by Sarah Gailey
I shook my head, resisted the urge to reach out and brush dirt from the fabric of her skirt. “How is this different?”
“Different from what?”
I reminded myself again—and again, and again—that she wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t slow. Still, I could hear myself getting impatient, could see her registering the irritation in my voice. The more I spoke, the more I needed to speak, and the more I spoke, the more defensive the set of her mouth got. I couldn’t stop myself, though. I couldn’t hold it back.
And maybe I didn’t try very hard.
“How is this any different from the way it was before? You knew he was a murderer, you knew he wanted to kill you. You knew he was awful. You can’t say that it’s just because he was awful to someone other than you, either, because you knew that part already too.” Anger, hot and biting, flooded the back of my throat like a bolus of morphine—because this at last was the real thing. This was the splinter lodged beneath my thumbnail. This was the thing I could not stand. “You knew that he was awful to me. So why is this different? Why does this suddenly make it so you can’t be here anymore?”
She clenched her fists in the soil a few more times before she answered me. She cocked her head, looking at me, her face hardening into grim lines I’d never seen her wear before. Finally, she let out a breath before saying, “Because they didn’t deserve it.”
I rocked back on my heels. “What?”
“None of them deserved what they got,” she said. She brushed her palms against each other, raining dirt. “They failed because he failed. But me and you, we failed all on our own, didn’t we? We failed on purpose.”
I wanted so badly to rage at her. I wanted to push her down onto the ground, wanted to grind her hair into the dirt and scream how dare you how dare you how dare you—but I couldn’t, because hadn’t I thought the exact same thing a hundred times? Hadn’t I sat on the floor of my town house with an open bottle of wine, thinking that I’d let Nathan down just as much as I possibly could?
I couldn’t answer her with anger, because the anger died before I could even fully feel it. Instead, I tried to answer her the way I wished I could answer myself.
“No,” I said. “We failed him because there was no way not to. I would have broken myself if I tried to be the thing he wanted me to be. You would have broken yourself if you had kept on trying to ignore the things he wanted you to ignore.” She shook her head ruefully, but I kept going. “It’s not just that we didn’t deserve what he did. It’s—I think we would have been dead either way. Even if we were still breathing, even if we were still aboveground, we would have been dead. I would have been dead. And I’m pretty sure you would have too.”
Martine wilted. She lifted her hands as if to bury her face in them, then stopped with her palms a few inches from her face, seeming to notice for the first time how filthy they were. She let them drop again and hung her head.
She looked exhausted. I thought of her exacting sleep schedule, wondered how often the baby woke her in the night. There was no catching up, for her. This was just how tired she was going to have to be.
“I can’t even be what I was made for,” she said softly. “He put all that work in, and I still can’t be a thing that he would have been satisfied with. If I can’t even get that right, then what am I for?”
I didn’t know how to answer her. She wasn’t technically incorrect. She was a made thing, and she had failed to fulfill her purpose, but that was all wrong. She needed to hear something different. I couldn’t sort out why it felt backward, couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to say to her. It hit me afresh how absurd this situation was—I was comforting a specimen about the fact of its own existence. I was talking to Martine as if she were a person.
I had started to think of her as a person.
And I couldn’t stop.
I tried to tell myself otherwise. I reminded myself of the truth about every specimen I had to dispose of: it’s like a stopped watch, it’s like an apple with a worm in it, it’s no good and there’s no use for it the way it is. But Martine’s tears were making soft divots in the soil in front of her, and I wanted to reach for her, and it made me dizzy because she was just a thing, she was just a broken thing. But she was a broken thing that looked and sounded exactly like me.
“This Nathan doesn’t know that you’re a failure,” I said at last. Maybe I should have argued with her, told her that she wasn’t a failure, but it would have been a lie, and it didn’t matter, anyway. “He doesn’t know that there were ever any attempts before you. He doesn’t know about any of this. You can have a perfectly good life with him.”
“Or,” she said, “we can killswitch him, and it will look like he died of natural causes, and I can have a perfectly good life here with Violet.”
I couldn’t do this part anymore. I couldn’t sit and argue with her, couldn’t comfort her, couldn’t keep breathing in that loam-smell. It was suffocating, all of it, and it felt like my mouth and throat and lungs were slowly filling with rich, dark soil. It was going to kill me.
So I stood up, trying fruitlessly to brush the dirt from my legs. I held out my hands and she took them, pulling herself to her feet. “We can’t kill him,” I said.
“Why not?” she asked simply, stooping to grab the shovel.
I didn’t have a ready answer. Because murder is wrong didn’t fit; by my own rationale, he was a clone just like any other. If he’d come out wrong, I wouldn’t have hesitated to encourage Martine to use the killswitch. Because he didn’t do anything wrong didn’t work, either—Martine couldn’t hear that, wouldn’t accept that he wasn’t a murderer at the cellular level.
I tried for another angle that might work, one that would leave her feeling whole when she climbed into their bed next to him at the end of the day.
“If we kill him,” I said slowly, “how are we any different from the original Nathan?”
She stared at me, holding the shovel in a loose, slack grip, as though she’d nearly forgotten it. After a moment, she turned and started reburying the third body. She was moving more slowly now, less frantic. She wasn’t burning off panic; she was tidying up. It seemed somehow reflexive, self-soothing. This time, I didn’t stop her from her work.
“I don’t think you want me to answer that,” she said. “Not really. I think you’re hoping you’ll change my mind, but I don’t think you want me to answer your question.”
I shoved my dirty hands into my pockets, feeling clumsy. She was right, which was bad. I could feel the situation slipping away from me. She had my motives pinned down, and she knew what button to press to derail me.
I didn’t care for that feeling at all.
Worse, it was going to work. I knew what she was doing, but I couldn’t fight it. “Tell me the answer,” I said, knowing that hearing the answer would only make things feel more wrong.
She hesitated, then shrugged, still shoveling soil over the third body. “I don’t think you’re different from him,” she said. “I think you make people and you dispose of them when it suits you, just like he did. I think that if this had all taken place inside a lab, and if his victims didn’t look just like you? You wouldn’t be conflicted about it at all. You wouldn’t think he’d done anything wrong.”
She used the back of her shovel to tamp down the earth over the body, then turned around and began working on the fourth. I didn’t have an answer for her, didn’t have an argument. She kept saying things that were true and I hated her for it, hated her with the reflexive venom of a child who’s been tattled on. But there was nothing I could say. She knew me better than I knew her. She knew me so much more than I wanted her to.
Since there was nothing for me to say, I went to the garden shed, and I grabbed the second shovel, the small one Martine had used to help me bury Nathan. I got to work on the fifth body, and then we buried the sixth together, and then the seventh. We didn’t speak until we were at the eleventh. I stepped carefully, trying not to let my feet land too close to t
he last, most-exposed corpse.
“If you think we shouldn’t kill him,” Martine said evenly, “then you must have a better idea. He’ll be home in, what, four hours? And I can’t stay here with him tonight. I’ll do what I have to do, but I won’t sleep next to him again.”
I paused in my shoveling, because I didn’t have a better idea. I didn’t have a solution that could beat out murder for permanence and efficiency. She knew that, just like she knew everything else.
I was so tired of arguing that part of me thought maybe we should just kill the new Nathan. I could pretend to be stopping by for some reason, act like I found him, cold. I could tuck Martine and the baby away while the police took away the body. I didn’t know what would happen to the house, but—
“He hasn’t done anything wrong,” I said, and I was flooded with relief, because it was so much more clear than I’d been telling myself it was.
It was selfish, but it was clear.
And I knew how to be selfish. I knew how to protect my own interests, how to treat myself as my own chief priority. This thing with Martine, it didn’t have to be a moral dilemma. It didn’t have to be a struggle between her opinion of me and my opinion of myself. It didn’t have to be about right or wrong.
I drank that clarity down like cold champagne. It didn’t have to be about right or wrong. I didn’t have to figure out what was right.
I just had to make it about me.
“I haven’t done anything wrong either,” Martine replied coolly. “But this still—”
“No, you don’t understand,” I interrupted. “We pulled off something impossible, making him. We shouldn’t have succeeded at this. It was such a long shot, such a reach, and it worked. We did it. I might not ever be able to publish a paper on it, I might not ever be able to tell anyone, but I won’t let you kill him. He’s my best work.”
She laughed, a sudden brittle laugh. “Your best work,” she said, incredulous, almost giddy. “Of course. What was I thinking? We can’t possibly undermine your progress that way.”
“I mean it,” I said, tossing a shovelful of earth over the lifeless, slack-skinned face of Nathan’s eleventh attempt. Katrina, my memory whispered. Her name was Katrina. “He’s the pinnacle of—stop laughing.” I used the back of my shovel to tamp down the loose soil of the grave. Martine moved toward the twelfth corpse, Laila, the one that still had eyes and lips, uneaten by the beetles and worms whose work it would have been to work away at the softest parts of her. I moved in front of her, stood in her way so she had to stop. I leveled a stare at her that I usually reserved for lab assistants I was about to fire. Cold, logical, direct, merciless. That’s the way.
“You’re serious,” she said. She folded her arms across her chest, but there was only so much fight in her.
If I pushed just a little harder, I knew she would topple.
“I gutted myself making this version of Nathan for you,” I said, trying to summon the cold, ruthless certainty with which my father had eyed the cast on my wrist. “I’ll never be able to tell anyone about him, and I’ll never win an award for him,” I said, “but I will not let you destroy him the way you destroyed everything else I’ve spent my life building.” Then, lower, letting her hear that note of quiet danger I’d used to keep her from leaping out of my car: “This isn’t up for any further debate. I’m not asking you, Martine. I’m telling you.”
It was enough to break her budding defiance. She kept her arms crossed, but her shoulders rose into a protective hunch. I felt a sense of cold satisfaction. I’d won. I’d crushed her just enough to remind her of the person she’d been before she met me, before she’d killed her husband, before she’d learned the details of how she was made.
It was power. I had given her that independence, and I could take it back.
Guilt came fast on the heels of that rush of power, but it wasn’t the time. I pushed the shame into my cheek so I could talk around it. I could feel remorse later. For now: victory. That was all that mattered.
She looked past me to the last unburied body. Laila. Her face was turned away from us, one cheek resting on the inside of that plastic bag. I was thankful that I didn’t have to look at her empty eyes. I couldn’t avoid seeing the narrow collar of bruising that ringed her throat, though. It was stark and purple, set high. The place where the bottom of the bag had been, where she’d struggled against it as she suffocated.
“We should finish,” Martine murmured. “We should bury her before he gets home. If I’m going to have to stay with him, I don’t want to have to answer questions from him about this. I need that, at least.”
I chewed on the inside of my cheek, and the guilt was there, I couldn’t dodge it, but there was something else there too.
An idea.
“Actually,” I said slowly, a plan coalescing in my mind like flesh in amnio, “I don’t think we should bury her. I think there might be a way to let Nathan live, but get you out of here.”
Her eyes didn’t brighten. She looked at me as though looking at me were a responsibility, just another item on an endless list of tasks, and she might as well check this one off now.
The cold satisfaction I’d felt at my victory curdled. It was rotten, all of it. All my callous resolve, all my stern determination, all the ends that I used to justify the means.
This was not a victory. There was no triumph in reminding a broken thing that it was broken.
I wanted more than anything in that moment to hide in my bedroom with the door locked. I wanted to hunch over a pile of brochures that promised an escape from the person who knew that I had my father in me. My mother, at least, had offered me that exit.
But there was no escape from this. I couldn’t run, couldn’t hide, couldn’t stay away over the holidays just in case. I couldn’t turn away from Martine.
I had done precisely the damage I set out to do. I’d wanted the advantage badly enough to let the monstrous seed of cruelty in me push up shoots, and now that I had that advantage, I needed to use it.
I could fix her later. When there was more time.
“We need to get her inside,” I said, tossing my shovel to the ground. Martine nodded, dull-eyed. She waited for me to move before she stepped toward the open grave. I forced myself to pay attention to the task at hand. Forward. “Get her ankles,” I instructed, looking only at the band of purple around Laila’s throat. “We don’t have much time.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY
I was not unused to bathing lifeless specimens. It was a standard part of the autopsy process. In fairness, it was a task I most often left to my assistants—the work of rinsing congealed amniotic gel from the cooling skin of a corpse was never going to be the best use of my time—but I was familiar with the strange work of it, the gentle practicality required to move a limp body without breaking it in the process.
Having that experience made the process of washing Laila familiar. Once we finished maneuvering her into the tub, it was almost comforting, doing this work I already understood. We cut off her half-rotted clothes and tossed them into the sink to keep the dirt from scattering. I used the handheld showerhead extension to rinse her down, sluicing water over her skin until the water running down the drain between her feet was close to clear.
Martine helped me to lather Laila’s limbs with the same sweet-smelling vanilla soap I’d used to wash Nathan’s blood from my hands. I used a lot of it, sweeping my hands in tight circles over her skin, trying to lift the death away from her.
When I rinsed the soap away, she almost looked new. She hadn’t been conditioned any more than Martine had. Her skin was smooth and pale, unfreckled, unscarred. She didn’t even have calluses on her fingers.
I wondered how long she had lived before Nathan decided that she would not suffice.
I didn’t usually wash the hair of specimens who were ready for autopsy; that, I think, was the strangest part. I was accustomed to rinsing their hair, usually before shaving it off, to make it easier to examine their
skin and bones and brains. But I never washed it, never combed it out. I couldn’t remember ever having done that work for anyone, alive or not. It felt wrong, too intimate. Too close.
But Laila’s hair was matted with dirt, and the water simply wasn’t enough, so I had no choice but to figure it out. I clumsily lifted her head a few times, trying to figure out how to work shampoo into her hair. Her neck was loose and her skull was heavy and it was all too cumbersome. I dropped her, and her head hit the bottom of the tub with a resonant thunk.
“May I?” Martine asked softly. I moved aside to make room for her. She leaned into the tub and cradled the back of Laila’s head in both hands, letting her fingers tangle in the clone’s damp hair. She leaned down, and it looked for all the world like she was going to kiss the dead woman. Then she slid one of her hands down under Laila’s shoulders, using the other to support the head, and lifted her smoothly into a sitting position.
I remember thinking, irritably, that this wasn’t a solution. That I wouldn’t be able to reach around Martine to wash Laila’s hair. That she was solving the wrong problem.
But then, Martine climbed into the bathtub and sat down behind the woman who had come before her. The fabric of her skirt began to darken as it wicked up water from the bottom of the tub, from Laila’s skin. She splayed her legs on either side of Laila’s hips, used her palms to prop up the clone’s limp shoulders. “There,” she said. She didn’t look at me, just kept her eyes on the limp forward-sway of Laila’s head. “That should be easier.”
I swallowed hard before continuing. Martine was as tender with Laila’s body as she had been with Violet. I worked a palmful of shampoo into Laila’s hair—it was longer than Martine’s, and I remember making a mental note that we would need to trim it. Her chin rested on her chest, and the lather ran down into her face. I flinched when it flooded across the lids of her closed eyes, then shook my head at myself for reacting as though she might tear up at the sting of it.
