Page 39 of The Echo Wife
I stopped talking to my mother when I was thirteen. That was the year she sent me away to school, a good school that she paid for with the yields of my father’s life insurance. In the state of Georgia, it only took four years to declare a death in absentia, and the moment his insurance policy accepted the death certificate, she started calling schools for me.
It wasn’t that she wanted to get rid of me. I knew it at the time, and I never bothered to perform petulance at being sent away. We had been too close together for too long, and the four years between my father’s disappearance and my first year of eligibility at boarding school had been especially difficult. While he was present, we had been forced into a default state of camaraderie, helping to shield each other from the worst of him. But then he was gone, and we began to see each other up close for the first time.
I resented the way she still fluttered and trembled, even after everything we’d been through together. I suspect that she resented my aptitude for my father’s work in spite of her determination to encourage me in those directions.
It was for the best, us being apart.
I didn’t stop speaking to her out of a sense of animosity. I didn’t stop speaking to her at all—we just stoppedtalking. Our conversations were logistical, formal.
Would I be coming home for the summer? No.
Could she send money so I could buy food for a holiday party in the dormitory?
Of course; would I like a little extra for gifts for my friends? No need.
I still called her once every year, on the anniversary of my father’s disappearance, in September. She wore a blue dress to my wedding and cried a little during the ceremony. She sent flowers after I told her about the divorce.
We were cordial.
But the last time I talked to her—really talked to her—had been a few years after my father’s disappearance. A few weeks before she handed me a stack of boarding school brochures to choose from. We’d been discussing my future, and I’d told her that I wanted to be a research biologist.
“Like your father?” she’d said, exactly the thing I’d been hoping she wouldn’t bring up.
“I’m not like him,” I’d answered, and she’d nodded. She gave me a long, bright look, and I’d tried hard not to feel afraid. “I mean it,” I’d added. She said that she knew, that of course I wasn’t like him. I remember going to my bedroom and quietly, quietly locking the door.
I stopped talking to my mother too much that day, because if Iwasanything like my father, I knew that I could never let her see it. I packed my things a month later, and I went away to school. I didn’t return to my mother’s house again until long after she’d moved away to remarry a man I’d never met. She left every piece of furniture in the house, everything precisely as it had been when I was a child, covered in heavy white drapes to keep the dust from settling over it.
After that fight with Martine, I wished that I could still talk to my mother. I wished that I could have asked her why she decided to have me at all. It sounds maudlin—did you ever wish I hadn’t been born—but really, I couldn’t believe I’d never asked her in the first place.
The question seems so obvious now. Had she truly wanted a baby? Or was it that my father had wanted a baby, and she had wanted to keep the peace with him? Or had she been convincedher entire life, by her friends and by her parents and by their parents, that shedidwant me?
Had she ever looked at a positive pregnancy test the way I once had, with grim resignation? Had she ever run a hand across her belly in the possessive way Martine did, with unerring confidence in the rightness of her decision?
I wished I could ask her whether I, like Martine’s baby, had made the things my mother endured feel worth the trouble.
I wished I could ask if I’d made them worse.
I couldn’t sleep that night. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the door to the doctor’s office at the clinic—the way the doctor had looked at me when she opened it, her smile tight and vague. I knew that no one would sequence Martine’s blood, and even if they did, they wouldn’t recognize the signature marking her as a clone. I knew that I wasn’t at any real risk of discovery. Still, Martine and the doctor had been in there alone. I hadn’t been there to answer prying questions or help her lie about her medical history. I hadn’t been there to make sure that our secrets remained secret.
And that was only going to continue. I didn’t want to spend my life supervising Martine in order to keep myself safe. I didn’t want to have to maintain the latticework of lies for her. But I didn’t see another possible future, either.
I got out of bed and crept down the stairs for a cup of tea. I sat at the tiny table in my dining nook, the one on which I’d signed my divorce papers such a short time before. I wrapped my hands around my mug and tried to imagine how Nathan had done all of this for so long. How had he hidden it all from me? How had he hidden Martine, an entire person for whom he was entirely responsible?
The truth, I knew, was that I just hadn’t been looking. I resented the moments when I had to pay attention to him at all. That had always been true of our relationship; some of our worst fightscame about as a result of me resenting him for being needy. There was a helplessness in him that I responded to by pulling away and ignoring him on instinct. It bred my contempt, and I never fought that contempt back, not once. It always felt justified.
Because of that, I had never paid enough attention to recognize when he was hiding something. Hell, I never paid enough attention to recognize when he had been bitten by a dog. I had no idea whether Nathan had been a good liar or a terrible one—I doubt I ever would have spotted a tell on his face, even if he had one.
Maybe that’s what he wanted from Martine. Maybe it was more than obedience, more than a willingness to give him a baby. Maybe he wanted someone who would pay attention to him.
But no, it had to have been something more than that. He had wanted someone who would pay attention toonlyhim. Someone whose goals and hopes and fears and desires would be solely influenced by his needs, by his whims.
It was why he’d tried to murder Martine for asking whether her own desires mattered to him. Before that moment, she had been an unblinking gaze directed at Nathan. In the instant when she had asked permission to consider herself instead, she had failed him. She had failed him in the exact same way that I had been failing him all along.
Martine found me there in the kitchen, watching my tea grow cold.
“What are you doing up?” I asked, trying to remember the details of her sleep-function programming. I couldn’t recall the mechanism we’d used in the iteration of programming that I suspected Nathan had stolen. It all felt so far away in that moment.
“I woke up to use the bathroom and saw that you were out of bed,” she said. Her voice still had the rough edges of sleep in it. “Are you okay?”
