out, laid it flat, and began folding it again.

  “I’m so glad,” she repeated, and she kept smiling, as she looked right through me.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  I stopped talking to my mother when I was thirteen. That was the year she sent me away to school, a good school that she paid for with the yields of my father’s life insurance. In the state of Georgia, it only took four years to declare a death in absentia, and the moment his insurance policy accepted the death certificate, she started calling schools for me.

  It wasn’t that she wanted to get rid of me. I knew it at the time, and I never bothered to perform petulance at being sent away. We had been too close together for too long, and the four years between my father’s disappearance and my first year of eligibility at boarding school had been especially difficult. While he was present, we had been forced into a default state of camaraderie, helping to shield each other from the worst of him. But then he was gone, and we began to see each other up close for the first time.

  I resented the way she still fluttered and trembled, even after everything we’d been through together. I suspect that she resented my aptitude for my father’s work in spite of her determination to encourage me in those directions.

  It was for the best, us being apart.

  I didn’t stop speaking to her out of a sense of animosity. I didn’t stop speaking to her at all—we just stopped talking. Our conversations were logistical, formal.

  Would I be coming home for the summer? No.

  Could she send money so I could buy food for a holiday party in the dormitory?

  Of course; would I like a little extra for gifts for my friends? No need.

  I still called her once every year, on the anniversary of my father’s disappearance, in September. She wore a blue dress to my wedding and cried a little during the ceremony. She sent flowers after I told her about the divorce.

  We were cordial.

  But the last time I talked to her—really talked to her—had been a few years after my father’s disappearance. A few weeks before she handed me a stack of boarding school brochures to choose from. We’d been discussing my future, and I’d told her that I wanted to be a research biologist.

  “Like your father?” she’d said, exactly the thing I’d been hoping she wouldn’t bring up.

  “I’m not like him,” I’d answered, and she’d nodded. She gave me a long, bright look, and I’d tried hard not to feel afraid. “I mean it,” I’d added. She said that she knew, that of course I wasn’t like him. I remember going to my bedroom and quietly, quietly locking the door.

  I stopped talking to my mother too much that day, because if I was anything like my father, I knew that I could never let her see it. I packed my things a month later, and I went away to school. I didn’t return to my mother’s house again until long after she’d moved away to remarry a man I’d never met. She left every piece of furniture in the house, everything precisely as it had been when I was a child, covered in heavy white drapes to keep the dust from settling over it.

  After that fight with Martine, I wished that I could still talk to my mother. I wished that I could have asked her why she decided to have me at all. It sounds maudlin—did you ever wish I hadn’t been born—but really, I couldn’t believe I’d never asked her in the first place.

  The question seems so obvious now. Had she truly wanted a baby? Or was it that my father had wanted a baby, and she had wanted to keep the peace with him? Or had she been convinced her entire life, by her friends and by her parents and by their parents, t
hat she did want me?

  Had she ever looked at a positive pregnancy test the way I once had, with grim resignation? Had she ever run a hand across her belly in the possessive way Martine did, with unerring confidence in the rightness of her decision?

  I wished I could ask her whether I, like Martine’s baby, had made the things my mother endured feel worth the trouble.

  I wished I could ask if I’d made them worse.

  * * *

  I couldn’t sleep that night. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the door to the doctor’s office at the clinic—the way the doctor had looked at me when she opened it, her smile tight and vague. I knew that no one would sequence Martine’s blood, and even if they did, they wouldn’t recognize the signature marking her as a clone. I knew that I wasn’t at any real risk of discovery. Still, Martine and the doctor had been in there alone. I hadn’t been there to answer prying questions or help her lie about her medical history. I hadn’t been there to make sure that our secrets remained secret.

  And that was only going to continue. I didn’t want to spend my life supervising Martine in order to keep myself safe. I didn’t want to have to maintain the latticework of lies for her. But I didn’t see another possible future, either.

  I got out of bed and crept down the stairs for a cup of tea. I sat at the tiny table in my dining nook, the one on which I’d signed my divorce papers such a short time before. I wrapped my hands around my mug and tried to imagine how Nathan had done all of this for so long. How had he hidden it all from me? How had he hidden Martine, an entire person for whom he was entirely responsible?

  The truth, I knew, was that I just hadn’t been looking. I resented the moments when I had to pay attention to him at all. That had always been true of our relationship; some of our worst fights came about as a result of me resenting him for being needy. There was a helplessness in him that I responded to by pulling away and ignoring him on instinct. It bred my contempt, and I never fought that contempt back, not once. It always felt justified.