The Echo Wife

by Sarah Gailey

  She asked me if I was sure that they never remembered their conditioning.

  I asked her questions in return, and she answered them with a greater degree of patience than I’d ever shown her in the lab. She turned out to have studied harder than I’d realized. She described a vast labyrinth of interweaving parenting models to me, described the theories behind each, explained the logic behind several of the choices she’d made. “I never had parents,” she explained, and hearing her voice was like listening to a taped version of one of my own lectures. She was confident, authoritative.

  Certain.

  “I don’t have my own model to work from. I don’t have any built-in ideas about what works and what doesn’t.”

  She stroked the back of Violet’s head through the swathe of cloth that held it upright. With her other hand, she held up a finger, then turned and vanished back toward the nursery. When she returned, she was holding a yellow notebook with her own name on the cover.

  “Actually,” she murmured, “I might be wrong about that.” She tossed the notebook onto the kitchen island, the same one where she’d been cutting onions the night the original Nathan had died. “Nathan programmed me with ideas about what’s important and what’s not. He gave me my priorities.” She drummed her fingers on the notebook cover, chewed her lip in a twitchy way that I didn’t recognize. A new habit she’d picked up in the time since I’d last seen her. Her eyes had gone distant. I waited as she studied the cover, tracing the ascender in the letter M over and over. Finally, she nodded, her decision made. “I’m reading it,” she said.

  “Is that a good idea?” I asked.

  She nodded again, and it was the kind of authoritative gesture that didn’t leave room for disagreement. “Yes,” she said. “It is a good idea. That’s why I’m going to do it.”

  She didn’t offer any explanation, didn’t leave any spaces into which I could wedge doubt. I felt caught in a strange trap of my own making—I’d wanted to argue with her, wanted to undermine her certainty enough that I might then be able to change her mind. But she wasn’t prepared to have her mind changed.

  She wasn’t talking like her. She was talking like me.

  In that moment, she was subtly demanding that I treat her as though she knew what she wanted. As though she didn’t have any need for my approval. On some level, I’d still been thinking of her as a child; she was asking me to extend her at least some measure of the respect I might show to a peer.

  So I did. I asked her to help me understand her reasoning.

  “I want to know why I’m making the choices I’m making,” she said, stroking the long hummock of Violet’s swaddled back. “It’s about Violet, but it’s also not. I’m just—” She peeked under the edge of the cloth, smiled at the baby’s face, and let the cloth fall back into place. When she looked back up at me, there was something arranged about her expression. Her resolve was formal, practiced. “I know that I’m responding to my programming a lot of the time, but I want to feel like I’m deciding whether or not to let it guide me.” She gave her head a tiny shake and tried again. “No. I don’t just want to feel like I’m deciding. I want to decide. I have a choice, and I’m going to exercise it.”

  All at once, I understood why she was being so formal, so rigid. Why she seemed prepared for a fight.

  She was going to do something that went against my work.

  But I hadn’t been the one to program her. I could have argued that it didn’t matter what she did, because if she managed to make decisions that went against her programming, then it was a sign of Nathan’s poor craftsmanship, and nothing more.

  I would have been lying to myself.

  Nathan had done good work in Martine, and if she succeeded in bucking off her programming, she would be proving that my methods weren’t ironclad.

  She was going to try to prove that she was her own person.

  To agree with her goal was to admit that her aims were valid; to disagree was to admit that her very desire for self-realization was a threat to my entire body of work. If this was a contest of wills, then I had already lost.

  She was being brave. I nodded to her, placed my own hand on the notebook beside hers. Our knuckles had the same topography, but her hands weren’t identical to mine. They had more calluses than I did, more tiny scars. Shorter fingernails. Our hands were a reflection of the time we each spent sowing our harvests—her in the garden, with her fists in the earth, and me in the lab, protected by gloves.

  She was a thing that I could so easily have been. I couldn’t begrudge her the opportunity to find out who she was capable of becoming.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let me know if you need help understanding any of it.”

  She peeked under the fabric again. From my angle, leaning forward across the kitchen island, I could see the soft curl of the baby’s ear, her white-blond hair. Her scalp was laced with blue veins, visible through the thin layer of down.

  “Finally,” Martine breathed. “She’s out.”

  “Already?” I glanced at the clock on the oven, trying to remember what time it had been when I arrived. Martine had said, then, that we only had a few hours. How long had the baby been awake? How soon would Nathan be home?

  “It’s like this in the afternoon,” she said. “She’s usually only awake for an hour or so between naps. She’ll wake up for longer later.” She began the work of unwrapping the fabric that held the baby to her chest. “Normally I’d just wear her around while she sleeps, but we should fix the yard, yes? I’ll put her down. It’ll only take a minute. She’ll cry a bit—she always does, when I put her down. But it’ll only take a minute and then she’ll be out again.”

  She disappeared to the back of the house. I eyed the notebook on the counter and listened to the muffled sounds of Martine putting the baby into the crib, the wail that rose and then quickly fell again. I was seized by a powerful urge to destroy the notebook, to light all four of the burners on the gas stove and hold the pages over it until the climbing flames reached my too-soft fingertips. I gripped the edge of the counter to keep myself from doing it, reminded myself that it wasn’t my place to protect Martine from herself in this. She wasn’t my responsibility. She wasn’t even my relative.

  I didn’t bother thinking about the part of me that wanted the notebook gone so I could protect myself, preserve my research. There was no profit in that level of honesty.

  It didn’t matter what I wanted. Not now, not about this.

  I had to let Martine choose.

  I heard the door to the nursery open and shut, the latch muted. I knew Martine’s method precisely—the way she would grip the doorknob in her palm before letting her fingers fall onto the backside of it, the smooth, careful turn. The way she would ease the door shut all the way before slowly, so slowly, turning the knob back. No snaps or clicks, no sudden sounds to draw notice or wake a sleeper.

  I had perfected the method while my father was alive, to protect myself. Martine had perfected it since the birth of her child, so that the baby would stay asleep. The air around me shivered with the sameness of her, and with the absolute difference of her.

  She was padding down the hall, her footsteps soft on the carpet. I forced myself to breathe deep and slow. I forced that doorknob out of my mind. Now wasn’t the time to be thinking about my father, not with all those bodies in the garden.

  Not that the bodies in the garden made it easy to stop thinking of my father.

  Inhale four, exhale five, keep it together. Poise, Evelyn. That’s the way.

  By the time she got to the kitchen, I’d collected myself. I tucked my father back where he belonged, let the roots of my breathing grow thick around him until he was safely out of sight and I could think straight.

  “Okay,” I said as Martine entered the room, “how long do we have to get the garden back in order?”

  She looked at me blankly. “As long as we want,” she said.

  I remembered the last time I’d underestimated her intelligence in this
kitchen, checked my impulse to think of her as stupid and slow. “Well,” I said carefully, “we had better get it done before Nathan gets home and, you know. Sees the bodies. He won’t have a memory of them, and he’ll probably freak out.”

  Martine laughed, a lovely fluting laugh that didn’t have anything to do with my own. “Oh, that!” She shook her head and smiled at me. “We don’t need to worry about that. We don’t need to worry about Nathan at all.”

  “No?” I said, starting to smile a little too, unable to help myself, even though I didn’t quite understand why she was laughing. Her certainty was contagious.

  “Of course not,” she said, reaching out to clasp my hands in hers. “Because the second he walks through that door, he’s going to die.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-NINE

  I looked between Martine’s fever-bright eyes, my heart sinking. I realized too late how badly I’d misread her. I’d thought she was handling things well, that her initial panic had given way to practicality. At worst, I had thought she was staying calm for the baby.

  But that wasn’t it at all.

  She was calm because she had already decided what to do about it all. She was calm because she had a solution in mind.

  “We can’t. Martine. That’s not the right answer.” I said it slowly, trying to keep my voice clear enough to remind her that I was rational. That listening to me was a good idea. I needed to cut through her certainty, needed to undermine the comfort she was finding in the idea of killing Nathan. “We can’t just kill him.”

  “Yes, we can,” she said, squeezing my hands in hers as if she were giving me a much-needed pep talk. She was still smiling that serene smile, the one that said not to worry, it would all be okay. “We installed the killswitch, remember? We installed it for something just like this. All I have to do is say the trigger phrase, and it’ll all be fixed. Right?”

  “No, that’s—we installed the killswitch in case he tried to hurt you.” She sounded so reasonable, so certain, that I found myself scrambling for a foothold in my own reality. That’s why we installed the killswitch, just to keep Martine safe, I reminded myself frantically. She’s wrong. This is all wrong. “We installed it in case you were in danger.”

  “We installed the killswitch in case I was in danger.” She dropped my hands. “Well, I’m in danger. He’s a murderer. He’s a … a murderer, he’s a serial killer!” She took a step back from me and pointed toward the backyard. She wasn’t shouting, not yet, but panic was starting to boil in her voice. “Or didn’t you notice all the corpses in the yard?”

  “Please be sensible about this,” I said, folding my arms.

  She shook her head. The finger that pointed to the yard began to tremble. “No,” she said, “no, don’t tell me to be sensible, don’t tell me to be reasonable, don’t tell me I’m crazy, I’m not—those are bodies! Those are bodies and they look like me, he’s a murderer, he tried to—” Her voice broke, and she lowered her hand, wrapped her arms around herself. “He tried to murder me.”

  She looked around the kitchen, her eyes brimming, her lips white. I could imagine what she was seeing: There is the knife block, there is the place where I was cutting the onions, there is the place where he put his hands around my throat and tried to squeeze the words right out of me. There is the place where I stabbed him the first time, and the second, and the third.

  There is the place where he died, and it was probably the place where some of them died, and it could have been the place where I died.

  “It wasn’t him,” I whispered. I stepped toward Martine, and she stepped back, away from me. Her grip on her own arms was merciless. There would be bruises later, I was sure.

  “It was,” she said. She was still staring at the kitchen floor. There was no bloodstain, but I don’t doubt that she remembered the contours of the pool as well as I did.

  “It wasn’t.” I ducked my head to try to catch her eyes. “It wasn’t him. It was the original. We can’t kill this one for something he didn’t do. Please,” I repeated, “be sensible.”

  She was breathing hard and fast through her nose. There was a scream building in her, I could see it—but she didn’t let it loose into the room. Instead, she spun on her heel and strode out of the kitchen, her steps so fast that she may as well have been running. I said her name, but she didn’t turn back, didn’t answer. I heard the back door open and close, and then I was alone in the house with the faint music that came from behind the closed door of the nursery.

  By the time I got to the backyard, Martine already had the shovel in her hands. She was flinging soil hard and fast, covering the most-exposed corpse, the one with the helixed mandible. She finished burying that one briskly, stepped over it with one decisive stride, and got to work on the next. I stood on the back porch, watching her toss shovelfuls of earth over the second body.

  It had been the worst wrong thing to say. Even then, I could understand that much. Asking her to be sensible was a mistake. It was the thing she least wanted to hear in her moment of terror—that her fear was baseless.

  But it was baseless. The Nathan who would be home from work in just a few hours wasn’t the same monster that had killed Martine’s predecessors. As far as he knew, he was a man who had been dissatisfied with his wife, and had proven himself a brilliant scientist, and had successfully made himself a new partner. He thought he had someone better this time, someone who wanted a baby and a nice house with a lovely garden. A second chance.

  He thought he loved her. He thought she loved him.

  That was who Martine and I had thought the original Nathan was, and so that was who this new Nathan thought he was.

  But Martine couldn’t seem to see that.

  I could understand, objectively. Her position was an exceptionally difficult one. But now was not the time for her to indulge in fear and irrationality. We just didn’t have time for this.

  When she started burying the third body, I crossed the garden to join her. I breathed through my mouth, shallow as I could, but the smell of turned earth was invasive, inescapable. I forced myself to wade through it. Forward, Evelyn, I told myself. Always forward.

  “You don’t care,” she said, as soon as I was within earshot. “He’s a murderer and you don’t care at all.” She dug the shovel into the loose soil once every few seconds, and the patter of falling earth punctuated her words. “You’re probably glad. He’ll take care of all your problems if you just wait long enough, right?”

  I bit back irritation, reminded myself that these weren’t just the hysterical antics of a petulant child. The original Nathan did try to kill her, after all. That had obviously traumatized her in ways that I hadn’t considered after that first night. She had never processed any of it, not that she’d told me.

  She had a right to be upset. I told myself that as if the telling could make me believe it too.

  “You know I don’t feel that way,” I said. I reached out and grabbed the shovel. She didn’t let go of it at first. She tugged hard, nearly toppled me over—but we were matched for strength, and after a tense few seconds, her shoulders went slack. She sagged to the ground, still clutching the shovel. I let it go. It fell across her lap as she sat, hard, between two of the still-open graves.

  “I know you don’t feel that way,” she agreed. She looked up at me, her face as broken as a dropped egg. “But it’s still true, isn’t it? The first Nathan was a murderer. I lived with him for two and a half years, I trusted him, I—” Her grip on the shovel tightened. “I slept with him. I got pregnant with his baby. And the whole time, they were out here.” She waved her hands broadly enough to indicate the whole yard, not just the graves. There were other holes scattered through the yard, shallow ones, and I realized that she must have been searching for the boundaries of her discovery—trying to see if her entire garden was planted on a necropolis. “They were out here and he was ready, all along. All that time, he was ready to put me out here too.”

  I looked down at her, kne
eling there in the soil with the shovel across her thighs like a penitent. There was some comfort that I was supposed to offer her, some way I was supposed to absolve her of this terrible knowledge. She was looking up at me as though I could possibly understand what she was going through, and I didn’t want to understand, I didn’t want to join her down there.

  But I did.

  I knelt beside her, felt the dirt embed itself in the fabric of my pants the instant my knees touched the ground. The word “ruined” glowed bright in my mind. I told myself that it didn’t matter.

  Things get ruined sometimes. That’s just how it is.

  “I know,” I said. “I know how you feel. He was going to kill me, too. Remember?”

  She slumped forward over the shovel. Then, quiet as a dying breath, she asked, “And would you be able to live with him, now? Knowing that?”

  My face went numb at the thought of it. Of moving into this house with the new Nathan, knowing that the man his DNA had come from had planned to kill me, to plant me in this garden bed beside his other failures. “That’s different,” I said. It tasted dishonest before it even left my mouth.

  Martine didn’t bother to argue with me. I think she knew that I knew the flavor of that particular lie just as well as I did. She let the shovel fall to the ground in front of her, and she sank her hands into the earth on either side of her knees. “You couldn’t do it. You couldn’t live with him, knowing what you know. And I can’t either,” she said.

  “But this version of Nathan,” I said desperately, “he … he doesn’t even know. If we bury these bodies, and we put the rosebushes back, he’ll never have to know. We didn’t program him to think of murder as a solution. He’s never killed anyone before.”

  “But he has killed before,” she said. “On some level, he has. It’s stamped into him somewhere. It’s got to be.” She made fists, compressing palmfuls of soil and dropping them, scooping up more loose earth. “This kind of thing doesn’t just leave a person, even if you make a new version of them. He can’t just be fresh and clean. It’s not fair to them, is it? For him to get to keep going as if he didn’t do anything wrong?”