The Echo Wife

by Sarah Gailey

  I could hear in her voice that she was trying to figure out a way to get off the line. It was a mercy to both of us when I told her that I wouldn’t waste her time.

  “I need the house,” I said.

  “Oh.”

  That’s all my mother said, the same sound she’d made when I showed her my first lost tooth, told her about my first kiss on a dare, failed to conceal my swollen arm.

  “I assume you haven’t sold it?” I said. “I need it. I’ll buy it from you, if you—”

  “No,” she said, “no, that won’t be necessary. It would go to you anyway, if I died, and it’s probably silly for it to be empty until then.”

  “Good.” I sank my teeth into my thumb, too hard. Normally, I would have hissed at the pain—but my mother’s voice was in my ear, and her voice always did make me default to silence.

  She was quiet for a moment. I heard soft clinking noises on the other end of the line—her fidgeting with something, no doubt, clicking her fingernails against a glass or running the pendant of a necklace up and down the chain. A human fucking twitch, my father had sometimes called her, and as I remembered that phrase I experienced a vicious spasm of something that directly opposed nostalgia. It was a hatred for everything that had ever passed between my parents, for the people they had been together, for the way they had trapped me with their fear and their anger and their desperate need for everyone in the world to think that they were fine, that I was fine, that the walls of our house were built on steady ground. The fact that I could never forget that place, that life—it was so bitter that I very nearly spat to get the poison of it off my tongue.

  “Well, good, then,” she said. “I’ll mail you the key, and I suppose that’s all you need.”

  I thanked her, checked to be sure she had the right address for me. That’s how simple it was. We said goodbye, and I hung up, and I went upstairs to let Martine out of the bedroom. Halfway up the stairs, I paused, looked down.

  The side of my foot was pressed flush to the wall.

  With immense deliberation, I lifted it, set it down again in the center of the step I was standing on. The step gave a soft creak under my foot. A few seconds later, the bedroom door at the top of the stairs opened.

  “Come downstairs,” I said to the sliver of Martine’s face that peeked around the door. “We need to talk.”

  There were still two teacups on the table, and a little puddle of spilled milk from where Nathan had fumbled Violet’s bottle. Martine sat in her usual chair and drew a finger through the milk. “I never bought a pump,” she murmured.

  I cleared away the cups, threw a dish towel onto the table to soak up the milk. “You what?”

  “I never bought a breast pump,” she said. “He must be using formula now.” She pressed the heel of one hand to the place where her left breast met her sternum, massaged it hard. “I hadn’t planned on weaning her so fast. I’ve been expressing manually for the last few days, but I suppose I should stop soon, or I’ll never dry up. The books said it would hurt—”

  “Yeah,” I said, impatient. “Do you need anything for that?”

  Her eyes lifted to mine slowly, as though they were weighted at the bottoms. “No,” she said. “Sorry. I’m fine. What did you want to talk to me about?”

  I swiped the dish towel across the table a few times, threw it into the sink. She flinched at the clatter the teacups made when it struck them. I forced myself to smile at her, a close-lipped attempt at offering her comfort. I sat down across from her and folded my hands on top of the little dining table.

  I waited for her to smile back.

  When she did, I began to tell her what Nathan had asked of me.

  * * *

  He held Violet wrong.

  I didn’t know how to hold her correctly either—I couldn’t have held her any better than he was, to be certain—but I could tell that he was doing it wrong. She squirmed and cried in his arms, twisting her body, wormlike. She wore one sock, the other foot bare and fat and strangely smooth on the bottom. Her toes curled and stretched, and her face was snarled up into a red knot, and her misery was a palpable thing.

  The lines of Nathan’s face spoke to profound exhaustion. He cupped her neck in one hand, gently but with obvious discomfort. He didn’t seem to like touching her, this baby that he had killed a dozen clones and destroyed a marriage—destroyed our life together—in order to get his hands on.

  I watched him more closely than I had ever watched my own husband. The man in front of me moved and spoke like an adult, but he was just a handful of months old. There were so many things he had never seen or experienced, things he only thought he knew. He had no idea that he wasn’t the man he thought himself to be.

  He was treading water far out of his depth, and he thought he was just a few feet from shore. Martine and I were the only ones who knew exactly how lost he was.

  He sat down at the dining-room table as I boiled water for tea, sat as though he’d never been off his feet before. This edition of Nathan was weary. Remembering Martine’s sleepless nights and napless days, I could not bring myself to pity him. He looked as out of place as if he’d walked through my front door and somehow found himself standing on the surface of the moon. He glanced around, taking in my kitchen, patting Violet’s back ineffectually.

  I watched him taking it in: my mugs and wineglasses in the drying rack by the sink, my dish towel hung on the handle of the oven door, my magnetless refrigerator. After an awkward minute, his brow furrowed.

  “It’s funny,” he said, “but I can’t remember what our old kitchen looked like.”

  “Mmm,” I said, hoping he would impose a suitable meaning on the noise. Of course he couldn’t remember that—it wasn’t a memory I’d handed him. It hadn’t felt important, when we were mired in the programming process, that he remember what our home had looked like. It had never occurred to me that he would have cause to remember, that he would ever be in a position to draw a comparison between the rooms we decorated together and the rooms I decorated on my own. “It’s good to see you,” I added.

  And it was good. I was glad to see this version of Nathan, this slightly simpler, slightly better man who looked like my ex-husband. Some part of me had been sad at the knowledge that I couldn’t observe him, couldn’t watch his development as it progressed. But here he was, and I could see the way that he was settling into himself. He moved like the old Nathan had, spoke with much of his same inflection. It was like meeting an old friend at a high school reunion: he was different, but also, he was exactly the same. I didn’t want to talk to him, but I couldn’t help feeling obscurely happy to see him. Familiarity, is all. Familiarity and the satisfaction of my own curiosity.

  “I have to share some … unfortunate news,” he said, shifting the baby’s weight from one arm to the other.

  “Oh?” I brought him a cup of tea, a licorice blend that the original Nathan hadn’t liked. I had always wondered if he really didn’t like it, or if he was pretending to dislike it to be ornery. It was a petty indulgence, but I intended to have an answer one way or another.

  He took a sip. He did not shudder or grimace or narrow his eyes. I counted myself victorious: he liked it. I knew it. Then he set his mug down, looking at it curiously—perhaps “liked it” was too strong a sentiment—and cleared his throat.

  “It’s about Martine,” he said.

  And then he told me.

  He told me about how he’d come home and found her dead. A month ago, he said. Natural causes, he said. She’d had a heart condition. The lie flowed out of him as smooth as cream. He held my eyes as he told me his story, as he gently criticized himself for the flaws he’d given her. He spun a tale of himself heroically trying to handle the baby on his own for an entire month before breaking down and coming to me, and he didn’t trip over a single word of it.

  He lied to me with ease, and as he did, I saw the weave of the cloth he’d been cut from. This was the man I knew, after all.

  I interrupted
him before he could go into further detail about the “heart condition.” I didn’t want to make him dance for me, didn’t want to see the routine he’d been practicing. I just wanted it to be over. “What do you need?” I asked, the words coming out sharp and abrupt. I didn’t intend it to be cruel but it was, it was terribly cruel, and I saw how it hurt him.

  “I don’t know how to do this,” he whispered. “I don’t—I don’t know anything about babies. I thought I did, but since Violet was born I’ve been learning it all fresh. Like this,” he said, shifting the baby’s weight between his arms again. “I don’t know how to hold her right. I’ve been trying to figure it out all month, I even looked it up on—on my phone.” He laughed. “Can you believe we don’t have a computer in the house? I didn’t even think about it, I always just use the one at work, but there’s no computer in the house. Isn’t that crazy?”

  It took an effort to swallow the sip of tea that was in my mouth. It went down like an overlarge pill. Of course there was no computer in the house. The original Nathan wouldn’t have wanted Martine to be able to use the internet, to learn about the way her life could be. He hadn’t even given her books to read, and it wasn’t out of neglect the way I’d assumed it was. He’d walled her up in a tower. The door wasn’t locked, but he’d kept her trapped in her ignorance. It was by design.

  This Nathan didn’t know that—couldn’t know. But the boundary between the original Nathan and the new one blurred together in my mind for a brief, furious moment, and I forgot that he truly had no idea. He’s lying again, I thought, pretending he didn’t do this to her on purpose, and I felt a buzzing rage deep in my bones and I knew that the original Nathan had been right about me. A hornet, he’d called me, full of hate and venom, and he’d been right because I looked across the table at the new Nathan and all I wanted to do was sting, sting, sting until he fell down swollen and dead.

  I hadn’t intended to be cruel when I asked this new Nathan what he needed from me. I hadn’t intended to hurt him then. But I wanted to hurt him now. “Don’t you have any friends you can ask?” I spread some butter on the “any,” made it heavy.

  It hit him exactly as I’d hoped it would. He looked down into his tea, took another sip, grimaced. “No one with kids,” he said, lying again, lying the way he always had. He would tell me truths that were true enough, that weren’t quite lies, and here he was, unwilling to confess his isolation to me.

  Inside, I was smiling like a cat. I knew precisely how weak he was, knew the taste of his misery—but just at that moment, Violet let out a noise like the legs of a dining-room chair scraping against the floor, and reality clicked back into place. This was not the old Nathan. This was a new man, one who didn’t deserve to be hurting, any more than he’d deserved to die when Martine wanted to kill him.

  I’d put him there, after all. I’d made him into the man he was, and I’d put him into that house. It wasn’t fair of me to be so callous. It wasn’t fair of me to want him to hurt like this.

  I tried to listen to him, this Nathan who had never been my husband. I tried not to interrupt, not to press. It was so hard, looking at this man who thought he had betrayed me, who thought he had ever loved me enough to stop loving me. Watching him hold his impossible baby the wrong way. I tried, but everything was fogged over by the shape of his mouth, the rise of his knuckles, the dip of his throat.

  Everything about him was Nathan, and everything about me was a hornet, and I could not keep myself from hating him.

  “Anyway,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m doing, and I need help. I know you never wanted children, but … I’m on my own, Evelyn. I can’t do this on my own.”

  I shrugged. “Make another one,” I said. “You did it right on the first try. Well, almost right, except for the heart condition.” He only looked away from me at the last two words. Those were the only ones he knew to be untrue.

  “No,” he said slowly. “No, I can’t make another one. I’ll understand if this seems impossible to you, but … I loved Martine. I can’t just replace her.”

  It hurt so much that it snatched the breath from my lungs, hurt so much I wanted to turn into stone right there. But I wasn’t made of stone, I was just bones and fingernails and undrinkable water.

  Maybe that’s why I couldn’t stop myself from saying the weak, foolish, plaintive thing. “But you replaced me.”

  He shook his head. “Please,” he said. “Let’s not do this now.”

  The burn of tears struck my eyes like an open-handed slap. I blinked them back, telling myself that I could digest this later. I could save it in my snake-belly, the agony of the if-then with which Nathan had presented me: If you are loved, then you cannot be replaced.

  “Sure,” I said. “Never mind. It’s not important.” My voice came out raw. I slipped a hand under the table and dug my fingertips hard into the meat of my thigh, pushing bruise-deep until the muscle cramped. I swallowed a gasp at the pain, smoothed my face, dragged my gaze back to him. “What do you need, Nathan?”

  He stammered his way through it, an entirely unreasonable request. One that was based in his constant certainty that I would, someday, change my mind about wanting children. He had always acted as though my decision not to have a baby were a temporary lapse, a delay. He had always assumed that all women came with an innate understanding of and desire for children—at least, the old Nathan had—and so it was not a surprise to me when he asked if I would help him raise Violet.

  It was a surprise to him, I suspect, when I said yes.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-TWO

  When I was a child, the city felt endlessly far away. I would sit in my bedroom with the window open and strain to hear a car, looking out over the treetops and knowing that the city was beyond the distant hills that formed the horizon. I knew that my father worked in the city during the day, but I didn’t know how long a commute could be—I only knew that he had one.

  I didn’t know, then, the precise duration of the drive from my parents’ house to the city. And as an adult who lived in that city, I didn’t have a sense of that distance either. Not really. I knew that it was about fifty miles, but I didn’t know the way those miles would feel passing under me. I’d never driven them, never visited that house. I left it when I went to boarding school, and I didn’t look back.

  I never wondered why my mother hadn’t sold it. I never encouraged her to, either. The risk of a new owner digging up the garden was simply too high. Just as she’d said on the phone, I was supposed to inherit the house. I might have been able to sell it, in the event of her death, or I might have simply had no choice but to keep it, to maintain it, to hold my parents’ secrets in trust until my own death. I imagine I would have neglected the house, would have let the garden become overgrown and rotten. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to live there, in the time before Martine.

  But things are different now. I know the feel of those fifty miles, the way they disappear underneath me as the road goes from eight lanes to four lanes to two. The buildings shrink and the trees grow thicker as I near the place where city becomes town. The dominant color of the landscape goes from gray to green, until the corners I turn are bounded only by dense undergrowth.

  If I make the drive while the sun is still up, I can see the way the light shines through the gaps where the trees don’t touch. Crown shyness, that’s called—the branches try not to touch each other, and their leaves grow to avoid competition for sunlight.

  If I make the drive when the sun is down, I do it more slowly. The road, about twenty-five miles in, begins to curve wildly, and I never know which bend will reveal a deer or a rabbit. I drive more slowly, because if I brake too hard, the baby in the backseat will wake.

  At first, I’d been prepared to deliver the killing no. I was going to refuse Nathan, and I was going to drink his failure down like cool water. He had betrayed me, betrayed our marriage, betrayed my work in order to get himself a baby, and I was ready to make him lie alone in the bed he’d ma
de. That “no” may have been vindictive and venomous of me, but in that moment after he asked for my help, I could taste blood. I wanted more.

  But then I’d heard a soft creak from upstairs, and everything came together all at once.

  My agreement with Nathan is simple. I bring the baby to him for a weeklong visit, one week out of every five. That’s as long as he needs, to feel like he’s still involved, to feel like he’s a good father. He still holds her awkwardly, still struggles to understand her development and her habits. I’ve taken to giving him the books that Martine finishes. He’s catching up slowly.

  I take no small satisfaction from the knowledge that she learns more quickly than he does.

  Nathan thinks that I have found some deep well of maternal instinct. He thinks that I take the baby with me to my distant outpost, a lab in the country where I do grant-funded research.

  He has never asked me for more detail on my work, but if he did, I would tell him the truth: I’m researching clone longevity. I’m looking into the reasons why their tissue decays so much more slowly than the tissue of a normal human. I’m looking into the ways one might alter a clone’s programming, to let the subject take naps during the day.

  I’m trying to find out how a clone could possibly change as quickly as Martine did, once the original Nathan was dead. She bucked some aspects of her programming far too easily, and now that I’ve had time to think about it, I can see that for what it is: useful data. It had never occurred to me that a clone could do that, and so I never looked into methods of making the programming process more ironclad.

  I finally took that meeting with my lab director.

  My research focus has shifted. My grant funding has increased.

  And now, I have an entirely private lab in which to carry out my work. I never have to do anything for the sake of appearances, never have to appease a lab director or erect a screen to hide challenging visuals from a board chair. I can just work.