The Echo Wife

by Sarah Gailey

  “I can lie to him,” she said. “If it makes him happy. It’s always been easy for me. I suppose it’s part of my programming.” Her smile was cold. “I can lie if it means I can tell Nathan what he wants to hear.”

  She walked out of the airlock mid-cycle.

  A red light flashed above the door to the lab. It kept flashing until I hit the button again, restarting the cycle, reassuring the system that I was going to stay put until the vents had finished cleaning the outside world off of me.

  By the time I got inside, Martine had already changed into her regular clothes. She was wearing a soft pink cardigan I hadn’t seen before, one that seemed perfect for the woman I’d met at that tea shop. Pearl earrings, a full skirt with a waistband that stretched high over her belly. Her dishwater eyes that were my dishwater eyes shone with bright anticipation, and she’d pushed a headband into her flat, colorless hair, the hair that was just like mine, only longer. She looked the part. She was the part.

  She was made for this, and looking at her now was a stark reminder of how different she was from me, and the awful truth that every difference was on purpose. There were no coincidental differences between us. Anything I admired about her was, by necessity, something I found lacking in myself. I had to hate her just a little if I was going to survive any of this, because if I truly believed she was better than me, it meant that the original Nathan had been right to make her.

  If Martine was better than me, the original Nathan had been right to stop loving me.

  I closed the airlock door behind me, coming fully into the lab just in time to see her duck behind the curtain that separated his bed from the lab where he was made. “Oh, Nathan, there you are!” Her voice drifted across the lab, bright and sweet and relieved. “I was so worried. Nathan, I came as soon as I heard.”

  “Martine,” he said, his voice slow and slurring. There was a beep—her dialing down the sedative drip, letting him begin to come back to himself. “Thank God you’re here. I was in an accident.”

  “What happened, Nathan?” Her voice again, high and soft. “Oh, your poor face. Thank goodness you’re all right.”

  I stood just inside the lab and listened to them talk. Martine put on an incredible performance: the worried wife, who hadn’t heard from her husband in a few days. She kept saying his name, kept reminding him about how he’d been in the mountains for a few months on a solo trip, a last long trip away from home before the baby came. She layered her fingerprint on top of mine and pressed down until the ridges and whorls were deep enough to stay.

  I looked over my lab—tungsten tables, tall tempered-glass tanks, massive fume hood, autopsy table, cabinets. All of it was scarred by this. Martine and Seyed and Nathan. All of them had carved their initials into my lab. This place would never be mine again, because some part of it would always, always be theirs.

  Ours.

  I had never wanted anything to be ours. At least, not with Martine or Seyed. And not with this version of Nathan. Not with the version of him that was relieved to see Martine. Not with the version of him that liked her better.

  “Who’s your doctor?” Martine asked in a carrying voice.

  “I don’t know.” Nathan’s answer came soft. He sounded embarrassed. “I didn’t get her name. She looked like—”

  “It’s okay,” Martine said quickly. “I’ll find her. I’ll find out when you can come home.”

  She kissed him. It didn’t sound passionate, but it didn’t sound removed, either. When she came out from behind the curtain, she looked around the lab, and in the seconds it took her eyes to find me, I saw it.

  She was happy.

  She was relieved that he was back. She hadn’t been acting, hadn’t been injecting false affection into her voice. She was glad to see this man again, the man who had kept her trapped under a bell jar of domesticity, the man who had wanted her to look only at him.

  She was glad to see him again.

  “Okay,” I whispered once she had crossed the lab to me. I put my lips next to her ear, barely breathed the words so that only she would hear them. My heart pounded in my throat, and I tried hard to control my breath so that she would hear my words and not my panic. “Okay. I get it.”

  “It’s so good to have him back,” she murmured, her chin bumping my shoulder. “I know you think it’s stupid, but I missed him, I missed him so much, and—”

  “Listen.” I cut her off because I couldn’t bear the idea of hearing more. “Listen, I get it. I understand. But he tried to hurt you before, and he might try to do it again.”

  “He wouldn’t, I know it,” she said, and the bright hope in her voice struck me hard in the ribs.

  “I won’t send you home with him without protection,” I said. The idea took shape faster than blinking, forming in my mind as though I’d set an electric current into the amnio of my mind. “But there’s a solution. A killswitch. It’s easy. I do it all the time. The people who…” I hesitated, then realized I was hesitating because what I was going to tell Martine might hurt her. It felt like weakness, that consideration. “The people who use clones want a way to get rid of them without getting messy.”

  Martine pulled her head back just enough that she could look at me. Her gaze darted between my eyes.

  From behind the curtain, Nathan called her name. Martine and I turned to look in the same moment, our eyes on the cloth that separated us from the man we had made.

  “Just a minute, love,” Martine said. “I’ll be right there.” Then she looked at me, her chin set firm, and nodded. “A killswitch,” she said softly, so softly it was like a sigh. “Whatever that is—you’ll tell me later, yes? For now, let’s get it over with.” She smiled, her eyes slipping back to the curtain. “Let’s finish this.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The day my cast was removed was also the last day I would see my father. My mother brought me home from the doctor and sent me upstairs to wash the sour cast-bound smell from my arm. I stayed in my bedroom for the afternoon, reading on my bed with my feet kicked up behind me as the square patch of sun that shone through my window parallaxed across the floor.

  I used to spend whole days like that, tucked away in my bedroom, creeping downstairs for food every few hours or whenever I heard the dull thud of the study door closing. Some days, my mother would leave snacks and water on a tray outside my bedroom door.

  She was always better at the stairs than I was—I never heard her come or go. I just opened the door to see a stack of cookies or a wax paper–wrapped sandwich tucked close against the doorframe, where someone who wasn’t looking wouldn’t spot it right away.

  Not that day, though. Not the day my father went missing.

  That afternoon, I had heard the dull thud of the study door, and it sounded to me like an opportunity. I eased the door to my room open, turning the knob all the way so the latch wouldn’t make a sound. I crept out into the hall on sock feet and padded down the stairs as silently as I knew how. The bottom floor of the house was mostly dark, with the curtains drawn, lit only by the flickering glow of a dying fire in the living-room hearth.

  When I was halfway between my bedroom door and the front door, I became aware of a strange, rhythmic sound. A sawing, ragged noise, like when the vacuum cleaner got stuck on something.

  By the time I was at the foot of the stairs, the noise had resolved itself into two separate sounds.

  I could recognize both as labored breathing—one strand of steady, panting gasps, met by a counterpoint harmony of uneven wheezes, wet and gnarled, choking.

  Halting.

  Slowing.

  I wanted to run, but I didn’t. I knew better than to run in the house.

  I walked softly, instead, and I poked my head around the corner of a hallway wall, leaning just far enough that I could see the back of the living-room couch. That couch was between me and the sounds. I could see my mother from the waist up. She was wearing a dress with a Peter Pan collar, buttoned to the throat. The coll
ar was white and starched and flecked with something dark, a shadow that also crept across the sliver of her face that I could see from my odd angle. She stood, breathing heavily, looking down at something on the floor, the firelight gleaming off of her hair.

  The congested inhalations that formed the topnote of the melody I’d heard from the stairs—those were coming from something I couldn’t see, something on the floor at her feet.

  A shadow stretched underneath the couch, huge and distorted in the firelight.

  My mother turned her head just a little, that familiar, warning arc to her neck. Just enough to let me know that she’d heard me, but not so far that she could see me. Just enough to let me know that I should sneak back to my bed. This, I understood, was not the time for me to be downstairs.

  The next morning, she sat at the foot of my bed, the mattress dipping just below the place where my feet ended. I pretended to have been sleeping. I pushed myself up onto my elbows and rubbed my eyes. I nodded silently as she told me that she didn’t know where my father was, that he hadn’t come home the night before. Her eyes bored into mine as she spoke. She wasn’t blinking.

  There was a right answer. I knew there was.

  I did my best to find it, and present it to her, the way I knew she wanted me to.

  “All right,” I said, taking care to not clench fistfuls of my bedsheets. It seemed very important, in that moment, to keep my hands still and relaxed. “Should we call the police?” At the sight of her face, I quickly added, “To tell them that he didn’t come home?”

  She blinked then, and her face relaxed into a smile. She patted my foot under the covers. Her hands were soft, scrubbed, but one of her fingernails had a deep split in it, and the damp scent of the garden clung to her. “That’s a very good idea,” she said. “Yes. We’ll tell the police that your father didn’t come home, and that we’re worried.”

  She looked at me for a long moment, not saying the thing that she was thinking. I looked back at her, not saying the thing that I was thinking. She reached forward and tucked a lock of my hair behind my ear, loam-smell drifting off her in eddies.

  “Get dressed, now, so you’re presentable when they arrive.”

  When the police got to our house, my mother fluttered her clean hands at them, fidgeted, apologized over and over and over for the inconvenience. They told her that she was worrying too much—that my father had probably stayed at his office overnight, would be home any minute. They traded he’s-having-an-affair glances, so obvious that even I could read the subtext. I stood beside my mother with my hands in my pockets, and when one of the officers squatted down to look me in the eyes, I let myself look scared.

  He told me not to worry. He told me that my old man would be home any minute now.

  My mother’s hand rested on my shoulder, light as a fallen leaf, and she told the officers that she would call them again if my father wasn’t home soon.

  “He’ll call,” she said, putting a brave tremble into her voice. “He’ll want me to know where he is. I’m sure I’ll hear from him any minute.”

  * * *

  Nathan spent another week in recovery.

  He imprinted on his own name, his age, the facts of his life. He clung to whichever memories we reminded him were important. Martine and I helped him to identify the patterns that he could hang a consciousness on: here’s how to talk, here’s what to look for. He learned to see what we told him to see, and he was too busy learning that to pay too-close attention to the rest of it.

  I occasionally caught Martine in contemplative moments, and it wasn’t hard to discern what she was chewing on. The thing we were doing to this new Nathan was precisely what the original Nathan had done to her, once, in a time she didn’t remember. A time she had forgotten by design. He had told her that her name was Martine, and that she was his wife, and that she loved him.

  She had believed him.

  The line between her brows grew a little deeper. It wasn’t my concern—Martine was who she was, what she had been made to be, and I couldn’t make myself responsible for her feelings about it. I never asked her about those moments of reflection. I demanded her participation in the final stages of Nathan’s programming.

  She never faltered. Just as she had never hesitated during Nathan’s conditioning, she never once buckled under the strain of his final proofing. I told myself that was a sign that she was okay with everything. I decided not to pry up the edges of it.

  I didn’t need to know.

  And so, during the new Nathan’s final week in the lab, I didn’t ask.

  The morning they left the lab holds a surreal clarity in my memory.

  It was early when we walked out of the airlock, still half-dark. The air outside the laboratory building was cool but edging away from crisp; the year was lunging toward spring.

  We had called the taxi from the phone in the laboratory instead of using an app. It was Martine’s suggestion, doing this thing the old-fashioned way so that there wouldn’t be a digital trail connecting her to the lab. I summoned the car while running my fingertips over the old takeout record, the running tally: S, E, S, E, S, S, S, E, E, S, E.

  Martine’s name and phone number were still written there too, in Seyed’s precise lettering.

  We walked Nathan out to the parking lot together. He was sedated to the point of stumbling so he wouldn’t be able to retain a memory of where he’d been. Martine had dressed him in clothes that belonged to the original Nathan, a sweater and slacks and shoes that had gone unoccupied for nearly five months. It seemed strange that they should fit him so perfectly, a coincidence to remark upon, except that, of course, it was no coincidence at all.

  It was craft.

  Nathan leaned his weight on Martine as he stepped out of the laboratory for the first time in his life. The eyes that belonged to this version of Nathan had never seen anything beyond the curtain that surrounded his bed. He was sedated enough, of course, that he was hardly seeing anything even then—the world would be a blur, vague and huge, for the first few weeks of his new life. Soft enough for his brain to gum on. Shapes and noises and patterns, gentle and digestible.

  The halls of the building were as dark and liminal as they had been the night I first brought Martine to the lab. The taxi was waiting already by the time we got out to the parking lot. It was a white taxi with green doors, and the windows were smudged from the inside, where some other passenger had pressed their hand or rested their head against the glass. The driver didn’t look up from his phone when we opened the back door.

  Martine helped Nathan into the car, her hand on his elbow. She climbed into the backseat after him. She was seven and a half months pregnant then, huge already. Carrying high, or so she told me. She struggled a little with the seat belt, maneuvering her belly with care. Beside her, Nathan’s head lolled against his window, leaving new smudges on the glass, overwriting whatever had been there before him.

  I closed the door after Martine once she was settled. I watched closely to make sure that she was tucked all the way into the car, that she wouldn’t get caught by the closing door. She turned her attention to getting Nathan buckled in. She was still hunched over him when the taxi began to pull away, too occupied to look back at me. I watched them drive off into the morning. The taillights and turn signal of the taxi were strangely anticlimactic, too practical for the gravity of the moment.

  I stood in the parking lot with my hands wrapped around my elbows. I couldn’t make myself move for a long time after they left. It felt important that I stay, just in case. It felt important that I wait to be certain.

  It was done.

  They were gone.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SIX

  I had four months of peace.

  Peace, or something like it.

  Martine and I met up a few more times over the course of Nathan’s first month at home, checking in, making sure that things were going according to plan. She came to my house each time. It was a place where there was no ri
sk of anyone seeing us together, asking awkward questions that would get her found out. Each time, when she walked in, I had a sense that she was checking on things, making sure that the house was the same place she’d occupied for the months of the new Nathan’s development. Seeing that the space she had carved out for herself was still vacant.

  We drank tea, and she updated me on his progress. He was brilliant, she said. He told his friends and colleagues everything he was supposed to, everything we’d stamped into him during that ductile period just after we woke him up for the first time. He had told people all about his research trip in the mountains. Some time at a cabin, a retreat to get his head on right about the divorce. An accident just when he was coming home. A head injury, a concussion, nothing serious but enough that he was a little off. His memory was fuzzy about a lot of things. Yes, he could still work. No, there was no need to check in on him.

  “They all buy it,” she said on her last visit. “Without hesitation. They believe him so much more easily than I thought they would. None of them seem to think he’s acting strange.” She drummed her fingernails against the side of her teacup. “I guess he was never really close enough with anyone that they would notice the little differences.”

  “No,” I said. “I suppose he wasn’t.”

  It was true. I couldn’t think of anyone Nathan had been close with, not truly close. He’d had colleagues, old college friends, distant family, people he occasionally spent time with—but none of them had been interleaved with our life. None of them had followed up with me after I left him. I remembered, in the weeks after I moved out of our house, how my triumph had been punctuated by guilt, knowing that there was no one who I could be certain he would lean on. I’d been too angry with him to let that guilt change my own trajectory, but still—it had been there. The knowledge that I’d left him alone.