by Sarah Gailey
Thirty-five miles outside the city—fifteen miles from the house where I spent my silent, careful childhood—the trees are so thick that there’s no parallax. The road is bounded on either side by a wall of green that rises up as dense and wild as a threat. I wonder if, when Violet is a little older, she’ll be scared of those woods. For now, her visual acuity is too poor for her to even recognize the trees. I learned that from Martine: the baby can recognize faces, but she can’t recognize forests yet.
She knows that I’m not her mother, too. She can recognize the difference between me and Martine. I’m not sure how—Martine could probably tell me—but she’s different with the two of us. She sleeps on Martine’s chest, laughs at the noises Martine makes. When I hold her, she’s still, quiet, a little tense. With me, she perches on the edge of crying, but doesn’t tip over into it.
She doesn’t make sounds until she’s in Martine’s arms.
The trees thin out again forty-five miles outside the city. There’s a little town there, mostly small houses. There’s a grocery store and a gas station and a post office and a sheriff’s office. The road straightens. There are stop signs, five of them, and then an orchard. We drive between rows of water-lined apple trees, their trunks scored at the place where the fields flood during irrigation, their branches twisted like something out of a children’s book. Martine has designs on apple-picking, eventually. I tell her we’ll see. I tell her that often.
I don’t intend to keep her hidden away, the way Nathan did. I just don’t have a plan yet for how to let her out into the world, for how to give her the freedoms she wants without endangering all of us. I’ll get it figured out, though, in time. I just need to focus on my research for right now. She understands.
Past the orchard, the road narrows even further. It turns sharply left, then right, and then we’re there.
We’re home.
Violet almost always wakes when the car begins to crunch over the gravel of the long driveway. I drive over it slowly, passing between roses. Some of them are old and tangled, the bushes that my mother tended, but they’ve grown stubborn and leggy in her absence. Some of them are new, Martine’s, grown from cuttings she asked me to bring her.
I try to bring her whatever she asks for, within reason.
Violet is always awake by the time I park the car, all the way at the end of the driveway. She doesn’t cry right away, just makes little snuffling noises, soft vocalizations, like practice for talking. Once I lift her out of her car seat, she quiets, goes silent and watchful the way she always does in my arms. I carry her on one side, carry my handbag on the other.
I’m better at holding her than Nathan is.
It’s the same every time I bring her back from one of her visits with the man who thinks he’s her father. I park the car, and I get the baby from the backseat, and by the time the car is locked again, the front door to the house is open. Martine stands silhouetted there, waiting for us, her hands clasped tightly in front of her. She waits as we walk up the path to the door, white-knuckled, eager.
I give Violet to her right away. Regardless of what it is convenient for Nathan to think, I am not eager to spend more time holding the baby than necessary. And Martine can hardly stand to be apart from Violet for an entire week; she frets and frays the entire time the baby is gone. It’s better for everyone this way. I hand her the baby, and she smiles, occasionally cries a little.
Then we go inside, and we close the front door behind us, and we are alone together, the three of us.
Martine has made the house into a place I can bear to live. It’s nice, the things she’s done with it. I brought her here a month ahead of my own move, let her settle in and get the place ready while I wrapped things up at home and negotiated my transition at work. It was a relief, really, unburdening myself of incompetent assistants and nagging oversight and labyrinthine ethical reviews.
I used the same service to pack up my house that I had used a year before. They remembered me.
By the time I moved to the house fifty miles outside the city, Martine had turned it into something like a home. She’d uncovered all the furniture, rearranged most of it, beaten out the carpets and divested the rafters of cobwebs. She’d even gotten into the garden a bit. I warned her to leave the northwest corner alone, the part of the garden that came closest to the walls of the house, and she didn’t ask me why. She just listened.
She doesn’t touch that part of the garden, and she doesn’t touch the study.
When I get home, I give her Violet. This is the bargain Martine and I have struck: While the baby is home, they can spend as much time together as Martine wants to take. Whenever Violet is awake, they’re together, and I don’t interfere, not much. I have my work to attend to, anyway.
And when Violet is asleep, or at her father’s house, Martine’s time is mine. That’s what I proposed to her, when I found myself in a position to deny Nathan my help. “No more fugue state nonsense,” I told her. “You’ll snap out of this Havisham shit. You’ll be a real person again, yes?”
She’d nodded, her brow knit, her fingers twisting together so tight that I looked away. “Yes, of course, anything,” she said.
I’d folded my hands in front of me, because that was the word I’d wanted to hear. Anything. And it’s worked out beautifully for everyone. Violet gets to be around her mother for weeks at a time, and Martine gets to see her baby. I get a tireless research assistant and a cooperative research subject all in one.
I’m going to figure out how Martine happened. I’m going to figure out how Nathan made a fertile clone, and I’m going to figure out how she broke her programming. We’re already making great strides.
I walk through the bottom of the house while they greet each other. I listen to the soft noises they make at each other, the low conversation Martine has with the baby she thought she would never get back after leaving Nathan behind. The house smells like food, usually—Martine cooks while I drive to the city and back. She likes to have dinner ready by the time I get home, likes to have a fire lit.
The old couch in the living room is gone. There’s a new one, a couch that I bought. There isn’t a single memory attached to it. I don’t think about it at all, and the not-thinking-about-it is a relief I cannot begin to describe.
I get home, and I walk through the bottom story of the house I grew up in, the one Martine has turned into a place for the three of us. At night, I walk up the stairs, planting my feet in the center of each step, and go to our bedroom to sleep. The baby is in my childhood bedroom, now a nursery, decorated to Martine’s tastes. Martine and I are in my parent’s old bedroom, a new mattress on an old bedframe, and at night, we sleep with our backs to each other. Sometimes I wake up in the night and hear her breathing; more often, I wake up and can’t hear her breathing at all. I can’t hear it because it’s too perfectly synced with my own.
Between coming home and going to bed, though, I need to work. There’s so much to do, so much to learn. I’m working on setting up an actual lab in the backyard shed—it won’t be nearly the same quality as the one I fought so hard for, but it’s mine, just mine, and it will have to do. Some of the hacked-together qualities of it remind me of my grad school days, the rickety old equipment and hand-me-down machines. It’s romantic, really.
While I get the lab into shape, though, and while Martine and Violet are cooing at each other, there’s still work to do. So much work. And so, once Martine has the baby in her arms, I proceed directly to my study.
I sit behind the desk, now, not in front of it. I’ve removed my father’s things, replaced them with my own. His pens and notepads and paperweights sit in a box in the corner of the room—I’ll sort through them later, when there’s time. When more pressing matters have been dealt with.
I sit in my study, and I close the door. Martine knows not to disturb me while I’m working, unless it’s to bring me dinner. I try not to work through dinner too often—we sit at the dining table, eat together like a family shou
ld. But sometimes, I have no other choice, and Martine brings me a warm plate to keep me going as I work. She knows to be quiet while I’m working, too, and to keep the baby as quiet as she can. She knows I need to be able to concentrate.
There is one exception to this rule. Once a week—every week, no matter what—Martine puts the baby down for the night, then knocks on the door to my study. I tell her to come in, and she does, and she sits in the chair on the other side of my desk. She brings a notepad with her. It’s filled with questions, every time. Questions about things she’s been reading, things she doesn’t understand or hasn’t quite put together yet, things I’ve done to her in the course of my research.
This time, once a week, is her time to ask those questions. I answer her as best I can. My father’s hourglass is in the box in the corner. I have no need of the hourglass, because Martine gets more than an hour from me. I answer her questions until the answering’s done, or until the baby wakes.
I’m not a monster.
It’s a good life we’ve made here. I have my work, and my space. Martine has Violet. We may not know many people, but it’s all right. We’re happy here, in this home we’ve made.
It’s better this way. We’re better this way. We have everything we need.
The more I think about it, the more I’m sure that there’s no reason at all why things should ever have to change.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Traditionally, this section of the book is a place for expressions of gratitude. This book, I think, needs something different from gratitude—it needs acknowledgments in the truest sense of the word. There are things that need to be accounted for. As I look at the book I have written, I feel that it would be dishonest not to recognize those who brought it into the world. To say “thank you” to some of the people here would be wholly inadequate; to say “thank you” to some of them would be wholly fraudulent.
Here are the people without whom this book would not be possible:
The adult man who groomed and abused me in my teens and early twenties, who put his fingers onto the still-warm plastic of my brain and gripped tight as he could, who shaped me into someone who understood harm to be a form of love;
Those who encouraged him, covered for him, protected him, and benefited from his actions;
Those who helped me escape him when the time came;
Those who stuck with me, and those who could not;
The therapist who told me that I could have a self;
The pastor who shared a cigar with me and told me not to get a motorcycle;
The church community that welcomed me, loved me, drained me, and eventually left no place for me;
The incredibly kind man who I married, and those who loved and cared for us both when that marriage came to an end;
The friends who helped me navigate the time when I had no center;
The friend who bought me a last-minute bathing suit and inhaled a feather boa with me;
My literary agent and friend, DongWon Song, who loved this book when it was just an idea;
My brilliant editor, Miriam Weinberg, who gave that idea a home and made it richer than I ever could on my own;
The bartenders at Angel Face in Portland, who taught me to love whiskey as I bulldozed my way through the first draft of a book about abuse and grooming and identity;
The therapist who told me that what happened to me was wrong;
The friends who read early drafts and middling drafts and late drafts, whose encouragement is my bedrock;
The entire team at Tor, who have nurtured and advocated for this book with unparalleled brilliance;
The friends who supported me when my body stopped working;
The health-care professionals who helped me to get on my feet again;
The partners who were kind and patient, and the partners who weren’t;
The partner who tried to put his own fingerprints on my brain, and who showed me that I could be angry at someone for trying to hurt me;
The therapist who told me I could face memories I didn’t feel brave enough for;
The writing community that has supported and critiqued me and my work;
The queer community that has shown me patience and kindness and stubborn compassion;
The booksellers and librarians who have put my work into the hands of readers;
The partner who showed me what kindness and family can be;
The beautiful home and family that’s grown around us;
And more than anyone, the readers. All of it is for you.
* * *
Harm is not a form of love, and your home does not have to be a place of fear. If you or someone you know is a victim of domestic violence, there is help available 24 hours a day at the National Domestic Violence Hotline (1-800-799-SAFE) and the National Sexual Assault Helpline (1-800-656-HOPE). There are more resources available at https://ncadv.org/resources.
ALSO BY
SARAH GAILEY
Magic for Liars
American Hippo: River of Teeth, Taste of Marrow, and New Stories
Upright Women Wanted
When We Were Magic
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hugo Award–winning and bestselling author Sarah Gailey is an internationally published writer of fiction and nonfiction. Their nonfiction has been published by Mashable and The Boston Globe, and they won a Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. Their most recent fiction credits include Vice and The Atlantic. Their debut novella, River of Teeth, was a 2018 finalist for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Their bestselling adult novel debut, Magic for Liars, was published in 2019.
Visit her Online at sarahgailey.com, or sign up for email updates here.
Twitter: @gaileyfrey
Instagram: @gaileyfrey
goodreads.com/gaileyfrey
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Acknowledgments
Also by Sarah Gailey
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE ECHO WIFE
Copyright © 2021 by Sarah Gailey
All rights reserved.
Cover art and design by Will Staehle
Edited by Miriam Weinberg
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
120 Broadway
New York, NY 10271
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trade
mark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
ISBN 978-1-250-17466-6 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-81825-6 (Canadian)
ISBN 978-1-250-17465-9 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250174659
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First Edition: 2021
