The Echo Wife

by Sarah Gailey

  Nathan was never one to check his assumptions during research. He was always just lazy enough, and just smug enough, to assume he had things right.

  But it turns out that the wrong kind of lime, applied in just the wrong way, will act as a preservative. And clone tissues are different, that’s always been true. They may look the same, but they behave differently. They’re brand-new, and they don’t know how to decay, not the same way human tissues do.

  Still. That specimen, the first one, had been in the ground for at least two years. She was only a dozen yards from the house, a face and a body and a pit of churned earth.

  I did the math, later, after we dug through Nathan’s study, after we pieced together the truth. She had to have been buried for at least two years, at least that long, because Martine was nearly two years old by then, and there had been no overlap between their lives. They’d never met. Underground for two years, and still the specimen was fresh enough that I could immediately recognize her.

  She looked exactly like Martine.

  She looked exactly like me.

  I walked outside and down the porch stairs, past Martine, who stood on the back porch with her arms folded tight to her chest. Everything was too loud, too heavy. Each of my steps felt individually significant.

  Martine was watching my back and I could feel it, could feel her watching me, could feel the hum of the air between us. I found myself looking toward the sky to see if there were any planes passing overhead. It felt impossible that we were alone in that yard, that no one else could see all of this death. It was too big for the two of us alone to witness.

  But there was no one else. It was us, and it was them.

  “What happened?” I asked. It came out as a whisper, impossibly quiet, but Martine still heard. She still answered.

  “I was gardening,” she said. Her voice was very nearly steady. “I was going to put in a couple of saplings.” I turned back to look at her, and yes, there were two saplings. Apple trees, they looked like. Right next to her. Still in pots, too skinny to hold themselves upright, so they were each tied to a thick stake. Had they been there before? I tried to remember seeing them, walking past them, but there were a dozen bodies in the yard and those little trees could have appeared by magic for all I knew. She could have pulled them out of her pockets while my back was turned. “I started to dig and I … I found her,” she continued. “She had that bag on her face. I ripped it open to see who she was, and that’s when I saw the other one. The next one.”

  I reached the first body, the one that was almost entirely unearthed. She was on her side, not curled up as closely as a sleeping Martine might have been. Her face was turned toward the sky. Her mouth was open. Her teeth were dark with soil—it must have landed there while Martine was digging up the other bodies, after she’d torn open that plastic bag to see whose body she’d found.

  I could see without having to look closely that her mouth was full of earth. I didn’t want to know that, but it was the kind of thing that makes itself immediately apparent. The hang of her jaw, and the rich thick darkness behind her teeth—I knew without thinking, and that’s not the kind of knowledge one can just let go of. I looked at her mouth and the smell of turned earth was so rich in the yard that I choked on the taste of it.

  One of her arms was behind her, flung back as if in a stretch. Her hand almost touched the outstretched fingers of the next corpse.

  I could see it in my mind clearer than anything—Martine finding the first body, digging her up, brushing dirt away from her face. Uncovering that second set of fingers, lifting her shovel again, and then again, and then again, angry and afraid, how many are there? I could picture her hoeing this awful row with increasing speed, harvesting the nightmare of it. These dozen lifeless faces hidden beneath her roses, some of them half-rotted, some of them choked with soil, all of them identical to hers. This strange family she’d never met.

  Her secret lifeless sisters.

  I made my way from the first corpse to the last. Martine had barely uncovered this last one, the furthest from the house; it was just a loose mound of earth next to a spill of white-blond hair and a chin. If not for the other bodies, I would have mistaken it for a protrusion of roots next to a paving stone. I would have walked right past her.

  I crouched down and brushed at the half-turned earth. It looked as though it had hardly taken any digging at all to get to her. Something in me bucked at the improbability of it, demanded that I acknowledge it as a hoax. She was right there, superficial enough that someone could have tripped over her. How long had she been so close to the surface of the soil? How could she have been so shallowly tucked into the earth, but still hidden?

  “I had to stop there,” Martine said from her place next to the house. “I called you after I found that last one. I couldn’t … I couldn’t keep going.”

  I swept my hand across the dirt one last time, uncovered the awful meat of the clone’s face. She was much further gone than the first body, most of her flesh missing. She was harder to recognize as a human thing.

  Eddies of loam-smell drifted up around me as I shifted the soil. I swallowed hard.

  Focus, Evelyn. Focus. That’s the way.

  “She’s wrong,” I muttered to myself, and then I said it again to Martine, louder. “She’s all wrong. Here, come see.”

  Martine had changed since we met, but not so much that she didn’t come to me when I called her. She didn’t hesitate, didn’t object. I listened to her approach, her footsteps light through the freshly ruined section of her garden, and then she was there next to me, ready to look at what I wanted her to see.

  Should I say that it occurred to me that she might not want to see? Should I pretend that it was a consideration? I wanted her to look with me, wanted her to understand what I understood. I didn’t want to be the only one who knew what Nathan had done. I could keep my own secrets, but I didn’t want to keep his. Not this one.

  “Look,” I said, and I used my middle finger to trace the air just above the spiral of the rotted specimen’s exposed jawbone. It twisted like the central spire of a shell, dozens of teeth forming a long ridged spine along the outer contour of the helix.

  “What,” Martine said, and then she didn’t say anything else. She reached out her own hand, touched the bare white bone with her fingertips where the flesh had sloughed away.

  “She’s wrong,” I said. “She came out wrong. She’s a failed attempt.” I looked along the row of partially exposed bodies, and as they came into focus, my loose understanding of the situation took solid form in my mind. I straightened up and walked along the row, looking closer this time, stopping in a few places to expose the specimens more thoroughly.

  Each of them was, in some way, wrong. The ones furthest from the house were worse, more obvious blunders. One had a chest that was caved-in; I recognized the shape from my own early failures, a problem with the development of cartilage and collagen. Another looked hollow, deflated: her bones had never set. I used my hands to scoop soil away from the legs of a third, and I saw the purple weblike mottling of too-tight fascia. A growth-rate failure. I went on down the row, finding all of Nathan’s hidden mistakes.

  Only the last body, the fully unearthed one, looked like a true success. Something, I knew, had been unsatisfactory to Nathan—something about her hadn’t turned out the way he wanted it to. It could have been anything. Her voice, her programming, her imprinting. Her fertility.

  Nathan hadn’t liked the way she turned out, so he had killed her, buried her with the others, and started over again.

  I counted the bodies out by letter. There were a dozen of them. A through L.

  “Martine,” I whispered. “You were his thirteenth try.”

  A swell of noise rose from inside the house. Martine looked away from me, up at a half-open window, toward the rising wail.

  The baby was awake.

  * * *

  We should have examined Nathan’s personal files before we attempted to progr
am him.

  I can take responsibility for that error. With the clarity of hindsight, I can see how I rushed things. Digging Nathan up and taking a core sample and rushing off to the lab to get started on his replacement—it was all too fast, too sloppy, predicated on the assumption that I knew enough to proceed, when really, the very fact of Martine’s existence should have demonstrated to me that I didn’t have the contours of Nathan’s interiority fully mapped.

  I didn’t know all of his secrets. Neither did Martine.

  Taken together, our view of the man Nathan had been was a more comprehensive picture than either of us could see individually—but we had missed so much. This huge window of time and energy and focus in which he had been hiding an ambition, a secret, a project.

  We hadn’t known, and we hadn’t thought to look. It was an unforgivable oversight driven by desperation, and reinforced by our own hubris. We knew that we didn’t know everything about Nathan, but we imagined that we knew him well enough.

  We were wrong.

  Before the pregnancy, Martine told me as she led me into the house, the nursery served as Nathan’s home office. It had always been a temporary accommodation, she said, looking over her shoulder at me, her pace quickening as the baby’s cry grew frantic. “I’ve been getting that room ready my whole life.”

  It was the one room I hadn’t seen, the night I helped Martine bury Nathan’s own, freshly dead body. It had made sense for me to see the rest of the house, with all that had to be done, but there had been no reason for her to show me the nursery, and it hadn’t occurred to me to ask. If I’d thought about it at all, of course, I would have known that there was a nursery in the house—but I had figured that the picture I had of Martine’s home was thorough enough. It was sufficient.

  I thought I’d seen enough to understand.

  But there it was, on the other side of a white door: the nursery. The room that represented the things Nathan wanted, the things Martine wanted, the life they had worked to build together. The walls were washed green with white wainscoting, a hand-painted trim of dark boughs flecked with tiny purple flowers. Two layers of curtains hung across a small, high-set window—one layer thick, the other sheer, both closed tight to keep the room dark. A mobile hung above the crib, bumblebees and felt flowers. The carpet was thick, and there was a rocking chair in one corner, and I could see Martine’s hand in all of it, every color, every corner, every detail.

  “This is lovely,” I said, and I meant it. I truly did.

  “His desk is still in the dining nook,” she answered, “but some of his files are in the closet.” I slid the closet door open, and there they were: a half closet’s worth of banker’s boxes, stacked up underneath a double row of hung onesies on impossibly small hangers. I searched the boxes as Martine changed the baby. She murmured as she did it, small sweet noises that didn’t quiet the baby, but that seemed to shift the tenor of her cries to something less emergent.

  “What’s her name?” I asked, opening the first box, flipping through tax returns.

  “Violet,” Martine said. “After Nathan’s grandmother.” On the changing table, Violet wailed, her limbs flailing in the same jerky motions as a freshly dry specimen.

  I found the records I wanted in the third box I investigated. I opened it just as the crying stopped. I looked over my shoulder, the lid of the box in my hand, just in time to see Martine settle back in the rocking chair with the baby at her nipple. I felt a strange flush of embarrassment, not at the sight of her breast, but at the contentment on her face.

  That wasn’t meant for my eyes.

  It wasn’t meant for anyone’s eyes. It was a moment in which, I realized, she wasn’t calibrating her expression to any purpose. She wasn’t trying to make anyone else feel happy, or important, or safe, or guilty. She’d been created and molded to think constantly of what her face and voice and body might incite in others. She’d been made to manage the emotions of people around her. She’d been made to be careful.

  But in that moment, her contentment belonged to her, and to her alone. She had made something, and she owned it entirely, and no one could take it from her.

  It wasn’t a feeling I would ever have. The idea of holding an infant to my breast made me feel faintly ill, the same way I felt whenever conditioning a specimen required the removal of a fingernail. But I could never begrudge her the privacy of it—the ownership of that moment. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was intruding upon it, just by existing.

  I wasn’t supposed to be here.

  I confirmed that feeling as fact when I opened the box labeled HEALTH INSURANCE and found a stack of yellow notebooks inside. Thirteen of them, the same kind of notebooks we had used as graduate students. They were labeled in Nathan’s spiky, uneven hand, thick black marker in the center of each yellow cover.

  Agatha. Bethany. Corinne. Dinah. Edith. Faith. Genevieve. Helen. Ingrid. Jacqueline. Katrina. Laila.

  Martine.

  They were filled with notes on Nathan’s progress, his methods. Each of the first dozen ended with a full-page black X, a marker of the day he’d given up on the specimens. The dates began to overlap—he was preparing new attempts before the old ones had failed, refining his methods.

  Martine’s notebook ended with a reflection, a page-long journal-style entry. It was dated only a couple of weeks before I had confronted him with proof of his infidelity.

  The entry described his certainty that he had finally succeeded. He was relieved. He was elated. He could finally have the life he wanted.

  The only thing left to decide, he said, was what to do about me.

  I stared at the words with a strange sense of distance. The only thing left to decide is what to do about Evelyn. Having seen what he did about the first dozen iterations of Martine, I had a feeling that I knew what his approach to dealing with me was going to be.

  “What is it?” Martine whispered.

  I looked up and realized that I’d been sitting on the floor, reading silently, surrounded by notebooks, for much more time than I’d noticed. Martine was still in the chair, cradling Violet in her arms, rocking at a steady rhythm. I couldn’t tell if the baby was asleep or just quiet.

  I kept my voice low and steady. I showed Martine the covers, the names, the dates. I didn’t share the details of each failure with her, but I gave her the broad strokes of my understanding: Nathan had rushed, extrapolated, experimented, and failed over and over again. Every time one of his attempts to clone me—to improve me—failed, he killed the clone, buried it, and started over again. All told, it seemed to have taken him barely eighteen months to successfully reproduce my results. At least, that was what he’d recorded. Three years in all between his first failure and his final one.

  I couldn’t read Martine’s face when I told her that she was his success. That she was the pinnacle of his accomplishments. “You were a real triumph,” I said, and she looked away, her lips white.

  “He was going to kill you,” she murmured. In her arms, Violet made a soft, high noise.

  “Yes,” I said. “I think so.”

  “He was going to kill you,” she said. “So that he could be with me. And then he was going to kill me, because he thought he had failed again. That was his solution to both of us.”

  I put the lid back on the box. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, that about sums it up. He would have killed both of us, and buried us in the garden, just like he did with all of the … women.” I swallowed hard around that word.

  They weren’t women. They weren’t people. They weren’t me.

  They were specimens, subjects, bodies, corpses, cadavers, failures, data points. They were biowaste.

  But to Nathan, they had been women.

  He hadn’t created them with a single function in mind. They weren’t there to absorb bullets, grow organs, host experimental therapies. They were supposed to be wives. He had created them to live alongside him. Incomplete lives, maybe, but he probably hadn’t seen it that way. He’d bought a hou
se, and clothes, and rose bushes for the garden. He’d been trying to make a home and a life with each one of the clones he built, just like he’d tried to make a home and a life with me.

  There wasn’t a notebook with my name on it. But the reality was that Nathan hadn’t thought of me as a different kind of thing than the specimens he buried in his backyard. To him, we were all iterations of the same experiment. We were all vehicles to carry his dreams.

  There hadn’t been twelve attempts prior to Martine. There had been thirteen.

  I was his first failure.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The baby needed so much more from Martine than I could have anticipated. I trailed around the house with the two of them as Martine and I talked about the truth of the man she’d lived with for nearly her entire life. Martine strapped Violet into some complicated tangle of fabric, one that let her wear the baby like a shirt. She said something to me about the necessity of skin-to-skin contact in development, the importance of early bonding.

  I like to think that my study of infant development was comprehensive. It was certainly comprehensive enough that I’m capable of building a functional person from raw materials. But I wondered, then, what I was missing. Martine used phrases I’d never encountered, ideas that I now recognize as being part of the attachment theory she’d read about in the books I brought her while we lived together. She’d studied ideas that I’d dismissed as infant-oriented, as too simplistic, as behavioral rather than physiological.

  She asked me if I had ever explored the long-term effect of isolation on my clones in their earliest stages of cognitive development. She asked me if I had ever considered letting them meet each other in their first few hours out of sedation.