Page 35 of The Echo Wife
The eggs and the pan went into the trash, which I suppose was fair; both were ruined. He made an incisive comment about my cooking—something about wondering how someone who claimed to value competence could be so inept at a basic skill. That was less fair.
I tried to explain that I’d spaced out because I’d had a huge breakthrough. I didn’t apologize, but I offered to make him something new to eat, if he would just wait a few minutes. But of course, he wasn’t interested in what I had to say. He was interested in being angry at me. He was interested in causing a scene.
He had stormed out of the house, slamming the door so hard behind him that the coffee mugs rattled against each other in the cupboard.
But when Nathan got home that evening, he apologized for his temper. He kissed me and handed over a bag of takeout. He made a joke about not wanting to make me cook. He apologized for not listening to me, the kind of apology that made me think he really understood what he’d done. Nathan said he should have been more invested in my work and my process.
He asked me to explain my breakthrough.
I was still brittle from the way he’d acted that morning. I wanted to make him apologize more, wanted to make him feel guilty. He’d hurt me, and I wanted to hurt him back, so I struck at the vulnerable underbelly of his apology. I asked him if he was even slightly interested in me. I asked if he actually wanted to know about my work at all.
“Of course I want to know,” he said, his voice tender. “I’m sorry if I made it seem like I don’t care. I do. I care so much about your work. Will you tell me? This is about the clone project, right?”
It was a stupid question, and I remember chewing on it. I could have bitten into it hard; all of my projects were “the clone project,” and his question was so vague that I could have accusedhim of having no idea what I was working on. But I decided that he was doing his best, even if his best wasn’t very good. I decided to let it pass.
I sat down at the kitchen table with him, and we ate Chinese food out of boxes, passing a carton of rice back and forth between us. I told him about my breakthrough. I was recalcitrant at first, petty, making him beg me for information, making him apologize again and again—but he asked questions, smart ones that proved he was listening, and I started to get excited.
I told him about the work I’d been doing, the ideas I had, the direction I knew I could take my research if I could just get the funding and supplies I needed.
We talked for hours. When we finished eating he pulled me up from the dining-room table by both hands. He tugged me into the bedroom, leaving the half-eaten boxes of food on the table, and he pressed me down into the mattress in our little bed and he kissed my temples and told me that I was brilliant.
The next morning when I woke up, I was alone in our bed. I remember smiling into my pillow, thinking that we’d done right by each other. Thinking that we’d fought and made up and now things were better than they’d been before. I felt like we’d cracked the code, we’d figured out the secret to being married. I felt like we were going to make it.
I wrapped myself up in my bathrobe and padded out of our bedroom feeling victorious. Maybe that’s why I didn’t think too much about it when I found him standing over my desk in our shared home office. He was examining a few pages of notes I’d left on my blotter, his brow furrowed. I stood in the doorway for a moment, watching him look at my papers. When I asked him what he was doing, he said, “Nothing,” and then he kissed me and went to get dressed for work, and I didn’t ask any other questions.
I didn’t think about it again until years later, when I finally found out what he’d been doing. What he’d done.
I didn’t consider why Nathan might be so interested in my work, in my research, in my notes. I thought that was how loveworked. People who love each other, I thought, would naturally be interested in each other, interested in what they were doing.
I assumed that I could trust his intentions.
It didn’t occur to me that he was trying to mine information out of me. It didn’t occur to me that he was trying to use my own research to replace me. I felt grateful for his interest, for the way we were talking again.
I thought we were coming out of a little rough patch, one caused by work stress and weariness, so I told him everything about my work. It became a thing we bonded over, me sharing with him over dinner and coffee and drinks and pillow talk.
Every advance I made.
Every roadblock I overcame.
Every victory, all the way up until I harvested my first viable adult specimen a year later. Right up until I discovered Martine, two years after that.
Of course I had told him everything.
I didn’t think I had any reason not to.
While Martine and I combed through Nathan’s scans, Seyed primed the suspension every day, laying groundwork for the mapping we’d do later. Lorna had been right to laugh at the idea of turning an existing brain into a fresh start. It was far more realistic to simply make one from scratch.
The specimen was still a loose slush, a slowly thickening slurry of dividing cells that wouldn’t consolidate without direct stimulus. The tank contained a thing that looked like a jellyfish with four thick tentacles that would eventually become limbs, and dark patches where smooth muscle and neurological tissues were starting to gel. Gradually, patiently, with the right balance of neurons exposed and developing, Seyed gave it shape.
I kept catching Martine staring at the translucent mass that we were going to turn into a man. I walked into the lab one morning after a coffee run to find her standing in front of the tank, herfingers pressed to the glass, watching it as though she could urge it to grow.
“Don’t touch that,” I said, setting her tea down on theFOOD USE ONLYtable.
“Why?” she asked, turning to look at me without taking her hand away from the tank.
A thousand answers occurred to me, none of them true. I could have fed her a lie about her body temperature disrupting the interior climate of the tank, or I could have told her that the glass was fragile, or that her skin oils were corrosive. The lies were too obvious, though—she would have seen right through me.
Getting caught in a lie is so much worse than saying nothing.
