Page 67 of The Echo Wife
It hurt so much that it snatched the breath from my lungs,hurt so much I wanted to turn into stone right there. But I wasn’t made of stone, I was just bones and fingernails and undrinkable water.
Maybe that’s why I couldn’t stop myself from saying the weak, foolish, plaintive thing. “But you replacedme.”
He shook his head. “Please,” he said. “Let’s not do this now.”
The burn of tears struck my eyes like an open-handed slap. I blinked them back, telling myself that I could digest this later. I could save it in my snake-belly, the agony of the if-then with which Nathan had presented me:If you are loved, then you cannot be replaced.
“Sure,” I said. “Never mind. It’s not important.” My voice came out raw. I slipped a hand under the table and dug my fingertips hard into the meat of my thigh, pushing bruise-deep until the muscle cramped. I swallowed a gasp at the pain, smoothed my face, dragged my gaze back to him. “What do you need, Nathan?”
He stammered his way through it, an entirely unreasonable request. One that was based in his constant certainty that I would, someday, change my mind about wanting children. He had always acted as though my decision not to have a baby were a temporary lapse, a delay. He had always assumed that all women came with an innate understanding of and desire for children—at least, the old Nathan had—and so it was not a surprise to me when he asked if I would help him raise Violet.
It was a surprise to him, I suspect, when I said yes.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
When I was a child, the city felt endlessly far away. I would sit in my bedroom with the window open and strain to hear a car, looking out over the treetops and knowing that the city was beyond the distant hills that formed the horizon. I knew that my father worked in the city during the day, but I didn’t know how long a commute could be—I only knew that he had one.
I didn’t know, then, the precise duration of the drive from my parents’ house to the city. And as an adult who lived in that city, I didn’t have a sense of that distance either. Not really. I knew that it was about fifty miles, but I didn’t know the way those miles would feel passing under me. I’d never driven them, never visited that house. I left it when I went to boarding school, and I didn’t look back.
I never wondered why my mother hadn’t sold it. I never encouraged her to, either. The risk of a new owner digging up the garden was simply too high. Just as she’d said on the phone, I was supposed to inherit the house. I might have been able to sell it, in the event of her death, or I might have simply had no choice but to keep it, to maintain it, to hold my parents’ secrets in trust until my own death. I imagine I would have neglected the house, would have let the garden become overgrown and rotten. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to live there, in the time before Martine.
But things are different now. I know the feel of those fifty miles, the way they disappear underneath me as the road goes from eight lanes to four lanes to two. The buildings shrink and the treesgrow thicker as I near the place wherecitybecomestown. The dominant color of the landscape goes from gray to green, until the corners I turn are bounded only by dense undergrowth.
If I make the drive while the sun is still up, I can see the way the light shines through the gaps where the trees don’t touch. Crown shyness, that’s called—the branches try not to touch each other, and their leaves grow to avoid competition for sunlight.
If I make the drive when the sun is down, I do it more slowly. The road, about twenty-five miles in, begins to curve wildly, and I never know which bend will reveal a deer or a rabbit. I drive more slowly, because if I brake too hard, the baby in the backseat will wake.
At first, I’d been prepared to deliver the killingno. I was going to refuse Nathan, and I was going to drink his failure down like cool water. He had betrayed me, betrayed our marriage, betrayed myworkin order to get himself a baby, and I was ready to make him lie alone in the bed he’d made. That “no” may have been vindictive and venomous of me, but in that moment after he asked for my help, I could taste blood. I wanted more.
But then I’d heard a soft creak from upstairs, and everything came together all at once.
My agreement with Nathan is simple. I bring the baby to him for a weeklong visit, one week out of every five. That’s as long as he needs, to feel like he’s still involved, to feel like he’s a good father. He still holds her awkwardly, still struggles to understand her development and her habits. I’ve taken to giving him the books that Martine finishes. He’s catching up slowly.
I take no small satisfaction from the knowledge that she learns more quickly than he does.
Nathan thinks that I have found some deep well of maternal instinct. He thinks that I take the baby with me to my distant outpost, a lab in the country where I do grant-funded research.
He has never asked me for more detail on my work, but if he did, I would tell him the truth: I’m researching clone longevity. I’m looking into the reasons why their tissue decays so muchmore slowly than the tissue of a normal human. I’m looking into the ways one might alter a clone’s programming, to let the subject take naps during the day.
I’m trying to find out how a clone could possibly change as quickly as Martine did, once the original Nathan was dead. She bucked some aspects of her programming far too easily, and now that I’ve had time to think about it, I can see that for what it is: useful data. It had never occurred to me that a clone could do that, and so I never looked into methods of making the programming process more ironclad.
I finally took that meeting with my lab director.
My research focus has shifted. My grant funding has increased.
And now, I have an entirely private lab in which to carry out my work. I never have to do anything for the sake of appearances, never have to appease a lab director or erect a screen to hide challenging visuals from a board chair. I can justwork.
Thirty-five miles outside the city—fifteen miles from the house where I spent my silent, careful childhood—the trees are so thick that there’s no parallax. The road is bounded on either side by a wall of green that rises up as dense and wild as a threat. I wonder if, when Violet is a little older, she’ll be scared of those woods. For now, her visual acuity is too poor for her to even recognize the trees. I learned that from Martine: the baby can recognize faces, but she can’t recognize forests yet.
She knows that I’m not her mother, too. She can recognize the difference between me and Martine. I’m not sure how—Martine could probably tell me—but she’s different with the two of us. She sleeps on Martine’s chest, laughs at the noises Martine makes. When I hold her, she’s still, quiet, a little tense. With me, she perches on the edge of crying, but doesn’t tip over into it.
She doesn’t make sounds until she’s in Martine’s arms.
The trees thin out again forty-five miles outside the city. There’s a little town there, mostly small houses. There’s a grocery store and a gas station and a post office and a sheriff’s office. The road straightens. There are stop signs, five of them, and then anorchard. We drive between rows of water-lined apple trees, their trunks scored at the place where the fields flood during irrigation, their branches twisted like something out of a children’s book. Martine has designs on apple-picking, eventually. I tell her we’ll see. I tell her that often.
I don’t intend to keep her hidden away, the way Nathan did. I just don’t have a plan yet for how to let her out into the world, for how to give her the freedoms she wants without endangering all of us. I’ll get it figured out, though, in time. I just need to focus on my research for right now. She understands.
