by Sarah Gailey
Rinsing out her mouth was the hardest part.
I couldn’t bring myself to ask Martine to do it for me—couldn’t explain to her why it was so hard. So I didn’t ask. I just swallowed bile and panic, and I reached into Laila’s mouth with my fingers and scooped out soil from between her teeth. Her tongue was dry under my touch, as dry as the skin of her face. Dirt rained down into her lap, just as it had rained down from Martine’s palms in the garden. As it met the water that had beaded up on Laila’s legs, it turned to mud, and I scolded myself for not having done this part first.
But I could not have done it first.
When her mouth was empty at last, I used the showerhead to rinse her teeth and tongue. It wasn’t enough. There was dirt stuck to her gums, between her teeth. I kept rinsing and rinsing, but I knew that this was a waste of time, and after a few minutes of trying, I sat back on my heels.
Martine looked at me, waiting. Her eyes were still flat, but they sparked a little when I asked if she had a spare toothbrush.
When we were finished washing Laila, we toweled the body dry as gently as we could. Her skin wasn’t in nearly as good condition as Martine’s was, obviously, and her neck was awful. But her face had been preserved well by the plastic bag, and the rest of her was in excellent condition. That, of course, was when I decided that it was necessary to commit more time to studying the effects of telomere financing on decay. All the time we spent washing Laila’s body, as I combed conditioner through her wet hair and flooded her mouth with water so the toothpaste would foam on her teeth and patted her eyelids with the corner of a towel—I spent all that time mentally structuring the research grant I would write, outlining a proposal. I spent that time calculating how many assistants that project would need.
I did not spend that time thinking about the work that I was doing. I did not spend that time wondering how different from Laila I would look if I had been in the ground for three years, my face protected only by a plastic bag. I thought about the research instead.
When we finished, we had two hours left to prepare.
“I have a question about this plan,” Martine said as we worked. She waited for me to nod before she continued. “Won’t—when they find her, won’t they know she’s been dead for a long time? She looks okay on the outside, but as soon as anyone looks too close…”
I picked up a pair of scissors, eyed Martine’s newly short hair. As I started to comb and cut Laila’s hair, I nodded. “But no one is going to look too close. Nathan will panic. He’ll try to hide her. You’re illegal, remember? You aren’t supposed to exist. He’s not supposed to have you. He knows that, and since he doesn’t know that he’s ever killed one of you before, he wouldn’t know what it looks like when one of you dies. For all he knows, the instant a clone dies, it liquefies.”
Martine glanced back and forth between the loosely knotted rope in her hands and the scissors in mine. “I hope this works,” she murmured.
“It will.” I said it as though I could be certain.
We dressed Laila in Martine’s clothes. Martine stood with her hands under Laila’s armpits, lifting her to eye-level, and I reached my arms around from the front to fasten the hooks of a nursing bra behind the clone’s back. We put her in one of Martine’s nicer dresses, green with pale yellow flowers, because the sleeves were long enough and the neckline was high enough to cover the lividity where blood had pooled in her arms and back. She had been buried in her clothes; I didn’t foresee Nathan trying to strip her naked this time, either.
We pushed aside the coats that hung on the sturdy wooden dowel in the front-hall closet, pushed them all the way to the sides of the closet. We stood back-to-back in the middle of that closet, each of us pushing at the coats with both hands, crushing them as flat as we could.
Martine hung the noose, and I looped it around Laila’s neck. We lined it up until it matched that narrow ring of purple, tightened it hard so it would stay in place. Martine made a small, high sound when the rope dug deep into Laila’s skin.
For reasons I still don’t understand, that sound made me want to loosen the rope. Everything else, I had been able to stand—but that sound, that small aborted whimper, made me want to cut Laila free.
“This isn’t fair to her,” Martine said. “None of this is.”
“I know,” I said. The part of me that was willing to see Laila as a person—as a woman, as a part of a peculiar estranged family I’d never known I had—felt the terrible injustice of this. Laila had been born, hidden away, murdered, and buried, and she still wasn’t finished. She still wasn’t free.
I tried hard, so hard, to listen only to the part of me that saw her as a specimen. A specimen is born to serve a purpose. It dies when that function is fulfilled, or if it can’t do its job. What happens to it after it dies doesn’t matter, doesn’t carry moral weight.
But in that moment, with Laila on the floor in front of the coat closet? It doesn’t matter felt less like an objective fact, and more like a thing I told myself to justify the life I led, the work I did. I couldn’t swallow back the way it felt wrong. I couldn’t tell Martine to let it go, to forget it, to just get the work done. Because we had dressed up a corpse that looked just like her, had dressed the body in her clothes, had used her shampoo to make sure that it smelled the way she did. Because that corpse had my genes.
Laila was dead, and Laila had our face, and Martine was right: It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to any of us.
Martine hauled Laila upright. She wrapped her arms tight around the clone’s thighs and, panting, held her up high. I stood on a stepladder and tied the loose end of the rope to the dowel in the closet. One knot, then two, then three. As sturdy as I could make it.
Martine eased Laila down slowly, lowering her until the rope was taut. She was breathless, her forehead beaded with sweat. I wasn’t sure if I could have lifted my own bodyweight the way she just had, not alone. Where had that strength come from?
Laila’s toes nearly brushed the floor.
The dowel creaked ominously, but it held, at least for now. If it broke, so be it—he would find her on the ground.
There was something dreamlike about seeing her there. Over the course of the months I worked with Martine to make Nathan, I had grown accustomed to seeing my own face wearing unfamiliar expressions. Sleeping, eating, vomiting. The corpses in the ground had been uniquely terrible, but they were wrong enough that I could separate myself from them.
But this—this was different. Laila looked so much like me, so much like Martine, and her face was peaceful, and she was unmistakably dead.
I told myself that there was no time for reflection, and I turned my back to her.
There was still so much left to do.
We threw Laila’s old clothes into a trash bag, swept up the dirt that Martine had tracked into the house before my arrival. We slipped out to the backyard, finished filling in the last open grave and the shallow, halfhearted holes in the lawn. We righted the rosebushes. We planted the apple trees over the graves, so that Nathan wouldn’t question the tilled part of the garden. We even watered them, so they would grow. We did it all as Martine would have done it, were she committed to completing every item on her itinerary before sending herself away into the dark.
It would have been an impressive afternoon’s work, all by itself. But the sun was low in the sky, and Nathan was already late getting home, and there was no time left to admire our handiwork.
“Okay,” I said. “It’s time to go. Are you ready?”
Martine stared at me, then walked into the house. She came back out a few minutes later with Violet wrapped tight against her chest, the box of yellow notebooks in her arms.
“Oh,” I said, because I had forgotten. How could I have forgotten? But of course I had—I focused on the work, and I paid attention to my goal, and I forgot about the baby.
“Martine,” I said, looking at Violet and wishing she would figure it out on her own. But she didn’t, and I had to tell her. The
re was no time to soften it. There was no time to hesitate and flutter and be gentle. Still, I tried to be kind. I tried to tell her without cruelty. “Martine. We can’t take Violet with us.”
She looked at me blankly. “What?”
“We can’t take her,” I said, and I remember it like I remember the deep aching crack of my wrist breaking when I was a child. That moment, when Martine’s face fell as I told her that she would need to leave her baby behind—that was the moment when I began to hate myself. Not before, not even when I’d been cruel to her, not even when I’d broken her for my own convenience.
When I told her that we had to leave Violet behind, it was obvious to me that she didn’t understand yet why the baby had to stay behind. She looked sad and confused and a little angry. But she didn’t look surprised. She didn’t know why we couldn’t bring her child with us, but she didn’t seem surprised that I would tell her something so painful and, to her, unnecessary.
I couldn’t blame her for expecting that from me.
“Nathan’s going to expect the baby to be there when he gets home,” I explained. It wasn’t possible to explain this to her in a way that wouldn’t hurt her more, because the more I explained, the more she would see that I was right. I walked toward her slowly, like she might spook and run off if I startled her. “Even if you’re dead,” I continued—then, seeing her face, I quickly amended that to “even if he thinks you’re dead. When he finds Laila’s body, the first thing he’s going to do is run to check on the baby. If she’s not there, he’ll know that something doesn’t add up.”
Her eyes darted around the backyard as though she would be able to find something there that might prove me wrong. But, of course, there was nothing. I was right, and she knew it. The baby had to stay behind. There was no reason for Violet to be gone, and there was no chance that Nathan would decide not to go looking for answers.
Our plan relied on him deciding not to look for answers. And, although I didn’t need to mention it to Martine, it struck me that leaving him to raise a baby on his own would help our cause. He would be exhausted and overwhelmed. He would decide it wasn’t worth his time to investigate what would look to him like a simple suicide.
I eased the box of yellow notebooks from Martine’s arms.
“You should put her back,” I said. “You should put her in her crib, and you should probably say goodbye. And then we have to go.”
I will not try to describe the way her face crumpled before the first of her tears fell. I will not try to capture the way it felt, knowing that no matter what I did, some part of her would always blame me for this feeling.
I will not try to explain it.
I will never forget it, either.
I let her go into the house on her own. A minute or two after she walked inside, I heard Violet begin to cry. It was the same kind of wail as before, when Martine had put her baby into the crib as I stood in the kitchen and contemplated destroying the notebook that contained her blueprints.
But this time, the wail didn’t die down. It rose, siren-like. It seemed to grow in size and weight, and as Martine walked back through the door into the backyard, it became grating, panicked, oppressively loud.
It was almost loud enough to cover the sound of the garage door opening.
“I left her,” Martine said. Tears streamed down her cheeks continuously, and her voice was raw, but her face was placid. She wrapped her arms around herself and dug her fingernails into her skin, hard, deep, cruel. “I didn’t—I couldn’t stand it, I couldn’t stay in there and get her to go back to sleep, I couldn’t sing to her, I just had to—”
Inside the house, a door opened and then closed again. Just under the sound of Violet’s howls, I could make out Nathan calling a greeting to Martine.
We didn’t have much time. He was in the house, and it would only be a few seconds before he found Laila’s corpse.
“Martine, we have to go. We have to go now,” I said. She looked at me with wide, numb eyes. “He’s home,” I said, and she nodded slowly, and I knew that she wasn’t hearing me at all.
I grabbed her by the elbow and dragged her behind me to the side of the house, to the garden gate. We slipped out and I pulled her with me, down the block to where I had parked my car. I put her into the passenger seat and leaned across her to buckle her in. The whole time, I could still hear Violet crying, crying, crying.
Then, just as I opened the driver’s side door to get in, the crying stopped. He must have found the body, and then he must have gone to the baby. Violet was not alone anymore.
She was with him.
We drove away from that terrible sudden quiet, and Martine did not speak, and neither did I. There were too many things that we could never say, and so we stayed silent. We stayed silent the whole way home.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE
It only took a week for him to come to me.
That week was hard, with Martine in the house. It was hard in ways that it never had been before. That first day, I couldn’t move her from the bed, couldn’t get a word out of her. I was frustrated that day by her silence, her immobility, her refusal to recover as quickly as I told myself I would have—but the rest of the week made me miss having her curled in on herself, crying silently and continuously into one of my pillows. She wandered aimlessly until I directed her, did as she was told with the listless apathy of a picked scab.
She haunted my house, filled the rooms with her grief until I thought I would suffocate. I found myself opening windows just to get air. I slept on the couch to avoid being next to her in the bed, as though her anguish could seep into me, poison me, leave me as broken as she was. But I couldn’t avoid her entirely. I went to work during the day and stayed as late as I could, but when I got home at the end of the day, the oppressive fog of Martine’s sorrow was always, always waiting for me.
I resented her more than I can say. I had rescued her. I had helped her get away with murder, and I had gotten her a clean escape from Nathan, and every time she drifted into a room I was occupying, with that lost look on her face, there was something in me that could only hiss the word “ungrateful” over and over again until I could think of a task to occupy her. It was as though she missed her baby too much to even see the magnitude of work I had taken on to help her, the amount of risk.
There was nowhere for me to send her, no boarding school I could stash her away in to rid myself of the constant reminder of the empty place in her life.
She was just there, always, staring at the walls with tears dripping from her chin. I remembered wondering if Nathan had programmed her to be able to cry. After seven days of her grief, a vicious part of me wished he hadn’t.
I began to turn over the idea of telling Martine that she needed to find some other house to haunt. There was nowhere for her to go, of course—there was no one else she knew, other than maybe Seyed, but I somehow doubted that she would turn to him in her hour of need. I didn’t savor the idea of putting her up in her own apartment, keeping her like a mistress, but it felt like the most humane option.
I will not pretend that it did not occur to me to kill her. I have wished, in the time since then, that there was any way for me to get credit for dismissing that notion out of hand.
I couldn’t have killed her, any more than I could have turned her out of the house. Any more than I could have shouted at her for crying. All of it occurred to me—again and again, during that week, I had to swallow my father’s voice to keep it from rising up out of my mouth. He was close to the surface in those days, bubbling under my skin like a blister. The taste of turned earth, the roses digging their roots into grave mud, the house flooded wall-to-wall with things that couldn’t be said—it was too familiar, and Martine was endlessly fluttering her hands and drifting silently down the stairs, and a marrow-deep part of me knew my role. She made a space for a thing the shape of my father to fit into, and the gravity of that space was so, so powerful.
But I didn’t. I didn’t do it. I
didn’t shout at her, or level cold cruelty at her to bend her spine, or demand her silent obedience.
I didn’t kill her. I didn’t kill her, and there is no one in the world left who could ever tell me that it was an admirable thing for me to let her live.
I was turning the problem of Martine over in my head, trying to decide how I might go about telling her that we needed to find a different set of walls for her grief to drain into, when my doorbell rang. By the time my hand touched the front door, she had hidden herself away upstairs. That was a habit she’d developed during the spring she spent with me, or maybe one she’d developed during her time with Nathan and brought with her—going into the bedroom when the doorbell rang, just in case. I told her again and again that it was absurd: we went outside together, had been seen in public, in my car and in the lab and at the store. I wanted her hidden, but it was easy enough to hide her in the places where people didn’t bother to look, in the eye contact people didn’t want to make. But something about being home made her afraid, and I couldn’t stop her from running off.
This time, I was relieved by her caution. Because this time, when I opened the door, Nathan was standing on my front step.
He had Violet in his arms, and his face was desperate.
* * *
After he left, I picked up my phone and dialed a number that I wasn’t sure was still in service. I had to check it three times as I punched the numbers into my phone. I chewed on the pad of my thumb as it rang, a habit I’d broken in my first week at boarding school, and I waited, half hoping I’d have to leave a voicemail.
But she picked up.
I didn’t bother with many pleasantries, after the hello and the so nice to hear from you and the yes, it’s been a while, longer than usual. She was almost always the one to call me, and she was plainly jarred by this reversal.