Page 12 of The Echo Wife
The tears still wouldn’t come. It was the same emptiness I’d been trying to work with since I first felt that twist in my belly, staring at my own signature on the sequencing result I got from her errant hair.
My eyes burned, and a pit yawned open at the hollow of my throat, but the tears wouldn’t spill over.
I ran a hand through my hair and let out a long, slow breath. I needed to cry, but every time I got close, something old and deep in my bones echoed a familiar refrain:Quit crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about.
I couldn’t overcome that directive, no matter how hard I tried.
Another failure.
My phone, still on the floor where I’d left it after texting Seyed, lit up.Nathan Caldwell,the screen said. I knew that if I didn’t answer, I would have to listen to one of his long, rambling voicemails later—no matter how many times I’d told him to just text me, he insisted on leaving messages that were needlessly descriptive and detailed. If I didn’t pick up, I would have to delete it later, would have to decide whether or not to call him back. I clenched my jaw and answered.
The first thing I heard was heavy breathing, wet and ragged. A cough on the other end, a whining intake of breath. This was not Nathan. This was something else. “Who is this?”
“Evelyn?” The voice was not light, was not airy and nonthreatening. It was hoarse, almost a growl. “It’s me. It’s Martine.”
“Are you okay?” I said it automatically—the raw edge of Martine’s voice wicked concern up out of me unbidden.
“Something’s happened. At the house. I need you to come here, please. Now. It’s—it’s an emergency. Please.”
I tried to ask what happened, but Martine had already hung up.
I stared at the phone in my hand, at the open wine bottle on the counter. I didn’t have to go. What right did Martine have to call on me? What right did Martine have to anything? She wasn’t even legally a human being, much less afriend. But then, I thought, Martine had called me. Even after everything I’d said, Martine had called me.
Which meant Martine was alone, too.
I called a car, and by the time I’d gotten my shoes on, it was waiting outside. The afternoon had been freezing. As I stepped out into the thin, pale light of the waning day, sobriety hit me hard in the temple. Not the kind of sobriety that would render me safe behind the wheel of my own car, no—rather, the kind of sobriety that nearly stopped me in my tracks with the weight of reality. It was like waking from a dream, except that the dream and the reality were the exact same thing.Yes,I told myself, forcing my feet to take me to the waiting car.You are walking out of your new town house in order to help the pregnant clone your husband made to replace you. Yes, this is real. Yes, you are doing this.
The car had complimentary bottled water in the backseat. I drank one fast, trying not to notice the taste of the plastic. I rolled down my window and let the cold slap my cheeks, clenched my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering. It was a twenty-minute drive, just long enough for me to feel stupid. I was reading too much into Martine’s tone of voice, I told myself. I didn’t need to go—it was a bad idea to set a precedent like this, that my clone could call me and I would come running. Besides, I told myself, if Martine has an emergency, she should call Nathan. He’s the one who opened that can of worms. It was uncharitable to think of Martine as a can of worms, but it was the truth. If the clone had problems, they were Nathan’s problems. And if Nathan had problems, they were his own. That was the whole point of the divorce.
By the time I tipped my driver, I was mentally composing aspeech to give Martine. Something about how I regretted losing my temper at the café, a gentle apology for my behavior. Something acknowledging how that had been wrong of me, but also emphasizing the fact that Martine and I simply could not have a relationship.I would prefer if you live your life and I live mine,I rehearsed in my head.It isn’t healthy for the two of us to know each other, and I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to call me again.
My father’s voice echoed in my memory.There will be no further discussion of this matter.It was the last thing he’d ever said in front of me.
I kept rehearsing as I walked up the paved path that bisected the dew-shining lawn.It isn’t healthy.I took in the house, a lovely gingerbread-looking thing with leaded windows and climbing ivy and a porch swing. It was one story tall, brick and shingles, an English cottage nestled into an immaculate American lawn.I would prefer if.The house was exactly nothing like the home I’d shared with Nathan, which had been modern and easy to clean and then shockingly easy to leave. This was a house for children to play in, for Martine to work hard at keeping clean.I don’t think it’s a good idea.The front porch was wide enough for jack-o’-lanterns to line up on, and the big bay window right in the front would have made a perfect frame for an enormous Douglas fir, whether or not Nathan had decided to start celebrating Christmas.
I walked up onto that broad, well-swept porch, my speech pressing against the backs of my teeth. I raised my fist to knock on the richly grained wood of the front door. But before I could land a blow on the house, the door swung open. Martine’s face stared out at me, just like the last time I had visited this place.
This time, it was not a blank, welcoming smile she wore.
Martine was gray-faced and trembling and she stared right at me, looking into my eyes with an animal intensity. Her hair hung around her face, one wild tendril swinging a loose bobby pin. A livid bloom of reddish purple mottled her throat. Her right hand gripped the door as though it were the only timber left of her storm-sunk ship.
Her left hand gripped the rosewood handle of a chef’s knife.
I had to look down, if only for an instant. That was all it took for me to verify what I knew I’d see: the skirt of Martine’s dress, which clung wet and red to her legs. An arc of blood swung high across her waist and breasts; it had already begun to dry on her calves and ankles. But the skirt—that was saturated.
When I met Martine’s gaze again, I saw blank horror there, and I knew that I had been right to come to the house after all.
“Thank you for coming,” Martine said in a throaty whisper, her words coming slow. She cleared her throat, wincing as though it were painful to do so. “Something terrible has happened.”
CHAPTER
EIGHT
The conditioning of a clone is a process that requires some fortitude.
The duplicative cloning process is, of course, based on genetics. One hundred days from sample to sentience, and every building block is based on the DNA of the original. Each specimen emerges from amniocentesis at the state of telomeric decay established by the source material: The clone is the exact same age as the original, give or take a handful of weeks. Telomere financing means the clones don’t age at the same rate as the original—clone tissues simply decay quite a bit slower than standard tissues—but no clone is in use for more than a few months at a time, so it isn’t an issue.
At the end of one hundred days, a perfect double of any human can exist in my lab. It’s all genetics. It’s all growth.
