The Echo Wife Read online

  I took a sip of my drink. It was too hot. I took another sip, letting it scald my throat.

  “I wanted to ask you some things,” Martine said, then looked down into her mug. “But first, I hope you’ll forgive me if I step away for a moment? I got here a bit early and my tea has just run right through me.”

  I was about to say that I didn’t mind. I was thinking that of course I didn’t mind, that Martine could get up and leave whenever she wanted, that Martine could take a running leap off a high bridge for all I cared. But before I had the chance to say anything, Martine pushed away from the table and stood, and the sight of her standing up stole my breath from my throat.

  Martine gave me a small smile, then walked off to the restroom, one hand smoothing her blouse over her slightly rounded belly.

  I finally managed a soft “Oh.”

  So that’s what she wanted to talk about.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  Martine was not the cause of my worst fight with Nathan.

  That fight, the worst one we ever had, happened years before she existed. Before Nathan and I were married, even. We had been working together, then, for two years, and had been dating for three. We already shared a home, a research lab, and—I thought—a dream.

  Then I got pregnant, and I found out how wrong I’d been.

  He didn’t go with me to the clinic, not because he didn’t want to, but because I didn’t tell him I was going. I can own that mistake: I should have told him that I wasn’t going to keep the baby, should have made it explicit. We had been working together for long enough that I knew Nathan struggled to grasp obvious concepts, and I should have applied that knowledge to myself the same way I applied it to pipette distribution and sensible glove disposal.

  I suppose, on some level, I hoped that I wouldn’t have to tell him every little thing all the time—I suppose I hoped that there would be something, anything, that he would understand without me spelling it out.

  But somehow, Nathan didn’t understand that a baby would destroy our dreams, would ruin the career that we had been building. Even though he’d known me for three years, even though he’d seen my endless hours of work, even though he knew how close I was to making a name for myself in the field—in spite of all that, he failed to see that I would never keep that baby. He failed to see that my career was all the legacy I would ever need.

  I got home from the clinic, unsteady on my feet and nauseated, to find him waiting with a bottle of sparkling cider. He told me his good news: He’d accepted a job as an assistant professor on an accelerated tenure track. He told me he would be able to support our family, that I could put work on hold for a couple of years.

  The fight was endless, cruel on both sides. He blamed me for his decision to throw away his own ambition in favor of “stability.” I told him that he was a coward, seeking refuge in the comfort of a child who would admire him without question, and colleagues who would never know how sloppy and useless his labwork was, how limited his dreams were. He yelled at me, knocked over a chair, clenched his fists and looked at me like he was going to put them to use.

  I vomited a thin stream of yellow bile onto the kitchen table, my head swimming, my vision spotted with white sparks.

  He threw a roll of paper towels into my lap, called me selfish. I threw them back at his head, calling him naïve.

  It was awful.

  The fight itself was bad enough, but the timing was catastrophic. I could barely hold my own after the day I’d had. Part of me wanted him to hit me, wanted him to make it the worst it could be—but instead he stormed outside for a cigarette. I waited for half an hour before I realized he wasn’t coming back.

  By the time he came home, I’d cleaned off the kitchen table, taken a scalding shower, and gone to bed. He woke me by turning on the lamp on my nightstand and saying my name.

  “Evelyn, wake up,” he said, his voice soft and calm, his hand gentle on my back. I remember the way my skull throbbed, his scotch-and-cigarette stink seeming to pulse in time with the pain in my temples.

  Nathan told me that he was sorry.

  If I had been in better condition, or maybe if I hadn’t been so recently asleep, that apology would have started our fight afresh. Nathan always apologized to try to make me feel guilty for having been angry with him, or to make me back down from a point.

  It was cowardly, his apology, and if I’d been myself I would have told him so.

  But I didn’t tell him so, and in that silent space where my hornet’s sting should have gone, he told me that he loved me. He set a ring down on the nightstand—no box, just the ring, pinched between his thumb and middle finger. He put it down with a tiny click of metal on wood, then walked out of the room without saying a word about it.

  I heard the squeal of the bathroom tap, the hiss of the shower running. I tried the ring on as I listened to the water rushing through the old pipes in the walls of our tiny apartment. The narrow band was yellow gold, set with two emeralds, and it was not so tight that I could say it didn’t fit.

  I fell asleep with the ring on. In the morning, I startled at the way it caught the light.

  The worst fight we ever had, and it ended with our engagement.

  After that, Nathan and I never really argued over whether or not to have children. We stopped arguing all together; arguing would have required me to engage in conversation beyond the word “no.”

  He started agitating anew for a baby shortly before he got tenure, and I told him that I didn’t intend to put my career aside just because he was bored by his, and that was the end of that. It never came up again.

  We had agreed.

  Or at least, that’s what I thought, until that day in the tea shop.

  * * *

  I waited until Martine was out of sight before allowing myself to collapse into a parenthesis. But I only gave myself a few seconds to slump in my chair before straightening; it wouldn’t do to have Martine see me in a posture of defeat.

  It wasn’t possible.

  Martine was pregnant. Not very pregnant, but definitely, absolutely pregnant. Impossible, completely impossible, there was simply no way—but it was right there in the soft swell of her belly.

  Martine couldn’t be pregnant.

  Martine was pregnant.

  Later, I would kick myself for losing my composure. I should have kept it together. But when Martine came back and sat down, it was still the first thing I said.

  “This is impossible.”

  She offered me an opportunity to repair the moment, acting as though I hadn’t said anything, trying to pick up the conversation where we had left off.

  “As I said—”

  But I cut her off. “It isn’t possible,” I repeated. I knew that I was speaking too loudly, but I couldn’t stop myself. I leaned across the table, gripped by feral disbelief. “You can’t get pregnant, you can’t, it’s not—” I cut myself off midsentence, lost in my own indignation.

  Martine’s cheeks lifted into a Mona Lisa smile as she rested a palm on her solar plexus. “I am. So, I suppose that I can.”

  I shook my head, staring openly at Martine’s midsection. “It’s impossible,” I whispered. “It’s impossible.” I ran numbers in my head, reviewed data, tried to find the place where I’d failed, but I couldn’t find the hole that had let this through. How? How? How?

  Martine’s face didn’t harden, not exactly. It set, though, just like an egg yolk firming from easy to medium. She was still open, still welcoming, but I was spending her goodwill at a rapid pace, and it showed.

  “I wanted to ask you some questions,” she started again, but I held up a hand. I couldn’t do questions. I couldn’t do anything until I figured out how this had happened—where my work had unraveled. How she had undermined it so thoroughly.

  “You don’t understand,” I said, trying to buy time.

  “I understand perfectly,” Martine said, her voice one degree above cool.

  “No,” I snapped, as impatien
t with her as I ever got with the incompetent assistants I’d run through before Seyed. “You don’t understand. Nathan could go to prison. I could go to prison. This is—this is highly unethical, this is illegal, this is—”

  “A miracle,” Martine said. Her smile was beatific. She was glowing. I wanted to incinerate her.

  “No,” I hissed, looking around the room. “You can’t be pregnant. Clones can’t get pregnant.”

  Martine smoothed her blouse over her belly again. “It would seem,” she said, her smile fading, “that we can.”

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  The remainder of my tea date with Martine had not gone well. I’ve never liked the idea of “needing” a drink—it made me feel too much like my father—but if there was any time that felt like the right time to bend to “needing” a drink, it was now.

  I jabbed a pair of scissors into the packing tape sealing a cardboard box, three layers of it. The scissors sank through the packing tape and into the tissue paper inside with a satisfying finality. There was something absolute in the sensation of driving the blade into the box, something primal and honest. I sliced through the tape, then yanked at the cardboard, tearing some of it with the strength of my grip. All around me, other boxes labeled KITCHEN were half-dissected, paper and bubble wrap streaming out of their open tops.

  When it became clear that Nathan was going to stay with Martine, I had hired a service to pack up my things. The service was cheap, but it had labeled the boxes by room, which was useful. The movers hadn’t made any small talk, hadn’t asked any questions; they’d just come in and wrapped everything I owned in gray paper, sealed up the boxes with what seemed like too much tape, and taken a check from me without any fanfare at all.

  I plunged my arm down into the nest of packing paper and felt the thrill of victory as my fingers met with cool, thick glass. Finally. I withdrew my arm, my fist clasped tight around the neck of a dark-green wine bottle. I twisted my elbow to read the label. It wasn’t a special bottle of wine, wasn’t one I’d been saving for any kind of occasion. It was just the first one I found in the mountain of still-packed kitchen things, which meant that it was perfect. Another dive into the same box surfaced a corkscrew with a folding knife attached to cut through the foil on the neck of the bottle, and I uncorked the wine with savage urgency.

  In hindsight, I don’t know why I ever thought he wouldn’t choose her. She was perfect—everything he wanted. He made her that way. He must have thought he’d never have to decide between us, but when it came down to it, she was the thing he wanted.

  It wasn’t just that Martine was pregnant. That was hard to take in, sure, but it would have been hard no matter what, even if she’d just been some woman Nathan had run off with. Even if she’d been a fling he’d had, the pregnancy would have stung—the permanence of it, the undeniable evidence of his betrayal.

  But it wasn’t that.

  Martine shouldn’t have been able to get pregnant.

  It shouldn’t have been possible.

  Nathan had somehow found a way to circumvent the sterility that was built in to the entire framework of duplicative cloning. It was one of the things that made my work legal and ethical: each duplicative clone was an island, incapable of reproduction, isolated and, ultimately, disposable. It was bedrock.

  Clones don’t have families.

  But somehow, Nathan—Nathan, the coward, the failure, who had abandoned industry for academia nearly a decade before, who shouldn’t have been able to even approach the level of work I was doing—somehow, Nathan had found a way to undermine that principle. To undermine my principles.

  If only it could have just been those things. If it had just been those things, I could have kept my composure. If it had just been those things, I wouldn’t have said what I said.

  But no. It was everything, all of it together, all at once. None of this was happening to me suddenly, but it still felt like a slap. I poured wine into the same mug I’d been hand-washing and reusing for the week prior. I didn’t bother putting the cork back into the bottle—I just sat down on the floor with the mug full of wine clutched in both hands.

  I drank fast, not registering the taste. A text message to Seyed—not feeling well, be home the rest of today, see you tomorrow—and another drink, slower this time. I set my phone on the floor next to my knee, leaned my head back against the wall, and forced myself to look the thing right in the face.

  What broke me ran deeper than the professional insult, deeper than the knowledge that Nathan had gotten Martine pregnant while we were still living under the same roof. What broke me was the knowledge that, as it turned out, he hadn’t just created Martine to exercise a fantasy. He hadn’t just created her to be an easier version of his wife, a version who had the time and patience for him that I didn’t have.

  I’d known that part already, the part about how Martine was a more navigable rendition of me. I’d absorbed that blow months before, when I first found her, during the screaming sobbing fights that defined the end of my marriage. But now, this new facet: Apparently, Nathan had created Martine to do what I wouldn’t do for him. What I’d refused outright, what I’d gone to great lengths to prevent. What I thought he’d stopped wanting a long time ago, when I’d made it clear that I wasn’t going to budge.

  Nathan had created Martine so that he could have a family.

  I thought he’d given up on all that. But as it turned out, he hadn’t given up on that dream at all. He had just given up on me.

  I drank wine down like medicine and I tried not to regret the things I’d said to Martine. I tried not to feel the cruelty of my words. It had been wrong to say the things I said, I knew that, but it had felt good in the way that vomiting felt good sometimes. It had felt right, getting that poison out of my belly.

  You’re not even a real person.

  You’re just a science experiment.

  You’re just a declawed version of me.

  Martine had looked hurt. Shocked, even. It probably wasn’t in her framework to say things that were cruel just for the sake of saying them. Nathan wouldn’t have put that into her patterning. It was one of the things he’d always hated about me. My “needless venom,” he’d called it. “You’re like a hornet,” he’d told me dozens of times, “stinging just because you can.”

  After I left Martine at the tea shop, I sat on the floor of my condo with only that wine bottle for company, digging deep into the bruise.

  I could have turned away from it, but I was feeling flattened and sad, and, masochistically, I wanted to feel sadder. I wanted to get all the way to the bottom of the hurt, to let the weight of it crush the breath from my lungs. So I let myself curl up around it.

  I thought that if I could just cry, maybe I could let go of the anger that had driven me to say such awful things to Martine. I meant the things I said, that was the worst part. Even the cruelest thing, the thing I knew I’d said only because I couldn’t bite it back in time: Why do you think you exist? What are you even for?

  Martine had rested her hands on her belly, taking the stream of abuse with placid neutrality, until that last one. Her face had crumpled, and I stormed out, not wanting to see my clone shed the tears that I hadn’t been able to muster.

  Toward the end of our marriage, Nathan had switched from calling me a hornet to the simpler, more straightforward mode of calling me a bitch. The former stuck with me more than the latter. Partly because it was more unique: I’d been called a bitch any number of times, occasionally for good reason.

  Nathan hadn’t been calling me a bitch for any good reason—he had been calling me a bitch the way a cornered dog growls, hoping it will seem bigger if it makes a noise.

  I’m embarrassed, still, by how long it took me to notice. Everything was right there in the open, right there in front of me, but it still took me so long to see the person I had married.

  It took me so long to hate him.

  Now, I pressed the bruise again and again—the way Martine’s c
hin buckled, the way her forehead had ruched into an expression of bewildered hurt. The way her hands had flown from her stomach and settled on the table.

  Shame. That’s the thing I had wanted Martine to feel in that moment, and I succeeded. I watched shame sink into the furrows of a face that was exactly, precisely my own, and I felt satisfaction.

  The tears still wouldn’t come. It was the same emptiness I’d been trying to work with since I first felt that twist in my belly, staring at my own signature on the sequencing result I got from her errant hair.

  My eyes burned, and a pit yawned open at the hollow of my throat, but the tears wouldn’t spill over.

  I ran a hand through my hair and let out a long, slow breath. I needed to cry, but every time I got close, something old and deep in my bones echoed a familiar refrain: Quit crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about.

  I couldn’t overcome that directive, no matter how hard I tried.

  Another failure.

  My phone, still on the floor where I’d left it after texting Seyed, lit up. Nathan Caldwell, the screen said. I knew that if I didn’t answer, I would have to listen to one of his long, rambling voicemails later—no matter how many times I’d told him to just text me, he insisted on leaving messages that were needlessly descriptive and detailed. If I didn’t pick up, I would have to delete it later, would have to decide whether or not to call him back. I clenched my jaw and answered.

  The first thing I heard was heavy breathing, wet and ragged. A cough on the other end, a whining intake of breath. This was not Nathan. This was something else. “Who is this?”

  “Evelyn?” The voice was not light, was not airy and nonthreatening. It was hoarse, almost a growl. “It’s me. It’s Martine.”

  “Are you okay?” I said it automatically—the raw edge of Martine’s voice wicked concern up out of me unbidden.

  “Something’s happened. At the house. I need you to come here, please. Now. It’s—it’s an emergency. Please.”