Page 27 of The Echo Wife
On the day I realized that my husband had been having an affair, we had seeded specimen 5183-N. That night at the lab, I’d filled the tank myself, staying up late with work to avoid having to go home. I wasn’t ready to confront Nathan, not until I had all the evidence to support my accusations. And I couldn’t stomach the thought of sleeping beside him.
I’d stood in front of the tank for an hour that night, watching every bubble that drifted sluggishly skyward. Watching as the pink liquid in the tank smoothed itself out, clarified, and became a place where a person could grow. By the time those bubbles were gone, I knew that our marriage was a place where nothing could grow.
Not anymore. Not after what he’d done.
Martine stood beside me, now, staring up at the tank exactly the way I had stared up at it that night so many months before. She held the edges of her lab stool in a loose grip, drumming her fingertips under the lip of her seat. “It doesn’t look like much.”
“That’s good,” I replied, stripping my gloves so I could rub my eyes. “It’s just broth right now. It’ll take a few hours to thicken up.” White spots danced in my field of vision. I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes and tried to calculate how many hours it had been since the last time I’d had any sleep.
“Evelyn—” Seyed started to ask a question, but I cut him off.
“Take the rest of today off,” I told him, intentionally brusque, leaving no room for argument. “Go home. Get some rest.” I gave him a sharp look. “Make your delivery tonight, and make damn sure you tell them it’s the last one. I’ll see you back here tomorrow.”
“Should someone stay here to keep an eye on… on him?” Martine gestured to the tank that would, within the next month, contain a replica of the man who had created her. The man who had gotten her pregnant. The man who had tried to kill her.
It struck me as fantastically funny, that she should think of keeping an eye on him. I swallowed a hysterical laugh.
“No,” I said. “There’s nothing for us to do right now, and even if there was, we wouldn’t be able to do it with any kind of skill. Not right now. Honestly, Martine, look at you.” I waved a hand at her vaguely, disdainfully, as though she were a mess—although in reality, it was difficult for me to discern any visible signs of fatigue on her. “You’re exhausted. We all are. We’ll go home, get some sleep.” I nodded significantly to Seyed. “Wrap up loose ends.”
Seyed handed Martine a pair of mirrored sunglasses. They were too big for her. “Wear those when you leave,” he said, and Martine nodded, letting the sunglasses swallow half of her face. Beyond that, he didn’t say anything. He wisely chose not to argue with my instructions.
This was not new: He usually did what I asked of him, usuallyacted without argument. But there was something different between us now. We’d had a respectful, easy partnership. Now, our interactions carried the flavor ofobedience. It put the taste of ruin in my mouth.
So be it. He put himself into this position, and I wouldn’t discourage him from being there. Maybe, I thought, someday—with a lot of time, and a lot of work—I could trust him again. We could work together again, the way it had been before.
We left, a sunglassed Martine walking a few paces behind me, just as the first of my colleagues began to arrive. None of them gave her a second glance. I greeted them without warmth, and they didn’t think anything of it, because I always spoke to them that way. Cordial, but dismissive. Uninterested. As though I were on my way to something more important.
I didn’t need them to think they mattered to me. I just needed them to stay out of my way. Martine kept the sunglasses on when we got to the car. She put on her seat belt, tipped her head back, and blew out a long stream of air. The sunlight caught some of the fine, tiny hairs that dusted her cheek. I couldn’t help but stare at the places where her face was unwrinkled—the corner of her mouth, the plane of her cheek. Beneath those sunglasses, I knew that the corners of her eyes were smooth too. She had the beginning of a crease between her brows, though. I wondered what made her frown often enough to put that crease in place.
“Why are you helping me?” she asked, not looking at me, although I’m sure she felt me staring.
I didn’t lie to her when I answered. I could have. It would have been easy enough to make myself seem kind.Because it’s the right thing to do,orbecause you need me,orof course I’m helping.But after all we had already been through, I thought she deserved honesty.
“I’m helping you because I don’t want to go down with you,” I said. “If I don’t help you, you’ll be found, and my research will be compromised.” I started the car, needlessly adjusted my rearview mirror. “There would be an ethical inquiry, an investigation into my methods. I would lose credibility. It would take me decadesto recover from that. I can’t afford it.” I braked to let another car pass and took the opportunity to look at her. “This is risk mitigation. Damage control. I don’t have a choice.”
Martine nodded and pushed the sunglasses up onto the crown of her head. Her eyes drifted closed as she did it. After a couple of silent minutes of driving, she spoke, her eyes still shut. “I’m not sleeping,” she said. “It’s too early for that. My eyes are just a little tired, is all. Don’t feel like you have to be quiet on my account.”
I swallowed hard, because Ihadbeen staying quiet on her account. I had been trying to let her sleep, aware of how exhausted she must be. But, of course, it didn’t matter how exhausted she was.
She couldn’t fall asleep before nine thirty.
She had fourteen hours still to go. Fourteen hours of wakefulness, of waiting for sleep to come. I tried to imagine staying awake with her that whole time. A wave of nausea swept through me. In its wake, it left behind a primal urge to lie down someplace dark.
“Have sedatives ever worked for you?” I asked.
She gestured at her belly. “I’ve never tried. I was always either pregnant or trying to get pregnant. Nathan wouldn’t let me take anything that might hurt our chances.”
I thought of the Klonopin on my bedside table, tried to recall if it would be safe for Martine. Safe for the baby. I couldn’t think fast enough, couldn’t remember. I was too tired.
“It’s okay,” she said, her lips tightening into a perfunctory smile. I doubted that the smile extended to her eyes, but with the mirrored glasses in the way, I couldn’t tell for sure. “I can still put my feet up and rest my eyes for a little while. Don’t worry about me.”
I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. This fresh shame I felt was, I told myself, almost certainly a byproduct of my own fatigue. It wasn’t as though I’d done anythingwrong. Martine had known that she wouldn’t be able to sleep until later, I reasoned, and she hadn’t said anything. She hadn’t asked to lie down during the window of time that would allow her to rest. That was her choice, not mine.
I couldn’t be expected to manage her every need.
Still, my conscience twitched, a child plucking at a mother’s shirtsleeve. It didn’t matter how true it was that I wasn’t in charge of Martine’s decision; I couldn’t convince myself that it was as simple as I wanted it to be.
Martine had been programmed to please. She had been programmed to obey. Nathan had used my technology to make her into the kind of person who would give up a night of sleep in order to help me with a tricky project, and I had known as much when I brought her to the lab. I’d forgotten about the limitation on her sleep cycle, but that wasn’t an excuse—I’d used her, and she was suffering for it.
