Page 31 of The Echo Wife
The effect of my words was as immediate as an injection delivered directly into spinal fluid. Martine visibly softened. She closed her eyes for a second, let her shoulders droop. She nodded. “I’d like that very much,” she whispered.
Her voice broke halfway through the sentence, and I understood, and the bottom fell out of my belly and that dark roiling rage drained out, leaving me water-stained and empty, a monster with no middle to it.
Half-numb, I showed her to the shower and gave her a towel. Once I heard the water turn on, I let myself sink to the floor. I rested my head in my hands and stared at my knees, unblinking.
It had felt like a standoff, like a battle of wills. It had felt like she was trying to undermine me, trying to shrink me down by pointing out that I hadn’t done a thing that came easily to her. It had felt like a brittle moment in which she was finally going to reveal her true quiet cruelty, because of course she must truly be quietly cruel, because she was made from the same stuff that I was made from.
I’d gotten it so wrong. That whole time, that sense of judgmentand interference, that feeling I had like I could have closed my hands over her temples and pressed with all my strength until her skull gave in to the pressure of my rage—it was nothing. It was based onnothing.
Martine hadn’t been playing some kind of passive-aggressive game with me. She hadn’t been trying to saw away at the floor under my feet. She hadn’t been setting a trap or baring her teeth.
She’d been waiting.
That’s all it was. She’d been waiting for me to tell her to stop working. She’d been waiting for me to tell her that she was allowed to use my shower, that she could change out of the clothes she’d been wearing for days. I had fallen asleep the day before without offering her anything to wear, anywhere to wash. Had she eaten, while I’d slept dreamlessly on the couch all day? Had she had water? Or had she been waiting for permission then, too?
I closed my eyes and forced myself to breathe.
I wasn’t prepared for this at all. I didn’t know how to take care of her, how to understand her needs. I didn’t even know how to find out what those needs were. I wasn’t ready for this, and I shook with the knowledge that I couldn’t do it right, that I would make mistakes layered on mistakes, that it would all go wrong because I didn’t have any of the information I knew I needed to do it right.
I never wanted children, and I never wanted this.
But, I reminded myself, I hadn’t been prepared for any of it—for the fact that my husband didn’t love me, for the fact that Martine even existed. For the things she was capable of and the things she had already asked of me. Her care and feeding were hardly frightening by comparison.
The sound of running water stopped. I pushed myself to my feet and walked into the bedroom to get clothes for Martine. I rummaged through boxes until I found a dress I never wore, one that Nathan had bought for me as a gift, years before. I studied it with new understanding: the full line of the skirt, the scoop of the neckline, the fall of the sleeves.
When Nathan bought that dress for me, I remember being baffled. I couldn’t imagine why he would think that I would ever wear such a thing, a dress that was so unlike any of my other clothes. I remember being faintly angry that he would give me such an unsuitable gift.
But, I realized, it hadn’t really been for me.
So before I tapped on the bathroom door to hand the dress over, I knew that I would let Martine keep it.
It had been hers all along.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
By the time Martine and I arrived at the lab, Seyed was already there, as usual. The shadows under his eyes were deep. His face had a hangdog quality to it, and I reflexively resented him for trying to work the exhaustion angle. I was tired too. That didn’t change the fact that he had betrayed me.
Still. I couldn’t help softening a little at the sight of him. I don’t often feel pity, but that doesn’t make me cruel. I’m not one to exploit vulnerability for the sake of punishment.
I’m not a monster.
“What do you have for me?” I asked as soon as we were through the airlock. He handed me a felt-backed clipboard without wasting time on a greeting.
“Numbers are good so far,” he said. “I pushed the first dose of cortical primer twenty minutes ago.”
I scanned the chart. Seyed had named this subject Nate-2. “Destroy anything with this labeling on it,” I said, handing him back the chart. “This subject is named 4896-Zed. And push an HGH inhibitor, will you?” I looked at the temperature reading on the base of the new Nathan’s tank. “It’s a little warm in here.”
Seyed nodded and got to work. I wasn’t being any harsher on him than usual, but something of the old easy trust between us was still gone, the same way it had been the night before. There was no room for him to make mistakes like letting the temperature inside a specimen’s tank drift too high. There was no space for banter. As always, I told him the work to be done, and he did it—but something was broken between us, and I couldn’timagine a way to get to a future where that wasn’t broken. We would just have to keep hobbling forward, leaning our weight on that fracture.
I left Seyed behind, feeling uneasy. I joined Martine at the wobbly table in the far corner of our lab, where everything was labeledFOOD USE ONLY. Both of her hands were wrapped around a cup of peppermint tea. She was staring hard at the specimen tanks, her brow furrowed hard enough to deepen the nascent line on her forehead, the one I’d noticed before.
I wasn’t prepared for her, and I didn’t understand her needs, but this, I could read easily enough.
This, I could solve.
When I first proposed neurocognitive programming to Lorna van Struppe, she treated the conversation as a learning opportunity. I was her research assistant at the time, fresh and bright-eyed and ready to change the world. The ink on my doctoral thesis was still wet. I was a year away from meeting Nathan, still carrying water for Lorna as she explored enhanced embryonic development in reproductive cloning.
