The Echo Wife

by Sarah Gailey

  It was a mercy, in a way. The whirlwind of the evening had kept too many people from asking about Nathan. I didn’t think I could have stomached defending him, not to Lorna. Even if it was the right thing to do, professionally. It wouldn’t have been good for me to be seen bringing my personal life into my professional circles, damaging Nathan’s reputation in his academic ones. It would have been justified, but justification didn’t matter in situations like this; no, I needed to be careful.

  I had seen it a hundred times in the field that we’d chosen. I knew who always bore the weight of divorce. Nathan could afford all of this, would come out unscathed regardless of how clearly the entire situation was his fault. And no matter how obviously I was the wronged party, it would haunt me for the rest of my career if I slipped at all, even once, if I ever seemed hurt or angry or sad. I needed to maintain the moral high ground, which meant that if I was asked, I needed to insist that everything was fine. I was fine. Nathan and I were fine. Amicable.

  I did not want to be asked. The internal battle between doing the right thing and doing the honest thing and doing the tempting thing was an ongoing one, and I just wanted a break from it, just for one night. I wanted to hide.

  And there were so many hiding places in that crowd.

  Any other night, my story of the development of synthetic amniotic fluid alone could hold the right audience rapt for an hour at a stretch—but of course, this crowd didn’t want to hear about amniotic fluid, nor about the process of accelerating bone growth in nascent specimens without damaging skeletal integrity. No, this crowd knew about that work, had heard it all before. They wanted something different, something remarkable. They wanted to know about the work that had won me the Neufmann Prize.

  The process of taking an adult clone and writing their personality into their neurological framework: It was mine. All mine.

  Sleepless nights, research mishaps, hours and hours in the lab alone. Nobody cares about those solitary, devastating failures. They don’t want to hear about that—they’d rather hear the story of the eureka moment. And mine was good. “I was making eggs for breakfast,” I would tell them, “and I was watching the way they started cooking from the bottom up, and that’s when I figured it out: the key is to begin programming before the tissues of the hypothalamic nuclei have solidified. I ran to write down my breakthrough … and I completely forgot that the eggs were still on the stove. They burned so badly that we had to throw out the pan.”

  Things I never added to the story: the fact that Nathan had been the one to throw the pan into the trash, had been the one to open the kitchen windows to let the smoke out, had come into my study red-faced and shouting. The way he stormed out of the house without listening to my breakthrough. The way he didn’t come home for days. Was I supposed to use the word “husband” or “ex-husband” for that part of the story? I could never decide, so I always told the story as though I’d been making breakfast for myself.

  It was my breakthrough. It was my legacy, not ours. Nathan was already nostril-deep in academia then. It was all mine.

  The Caldwell Method had never been a thing we shared.

  “But aren’t you concerned about the developmental mottling of the limbic system in early stages?” This question from a man in rimless glasses and a wrinkled suit, another person I’d never met before. I fielded the question as if I didn’t chafe at the implications of such a basic objection to my methods. No, you asshole, I did not say, it never occurred to me to keep an eye on the fucking limbic system, what a breakthrough, here, take my grant money.

  Poise. Patience. Be nice, Evelyn.

  I answered questions, worked the crowd, took photographs. Someone asked me to sign a program, and I did, feeling ridiculous. I kept thinking that I wanted to go home, and then remembering that “home” didn’t really exist anymore. I just wanted to escape. Right up until the moment when it was time to do just that. That’s when I realized that leaving the suffocating press of the crowd would be the very worst thing in the world.

  But there was no choice. The night was finally over, and home was waiting. I climbed into the back of a black car with my award in one hand and my tiny, useless clutch purse in the other. I leaned my head against the window. Behind my eyes, the champagne-hum was already turning into a headache that would be devastating come morning. The streetlights that passed were blurry, haloed by the winter air. I tried to remember why that happened—ice crystals in the atmosphere? No, that was the thing that put a ring around the moon. Maybe it was something wrong in my own eyes, something that I should have recognized as a warning sign. Should have known, I’d say later. No one else ever mentioned halos around streetlights.

  It was past two o’clock in the morning by the time I walked in through the backyard of the little town house I’d rented, letting the gate slam shut behind me. I kicked my shoes off next to the sliding glass door and made an involuntary noise at the relief of standing flat-footed. The carpet was new, installed just before I signed the lease, and it was a mercy to curl my toes into something soft. I put the silver double helix down on my newly assembled flat-pack dining-room table.

  I’d put the table together just that morning, half an hour with an Allen wrench and an illustrated manual. It existed for the express purpose of holding two items: my award, and an inch-thick stack of papers bristling with sticky-note flags.

  Finding out what Nathan was doing should have been so much easier than it was. Once I started looking right at things, it was obvious. He had gone to no great lengths to hide her from me. His nightstand was littered with receipts—for clothes and jewelry that never made it to our house, and meals at restaurants I’d never had time to eat at. He didn’t bother to make excuses for late nights out, for strange bruises on his shoulders and scratches on his back. Was there ever lipstick on his collar? Did I ever pay close enough attention to find out?

  I don’t know if he thought I was too stupid to see what he was doing, or if it just didn’t matter to him that I might catch him.

  Now, I padded across the unfamiliar dining-room tile to the open galley-style kitchen and filled a coffee mug with water. Drank the whole thing, yes, must be responsible about hydration, then refilled it and took the mug back with me to the table. My belly sloshed uncomfortably with water.

  Now was as good a time as any, I figured. I’d sign the papers while I was still a little buzzed and riding high on the ego-flush of the evening. I’d get it over with, and in the morning, I probably wouldn’t even remember doing it.

  I fished a pen out of my leather shoulder bag, the one I took to work with me every day. It was big enough to fit a few shirts, a few pairs of underwear, a pair of slacks, a toothbrush. It was small enough that no one noticed I was living out of it, the week after I’d found out about Nathan. It wasn’t unusual for me to stay in the lab for a couple of hours after everyone else was gone, and no one commented on the way I was there before anyone else in the morning. No one had needed to know that I was sleeping in my office during that terrible week.

  I pressed the tip of my pen to the bottom of the first page, above the first yellow sticky flag, a line with my name on it. My married name. My name for good, since all my publications were under it. My doctorate had been issued to that name, even. I was so young when I married Nathan, so sure that he was good enough, that he was what I wanted. So sure that we’d go on to conquer the world together. So ready to give up the name I shared with my mother and my father. So ready to become someone new.

  My award glinted in my peripheral vision, the silver double helix shining in the fluorescent light from the kitchen. I put it on top of the thick stack of divorce papers and let the weight of it compress the pile.

  “Worth it,” I whispered to myself. I let the pen in my hand fall to the ground. I could sign the papers in the morning, with coffee and aspirin and whatever headache was waiting for me. I decided that I would lean right into the misery of it, make it a whole pathetic tableau.

  I walked upstairs and
wilted onto my bed, on top of the covers. I yanked at my gown until I felt the buttons between my shoulder blades pop off. I tugged the silk over my head and gasped at the feeling of freedom, my ribs expanding further than they’d been able to for hours.

  I could breathe. I could finally breathe.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  The weekend gave way to Monday like fog dissolving in sunlight. I drove to the lab with too much gratitude, embarrassingly relieved to be out of the little house I’d never wanted. The lab, by contrast, was something I’d wanted with the kind of mania some women reserve for childbearing.

  It had been an incredibly hard win. The Artemis Corporation hadn’t initially wanted to give me my own space for my research—they’d claimed that, without military contracts, my work was too controversial to be profitable. It took years of fighting to convince them that my work could have other applications, the kinds of applications that would bring in immeasurable profit from private sources. Years of measuring out the size of the waves I could afford to make. Waves just big enough to keep the conversation going, but not so big as to make me into a problem. Years of sharing my space with people who could never begin to understand the kind of work I was doing. Except for Seyed, of course. He always understood the work. He always understood me.

  But then, one day, the fighting was over, and the lab was built. Tempered glass tubes filled with artificial amniotic fluid, tables made of tungsten instead of steel or aluminum, a fume hood big enough to fit an adult specimen if necessary. I still had to fight over funding every year, of course, but maybe the Neufmann would change that. Maybe results would change that.

  Either way. My lab felt more like home than any iteration of home ever had.

  “Did you bring it?” Seyed never greeted me with a “hello.” He considered that kind of formality a waste of time. It was part of why I’d hired him in the first place.

  Seyed was already waist-deep in the fume hood. I couldn’t see him until after I went through the airlock, positive-pressure ventilation pulling a few strands of my hair loose—but I could, as usual, still hear him. He always started talking as soon as he heard the affirmative beeps of my entry code.

  Now, his muffled voice reverberated through the vents of the hood as I walked into my lab. “Of course I brought it,” I said, setting the Neufmann on a bare patch of lab table. “You’d quit if I didn’t.”

  Seyed emerged from the fume hood, scrub brush raised high, and yanked off the respirator that covered the lower half of his face. He was small, rail-thin but with a round face that made him look like an undergrad. A soul patch sat in the center of his chin, groomed with the great pride a man shows the only facial hair he can reliably produce. He stared at the silver double helix with a critical eye. “It’s smaller than I expected,” he said.

  I dropped my things on my desk and told him to get used to it. “You’ll have ten of them someday, if you keep practicing your fume hood maintenance.” He saluted me with a finger, pulled his respirator back on, and vanished into the fume hood again. “What are you doing in there, anyway?” I asked. “Did something explode?”

  “No,” he said, “not technically. Don’t worry about it, I ordered the replacement parts already.”

  I didn’t worry about it. I never worried about anything that Seyed told me not to worry about. Some of my colleagues would flinch at the idea of trusting an assistant the way I trusted Seyed, but he’d earned it. He was smart, sure, but anyone could be smart. I would never take on an assistant who wasn’t smart. I demanded more than smart—brilliance was the bare minimum required to keep up in my lab, and not keeping up wasn’t an option. Not keeping up was dangerous.

  Seyed was more than just brilliant. He was competent, independent, and fearless on a level that matched me pace for pace. I spotted it in him for the first time when Nathan brought him home for dinner, when he was a graduate student threatening to become Nathan’s protégé. The questions he asked me about my research that night went well beyond polite interest. His teeth were sharp and he was hungry, too hungry to be satisfied by the kind of growth Nathan could offer him.

  I told him so, that night, and then I offered him a job where he could flourish, and that was that. I don’t remember if Nathan was upset or not. I suppose that, by then, I’d stopped paying attention to that kind of thing.

  Most of the time, it was just the two of us working together, and it was easily the best working partnership I’d ever been half of. I trusted Seyed’s judgment like I trusted my own. I trusted him without question.

  So I didn’t bother looking into the fume hood to see what he was doing. Instead, I grabbed a clipboard from the side of a specimen tank and started reviewing nutrient updates, as recorded by the weekend intern I’d never wanted to hire. I hated trusting data collection to someone other than Seyed or myself, but there were labor laws to consider.

  The subject in the tank, 4896-T, was eight days into the growth process and was already recognizable as an adult humanoid. She appeared to be progressing well, but her HGH levels were uneven, which was concerning. I eyed the major muscle groups on the subject’s thighs, looking for signs of atrophy—the only visible indicator of the compartment syndrome that would result from the subject’s muscle growth outpacing the flexibility of her other tissues.

  Of course, if there was atrophy, it was already too late to fix the problem. If there wasn’t atrophy, it would be tough to tell if there was any compartment syndrome at all without getting involved in some seriously invasive diagnostic procedures. Those procedures would interfere with the programming process significantly enough to make the subject useless for research purposes, and the waste would be a nightmare to justify when I was trying to get my budget for the next year locked down. I tapped my pen against my clipboard, mentally flipping through options.

  It was a habit Nathan hated—the way I drummed out a beat while I was thinking. It was an indulgence I allowed myself only in my own lab, now, where he had never once set foot. It felt like a stolen luxury, a finger dragged through the frosting on an uncut cake.

  “You missed a call,” Seyed said, interrupting my rhythm. I tamped down irritation: it wasn’t his fault that I hadn’t found the answer to the HGH problem before he finished his work. I didn’t bother to school my face to stillness as I turned toward him, though. I didn’t have to do that with Seyed. He would commence giving a shit about my emotions the moment I raised them as a subject of concern, and not a second sooner. Inside my lab, I could afford to frown.

  “Congratulations, I suppose? I won’t be returning those calls,” I said.

  Seyed emerged from the fume hood with a bundle of rags. He held the rags at arms’ length, walked them to the red biohazard bin next to the autoclave, and dropped them in along with his elbow-length gloves. With his bare hands he removed his respirator and, after a moment’s consideration, dropped it into the bin too. “Someone named ‘Martine.’”

  The metal edges of the clipboard dug into the soft meat of my fingers.

  I forced myself to loosen my grip. I replaced the clipboard, carefully threading the hole in the metal tab over the plastic hook that was affixed to the glass of the tank. The clipboard clicked against the glass, and the specimen in the tube twitched. I flinched. “Seyed, please do me a favor and line each clipboard in this lab with felt. Any neutral color. Back and edges.”

  “You got it,” Seyed said, scrubbing his hands to the elbows with antimicrobial soap. “Deadline?”

  “End of day,” I called over my shoulder, not looking back for confirmation.

  I walked to the lab phone. There was a trash can on the floor next to it, which held messages—one of the many ways in which Seyed had streamlined the systems in the lab since I hired him. The legal pad next to the phone was dominated by a running tally of who had last ordered takeout. S, E, S, E, S, S, S, E, E, S, E. Next to the column of letters, Seyed had written the name “Martine” and a phone number. His handwriting was architect-tidy. “Did she
say what she wanted?”

  “No,” Seyed called back. “She just asked if I would pass along her regards and her ‘request for a return call at your earliest convenience.’ What kind of person talks like that?”

  No kind of person talked like that.

  My mother talked like that.

  Martine talked like that.

  I thanked Seyed, and my voice must have given something away, because he asked if I was okay. He never asked if I was okay, never. He would only have asked if I sounded truly broken. I swallowed another flash of anger as I told him that I was fine. “I mean, I’m not fine, but I’m fine,” I added, hating everything about the conversation already.

  “Right, sure,” he said, his voice as steady as if I’d said something normal. As if he believed me.

  That, I think, is the thing that made me tell him the truth. I hadn’t planned to say anything, but Seyed sounded like he believed me, like he thought it possible that I could be fine at a time like this one. “Martine is Nathan’s fiancée.”

  I didn’t like to talk about Nathan. Especially not at work. Especially not with Seyed, whose connection to Nathan I’d so effectively severed. But there it was, in the room, right there where Seyed could hear it: Martine is Nathan’s fiancée. It was the first time I’d ever said that exact sentence out loud, and it stayed on my tongue with an aftertaste, like tin and brine.

  Seyed sucked his teeth. “He’s engaged already? Shit, I’m sorry, that’s fucking terrible.”

  “Yeah.” He was right. It was oddly satisfying to hear someone put it that way, because yeah. It was fucking terrible. “They’ve been together for a while now. I haven’t really talked to her beyond the bare minimum.” I shook my head. “I don’t know why she’d call me here.”